Language and Democracy

Posted on June 30, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

One of the most intriguing sessions as last week’s Frontiers of Democracy Conference was on “democratic reading and writing,” a topic inspired by Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration.

I’ve only just begun reading Allen’s book, but I am struck by the core of her argument.

“The achievement of political equality requires, among other things,” she writes, “the empowerment of human beings as language-using creatures.”

This seems like something of a bold statement. Not that language is explicitly not required, but there are so many great barriers to political equality, it is easy, perhaps, to dismiss language as the least of our problems.

But words do have power.

In How To Do Things With Words, J.L. Austin argues that words can, in the fullest sense, be actions. The performative act of an utterance goes beyond the physical action of speaking; something is actually accomplished by the words themselves.

“Saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons,” Austin argues, “and it may be done with the design, intention, or purpose of producing them…”

Not all utterances are performative acts, but some words do have this power. Words may bind one into an agreement, or may have a real impact on the listener.

The American Declaration of Independence, which Allen close reads in her book, is one example of the power and action of words. It “brings to light the incandescent magic of human politics: the fact that it is possible for people, with ideas, conversations, and decision-making committees – both formal and informal – to weave together an agreement that can define our common life.”

The process of reading and writing democratically is messy, frustrating, and hard. But from it, Allen argues, emerges a greater whole, something better and stronger than would have existed otherwise. “The source of sturdiness is solidarity,” she writes.

The Declaration, Allen finds, “is as much about how to solve the central conundrum of democracy – how to make sure public actions can count as the will of the people – as about anything else. It is about how to ensure that public words belong to us all….I believe the Declaration succeeded, and succeeds still, because it took on the task of explaining why this quantity of talk, this heap of procedures, these lists of committees, and this much hard-won agreement – such a maddening quantity of group writing – are necessary for justice. The argument of the Declaration justifies the process by which the Declaration came to be. It itself explains why they art of democratic writing is necessary.”

In short, as Allen argues: this country was built on talk.

New Podcast: “The Deeper Magic of the Commons”

Posted on June 24, 2016 by David Bollier

Now here’s a fun audio experience – a 56-minute podcast, “The Deeper Magic of the Commons,” which functions as a kind of introduction to the commons by several eminent commons historians and commentators George Caffentzis, Massimo de Angelis, Peter Linebaugh, along with Dr. Bones, and yours truly.

Besides conveying some great history, the podcast is an audio treat. The interviewer and producer, James Lindenschmidt, is a sonic engineer who cleverly splices in all sorts of short audio segments and atmospherics to the podcast. Lindenschmidt is producer of the Crafted Recordings Podcast and resident audiogeek for Gods & Radicals, “A Site of Beautiful Resistance.”

The website explains itself this way: “We think that resistance should be beautiful, because the idea isn’t to replace a violent world with more violence, or a dreary world with more drearyness, but to replace what has become destructive and cruel with something beautiful and life-affirming.”

James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner

Posted on June 22, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

On June 21, 1964, three Americans working to register voters in Mississippi were brutally murdered by KKK members. Their bodies were found 6 weeks later.

The murders were among the most gruesome acts of a summer marked by violence; as America began to come to terms with its racist past and hateful present.

It was Freedom Summer, a remarkable effort led by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition of the Mississippi branches of SNCC, CORE, NAACP and SCLC. It was a summer which transformed our nation, though, more than 50 years later, we still have some transforming to do.

For details on this effort, which brought over 1,000 volunteers – mostly white, liberal, college students – to Mississippi to register African American voters, I highly recommend Doug McAdam’s excellent book, Freedom Summer, which thoughtfully details the selection of volunteers, their experiences, and the impact of the summer.

But today, 52 years after the deaths of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, I find myself reflecting on what has changed – and how much further we still have to go.

All the Freedom Summer volunteers faced significant violence. McAdams notes that over the course of the 10-week voter registration campaign 1,062 people were arrested, 80 of the Freedom Summer workers were beaten, and 67 black churches, homes, and businesses were bombed or burned.

Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were arrested. For speeding. They were denied the right to make phone calls, and civil rights organizers who called the jail looking for them were told the three men were not there. After they were released at about 10pm, the deputy sherif and Klansman who had arrested them followed them in his car – eventually forcing them out of their own car an into his. The Sherif’s deputy then drove the three to an isolated area where they were murdered.

Chaney, a black volunteer with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was savagely beaten. All three were shot.

I’d like to think something like this couldn’t happen today, but to be honest, I am not entirely sure. If I read this story in the news today, I would be saddened, but not surprised. People of color face so much violence in our communities – more, I’m sure, than I can truly appreciate.

Freedom Summer transformed our nation because it served as a wake up call for white America. When it was their sons and daughters being jailed, beaten, and murdered they could no longer ignore the deep injustice and atrocity faced every day by black people in the south.

This is exactly what the black civil rights activists who organized Freedom Summer had in mind. They’d been working for justice for decades, but when it was black bodies dying, the sad truth was – nobody cared.

Bringing white volunteers to Mississippi for Freedom Summer put America’s violent, racial injustice on the front page of the news. The nation suddenly cared.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act – which was effectively gutted by a 2013 Supreme Court vote – was a landmark showing just how much we, as a nation, had changed.

But there is so much more work to do, and we have even lost some ground.

Before Freedom Summer, the injustice faced by black Americans was largely invisible to the mainstream. The experience of blacks in places like Mississippi had no effect on the lives of their white, Northern peers. And, as is commonly charged of white, Northern racism – before Freedom Summer, white liberals could comfortably pretend the problem simply wasn’t there.

When Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two nice Jewish boys from New York, were murdered by klansman, when for ten weeks the news was full stories of white Northerners being arrested and beaten registering voters – it became clear that something needed to change.

But there has been so much death already – so many people of color dead at the hands of police or others who felt the need to ‘stand their ground.’ I’d hope it wouldn’t take even more death to galvanize our nation to change.

The deaths of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were horrific – and I wish they been the last.

Okinawa and the Shadow of U.S.-Japanese Relations

Posted on June 20, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

Yesterday, some 65,000 people in Naha, the capital of Okinawa Prefecture, gathered to protest U.S. military bases on that island.

The protest was sparked by the recent rape and murder of 20-year-old Rina Shimabukuro, a crime which has been linked to an American military contractor, and is reminiscent of the 1995 protests which followed the rape of a 12-year-old girl by three American servicemen.

Among Okinawans, there is a widespread perception of U.S. bases as “hotbeds of serious crime,” though, as the New York Times points out, “defenders of the military point to statistics that show American soldiers and sailors in Okinawa are charged with crimes by the Japanese authorities at lower rates than locals.”

The strain between the U.S., Okinawa, and Japan, however, runs deeper.

Teacher and protestor Noboru Kitano, 59, is quoted in the Japanese Times as succinctly explaining the heart of the matter: “Japan is still a military colony of the United States. This base symbolizes that.”

The U.S. has had a continuous presence in Japan since the end of the second world war. Following the post-war occupation, the 1952 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan – which has been active in its current form since it was updated in 1960 – provided for the permanent presence of U.S. forces on Japanese soil.

The majority of those forces are on Okinawa.

As of January 2016, the Japanese census puts 1,432,387 people living on Okinawa, including about 50,000 Americans – making it home to about half the American soldiers and sailors stationed in Japan. About three-quarters of the acreage taken up by U.S. bases in Japan is on Okinawa.

But, here’s the thing – Okinawa and the Ryukyu Island chain of which it is a part, has its own distinct culture and a long history as a political pawn between Japan and China. In 1879 – around the same times our own U.S. civil war – Japan’s Meiji government annexed the then-sovereign Ryukyu Kingdom, creating the Okinawa prefecture we know today.

During the second world war, just 66 years after its annexation, Okinawa was the scene of one of the bloodiest skirmishes in the Pacific, and the largest military engagement in history. The brutal, 82-day, battle claimed the lives of 14,000 Allied forces, 77,000 Japanese soldiers and somewhere between 100,000 to 150,000 Japanese civilians died.

Nearly all those civilians were Okinawan, and many of the Japanese soldiers were in fact Okinawan conscripts, drafted by the Japanese government against their will. The shocking death toll of this battle would then be used to justify U.S. use of nuclear weapons – as the American government became convinced that a land battle on the Japanese mainland would be just as horrific as the Battle of Okinawa, if not more so.

It’s entirely unclear if this is true, however. Seen as Japanese by the American troops and considered second-class citizens by the Japanese troops, Okinawan civilians suffered atrocities at the hands of both sides. Caught between the two superpowers, it was Okinawan civilians who suffered – one of the reasons for the horrific toll.

Following the war, the Japanese had little choice but to cede to American interests – which included establishing a strong presence of military operations in the east.

Okinawa, then, provided the perfect setting for rebuilding U.S.-Japanese relations. A strong U.S. presence there mitigated the risk of loosing the island prefecture to China – a manuver in the interest of both U.S. and Japanese officials. Furthermore, the Japanese lost little by ceding Okinawan land, while simultaneously ameliorating their U.S. occupiers. It was a win all around – except for the Okinawans.

This is a history that’s critical to understanding today’s Okinawan protests of American military bases. It’s almost beside the point whether local perceptions of American military crime are accurate or exaggerated. Just a few generations ago, the Ryukyu Kingdom was a proud, independent nation. Desired by China, annexed by Japan, and then colonized by the U.S., Okinawa has found itself continually caught between the interests of these global superpowers. And while great games of politics play out across the world stage, it seems it’s always the Okinawan people who suffer.

That is why they protest.

“My Own Kind of Champion”

Posted on June 6, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

In 1960, Muhammad Ali returned to his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky as a victorious gold-medalist. Soon after, he was denied service at a ‘whites only’ restaurant and threw his medal into to the depths of the Ohio River.

Some claim that story to be apocryphal, but, whether fact or parable, Ali described the experience in detail in his 1975 autobiography, The Greatest: My Own Story. It’s a power story, worth excerpting at length here:

So what I remember most about the summer of 1960 is not the hero welcome, the celebrations, the Police Chief, the Mayor, the Governor, or even the ten Louisville millionaires, but that night when I stood on the Jefferson County Bridge and threw my Olympic Gold Medal down to the bottom of the Ohio River.

A few minutes earlier I had fought a man almost to the death because he wanted to take it from me, just as I had been willing to fight to the death in the ring to win it.

It had taken six years of blood, blows, pain, sweat, struggle, a thousand rounds in rings and gyms to win that medal, a prize I had dreamed of holding since I was a child. Now I had thrown it in the river. And I felt no pain and no regret. Only relief, and a new strength.

I had turned pro. In my pocket was my agreement with the ten Louisville millionaires, our “marriage contract” for six years. I felt as sure as day and night that I would one day be the World Heavyweight Champion. But my Olympic honeymoon as a White Hope had ended. It was not a change I wanted to tell the world about yet. I would be champion. My own kind of champion.

The honeymoon had started when my plane touched down at Standiford Field. They opened the door and my mother rushed up to hug me. Then my brother Rudy and Dad. I had been gone for twenty-one days, the most time I’d been away since the day I was born.

Then came the celebrations: the long police escort all the way downtown; black and white crowds on the streets and sidewalks; WELCOME HOME CASSIUS CLAY signs from my classmates at Central High; the Mayon telling me the Olympic Gold Medal was my key to the city; plans under way for me to have my picture taken with President Eisenhower.

…One Kentucky newspaper described my medal as “the biggest prize any black boy ever brought back to Louisville.” But if a white boy had brought back anything better to this city, where only race horses and whiskey were important, I hadn’t heard about it.

…And although I was still hit with some of the same race hostility I’d known all my life, my spirits were so high I gelt whoever was against me would change. Even those whose resentment made them go through the acknowledgements half-heartedly or with no heart at all. Those who came only out of curiosity, and looked disgusted when they learned they had to honor a black boy.

I was deeply proud of having represented America on a world stage. To me the Gold Medal was more than a symbol of what I had achieved for myself and my country; there was something I expected the medal to achieve for me. And during those first few days of homecoming it seemed to be doing exactly that.

I remember the crowds that followed us down the street where we lived. The porch of our house was decked with American flags, and my father had painted the steps red, white and blue. Photographers yelled, “Hold it! Hold it!” and I posed for a minute, arm-in-arm with my father as he sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” in his best Russ Columbo style. We stood proud. Everybody cheered.

…It was getting cloudy, and Ronnie and I raced our motorbikes across downtown Louisville. There had been a forecast of high wind and heavy rain, and the first sprinkle came when we passed a newly remodeled restaurant. I slowed down.

“Not there, not there!” Ronnie warned and kept his motor going.

But I stopped and parked near a line of big Harley-Davidson hogs. Their owners, a leather-jacketed gang, were sitting at tables near the window with their girl friends. Nazi insignias on their backs, Confederate flags painted on the front, a style popular with some whites in the East End. One they called “Kentucky Slim” I’d seen at my fights. Slim gave me a nod. Their leader, a big redhead with doubled-up leg chains hanging from his shoulder, sat with his arms around a heavy blonde. “Frog,” as we knew him, never looked up, although I new he saw me.

I found two empty seats at the country, and as Ronnie caught up I sat down and picked up a menu. A young waitress quickly came up and placed napkins, silverware and a glass of water in front of us.

“Two hamburgers. Two milk shakes, vanilla,” Ronnie said, but as the waitress moved back to the kitchen a big, beefy man with a hung-over stomach motioned for her to come where he sat near the cash register.

Whatever his words, they were brief, The waitress disappeared inside the kitchen, and after what seemed a long time, appeared again, talking to one of the kitchen help, an old, thin-faced black woman who just stood at the door, looking down my way and trying to say something.

In those days most of the restaurants, hotels and movies in Louisville, as in all of the South, were either closed to blacks or had segregated sections.

The white girl finally came back and whispered as though she had something confidential to tell me. “We can’t serve you here.”

Ronnie mutter under his breath, and I nudged him to be quiet. It felt good to be so calm and prepared for what I thought was coming. My Gold Medal would be the solution to the whole thing.

…”Miss,” I began politely, believing she was acting out of ignorance. “I’m Cassius Clay. The Olympic Champion.”

Ronnie proudly pulled the medal from under my T-shirt and adjusted the red, white and blue ribbon. He flashed it to show the Italian word pugilato. Oh, how he admired and loved it. Maybe even more that I did.

The waitress was impressed. Without hesitation she dashed down the counter to The Owner, and spoke in urgent, hushed whispers. He never turned around.

“I don’t give a damn who he is!”

The voice boomed with such force that everyone’s head jerked up from their plates.

“I done told you, we don’t serve no niggers!”

She put her hands over her face as though she had been hit, backed up, hurried to me and began repeating the message, as though I hadn’t heard it. It got real quite.

I remember looking directly into the eyes of a white high school boy with a Manual High sweater, no older than myself, who’d been admiring my medal a minute before. Manual High was a rival school to my own Central High, and he played on the opposing teams. He looked down at the floor.

My heart was pounding. A minute before, this had been a noisy, chatty place with thirty or more customers. I pushed away from the counter. Ronnie went through every motion with me as though we’d rehearsed the act. I stood up. Knives, forks and chitchat stopped, and all eyes were on me. My mouth felt hot and dry. Never in a hundred fights did I feel blood rushing to my head as I did then.

I tried to meet the eyes of the whites along the country, but the only eyes looking into mine were those of the old black woman from the kitchen. She came through the door, a large cross hanging from her neck, trying to get my attention by waving a small book that looked like a prayer book.

Then The Owner, arms folded, his huge stomach bulging over his apron tie, started out from around the counter as if to give me a personal message. I backed off to the center. For an instant I had an urge to dig a right cross in the pit of his stomach, then a left hook to his mouth, then uppercut…and to this day I wonder if I shouldn’t have obeyed that urge.

But my outlook on “fighting” had undergone a total change since the days when I scrapped in the streets and schoolyards at the slightest excuse. I had already signed for my first professional bout. It’s part go the pride of a truly professional fighter not to indulge himself, not to be caught dead or alive in a free-for-all.

Most important, I had in mind another approach, one I was sure would work. I would make them feel ashamed of what they were doing. If necessary, I would stay here until they took me to jail.

I got myself together to tell them everything I’d been thinking. “This is supposed to be the land of the brave and the home of the free, and you’re disgracing it with your actions. You all know me. I was born in General Hospital, only a block away. I was raised here. I went to Central High. And now I’ve brought back an Olympic Gold Medal for all the people of Louisville. I fought for the glory of my country and you should be ashamed of what you’re doing. You serve any foreigner here, but not an American Negro citizen. You’ll have to take me to jail, because I’ll stay until I get my rights. You should be ashamed…”

But I never said a word.

The words wouldn’t come out. Something there wouldn’t let the words come out. Instead of making them feel ashamed, I felt shamed. Shamed and shocked and lonesome.

…I had been standing there for less than a minute, but it seemed like a year. Ronnie was saying, almost in disbelief, “They don’t really know who you are. They just don’t know you The Champion! I ain’t scared to tell ‘em!.” Then, almost like an announcer in the ring, “Folks, this is The Champion! Louisville’s Olympic Champion! Just back from Italy.”

I heard my stomach growl. “Ronnie! Shut up! Don’t beg. Don’t beg!”

“You got sponsors,” Ronnie said. “Call them sponsors.” He reached inside my pocket for the list of the millionaires. “Go ‘head. Call ‘em up, tell ‘em what’s happening. They can buy and sell this little funky place with their pocket change. Watch their faces when Mr. Vicerory tells ‘em.”

…How could I explain: my millionaires were the real rulers of Louisville. But I did not want to be considered “their” boy even in the eyes of those who hated me. I had earned my Gold Medal without their permission. It should mean something without their permission. I wanted that medallion to mean that I owned myself. And to call, seemed to me, to be exchanging one Owner for the Other. And suppose they did come to my rescue? Then I could come and go in the “white only” please, but other blacks couldn’t. Then what would I be?

I moved closer to the door, keeping my eyes on The Owner. I felt a peculiar, miserable pain in my head and stomach. The pain that comes from punches you take without hitting back.

Whatever illusions I’d built up in Rome as the All-American Boy were gone. My Olympic honeymoon was over. I was back in my Old Kentucky Home.

Ali leaves the restaurant.

…I remember thinking that the middle of the Ohio was probably the deepest part, and I walked over to the center of the bridge. An Ronnie, with that extra sense people who have known and loved each other for a long time, anticipated my actions. Dropping the bike, he ran towards me, yelling. But I had snapped the ribbon from around my neck. I held the medallion just far enough out so that it wouldn’t tangle in the bridge structure, and threw it into the black water of the Ohio. I watched it drag the red, white and blue ribbon down to the bottom behind it.

When I turned, Ronnie had a look of horror in his eyes. “Jesus. Oh, my God!” Then tears came down his cheeks. “Oh, my God. You know what you did?”

“It wasn’t real gold. It was phony.” I tried to put my arms around him. He was wet and cold and stiff. “It was phony.”

He wasn’t listen. “Why you throw it in the river? Why?”

How could I put the answer together? I wasn’t sure of all the reasons. The Olympic medal had been the most precious thing that had ever come to me. I worshiped it. It was proof of performance, status, a symbol of belonging, of being part of a team, a country, a world. It was my way of redeeming myself with my teachers and schoolmates at Central High, of letting them know that although I had not won scholastic victories, there was something inside of me capable of victory.

How could I explain to Ronnie I wanted something that meant more than that? Something that was as proud of me as I would be of it. Something that would let me be what I knew I had to be, my own kind of champion.

“We don’t need it,” I said. “We don’t need it.”

Hiroshima, Apologies, and American Exceptionalism

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

Tomorrow, Barack Obama will become the first sitting U.S. President to visit Hiroshima since the U.S. B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped 64 kg of uranium-235 over that city, creating a blast equivalent to the detonation of 16 kilotons of TNT.

He is not expected to apologize.

Or, more specifically, he is expected not to apologize. The White House has openly said as much, instead describing how President Obama’s historic trip will “highlight his continued commitment to pursuing the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

The political calculation of not formally apologizing is hardly surprising. On the one hand, the Japanese Times is reporting that most Japanese people don’t expect or need an apology. Whereas, here at home, the resistance against such an apology is clear. As American Legion National Commander Dale Barnett said in a statement:

We are heartened that the White House promised today that President Obama will not apologize for the bombing of Hiroshima. We share his sorrow for the many innocent civilians who were lost that day. But we temper that sorrow with the joy for the many more American, Allied and Japanese lives that were saved because the war was finally brought to an end in the short aftermath that followed.

And thus the visit will “honor the memory of all who lost their lives” during the war.

In a news segment the other day, I heard U.S. sentiment on this matter described as a bit of American exceptionalism – we made the best calculation we could and we stand by our decision and our right to have made it.

I rather expect we will never apologize.

As I’ve been thinking about President Obama’s visit this week, I was reminded Akiyuki Nosaka brilliant short story American Hijiki.

Nosaka, whose father died during the 1945 bombing of Kobe and whose sister died of malnutrition following the war’s devastation of Japanese fields and food supplies, wrote passionately about life in post-war Japan. His work captures the shock of defeat and highlights America’s constant, ill-conceived attempts to be good.

The whole story is really worth reading, but I including a notable excerpt below:

In the summer of 1946 we were living in Omiyamachi on the outskirts of Osaka, near a farm – which may have been why our food rations were often late or never came at all. More or less appointing herself to the duty, my sister would go several times a day to look at the blackboard outside the rice store and come back crushed when she found nothing posted. Once, we turned the house upside-down but found only rock salt and baking powder. We were so desperate we dissolved them in water and drank it, but this takes bad, no matter how hungry you are. Just then the barber’s wife, her big, bovine breasts hanging out, came to tell us, “There’s been a delivery. Seven days’ rations!” This was it! I grabbed the bean-paste strainer and started out.

…We all watched as the rice man split open a carton with a big kitchen knife and came out with these little packets wrapped in dazzling red-and-green paper. As if to keep our curiosity in check, he said, “A substitute rice ration – a seven-day supply of chewing gum. That’s what these cartons are.” He pulled out something like a jewel case. This was a three-days’ supply.

I carried off nine of these little boxes, each containing fifty five-stick packs, a week’s rations for the three of us. It was a good, heavy load that had the feel of luxury. “What is it? What is it?” My sister came flying at me and screeching for joy when she heard it was gum. My mother placed a box on the crude, little altar of plain wood. The local carpenter had made it in exchange for the fancy kimono my mother had taken with her when we evacuated the city. She dedicated the gum to my father’s spirit with a ding of the prayer bell, and out joyful little evening repast was under way, each of us peeling his gum wrappers and chewing in silence. At twenty-five sticks each per meal, it would have been exhausting to chew them one at a time. We would through in a new stick whenever the sweetness began to fade. Anyone who saw our mouths working would swear they were stuffed with doughy pastry. Then my sister, holding a brown lump of chewed gum in her fingertips, said, “I guess we have to spit this out when we’re through.” The second I answered, “Sure,” I realized we had to live for seven days on this gum, this stuff that made not the slightest dent in our hunger. Anything is better than nothing, they say, but this anything was our own saliva, and when the hunger pangs attacked again, my eyes filled with tears of anger and self-pity. In the end, I sold it on the black market – which was on the verge of being closed down – an bought some corn flour to keep us from starving. So I have no reason to be bitter. One thing is sure, though: you can’t get full on chewing gum.

American exceptionalism indeed.

The Bombing of Philadelphia

Posted on May 16, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

On May 13, 1985 state police dropped a bomb on 6221 Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia. Eleven people, including five children, were killed. The resulting fire spread to neighborhing houses, destroying 61 homes and leaving nearly 250 people homeless.

This was the day that Philadelphia bombed itself.

In a New York Times article which ran a few days later, area resident Steve Harmon commented ”Drop a bomb on a residential area? I never in my life heard of that. It’s like Vietnam.”

Of course, there’s a dark irony in this shock. Killing civilians? That’s what we’re supposed to do overseas, not to our own people.

The Times similarly reported that onlookers “were shocked by the devastation of an area whose residents –teachers, nurses, civil servants, factory workers — were known for their flower gardens and congenial block parties. Ronald Merriweather, whose home escaped damage, looked at the smouldering ruins of other houses and said, ‘It looks just like a war zone. The neighborhood was here and now it’s gone.’ Families that had evacuated supposedly for a day found themselves refugees…”

The bombing targeted the MOVE, a black liberation group who’d had numerous problems with police and neighbors. In 1978, police officer James Ramp was killed in a shootout between police and MOVE members. The nine MOVE members later convicted for this murder maintained that Ramp was killed by friendly fire.

Police made the decision to drop a bomb on the residential building following a 90-minute shootout which came after “a week of growing tension between the city and the group, known as Move. Residents in the western Philadelphia neighborhood had complained about the group for years.”

The extent of the devastation came largely because once the fire broke out, officials waited 30 minutes before dispatching fire control teams to respond. They’d been hoping the fire would create an opening in the roof of the MOVE building, through which police planned to drop more tear gas.

In an NPR piece, Sociologist Robin Wagner-Pacifici argued that the bombing of Philadelphia has largely been forgotten for ideological reasons: “MOVE’s quasi-Rastafarian, anti-technology, pro-animal-rights worldview doesn’t neatly fit on any part of the political spectrum, while other militant groups she has studied had some degree of overlap. And you can’t lump MOVE in with other black power movements of the time, either; black radical groups often bristled at their tactics.”

That is, people remember incidents in Waco, Texas and Ruby Ridge, Idaho because those movements fit into a broader narrative – a sort of mainstream extremism.

Of course, the people killed there were also white.

But more broadly, it seems that we quickly forget our own trespasses – abroad and domestically. In 1894, thirty-four people were killed in Chicago when the National Guard was called in to quelled the Pullman Strike. So as appalling as it may sound, it is somehow not surprising that state police in Philadelphia decided to bomb a residential neighborhood some 100 years later.

How little we learn.

It was a very lovely spring day…

Posted on May 13, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

Perhaps its because I just spent several hours siting outside reading rather than doing the work I more properly ought to be doing, but all I can think of today is a particularly memorable passage from Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Stein, I feel compelled to add, was raised in my hometown of Oakland, California.

It was a very lovely spring day, Gertrude Stein had been going to the opera every night and going also to the opera in the afternoon and had been otherwise engrossed and it was the period of the final examinations, and there was the examination in William James’s course. She sat down with the examination paper before her and she just could not. She wrote at the top of her paper, Dear Professor James, I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy to-day, and left.

The next day she had a postal card from William James saying, Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel I often feel like that myself. And underneath it he gave her work the highest mark in his course.

Activist Roots of Mother’s Day

Posted on May 9, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

In 1925, Anna Jarvis was arrested for disturbing the peace at a Philadelphia confectioners convention.

The candy makers, she thought, had done poorly to profit though the commercialization of motherly affection.

I imagine the scene – dignified confectioners discussing various ganaches and pastries, Jarvis crashing in like Carrie Nation, perhaps similarly wielding a hatchet for good measure. Eventually getting carted off while still yelling at the profit mongers for twisting her invention.

No doubt it was significantly less dramatic, but that’s how I picture it.

In 1948, Jarvis died in Philadelphia’s Marshall Square Sanitarium, having spent her fortune fighting to stave off the commercialization of mother’s day.

She was unsuccessful.

Jarvis was, in fact, the founder of mother’s day. She had started the celebration in 1908 – three years after her own mother’s death – and worked to see it become a national holiday in 1914.

For much of her life, Jarvis’ mother, Anne Reeves Jarvis, organized Mothers’ Day Work Clubs which worked to address tragically high infant mortality rates and tended wounded soldiers from both sides of the U.S. Civil War.

The group’s motto was “Mothers Work — for Better Mothers, Better Homes, Better Children, Better Men and Women.” In the midst of war, its members fought hard for peace. Amongst so much injustice, the women fought for justice.

In 1870, abolitionist and member Julia Ward Howe articulated the vision of the work clubs with her Mother’s Day proclamation:

Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.

“Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm! The sword is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.

It goes on to call for a general congress of women “without limit of nationality.” After all, “as men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war,” women must now “leave all that may be left of home” in order to discover the means of peace.

So, this was what was in the mind of the young Anna Jarvis, three years after she buried her mother – founder of the radical Mothers’ Day Work Clubs – when, on May 10, 1908, she gathered 400 people at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, to commemorate her mother and celebrate the first Mother’s Day.

Jarvis asked that people wear carnations to remember all mothers.

And then she worked for the day to become a national holiday. A day for peace, for equity, for lifting the voices of women among the shouts of men and, yes, a day for sending a handwritten note to your own mother and thanking her for giving you so much.

So, perhaps, you can appreciate the devastation which motivated Jarvis’ rebellion as she saw this vision go awry. As she saw mother’s day devolve into little more than a day to buy flowers and chocolates, and, perhaps, to get you off the hook from calling your mother for another year.

While I can identify with Jarvis’ distaste for commercialization, in honesty, though, I’m not entirely enamored with Jarvis’ ideal mother’s day either.

She intentionally tried to frame the day as a holy day – organizing it on Sundays and celebrating in a church. And she intentionally called the day ‘mother’s day’ as opposed to ‘mothers’ day.’ It was a day to celebrate your own mother, she insisted, not a day to celebrate all mothers.

As one article puts it, “Jarvis retreated from her mother’s socially conscious vision for Mother’s Day in favor of one that idolized the mother’s individual role.”

This, I believe, was a mistake. Her visions of celebrating individual mothers for their sacred domestic role plays into all the tired tropes of separate spheres. We can do better than that.

And I’d give her a pass, say that Jarvis’ vision was simply a product of her time, but I can’t help but think that her mother would have envisioned something more radical – and, of course, her mother knew best.

The Rape of the Sabines

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to visit the Museum of Fine Art’s Pairing Picasso exhibit, which “centers on pairing and juxtaposing works by Pablo Picasso.”

I was particularly taken with two pieces I’d long admired online, but had never before seen in person. From his 1962-63 series The Rape of the Sabines (L’enlèvement des Sabines), the MFA paired the first piece in the series with the final piece from their own collection.

They were beautiful and grotesque. Picasso’s cubic and abstract style expressively dehumanizing the perpetrators and painfully illustrating the horrors of war.

Now, my high school Latin teacher would be very disappointed if I didn’t clarify that “rape” in this context is taken from the Latin raptio, more properly translated as “abduction.” Though the distinction in this story is muddy.

As Livy recounts in Book 9 of Ab Urbe Conduit Libri, following Romulus’ founding of Rome, the bourgeoning empire found itself with a problem:

And now the Roman state was become so powerful, that it was a match for any of the neighbouring nations in war, but, from the paucity of women, its greatness could only last for one age of man; for they had no hope of issue at home, nor had they any intermarriages with their neighbours. Therefore, by the advice of the Fathers, Romulus sent ambassadors to the neighbouring states to solicit an alliance and the privilege of intermarriage for his new subjects. “That cities, like every thing else, rose from very humble beginnings. That those which the gods and their own merit aided, gained great power and high renown. That he knew full well, both that the gods had aided the origin of Rome, and that merit would not be wanting. Wherefore that, as men, they should feel no reluctance to mix their blood and race with men.” No where did the embassy obtain a favourable hearing: so much did they at the same time despise, and dread for themselves and their posterity, so great a power growing up in the midst of them.

Find themselves so declined by their neighbors, “The Roman youth resented this conduct bitterly, and the matter unquestionably began to point towards violence.”

Romulus, therefore, planned a trap. Inviting neighboring people into the great city for the festival of Neptune Equester. Hearing of this great spectacle, “great numbers assembled, from a desire also of seeing the new city; especially their nearest neighbours, the Cæninenses, Crustumini, and Antemnates. Moreover the whole multitude of the Sabines came, with their wives and children.”

Livy is generally interpreted as claiming that the rape involved only benevolent kidnapping and not sexual assault. The Romans, after all, were not malevolent towards their intended property; they were only interested in acquiring proper wives:

…upon a signal given the Roman youth ran different ways to carry off the virgins by force. A great number were carried off at hap-hazard, according as they fell into their hands. Persons from the common people, who had been charged with the task, conveyed to their houses some women of surpassing beauty, destined for the leading senators. They say that one, far distinguished beyond the others for stature and beauty, was carried off by the party of one Thalassius, and whilst many inquired to whom they were carrying her, they cried out every now and then, in order that no one might molest her, that she was being taken to Thalassius; that from this circumstance this term became a nuptial one

…Romulus in person went about and declared, “That what was done was owing to the pride of their fathers, who had refused to grant the privilege of marriage to their neighbours; but notwithstanding, they should be joined in lawful wedlock, participate in all their possessions and civil privileges, and, than which nothing can be dearer to the human heart, in their common children. He begged them only to assuage the fierceness of their anger, and cheerfully surrender their affections to those to whom fortune had consigned their persons.” [He added,] “That from injuries love and friendship often arise; and that they should find them kinder husbands on this account, because each of them, besides the performance of his conjugal duty, would endeavour to the utmost of his power to make up for the want of their parents and native country.” To this the caresses of the husbands were added, excusing what they had done on the plea of passion and love, arguments that work most successfully on women’s hearts. The minds of the ravished virgins were soon much soothed…

Picasso’s interpretation seems distinctly less kind.

With the first piece completed just ten days after American reconnaissance planes recorded the construction of Soviet missile bases in Cuba, Picasso quickly turned to the dark fable of the Sabine women as the world appeared on the brink of destruction.

As Aegean prehistorian, Malcolm Wiener described:

On October 22, 1962, then 81-year old Picasso was at his grand estate in southern France when he turned on the television to hear President Kennedy announcing the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba capable of reaching the U.S. with nuclear warheads. Dismayed at the immense danger facing the world, Picasso contacted his friend Hélène Parmelin and her husband Edouard Pignon in Paris and asked them to bring him slides of Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents and David’s Rape of the Sabines, depicting a fabled abduction of Sabine women by ancient Romans. Wiener writes that according to Parmelin, the two couples stayed up much of the night as Picasso studied and viewed the slides superimposed on his wall.

The results are astounding and horrendous; a testament to the relentless violence and brutality of man.

Pablo Picasso, The Rape of the Sabines (L’enlèvement des Sabines), Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, November 2–4, 1962

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