Last month I wrote about Munich and the fusillade of criticism it has received from extremists on either side of the Middle East’s Maginot Line. Tony Kushner, the Angels in America playwright who co-wrote the screenplay for Munich, has penned an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times that takes the film’s critics head-on:

In the last month, the co-creators of “Munich” have been accused of being apologists for the Palestinians, apologists for Israel, defamers of Palestinians and of Israel, softheaded Hollywood liberals, dupes of the radical left, dupes of the radical right, even of being anti-Semitic or self-loathing, for showing Jews talking about receipts and handling money. We’re morally confused, overly complicated, simplistic. We’re cowards who refused to take sides. We took a side but, oops! the wrong side.

Ironic, isn’t it? When you refuse to take sides in any other conflict you’re called an honest arbiter, but when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, everyone needs to have blood on their hands (or lips). In Munich Kushner and the film’s director, Steven Spielberg, have created a film that shows an empathy and understanding that their motley crew of critics lack, and for that they will likely never be forgiven.

For his part, Kushner reaffirms his love for Israel and his staunch belief in its right to exist, and yet he also acknowledges that, like so many Palestinians (and Europeans and Americans and Asians, etc.), he is critical of the Israeli government’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. In his op-ed Kushner passionately makes the case that neither side has a monopoly on justice in their battle for a homeland, and that ending terrorism will require not just bullets, but also intelligence:

Contradiction in human affairs, such as the possibility that injustice can drive people to do horrible things, is routinely deplored and dismissed in these troubled times as just another example of the naïveté of the morally weak (a.k.a. liberals and progressives). But there will always be pesky people who, when horrific crimes are committed, insist on asking, “Why did that happen?”

This is a great annoyance to the up-and-at-’em crowd, whose unshakable conviction is that the only sane and effective response to terrorism is savage violence commensurate with the original act. To justify this conviction they offer, as so many of the political critics of “Munich” have done, tautologies on the order of “evil deeds are done by evil people who do evil deeds because that’s what evil people do.” If that’s helpful to you as a tool for understanding terrorism, you won’t like “Munich.”

In the film, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is presented not as a matter of religion versus religion, or sanity versus insanity, or good versus evil or civilization versus barbarism or Judeo-Christian culture versus Muslim culture, but rather as a struggle over territory, over geography, over home.

We’ve followed the lead of many Israeli historians, novelists, filmmakers, poets and politicians who have recognized and described the Israeli-Palestinian struggle this way — as something tragic and human, recognizable. We’ve incurred the wrath of people who reject, with what sounds like panic, an inescapable fact of human life: People do terrible things in the name of a cause they believe is just, even in the name of a cause that actually is just.

”Munich” insists that this characteristic of human behavior is not meaningless in the struggle against terrorism. In other words, we believe that one aspect of the struggle against terrorism is the struggle to comprehend terrorism. If you think understanding the enemy is unimportant, well, maybe there’s a job in Washington for you.

Ouch. Okay, Kushner is certainly a partisan, but he’s one who’s willing to listen before he shouts. And in the bloody pageant of Middle East politics, listening is a revolutionary act.

(Make sure to read Rich’s excellent review of Munich.)

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

A study of college students finds that they have a startlingly low level of literacy when it comes to reading and understanding various types of printed information, including postal instructions, gas bills, survey tables, and — yes — news articles.

Take a look at the study and scroll down to Appendix A, which contains some sample questions. Only 75 percent of four-year college students and 83 percent of two-year college students could properly fill out the name and address portions of a certified mail slip. Only 27 percent and 24 percent, respectively, could read a news article and summarize one of its key points.

What’s more depressing is the even lower scoring of the overall adult population on these same questions. (Remember that only about a quarter of American adults age 25 and over have a college degree.) Only 16 percent of American adults answered correctly when asked about the aforementioned news article.

Thankfully, most of us bloggers use easy-to-understand four-letter words in our commentary, with abundant use of punctuation and emoticons to graphically demonstrate our points. And yet an infinite number of bloggers typing away at an infinite number of keyboards can, theoretically, produce a work of Shakespeare — or at least a humdinger of a post on Boing Boing.

😉

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Yesterday I wrote about Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning and its message that human beings could choose their way in life, in spite of any hardships. The philosophy can be summed up in a few words from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that Frankl quotes repeatedly: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” This why can come from various sources, and it does not stay the same over the course of a lifetime; its origin, Frankl says, “differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour.”

Frankl discusses three different ways that individuals go about discovering meaning in their lives. The first is by “creating a work or doing a deed.” This is usually what we think about when we hear someone talking about finding “meaning” in their life. Through creative work we lose ourselves in a greater principle or cause.

The second is more passive, a matter of “experiencing something or encountering someone” — in a word, enjoyment. This may mean contemplating the beauty of nature, or savoring the intricacies of culture, or simply loving another human being. In one of his more eloquent passages, Frankl describes love as a way of becoming aware of the “very essence” of another person, of understanding “what he can be and … what he should become,” and by doing so helping the loved one to reach his potential.

A few of us will be able to find meaning in our lives through the utilization of unique and valued talents. Some may find meaning in experiences of love, or encounters with the beauty that surrounds us. But for others there will not be those consolations. For many, even the blessings of achievement and love will be fleeting, forgotten or lost with the passage of years.

But the third path is open to all. It was the one alternative left to many of those trapped, along with Frankl, within the automaton existence of the concentration camp. Some of these prisoners had once been learned, wealthy individuals with power and prestige, others had known the love of partners and children, but in the nakedness and poverty of camp life even these seemingly intangible possessions had been stripped from them — for many, irrevocably so. What remained to these men and women was a choice. Would they give into the humiliation and terror that enveloped them, or would they choose to show courage, dignity, and compassion in spite of their surroundings?

The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity — even under the most difficult circumstances — to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worth of his sufferings or not.

This ability to conquer suffering should not be confused with masochism, Frankl emphasizes: Avoidable suffering should always be avoided. But especially in today’s more affluent, technologically sophisticated societies, there is a tendency to delude ourselves into thinking that all suffering can be avoided, and that any kind of suffering is meaningless. Frankl’s experience in the concentration camps is testimony to the contrary. “If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering,” Frankl observes. “Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.”

The problem is that we see suffering as destruction, a pathway to that most absolute destruction of all, death. Suffering closes off our possibilities; it degrades our most important possessions of mind and body; it saps away our potential for future life, future achievement. For a similar reason we fear old age, that most gradual form of suffering that all of us must endure. In a society in love with youthfulness, suffering and old age inspire dread not only for the difficulties they present, but also for the shame they burden us with — the shame of no longer being useful, of being contrary to the universal order of happiness.

Yet Frankl reminds us how foolish those fears are. The suffering that awaits us can be ennobling. To bear it with dignity can be our life’s greatest achievement. Why envy the youthful, then? The promises of their future potential are mere shadows, while the joys of a moment well-lived remain with us to our ends. “Usually, to be sure, man considers only the stubble field of transitoriness and overlooks the full granaries of the past, wherein he had salvaged once and for all his deeds, his joys and also his sufferings,” Frankl writes. “Nothing can be undone, and nothing can be done away with. I should say having been is the surest kind of being.”

When the future is lost to us, the meaning of our lives may only then become clear. Frankl tells us the story of a young woman he met in the camps, a woman who knew she would die in the next few days.

… when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. “I am grateful fate has hit me so hard,” she told me. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.” Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. “I often talk to this tree,” she said to me. I was startled and didn’t quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. “Yes.” What did it say to her? She answered, “It said to me, ‘I am here — I am here — I am life, eternal life.’”

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

For a while now I’ve been meaning to mention some books that have been on my mind and on my bookshelves — some newly published, most quite old. The problem is that with any good book, there are a hundred different things to talk about, and I never have the patience to write a comprehensive review. Capsule reviews, on the other hand, don’t give you a chance to say much of interest. So I’m going to limit myself to some random thoughts about random books, with the hope that whatever I say piques your interest enough to read the full work. (It goes without saying that I’ll only mention books worth reading. It’s hard enough for most people to pick up a book, so why waste your time on a mediocre one?)

Today I’ll discuss a book by book by Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, which was first published in 1959. It is perhaps the most accessible book by a psychiatrist you will ever read. The first part tells the story of Frankl’s experiences as a prisoner of Nazi concentration camps during World War II. The second part outlines the tenets of logotherapy, an approach to psychotherapy that maintains that what drives human beings is not the search for pleasure or power, but rather meaning — however the individual defines it.

What Frankl does in his relatively short book can only be called ambitious — who else would dare to have subject headings like “The Meaning of Life” and “The Essence of Existence”? Yet, unlike so many self-help gurus and modern-day philosophizers, Frankl manages to rise above caricature. One reason, of course, is the iconic horror of what he and others experienced in Auschwitz, Dachau, and other Nazi-run camps. Frankl’s autobiography is the grim foreground of the book’s first part and the essential background of its second, offering us a rare glimpse of humanity at its worst and best. When Frankl speaks of the meaning of life, we know his words to be credible, the testament of a man who survived life at its cruelest and salvaged meaning from its most nihilistic depths.

But this is not just a Holocaust story. What I found to be most valuable in Frankl’s book is its insistence that the lessons of Auschwitz apply in any situation, in any individual’s life. Fate, in fact, matters little. What matters is how human beings respond to it. Can we find meaning in our suffering, regardless of how arbitrary and maddening it may seem? Do we bear the inevitable misfortunes that befall us — all of us, eventually — with grace and dignity? Indeed, many of us are blessed with liberties and comforts unknown to the camp prisoner, and yet we still show an inability to make use of the most fundamental freedom of all — the freedom “to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

This is not to say that all of Frankl’s fellow prisoners (or even Frankl himself, as he suggests in the book) chose virtuously in the concentration camp. The majority did not. There were many, in fact, who allowed the brutality of the conditions there to eviscerate their humanity. These men were selected to be Capos — prisoners with special privileges — and as Nazi stooges they treated their fellow prisoners more cruelly than the guards themselves, Frankl points out. Likewise, among the guards there were many who perversely enjoyed their work of torture and killing, and yet there were also a few who showed unexpected kindness to their prisoners. It seems the same choice was posed even to them, the captors: Would they allow the baseness of their surroundings to destroy them? “It is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing,” Frankl writes.

Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils. Certainly, it was a considerable achievement for a guard or foreman to be kind to the prisoners in spite of all the camp’s influences, and, on the other hand, the baseness of a prisoner who treated his own companions badly was exceptionally contemptible. Obviously the prisoners found the lack of character in such men especially upsetting, while they were profoundly moved by the smallest kindness received from any of the guards. I remember one day a foreman secretly gave me a piece of bread which I knew he must have saved from his breakfast ration. It was far more than the small piece of bread which moved me to tears at that time. It was the human “something” which this man also gave to me — the word and look which accompanied the gift.

Frankl here shows a remarkable ability to empathize even with his Nazi captors, and in doing so he demonstrates the fundamental truth of his teaching: the ability of every individual to reject the corruption and the blindness of hate and to see the world as it is, without illusion, without cynicism.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about what meaning Frankl’s book has for a modern culture obsessed with avoiding suffering.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

When people can be honest about their lives and their sexual orientation as just one part of their life, then we can move past the unknown and allow people to just be real. I think that’s what these films have significantly helped America see.

They’re stories about real people. They’re neighbors, they’re co-workers, they’re friends, they’re family members. That does, I think, over time translate into advancement for equality and against the defamation we face.

—Neil Giuliano, president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, commenting on the outcome of Monday night’s Golden Globes, where films with gay and transsexual characters racked up the awards: Brokeback Mountain won four Golden Globes, including best motion picture and best director (Ang Lee); Capote’s Philip Seymour Hoffman won best dramatic actor; and Transamerica’s Felicity Huffman won best dramatic actress. In her acceptance speech, Huffman said, “I would like to salute the men and women who brave ostracism, alienation, and a life lived on the margins to become who they really are.”

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Boston Globe columnist Adrian Walker interviews the historian Taylor Branch, who has just published the third, and last, installment of his critically acclaimed series on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. At Canaan’s Edge follows King in the last three years of the activist’s life, as he fought to extend his message of justice beyond Jim Crow while struggling to inspire a movement increasingly disillusioned with nonviolent protest.

In Parting the Waters we saw King rise from obscurity as leader of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, a young, charismatic black preacher in a South boiling with racial hatred and violence; in Pillar of Fire we watched him give a hopeful nation a glimpse of the promised land as the legendary orator of the 1963 March on Washington, inspiring legions amid the firestorm unleashed by Freedom Rides and congressional legislation, bombings and assassinations. But it is in the last years of his life that we see King tested as never before. Young Americans turned away from his teachings. Mainstream America turned its back on his increasingly caustic criticisms of the Vietnam War. We sometimes forget how hated King became in those years, even among the liberal intelligentsia: TIME magazine called one of his speeches “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi,” and The Washington Post argued that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”

“He became more and more lonely, in my view,” Branch says of these last years of King’s life.

But King’s willingness to expand the horizons of his activism in those years is perhaps the reason he is most relevant to us today. Four decades earlier, he was talking about poverty in the global South, joblessness in America, and the moral and social costs of warmongering abroad and — yes — capitalism at home. “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?” Jesus proclaimed to his followers, and King, addressing strikers in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968, echoed those words:

What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t have enough money to buy a hamburger? What does it profit a man to be able to eat at the swankest integrated restaurant when he doesn’t even earn enough money to take his wife out to dine? What does it profit one to have access to the hotels of our cities, and the hotels of our highways, when we don’t earn enough money to take our family on a vacation? What does it profit one to be able to attend an integrated school, when he doesn’t earn enough money to buy his children school clothes?

Political liberties were not enough, King said. Economic equality was also necessary, for without it there would be no dignity to speak of, no freedom to defend. And so King and other activists organized the “Poor People’s Campaign,” which sought to rally a “multiracial army of the poor” on behalf of an economic bill of rights that would bring opportunity to America’s poorest communities.

This struggle that King championed in his final years remains with us today, from the rusting factories of America’s heartland to the broken cities of its urban core, where workers of all races and ethnicities continue to struggle for a living wage and basic healthcare.

“His Nobel acceptance speech said that the triple evils are racism, poverty, and war,” Branch said in the Globe interview. “And that nonviolence and democracy are equipped to address these both politically and spiritually.” That political stance became increasingly controversial in the late 1960s, but King did not back down. At a time of deep national divisions over the war in Vietnam, he dared to call America “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” a bellicose nation that sought to occupy Vietnam as its “colony” — words that would likely place him among the reviled ranks of Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore today. At a time when American eyes were fixated on their military’s travails in Vietnam or the social strife and malaise within their own borders, King looked elsewhere, calling for an end to American support of brutal generals in countries like Venezuela, Guatemala, Colombia, and Peru. “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation,” he said in 1967.

He was searching for the big solutions. The problems besetting America did not lie merely with lone racists and tyrants, King came to believe. They were more deep-rooted than that. Speaking to a New York church audience exactly one year before his death, he declared that the entire system of economic and social injustice needed to be transformed:

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

It was King at his most fiery, his most controversial, his most defiant. He was ignored by many then. Even decades later, the King who emerged in those last three years of his life remains forgotten, eclipsed by the anti-segregation crusader who stood so tall in Washington.

Perhaps another generation will live to see his parting words remembered and their truth recognized.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Today Michelle Bachelet was elected the first woman president of Chile. With her victory, Chile has come full circle.

More than two decades of dictatorship under Gen. Augusto Pinochet ended in 1990, but the South American country has always remained deeply divided between those who saw Pinochet’s dictatorship as a necessary corrective to left-wing extremism and those who saw it as a human rights nightmare of epic cruelty — a nightmare that the United States helped bring about. With Pinochet’s recent indictment for human rights crimes, and Bachelet’s victory today, it appears that history is finally imposing its own corrective upon Chilean politics: Bachelet was herself a victim of torture at Villa Grimaldi, one of the dictatorship’s most notorious detention centers. Her father, a general loyal to the administration of President Salvador Allende, died after enduring continuous beatings in the months following the September 1973 coup, which toppled the democratically elected government and brought Pinochet into power.

Bachelet’s mother was also detained and tortured by the Pinochet regime. Her boyfriend, Jaime López, was detained and tortured, then “disappeared.”

“Michelle Bachelet belongs to the generation that suffered the most after the coup,” Andrea Insunza, a Bachelet biographer, told The New York Times. “The majority of those imprisoned, killed, tortured, and exiled came from that group, which is why I say her election represents the triumph of history’s defeated.” Bachelet also represents change to the status quo in other ways — as a pediatrician who previously served as health minister and then defense minister, a mother of three who separated from her husband and raised their children (remember that Chile only legalized divorce in 2004), and a self-acknowledged agnostic and socialist in a predominantly Catholic country. In fact, as defense minister Bachelet once joked with military commanders that she represented “all the sins together.”

In her victory speech, the president-elect spoke of extending the prosperity that Chile had achieved under her predecessor, President Ricardo Lagos, to the country’s poor and disadvantaged. “Ours is a dynamic country — one with the desire to rise up — one all the while more integrated into the world — a country of entrepreneurs who with ingenuity and creativity have created prosperity,” Bachelet said. “But in order to dare to innovate, Chileans also need to know that the society in which they live protects them. My promise is that in the year 2010 we will have put in place a great system of social protection.” The Chile that her administration hoped to build, Bachelet said, was one where “everyone — women and men, those living in the capital and those on the periphery, people of all colors, creeds, and convictions — can find a place.”

Bachelet’s words struck a more personal note when she spoke of her family’s history under Pinochet’s dictatorship:

There is someone who in this moment would be very proud. A man whom I wish I could embrace tonight. This man is my father. Alberto Bachelet Martínez, general of the Chilean Air Force. I inherited from him his love of Chile and of all Chileans without distinctions, his admiration for the natural beauty of our country, and his selfless sense of public service.…

You know that I have not had an easy life. But who among us has had an easy life? Violence entered my life, destroying that which I loved. Because I was a victim of hatred, I have devoted my life to reversing hatred, and converting it into understanding, tolerance, and — why don’t we say it? — into love. One can love justice and, at the same time, be generous….

With her election, Bachelet joins a handful of other woman presidents in South American history. Those few who preceded Bachelet, however, were either the widows of prominent politicians or not democratically elected, or both. Bachelet, the “doctora,” earned her victory today with a wider margin than her mentor, President Lagos, garnered in 2000. Given her background as a victim of the dictatorship, Bachelet’s presidency may be just what her country needs to reconcile with its brutal past and move forward.

Those of us north of the equator may also see her victory as a painful reminder of how little success women here have had in attaining their countries’ top posts. In Canada, there was Prime Minister Kim Campbell (who served five months in 1993), and in the United States … well, there was Mackenzie Allen on ABC’s fall drama Commander in Chief. (There was also an African American president, David Palmer, on Fox’s 24, but he was gunned down tonight, I’m sad to say.)

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

They have red hair. And same kind of nose.

—Markku Jaaskelainen, campaign manager for Finland’s president, Tarja Halonen, on the alleged physical similarity between his candidate and American late-night talk show host Conan O’Brien. According to the Associated Press, Halonen’s reelection bid has received an unexpected boost from O’Brien, who has shown a keen interest in the political contest across the Atlantic, regularly mentioning Halonen on his show and praising her positive impact on Finnish carp production. O’Brien says he supports Halonen because she shares his piscatory values and “good looks.”

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

As 2005 comes to an end, critics are trotting out their various “Year in Review” lists. I’m not sure if 10 or 20 years from now we’ll remember anything on these lists. The few items of real importance — Hurricane Katrina or the South Asian earthquake, for instance — we’d sooner forget, along with the litany of 2005’s other disasters, natural and man-made. The rest of 2005’s “memorable moments” just clutter our brain cells. Yes, it is true that our beloved celebrities rose to unprecedented pinnacles of insanity and inanity in 2005 — with on-air crack-ups and fizzled marriages and a revolving door of indictments and acquittals, continually televised and scrutinized — but that kind of news lasts as long as the cheap tabloid paper it’s printed on. A few decades from now, almost all the personalities of 2005 will have become obscure, the stuff of unfortunate Trivial Pursuit stumpers.

Instead of dwelling on celebrated disasters or disastrous celebrities, then, I’d like to end the year paying homage to two individuals who actually lived quiet and ordinary lives, mostly away from the cameras, and yet left legacies that our grandchildren’s grandchildren will likely remember. One is Rosa Parks, and the other is Fred Korematsu. Both died in 2005.

The better-known of the duo, of course, is Rosa Parks, but even her life has become clouded by myth-making over the years. Most of us remember her as the fearless woman who one day refused to get up from her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and thus sent Jim Crow crashing to the ground. Rosa Parks did all this, yes, but we sometimes forget that she was not just a seamstress but also a longtime activist, who served as an officer of her local NAACP chapter and trained at the Highlander Folk School, a center in Tennessee known for its left-wing politics and outspoken advocacy on behalf of workers’ rights and racial equality. At Highlander the instructors taught, “You are a child of God; You can make a difference” — and it was these words, Parks later told a friend, that inspired her to defy a white bus driver’s order to give up her seat.

What is so moving about Rosa Parks’ life is the dignity and humility that she brought to it. She saw herself as one woman in a long line of activists struggling to change an unjust society. She had no ambition for leadership when she became secretary of the Montgomery NAACP in the 1940s: “I was the only woman there, and they needed a secretary, and I was too timid to say no,” Parks later said. She had not planned to stage a bus protest on December 1, 1955, she insisted, but when the bus driver barked at her Parks realized she was just too “tired of giving in.” She was not the first African American to be arrested for refusing to surrender a seat, but Parks brought a character of such irreproachable integrity to the cause that the community easily rallied around her; she was regarded, said the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., as “one of the finest citizens of Montgomery” — black or white. Even after she gained fame for her role in the boycott, Parks continued to work as a seamstress, putting aside her needle and thread only in 1965 when Congressman John Conyers hired her as a secretary and receptionist. “You treated her with deference because she was so quiet, so serene,” Conyers said after her death.

Fred Korematsu, too, was a seemingly ordinary American who defied an unjust system. A 23-year-old welder from San Francisco, he refused to follow 100,000 other Japanese Americans to the internment camps during World War II, and was arrested.

While Korematsu was in jail the American Civil Liberties Union chose him (much as the NAACP had chosen Parks) to be their test case in a fight against the legality of internment. Korematsu’s case wound up before the Supreme Court, but in a 6-to-3 decision the country’s highest court declared that the government had a right to round up its citizens and imprison them, en masse, without trial. Korematsu, meanwhile, had become a pariah. The newspapers called him a spy; his fellow Japanese Americans, anxious to prove they were patriots, shunned him. “All of them turned their backs on me at that time because they thought I was a troublemaker,” Korematsu later said. After the war, Korematsu refused to speak of his earlier resistance. He felt remorse for his role in bringing about the Supreme Court decision that legalized the internment. His own daughter didn’t learn of her father’s wartime actions until she was a junior in high school.

Korematsu’s defining moment of courage would happen decades later, in the early 1980s, when a lawyer convinced him to take up his legal struggle once more. The lawyer, Peter Irons, had uncovered evidence that the government had exaggerated the dangers posed by Japanese Americans even while it was defending its policy of internment before the courts. Government lawyers offered Korematsu, then 64, a pardon. He refused. “As long as my record stands in federal court,” he said, “any American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without a trial or a hearing.” His conviction was eventually overturned — and with it, the legality of the Japanese American internment. Korematsu’s activism continued, however; in 2004, he filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, comparing the detention without trial of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay to those earlier human rights abuses perpetrated against Japanese Americans in the name of national security.

Fred Korematsu died on March 30, 2005. Rosa Parks died on October 24, 2005. On the surface, they were ordinary Americans, thrust into extraordinary circumstances. And yet both showed a quiet dignity that history will surely remember, long after this year’s headlines have faded away.

For more about Rosa Parks and Fred Korematsu, I recommend this Korematsu profile in The New York Times Magazine and the extensive entry on Parks in Wikipedia, which were useful sources for this post.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

In journalism there are two fairly reliable ways to figure out if you’ve done a good job reporting a story. One is if both sides like your article, which suggests you were fair.

The other is if both sides despise it.

Well, the reviews are in of Munich, Steven Spielberg’s film about the 1972 Olympic massacre, and not surprisingly, partisans on both sides hate it. One group accuses it of pandering to the enemy. The other accuses it of the so-called “sin of equivalence” because it depicts wrongs committed on both sides. (I’ll let you figure out which group is which.)

The irate reactions to Spielberg’s film remind us of how futile this decades-long conflict has become. Whether you believe that one group or the other had a claim to justice at one point, with the passing of time any compelling idealism or coherent ideology in this struggle has disappeared. Now there is only a ritual of bloodletting, followed by a ritual of finger-pointing.

Debates over Munich’s “equivalence” and “pandering” have the same hollow ring to them as these real-world protests over land and rights and security. The devil is always in these details. People die for them. Perhaps they are right to believe what they believe. And yet they never seem to find the justice they seek.

Rhetoric and righteousness aside, it is clear that there must be compromise on both sides for the conflict to ever end. Yet any attempt to reach compromise or consensus — including Munich, which Spielberg calls his “prayer for peace” — are inevitably savaged as pandering to the other side.  

Munich will not persuade the extremists hungry for more justice, but perhaps it will encourage a conversation between those tired of it. Spielberg says he saw a glimpse of this on the set of Munich, among the young Arab and Israeli actors who played the roles of terrorists and hostages in the Olympic massacre:

“It was just very, very difficult for me to play war with them,” says Spielberg. “It was — it was brutal and cathartic at the same, all in the same breath, to stage a scene where Jews have been killed and then I say, ‘Cut.’ The Palestinian with the Kalashnikov throws his weapon down and runs over to the Israeli actor who is on the ground and picks the actor up and falls into the Israeli’s arms and is sobbing. And then the Israeli actors and the Arab actors all running into this kind of circle and everybody is crying and holding each other.”

Spielberg’s voice is tremulous as he describes the young actors, steeped in the history and suffering of their two tribes, nonetheless trying to communicate with one another.

“It was so positive to see these two sides — actors, professional actors — coming together and being able to discuss what’s happening today in their world. Over dinner, between shots. There was always open discussion. No fighting. Just understanding and listening. I wish the world would listen more and be less intransigent. These kids weren’t talking on top of each other like trying to win an argument. These kids took time to listen before they spoke.”

The extremists, of course, aren’t listening. They are always criticizing, always asserting their righteousness, always demanding justice.

Perhaps someday peace will become more valuable to them than justice.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Congressman John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, recited a poem parody of “The Night Before Christmas” on the House floor last night, in response to a resolution proposed by Republicans to “protect” the “symbols and traditions of Christmas.” Demagogue has the text, and Crooks & Liars has the video.

I hope this War on Christmas ends sometime during my lifetime. Christmas just isn’t any fun anymore with all the elves locked up in Abu Ghraib and St. Nick stuck in a spider hole. I say we launch a preemptive strike on Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and take them out. Let’s not wait until Dec. 25 for that mushroom cloud over Macy’s.

Free the reindeer!

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Cartoonist Aaron McGruder has a good riff going this week at The Boondocks, with Granddad Freeman intent on seeing a “manly” movie. Here’s an example:

Grandad Freeman: I feel like seeing a movie! What’s out?

Huey: 50 Cent, “Harry Potter,” “Syriana” …

Grandad: Naw … I want to see a man’s movie. How ’bout this “Brokeback Mountain”? What’s that about?

Huey: Um …

Grandad (reading newspaper): Let’s see here … Oh, it’s about cowboys! Well, that sounds very manly! Let’s go!

Things go quickly downhill from there.

Do your slightly homophobic granddad a favor and take him to see the film adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain” this weekend. It’s directed by Ang Lee, stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger as our gay cowboy heroes, and boasts an 80 percent “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes so far. Granddad Freeman would approve.

P.S. I had a Granddad Freeman moment last week, when my dad spotted us watching the film Saving Face. “Oh, a Chinese movie!” he exclaimed, his immigrant interest piqued, just minutes before the racy lesbian love scene … (fortunately for all involved, he fell asleep).

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen