LEARNING FROM EXES

(President George W. Bush waits behind a camouflage curtain before being announced to speak to the troops at Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq’s western al-Anbar province 03 September 2007. Photo from The New York Times.)

A few days ago, I kept having the nagging feeling that it was a date I should be remembering for some reason. It wasn't until I woke up the next morning that I recalled: On February 4, 1991, my partner of six years left my house (where we'd slept together one last time) to board a plane for the West Coast. Leaving me for good.

It took me years to recover. I developed severe hives, such that it was difficult for me to go out in public for a while. I stopped listening to music because it was loaded with triggers. I lost a lot of weight, I made bad decisions, I blew new relationships. I had to reinvent myself.

In retrospect, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. She understood, long before I did, that I was never going to become the ultimate codependent she required of a partner, determined as I was to try. She knew I was headed down a road where I would eventually say no to her and demand she do her share. So, a few days late, I'm celebrating. To my ex I say, thanks for walking out on me, finally, after having sucked me dry for two years. I wish you peace. I've certainly found it without you.

I think of the Carole King song: "If it had been as I intended, I wouldn't have the peace I know."



This kind of cataclysmic change, this total reinvention, doesn't happen to us personally very often -- although I don't see why it shouldn't, the opportunity for it is always there. We tend to resist it, because we are easily frightened, soft-fleshed and slow little bipeds who've bought the ability to outlive our intended lifespans without first making sure we've filled in the gaps with art, spirit, and sustainability. So even when we think we're welcoming "change", we insist it be slickly packaged and not actually radical. Radical as in "going to the root."

We resist it even more as members of cultures, tribes, and nations. I happen to believe the current need for change has run us down like a semi approaching an armadillo on the interstate, and jumping into the air isn't going to do us any good. But even with my poet's heart and my appetite for revolution, I have trouble answering the question Billy Kwan posed: What then must we do? Usually when I don't have an answer, I know that's because it is up to more than me to answer it. It will take a lot of us, like white blood cells surrounding a virus and saying in low voices "You want a piece of this?"

However, I keep pushing myself to "remember, or failing that, invent", partly because I am a writer and that's fun for me, partly because this winter is beginning to look like Valley Forge, and partly because I helped elect this current President, which carries with it responsibility. So the last day or so, I've been pretending the old regime, not just Gunner Dick and Chimpy McFlightsuit, et al, but also the broken press mechanism in this country and a Congress whose response on 9/11 was to gather on the steps and sing the national anthem (when I saw that on TV, I knew we were in trouble) -- I've been imagining that the whole ball of wax is a dysfunctional relationship with a girlfriend who is simply never going to change, and the only way I can ever be happy again is to redefine everything I think about love and trust from the ground up.

In the process of this experiment, some interesting elements have emerged.

One is that I realized I am still very, very pissed at all the people who let this happen: All of you out there who were ever taken in by Bush. I've made excuses for you. I mean, I grew up around men who were fuckers of the first degree, vicious little ballscratchers who never ever gave anyone as much as they took and who simply reveled in their own ignorance. So when this kind of photo of Bush appeared

(President George W. Bush has his early morning school reading event interrupted by his Chief of Staff Andrew Card shortly after news of the New York City airplane crashes was available in Sarasota, Florida. Photos by Paul J. Richards/Agence France-Presse.)

or this one

(President George W. Bush speaks to reporters after a meeting with members of his National Economic Council in the Cabinet Room of the White House, February 25, 2003. Bush said Iraqi President Saddam Hussein will have to fully disarm to avert war. Photo by Kevin Lamarque/Reuters.)

I instantly recognized the kind of guy Faulkner would write about, except not even that interesting. He's not someone you'd trust to run a forklift, much less anything where considering the needs of other human beings is a job requirement. And yet you elected him President, twice. (Kind of.)

My anger about this has gotten in the way of my thinking, I reckon. Because there's some part of me, deep inside, saying "See what you did, you stupid asswipes, this is NOT MY PROBLEM."

But I live here, of course it's my problem. In fact, since I was never for an instant taken in by this man, or by Reagan, or by any neoconservative lying puke, I'm in a better position to lead us out of the wilderness than most. As Fannie Lou Hamer allegedly once said, "If you can see what the problem is, and you know one thing to do about it, then you're a leader."

So, I have to keep getting over the feelings attached to having been shafted, royally shafted, and get on with clean-up. (On good days, when I have extra, of course.)

And then, Friday night, Bill Moyers had Jay Rosen and Glenn Greenwald as guests on his PBS show Journal. I watched it with intense satisfaction. I recommend you all at least read the transcript (available here) if you can't find a re-airing on your local stations. Here's my favorite part of it, words spoken by Glenn Greenwald:

"I think that clearly, the opinion-making elites and the political elites are generally insulated from the level of anxiety and economic threat that millions and millions of Americans are facing in the most extreme fashion since the Great Depression, as the cliché goes.

"At the same time, I think the problem is, is that the citizenry has really been trained to believe that they're impotent when it comes to demanding action from the political class.
......
"I think what needs to happen is there needs to be a sense, as you said, whether it's street demonstrations or other forms of true social disruption that can threaten the people who have an interest in preserving how things are, that until that happens, and whatever form that takes -- (it's hard to predict, it can be spontaneous, it can grow out of real dissatisfaction and anger- -- that more or less, lip service will be paid to the idea that these are significant problems that our political leaders care about, that change is coming."

I began considering the idea of imagining the future two years from now and embracing it, getting ready for it, by (say) tomorrow night. What if two years before my ex left me, I had had the sense to accept where things were headed and said "All right, I'm going to live as if you've already gone." I'd not have wasted years of my life. Sometimes, of course, we have to learn lessons the hard way, the slow bleed, or, my own preferred method, by the Quaker axiom of "Proceed as the way opens." But sometimes we have a chance at quantum leaps. If this is one of those windows, I'd like to jump through it.

I'm only beginning this thought exercise. I have no profound lessons to pass on as yet. Still, I thought I'd share it with you -- possibly some of you are way ahead of me. And we are certainly all in this together. Happy day of rest, ya'll. See you on Monday.




[Note: The photos in this post are from The New York Times photoessay/editorial by Errol Morris titled Mirror, Mirror On The Wall. My deep thanks to Digby for writing about this article and linking to it; I've been studying it ever since. Hat-tip also to Saturday Night Live's Seth Myers whose comment in Weekend Update made me laugh cola out my nose: He mentioned that President Barack Obama had apologized this week for "screwing up" in the nominations of two Cabinet members with tax problems, and responded with "Dude, the guy who had this job before you? He broke the world." Yeah.]


[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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HATE CRIMES AND THE WAR ON TERROR

Which of these is a hate crime?
(1) Invading a nation which had done nothing to us for made-up reasons to keep their natural resources for our own use, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people of a different race and religion than our own.
(2) Choosing to stay on vacation for four days instead of acting when tens of thousands of poor people, overwhelmingly African-American, are suffering and dying, trapped by a natural disaster.
(3) Hanging a noose on the door of a highly-esteemed African-American woman whose scholarship and speech illuminates the issue of racism.

I'd say, all of them. But none will appear in the FBI database.


Last week, the Department of Justice and the FBI released their Hate Crimes Statistics for 2006. This is an annual report in compliance with the 1990 Hate Crimes Statistics Act performed by the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program. The FBI collects data regarding criminal offenses that are motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity/national origin, or disability and are committed against persons, property, or society. (Crimes against society are defined as drug or narcotic offenses, gambling offenses, prostitution offenses, and weapon law violations.)

To read the assorted tables, go to the website. Unfortunately, the raw data used for the report is not available online. Various blogs and media outlets have been reporting on the conclusions. CBS News led with "Hate crime incidents in the United States rose last year by almost 8 percent, ... as racial prejudice continued to account for more than half the reported instances." The incidence of racial prejudice was "up 7.8 percent" from 2005.

"More than half of the victims were targeted because of their race, said CBS News correspondent Stephanie Lambidakis, and almost 60 percent of all known offenders are white. Heidi Beirick of the Southern Poverty Law Center says the numbers are probably higher than that. 'It's unfortunate that the numbers went up by almost 8 percent, but the truth is the FBI Hate Crimes statistics severely undercounts the number of hate crimes that we have in the United States every year,' she told CBS News. That's because only 12,600 of the nation's more than 17,000 local, county, state and federal police agencies - roughly three-quarters - participated in the hate crime reporting program in 2006."

For instance, left out of these data is the Jena 6 incident.

"As has happened since the FBI began collecting hate crime data in 1991, the most frequent motivation was racial bias, accounting for 51.8 percent of the incidents in 2006. That was down slightly from the 54.7 percent in 2005.

Also in 2006, religious prejudice was blamed for 18.9 percent of the incidents; sexual orientation prejudice for 15.5 percent; and ethnic or national origin for 12.7 percent."

I'm leaving it to other to comment on the meaning of this data. I especially recommend the Discounting Hate intelligence report from the SPLC, as well as their recommendations about What Can Be Done. My interest lies elsewhere at the moment.

Conspicuously absent from the list of hate crimes as they are defined above are attacks against women or children because they are women or children. These are the most targeted identity-based groups in the world, yet they are not included as victims of hate crimes.

Likewise, class is completely invisible in the data. I know Americans are confused about how to identify class, but we're also highly confused about gender and race, yet we find ways to make at least crude approximations about those identities in reporting crime, both perceived and real.

Also absent is any tabulation of offenders identities except for race -- I have to say, it appears to me as if the race category was included at least in part to allow the argument of "well, look, they attack their own people, it's not just whites doing the racial violence." Thus, we have no way of creating a profile of who is committing hate crimes. If early identification of risk and prevention were a goal, wouldn't that be critical information to have?

I think these gaps point to problematic attitudes not just within the criminal justice world but also shared by the general population, which can be summed up as:
(1) All crimes against people and property arise from "hate", why single out some definitions of hate as worse than others? and
(2) The belief in punishment as a deterrent to crime breaks down when it is necessary to apply it in the defense of target groups whose oppression is part of the "natural order" or perceived institutional prerogative.

And -- although I'm coming from a radically different stance, of course -- I have to admit, I can see validity in both these attitudes.

As someone who is and has been a multiple target for hate (depends on how I parse my "victimhood" that particular day), who has lost beloveds to hate-based violence, who has been up close and personal with monsters: I'm still not sure that kind of behavior deserves an offender category separate from, say, someone who sends workers into a coal mine long past the point of safety.

I'm not being disingenuous, here. I'm actually proposing that we begin discussion on expanding the working definition of "hateful" to include actions which would lock children into a prison cell because their parents were not born in the United States, or permit waterboarding on individuals who have no access to habeas corpus.

Likewise, while I can see the absolute need for collecting statistics, I think the point of this effort should be education, not necessarily punishment. Not under our current system. Morality should not be the province of the justice system.

Thomas Cahill was interviewed last week by Bill Moyers on his PBS Journal. Cahill is currently researching a new book which focuses on the death penalty. At one point, Moyers raised the issue of justice -- seeking justice for murder.

"Moyers: But there is the question of a crime and of justice as some people see it.

Cahill: The crime is secondary. Crime is secondary. There are no millionaires on death row nor will there ever be. Almost everyone on death row is poor. And do you really think that no millionaire ever committed a capital crime?"

I believe as progressives we should be just as concerned about how hate crimes legislation is applied unequally, falling primarily on those who are poor and nonwhite, as we are concerned about how anti-pornography legislation might erode other forms of free expression.

In May 1996, a Feminist Family Values Forum was held in Austin, Texas, sponsored by the Foundation for a Compassionate Society. Speakers included Miliani Trask, Gloria Steinem, Angela Davis, and María Jiménez. At one point, there was an open Q&A. I was one of the 2000 attendees, and I directed a question to the panel but especially to Angela Davis about the inherent contradiction of hate crimes laws.

This event was videotaped and transcribed into a book, which is now online (published and edited by Susan Bright), and my question with the response can be found on page 66. I'll reproduce it for you here. The eye contact and comprehension I got at that time from Ms. Davis has stayed with me.

"Question (from me): As a lesbian, I am really appalled at how much money and energy my community is spending in supporting so-called Hate Crimes Bills to make there be more vicious prison sentences for crimes against specific peoples, as if that's the answer. I'd like to hear what you think about that.

[snip -- other responses]

Angela: I was involved in some of the very early efforts to develop model legislation for laws against racist violence and then homophobic violence. I understand what you mean, the way the laws are often rendered very racist in their effects. Now, what do you do? Do you say, "Well, let's get rid of the laws?" Or do you recognize that laws themselves have never really brought about any change. It's the movement that people organize to demand that they be implemented in progressive ways, that creates change.

"The fact is, the conservatives have the upper hand on this, and that is why, increasingly, hate crimes laws are being used in ways that are objectively racist. As a matter of fact, I'd be interested in seeing how many cases are being brought against people of color for committing hate crimes against white people, as well? This is what is happening; this is the way the laws are being used. However, if our movements become larger and more effective, then that will change the way the laws themselves affect our lives."

Nor, clearly, has it worked to leave contradicting hate to our religious institutions, too many of which are fatally flawed in this country because of their dependence on notions of vengeance, retribution, eternal judgment, child sacrifice, and "redemption" without a meaningful process of accountability and amends. If Dubya had used an effective 12-step program instead of jiffy-stop "salvation" way back when, if someone had insisted on self-examination and change before he was off the hook, the world would not be currently miserable at his hands.

The only time in his life that George W. Bush attended public school instead of elite private schools was briefly in Midland, Texas, leaving after seventh grade. It's clear he looks on this as a golden age, a time when he was just one of the neighborhood kids. It's where he picked up what few social skills he has -- in seventh grade, it was all right to lay ham hands on the shoulders of a powerful girl and claim to be offering her a "massage". And, it should be noted, Midland in the 1950s had a school system that, like the town, was heavily segregated by class and race. I went to third grade there, and that was still the case in 1963.

When you grow up nontarget in segregation, you are damaged in your ability to relate to others. This damage must be undone, with curiosity and courage, or you will continue live in gated environments, fearfully wondering "why those people hate us so much". And your answer to that question will be disastrously wrong. It will progress you from being indifferent to the execution of hundreds of prisoners while you are Governor to indifference on a global scale.

My friend Jamila taught me a philosophy I use daily: Any difficulty I have with your difficulty is still my difficulty.

We in the reality-based community have recognized from the outset that the "war on terror" is rationalization for spreading our own brand of terror around the world and rolling back civil liberties here. But the question, often plaintive, that comes from both ordinary citizens and sometimes earnest politicians -- "Why do they hate us?" -- has not been answered in a way that gives us direction and hope. The answer will not come from crime statistics or evangelical sermons.

In the same interview of Thomas Cahill by Bill Moyer mentioned above, the two men are discussing cruelty on a societal level. Cahill points out that executions are front-page news in Italy, whoever performs them -- he says "They consider it to be a terrible injustice that people are still being executed. You know, you cannot join the European Union as a country if you execute people."

Going on to discuss the death penalty, Cahill states:

"Getting rid of it is a very new phenomenon. You know, it wasn't very long ago that all civil-- all societies had the death penalty. So, it's a little early to say how important it's going to be. I mean, a historian really wants a few hundred years to elapse before he makes a statement about anything. But I think it will be important. I think it's among the touchstones-- right now of where different societies are going. The crueler societies, China, Saudi Arabia, the United States support the death penalty. The easier, more open, more generous societies, like Western Europe do not.

MOYERS: And yet that's the continent that was ravaged by one war after another for so long.

CAHILL: They finally learned something. I really do believe that that — thanks especially to what happened in the First and Second World Wars in which they behaved abominably, they learned that it was time not to do that anymore."

Let's talk to each other in new ways, people, so this becomes true for us as well.

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