"THE WAR", OURS AND THEIRS -- PROPAGANDA AS BRAIN DAMAGE

When I was growing up, I dreaded every December 7th. That was the day my Mama, reliably open-minded and non-racist the rest of the year, turned into a raving hater. As we stumbled into the kitchen for breakfast, she'd turn and say "You know what today is? A date that will live in infamy!"

Which meant as we sipped our Tang or Bosco, she would be telling us the story of listening to the radio with her parents and friends, hearing FDR announcing we were at war with Japan. While we spread margarine on Sunbeam toast, she'd fill our ears with how the various sections of the U.S.S. Arizona blew up, disassembling or crisping sailors. As she packed our lunchboxes (never any Little Debbie snack cakes for us, too expensive -- usually a bologna sandwich and a thermos of milk, and twice a week, a piece of fruit), she explained how sadistic the Japanese mind was, how treacherous, how they lacked the capacity to honestly care for other human beings. She'd comb my long hair into braids, muttering the names of the boys in her high school who died in the Pacific. Whatever the weather was that day, it was a relief to leave the house, finally, to suck in deep gulps of air and head for a segregated school, where the malevolence was more muted.

This from a woman who fought the rest of her family to never allow any other racist epithet under her roof, who had embraced Indian culture and given up Christianity in favor of believing in reincarnation, who went to the "Mexican" grocery stores instead of the "white" ones, who was ecstatic when we re-established diplomatic relations with China because she said it was the oldest and greatest civilization on earth.

But I never once heard her say a good thing about Japan or its people.

As a child, this contradiction in Mama's thinking, this obvious character flaw, was tremendously upsetting. As a young teenager, I threw it back in her face during our fights about Vietnam, and likely I scored with this tactic: Deep down, she knew she was irrational about Japan, and when I compared that to our country's racist views toward Asia in general, she was too conscientious not to listen. Once I reached adulthood and moved away from home, her example was useful to me as an activist: Good, smart people could be that deluded. I wanted to help them get past their delusion, no longer interested (most of the time) in using it as a weapon against them, to prove my own moral superiority.

During the 1980s, I studied what I could about World War II pop culture. I went to a documentary at the Jewish Film Festival which unearthed FDR's core anti-Semitism as part of the reason why the rail lines to Auschwitz were never bombed, despite hysterical pleas from the most prominent Jews in America. I visited one of the sites of a Japanese-American internment camp near Tule Lake in California, and I wrote that despicable history into some of the chants and flyers I helped create for political actions linking violences from the state. One of my exes and one of my most intimate living partners were Japanophiles, and I absorbed all I could from them.

And, when a retrospective of the banned cartoons produced by Looney Toons opened at the Castro Theater, including a series of propaganda cartoons featuring Bugs Bunny and crew, I went to see it. Twice. Taking in the unthinkably vile characterization of Japanese culture portrayed supposedly for laughs, although it's hard for me to understand how this was ever funny. The anti-Hitler stuff was focused on Hitler; the anti-Japanese stuff was across the board, comparable only in intensity to the Steppin Fetchit portrayals of rural blacks also in the series. These cartoons were shown before every movie in those days, followed by Movietone newsreels of the war -- a perfect propaganda one-two punch.

This week, watching The War documentary series by Ken Burns, I found myself focusing much more on what World War II did to our psyche as a nation than the military details. There's a lot of grist for my mill. More than one of the soldiers explains his progression from believing that killing is morally wrong to someone who takes pride and pleasure in his kills, and more than one of them are articulate about their hatred of "Japs" (though none evince a similar animosity toward "Germans" or "Italians"). Some of them rationalize this hatred of Japs as a return of Japanese viciousness aimed at Americans, and I'm not going to argue with their accounts: It's well-documented and inexcusable.

But pales in comparison to German-constructed death camps. And the torture the Japanese dealed out is far, far less than what we are doing at Guantanamo.

One woman, the sister of a soldier from Mobile, Alabama, Katherine Phillips, is especially eloquent and acknowledges her focused hatred on Japs with an embarrassed laugh. I appreciated her honesty. She also points out that the first images the U.S. government allowed to be released of the war to show American dead was of floating corpses in the surf at Tarawa, and the impact this had on her and her friends. When the only death and dismemberment you are allowed to see is from Japanese hands, isn't that going to skew your viewpoint?

I had a chance to talk with Mama often about the impact of the war on her worldview, since it was the overriding influence of her adolescence (began when she was 13, ended when she was 19). We discussed how she had no idea what the Nazis were doing to Jews and other minority groups in Germany; how the first information about concentration camps didn't reach her ears until after the war was over. This was confirmed by my Aunt Sarah, Mama's older sister, who lived and worked in Lawton, Oklahoma (a military base town) during the war, married a Jewish airman for her first marriage, and remained closely tied to Jewish culture her entire life despite a quick divorce and a later marriage to my Uncle Stuart, a Gentile. Aunt Sarah, too, said there was "not a whisper" of what was happening to Jews in occupied Europe. I know from Jewish friends this silence was not the case in their parents' communities, not across the board. Still, it reflects some kind of lid being held down that was not observed regarding Japanese atrocities.

I haven't yet seen the final episodes of The War, so I don't know how they are going to handle the discovery of concentration camps or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I can hear a beginning drumbeat, however, in the repeated comments from both soldier interviewees as well as narration quoting military leaders about how "those Japanese would never surrender, they fought to the last man". One former GI talks about how after the capture of an island in which 30,000 Japanese soldiers were killed, a few survivors began swimming into the ocean, preferring to drown than to surrender. He and his friends sat on the cliffs and had a sharpshooting contest, to see how many Japanese heads they could hit with a bullet. He gave a chuckle as he told this. It's going to be an easy segue from this to justifying the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians as an alternative to the invasion of mainland Japan.

In recent years, we've learned about how Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) was enlisted to create political cartoons for the New York newspaper PM. A search through the University of California, San Diego archive of his cartoons by subject shows he drew 60 that are anti-Japanese propaganda, but only 6 that are anti-German. This is despite his far greater emotional reaction to the war in Europe.

Austin Kleon at his website has produced a cartoon about watching one of these interviews. I'm indebted to him as well for the link to a critical review of the documentary by Nancy Franklin in The New Yorker. Another great resource for my unraveling our wartime prejudice about Japan was reading Sarah Bird's book The Yokota Officers Club.

But rationalizations after the fact of oppression are never the cause for the oppression. And who on earth can argue that racism didn't play a serious role in the difference between how Japanese-Americans and German-Americans were perceived and treated during the war? I know, very well, there was anti-German persecution. One of my exes had two German grandparents who lived here during the war, I've heard. But the propaganda was different. Racism is easy to build on. It's a default foundation, waiting for lies to be added. And even self-identified liberals are swallowed by the confusion, as can be found in a recent thread at the Dykes To Watch Out For blog.

As a child, I was home sick a great deal, unable to leave the house. I survived by reading. I was always cruising Mama's books, which she got in stacks at the used book store. I can't remember her ever stopping me from picking up a particular volume, although she did check out what I was reading and sometimes grilled me afterward about what I'd gotten from it. Thus, by the time I was 11 I'd gone through Fanny Hill, Look Homeward Angel, Lolita, and On the Beach -- none of which I would now allow a pre-teen to read.

One day I picked up Hiroshima, by John Hersey, and on the first page it focused on August 6, which was the day after my birthday. That was enough to keep me going. It's a journalistic style of writing, a slender volume, and I read it through in one sitting. When Mama discovered me on the front porch, hunched into a metal lawn chair halfway through it, she almost took it away from me -- that was the only time I can remember her openly considering censorship. I did have nightmares afterward, and I thought that was why she had hesitation about me being exposed to that particular book. But perhaps it was because the first-hand accounts of what dropping the bomb did were moral proof we had no right to use it. No matter what. Perhaps on some level she understood that.

In a recent article by Sally Lehrman of the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC Annenberg on the work of social psychologist Brian Nosek, she reports:

"Despite our best intentions, our minds construct expectations about the world and then perceive it accordingly, says Nosek. We notice different motives, actions or performances based on the biases we've accrued, unaware, over time. Nosek, who is a professor at the University of Virginia, studies these perceptual mistakes with colleagues Mahzarin Banaji at Harvard University and Tony Greenwald at the University of Washington. They are trying to understand our underlying assumptions and how they influence behavior.

"To measure them, they have developed a tool called the Implicit Association Test. It times users' reactions to prompts on a computer screen associated with race, gender, skin tone, religion, sexuality, disability and other characteristics.

"The team has studied automatic reactions through more than 5 million Web-based tests so far. About 80 percent of users have shown a preference for young over old. Nearly the same proportion of self-identified white people and Asians have a more favorable impression of white faces relative to black ones. Users also prefer able-bodied people over those with limited physical abilities, straight people over gay and thin people over heavy ones.

"Worse yet, according to the team's research, test results sometimes trumped respondents' expressed attitudes when the team analyzed judgments, behavior and physiological reactions. Unconscious assumptions especially influenced people's reactions and decisions in ambiguous situations. Such assumptions took front stage when users weren't sure what was most important or when they were pressed for time. Sound familiar?

"Our automatic reactions often don't match the conscious attitudes we hold, the researchers have found, and yet we act on them every day. Even though a majority of people explicitly expressed the opposite view, for instance, most test takers implicitly considered Native Americans less "American" than white citizens. Native Americans themselves, however, strongly disagreed. Asian Americans also fell short of belonging, according to users -- even those who were Asian American themselves. The team discovered it was easiest for test-takers to associate harmless objects with white people. And what about black people? With them, users of all races found it easier to associate weapons.

"What does all this mean for a journalist? How about, 'Question everything you think you see'"?

"Not just for journalists, of course, but anybody concerned with justice and fairness" add commenter Meteor Blades at Daily Kos.

Another confounding psychological entity, "inattentional blindness", obliquely referred to in this article is a video experiment I first learned about several years ago. Called the Opaque Gorilla Video, two groups of three people each -- one team wearing white, one wearing black -- are depicted passing a basketball back and forth. The viewer is told beforehead that at the end of the video, they will be asked to state how many times the ball was passed from a team member wearing one color to a team member wearing the opposite color. In the middle of the action, a woman wearing a gorilla suit clearly walks into view, beats her chest and then walks off. In the study, after seeing the video, the viewers were asked for their ball pass count. They were then casually asked "What did you think about the gorilla?" Almost half of the viewers replied "What gorilla?" They hadn't seen it -- because they didn't expect to see it. It's hard to believe, but it's true and has profound implications for our so-called powers of observation and objectivity.

I don't believe we can pretend any aspect of our thinking is free from millenia of distortion and propaganda. I don't believe we can rely on thinking as separable from emotion -- indeed, the best of human endeavor unabashedly combines the two. I believe, as activists and artists, we are morally bound to examine our own conditioning and ruthlessly, relentlessly clean house: It's not something you do briefly in your 20s and presto, cross that chore off your list.

And that's just the individual work, the clinical aspect, as it were. On an activist level, I think we have to examine resources like The War for clues to what we are facing when 130,000 military personnel return home from Iraq. Not that the two wars are cleanly comparable: Iraq never attacked us, it's a war based purely on economic control, and the training our soldiers are receiving is how to distrust and kill apparent civilians in an urban setting. Far more dangerous to our culture upon their re-entry, and you can rest assured our government will assume no responsibility for helping these women and men process their wartime training and experiences. Once they return, the real work of "supporting our troops" will kick into overdrive, and the racist overlay that's found a home in "the war on terra" will have to be cleansed from our cultural myth in order for sanity to be restored.

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Broad Cast for 11 August 2007

Passport photo, 1956, for Mary Jo Atkins Barnett and little Maggie. I was running a fever from my travel vaccinations and not a completely happy baby. Mama was told not to smile. Our dresses matched (something she continued to do until I got old enough to rebel). Check out her deep red lipstick.

This feature, Broad Cast, will consist of links to various online articles and features I've run across and want to recommend. I'll be doing this regularly. One thing I find completely obnoxious about such "round-ups" on most blogs is their proclivity for just using cutesy, incomplete phrases to indicate links, instead of telling you what the link is about -- as if you have unlimited time and energy to click your way through a list of items you may or may not want to read about. I promise not to do that here. You'll be well-informed before you leap to anything I hypermark.

In America, the top one-tenth of one percent of earners makes about the same money per year collectively as the millions of Americans in the bottom fifty percent combined. At PBS NOW "David Brancaccio talks with Pulitzer prize-winning financial reporter David Cay Johnston, as well as author and advocate Beth Shulman about the state of our country's vast income divide and how it's hurting those just trying to make ends meet." At the website link above, you can read excerpts from these two authors' books, a P.O.V. interview with Barbara Ehrenreich, and check out other pertinent links.

"Parents hoping to raise baby Einsteins by using infant educational videos are actually creating baby Homer Simpsons, scientists said today. For every hour a day that babies 8 to 16 months old watched such popular video series as Brainy Baby or Baby Einstein, they knew six to eight fewer words than other children."
Huh -- once again, there's no substitute for human interaction or reading a BOOK. "The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no television for children younger than 24 months." That's NO television. It's a developmental thang.

I've gained a lot of useful self-insight by taking Implicit Association Tests at this well-respected site. Their intro states: "It is well known that people don't always 'speak their minds', and it is suspected that people don't always 'know their minds'. Understanding such divergences is important to scientific psychology. This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods. This new method is called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT for short." I can't recommend it enough.

A recent post by Terrance DC (Terrance Heath) speaks to the irony of lesbian and gay adoptions under attack in Oklahoma when the poisonous example of so many heterosexual parents leaves us breathless. The post has some chilling stories that you might have a hard time reading, but I wanted the chance to plug this man's blog, The Republic of T., who describes himself as "Black. Gay. Father. Vegetarian. Buddhist. Liberal."

This article by Jane Mayer at The New Yorker has been referred to repeatedly in the blogosphere since it was published this week. Entitled "The Black Sites", it offers "A rare look inside the C.I.A.'s secret interrogation program." The details are here, folks. But it's a devastating read -- the real deal.

The very first thing I thought of when I heard about the Minneapolis bridge collapse was the prospect of being a parent with small children or babies strapped into car seats as I drove across that bridge. The possibility of having to make unthinkable choices if we hit the water alive. I actually had a nightmare about it. The linked article from a Minneapolis news source verified my nightmare, so don't go here if you don't want to know. Thx to BitchPh.D. for the tip.

Lastly, a new website called Flight Memory
"enables you to easily keep track of where you have flown and then easily produce maps showing your flight routes. We'll also tell you your total time in the air, distance flown and even keep track of aircraft types and airlines!" It's free and it's already been illuminating for me. I have vivid impressions from my family's flight to Brazil in December of 1967: The precipitous descent into the airport at Caracas, Venezuela; my little brother Bill scampering away at Lima, Peru toward two soldiers with machine guns, asking them brightly if he could "touch the guns", and the extreme tension in that terminal until my mother caught up with him (the soldiers were not amused); crossing the Andes for several hours from Lima to Rio de Janeiro, at one point flying directly over an active volano where I was able to look down into the caldera and see a lake of lava; the chaos of Rio, and the increasing subsequent chaos of the Salvador and Aracaju airports, which had no electronic or even written flight information posted, only staticky announcements in a language none of us spoke. I, at age 12, was hyper-aware of my mother's feverish worry and my father's incompetence. But learning the actual distances and times of these flights has helped me construct a more coherent narrative. It's easy to sign up and use the tables, even if your memory is incomplete or sketchy.

Here's a poem I wrote about that flight, putting myself inside my mother's head:

BAHIA 1969

The airport in Bahia had open windows
Beyond the tarmac were unfamiliar trees
The children kept asking if we might
see monkeys, kept asking for something else
to drink, why can't we eat the ice

The plane was there, we could see it
but men had pulled apart one engine
Pieces of metal flashed in the sun

I spoke not a single word of Portugese
I kept opening my phrasebook, trying
to memorize anything useful but if I
did not keep my eyes on the children
every second one of them walked away
into the crowd that contained crates of chickens
and dogs on ropes, were they really going to
let those dogs on the plane?

The loudspeaker had a short
but I couldn't have made out
a word in any case

Ourr boarding passes were
kelly green plastic squares, I kept track of
the people nearby who had the same color passes
If they got up to talk to an agent, or stand at
the window, I did too, hissing at the children
to grab their bags, come on, this might be it

What kind of mother would drag her children
onto a plane that obviously needed major repairs
At least if it went down, we would all be
together. I had no idea if the jungle here
had monkeys, or snakes, or giant black scorpions

The phrasebook said Thank you was Obrigada
which seemed to mean I'm much obliged

When my son tried to wander off one more time
I was going to declare out loud if he got lost
I planned to just leave him behind. His pale
face would go bloodless but nobody here would
understand what I had said

written by Maggie Jochild on 27 April 2006, 5:41 a.m.

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