Tim Hetherington’s Diary

Diary (2010) from Tim Hetherington

1970 – 2011

L-R: Steny Hoyer, John Lewis, Nancy Pelosi, John Larson

The great economic achievement of my lifetime – and I mean this absolutely seriously – has been my ability thus far to have a family with three major chronic diseases and not (yet anyway) go into bankruptcy. Over the past three years, we have paid over $45,000 above & beyond my “excellent” health plan for various prescriptions & doctors, and would have paid considerably more except for a “flex plan” benefit through my job. That saved us $5,000 each year. And this year that plan is being restricted only to those employees who choose the cheapest of the three options my employer makes available, so I won’t have access to that benefit going forward. All of which means that, other things being equal, I can expect to spend some $60,000 over the next three years, presuming of course that I keep my own health & don’t have to retire at 65 or sooner.

So it might not be surprising to discover that last Sunday, the entire family camped out in front of the TV, which we kept mostly on C-SPAN & MSNBC (with just a couple of detours over to CNN), watching the House deliberations on the health care reform bill with the sort of attention most families reserve for the Super Bowl or the Oscars. That bill is way short of adequate – women really should have control over their own bodies, a right that simply does not exist if poor (and increasingly middle class) women lack access to abortion on demand. And there is no rationale whatsoever for keeping insurance companies around just to suck on my wallet – but it is a small, critical step in the right direction.

Congress was voting on my well-being Sunday night. Congress was voting on the survivability of my family. And one political party voted unanimously against my family. That is something I will never, ever forget.

But that is not what this note is about. That ultimately was not what was most alarming about Sunday’s proceedings. Tho the idea of either political party voting unanimously for or against anything is, by itself, a symptom of something dreadfully wrong in the body politic.

No what really was most distressing about Sunday’s proceedings on & around the House floor was the utter lack of civility the two sides had for one another. It was exacerbated, no doubt, by the fact that the Republicans felt no compulsion to argue against the bill on its merits. It was amazing just how often during the debate that the arguments raised by one Republican after another were demonstrably untrue, often laughably so. If there were perfectly good reasons to oppose the bill from the right – and I’m going to presume that there were – why didn’t any member of the GOP feel compelled to raise them?

Instead they chose to spread FUD, fear, uncertainty & doubt. They raised points that their own behavior in office during the Bush administration demonstrated were not true. They argued cost in the face of their own Congressional Budget Office’s assessment of the economic impact. They argued about “government takeovers” when a major failing of the bill is its unwillingness to wrest control from the insurance industry. One Republican from Texas called Bart Stupak – the man who has done more than anyone to prevent women from controlling their own bodies – “baby-killer.” Outside the House Floor, congressmen were spat on, called the N word & subjected to homophobic slurs. Since the weekend, ten members of Congress have reported threats. In one instance, a right-wing blogger posted the wrong address for one member and the gas line to that address was sabotaged.

Somebody – I missed just who – was quoted on CNN as saying that the nation was more deeply split right now than at any time since Reconstruction. Watching Congress – and the tea-partiers in the balcony & beyond – on Sunday made that seem like an eminently reasonable assessment. Which means that this society is as nearly as deeply split as it was when it had just finished killing 3% of the entire population. Think about that for a minute. In today’s terms, you would have to kill ten million Americans to reach that threshold. That is a lot of bad mojo.

Monday, after the votes were counted, I was heartened to read this note from the US News & World Report blog. US News & World Report is an old-school Republican journal, something I used to read even back in high school to see what the GOP was thinking. To see a non-liberal make a reasonable argument felt refreshing. And it made me wonder again just how & why the debate has grown so poisonous.

In the 1970s, when I worked as a lobbyist for a coaltion of prison movement organizations in Sacramento, I had little difficulty in working with Republican members of the legislature. In fact, when we introduced legislation to end the draconian indeterminate sentence, our sponsor was State Senator John Nejedly of Walnut Creek, the former district attorney of the county & a career lawman whose nickname was “Iron John” (that was pre-Robert Bly). Nejedly would have told you that he was a Goldwater Republican, which is to say that he understood himself to be a man of the right. But he also believed that laws should mean what they do, and do what they say. He understood instinctively why sentencing everybody to either six-months to fifty years or one year to life fundamentally undercut not just the lives of prisoners, but the ability of the prison system to operate fairly. And he understood that fairness, both in practice & perception, were essential to the criminal justice system. He was a smart guy with a ready wit – he used to wear a Mickey Mouse watch just to remind people that the indeterminate sentencing system was, in his words, “Mickey Mouse time.”

All of his staffers also happened to be Democrats. In fact, in the early 1970s, this was true for almost all Republican legislators in Sacramento. There was an assumption – with good cause – that any young person fresh out of college who was a Republican wasn’t smart enough to work for a Republican legislator. (There was a corollary to the effect that a "serious Republican" didn't become one until they were in their 30s or even 40s.) The notable exception to this was another state senator, H.L. Richardson. Richardson made no bones about the fact that he was close to the John Birch Society. He also made no bones about the fact that he was the one state legislator who routinely carried a pistol, as did his chief aide-de-camp, an ex-cop.

In the 1970s, John Nejedly was a mainstream conservative, while everybody around Sacramento used to laugh at & about Richardson, especially members of his own party. I don’t believe that the same would be true today. And the person who set that transformation in motion, more than anyone, was someone to whom Nejedly once introduced me, then-governor Ronald Reagan. It was Reagan, both in his runs for the White House & in his two terms as president (tho not, it is worth noting, his terms or campaigns as governor), who first demonized government. Everyone by now knows his joke that the “9 scariest words” are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” and his motto that government is the problem.

It’s worth considering what that means and why that has become the wedge issue in the divide between the two Americas. What is government but ourselves? It’s the institutionalization of our collective being in order to accomplish some things we agree need to be done. Stop signs for example. Police for another. Schools for a third. Government may not work well, it may be bloated, sclerotic, bureaucratic. But it is ourselves. We have nobody else to blame. When Ronald Reagan argued that government is the problem, what he meant was that we are our own problem. His slogan was a direct assault on the fundamental principle of democracy: collective, communal action.

Ronald Reagan did not invent the anti-tax movement whose slogans he co-opted as his own. But he certainly recognized its potency & made great use of its potential. And he appears to have understood that the fundamental premise of the tax revolt, the right’s great perception about the 1960s that still drives that movement to this day, is that we are not ourselves. Government isn’t us, it’s not even about us, it’s about Them.

They are the people who have “invaded” “us.” The hippie commie queers, the blacks who “snuck in” on slave ships, Africans, Asians & Latin Americans who took Emma Lazarus at her word. Ultimately, I think that this is what all this lack of comity is about – one group of Americans (largely tho not entirely white males) look in the mirror & what they see does not look like America, although they may pretend that it does. That other America of difference & diversity has in their view wrested control of the government. Which of course is why everything government does has, for them, become illegitimate. (Tho they would like government, such as the courts, to do whatever it can to preserve their dying stranglehold on power.)

Time will, of course, resolve this precisely because these demographics are headed for change. If the tea-party Mad Hatters think that the socious today looks bizarrely non-white, non-male & non-straight, wait till they look at it circa 2020 or 2050. But between now & then, we can anticipate that this same cluster of conservative – or at least reactionary – values will only get more upset, more hyperbolic, more dislodged from reality, more extreme, and definitely more dangerous. The whole “Obama birth-deniers,” for example, aren’t complaining nearly so much about where the president was or was not born as they are expressing their incomprehension that a man with an African father & who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia could become president. That is the unimaginable & everything else just flows from that.

All of which is to say that we should not anticipate that the political discourse in this country is going to improve anytime soon. If the right is acting panicky, it’s because they’ve been spooked: they can taste the day when they no longer control the institutions in this society, not just on a vote or two, not just a few elections. So the right’s program can be characterized as a longterm strategy of postponement. And the real question is just how far the right will go to preserve whatever shards of privilege remain. The fact that they own the majority of weapons in this country should not be lost on anyone. 150 years ago, we saw an earlier group of Americans go to war to try to hold onto what had already become untenable & obsolete. Don’t think that couldn’t happen twice.

National Map of March 4^th actions

Stand up for Schools

Defend California Public Education

California Federation of Teachers
March 4^th Action page

You only have until February 28 to vote for GTECH’s proposal to build creative community activism through the simple (and very elegant) idea of remediating environmentally degraded land through planting sunflower gardens in Pittsburgh & New Orleans. The top ten vote-getters will each receive $50K for their projects. If you’ve ever volunteered for a community garden project, a food co-op or worked on the problem of getting investments to enable brownfield sites become assets to, rather than drains on, their neighborhoods, you’ll know how powerful this very simple project is. You can vote once each day, and you should.

Matt Damon & Clint Eastwood with crew & extras filming a scene
in which the Springboks conduct a rugby camp in a shanty town

As a director, Clint Eastwood likes to make well-architected narratives with few loose ends. Films such as Million Dollar Baby & Mystic River have the virtues one might normally associate with short fiction – nothing occurs that does not lead directly toward a conclusion that ultimately should feel “inevitable.” And Eastwood is by now as veteran a director as one can find – his 34 credits (including the forthcoming Hereafter) are not so terribly short of the four dozen acting credits he’s had since he quit his television role as Rowdy Yates on Rawhide & struck it rich with the first of the spaghetti westerns, Serge Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. As one of just three living directors with two Oscars, Eastwood can do whatever he wants. He’s only appeared in one film that he hasn’t directed in twenty years. And if he wants to tell the story of Iwo Jima from two perspectives, one American, one Japanese, he can. I haven’t seen Flags of Our Fathers, but Letters from Iwo Jima, the Japanese half of that pair, benefits enormously from Eastwood’s desire to pare the chaos of war into an intelligible structure.

The story of South Africa’s 1995 World Cup rugby victory isn’t half so messy as the Pacific Theater of the Second World War & yet it presents some complex narrative challenges for Eastwood’s film that it almost gets right. Because it’s such a positive film, with its heart so self-evidently in the right place, you want it to work fully. And yet it’s such a fragile construction at the same time that almost any challenge to the expository house of cards that is being built could cause the entire project to come crashing down. I think it’s a film that some people will love enormously while others will dismiss it as a do-gooder veil tossed over what otherwise is a very predictable sports movie.

In some ways, the film to compare it to might be Kyentse Norbu’s The Cup, a tale of budding soccer fans in a monastery of Tibetan monks exiled in India. Both are heart-warming films that hinge on the social meaning of a sport for cultures in transition. The Cup, which was an indie hit ten years ago, is by far the better movie. And yet Eastwood and star Morgan Freeman have already won one award each for their roles in Invictus (National Film Review) and been nominated for another (Washington Area Film Critics Association), and the awards season hasn’t really gotten under way yet.

Unlike the Iwo Jima films, this isn’t a project Eastwood developed himself. Morgan Freeman bought John Carlin’s book, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation, and brought people in to bring his dream of a Nelson Mandela film to reality. Two-thirds of this movie are about how Mandela, only a couple of years past his 27-year imprisonment, much of it on the infamous Robben Island, took office and dealt with the fundamental issue that threatened South African democracy – the resentment and desire for revenge of a black population reduced to poverty through Afrikaner colonialization and 46 years of explicit apartheid, and the fears of revenge & marginalization of a white population. Since rugby was the white sport, blacks in the RSA generally preferred soccer. Since the Springboks national rugby squad had been to white Afrikaners what, say, the New York Yankees are to the citizens of New York (sorry, Mets fans), the black population tended to root for whoever was playing  against the Springboks. And the Springboks had just one “colored” player on its squad at the time, Chester Williams.

Much of this part of the story is told not by focusing on Mandela directly, but instead on his security detail. One of the first actions on the part of Madiba – as Mandela is widely called throughout Africa – was to blend his own African National Congress (ANC) security detail with the white team that had previously served the last Afrikaner president, F.W. de Klerk. This gives Mandela his chorus narratively, particularly as the ANC members have to explain Madiba to the Afrikaners & they in turn explain rugby to the ANC team. It also sets up a subtext of potential assassination that haunts most of the picture, upping the stakes for many of the actions Mandela takes, from his daily predawn walks to his public appearance at the World Cup finals.  

But Mandela wants people – especially investors from the US, Japan, Saudi Arabia & Taiwan – to see him surrounded not just by ANC veterans, but by whites as well. And what better, faster way to make that impression than to ensure that his security team is blended. Then he prevents the national sports authority from stripping the rugby team of its hated Springboks name and green & gold colors. He wants Afrikaners to know that what is important to them will continue to be important to South Africa. In fact, he goes further, inviting the captain of the team, Francois Pienaar, to his office for tea. Pienaar (who is not the Springbok’s coach, but more the equivalent to, say, the role Derek Jeter plays with the Yankees) is very much a jock & his family, particularly his dad, is perfectly willing to use the worst racial epithets & stereotypes in front of their black housekeeper. What, Mandela asks Pienaar, can he do to help the Springboks win the World Cup next year? The finals will be held in South Africa.

Pienaar is played by a bulked-up Matt Damon in a role that feels like an extension of Private Ryan, the basically patriotic, open minded but not exactly intellectual character of Stephen Spielberg’s film of D-Day & the days thereafter. And the actual change that we see & feel in the film is figured more than anything by the changes we see in Damon. It’s a difficult task, but one for which the mostly muted Damon is well suited. In the story as told here – Chester Williams’ autobiography has a version at odds with this one, tho he served as the film’s rugby advisor  – Pienaar gradually gets his teammates to grasp how their role transcends just rugby. The team gives rugby clinics in the slums – to much grumbling by the players, many of whom appear startled at the corrugated tin huts where so many of their neighbors live – and the morning after a major victory, they go for an early run that leads to a boat that takes them out to see Robben Island. Damon’s best moment in the whole film comes in Mandela’s own cell, as he reaches out in either direction with his arms and realizes that he can just about touch all the walls. And that Mandela lived there for many years (18 in fact, tho the film makes it sound like 30).

Gradually as the film proceeds, the focus shifts from Mandela to the team and its unlikely series of successes to reach the championship match. Eastwood is remarkably faithful to the actual events of the title game itself, which goes into overtime before somebody other than Pienaar kicks the winning shot. And – perhaps the very best thing about Invictus – it doesn’t over-explain rugby. I don’t understand the sport, but I learned a fair amount just by watching – tho not enough to pretend I really get it. The absolute eroticism of these muscular guys locked arm-in-arm, head-to-head is completely apparent from the final rugby match, with amped up sound effects and film speed slowing down & speeding up so that we can tell who is doing what.

Perhaps nothing signals more thoroughly how these parts of this film are stitched together than the one extraneous detail Eastwood feels he must include, the explanation of the absence of Winnie Mandela. We have maybe three, maybe four scenes in which Madiba’s unhappiness at her absence and the absence of his children is underscored, but they have nothing to do with either half of the plot, save perhaps when Mandela declares that his family is all South Africa now. But if these scenes don’t have a narrative function, they do play an important role in the film itself. They are the only moments here in which Nelson Mandela doesn’t appear thoroughly Christ-like in his beneficence and forgiveness to the monsters who ruled South Africa before him.

And this is the real challenge of Invictus, how to make Nelson Mandela seem like a human being. It stuns almost everyone – from the Afrikaners in his security detail to the ANC members in the sports union to Pienaar – how somebody who was caged for so many years in such a small cell and permitted out only to break rocks in the lime quarry (the film passes over the worst aspects his imprisonment) can so consistently reach out and preach forgiveness. Nelson Mandela, one suspects, got much further in his presidency than anyone anticipated simply because nobody knew quite what to expect.

And this is where you will either buy the film or not, as the case may be. I’m inclined to buy this, but then Mandela is one of only three living presidents I’ve ever seen, and the sole one where I actually made an effort to do so.¹ That he even survived his captivity was something of a miracle.² That he lived to lead his country is even more of one.

It is impossible to watch this movie and not think, of course, of all the compromises the Obama administration has made in its first year in office – with Wall Street, with the hawks in the Pentagon, with the insurance companies on health care. I’ve felt much of this year as tho the American people thought they’d elected Václav Havel and what they’ve gotten was Alexander Dubček. It’s a significant and unhappy difference: the former was a transformative figure, the latter merely a reformer of the Bad Old System. But every single action Mandela is seen as taking in this picture can be read (and is, in several instances) as giving in to the Afrikaners, who control the military, the police & the economy.

A word, finally, about the title and the poem by William Ernest Henley, a minor 19^th century British writer whose major contribution to world culture was that his daughter, who died at age six, had difficulty pronouncing words and called family friend J.M. Barrie “fwendy-wendy,” from which he coined the name Wendy he gave to the female character in Peter Pan. “Invictus” is a cringer of a poem, tho its sentiments are noble (and it is all about sentiment), and it apparently gave Mandela some comfort on Robben Island. But it has very little to do with the story itself and is mostly a mechanism for letting us know that this film is (a) important and (b) uplifting. It’s one of those things that tells you that all is not perfect in this film you very much would like to like.

 

¹ The others being Corazon Aquino of the Philippines and LBJ.

² Something Mandela credits Ron Dellums for making possible, by making Mandela’s imprisonment an issue in American politics & foreign policy. No matter how badly Dellums muddles in his role as mayor of Oakland, he will always have accomplished that.

At UC Santa Cruz,
the occupation picks up steam

Inside the barricades

“Push the university to its limits”

Google news

Local NBC news coverage

Santa Cruz students refusing
to end occupation

“…being president of the University of California
is like being the manager of a cemetery…”

§

The news from Santa Cruz

§

“No confidence” in Yudof

Lyn Hejinian
on the Berkeley Solidarity Alliance

UC campuses erupt
in protest

The Daily Californian

San Francisco Chronicle

UC student walkout

Graduate student stoppage

UC Student Association resolution

UC faculty walkout
(Facebook)

UC faculty walkout
(website)

Faculty walkout blog

University Professional & Technical Employees

Follow the money

This day, eight years ago, proved to be the very last day I thought of the George W. Bush administration as being relatively harmless. W had been in office less than a full year and, while his general incompetence was there for all to see, what was most striking about his administration was its very lack of any vision or overarching agenda. The cabinet member who seemed most poised to do active damage to society in general was the attorney general, John Ashcroft, whose hostility to the Constitution and preference for his own crabbed misreading of the Bible appeared primed to perform all sorts of mischief. I actually thought that Donald Rumsfeld’s garble about modernizing the military over at Defense might have the beneficial side-effect of reducing our economic dependence on military spending.

The contrast with the incoming Reagan administration two decades earlier was telling. Where Bush, like Reagan, failed to see that government is nothing less than the community’s own best expression of itself, which led W to appoint obviously unqualified people to head up programs and departments whose work he undervalued, Reagan actively sought to tear down large swatches of the federal government. Reagan deliberately provoked the air traffic controllers’ strike, knowing full well that PATCO was the least well-liked labor organization in the labor movement (its lack of solidarity with other unions set it up to receive too little help too late to save it). And Reagan’s slashing of social spending had, just this far into his first term, already begun to swell the ranks of his administration’s one true achievement – the creation of the homeless.

San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein had appointed me to the Census Oversight Committee for the 1980 tally of all Americans. My primary responsibility was to ensure an adequate counting of residents in the central city – the Tenderloin & South-of-Market – and the so-called “casual count” of San Franciscans with no fixed addresses. There were so few homeless people in San Francisco in 1980 that I knew who many of them were. There were a couple of food programs for the hungry at Saint Anthony’s and South of Market, but most of the homeless were mentally ill alcoholics who got enough money from Social Security to afford residential hotels at the start of any given month, but whose disruptive behavior would get them 86’d after just a couple of weeks. When the census identified 275 homeless people in San Francisco in 1980, Feinstein was flabbergasted & told the press that the number could not possibly be that high. I had the unhappy job of telling the press that the census was right. Little did either of us realize just how quickly Reagan would swell those numbers to well over 10,000.

But W had no such agenda. Reagan had wanted to be president because he wanted to change America. His vision of society was far meaner than anything we had seen before in my lifetime. Bush’s vision was no better, but he wanted to be president not out of any need to change anything, but just because his daddy had had the job and W was a poor, confused SOB still struggling to find his own identity in the shadow of overbearing parents. Reagan may have been in the earliest stages of the Alzheimer’s that was eventually to claim him – this was pretty obvious by his second term & the public diagnosis soon after he left office surprised no one – but Reagan had a theory of government & a purpose in his presidency, evil tho it was. W, on the other hand, was simply a mess.

What a difference a day makes. Like Hurricane Katrina in the summer of 2006, the attack of September 11, 2001 found a federal government ill-prepared to respond, and an administration with no real clue as to what it should do going forward. Unfortunately, however, September 11 gave the floundering W administration a purpose, even the rudiments of an agenda.

An administration that puts incompetents at the head of agencies because it has no respect for their mission & work is sending trucks barreling down the road with no driver. September 11 raised the stakes enormously precisely because it the put the pedal to the metal on all of the most dangerous federal departments, those that conduct foreign policy & those that conduct war. If Al Qaeda wanted to destroy America, it could have done no better than to set those wheels in motion, which is what it accomplished in killing roughly 3,000 Americans in three locations on a single morning, all of which it achieved with a handful of suicidal young men & less than two dozen box cutters.

It is worth contrasting where we are today with where we were on September 10, 2001, and maybe even on September 10, 1981. The Obama administration has a comprehensive agenda, but not particularly one of its own making. The Republican regime left virtually every public arena in some state of crisis. The Obama administration is responding to as many as it can & very possibly more than it can hope to ameliorate in one or even two terms in office. It now seems evident that the two issues that will determine the future political capital of this administration – something that dwindles very rapidly regardless of which party is in office and whether or not it has a “friendly” congress – are health care and the economy. The two problems are deeply intertwined and the Obama administration’s primary hope in solving either lies in the fact that many businesses – which opposed all reform in the early 90s when Hillary Clinton et al attempted to resolve the health care crisis – now recognize its negative impact on them. Add to these problems the issues of the Middle East (including Iraq & Iran), the two lingering Bush wars & potential for the environment to make Katrina look like a walk in the park, and you get some sense of the overwhelming (literally!) number of crises that must be managed simultaneously.

Perhaps the most distressing of these problems is the very one that reared its ugly head on September 11 – Al Qaeda, Afghanistan & what to do about failed states in general. This is the most distressing because it’s the area in which Obama has done the very least to distance himself from the failed policies of his predecessor. Indeed, reappointing Robert Gates secretary of defense was a move to inoculate Obama from attacks from the right. But Al Qaeda continues to exist & Afghanistan is hardly any closer to being a successful nation than it was when it was in the hands of the Taliban in 2001. After eight years of Bush administration incompetence dealing with these questions, Afghanistan looks like the very same problem to the US that it presented to the Russians in the 1980s. There will never be enough troops to solve this problem.

My sense has been Obama’s plan has been to back Gates’ approach to Afghanistan at least until such time as his administration has both health care & the economy back on track, but that’s a luxury that is paid for in American & Afghan lives alike. & Iraq comes after that. You can see the logic in that approach, even if it makes you cringe at its costs. But the problem is that all this hinges on the first two items in this sequence: health care & the economy. I have not been impressed at the failure of the administration to move the old guard of Wall Street out to pasture. If the cost of not panicking Wall Street further is the perpetuation of the system that collapsed last fall anyway, it may just be too high to pay. And it’s not at all apparent yet that Obama is going to be successful in impacting either the escalating costs of health care or the inability of millions of America to access it in the first place.

I do think that Obama has a vision of a better America, one in which people work together, rather than setting up one group or sector against another. But what Obama doesn’t have, at least not yet, is any real ability to control his agenda. There are too many crises all happening at once, thanks to W & his gang, too many chickens coming home to roost. If Obama can’t get control over this, and fairly soon, the failures of the likes of Robert Gates & Larry Summers inevitably will become his as well.

In 1973, the one prisoner with whom I worked whom I absolutely knew in my gut was railroaded was a North Carolina moonshiner by the name of Cecil Lovedahl. Part of a group of returning WW2 vets who had taken up the manufacture & distribution of hootch, which was not only illegal, but horning in on what an older coterie of politically connected moonshiners thought was their monopoly, Lovedahl found himself at the wrong end of a plot to break up his goup. He had been riding in the back seat of a car that was involved in a fatal accident, killing the driver. The local pols saw it as an opportunity to break up the newcomers and charged Lovedahl with murder, though nobody could say why anyone in the back seat of a car would murder the driver while speeding on a dark mountain road. To escape a worse fate, his attorney (I forget whether he was a public defender or court-appointed) pled Lovedahl guilty over his own protestations in court, and he received a life sentence. Inside, Lovedahl deteriorated & attempted suicide several times, up to & including swallowing a box of straight pins. He would have been quietly released a couple of years later except for the fact that the prosecutor had risen quite high in state politics, with some thoughts of going even higher.

In my job at the Committee for Prisoner Humanity & Justice, I managed to arrange an out-of-state parole plan for Lovedahl through the Delancey Street Foundation in San Francisco, but I still had to persuade the North Carolina political establishment, and especially that pol, that putting Lovedahl on the streets 2,500 miles from home wasn’t going to come back to haunt him. There was only one person I knew who might be able to accomplish this, so I called Ted Kennedy’s office in Massachusetts. Without even once asking “What’s in it for me?” Kennedy made the call, and Lovedahl got his parole. That might have been the end of the story but Lovedahl broke parole – after 20 years in prison, he found Delancey Street’s restrictions hard to take – & headed to Nevada, where he was arrested as a parole violator. An extradition hearing was held, but it was easy for the Washoe County public defender to show that Lovedahl should never have been convicted in the first place. Free so long as he remained in Nevada, Lovedahl stayed there the rest of his life.

I’ve always wondered just how many times over 46 years in the U.S. Senate Kennedy made those kinds of phone calls. He was not only the one senator in 1973 who might have made that gesture, he was also the only one who could have gotten that result. I fear that the same may have been true as recently as last week.

My note about Corazon Aquino brought to mind three other, somewhat parallel lists that I keep around tucked in the back of my brain. One is of people whom I’ve seen in person who went on to become president:

Ronald Reagan, whose hand I shook briefly once in Sacramento when he was still governor. I was walking down the hallway past Regan’s office in the Capitol with an aide to one of the Republican legislators with whom I sometimes collaborated on prison reform issues, and he more or less dragged me over to introduce us. “You never know when that will come in handy,” I was told later. It never did.

Barack Obama, who spoke at the Paoli train station last year (April 19 to be exact) as part of a one-day railway tour of the state. This is roughly six blocks from my house. Krishna & one of my sons got to shake his hand amidst the throng.

Nelson Mandela, when he came to speak at the Oakland Coliseum on the last day of June, 1990. This stop on his post-prison national tour was largely a way to say thank you to then-Congressman Ron Dellums, who had made Mandela’s treatment as a prisoner sufficiently an issue in US-South African relations that the old regime was constrained from murdering him. Barrett Watten & I attended that event together, along with some 58,000 others. It was your basic outdoors big leftwing party.

A somewhat longer list consists of those politicians who thought they were going to be president, starting with Nelson Rockefeller & William Scranton, who appeared at an “anybody but Goldwater” rally in San Francisco immediately prior to the 1964 GOP Convention held at the Cow Palace. Goldwater was the first wave of the Republican rightwing that was to wash over the GOP, and which runs the party now. The crowd, which had marched up Market Street to the plaza in front of City Hall, was the same lefty coalition that would be turning out in anti-war marches before too long, and had little in common with either candidate. Scranton they listened to politely, but Rockefeller was booed quite heartily.

Democrats: Jerry Brown (too many times to count), Jesse Jackson (ditto), George McGovern (during the ’72 campaign – the most boring public speaker imaginable) & Walter Mondale (sometime around 1983), who like Rockefeller was booed loudly. Dianne Feinstein, introducing him, shouted back, “Listen, this man is going to be the next president of the United States.” The crowd was unconvinced.

A couple of years ago, I was at the Philadelphia airport, catching a flight somewhere when I realized that the person in front of me, in a pale blue suit, with no entourage & carrying his own bags, was John McCain. I’ve been more conscious of McCain over the last 15 years or so since we have some mutual friends. To be honest, I thought that he represented the best the GOP had to offer last year, and was disappointed that he made such dreadful – and dangerous – decisions throughout the campaign. I still think that he would have done much better in the long run – carried Pennsylvania for certain & possibly Ohio – if he had picked Tom Ridge to be his running mate. But once the economy collapsed in September, that may have been too little to make much difference.

The third list is the quirkiest: presidents who have been in my home. Or at least my house, albeit before I owned it. The initial owner of this 1959 home was then the head of the Valley Forge Military Academy, and a close friend and former aide to Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose grandson David lives about a mile away. When we bought the house in 1995, some of the older neighbors told us of the parties that would take place after events at the Academy, and of seeing Ike and Nixon over here more than once. Some of the other notables at these events mentioned by more than one of our neighbors include Bob Hope, Al Haig & Henry Kissinger. Though we bought the home from the woman who had purchased it from the original owners, there were still some American eagle light switch plates that we removed when we painted the place before moving in.

Just the second sitting president whom I ever got to see in person, and the only one with whom I ever shared a meal, died this week. My first, early in the summer of 1964, had been LBJ, dedicating the federal building in San Francisco. I was taking some classes nearby & walked over on my lunch hour. Johnson was a tall man, something I had not fully appreciated from seeing him on television, and towered over his Secret Service agents. There were only a few hundred people there, and the only picket signs – there were maybe three – read Au H²O.

My one prior glimpse of reigning state authority had been to see – quite by accident – the motorcade of Nikita Khrushchev as it traveled through Santa Cruz on its way to Carmel or Pebble Beach. We were on the beach & might not even have noticed it had my grandfather not yelled for us to look. I was maybe 12 at the time, thoroughly a repository still for the anti-Communist propoganda that filled our school textbooks, and can recall feeling apprehensive that this man sworn to “our destruction” was somehow in one of those limos gliding past, plain as day.

But it was in September 1986 that I found myself at a Foreign Affairs Council luncheon in San Francisco for Corazon Aquino, then very newly installed as the president of the Philippines. Born into one of the wealthiest families in her nation & a lawyer by training, Aquino had run for the office after the assassination of her husband, Benigno, who had led the movement to oust the dictatorial incumbent, Ferdinand Marcos. She actually lost the election, albeit rather in the same manner as Mousavi recently lost in Iran. But the people – and civil institutions, such as the Catholic Church – had had quite enough of the blatantly corrupt Marcos family & forced him into exile, installing Aquino in his place.

In 1986, the idea of a female head of state was still quite a novelty. In the U.S. to assure President Reagan and Congress that theirs was not a revolution in the sense of Cuba, Aquino was the guest of then-mayor Dianne Feinstein, another female who rose to executive power as the result of an assassination.¹ Aquino’s husband had been an exceptionally popular figure in the Bay Area Filipino community, and his assassination on the tarmac of the Manila airport, returning from exile to challenge Marcos, was treated by San Francisco media as though it were a major local story.

In many respects, Corazon Aquino in 1986 faced the same challenges Barack Obama does today. Each was the repository for the hopes of many people who felt marginalized by a predecessor who was openly contemptuous of law & morality. Each represented a demographic that previously had not exercised power. And each soon discovered exactly how little of their nation, indeed how little of their government, the president controlled. In Aquino’s case, her six-year tenure was repeatedly punctuated by attempts at coups from various factions of the military – and indeed there was a non-electoral change in the presidency there as recently as 2001.

But in 1986, Corazon Aquino embodied the aspirations of the Philippine people, of women, of people anywhere trapped by repressive regimes and reactionary social institutions. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize and named Time magazine’s woman-of-the-year. Her speech to the foreign affairs council was articulate, but general, and she got absolutely nothing but softball questions from an audience that just wanted to bask in the promise her administration offered.

If there is a lesson here, it’s that even the most thoughtful, well-positioned politician cannot succeed just on good intentions. There needs to be a massive social movement not only to ensure that success, but to demand it. And if I’ve seen anything in the first seven months of the Obama administration, it’s that there is no such movement in the U.S. Wall Street has been writing the rules for its own recovery, Afghanistan increasingly is looking like the latest embodiment of the word quagmire, and if the future of healthcare reform depends on the wisdom and good intentions of Max Baucus’ gang of six, we are all in serious trouble. Don’t even get me started on the civil rights of the gay community or the persistence of Bush-era legal tactics in the name of counter-terrorism.

But don’t get me wrong either: I would vote for Obama again in a second. Consider the alternatives. Yet everywhere I look, I see drift, entropy & compromise. And compromise from a position of weakness, because there is no larger movement demanding the changes we all talked about last fall. It’s not enough, say, for just the gay community to demand the same civil liberties enjoyed by everyone else. Or for the pacifist community to ask what we think we can accomplish in a land that never in its history has truly been a nation. Nor is it enough to have an administration filled with the brightest people & best intentions. Everywhere you look, you see the gravitational pull of corporate capital. It’s like having a planet the size of Jupiter at about the distance of the moon.

Unless and until the forces outside the beltway are more organized, more powerful, and more articulate than the enormous capital resources that are at work inside it, the Obama administration of 2009 is going to look one helluva lot like the Aquino one of 1986. And that is not a portrait with a promising future.

 

¹ Feinstein had been the president of the Board of Supervisors – what passes for a city council in San Francisco – when Dan White, another supervisor, shot & killed Mayor George Moscone & supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978. She finished Moscone’s term and was then elected twice in her own right. In 1986, she was midway through her second full term.

The Crisis in Iran

10 YouTube Videos

Protests outside Tehran

Use Twitterfall filters
#iranelection
Basij
Tehran

But beware
fake Iranian tweeters

Evidence of fraud in the election numbers

A good Flickr site
is Mousavi1388

Photos from Saturday’s riot in Tehran

Injured demonstrators arrested at hospitals

The latest coverage from Stratfor

Nieman Reports:
Iran – can its stories be told?

LiveBlogging the Uprising

Barack Obama in Paoli, PA nine months ago yesterday

Today is one of the most momentous days in American history. Regardless of how far short of its initial promise the Obama administration should fall – and there really is no other possibility, given just how high expectations are – there can be no question that a profound transformation in American society is being set into motion. Even if you are someone who is quite skeptical of the Democrats in general – and, say,  unhappy that Rick Warren was chosen for the inaugural prayer or that Obama wants Big Medicine apologist and all-around empty suit Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General – you can’t fail to recognize the shift away from the imperial malevolency that has sent this nation spinning out of control with wars of choice & economies of chance over the past eight years.

There are a lot of layers of event going on here at once. The most obvious is the end of a white male monopoly on power. And a step toward fully committing this country to Thomas Jefferson’s initial vision that all men are created equal, a vision that Jefferson himself could not live up to.

As important, at least, is the turn away from the pursuit of foreign policy through bullying – the “toga boys rule the world” mindset brought in by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. Far from being the world’s only superpower, we are a nation that has failed miserably at every single military adventure we’ve set our mind to, with the possible exception of the invasion of Grenada, since the end of World War II. The number of people who have died because we don’t understand – or acknowledge – our own history is startling. The percentage of those people who happen to be civilians and even children is stomach turning.

Simply by not being Bush, and by not being identified as white, and having positioned himself as the champion of change, Barack Obama does this nation an enormous amount of good. But the challenges facing the new administration are way beyond daunting. When Nero died, the Roman empire went through three more emperors in less than a year. Anyone who thinks we’re in for an easy time over the next 48 months simply hasn’t been paying attention.

I have my own reservations and concerns about the new administration. When I first endorsed Obama on February 11 of last year, I did so not because I thought he was the most progressive of candidates, but because he was the one I thought had the best chance of winning. Policy wise, he was best candidate on one issue – Iraq – but quite thoroughly one of the pack among that particular group of Democrats on everything else.

Right now, my biggest concerns are that the new president won’t get the best advice from his cabinet of mostly recycled Clintonites. And that he may be making the same mistake that neutered Jerry Brown’s governorship in California a generation ago. Brown, who came to office in 1975 mostly on the name recognition of his father, a former governor who preceded Ronald Reagan in that post, likewise ran as a post-partisan agent of change. And Brown, ever the Jesuit, really meant it. In practice this translated into a belief that government should “raise the contradictions” that already exist within society. So Brown appointed the most militant of troglodytes to various law enforcement positions, while putting serious pacifists and progressives into positions in the courts.

I actually stopped the appointment of Brown’s choice to head the state parole board, Raymond Procunier, who had been the head of the prison system during the days of the San Quentin Six and Soledad Brother fiascos. I knew that “Pro” had taken charge of the board weeks before Brown was ready to announce it, so all I had to do was leak it to the San Francisco Examiner and suggest that Brown was hiding what he knew would be a controversial appointment, since most people on the left thought Pro was responsible for the death of George Jackson. It was Brown’s secrecy more than Procunier’s record that scotched that appointment, but it also was very quickly the first in a series of "gotchas" within the Brown administration where the liberals were only too happy to “take out” the reactionaries – and vice versa. Brown’s chief counsel was soon busted because of 300 marijuana plants being grown in the backyard by his wife (herself then the chief lawyer for the Northern California chapter of the ACLU). I’ve always thought that this was payback for the Procunier misadventure. Brown’s administration never did get its sea legs, and the justices that he appointed to the State Supreme Court were eventually voted out of office because of their opposition to the death penalty.

In trying to “raise the contradiction,” Brown functionally cancelled himself out.. For largely the same reasons, I don’t think it’s feasible to truly have a “national unity” government in Washington. Rick Warren is only there for one bit of distasteful show business, but other divisions run deeper and are already visible. For example, Samantha Power, who was forced to resign her post as a foreign policy adviser to Obama during the campaign after she was quoted in the media as characterizing Hillary Clinton as a “monster” is back already as a key transition team member. I can’t imagine that she’s going to have much luck advising the new secretary of state.

So I’m holding my breath. I think the immediate challenges before us are horrific, and our options aren’t all that many. Further, there remains a tremendous amount of unfinished business in this country, a nation in which black men are still more likely to go prison than college, where women still earn less than their counterparts, where nobody wants to admit to the genocide of native peoples on which this nation was built, and where many gay & lesbian citizens are far from equal in the face of the law.

Still, today is a day when we can all feel the pent-up demand for change that exists in our society. And we can see that as a people we’ve taken a concrete step, however timorously, toward unleashing those forces. I think we’re in for some very interesting times.

I have been asked more than once if I would comment on the situation in  Gaza, tho I’ve never proposed myself as an expert on the Middle East. Philip Metres, in Monday’s comments stream, is very sweet when he writes

You're a voice that matters, that people listen to, and I personally want to know what you think about it.

Personally, I would want somebody with a lot more background on this topic myself.

Having said that, however, I do have both thoughts & feelings on the current situation. More than anything, I am reminded of a conversation I had with Sigmund Laufer the one time I got to spend an afternoon with him maybe 20 years ago. Perhaps it’s that I was just at the funeral for his granddaughter, Emma Bee Bernstein, last week, tho she was buried alongside her other grandfather in Valhalla, New York, not with Sigmund in New Jersey. Sigmund & Miriam Laufer, Susan Bee’s parents, left Palestine in 1947 & settled in New York City just a few blocks from where Susan lives today. They did so at a time when the creation of Israel was clearly about to happen. I asked Sigmund why, with the foundation of a new nation in the offing, they chose to leave. He said that it was self-evident that any Jewish state had to be a theocracy – otherwise the resident Palestinians would have been an overwhelming electoral majority – and that the creation of a state based on religion was only an investment in what he termed a “generation of tsouris.” Would that it had been only a generation.

In reality, the creation of Israel in the 1940s ensured what I believe will be multiple millennia of murder & counter-murder that will make the 700-year-old conflict in Kosovo between Christians & Muslims feel like small potatoes. The creation of Israel could have been accomplished only through genocidal action – the displacement of an entire nation already in place long before Zionism got going in the 1890s. It is a sad comment on the crudeness of colonialism – on a par with many of the arbitrary “national” boundaries that stretch across Africa & well into Southern Asia, completely ignorant of tribal communities that may cross over them – that anyone thought it was in their power or right to just give a state to any group of people.

Now, however, it is there and it is not going away. Israel’s government is dysfunctional and willing to do anything – no limits – to protect itself. That it projects itself externally as a bully, or uses the methodology of apartheid internally, should surprise no one. That it howls when this is pointed out – thank you, Jimmy Carter – is no different than the U.S. pretending it did not commit genocide in its sweeping aside of native nations in the 18^th & 19^th centuries.

I have sometimes wondered what America might be like today if the Roosevelt & Truman administrations had not been so overtly anti-Semitic and had instead opened our doors to every displaced Jew after the Second World War. The entrepreneurial capabilities and deep commitment to learning of that community would have flourished in the United States, the civil rights movement would have had a much easier time of it and George Bush never would have carried Florida. Instead we have had 60 years of fighting & cease-fires. Some day someone will be able to simply add another zero to that number. And then another.

Hamas is the perfectly logical response to this situation. The local version of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas is at best a group of thugs and even more committed to theocracy than is Israel. They are not all that much different, nor any better, than the Taliban in Afghanistan. By shooting rockets into Israel, Hamas invited the current Israeli response and did so because it forces the population there to rally around what has been an obviously failing regime. The cynicism of its strategy – which turns Gaza’s own civilian dead into an investment in Hamas’ political fortunes – is beyond appalling.

That Israel would be suckered into this response and would do so during the last three weeks of the Bush administration speaks volumes for its role as an American client-state – our primary military surrogate in the region – as well as for the ineptness of Team Bush. The cynicism of Israel’s strategy is beyond appalling.

There are no “good guys” in this conflict. The citizens of both sides are the victims of history as well as of their immediate hoodlum politicians. If the Zionist movement could invent the state of Israel in the middle of the 20^th century, you can be certain that the descendants of the Palestinians will still be able to imagine a “right of return” in the 40^th century. There is simply no solution. Period.

What there are, however, are measures that can minimize the bloodshed on all sides. A cease-fire, a two-state balancing act, serious economic investment in Palestine – the presence of a real middle class there would be a substantial brake on the impulse to violence – would all have an impact. I don’t think this is all so mysterious, but I don’t think it’s a long-term resolution either.

In the meantime, I bleed for the victims of all sides.

Dear Ron,

Mayor Nutter and Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance invite you to a discussion and Q&A session for the arts community on the City's response to the financial crisis and subsequent changes to the City budget. The meeting will be held this Friday, December 5th, at 5:30pm in the Mayor's Reception Room in City Hall. We hope that you will be able to attend.

Friday, December 5th

5:30-6:30pm

Mayor's Reception Room

City Hall, Room 202

At the meeting, Mayor Nutter, Finance Director Rob Dubow, and Chief Cultural Officer Gary Steuer will be on hand to explain the context of the economic crisis, the difficult decisions that need to be made, how they will affect cultural organizations and programs, and to share the principles that guided the process. They will answer questions and solicit input on priorities going forward.

Please feel free to share this with friends and colleagues who may be interested in attending. If you have any questions, please contact Katherine Gajewski in the Mayor's Office at Katherine.Gajewski@phila.gov or 215-686-2120.

Please note: It is a good idea to arrive early to get through City Hall security. Enter through the Visitor's Entrance at the NE corner of City Hall.

Gary

Gary P. Steuer
Chief Cultural Officer
Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy
City Hall, 708
Philadelphia, PA 19107
215-686-3989 (O)
267-438-7153 (C)
gary.steuer@phila.gov

One great irony last night was that the finest moment in John McCain’s campaign proved to be his concession speech, perhaps the most magnanimous, gracious & even, yes, patriotic I have ever heard. I listened to it thinking that if McCain had just used that same approach to his entire campaign, he could have made a much closer race of it.

Of course, McCain had a lot of time to work on that address so that he could get it just right. McCain has known for weeks that he was going to lose. As I’ve told several friends from the west coast who have called in their panicky moments to ask what it was about Pennsylvania that caused McCain to be campaigning here so much, it was precisely because he knew that he was going to lose that he focused on Pennsylvania at all. He needed to challenge for a blue state just to be able to show his supporters that he was seriously trying to win, knowing full well that he was going to lose several of the legacy red states from the Bush era. Pennsylvania seemed like a credible ploy. Without it, his campaign had no chance and his fundraising would have dried up six weeks ago, making yesterday far more of a blow-out than it proved to be. Pennsylvania has more rural citizens than any other state in the union. While its two cities may be great metropolises, the third largest is just over 100,000 people. This is a state that sent Rick Santorum (Sarah Palin in pants) to the U.S. senate not once, but twice. McCain knew that the polls were always correct about Pennsylvania, but he also knew that he could argue for the plausibility of a larger-than-usual “Bradley effect” here than elsewhere. As it turned out, there were states that McCain would have lost had he not had that end-of-campaign financing, including Arizona. So focusing here was not a bad idea, just one that openly conceded that he was going to lose. Once Obama picked Biden & McCain failed to pick Ridge, the deal was sealed. 

I got up yesterday at 4:30 AM in order to get out to Phoenixville where my poll-watching assignment had been moved late Monday night. I needed to be there at 6:00 AM when the local election officials set up their equipment to make sure that the M1 vote scanning machine & the lone iVotronix or whatever it’s called (used in Chester County only when a voter insists on doing so instead of the paper ballot), both read 000 at the start of the day, to check out who had gotten absentee ballots (44 voters) and who had returned them (just 32), and then to check off which of the Obama “target voters” came in to vote so that our get-out-the-vote work later in the day could focus on just those who had failed to show. In a precinct of 1203 registered voters (maybe 200 of whom were dead or had moved away since the registrations have not been purged in several years), Team Obama had identified 465 votes for their candidate that could be counted on in this precinct. In the 46 years that I’ve been doing election-day volunteering for the Democratic party, I’d never seen a list that included so many disaffected Republicans, but that proved to be true all day yesterday. Obama did very well among the GOP here in Chester County, which is how he won this still very Republican “horse country” exurb.

After my three-hour shift I returned to Paoli to vote, where long lines snaked out into the parking lot, but steady movement forward kept the wait to just a half hour. Then time for a quick lunch with Krishna before heading over to a local catering firm in whose back offices the Obama canvassing operation was headquartered. I took a route that amounted to one-sixth of my own precinct and was reminded (once again) just how labor intensive suburban canvassing is compared with the work I used to do in San Francisco where you could focus on one or two city blocks and reach enough people to be certain that you added at least five or six votes that otherwise would not have occurred. As I walked my precinct, I managed to turn out just one vote that I knew for certain was the result of my labor, but partly this was because so many people had already gone to the polls. The truth was that, by mid-afternoon, I’d run into the last non-voter I would find all day. After three hours of door-to-door, I headed over to a local title insurance firm that has been lending its offices for a phone bank and where I worked right up until 7:45 PM. Again, also for the first time in over 40 years, I did not find any people who had yet to vote, and my going was made slower by people who wanted to thank me for what I was doing. If you have ever done this sort of work, you know just how rare that is.

Not that any of this was by now a great surprise. When I was poll-watching it Phoenixville, it became quite clear by 9:00 AM that somewhere between 90 and 100 percent of the Obama “target voters” – people who had already indicated to volunteers that they were voting for him – were going to turn out. I have never seen anything like that before in my life. I was just one of 1.1 million Obama volunteers yesterday. Unquestionably the get-out-the-vote effort was the greatest single act of community organizing in this nation’s history.

In the past week my team has won the World Series, and my candidate just threw the GOP out of the White House. I should buy a lottery ticket.