(Rich Tenorio)

Walk into a comic book convention, and you might be immediately tempted to walk back out. You’ll find yourself in a weird world, with people of all ages engaging in various types of indulgence. Often, this includes fantasies that heroes venerated on the page or in film are actually three-dimensional, tangible realities that they can encounter, or even become. To an outsider, this is silliness taken to the extreme. To an insider, this is serious freedom.

Last summer I went to one such convention, and as I walked around in bewilderment, my eyes finally settled on a young woman dressed from head to toe in a spandex body suit, tricked up to resemble the costume worn by Phoenix (a comic book character who once destroyed an entire universe). She had a gravely somber look on her face, which was appropriate, for Phoenix was about to meet her maker.

Chris Claremont, creator of the character Phoenix and a 30-year luminary in the comics business, was signing his work for awestruck fans. Phoenix was next in line. Claremont motioned for her to approach him, but she just stood there, shell-shocked. The absurdity was obvious — this girl wasn’t even born when Claremont was in his prime, and it’s a comic book, for heaven’s sake, and to top it all off, she’s dressed like an ice skater without the skates. In another sense, this was her moment of epiphany. Her world’s maker was bidding her to come, and such existential moments are hard to come by.

The phenomenon of this grave absurdity extends throughout the comic book universe, even to such comparatively local heroes like Gotham City-bound Batman. With the release of the first Batman film, the comic strip Foxtrot lampooned the seriousness with which comic book fans take their heroes: young Jason Fox and his friend, dressed in Batman costumes and hopped up on comic book trivia, were unwillingly chaperoned by Jason’s brother to the movie’s release. There, they criticized lapses in continuity and celebrated clever innovations in the Batman myth, all while the elder brother hid his head in shame. By the close of the film, however, the brother had been converted and had donned his own Batman costume, greeting Jason with the insanely geeky “Hail, Bat-Brother!”

A similar lunacy was on hand this summer as Batman Begins relaunched the character’s film franchise. Started in 1989 as a gothically quirky spectacle, the character was fueled by his comic book history and director Tim Burton’s imagination. Batman gradually evolved into a camp spectacle under the helm of replacement director Joel Schumacher, and with the release of 1997’s Batman and Robin the franchise was declared dead. Good riddance, said fans, until rumors began rippling that a new movie would feature Christian Bale as star, and Christopher Nolan as director. This film was rumored to bear a closer resemblance to the spooky suspense film Memento than to Rocky Horror Picture Show, and it would rival Fantastic Four, Star Wars 3, and Spider-Man 2 in box office receipts. This was to be the film to resuscitate the dead character. Upon closer inspection, however, it’s clear that Batman hasn’t been dead, but he’s simply been in the midst of yet another cycle — one that begins in dour seriousness, and ends (over and over again) in deliberate silliness.

Consider Batman’s origin: A boy witnesses the murder of his parents. In a vision, he finds his calling in fighting crime, using fear as his principal weapon. He plans to bring justice to a community overrun with corruption — what’s so funny about that? If you take the long view, the answer is… Plenty. This boy has become pudgy, corny, and ambiguously gay, at various points in his career. He has been joined by a Batgirl, a Boy Wonder, a Batmite and a butler. He has bottled Bat-Shark-Repellant and narrowly avoided being burned to death by a giant magnifying glass. How long can we tolerate such radical oscillation in one character, however iconic? How can we justify our long romance with such an unsettled enigma?

Putting the Goth in Gotham

Batman was the second major superhero to find a following in the comic book industry of the 1930s, providing a stark contrast to the bright, flashy optimism of his forebear, Superman. More influenced by film noir and crime novels than by science fiction, he found an immediate Depression-era audience. The early days of comic books met an undefined audience. Batman played to the middle, telling stories that appealed to soldiers, school children and traveling salesmen, and with Superman and other new entries he was soon selling millions of issues per month.

The primary audience was children, of course, and the publisher gambled that adding a child as a principal character would cement customer loyalty. Robin, orphaned by organized crime, came under Batman’s care and soon joined in his adventures. Though his origins were also tragic and dramatic, Robin’s presence gave Batman a fatherly dimension that furthered his shift to the mainstream. Over time, particularly after the war, Batman and Robin were domesticated.

Too close for comfort

The domestic allure of the 1950s is well-documented, providing a monetary channel for post-war affluence and a means of repatriation for soldiers returning home and women exiting the workforce. The American image of the day was security, propriety and general bliss, providing nary a reason to leave the house. The comic book audience was fragmented, with readers attracted to gritty crime stories pilloried by parents desperate to shield their children from harmful influences. Superhero comics settled on an audience of children, which meant that their stories — most notably stories of the Batman — became sillier and simpler, with villains serving more as pranksters than as menaces to society.

The sillier Batman became, the more seriously he was scrutinized. As the 1950s progressed, perceived threats to domestic tranquility became matters of grave public concern. When Frederick Wertham published his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, a damning polemic on the harmful effects of comic reading, he scandalized his audience by reporting that some of his adolescent male clients reported homosexual wish dreams based on Batman and Robin.

Comics producers tried to silence the gay reading of Batman. New characters were added, including Batwoman and Batgirl, to suggest heterosexual love interests for both Batman and Robin. Nevertheless, the Wertham revelation signaled the beginning of what might well have been Batman’s end — by 1965 the title was in grave danger of being canceled.

If you can’t beat ’em …

In 1966, however, ABC Television launched the Batman television show, airing twice weekly. Comic book sales surged to their highest levels, and Batman was revived. Rather than fight back against the stigma of silliness and subversion that had sunk the character so low, the television reveled in camp. Bizarre camera angles, outlandish colors and sets, ridiculous dilemmas, melodramatic language, and flamboyant acting made the show the centerpiece of pop television. The program won a devoted adult audience, with kids watching alongside the adults.

Interestingly enough, viewers who would have watched the show as children (myself included) recall not so much the silliness of the program as the sense of adventure that made each episode appointment television. Will Brooker, in his book Batman Unmasked, reflects on his childhood experience:

I didn’t think it was funny when Batman announced that he’d resisted King Tut’s hypnosis by reciting his times tables backwards; I thought it was pretty impressive. . . . As an adult watching the series for this research, I found Batman divinely funny: but I can still very much remember what it was like to idolize the Caped Crusader. (pp. 197-98)

Brooker highlights the phenomenon of the dual audience — adult viewers reveling in the self-mocking humor of the series, set alongside young viewers seeing the full flash and spectacle of a hero in action. The same show that salvaged Batman as a character by lampooning him for adults thus, simultaneously, built a fiercely loyal fan base of young children by showcasing the character’s life of adventure.

Return to the Dark Knight

The camp television show was cancelled after only a few seasons, ending Batman’s romance with the mainstream. In the meantime, the comic book industry had been changing dramatically. Now appealing more centrally to a college-age audience, writing was geared toward issues that interested that demographic. Comic books were telling stories of racial tension, Cold War scenarios, illicit drug use, and cavalier sexuality. Now-adult fans interacted more directly with comics producers than ever before, and the consensus was that Batman is a serious character — not silly. The post-television Batman parted ways with Robin and focused in hard on the crime plaguing Gotham City. Writers Gardner Fox and Denny O’Neil, among others, emphasized Batman as the world’s greatest detective, putting a lie to the TV series’ Batman-as-gadabout and fueling two decades of serious storytelling.

Of course, Batman never really shed his TV image during this time. The 1960s series continued in reruns with its dual-audience formula, and Saturday morning cartoons of various stripes reinforced the image of Batman as a folksy patriarch, complete with Robin and the occasional magic bug named Batmite. Young viewers still took comfort in Batman’s accessibility, and read adventure into the bright colors that characterized his television exploits. But with the retrenchment of the comic book community as a cloistered set of writers and artists, the character’s potential for somber storytelling was mined for all its worth.

Serious-Batman reached its apex with 1986’s The Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller. Miller, who later would write the comics that eventually gave us another of this year’s blockbusters, Sin City, took his inspiration as much from the crime-novel genre as from Batman’s history and superhero conventions. Miller starts his fresh take on Batman by introducing us to Bruce Wayne toward the end of his life, as he struggles to retain his sanity, much less his relevance, in a world that has long since buried the Batman.

In his book How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, Geoff Klock highlights the “deliberate misreading” Miller applied to the comic icon: “Miller forces the world of Batman [in all its innate silliness] to make sense” (p. 29). Bruce Wayne has aged to a point never seen by any previous comics writer. Robin has been killed, at some point, but Batman has been pressed into another patriarchal role. This time, it’s by a girl who speaks a barely recognizable English, and who wishes to take up the mantle of the “boy wonder.” Batman’s enemies are portrayed as having intimate knowledge of his psyche, and prove, ultimately, to be closer to him than that other iconic hero of comics history, Superman. The world that died to Batman 10 years prior has become a scary, scary place, and the only humor that enters the story is infused with irony, cynicism and defiance. Batman is not only serious, he is deadly serious.

Deadly seriousness ruled the day in comic writing, however. Alan Moore, who scripted the simultaneous blockbuster The Watchmen as an utter deconstruction of the superhero mythos, wrote about the new gothic home crafted for Miller’s Batman:

Gotham City, a place which during the comic stories of the 1940s and 1950s seemed to be an extended urban playground stuffed with giant typewriters and other gargantuan props, becomes something much grimmer in Miller’s hands. A dark and unfriendly city in decay, populated by rabid and sociopathic streetgangs, it comes to resemble more closely the urban masses which may very well exist in our own uncomfortably near future. . . . The values of the world we see are no longer defined in the clear, bright, primary colors of the conventional comic book but in . . . more subtle and ambiguous tones.

The Dark Knight Returns was met with immediate critical acclaim and consumer enthusiasm, and the Batman film that would launch the new franchise three years later would capitalize on Miller’s brooding vision.

Overexposed

Four films and three Batmen later, the franchise had entirely abandoned Miller’s take on the world of Batman. Gone was the dark, foreboding cityscape; in its place were skateboard ramps, double-entendres and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The cryptic Bruce Wayne portrayed by actor Michael Keaton had devolved into a lovable, bumbling patriarch played by George Clooney. In the meantime, another wildly successful cartoon had entered syndication, and although this animated Batman had some edge to him — no pupils in his eyes and a gruff, utilitarian voice — he was surrounded by the pranksters and silly supporting cast that had characterized stories in the 1950s.

Meanwhile, the grittiness that had entered comic-book storytelling through Miller had diffused from Batman into other storylines, and what had been unique to Batman quickly came to characterize the industry. Specialty shops became lone sanctuaries for proponents of that industry, and comic book readers became laughing stocks in the eyes of the mainstream. The star-studded comedy Mystery Men lampooned not just Batman, but superheroes in general. More broadly, the film mocked the obsession that overtakes fans of superheroes. The capacity for mainstream popular culture to take superheroes seriously had reached its limit, and only fanatics were left to embrace the darker side of Batman and his peers.

Isolating serious readers of comic books in quarantine, however, ultimately incubated some profound storytelling opportunities, enabling a renaissance of the genre, and launching the cycle all over again.

If I don’t laugh I’ll cry

Today’s Batman, in film, on television, and in print, is typically dour, obsessive, efficient and generally unfriendly. He remains so focused on his mission — to combat crime and seek the welfare of his city — that he remains isolated even from those closest to him. He has, as such, become a bit of a laughing stock to other superheroes. Kevin Smith’s 2002 Green Arrow: Quiver features just one of many such interactions:

“With all due respect, Bats . . . anyone ever tell you you’re a weird guy?”
“You’re here to observe, Stephanie. Not to make observations.”
“I know, but c’mon—you find a friend who everyone thought was dead, and instead of throwing him a ‘welcome home’ party . . . or even a ‘Holy Moley! You’re alive!’ party … you knock him out, x-ray every bone in his body, and give him multiple cat-scans. Or do we call ‘em ‘bat-scans’ down here?”

Hyperseriousness in any situation, after all, is itself rather silly. And, in a sense, it’s a little sad as well. Teenaged Robin suffers from Batman’s seriousness as he’s forced to be an ever-vigilant soldier while his friends get to play at recess. Neil Gaiman, author of the acclaimed Sandman series, and no stranger to serious storytelling in the comic format, lamented the loss of Batman’s playfulness using the Riddler’s voice in 1995’s “When Is a Door”:

It was fun in the old days. … We hung out together, down at the “What A Way to Go-Go.” It was great! … You know what they call them now? Camp, kitsch, corny …  Well, I loved them — they were part of my childhood.

In response, the genre has expanded the principle of the dual audience to a triple audience. The young are courted through animation, merchandising and age-specific stories and formatting; the adult fanatics are honored with deliberate misreadings of characters in a variety of formats (such as Brian Augustyn’s Gotham by Gaslight, placing Batman in the historical context of Jack the Ripper); and the adult mainstream is guaranteed a laugh, with winks of self-referential humor and with storytelling that acknowledges the silliness of simply being human.

So, for example, the X-Men are represented in toy stores and on the Cartoon Network, they’re reconceived by postmodern storytelling juggernaut Joss Whedon, and they mock themselves in film with jokes about spandex and code names. Films that fail to acknowledge this triple reading, such as 2004’s The Punisher and 2005’s Elektra, are given negative reviews by fanatics and perform poorly at the box office.

Batman Begins offers psychological complexity to the adults, reverent treatment of characters to the fanboys, and lots of toys for the kids. Batman, more so than Superman or any other character, continues to cover the complete spectrum, from silly to serious, with astonishing effectiveness. Moviegoers feel no compunction laughing at the souped-up Batmobile mere moments after weeping for a traumatized young boy.

The fact of the matter is, stories about superheroes, much like stories about all of us, can hardly avoid a simultaneous mix of seriousness and silliness. Fundamentally, after all, stories about superheroes are merely supercharged stories about us. The agony these heroes feel over the wrongs done to them may, from an objective distance, be clearly overdone, but with a sympathetic viewing they can be seen as true expressions of how people struggle through whatever life they’ve been given. With a clear head, we can laugh at ourselves for the ways that we react to others, and yet, we can remove ourselves from our own lives for only so long before we have to deal again with the agony as we experience it. Our pain would be silly if it weren’t so sad.

Authors have clearer sight than their characters — they can see the absurdity and the agony all at once. Authors who have told the stories of Batman and his contemporaries have chosen to emphasize either silliness or seriousness, but virtually no Batman tragedy is told entirely without humor, and virtually no Batman comedy is told entirely without the subtle weight of pain. We can sympathize with Batman even as we’re tempted to laugh, because life itself is such a subtle mixture of tragedy and comedy that we don’t always know whether to laugh or cry. And there — somewhere between the tragedy and the comedy of it all — lies the truth.

STORY INDEX

MARKETPLACE >
Purchase these books through Powells.com and a portion of the proceeds benefit InTheFray

Comic Book Character: Unleashing the Hero in Us All
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=1-0830832602-0

RESOURCES >

Fan-initiated community page
URL: http://www.darkknight.ca

Batman Begins official movie site
URL: http://www2.warnerbros.com/batmanbegins/index.html

Adam West, star of 1960s Batman television series
URL: http://www.adamwest.com

Fan-initiated chronicles of Batman, 1940s-1960s
URL: http://www.goldenagebatman.com

davez

“There is just something intriguing about a woman who looks like she could kill you.”
— Bryan Williams

Jennifer Garner walks funny. Watch Alias and you’ll see what I mean — one arm is raised in front of her, as if to stop what’s coming, and one arm is bent back, almost cocked. Her feet don’t quite criss-cross, as though she doesn’t want to be off-balance. She floats rather than walks, always one step away from a battle stance.

Jennifer Garner is the current head of state in Grrl World. She’s tough, gorgeous, sensitive and serious. She’ll do romantic comedy when she wants to, but mostly she just kicks butt in a variety of venues. She’s inherited the throne of the action chick with her successful turns in Alias, and will reign on the big screen in Elektra. She is a force to be reckoned with, and serves as the latest signpost in the journey of feminine heroics.

Tough old birds

There have always been women who have captured the imagination of their cultures, and many of them have done so by force. ‘Woman as warrior’ is not such an unfamiliar image that its history cannot be traced. In the West, we can look to the ancients for examples of women accustomed to the thrill of adventure or the terror of violence — witness Artemis the Greek goddess of the hunt, Deborah the judge of Israel, or Cleopatra the queen of Egypt. We can recall Joan of Arc, Catherine the Great, or even the iconic farm wife of the American westward expansion. These are women of strong backs and iron wills.

We have left room in our hearts for women of valor, but these visions can become caricatured. Some images persist: the noble, frail, civilized women who must be protected from the world outside, or the wild women from whom young men must guard their hearts. For much of history, woman of valor didn’t challenge, so much as mitigate, that cultural bias. Deborah was revered by Israel as its judge, yet she derided her warrior Barak for needing a woman to fight his battles. Rosie the Riveter served as a convenient icon for World War II America, when women were needed in industrial labor while men were at war, but she was quickly replaced by the Happy Homemaker once the war was won. In more recent history, however, strong women have lingered, as have their audiences. Since World War II, and more forcefully since the Civil Rights movement, women in heroics have moved from temporary positions to strong, silent partners, to principals in their own stories.

Wonder women and girly powers

Scholar Richard Reynolds characterizes the superhero as a modern mythology, complete with its own gods and goddesses. But these goddesses were slow in coming. It took an intentional act of creation on the part of psychotherapist William Moulton Marston for the first great superheroine, Wonder Woman, to come out swinging. The heroines that followed were either granted distinctly “feminine” powers, or were utterly derivative, with names and powers identical to, but muted from, their male counterparts.

• The “lasso of truth” bound Wonder Woman’s enemies, rendering them unable to fight and incapable of lying. The domination imagery has been widely commented on.
• While Batman and Robin would swim through a sea of villains, throwing punches as they went, Batgirl tended to sit above the fray, letting the bad guys come to her, then kicking them in the face with her high-heeled bat-boots.
• The Scarlet Witch didn’t fight physically; by controlling the laws of probability she changed the outcome of conflicts by changing her mind.
• The X-Men’s Marvel Girl was a telepath — another ability characterized by passivity rather than physical prowess.
• Susan Storm of the Fantastic Four took the name Invisible Girl (not yet, apparently, a woman, despite her marriage to team patriarch Mr. Fantastic). In battle she would simply fade from view.

Six steps behind

In spite of obvious gender inequalities inherent in the design of women characters, the commitment to an expanding female presence in comic books was a significant development. With the advent of Invisible Girl and the women who followed after her, the dynamics of comic book storytelling changed. Sexual politics, now far more sophisticated than the cat-and-mouse games of Superman and Lois Lane, were driving a storytelling format that had shifted from issue-specific epics (one issue tells one complete story) to a serial format (plots and characters developing over years and even decades). Women had found their niche in the genre, as they were finding their niche on television and in song.

Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie told the stories of women with exceptional abilities living out an idyllic existence from week to week. Women sang about the joys and challenges of romance in chart-topping hits like He’s So Fine and It’s My Party (I Can Cry If I Want To). While women were enjoying prominent roles in a variety of mediums, their worldview was highly restricted. Male characters (such as Superman, Captain Kirk, and Marshall Dillon) were often driven by the call of adventure, while female characters were still motivated largely by romance and domestic tranquility.

While the far-reaching implications of the Civil Rights movement prompted discussions about equality as a practical rather than cerebral issue, the job market was also being forced further open to women. By the late 1970s Nancy Drew and Charlie’s Angels were on television as (relatively) independent heroes, and the comic book hero Dazzler, disco singer with mutant powers, celebrated the power of women to define heroism for themselves: “World savin’ ain’t my style . . . I prefer singin’ my heart out to an audience that really digs me,” said “Dazzler” in Comic Book Encyclopedia.

The good, the bad, and the beautiful

Moral ambiguity ruled the day in the 1980s — or so it would seem. Marvel Girl had grown in power, sacrificed herself on behalf of the X-Men, and was reborn as the Phoenix. A sympathetic hero, she was driven insane by her newfound power and destroyed an entire universe. The beloved Jean Grey had gone bad and had to be punished, but at her trial she once again sacrificed herself to save her friends. Whether hero or villain, she was dead.

Catwoman, with a longer history than Jean Grey, gained prominence as well. Always acknowledged as a villain, but with a clear hold on Batman’s affections, Catwoman played a role in the landmark Dark Knight Returns, a story of Batman ten years after his retirement, and in Batman: Year One, the first year of Bruce Wayne’s crime fighting career.

Much later, in the 1980s, the character of Catwoman was played with supreme sensibility by Michelle Pfeiffer in the second film of the Batman franchise. Sexy and sympathetic, Pfeiffer’s Catwoman stole the show. Blurring the lines between good and bad, Pfeiffer saw the villain “as a positive role model if you look at her metaphorically. She’s about empowerment, a character coming into her own,” Suzan Colón wrote in Catwoman: The Life and Times of a Feline Fatale.

Into the midst of these longstanding characters came a new woman with a nebulous history: Elektra Natchios was an intriguing romantic interest for fan favorite Daredevil. She appeared out of nowhere and prompted a mild revisionist retelling of Daredevil’s history — a college love of Matt Murdock, she witnessed her father’s killing and lashed out at Matt: “I used to love the world. . . . You’re a part of that world. And you love it. You let it hurt you and you love it all the more. I’m not that strong, ” she said in Elektra Saga. Her innocence lost, Elektra channels her rage into a job as an assassin. Even after dying (more than once), Elektra remained a popular character who would ultimately make the jump to film — not simply as a foil for the male hero, but as the center of a storyteller’s universe.

Girl power remixed

Elektra opened the floodgates for strong, independent women in heroic roles. In the comics, characters like Witchblade carved out their own niche audiences, and writer Anne Nocenti took a turn crafting Daredevil, taking up where Elektra’s creator left off,  introducing her own complex character, Typhoid Mary, whose split personality made her sympathetic one moment, psychotic the next.

On television, women were becoming the focal point for action. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a cult favorite that rested the fate of the world on a teenage girl’s shoulders. With its commitment to ensemble heroics and relationship development, Buffy and its spinoff series Angel turned convention on its ear. Whereas “legitimate knowing in Western patriarchal cultures has for centuries situated the ideal knower as an autonomous individual,” and in particular “strong female heroes have been represented as isolated from other women socially,” Sharon Ross wrote in “Tough Enough,” in Action Chicks. Here we saw men and women fighting side by side with a young woman — a child, really — leading them.

Alongside Buffy were others — shows like La Femme Nikita, Xena: Warrior Princess, Witchblade, Dark Angel, Birds of Prey — each showcasing the particular strengths and challenges of women in heroic roles. Even children’s programming got in on the act with The Power-Puff Girls and Totally Spies. While many such series featured a man in prominent leadership over the principal characters, the women remained the heroes, and the drama involved watching them come to terms with their emerging power and womanhood.

Alias, Elektra

That brings us to Alias, the most recent entry in grrl power television. Alias follows Sydney Bristow, a young woman working alongside a man, and under the authority of her father and a father figure, until she realizes that the spy agency she works for is an enemy of the American government. She turns herself in to the CIA and begins to work as a double agent. In the process, she is given another male mentor, her “handler.” The show develops from there as Sydney and her viewers have to make sense of unbelievable plot twists from minute to minute while Sydney avoids being killed or revealing her secret mission.

Jennifer Garner brought a youthful naiveté to the role of Sydney, striking a difficult balance between supreme competence and a sense of being in over her head. As the series develops, we see Sydney seize and effectively wield power, not just physically, but bureaucratically: she makes the systems work for her.

In this sense, Alias reflects a common theme in female heroics, particularly for the young: our hero is as much becoming as she is overcoming. The most recent wave of women characters has brought this insight into heroism, where it has often been lacking. Rather than hacking away at villains until there are no more villains to hack away at, “feminine” heroes are “flexible with how they approach the events with which they become involved. They learn to listen before they speak, converse before they act,’ according to Sharon Ross. This shift offers a corrective to the negative agenda of the conventional epic (putting an end to clear and present danger) by pursuing a positive agenda: the peace and prosperity of the whole community.

This pursuit finds its way into the Elektra film as well. In the 2003 film Daredevil, Jennifer Garner plays Elektra, a character who bears a striking resemblance to Sydney Bristow. In the 2005 sequel, Elektra, Garner reprises the titular role. Here, we no longer find the young, naïve girl struggling to get by. Elektra is hardened, old-souled and is almost mythically ruthless until she meets a girl who is at the first step in the same journey. Elektra, having left behind her own “handler,” Stick, becomes the handler for her protégé while fighting to protect the girl’s life. In the process, Elektra fulfills a prophecy that leads to a final peace after centuries of conflict.

Naturally, she also learns a lot about herself. Garner told Wizard magazine that Elektra “does not enjoy this journey back to well-being at all. She doesn’t see the good in it. Nor does she see any good in herself.” The good becomes evident, however, in the maternal looks she gives her student, in her reconciliation with Stick, in the vindication of her mother’s death, and in her own happy ending as she walks off into the sunset.

Former villain and never-ending warrior, Elektra breaks new ground for women of valor. She has left behind the protection of men while maintaining a close relationship with them — she has no handler, only men who wish her well. She makes peace with who she is: as a woman and a warrior. In playing the role, Garner herself felt “like a great combination of a fighter and a girl.” While the film is unlikely to break box office records, the impact of Elektra will linger long, leaving young women and men with a vision of heroism that moves beyond simple opposition to evil by adding the promotion of good. Elektra is a hero, plain and simple, in the fight for her own humanity — just as all of us, male and female, are called to be.

STORY INDEX

RESOURCES >

Dave A. Zimmerman’s blog Strangely Dim
URL: http://ivpress.gospelcom.net/campus/sd/

A Tale of Two Superheroes: Spider-Man, the Punisher & the Ethics of Power
URL: http://www.bustedhalo.com/archive/2004_18pop_culture.htm

Elektra Artwork Gallery
URL: http://www.wordsandpictures.org/Elektra/maingallery.html

BOOKS >
Purchase these books through Powells.com and a portion of the proceeds benefit InTheFray

Comic Book Character
By David A. Zimmerman. Published by InterVarsity Press. 2004.
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0830832602

davez

Along with many leftists who believed that public protest could actually influence policy decisions, in February 2003 I attended a rally against the War in Iraq.

“No Blood for Oil” was emblazoned on signs as a simplistic cry of indignation against the suffering Bush wished to visit upon the Iraqi people, challenging the just-as-simplistic reasons for going to war, weapons of mass destruction, and Iraqi liberation. Of course, I had driven my car to get to the rally, had eaten pesticide treated food produced thousands of miles away for breakfast, and bought a CD later that afternoon. I also attend the University of Texas at Austin, which, with Texas A&M, keeps education affordable due to joint ownership of oil prospects in Texas. I had raised my voice in protest, but had lived my day in complacency.

Sonia Shah’s book Crude: The Story of Oil brings this point home. As consumers, we have learned how to deploy an exquisite form of doublethink — we have embraced the softer side of BP, Exxon, and Shell, easily forgetting the death squads that marched through Nigeria, the Exxon-Valdez oil spill that constituted one of the worst human-made disasters in history, and the mounds of evidence supporting theories of global warming.

Shah is a freelance writer who has contributed to magazines such as Zmag, In These Times, The Progressive, and The Nation, and is the former editor of Nuclear Times. The overlap of science and progressive politics make Shah quite adept at creating a multi-faceted study of how science, politics, and economics merge in forming the hegemony oil has over everyday life and worldwide geopolitics.

Shah spent over a year interviewing oil executives, experts, workers, and anti-oil activists, studying all publications concerning oil and energy, and basically became the central interlocutor of all things oil. What she discovers is that though we may want a world free from the ravages of CO2 emissions and repressive regimes the U.S. supports for access to oil, oil companies in collusion with the United States government have made the costs seem too great. Perhaps the price we pay is already too great, but oil companies in league with the media and the government work tirelessly to keep us from realizing it. This is the story of oil, the story of misdirection, promises, and misinformation. This is also the story of our society.

Sacred oil

Fascination with the properties of hydrocarbons predates even the most zealous Standard Oil executive’s starry-eyed visions. More than 2,000 years ago, a prophet named Zoroaster founded a religion, in part upon the worship of fire. The fire that inspired this worship was the result of natural gas flares that accompanied the seeping oil in what is now Iran. People would put the black liquid in water and see signs of the future, carefully coded in the shifting shapes. Oil was mystical, plentiful, and indeed, useful. It could be used to seal roofs and boats and as a base for “Greek Fire,” a weapon of war that spread fear amongst enemies of Persia. This is the framework Shah sets up for an understanding of oil’s first entrance into human lives. From mysticism to war, it seems that oil’s role has changed very little in the ensuing millennia.

The Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution were supposed to strip away the mystical aspects of natural resources, leaving only rational empirics of efficiency and energy production. The new appeal to reason made the rise of the nation state, the steam engine, and capitalism seem natural, or even inevitable. These institutions are imbibed with just as much mysticism as the Koran, the Bible, and the Torah. Their existence rests on a mythology of constructed truths: capitalism expands wealth to provide for all, the nation-state was the natural outgrowth of the inevitable desire for a balance of power, progress is our destiny. In pursuing destiny, trampling other, less civilized cultures was a small price to pay.

At first, coal fueled this revolution. As coal began to dwindle, oil, called the “excrement of the devil” by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) co-founder, Juan Perez Alfonso, became the heir apparent to the throne of energy. It’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing oil’s rise as natural, just as it is easy to believe there are no alternatives to the nation-state or to capitalism.

But as with all historical phenomena, the rise of oil was more a matter of luck than a natural progress. We have built a cult of what Sonia Shah calls petrolife. For Americans and oil companies, oil is more life-giving than a mother’s milk. Each American consumes about three gallons of oil per day, requiring it for food, transportation, heating, entertainment, medicine, housing, and perhaps much more. It seems we have no choice but to worship oil, and to do anything to secure that the free-flow of oil continues unabated, for our very lives rely on it. Every aspect of American life is infected by oil — but was this necessary or even likely 100 years ago?

Many commentators on our culture of oil consumption see this reliance as a natural and even inevitable part of life. The transition from coal to oil seems just as naturally progressive as the switch from train to car culture. But such equations are based on a fundamental flaw in logic. While the current configuration of American society can effectively be traced back to the emergence of oil-based capitalism, this was not the only option prior to the development of industrial society. Shah’s most striking revelation is in showing how absolutely contingent the original growth and continued expansion of petrolife has been. What if, after oil began to peak in Pennsylvania and Texas, President
Franklin Roosevelt did not decide to court Saudi princes for more secure oil? What if the Arab oil embargo had lasted months instead of days? Though these counterfactuals may not provide us with insight into our current dependence on gluttonous consumption, they do point us to consider how indeed we may transition away from unsustainable growth to sustainable consumption.

Banality of production

Shah takes great pains to illustrate how oil is literally raised from the dead to bring new life. Beginning with the natural history of the formation of oil deposits from the corpses of hundreds of millions of prehistoric creatures, the mixture of oil and death does not end there. The oil industry has the highest level of industrial accidents and deaths. Since maintenance and safety precautions cut into ever-dwindling profits, workers toil on oil rigs that are literally floating death traps. Shah tells the stories of frozen hydraulic systems that are meant to raise and lower lifeboats on rigs in the North Sea, and of wind gusts that have collapsed entire rigs. Have these incidents resulted in greater regulations or more safety requirements? Oil executives have made sure these stories do not reach the media, and without any public outcry, government officials are wont to avoid action.

The oil industry spills 1,000 barrels of oil for every billion it transports. Beyond the infamous Exxon-Valdez oil spill that permanently debilitated the Alaskan coastline, oil tankers routinely expunge oily ballast water, and are so tipsy when unloaded that their cargo leaks. Even the spectacular oil spills, such as that of the Prestige in 2002, fade from our view much more quickly than environmental groups would like , as Greenpeace accounts in ”Year One of the Prestige Oil Spill”. Even as the damage remains obscured or forgotten, thousands of animals and people who live in these areas cannot afford such ignorance and avoidance. But, as Shah rightly points out, since oil is the greatest shipped commodity, it remains largely unregulated, save for symbolic gestures when the disasters are too large to ignore.

The most egregious crime occurs on land, not at sea. After oil production peaked in the United States in the 1970s, U.S.-based oil companies began to search the world over for more abundant oil supplies. The Middle East, South America, and Africa proved to be the most reliable prospects. Oil companies, corrupt regimes, and even legitimate governments pumped oil out of the ground and repaid the pillage with murder, destruction, and mass suffering. The most in-depth account Shah provides concerns the activities of Shell in Nigeria. Shell entered Nigeria under the auspices of bringing wealth, prosperity, and stability. But when their goodwill was met with protest, they helped to organize and deploy death squads, razing entire villages and publicly executing leaders of the resistance, as evidenced in the Human Rights Watch Report, “The Price of Oil.”

Shah carefully details murder in the pursuit of oil in areas as diverse as Nigeria, Columbia, and Chechnya, but the striking inhumanity is also evident in understated observations, such as Chevron’s choice to turn an old slave port into an oil terminal.

This is what distinguishes Shah’s account from any other. This story of oil refuses to disconnect the current status of oil as a bringer of industrial grandeur from the oil spills from the death squads from the science and economics that drive an industry. The story is infinitely more complex than anyone can reasonably comprehend. What made Shell executives believe that mass slaughter was an appropriate response to popular dissent? And why do we as consumers still not boycott Shell or turn away in horror, even after we have heard the story? To invoke Hannah Arendt’s perceptive observation, the totalitarian horrors of Nazi Germany were less driven by blind hatred than it was by the “banality of evil.” During the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt recounted how Eichmann was a very effective bureaucrat who merely went with the flow of the times. The banality of oil consumption may not take the form of organized mass slaughter, but genocide, environmental destruction, and even global warming which threatens much of the life of the planet are the results of our mindless consumption.

Shockingly, oil company executives often believe that they are truly bringing good to the world. They are the saviors, able to overcome difficulties in extraction, easily crushing rival energy producers. With such a messianic belief that oil will truly solve the problems of poverty (through establishing oil markets), famine (through oil-based pesticides), and indeed, social antagonism (through petro-dollars, everyone wins), it is not hard to imagine how a little genocide now and then may not seem so bad. This is why Shah’s project is so critical today — only in demystifying the belief that economic progress is the panacea to the world’s ills can we begin to think of solutions to the daily suffering that occurs on a global scale.

Refining oil, refining knowledge

Some of the most troubling information in this book concerns how oil companies have a virtual monopoly on understanding all aspects of their resource. Faulty statistical models create over-inflated estimates of oil reserves in order to keep investment in oil companies high; according to one estimate, unexplored Greenland has more oil than the entire Middle East. Why would oil companies continue to risk their prospects in a region where insurgents routinely attack pipelines when land abandoned by even the Vikings holds enough oil to keep America in the black for decades?

Entire university departments are subsidized not by the government, but by oil companies. Whole technologies have been developed to make exploratory drilling less costly and less financially risky. Oil companies actively seek scientists, economists, and geologists who will tell them what they want to hear. Once they hear it, the oil companies make sure that their experts are heard over any dissenting clamor by those who have yet been bought off.

If anyone doubts this production of knowledge, Shah provides us with two words that should silence any naysayers: global warming. After scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, confirmed that CO2 emissions were responsible for the slow warming of the planet, oil companies scrambled for scientists who would be willing to counter these claims.

Some rogue scientists joined with Big Oil to begin a campaign of misinformation, undermining the credibility of the models, data, and conclusions of the consortium. Global warming does not exist, and if it does, it’s necessary to stop the oncoming ice age. I’m reminded of the doctors hired by tobacco companies who reported that cigarettes decrease the incidence of certain cancers. Oil companies have been more successful than King Tobacco in their propaganda campaign, fabricating debate and successfully assuaging consumers’ fears that they were poisoning the planet. Perhaps some healthy debate is necessary, but when that debate is funded by the deep pockets of parties with vested interests in the findings, it is easy to see that the public sphere has been sold to the highest bidder.

The crunch

Fortunately, we may not have hundreds of years of oil to fuel our wager with global warming. Shah’s expose joins no less than five other major books published in the last few years, such as The End of Oil by Paul Roberts, Out of Gas by David Goodstein, The Party’s Over by Richard Heinberg, Blood and Oil by Michael Klare, and The Coming Oil Crisis by C. J. Campbell,  warning of the inevitable peak in oil production. The oil peak, as Shah explains, is the point at which we have consumed more oil than is left in the ground. Even with better technologies for extracting the remaining oil, the law of diminishing returns will rule the days until we truly run out of oil. Estimates for the world oil peak range from 2005 to 2050 for the more concerned experts, and as consumption continues to grow worldwide, the crash is not something we can ignore for much longer. Regardless of when the crunch comes, the years leading up to the end of oil will be characterized by violent geopolitical struggles for the remaining resources, so long as we remain tied to petroculture. Michael T. Klare gives a thorough account of the reality of these coming resource wars in ”Crude Awakenings” from the November 11, 2004 issue of The Nation.

Shah joins these authors in approaching the coming oil crash with cautious optimism. At some level, it does seem that the only thing that will stop our gluttonous oil consumption in the United States is to be cut off. Tales of oil spills, global warming, and genocide have proven ill-equipped to guilt us into giving up our current habits. Oil will first become cost-prohibitive to the majority of America, and will then disappear altogether. This will inevitably bring crisis, and given our current level of preparation for a transition to another energy source or another way of life, it may be worse than any of us can imagine.

Indeed, in the face of mounting evidence of the peak, the Bush administration has decided to invest in methane, ethanol, and coal development, both of which require oil in production. Producing ethanol gas from corn requires almost the same amount of oil as producing petroleum gas. Yet, this is what President Bush funds instead of supporting renewable energies such as solar and wind power. The politics of energy consumption have put us on a collision course with the oil peak, and things will only become more violent. The violence we have exported to oil-rich regions around the globe will return to us with a vengeance. The price we pay for oil may be measured in our blood as well.

What separates Shah from authors who bemoan the coming end to the age of oil is the investigative journalism at the heart of her accounts. Mixed in with the fact sheets are very in-depth narratives of the individuals who are central to the functioning of the oil machines. From the oil rig workers who luckily escaped catastrophic accidents, to professors who churn out the new batch of engineers to be consumed by the industry of consumption, one begins to see much more clearly how no one remains innocent in oil production. Through her investigation of the science, history, politics, and economics of oil, Shah provides a plethora of information in a very straightforward and digestible form. Readers must think twice about their consumptive habits. At its core, Crude reminds us that everything has its price, and the costs are more hidden than we think.

STORY INDEX

ARTICLES >

“No Escape From Dependency” by Michael Clare
URL: http://alternet.org/envirohealth/20701/

“Scholars to Working America: Sacrifice Your Children for Oil and Empire” by Paul Street
URL: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=5319

“China Invest Heavily In Sudan’s Oil Industry” by Peter Goodman
URL: http://www.genocidewatch.org/SudanChinaInvestsHeavily23December2004.htm

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Crude: The Story of Oil by Sonia Shah
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Blood and Oil by Michael Klare
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The End of Oil by Paul Roberts
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Out of Gas by David Goodstein
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The Coming Oil Crisis by C. J. Campbell
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In The Fray Contributor

For those of us just emerging from the hangover of an election gone awry for the Left, a proclaimed “mandate” from the people, and a string of fun new political appointments, the worst is yet to come. After a long night of ill-fated political exuberance , we roll over to find out we went home with John Kerry. The deed is done and there is no time for regret. Finding ourselves emerging from the haze of a series of embarrassing one night stands with the shrieking Vermonter, the slick Hip-Hop-savvy general, and pretty-boy Edwards — may demand a moment of clarity.  

None of these men seemed like out and out bad people. Their agendas all stood starkly in contrast to that of George W. Bush. Each candidate had his own nostalgic connection to a progressive era we missed. They opposed the war as it was being fought, made gestures towards labor, and even questioned the necessity of the Patriot Act’s most invasive measures. But none were men of substance. The shame of our brief affair with mainstream democratic politics is how little these men stood for. I am embarrassed that I voted for someone who crafted his position on gay marriage in the gutless language of states’ rights. And who responded to the increasingly genocidal violence enacted in the name of U.S. democratic principles with the phrase “find them and kill them.”  

How did it get so bad? Why were so many leftists and young people motivated to campaign and vote for people who represented them so poorly? (The media spinsters who have constructed the “people’s mandate” for Bush will fervently disagree, but as Michael Moore correctly points out, more young Americans voted in the last election than ever before.) What seems obvious now is how convinced we have all become that there is no alternative. What is missing is any kind of real dialogue over the issues.  

Even the “hot button” values issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and prayer in schools were not debated. Both the vice presidential and presidential debates where characterized by vaguery and moralizing, as opposed to reasoned discussion. In a pre-election appearance on the “debate” show Crossfire, Daily Show anchor Jon Stewart pleaded with host Tucker Carlson to stop “hurting America.” What seemed appalling to both the Democratic and Republican hosts on Crossfire was Stewart’s claim that they did not actually debate on the well-rated CNN talk show. Stewart was, of course, correct. The show that is supposed to provide “partisan balance” does exactly what it sets out to do: It gives exactly equivalent doses of pre-prepared democratic and republican sound bites.

A requiem for lost souls

Most of us know that a vote for Kerry was largely a vote against Bush. We found ourselves desperate and hopeless enough to believe anything would be better. In the past decade of an increasingly conservative Democratic party, many have begun to believe the Religious Right’s assertion that the history of America is a conservative Christian history, leaving the Left to settle for “anything but Bush.”

It is with this newfound nihilism that esteemed Princeton Professor Cornel West takes issue in his new book, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism. In a sweeping survey of American history focused on what he calls a “Socratic and Prophetic tradition of truth-telling,” West returns to the oft-heralded founding artists and thinkers of radical democracy — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Melville, and their inheritors, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, amongst others, to resuscitate the rich American tradition of questioning and dialogue.

West’s well-known wit and brusque style immediately call out the Democratic party, dubbing them  “pathetic” and “spineless.” He argues that, as a nation, we suffer from a “deadening nihilism.” As West defines it, American nihilism has taken on three forms: evangelical, paternalistic, and sentimental. All, he says, demonstrate a “cowardly lack of willingness to engage in truth telling, even at the cost of social ills.” The sources of this nihilism are not surprising. Citing the increasingly violent and yet directionless infotainment of CNN and other major media sources, West argues that while they show the tragedy of the world, they prevent a “reckoning with the institutional causes of social misery.”

It is difficult to dispute this fact. Consider, for instance, the vice presidential treatment of the domestic AIDS spread. During the 2004 vice presidential debate, moderator Gwen Ifill asked both candidates to comment on the increasing spread of AIDS amongst African Americans and young people domestically. She added that their responses should specifically not address the AIDS crisis in Africa. Both Cheney and Edwards, of course, quickly redirected the question towards Africa. Finally, Cheney admitted that he was not aware that AIDS was spreading more rapidly amongst African Americans. However, he showed no remorse for this ignorance and instead enacted what West seems to mean by “sentimental nihilism.” Cheney used this opportunity to repeat with heartfelt sincerity the “tragedy” of such occurrences, as if such a compassionate performance was sufficient to address the AIDS crisis. West has aptly identified the role that admitting the horror of social ills has come to play in postponing any significant response to modern day injustices. His assessment of the Democratic party is equally correct. Edwards’ predictable response simply attacked Bush’s policy toward the AIDS epidemic in Africa, rather than taking the risk of proposing aggressive alternative solutions or even answering Ifill’s question.

The dreams that stuff is made of

West responds to this darkening political landscape with vigor. He identifies Ralph Waldo Emerson as the dreamer of American potential and Herman Melville as the dark oracle foretelling where American exceptionalism will lead in pursuit of our great white whale —global military control. West synthesizes these two historical referents into what he calls the “tragicomic position.” Or a historically rooted political ethos that owns up to the troubled and often violent history of the United States, a democratic experiment as indebted to notions of freedom as it is to enslavement and genocide.  In a description of what West feels few Americans are willing to accept, he describes our nation as a “complex intertwining of democratic commitment and nihilistic imperialism.”

West is frank and unflinchingly honest about the troubled histories of our brightest moments in democratic progress. The agrarian-led Populist movement, the social reforms of the Progressive era under Woodrow Wilson, and the Labor movement spearheaded by Eugene Debbs — all of these leaps forward for social justice and class equality also contain a shadowy and often forgotten history of racism, sexism, and profound xenophobia. Many of these advances occurred under the Wilson administration, which reasserted the Monroe Doctrine and exported American Manifest Destiny to Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines, while renewing racism at home through increased segregation and the re-segregation of Washington, D.C. In emphasizing the at times schizophrenic policies of reform and democratic struggle, West hopes to carve out a new space for politics that can be hopeful without the willful ignorance of nostalgia and sorrowful without the melancholy of nihilism.  

West impressively displays the breadth of his historical and philosophical knowledge throughout Democracy Matters. But he sets this work apart from other detailed histories of American progressivism like Richard Rorty’s Achieving our Nation by maintaining a truly global scope in his sources in hopes of renewing the American democratic tradition. Unlike Rorty, who champions the universal human spirit found in Emerson and Baldwin along narrow class lines at the exclusion of race and sexual politics, West devotes the second half of his book to the voices of dissent amongst three groups who are often represented as being united behind their dogma: Muslims, Jews, and Christians. It is this move to disrupt the predictable Christian, Jewish, and Muslim responses to global problems of injustice that makes this book a must-read. What West attempts is a truly ecumenical approach to politics that resonates with the religious and nationalistic tendencies of Americans while holding tightly to the truly cosmopolitan scope of his dream for global democracy. This is a Herculean task that tests the mettle of West as a thinker and a writer.

It is difficult to say West succeeds at the task, however. Democracy Matters concludes as more of an invitation for further striving than a final proposal or policy statement. But West’s attempt to reclaim the ossified history of the American renaissance alongside the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.’s liberation theology, now mostly forgotten by mainstream religious dialogue, gives pause to cynics who have replaced hope with vitriolic aspersions toward the faith-based communities of this country. Democracy Matters is important because it starts an honest and fearless dialogue between the religious traditions that seem to draw the starkest lines of global division and conflict and have gained undeniable power, whether it be direct theocratic rule or the proxy wars of the Religious Right. West’s invitation to Judaic, Christian, and Islamic thinking is not one of banal respect or politically correct multiculturalism. Rather, it is an engaged, committed search for a common history that demands social justice and ethical lives in a world many have given up on. He crosses the lines into religious and spiritual debate that our “born-again” leaders run from as they profess their religiosity. Engaging new power centers of American politics within their belief structures presents political possibilities that Democratic leaders have not even considered. Given the new political landscape of values and beliefs, it is difficult to imagine competing with the church-led grassroots Republican organization until opposition leaders can dispute their claims to righteousness. West lays the groundwork to develop such a political vocabulary, concluding that “to be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely — to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away.”

Out of curiosity, I wondered what the opposition response would be. I went to the Christian Coalition website, and typed into the search box, “What is a Christian?”  I received the following response: “Sorry, your search for ‘What is a Christian?’ yielded no results. Please try again.”  

Luckily, despite the confusion, I still received an invitation to make a donation using my Visa, Mastercard, or American Express.

Player Haters and Hater Players

Given that West intervenes in questions of capitalist greed, military empire, racial subjugation, and the fate of our nations souls in ways that have gotten many men shot, it is not surprising that his work should stir controversy. What is troubling is that the controversy has centered around his competence as a scholar rather than the validity of his claims. In a recent media frenzy over West’s scholarly credentials started by Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers, one of the most accomplished men of American letters has had to defend his significance.  

Democracy Matters, however, lays those question to rest. The trajectory of this work points to a corpus of new philosophical developments that address the continuing legacy of American arrogance and political nihilism. For those like Summers who criticize West for his forays into Hip-Hop or appearances in movies such as The Matrix: Revolutions, bravo, you are correct. The man has no mic skills in that department. (His music reminds me of Christian rock; it is awful and embarrassing to listen to.)  But what makes West’s work exciting is his willingness to put himself on the line for what he believes. He finds hope in the possibility of a democratic youth that most politicians and thinkers write off all together. His attempts to speak in the idioms of science fiction or Hip-Hop are laudable, if not successful. Although his attempts at infiltrating popular culture have had mixed results, West’s invocation of Christian grace and generosity is undeniably powerful even amidst the best arguments for civic secularism.

West confronts the Left with a deeply powerful and difficult question, one that it must engage in a world increasingly dominated by theocratic politics. What must be discussed further is how well West can maintain his spirit of ecumenicism in an increasingly divided world.  

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Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism by Cornell West
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Jairus

The American correctional system of the past 30 years has been characterized by a population increasing exponentially in response to shifts in policy towards mandatory minimum and determinate sentencing. Persons convicted of a crime today are far more likely to be sentenced to incarceration — and will spend a longer period in prison — than their counterparts in past decades. During 2002, the nation’s state and federal prison and local jail population exceeded two million for the first time in history. These trends have contributed to prison overcrowding and state governments being overwhelmed by the burden of funding a rapidly expanding penal system. The results of these decisions are prisons filled with large numbers of non-violent and drug offenders (over 50 percent in both state and federal prisons) at an annual cost of incarceration of $20,000 or more, along with increasing evidence that large-scale incarceration is not the most effective means of achieving public safety.

It is the logical, inevitable consequence of “tough-on-crime” laws and punitive sentencing polices that elected leaders and public officials embrace to avoid addressing the pressing social problems caused by institutionalized racism and political and economic exclusion. By incarcerating high proportions of low income African American, Latino and American Indian residents and maintaining surveillance over them for even longer periods of time, the criminal justice apparatus perpetuates a social segregation policy that intentionally isolates historically disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities and communities, ensuring a capital divestment policy that builds neither social capital nor economic infrastructure.

According to the U. S. Department of State’s 2000 report to the U.N. Commission on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), “discrimination in the criminal justice system” is a “principal causative factor” hindering progress toward ending racial discrimination in [U.S.] society.

Facts & statistics on criminal justice & black people

Arrests

FBI data compiled from more than 8,500 police agencies show that blacks were the subject of 29 percent of arrests in 1999 (The Herald Sun, 2001), although they make up about 12 percent of the population.

In 1996, black Americans made up 13 percent of the U.S. population, but 30 percent of all convicted federal offenders (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1997).

The possibility of incarceration for black Americans is six times (16.2 percent) higher than for the rest of the population (2.5 percent) (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1997).

Incarceration

In South Carolina, 68 percent of men between the ages of 18 and 64 were African American. Blacks made up 27 percent of the state’s total population in the same age group (The Herald Sun, 2001).

In 2000, roughly one in 10 black men was in prison (Boston Globe, 1999).

In West Virginia, blacks made up 44 percent of the female inmates ages 18 to 64. Blacks were 3 percent of the total female population in the same age range (The Herald Sun, 2001).

The black prison population has increased eightfold from three decades ago, when there were 133,226 blacks in prison (Boston Globe, 1999).

Black children are nine times more likely than white children to have a parent in prison (Children’s Defense Fund, 2001).

A survey of traffic stops in Volusia County, Florida, showed nearly 70 percent of those stopped were blacks or Hispanics (Boston Globe, 1999).

Because many states bar felons from voting, at least one in seven black men will have lost the right to vote (Boston Globe, 1999).

Thirty to 40 percent of the next generation of black men will permanently lose the right to vote if current trends continue (The Sentencing Project, 1998).

In nine states, one in four black men can never vote again because they were convicted of a felony (The Sentencing Project, 1998).

Juvenile injustice

Ever since juvenile courts were first established in the early 1900s, the laws in most states have permitted judges to approve the transfer of children from the more protective and treatment-oriented juvenile court to criminal court jurisdiction. But first, there had to be a hearing in which the child’s maturity, comprehension, skills, and appropriateness for treatment in the juvenile system are balanced against the nature of the offense and factors such as the length of time before the child becomes a legal adult. In rough numbers, approximately 10,000 children were transferred annually to adult criminal court in this manner.

But in the late 1980s, as violent crimes among juveniles surged, lawmakers following a “tough on crime” ideology enacted laws that authorized transfer to criminal court of juveniles at a much younger age and for less serious crimes than before. These “automatic” or “direct file” transfers were determined by the charge placed against the child by police or at the discretion of a prosecutor, without prior judicial review. Under these laws, upwards of 200,000 children have been prosecuted each year as adults in criminal court.

The Sentencing Project has sought to restrict the practice of “automatically” transferring children to adult court without judicial review. There are many reasons. Children are responsible in different ways than adults for their actions. They are less able to exercise their rights and less able to comprehend court proceedings. They are frequently denied access to education and subjected to abuse when placed in adult jails and prisons. Many court systems fail to provide adequate defense services to children in adult court. Racial disparity characterizes the decisions to prosecute children as adults. Adult sentences, imposed upon children, are unduly harsh — destroying the formative years of a young person’s life, and in the instance of lengthy sentences, the prospect of life outside a prison forever.

Statistics on black youth and the criminal justice system

Black students are punished more severely for the same behaviors as white students. Nationally, black students are fewer than one out of five public school students, but one out of every three students suspended is black (Advancement Project and the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, June 2000).

Compared with white youths, black youths are more likely to be held in a detention facility, formally charged in juvenile court, and transferred to adult criminal court, where they receive harsher and longer sentences (Youth Law Center, Justice Policy Institute, Building Blocks for Youth, April 2000).

Compared with youths in juvenile facilities, youths in adult prisons are eight times more likely to commit suicide, five times more likely to be sexually assaulted, twice as likely to be beaten by prison staff, and 50 percent more likely to be attacked with a weapon (Children’s Defense Fund, 2001).

The latest juvenile-crime report by the Department of Justice shows a 68 percent drop in the juvenile murder rate from 1993 to 1999, reaching its lowest in recorded history (Building Blocks for Youth, Youth Law Center, 2001).

Juvenile arrests for violence fell 36 percent from its 1994 peak to 1999, the lowest they have been in a decade (Building Blocks for Youth, Youth Law Center, 2001).

Despite the continuing decline of youth crime, nearly every state has changed its laws to make it easier to prosecute youth as adults (Building Blocks for Youth, Youth Law Center, 2001).

A study in California found that compared with white youths, minorities were 2.8 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 6.2 times more likely to be tried in adult court and seven times more likely to be sentenced to prison once they get there. (Justice Policy Institute, 2000).

For youths charged with violent offenses, the average length of incarceration is 193 days for whites, 254 for African Americans, and 305 for Latino youth.

Among those not previously admitted to a secure facility, African Americans are six times more likely than whites to be incarcerated and nine times more likely to be jailed if charged with a violent offense.

For drug offenses, African Americans are 48 times more likely than whites to be sentenced to juvenile prison (Building Blocks for Youth, 2001).

In Cook County, Illinois, 99 percent of youths tried as adults are African American or Latino (Building Blocks for Youth, Youth Law Center, 2001).

Education versus incarceration

In the past decade, many states have cut their budgets for higher education funds to compensate for rapid growth in prison populations and prison construction, fueled in part by increasing numbers of drug offenders in state and federal prisons. In both New York and California, prison expenditures now exceed university financing and more black men are admitted as prisoners than graduate from the state universities. From 1977 to 1995, U.S. prison spending increased by 823 percent while spending on higher education went up by only 374 percent.

Prison industrial complex

What is the prison industrial complex?

The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a complicated system situated at the intersection of governmental and private interests that uses prisons as a solution to social, political, and economic problems. The PIC depends upon the oppressive systems of racism, classism, and sexism. It includes human rights violations, the death penalty, industry and labor issues, policing, courts, media, community powerlessness, the imprisonment of political prisoners, and the elimination of dissent.

Black women are the fastest growing segment of the prison population and Native American prisoners are the largest group per capita. Approximately five million people — including those on probation and parole — are directly under the surveillance of the criminal justice system. The prison industrial complex profits from racist practices in arrest, conviction, and sentencing patterns. Black and brown bodies are the human raw material in a vast experiment to conceal the major social problems of our time.

The racially disproportionate demographics of the victims of the war on drugs will not surprise anyone familiar with the symbiotic relationship between poverty and institutionalized racism. Economic inequality and political disenfranchisement have been inextricably intertwined since the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The racist enforcement of the drug laws is just the latest example of institutionalized racism. As political economist John Flateau graphically puts it: “Metaphorically, the criminal justice pipeline is like a slave ship, transporting human cargo along interstate triangular trade routes from Black and Brown communities; through the middle passage of police precincts, holding pens, detention centers and courtrooms; to downstate jails or upstate prisons; back to communities as unrehabilitated escapees; and back to prison or jail in a vicious recidivist cycle.”

From plantation to prisons:

Where does the money go?

According to the U.N. International Drug Control Program, the international illicit drug business generates as much as $400 billion in trade annually. Profits of this magnitude invariably lead to corruption and complicity at the highest levels. Yet the so-called war on this illegal trade targets economically disadvantaged ethnic minorities and indigenous people in the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. Putting aside the question of legality, there is no evidence of a “trickle-down effect.”

These substantial profits are not enriching the low-level players who constitute the vast majority of drug offenders. To the contrary, the black market drug economy undermines non-drug-related businesses and limits the employability of its participants. Discussing the “legal apartheid” that keeps the developing world poor, Peruvian economist Fernando De Soto observes that “[t]he poor live outside the law . . . because living within the law is impossible: corrupt legal systems and warped rules force those at the bottom of the world economy to spend years leaping absurd hurdles to do things by the book.”  “In a criminalized economy, the risk of imprisonment is almost ‘a form of business license tax.’”

Who is profiting?

In the United States, prison architects and contractors, corrections personnel, policy makers and academics, and the thousands of corporate vendors who peddle their wares at the annual trade-show of the American Corrections Association — hawking everything from toothbrushes and socks to barbed-wire fences and shackles are making money from the PIC.

The sale of tax-exempt bonds to underwrite prison construction is now estimated at $2.3 billion annually. The Wackenhut Corrections Corporation —  which manages 37 prisons in the United States, 18 in the United Kingdom and Australia and has one under contract in South Africa — tried to convert a former slave plantation in North Carolina into a maximum security prison to warehouse mostly black prisoners from the nation’s capital. Promising investors to keep the prison cells filled, these corporations dispatch “bed-brokers” in search of prisoners — evoking images of 19th century bounty-hunters capturing runaway slaves and forcibly returning them to the cotton fields. Corporations that appear to be far removed from the business of punishment are intimately involved in the expansion of the prison industrial complex.

Prison construction bonds are one of the many sources of profitable investment for leading financiers such as Merrill Lynch. MCI charges prisoners and their families outrageous prices for the precious telephone calls which are often the only contact inmates have with the free world. Many corporations whose products we consume on a daily basis have learned that prison labor power can be as profitable as third-world labor power exploited by U.S.-based global corporations. Both relegate formerly unionized workers to joblessness, many of whom wind up in prison. Some of the companies that use prison labor are IBM, Motorola, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Microsoft, and Boeing. But it is not only the high-tech industries that reap the profits of prison labor. Nordstrom department stores sell jeans that are marketed as “Prison Blues,” as well as t-shirts and jackets made in Oregon prisons.

Racism & poverty: The free market and prison economies

Today there are over two million people incarcerated in the United States. Studies demonstrate that two-thirds of state prisoners had less than a high school education and one-third were unemployed at the time of arrest. Over the past decade states have financed prison construction at the expense of investment in higher education. At the same time, access to education in prison has been severely curtailed. Officially, 8.3 percent of working-age blacks in the United States are unemployed but taking into account the “incarceration effect,” the rate is significantly higher. Research confirms the obvious &dashm; the positive relationship between joblessness or low wages and recidivism.

The stigma of prison has been codified in laws and licensing regulations that bar people with criminal records from countless jobs and opportunities, effectively excluding them from the legitimate workforce and forcing them into illegal ventures. As economists Western and Petit point out, “[T]he penal system can be viewed as a type of labor market institution that systematically influences men’s employment … [and has a] pervasive influence … on the life chances of disadvantaged minorities.”

Like slavery, the focused machinery of the war on drugs fractures families, as it destroys individual lives and destabilizes whole communities. It targets American Indians living on or near reservations and urban minority neighborhoods, depressing incomes and repelling investment. “The lost potential earnings, savings, consumer demand, and human and social capital … cost black communities untold millions of dollars in potential economic development, worsening an inner-city political economy already crippled by decades of capital flight and de-industrialization.”

Abolition & prisons as environmental racism

What is abolition?

Abolition is a political vision that seeks to eliminate the need for prisons, policing, and surveillance by creating sustainable alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.

Abolition means acknowledging the devastating effects prison, policing, and surveillance have on poor communities, communities of color, and other targeted communities, and saying, “No, we won’t live like this. We deserve more.”

Abolitionists recognize that the kinds of wrongdoing we call “crime” do not exist in the same way everywhere and are not “human nature”, but rather determined by the societies we live in. Similarly, abolitionists do not assume that people will never hurt each other or that people won’t cross the boundaries set up by their communities. The society must create alternatives for dealing with the injuries people inflict upon each other in ways that sustain communities and families. Keeping a community whole is impossible by routinely removing people from it.

In the last 20 years the United States has built more prisons than any country during any period in history. The cost of the U.S. criminal justice system now runs to $120 billion per year. But the financial costs are only part of the story. There are other costs not so easily seen; costs passed on to those least able to pay them &dashm; the poor rural towns in which most prisons are built and the poor urban communities from which most prisoners are sent. Therefore, because the costs of the current prison expansion are being passed to the poor, and especially to people of color, prisons are examples of economic injustice and environmental racism.

Women, incarceration & re-entry

Since 1980, the number of women in prison has increased at nearly double the rate for men. Nationally, the 93,000 women in state and federal prison represent a figure more than seven times the number in 1980. The “war on drugs” has been the primary factor in this dramatic growth, with a third of women prisoners incarcerated for a drug offense. These trends raise questions regarding the consequences of incarceration on women offenders. Women prisoners often have significant histories of physical and sexual abuse, high rates of H.I.V. infection, and substance abuse. Traditionally, alternatives to incarceration for women have been limited, as has correctional programming designed to meet their specific needs. In addition, large-scale women’s imprisonment has created an increasing number of children &dashm; estimated at 125,000 &dashm; who suffer from their mother’s incarceration and the loss of family ties.

Women comprise over 6.7 percent of the incarcerated population. One can expect about 9 percent of those women to be released within 60 months of their sentence. Upon release, society expects them to find employment. Of the women who face this challenge, most of them are women of color who will face a greater challenge finding employment upon re-entry than white women. Whether they are expected to work as a condition of a public assistance program or simply as a means of survival, to successfully re-enter, women have to create a foundation for themselves and a job provides the bedrock of this foundation. Unfortunately, the criminal record that follows them out of incarceration serves as a terrific impediment to fulfilling both society’s and their own expectation that they find employment upon release.

Alternative to mass incarcerationRestorative justice

What is restorative justice?

Restorative justice is a systematic response to wrongdoing that emphasizes healing the wounds of victims, offenders and communities caused or revealed by the criminal behavior.

Restorative justice is a new framework for the criminal justice system that is rapidly gaining acceptance and support by criminal justice professionals and community groups. Restorative justice involves looking beyond retribution to find deeper solutions that heal broken relationships.

Indigenous/Native practices, such as Maori justice, and the use of sentencing circles (or peacemaking circles) by North American Indians have been heavy influences.

South Africa created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to address injustices under apartheid.

A report from the Department of Justice of Canada analyzed a collection of studies to determine the effectiveness of restorative justice. Encouragingly, it found “restorative justice programs are a more effective method of improving victim/offender satisfaction, increasing offender compliance with restitution, and decreasing the recidivism of offenders when compared to more traditional criminal justice responses (i.e. incarceration, probation, court-ordered restitution)” (Latimer, Dowden, & Muise, 2001, p.17).

Practices and programs reflecting restorative purposes will respond to crime by:
a.identifying and taking steps to repair harm,  
b.involving all stakeholders, and
c.transforming the traditional relationship between communities and their governments in responding to crime.

Some of the programs and outcomes typically identified with restorative justice include:

Victim offender mediation
Conferencing
Circles
Victim assistance
Ex-offender assistance
Restitution
Community service

Three principles form the foundation for restorative justice:

1. Justice requires that we work to restore those who have been injured.
2. Those most directly involved and affected by crime should have the opportunity to participate fully in the response if they wish.
3. Government’s role is to preserve a just public order, and the community’s is to build and maintain a just peace.

Restorative programs are characterized by four key values:

1. Encounter:  Create opportunities for victims, offenders and community members who want to do so to meet to discuss the crime and its aftermath.
2. Amends:  Expect offenders to take steps to repair the harm they have caused.
3. Reintegration:  Seek to restore victims and offenders as whole, contributing members of society.
4. Inclusion:  Provide opportunities for parties with a stake in a specific crime to participate in its resolution.

STORY INDEX

MARKETPLACE >

Poli-Tainment
URL: http://www.Poli-Tainment.com

RESOURCES >

American Civil Liberties Union
URL: http://www.aclu.org

Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice
URL: http://www.cjcj.org

Critical Resistance
URL: http://www.criticalresistance.org

Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM)
URL: http://www.famm.org

Justice Policy Institute
URL: http://www.justicepolicy.org

National Black United Fund, Inc.
URL: http://www.nbuf.org

National Lawyers Guild
URL: http://www.nlg.org  

The National Urban League, Inc.
URL: http://www.nul.org

Prison Activist Resource Center (PARC)
URL: http://www.prisonactivist.org

Homies Unidos
URL: http://www.homiesunidos.org  

Active Element Foundation
URL: http://www.activeelement.org  

Prison Moratorium Project — NY
URL: http://www.nomoreprisons.org  

Youth Empowerment Center
URL: http://www.youthec.org  

The No War on Youth Online Resources page
URL: http://www.colorlines.com/waronyouth

In The Fray Contributor

When Salman Rushdie’s Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction, 1992-2002 was published in 2002, I read it cover-to-cover. His essays became my bedtime stories — and opportunities for politico-cultural ruminations — for several weeks thereafter. Reading it again some two years later, I can’t help but feel a bit giddy at times as I alternate between thinking, “he gets it,” and longing for Rushdie to produce another collection of essays if for no other reason than to flirt with my wit, and offer me insightful new perspectives that remain pertinent this political season.

The essays cover a huge amount of territory: temporally, geographically, and culturally. He reflects on both his first screening of The Wizard of Oz as a young child in India in “Out of Kansas,” and his attendance at a Rolling Stones concert in “In the Voodoo Lounge.” He pays homage to literary greats J.M. Coetzee, Edward Said, and Arundhati Roy, and muses on both the predatory nature of photography in “On Being Photographed,” and the value of the press “in keeping the issues alive” in “Farming Ostriches.”

Now transplanted in, but never wholly of, the United States, Rushdie explores the mundane with a high-caliber literary brilliance. Throughout, Rushdie’s fascination — even boy-like obsession — with contemporary culture is linked to politics. The perfect example of this is his tale of joining U2 onstage during a concert and his admiration of Bono’s success at “reducing Jesse Helms — Jesse Helms! — to tears, winning his support for the campaign against Third World debt.”

For Rushdie, though, it’s not simply such acts of cross-cultural solidarity or unions of the Left that constitute politics. Rather, Rushdie finds politics in the very act of frontier-crossing inherent in both reading and writing: opening one’s eyes, elevating one’s consciousness, allowing oneself to be simultaneously astute and vulnerable to political and moral malleability. As the author explains in “Step Across This Line: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Yale, 2002”:

To cross a frontier is to be transformed … At the frontier we can’t avoid the truth; the comforting layers of the quotidian, which insulate us against the world’s harsher realities, are stripped away and wide-eyed in the harsh fluorescent light of the frontier’s windowless halls, we see things as they are … At the frontier our liberty is stripped away — we hope temporarily — and we enter the universe of control. Even the freest of free societies are unfree at the edge, where things and people go out and other people must go in and out. Here, at the edge, we submit to scrutiny, to inspection, to judgment. These people, guarding these lines, must tell us who we are. We must be passive, docile. To be otherwise is to be suspect, and at the frontier to come under suspicion is the worst of all possible crimes … what we mean when we reduce ourselves to these simple statements is, I’m not anything you need to bother about, really I’m not … I am simple. Let me pass.

Did I step across that line and let myself be challenged the last time I read Rushdie’s essays? Certainly. Many times. And re-reading Step Across This Line some two years later, I get the feeling that I’m being questioned once again. This time, though, I cannot help but read from a slightly different position — that of an American who, since her first reading, has seen this country wage a unilateral war in the name of securing the world from terrorism — under the leadership of a man who scarcely knew the names of foreign leaders when he came into office four years ago and who may again win another tight election, even though he has alienated most of those whose names he has since managed to learn.

“About Islam”

Rushdie’s insight on U.S. domestic and foreign policy demands our attention in this election year — even if the publication date makes his essays appear outdated at first glance. Given the author’s personal experience with terrorism in the form of a fatwa issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini calling for Rushdie’s assassination, the essays offer a unique perspective on the United States’ war on terrorism — likely the deciding factor for many voters. Perhaps predictably, this traumatic experience, which forced Rushdie to go into hiding until the Ayatollah’s 1998 death, has forever changed his life, his politics, and his characterization of Islamic “extremists.”

Born to Muslim parents in India, Rushdie vehemently criticizes what he calls “militant Islam” in several selections in Step Across This Line at a time when demonizing Islam and conflating it with terrorism isn’t exactly politically correct. Somewhere in the process, he contributes to a political reality that may burn as many bridges as many of his other essays seek build.

Consider, for instance, his seemingly trite, yet highly personal and deeply internalized, position concerning the causes of September 11 and the resulting war on terrorism in his November 2001 essay “Not About Islam?”:

Let’s start by calling a spade a spade. Of course this is ‘about Islam.’ The question is, what exactly does that mean? After all, most religious belief isn’t very theological. Most Muslims are not profound Quaranic analysts. For a vast number of ‘believing’ Muslim men, ‘Islam’ stands, in a jumbled, half-examined way, not only for the fear of God — the fear more than the love, one suspects — but also for a cluster of customs, opinions, and prejudices that include their dietary practices; the sequestration or near-sequestration of ‘their’ women; the sermons delivered by their mullah of choice; a loathing of modern society in general, riddled as it is with music, godlessness, and sex; and a more particularized loathing (and fear) of the prospect that their own immediate surroundings could be taken over — ‘Westoxicated’ — by the liberal Western-style way of life.

Highly motivated organizations of Muslim men (oh, for the voices of Muslim women to be heard!) have been engaged, over the last thirty years or so, on growing radical political movements out of this mulch of ‘belief.’ These Islamists …  include the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, the blood-soaked combatants of the FIS and GIA in Algeria, the Shia revolutionaries of Iran, and the Taliban. Poverty is their great helper, and the fruit of their efforts is paranoia.

In this passage and numerous others in Step Across This Line, Rushdie can, at times, seem reminiscent of Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington, whose “Clash of Civilizations” thesis foreboded that the post-Cold War world would be fraught with civilization-changing wars between Eastern and Western religions and cultures, with Islam playing a central role. In progressive academic circles, Huntington has long been heavily criticized for his oversimplified characterization of Islam and of relationships between peoples across cultures.

But when Rushdie makes such statements, they seem to reflect authenticity; one cannot simply dismiss the speaker’s words as racist or essentialist. Not only does Rushdie hail from a part of the world and a history where conflict is often the norm, but the Anglo Indian writer-in-exile has literally had his very existence at stake and been affected by so-called terrorism more intimately than almost any American politician waging the war on terrorism. It also doesn’t hurt that Rushdie, in his usual fashion, tells his own narrative in such a compelling manner in “Messages from the Plague Years” that even opponents and skeptics of the war on terrorism can’t help but empathize with Rushdie’s alienation. He has been shunned not only by Iran, but also by his Indian homeland, which quickly renounced The Satanic Verses as anti-Muslim, even though, as the satirist-novelist suggested in a recent interview with St. Petersburg Times writer Margo Hammond, the book was actually intended to depict metropolitan life in Thatcherite London.

At the very least, Rushdie invites those on the Left — many who oppose everything from the war on terrorism to the war in Iraq to the Bush administration — to reconsider the way in which their position allows them to divorce themselves from genuine political action. It also encourages us to consider how — and if — one can reconcile discriminating against “militant Muslims” while demanding that civil liberties and freedom of speech not be sacrificed in the name of the war on terrorism.

“It Wasn’t Me”

On the other hand, Rushdie’s book, which was published prior to the Bush Administration’s March 2003 declaration of war on Iraq, can seem outdated when read in the context of the 2004 election. That is, his demonization of so-called militant Islam certainly has some relevance today, but it cannot effectively address the question that has dominated much of the 2004 campaign: Why did the Bush Administration invade Iraq unilaterally when the Presiden allegedly knew all along that Saddam Hussein did not have any weapons of mass destruction?

While many leftist writers and publications dubbed Rushdie a “Hawk” when, citing the terrible toll taken on the Iraqi people under Saddam, he voiced his support for the dictator’s overthrow, Rushdie has never gone so far as to support Bush’s war. Last month he told C.F. Niles of the People’s Weekly World Newspaper, “President Bush did not tell the truth to the United Nations. Things in Iraq are not getting better, they are getting worse. This is not my opinion — everybody knows that Bush is just electioneering …”

Perhaps Rushdie was borrowing a page from his own book here. Some three years ago, writing about Bush’s claim that there was no proven link between greenhouse gases and global warming in his April 2001 essay “It Wasn’t Me,” Rushdie relayed, “The president has a big microphone, and if he goes on repeating his claims, he may even make them stick for a long, damaging time.” When I initially read “It Wasn’t Me” — an essay suggesting how fitting Shaggy’s hit single (about a man denying an affair even when his girlfriend witnessed him in the act) is at a time where denial keeps the world spinning ‘round, I didn’t fully appreciate Rushdie’s accuracy. Today, however, the truth that those in high places can right their wrongs with countless doses of denial is more evident.

After reading Step Across This Line in the current election milieu, I was repeatedly reminded of President Bush’s insistence that he had made the right choice in unilaterally invading Iraq, even though he justified that invasion with the false information that Saddam did indeed have weapons of mass destruction. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and many others have conceded, to some extent, that Bush misled the American public to invade Iraq, and yet billions of dollars and thousands of lost lives later, he remains poised to win a second term. Perhaps the best support for Rushdie’s argument comes from an October 22 Boston Globe article, which reveals that “A large majority of self-identified Bush voters polled believe Saddam Hussein provided ‘substantial support’ to Al Qaeda, and 47 percent believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the US invasion.” All of this despite a flood of stories and high profile reports to the contrary. Bush is apparently at the center of it all — he is, after all, the one with the microphone, as Rushdie says — and everyone else just can’t quite capture the attention of diehard Bush followers. No one else gets as much air time to deny, deny, deny.

Four years none the wiser: Lessons from 2000

Of course, while the free speech — er, free denial — of one American man is helping this election shape up to be as close or closer than the last, the outcome will affect far more than the American people. As Rushdie wrote in his essay entitled Senator Liberman” four years ago, “The citizens of the rest of the world [are] already disconcerted that only about 30 percent of American voters feel it’s worth bothering to vote at all, and the thought that the relative perceived holiness [of the candidates] may be of decisive importance does nothing to reassure us … Today, even the United States’ friends are beginning to wish a Rest of the World candidate were permitted to run. We all live under the aegis of the American Empire’s unchallenged might, so the victorious candidate will be our president, too.”

If Rushdie’s argument made sense four year ago, it’s even more fitting in 2004, at a time when a combination of Bush’s pre-emptive doctrine and the United States’ disregard for its allies’ opinions have spurred a drastic decline in the world’s opinion of the United States. Not that long ago, I mulled over the possibility that non-Americans should get to vote for the U.S. president. Often it seems that there are far more people across the globe who criticize — and sometimes praise — the ways in which they’re affected by U.S. policy than there are Americans who concern themselves with the far-reaching consequences of Washington, D.C., decisions. But given the controversy that has arisen in several states over new Americans registering to vote, the possibility that the Republicans or Democrats would so much as entertain the idea of opening the U.S. presidential election up to citizens of the world seems extremely remote, to say the least.

Fortunately, the next best possibility — heeding the advice and insight of those looking in — is well within reach thanks to the wonders of modern media. While Rushdie can’t vote here, he can offer an outsider’s view of how the democracy we practice in the United States can impact billions of people worldwide. He can offer as well an insider’s view into another democratic system — that of his Indian homeland, which, he writes, “is like the United States a large federation of regionalisms, where people define themselves first as Bengalis, Tamils, Kashmiris, and so on, and only after that as Indians. But India, with far fewer resources than the USA, has managed — albeit imperfectly — to run a constituency-based, direct-election democracy for over half a century. It’s hard to grasp why Americans can’t do the same.”

While Rushdie certainly raises useful questions concerning indirect democracy’s necessity and its ability to represent minorities — many whose ballots went uncounted or who were barred from voting on Election Day 2000 — his criticism of American democracy could not, of course, be fully realized when he wrote this first essay after Election Day 2000. Sure, he correctly indicated that the Electoral College foolishly allows for the possibility of a tie. He also pointed out — quite eloquently — that the United States often provides election assistance to developing countries to teach them how to build “fair” and “efficient” democracies while it can’t even count all of its own votes or find a non-partisan way to quell the political bickering that predominates during election season — particularly during election overtime season.

But it was in his December 2000 piece “A Grand Coalition?” that Rushdie raised a question deserving of far more attention then and now. That is, when an election ends in what essentially amounts to a tie, might it make more sense to resolve it through a coalition government — one where, for instance, the Bush/Cheney Administration serves half the term and the Kerry/Edwards Administration serves the other two years, or where the vice presidential candidate on the ticket that garners a few more votes steps aside and allows the other presidential candidate to serve as vice president?

As President Clinton said back in 2000 during the 35-day election standoff, “The people have spoken. It’s just that we don’t yet know what they mean.” Might it be possible that some sort of coalition government — a system that has worked reasonably well in many other democracies — provides the best answer to the problem of the divided nation? Perhaps it would even help unite it, as Bush promised — falsely — to do four years ago.

STORY INDEX

TOPICS >

Iraq War >

“Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, and the Iraq War” by Dr. Sabah Salih
URL: http://home.cogeco.ca/~kurdistan3/11-5-04-opinion-sabah-rushdie-and-irq-war.html

Islam >

”War on Iraq: Where are the Islamic Moderates?” by Mark LeVine and Raymond Baker
URL: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/15050/

Interviews >

A Conversation with Salman Rushdie
URL: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1177360

Salman Rushdie, Out and About
URL: http://www.powells.com/authors/rushdie.html

Election >

”How the Grinch Stole America” by Salman Rushdie
URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/US_election_race/Story/0,2763,417622,00.html

Marketplace >
(A portion of proceeds from all books purchased through the Powells.com link below help support InTheFray)

Step Across This Line by Salman Rushdie
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=2-0679463348-3&partner_id=28164

“

Laura Nathan-Garner

To read Jairus Victor Grove’s interview with Rebecca Carroll, click here.

Following a series of uninspired presidential and vice presidential debates, award-winning narrative nonfiction writer, editor, and interviewer Rebecca Carroll’s Saving the Race: Conversations on Du Bois from a Collective Memoir of Souls reminds us that hope is not yet lost. The United States is still home to a few brave individuals with vision. Unlike many academic collections on W.E.B. Du Bois, Saving the Race brings together the inheritors of the civil rights movement and a number of artists and writers who represent a diverse array of defiant voices.

The inspiration of this collection was the 100 anniversary of W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk. Published in 1903, Du Bois’ most widely read text explicates his philosophical and political aspirations for the black race, situating himself in almost total opposition to the “separate but equal” and industrial education focus of Booker T. Washington.  As Du Bois argued in chapter 3 of The Souls of Black Folk, Washington’s compromise asked black people to give up:

First, political power. Second, insistence on civil rights. Third, higher education of Negro youth — and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, and accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. This policy has been courageously and insistently advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred:

1. The disfranchisement of the Negro.
2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro.
3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro.

It was this hallmark unwavering disdain for compromise in the area of excellence and achievement for African Americans that alienated many of Washington’s followers and defined Du Bois as a visionary leader and thinker. Equally infamous was the air of elitism that frequently characterized Du Bois’ tone regarding the value of higher education. Most accounts of Du Bois describe a cold and introverted man, who, although well-mannered, was only conversant with those he considered his equals.

Du Bois’ stepson David G. Du Bois described him as “basically a shy person” who did not like to interact with those to whom he was not already close. When David Du Bois’ mother planned dinner parties, David recalls, “My mother did not invite people over with whom Du Bois did not feel relaxed and comfortable.” Cultural critic and author of Reconsidering the Souls of Black Folk Stanley Crouch goes so far as to argue that eventually “white people drove Du Bois crazy” after a lifetime of fighting against narrow-mindedness, causing him to break with the mainstream efforts of the NAACP.

Despite his penchant for alienating those he met, Du Bois’ intellect and rigorous scholarship are unquestionable. As a student he pursued and completed a Ph.D. from Harvard University that included study at the prestigious University of Berlin. Despite an impressive academic career for any historical period, his intellectual pursuit was at times a refuge from the intolerable world of racial bias and violent exclusion. As Du Bois once remarked, “I was in Harvard but not of it.”

Today, 101 years later, New York University Law Professor Derrick Bell describes his own tenure at Harvard before he quit in protest over low minority employment, in terms starkly congruent with Du Bois’. As Professor Bell writes in his segment of Saving the Race, “Very few black folk are able to get totally beyond presumption of incompetence. The fact is that those who are even modestly welcome in certain academic circles are the most welcomed they will ever be.” This recognition of African American achievement, tempered by the reality of contemporary more and less subtle forms of post civil rights racism, typify Carroll’s collection.

Comprised of the reflections of African Americans ranging from civil rights attorney Vernon Jordan, Jr., to jazz musician and Grammy-nominated composer Terrance Blanchard, Carroll’s collection is tied together by the editor/author’s own compelling autobiography. Lacking the self-indulgence typical of many auto-narratives concerning identity, Carroll unflinchingly describes her intellectual and emotional movement from rural New Hampshire, where she was raised by white adopted parents, to an eyes-wide-open relationship with the complexities and uncertainties of her black history and identity. Carroll’s own struggle to forge an identity that could provide her with a site for empowerment while also ensuring her a sense of authenticity lies at the heart of what Du Bois called “double-consciousness.”  

Although hybridity is a popular topic of academic discussion, these dialogues often disregard the traumatic and difficult growth experienced by real people who do not easily fit into the rigid categories of contemporary identity politics. What Du Bois and Carroll share and contribute to this discussion is a profound sense of what it means to be out of place. Like Du Bois, Carroll grew up in a mostly white, Northeastern town. Neither scholar describes overt racism in their childhood, instead describing a sense of loss and alienation that their privileged education provided no vocabulary for discussing. In the most common, yet telling, example, Carroll recalls how it felt to admired but never asked out on dates and how she was often complemented for only being cosmetically black.  

Carroll’s multifaceted story, then, foregrounds the disparate and even opposing accounts of W.E.B. Du Bois and his continuing relevance to a socio-political world that still cannot confront how profoundly the history of the United States of America is the history of “the race problem.” The taboo of discussing race in the United States not only impoverishes our understanding of where we come from; it also erases a rich history of hope and political commitment that has driven that history.

It is this connection between history and politics that demands that we read Saving the Race alongside Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. If we were to develop a cannon of American literature that was truly representative of our collective experience for high schools and universities, the absence of Du Bois’ still eminent work would do a grave injustice to the interests of democratic culture. Former Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver, for instance, conjures this spirit in her contribution writing:

Right now, we’re at a point of dissent — dissent about globalization, opposition to racism, opposition to forms of neocolonialism, opposition to war … And I have to have hope in that. What’s the alternative? I could say, “Oh, I give up. The pigs have the right way. There is no alternative.” But that’s totally insane. The world that is being presented to us right now is a world based on genocide, ecocide, and homicide; that’s unacceptable. To choose it is to choose your own destruction, and since I’m not self-destructive, I have to maintain hope in an alternative … Let’s clarify that you can rethink and transform how you view the world. Let’s clarify that the world could be entirely different.

A century after the publication of The Souls of Black Folk, Cleaver and the others who join Du Bois’ legacy renew the intellectual and political pursuit of seemingly impossible demands for justice and equality, demonstrating that The Souls of Black Folk still testifies to an outspoken commitment to causes often derided as doomed or unrealistic. By reminding us of the lasting influence — and relevance — of Du Bois on social and racial justice, then, Carroll’s project provides a context for beginning to understand the indispensable role of The Souls of Black Folk in shaping modern America.  

To read Jairus Victor Grove’s interview with Rebecca Carroll concerning Saving the Race, click here.

STORY INDEX

INTERVIEWS >

National Public Radio’s compilation of interviews and responses to the 100th anniversary of The Souls of Black Folk
URL: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1384569  

HISTORY >

The W.E.B. Du Bois Learning Center
URL: http://www.duboislc.org

MARKETPLACE >
(A portion of the proceeds from the purchase of these books will go the InTheFray if the link below is used.)

Saving the Race: Conversations on Du Bois from a Collective Memoir of Souls
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0767916190

The Souls of Black Folk
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=1930097131

Jairus

(Courtesy of Melville House Publishing)

There is, today, only one serious political problem:  the tragedy of the disappearance of the other.

Top billing in the competition for media attention has been a veritable blood bath for the past few months. A summer of election politics, Olympic scandal, and the potential loss of overtime pay for six million Americans have dominated “above-the-fold” coverage of most major American newspapers.

What is remarkable about this summer’s press coverage is how unremarkable the stories have been. The old journalistic adage “If it bleeds, it leads” found little place in the editorial decisions of mainstream newspapers. Or else the crisis in Sudan has been deemed unimpressive by media standards for death and destruction. Although most major newspapers offer regular updates about the situation unfolding in Sudan, these stories hardly reach the fever pitch of Paul Hamm’s “mistaken” gold medal or the veracity of the attacks on John Kerry’s war record.

Acts of naming

After the unforgivable inaction in Rwanda in 1994, both the media and U.S. government have been quick to utter the ‘G’ word — genocide — but even such a declaration has not compelled us to act in any significant way. The political malfeasance of the Clinton administration should not be forgotten. After the decision was made to classify the brutal slaying of Tutsi Rwandans as acts of genocide rather than genocide — a critical semantic distinction since use of the latter term obliges international intervention under the 1951 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,  the Clinton administration actively blocked international action both through the United States’ privileged position in the United Nations via the Security Council and through less formal diplomatic channels.

After the deaths of 800,000 Tutsis, the United Nations was left to apply ad–hoc peacekeeping efforts in the form of refugee assistance and humanitarian aid. Where this was possible, many of those helped were members of the Hutu power militias that orchestrated and carried out the genocide. Regrouping in the camps in Goma, Hutu power militias led killings and attacks using the camps and assistance in the aid of such atrocities. The horrors that continue in Burundi and the Congo today cannot be disentangled from the sordid past of purposeful ignorance that characterized the Clinton administration’s lackadaisical response.

The first time as tragedy, the second as farce

The Bush administration’s version of willful ignorance in the case of Sudan has been to substitute directionless condemnation for action. An administration too committed to “global democracy” to wait for the United Nations to enter Iraq is now content to obey and wait for direction from those same painfully slow U.N. channels. The diplomatic sclerosis of the U.N. Security Council has yet to be condemned by the short-tempered Bush foreign affairs team — in this case. Even the decision to omit the explicit threat of sanctions from a Security Council resolution directed at Khartoum’s involvement in the Darfur region of Sudan was met with little more than disappointment.

Unfortunately, given the rhetorical power behind the Left’s critique of the Iraqi intervention, it is difficult to muster the intellectual consistency to decry this wait-and-see approach. The Democratic and moderate Left demand for a measured multilateral response in Iraq is being heeded in the case of Darfur. What we find at the heart of this deadlock is a strange double bind that has plagued Leftist politics at least since Vietnam: the opposition to empire lacks an alternative strategy and language for intervention.

Years of developing an anti-colonial critique of economic and military intervention have left most of the nations under the siege of violence without the basic resources necessary for defense or survival. Countries ravaged by both structural and military violence face a world of decreasing aid and attention. Some have accused the West of using half-hearted attempts at peacekeeping as an alibi for insufficient financial and infrastructure assistance.

Supporting minimal peacekeeping efforts to contain the fires started by post-colonial economic exploitation, Western nations are willing to commit just enough resources to create a kind of negative peace. That is, just enough stability to extract necessary resources, such as oil or cheap, expendable labor, but not a peace that allows for basic inequities — including organized sexual violence, debilitating diseases, or illiteracy — to be addressed in a comprehensive manner. It is this increasingly common vulnerability for which the anti-globalization, anti-empire Left has no answer.

Those who doubt this dark thesis should only ask why the invasion of Iraq inspired massive popular protest against the Bush administration for taking out a dictator while the daily murder, rape, dislocation, and terrorizing of as many as two million in Darfur has not inspired so much as a witty ad campaign from MoveOn.org (save the courageous acts by Danny Glover and a few others arrested outside the Sudanese embassy).

There is a selective silence, in that there is reporting on Darfur but inadequate political response regarding violence in southern Sudan — demonstrating a kind of bizarre narcissism in which only atrocities committed by the United States or other western nations matter. The failure of this fascination with our own destructive capability is that it obscures often more devastating and systemic levels of violence in what Bernard-Henri Levy calls the “forgotten wars” of planet Earth.

Even as the Bush administration and CNN grouse over the word genocide, vital elements of the conflict are omitted from the explanation of conflict in Darfur. The description of bloodthirsty Arabs on horseback now ubiquitously known as the Janjaweed in news cycles fits nicely into the current lexicon of Arab stereotypes. The blaming of internal ethnic divisions belies the fact that Western and Chinese oil development has played a fatally significant part in the massacres beyond the Darfur region, such as the Nuba mountains, Dinka villages, and Nuer populations throughout southern Sudan. Although described as a recent flare-up in ethnic tensions between Arab Muslims and Christian and Animist black Africans, the organized displacement and outright slaughter of villages in southern Sudan predates the narrow timeline cited in CNN’s coverage of the Darfur crisis.

Part memoir, part philosophical reflection on ethnic conflict, Bernard-Henri Levy’s recently published War, Evil, and the End of History relays accounts of southern Sudan identical to  “recent” events dating as far back as 1985, when, as a recent Human Rights Watch report argues, the Chevron Corporation began negotiating with Khartoum to gain rights to oil rich areas in southern Sudan. In a chapter dramatically entitled “The Pharaoh and the Nuba,” Levy recounts the aerial views of southern Sudan in 2001:

We have actually come upon the oil complex, in principle a no-fly zone, of the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, the consortium that includes the Canadian firm Talisman Energy, Chinese and Malaysian interests, and the Sudanese national company Sudapet. And now we’ve had confirmed what the NGO’s, Amnesty International, [and] the Canadian government itself, have suspected for years but which the oil companies and the state fiercely deny: namely that the government is systematically “cleaning” the land, in a perimeter of 30, 50, sometimes 100 kilometers, around oil wells; that the least oil concession means villagers harassed, bombed, razed, and columns of poor people chased away from their homes; in short, that wherever oil is gushing, wherever black gold is supposed to bring happiness and prosperity, the desert increases.

Levy goes on to chastise Carl Bildt, former U.N. emissary in the Balkans, for championing the oil companies’ building of roads and air-strips, which says Levy, are now used for bombing runs.

A 2003 Human Rights Watch report entitled “Sudan, Oil, and Human Rights” confirms the consensus cited by Levy with eyewitness testimony. According to a 1990 account of one Nuer villager, the army drove his family out of their town.

“What happened is the jallaba [Arab, but also the word used for slave trader] just walked into the village and opened fire so everybody just ran … The jallaba are wanting the oil,” he said.

When asked in an interview why he joined the rebellion, another young Nuer responded that Arabs had displaced his family. In return he asked, “Why do people disturb those who do not have guns?”  He answered his own question with one word: “Oil.”

Forgetting politics, forgetting genocide

What we find just behind the quick accusation of genocide by the Bush administration and others repeating shortsighted explanations in the popular media is the pursuit of another strategy of willful ignorance no less reprehensible than the Clinton administration’s denial of the Rwandan genocide. The overly simplistic, but seemingly progressive (at least compared to denial), decision to label the Darfur crisis genocide is hiding the disquieting details of its cause.

Is it possible in an age of almost total worldwide security surveillance that the Bush administration could have overlooked the direct correlation between the building of oil wells and the destruction of villages?

One could simply claim that this is an area outside the United States’ strategic (satellite and human intelligence) purview. But is that really possible given Sudan was one of the first sites of conflict with Al Qaeda?  Would the United States really ignore an Islamic government thought to have ties to the bombings of American embassies?

This seems unlikely. What is more likely is that U.S. involvement in the Sudanese peace process and the heavy investments of BP/Amoco in the Chinese oil companies that are dependent on Sudanese oil has created an incentive for stability at the price of genocide.

In an attempt to give voice to these forgotten or ignored histories, Levy’s book diagnoses the Sudanese conflict as an event outside of history. He refers to the people of southern Sudan as “the Damned.” That is not to say in his critique of Hegel’s and more recently Francis Fukuyama’s grand optimism for the “end of history” that Levy repeats the racist claim that Africa lacks the Anglo-European aptitude to experience and drive history’s dialectical progression. Rather, he suggests the United States and European states and businesses are stripping African events of their historic significance, leaving the living remainder of these “directionless” genocidal equations little more than their suffering to provide content to their existence. And even this we steal and sell to the merchants of 24-hour news feed.

Levy says our language euphemizes this process of dehistoricization and depoliticization as “humanitarianism.” In a brutal description of aid and the purely biological or health approach of current relief efforts as the “forgetting of politics,” Levy writes:

The confusion of humanitarianism with the politics whose place it is taking more and more … How can you avoid the political and make it seem you’re not avoiding it?  How can you abandon the disinherited populations of the Third World to their fate and prevent public opinion, whose emotionalism is familiar to us, from having a sudden awakening of conscience and reproaching their governments? By humanitarianism. A strong presence of humanitarian aid. The transformation of the government itself into a giant humanitarian aid agency. And a media/humanitarian frenzy that will at least have the effect of masking the absence of vision, of aim, of will. Sometimes, though, it’s not so bad; sometimes the humanitarians are the last ones, as I said, to carry the colors of Europe, to defend a certain idea of humanity and human honor and to remember, consequently, the time when it was through politics that one resisted oppression; I have known these kinds of humanitarians; I have seen their work, here, in the Sudan … But sometimes aid is catastrophic; and, without giving in to the temptation of pessimism, it is difficult not to reflect that the whole of the humanitarian apparatus serves to anaesthetize public opinion, to disarm its protests, and above all to discourage the initiatives of those who could be tempted to do more … That is the case here in the Sudan, where the humanitarian machinery has as its prime effect the prolonging of a war that the West has, if it wanted, the financial, hence political, means to stop.

It is this “humanitarian machinery,” as Levy calls it, on which the Bush administration is focusing its efforts. For whatever reason, the resolve to cross the line into the realm of political choices and military options is not present. The decision to do little more than think about the threatening of sanctions or offer to outsource our responsibility to intervene to groups such as the African Union maintains what Levy refers to in a June 24, 2004, interview with Charlie Rose as “a Western belief in two humanities.” One of dignity and one of sub-human suffering.

When Rose asked Levy why he wrote this book, Levy responded, ”No one else did it.” Levy went on to explain that he believes, “It may be because we believe in two Mankinds that Abu Ghraib happens.”  

Engaged journalism, or politics as usual?

Despite, at times, a very Eurocentric account of universal human value, what Levy contributes to the complexity of formulating a new Left response to genocide is a model of engaged journalism. In a moving description of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s brief stint as a journalist covering the Iranian revolutions, Levy describes a form of intellectual intervention in hopes of militating against the voyeurism of modern media atrocity coverage while also fulfilling what he calls the “responsibility of a writer traveling through the black holes.” This act of professional witnessing is for Levy what is truly to be done as an act of conscience.

Although Levy’s attempt to “be there” for the damned of Sudan and other forgotten wars should not be scoffed at, it is not entirely consistent with his nostalgia for the anti-fascist fighters of Andre Malraux and George Orwell, whom Levy would like to in some sense join. Not unlike the troubled — and at times confused — ethical inquiry of Christopher Hedges’ War is the Force that Gives Us Meaning, Levy declares that he is “sick of hearing talk of courage and heroism” in relation to the wars of which up-close seem to lose all meaning. He lambastes the “non-interventionists” of Bosnia and the opponents to the war on terrorism, going so far as to say, “There is one single objective: to stop burying our heads in the sand, to take responsibility of naming the adversary, and provide ourselves with the means to conquer him.” Levy is much more careful than the Bush administration in providing a precise definition of democracy’s enemy so as to distance himself from the Samuel Huntington-inspired Clash of Civilizations theory. But for those who wholesale dismiss the war on terrorism, there is a faint but discernable echo of great ideological — if not religious — war in Levy’s thesis. At his best, Levy contextualizes his definition of militant Islam in terms of a certain connection to a morbid desire for death over social change. In the introduction to War, Evil, and the End of History, Levy writes:

I knew enough about Islam, in other words, to suspect that, at the very least, two Islams exist. The new war, if there had to be a war, would be waged between these two Islams as well as between Islam and the West; and that to accept [Huntington’s] idea of an Islam entirely set against a Satanized West was truly too handsome a gift to give bin Laden and those who resemble him, and for whom he was perhaps only the front man.

Levy goes on to describe the role of an ahistorical interpretation of Jihad that has been politically hijacked by leaders such as Osama bin Laden. It is along these lines Levy is willing to locate his call to action.

However, it is such a call to action that creates Levy’s diametrically opposed theoretical positions: Heroic anti-fascist war and the anti-polemical commitment to witness, which are an aporia that not even Levy’s powers of literary flare and imagination can hide and at times clearly he does not want to hide. What is important about this book and its relationship to the current genocide in Sudan is the very schizophrenic impulse toward these two impossible goals that so aptly demonstrates the current ambivalence of the Left (particularly the anti-empire Left). Those of us who are troubled by the forgotten wars of Darfur and elsewhere are being torn in two by the increasing inconsistency and inadequacy of our anti-imperialist protest against intervention and the visceral call to respond to the Others who must not remain faceless and nameless.

While the Right’s ability to distract us from the greater global atrocities or “international escapades” under the preemptive doctrine can be addressed, what do we do once we possess the knowledge of who must be opposed and who must be joined in opposition? It is the transition away from the naïve politics of global retreat and non-intervention that poses one of the greatest challenges to the possibility of a global struggle for social justice. After all, the removal of the Bushes of the world without the removal of the bin Ladens from the helm of global agenda setting would simply shift the balance from one fatal ideology to another. Given the history of inaction on the part of the Democrats, including Kerry and John Edwards, even the hope of a new administration in the White House will do little to alter the trajectory of the conflict in Sudan and elsewhere. Change must happen domestically, but it must be real change, backed by a committed strategy to oppose the leaders that drive the other side of the conflict.

While Levy does an impressive job of describing the failures of current thinking on global conflict at the level of resolving the Left’s ambivalence, he offers very little. What seems overstated in his account of Sudan is the degree to which the “damned” are cut off from the knowledge of their own circumstances. Levy’s diagnosis of a loss of history may go too far, stripping those whom suffer of the human agency to resist and organize politically. This not only runs contrary to what Levy most admires about Foucault’s dictum, “Where there is power, there is resistance.” It also diminishes the capacity for cooperation between those in the West and the forgotten wars to work together against oppressive governments.

Another kind of European exceptionalism seeps in whereby only those in history can have the means to revolt. I do not believe this is what Levy intends, but intellectually, this is what the reader is left with. Contrary to Levy’s descriptions of hapless suffering, the Human Rights Watch report that seems to confirm many of Levy’s accounts of Sudan displays a slightly different picture of those who are the objects of genocide. In a pointedly self- and globally aware statement, one of the Nuer chiefs, Isaac Magok, responded caustically to a Human Rights Watch researcher in August 1999:

You are from America. We want you to see the location [in the fishing camp where we live]. I have seen on TV a village bombed in Kosovo … The U.N. brought camps and cooked food and then in little time everyone was laughing. Why do they not do the same to us?  Because we are black?  What is wrong with them?  You will see our conditions and then we will talk to you.

If our task, according to Levy, is to return to politics and escape the husbandry of humanitarian assistance, we must listen to the voices of those who suffer and insist on their rebellion. What is lost at times in the narratives contained by War, Evil, and the End of History is an attempt to find such political forces to align with seeing all acts of rebellions within the “black holes” of the planet as historically doomed. This seems to repeat the very forgetting of politics that Levy condemns. It forgets the politics outside the European tradition with which Levy so strongly identifies.

As this article goes to press, the Bush administration is supporting a U.N. envoy to Sudan. This envoy is predominantly an observation group. The question remains: How much more do we need to know? This is, of course, the paradox of Levy’s will to observe. To give names and faces to the Other is of little consequence to any except those who watch and survive at a safe distance. The near-heroic chances being taken by Levy and other journalists willing to break through what New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof calls the “information quarantine” of Darfur must be reinforced by more than food and clean water. Otherwise, those in the profession of watching will bear a special kind of damnation.

Like the angels of Wim Wenders’ classic 1987 film Wings of Desire, we will suffer a fate “to watch, record, and testify,” never knowing life or those that lived. To know and not respond with the full capacity of what we are capable as people is to sacrifice the very significance of our unique existence. The tempering of our commitment on the basis of national interest and pragmatic economic calculations reduces us to national packs of clever animals. The name of humanity and what it represents must carry a much greater weight than that of a charitable pastime.

STORY INDEX

ARTICLES >

“Sudan: Janjaweed Camps Still Active”
URL:  http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/08/27/darfur9268.htm

“Crisis in Darfur”
URL:  http://www.hrw.org/doc?t=africa&c=darfur

BOOKS >
Purchase these books through Powells.com and a portion of the proceeds benefit InTheFray

War, Evil, and the End of History by Bernard-Henri Levy
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0971865957

A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0060541644

“

Jairus

(Courtesy of Knopf)

To read ITF’s interview with David Shipler, please click here.

There’s a popular liberal bumper sticker that reads, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Following in the tradition of other canonical anti-poverty works like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Cold New World, David Shipler’s The Working Poor incites a similar sentiment. His investigative journalism delves deep into the seamless nature of poverty by unveiling the poor we are most likely to overlook: those who work.

This investigation is a formidable challenge — partially because poverty isn’t an easy subject to read about, but also because tackling the roots of cyclical poverty in America is like navigating a spider web: Everything is interconnected. In attempting to address the manifold causes and effects of poverty, Shipler bounces between migrant workers and drug-addicted mothers, homeless men and college-educated women. His subject shifts can at times be jarring or feel cursory, but Shipler’s work is ultimately powerful and moving because it is imminently readable. When Ron Suskind reviewed The Working Poor in February 2004 for The New York Times Review of Books, he explained, “This is clearly one of those seminal books that every American should read, and read now.” And this is a book many people can read. Shipler explores his subjects’ lives in an easy narrative, resisting the temptations of dry academic discourse. The book’s strength lies in Shipler’s ability to step aside and give his subjects the floor. His role is that of a guide, not merely a witness.

Budgets, bank accounts, and other enemies of the working poor

The working poor occupy an economic position the middle class typically only know from their summer job experiences in high school, a position we have difficulty acknowledging as anything other than transitory. But the working poor are always floating in our peripheral vision: the man who hands us our coffee, the woman who watches our children, the housekeepers who come through our offices at night while we relax at home, the bank teller who collects food stamps to support her kids. The job opportunities available to those who live on the brink of poverty are, for one reason or another, largely minimum wage. Such work doesn’t pay sufficiently in either salary or benefits to sustain a family. The stories — and struggles — of those Shipler terms “the working poor” poignantly illuminate the gap between what we consider poverty and what it really looks like for millions of men and women.

Why the gap? Americans, it seems, remain largely incapable of reading between the lines when it comes to the reality of the economic crisis. Part of the problem lies in the fact that the American dream doesn’t make room for ambiguities. We want people to climb from poverty to wealth (or at least the middle class) through hard work, to sweat their way off the welfare rolls. The media jumps on success stories as evidence of our socio-economic fantasy. But as Shipler suggests in the aptly titled chapter, “Work Doesn’t Work” — or rather, not all work works. Shipler argues that the American dream positions the poor as scapegoats and allows the middle class to ignore the trauma and hardship that frame their need. The working poor are left balancing their fragile lives against myths of hard work and perseverance.

To demonstrate the tenuous position occupied by the working poor, Shipler asked his subjects to keep budgets. Presented in the same easily navigable storytelling style that characterizes the rest of his work, the budgets, broken into simple numbers, reveal just how little budge room people working for minimum wage have, as they treadwater. Christie, a childcare worker, had a budget that looked like this:

Income:  $37.68Child Support Check
$660.00Monthly take home
$697.68

Expenses$15.00Gas
$6.00Take day care kids to zoo
$3.00Fee to cash paycheck (no checking account)
$172.00Rent (w/ late fee)
$31.47Layaway for Christmas presents
$40.00Shoes for two kids
$5.00Corduroy pants (second hand)
$5.00Shirt
$10.00Bell Bottom Pants
$47.00 x 2Bi-weekly car insurance
$43.00Phone
$34.00Gas (apartment)
$46.00             Electricity
$8.00 to $15.00        Prescriptions
$150.00Car payments
$72.00Medical insurance
$43.00Cable
$784.47

Simply put, it’s expensive to be poor in America. America’s working poor pay a double fee their predecessors never encountered. First, the working poor are required to pay surcharges to cash paychecks, wire money, receive child support, and file their taxes. They also face a marketing establishment that has argued successfully over the last 20 years that all Americans — rich and poor alike — deserve cable TV and the opportunities to dine out and wear name-brand apparel.

As Shipler demonstrates, poverty knows no racial, gender, or language lines — but it does disproportionately affect women. The majority of Shipler’s subjects are female, and many are single mothers. His sample reflects a gendered wage gap where women earn 77 cents to every dollar earned by a male. As the Institute for Women’s Policy Research reveals, this statistic has a devastating effect on women’s long-term earnings.

Poverty’s trail of tears

But budgets and the poverty line alone cannot define poverty. One of the book’s most exciting contributions to the popular discussion on poverty is the causal link it draws between trauma and endemic poverty — a correlation long familiar to academics and anti-poverty workers, but often invisible to those distanced from the front lines. Shipler explores this connection through Sarah’s personal narrative

Unless treated, trauma — particularly childhood trauma — profoundly impairs human beings’ ability to reach their potential. Shipler cites a 1997 study finding evidence that children subjected to stress often continue to display high levels of cortisol that then affect their neurological development. Childhood trauma is frequently linked with adult chemical dependency and exposure to violence. Dr. Sandra L. Bloom’s literature review, The PVS Disaster: Poverty, Violence and Substance in the Lives of Women and Children, reveals that between 50 and 70 percent of women on welfare have been in an abusive relationship at some point, a significantly higher proportion than the general population.

Trauma survivors are marked by a sense of powerlessness, what Shipler calls a “corrosive suspicion of worthlessness.” This feeling is compounded by his subjects’ sense of economic irrelevance. As one of Shipler’s subjects, Ann Brash, observes: “People who don’t call when they can’t come to work probably don’t think they’re important enough … It’s more than low self-esteem. It’s invisibility.”

Partisan politics and nonpartisan money matters

In incorporating this discussion of trauma within his examination of poverty, Shipler blows open partisan dialogue about poverty programs — making The Working Poor an essential read during this election season. Current political dialogue fails to address the endemic nature of poverty when it chooses to see people as either bad or lazy, or to place full blame on insufficient funding. As Shipler indicated when I spoke with him, “Liberals tend not to want to see the families’ individual failures, and conservatives tend to see only those [failures, ignoring] societal issues … only if you define the problem thoroughly can you invent thorough solutions.”

Shipler posits that the solution lies in part with integrated programs, like So Others May Eat (SOME) in Washington, D.C. Anti-poverty initiatives must not only address concrete issues like job training and benefits advocacy, but also what Shipler calls “soft skills” — how to show up for work on time, how to negotiate with peers and employers, and perhaps most importantly, how to heal from emotional injuries.  Dr. Bloom’s work has focused on helping service providers create trauma-informed systems that teach healing skills as a means for growth.

In order to create trauma-informed and integrated services, liberal and conservative social service ideologies must meet. Shipler writes:

Pleas for more money and discussion about trauma aren’t popular issues in election years, and, unsurprisingly, as of this writing, neither candidate has sufficiently addressed an anti-poverty platform capable of effectuating large-scale change. Given President George W. Bush’s history of programmatic cuts and tax reform designed to assist the upper echelons of American society, liberals look to Democratic candidate John Kerry for leadership. While Kerry’s plans to raise the minimum wage to $7 per hour and expand health care coverage for larger percentages of the population demonstrate a desire to reach low income voters by speaking to their concerns, his agenda is at best a superficial attempt at appeasing liberals rather than a genuine attempt to address poverty and mobilize voter turn out. This failure, of course, could hurt the Democrats as much as it hurts the working poor since the vote of the latter is essential to the former’s prospects of electoral success.  As Shipler points out in an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times, “Historically, the lower a person’s income, the greater his support for the Democrats — but the less likely he is to vote.”

The poor may not vote because, like Ann Brash, they feel invisible or because they don’t have transportation to the polls or child care. But they also don’t vote because they don’t see answers to their everyday problems in the candidates’ rhetoric. Kerry’s claim that the minimum wage raise will positively affect working mothers is accurate, but it still won’t raise them above the poverty level. Most living wage campaigns define a living wage as $8.20 for a family of four (although in urban areas, this rate is correspondingly higher). Raising the minimum wage for a 40-hour per week employee would amount to $3,800 more annually; enough to buy more groceries and jeopardize food stamp and welfare benefits, but not enough to ensure a family’s financial stability.

Focusing on minimum wage and job creation as solutions to poverty neglects the larger picture. As the Center for Law and Social Policy points out, 42 percent of projected job growth over the 20 years will be for workers with post-secondary training. But Bush proposes doubling the number of students trained by the workforce — without increasing the program’s funding. Minimum wage jobs are disappearing, and as Shipler writes in his conclusion, “the minimum wage is a blunt instrument, and the skill to use it is not perfected.” Shipler’s call for increased employment training and the revival of vocational education necessitates that Sen. John Kerry and other Democrats challenge private industries to step forward and bear responsibility for training workers.

But given the tendency of most politicians to consistently place a greater emphasis on middle-class families than on low-income workers, will private industries have any incentive to expend the resources necessary to train lower-income workers? It’s difficult to tell. After all, talking about poverty too much is derided as a liberal malady, the territory of left-wing journalists and activists incapable of seeing the long-term economic future; politicians are reluctant to tackle the issue whole heartedly for fear of alienating those constituents whose votes they rely on.

But perhaps we are moving away from these traditional divides: The poverty crisis in this country is attracting increasing attention from those in the center. Barbara Ehenreich’s bestselling book, Nickel and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America, was a fixture on bestseller list and selected as summer reading material for students at the University of North Carolina.

If a dialogue concerning poverty is to move to the center of our nation’s agenda, it will require not just armchair liberals willing to read a book or two, but political participation of all types at  all levels of the economic spectrum. James Agee wrote in 1936, ”Let us then hope better of our children, and of our children’s children; let us know there is a cure, there is to be an end to it, whose beginnings are long begun …”

But if Shipler’s work teaches us anything, it’s that it isn’t enough to merely hope anymore. Incisive investigative journalism has only so much power to effect change As Shipler writes in closing: ”We do know how to do much more than we choose to do. Our insufficient will has not carried us even close to that twilight region where our competence fades.”

Shipler made the working poor visible, but the rest, it seems, is up to us — the readers, the voters, the workers, the employers, the privileged. We’re the ones who have to figure out how to make them feel visible — and powerful.

To read ITF’s interview with David Shipler, please click here.

STORY INDEX

MARKETPLACE >
A portion of the proceeds from the purchase of these books will go the InTheFray if the following links are used

The Working Poor
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0375408908

Nickel and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0805063897

ORGANIZATIONS >

SOME program
URL: http://www.some.org

Center for Law and Social Policy
URL: http://www.clasp.org

America’s Second Harvest
URL: http://www.secondharvest.org

U.S. Census Bureau’s Poverty Measurements
URL: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty.html

ACORN’s Living Wage Campaign
URL: http://www.livingwagecampaign.org

National Low Income Housing Coalition’s Voter Registration Project
URL: http://www.nlihc.org/vrem/

National Coalition Against Homelessness’ Voter Rights Manual
URL: http://www.nationalhomeless.org/vote2004/

Jobs with Justice
URL: http://www.jwj.org

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Agee and Walker’s Great Experiment
URL: http://history.hanover.edu/hhr/hhr93_5.html

Dr. Sandra Bloom’s work
URL: http://www.sanctuaryweb.com

“

llouison

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

To read Laura Nathan’s interview with David Bezmozgis about Natasha and Other Stories, please click here.

What does it mean to be a Jew? What defines a “good” Jew? Is one’s Judaism something that is performed through active participation in certain rituals and religious services? Or can Jewish identity be proven simply by referring to oneself as a Jew?

In a sense, the debate over Jewish identity is as old as the Torah. One could say debating Jewishness is part of being Jewish. But the increasing cosmopolitanism, refugee flows, and globalization that have characterized the last half-century have left Jewish communities around the globe grappling with these questions in a new context. As David Bezmozgis demonstrates in his debut short-story collection Natasha and Other Stories, the answers, when they are reached, are hardly final — or universal.

For the 320,000 Soviet Jews who fled the U.S.S.R between 1960 and 1989 to escape persecution, the debate over what constitutes Jewish identity is especially pronounced as refugees like Bezmozgis and his family cautiously — and somewhat naively — navigate the newfound ability to practice their religion freely. Only seven years old when his family left Riga, Latvia, for Toronto in 1980, Bezmozgis offers an intoxicating exploration of the poignant arguments about Jewishness among émigré communities, using his own experiences as a guide. Having just emigrated from Riga to Toronto at the age of seven, when the book begins, Mark Berman, the narrator in each of the seven stories, has stolen part of his author’s biography.

In Natasha, Mark tells the story of his family: himself, his mother Bella, and his father Roman, as the Bermans — like those making the transition from closeting their queerness to “coming out” — learn how to live the once persecuted identity publicly, openly, and as part of a community. In the Soviet Union, saying “I am a Jew” affirmed one’s Judaism. But in Toronto, the Bermans’ relationships to Judaism — and the Jewish community — are complicated by the tendency of some North American Jews to expect — even require — more than a moniker to substantiate Jewish identity. The family discovers that they must reconcile conflicting desires in order to remember the past, practice Judaism on their own terms, and assimilate into the North American Jewry.

Bezmozgis depicts North American Jews, meanwhile, as needing to balance the freedoms they’ve taken for granted with those previously denied to their brethren. What they’re all left with is a community that simultaneously demands definition and refuses certain definitions — and the people who embody them.

The metamorphosis

The death of a neighbor’s dog. The labor of establishing a clientele for an émigré’s new massage business. The visit of a Soviet weightlifter. A fight on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Sexual encounters with a cousin. The quest for knowledge about a great Jewish American boxer. A controversy at a Jewish old folk’s home when one man’s death leaves his male partner to fend for himself in a community of opportunists.

In the course of a full novel, these events might seem pedestrian. But without intervening chapters to denote the passage of time and make the process of change seem less acute, Bezmozgis’ seven stories demonstrate that identity is a work-in-progress. Or as L.A. Weekly columnist Brendan Bernhard puts it, “mysterious and seemingly random.” Although Mark participates in and narrates each story, one might not know that these stories bear connection to one another if not for the recurring Berman name. A mere first-grader when the book begins, Mark is in middle school by the fourth story — “An Animal to the Memory” — and is a sexually active 16-year-old just one story later in “Natasha.” Although Bezmozgis leaves us in the dark about Mark’s exact age at the book’s conclusion, he assures us that the narrator has matured considerably, exhibiting a thirst for knowledge and embracing the responsibilities of work, family, history, and Judaism.

Given Mark’s evolution over the course of Bezmozgis’ stories, one can’t help but read Natasha as a coming-of-age narrative — one at times reminiscent of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

But Bezmozgis sets his coming-of-age narrative apart by complicating the common experiences of adolescence with the struggles of migration, loss, and Jewish identity. As we come to realize, Mark isn’t the only one to come of age in Natasha. In many ways, immigration is a form of rebirth, an event that puts adults back at square one and forces them to unlearn every cultural custom and norm that they internalized in their homeland over the years.

Children, however, tend to be more malleable, making the changes they undergo seem less drastic. Or perhaps their metamorphosis just seems inevitable, given the usual pitfalls of adolescence. This, of course, could lead one to expect that an émigré child would assimilate more easily than an adult. But as Natasha surmises, it isn’t that simple.

For Bezmozgis, an émigré’s life cannot be divided into two simple categories of pre- and post-Soviet life, religious persecution and religious freedom. Rather, the author shows destruction stalking each individual stage of change as each story ends with a form of death: The death of the neighbor’s dog. The disposing of an unwanted, non-kosher apple cake that denotes a bond between the Soviet Jews and the Canadian Jews. The death of dreams and the defeat of the “strongest man in the world.” The death of millions of Jews and the death of one individual’s understanding of what it means to be a Jew. The death of an identity associated with drugs, sex, and incestuous relationships. The death of a grandparent and the death of a stranger whose only relationship to Mark is a shared enthusiasm for a legendary Jewish boxer. The death of an ostensibly gay elderly man, the death of uncertainty over what it means to be a Jew. Occurring so frequently in Natasha, death and drastic change become predictable rites of passage.

With death ever-present as Mark comes of age, Judaism plays a more defining role in his identity, demonstrating that it is possible to keep vestiges of his past alive in his present. From his parents and their contemporaries — people who fear assimilation after living the majority of their lives in the Soviet Union — Mark learns that he can’t simply discard history. Or rather, he can’t discard the history his parents want for him, the religious freedom that became the cause for sacrificing everything in moving to a new land. Meanwhile, those who seek to erase the Bermans’ history and redefine Judaism for them reinforce the past the family fled. The feelings of inadequacy and invisibility that their critics inspire remind the Bermans that the past — their past — will always be with them.

Are you a good Jew or a bad Jew?

Coming to Canada with nothing but their history and their religion, as documented on their emigration papers, the Bermans initially milk their Jewish identity for all it’s worth. Judaism, after all, seems to be their only currency of any value, their only connection to others who don’t speak their language or understand their cultural idiosyncrasies.

As Mark explains: “This was 1983, and as Russian Jews, recent immigrants, and political refugees, we were still a cause. We had good PR. We could trade on our history … My mother … believed that [my father’s] strongest selling point [as a massage therapist] was his status as a Soviet refugee. The most important appeal, she said, was to guilt and empathy. That would get them in the door.”

Heeding this advice rather than appealing to the poor Soviet émigré community, Roman looks to Canadian Jews to help build his clientele. After all, Canadian Jews are privileged. They know people. And they know what it means to be Jewish.

Unfortunately, they don’t fully grasp what it means to be persecuted for being Jewish.

“The rabbi,” for instance, “was supposed to be particularly sympathetic to the plight of the Russian Jews,” Mark suggests. “To improve his chances [of getting the rabbi to help him establish a clientele], my father brought me along.”

Roman could of course prove his Jewishness simply by pointing to his emigration papers. But because Mark also attends Hebrew school and can speak very rudimentary Hebrew, Roman has living, breathing proof that the Bermans are not just Jews, but good Jews — Jews who make their religion a priority and consequently, are deserving of help.

But the rabbi doesn’t accept the “Jew card.” As Mark says upon leaving the synagogue: “Fifteen minutes after going in, we were back out on the street … and on our way home. For our trouble we had five dollars and the business card of a man who would print my father’s flyers at a cost.”

Given Mark’s tone, the Bermans seem to have naively believed that the sympathy of Canadian Jews would improve their lot and help them fit right in. But a combination of sympathy and guilt cannot lay the groundwork for an equal relationship between two peoples, particularly of such contrasting backgrounds.

In the story “Roman Berman, Massage Therapist,” this becomes increasingly evident through the Bermans’ interaction with the Kornblums, a Jewish couple that invites them to Shabbat dinner. One might assume that the Kornblums are simply making a kind gesture, but their intentions seem slightly selfish, more imbued with sympathy than empathy, as they try to play the part of model Jews.

This is evident when Rhonda Kornblum returns the entire apple cake that the Bermans bring to dinner. Explaining to the Bermans that “although they sometimes took the kids to McDonald’s, they [keep] kosher at home,” Rhonda makes Bella feel inadequate. The reader, meanwhile, can’t help but question this qualification. Why do the Kornblums make exceptions for McDonald’s and for their own kosher-raised children while refusing to make exceptions for Soviet Jews who never had the privilege of keeping kosher? Why don’t the Kornblums just keep the cake and throw it away rather than making their guests feel inferior?

The Kornblums, it seems, are a reminder that established Jews may manipulate newcomers’ pleas for pity to make themselves feel that they are “good Jews.” In other words, marketing one’s Jewishness may gain one access into the Jewish community; it may even earn a dinner invitation or a few minutes of the rabbi’s time. But it can never guarantee genuine, unmotivated inclusion. Perhaps at best, it can ensure a place on the margins, as the disparity between the Jewish émigré experience and the Canadian (read: privileged, un-persecuted) experience undermines the inclusiveness that the community prides itself on.

All for one and one for all: Memories of suffering

Telling the couples “what an honor it was to have them at his house,” Dr. Kornblum reveals that he and his wife have been trying to help Soviet Jews “for years” and “If it wasn’t too personal, he wanted to know how bad it really was.” After hearing their stories, Kornblum takes out a family photo album and makes a point of identifying each person killed by the Nazis.

We see this concerted effort to remember the Holocaust not just at the Kornblums’ but also when Mark fights with another student on Holocaust Remembrance Day in “An Animal to the Memory.” Ironically, Mark’s parents have sent him to a Jewish school to “learn what it means to be a Jew.” But when the rabbi — the son of a Holocaust survivor — tells Mark that even the Nazis wouldn’t do what he did, he implies that Mark hasn’t fulfilled his parents’ objective. Making Mark repeatedly yell, “I’m a Jew,” the rabbi replies nonchalantly, “Now maybe you understand what it is to be a Jew.”

But does he? Do we? Perhaps more than any other story in Natasha, this one concludes with more questions than answers. That is, we know there’s some connection between being a Jew and remembering the Holocaust. But the inability to pinpoint this connection is something with which Bezmozgis takes issue.

You can’t help but wonder why the Holocaust is treated as the end-all-be-all of Jewish identity throughout a book that is predominately about the Bermans, who never discuss their connection to the Holocaust. Pointedly, whenever Bezmozgis puts Soviet Jews in the same room with non-Soviet Jews, the Holocaust — rather than the countless Jews who died under Stalin or subsequent Soviet regimes — becomes the rallying point for Jewish identity. Those whose connection to persecuted Judaism derives from some other epoch tend to be treated as outsiders.

In fact, Natasha questions whether North American Jews are capable of articulating a shared history based on anything other than the Holocaust and its assault on their collective identity. The reader — at least this reader — can’t help but wonder: As North American Jews belabor this epoch more than the rest, do they disregard their own individuality and the potential of the Jewish community to forge a collective identity that is more true to the diverse experiences and memories of its members? And by focusing their energy on remembering a specific past, might they end up forgetting, overlooking, or trivializing something occurring in the near-present?

The problem, as we learn through the Bermans, is that the Holocaust isn’t the only thing Jews must remember in order to retain a sense of who they were and who they are becoming. Looking backward to a specific epoch — one that some members of a given community might not identify with — does not necessarily hold the answers for defining shared identity. For as Mark learns in “Minyan,” only empathy — genuinely and unselfishly connecting with and relating to other people for an extended period of time — can begin to ensure membership in the Jewish community. Easier said than done.

Death becomes them

Mark comes to realize this through the death of Itzik, a man who has been living in a Jewish old folk’s home. When Itzik’s death leaves Herschel — the man believed to have been his lover — alone in their apartment, hordes of people vie to move in and displace the bereft partner. Suddenly, Zalman (the man who runs the building and organizes weekly religious services) finds people he never met before, people who have never attended religious services, appealing to him for help. They go out of their way to convince him that they are “good Jews,” better than Herschel. In fact, whereas Zalman typically struggles to find ten Jewish men to form a minyan at religious services, more than 20 men attend services the Saturday following Itzik’s funeral. “Everyone [making] an effort at making an effort …” Mark recalls. “Voices battled for distinction.”

Here history is simultaneously relevant and irrelevant in defining Judaism. That is, the opportunists believe they’re Jews because their ancestors were. But they want Zalman to disregard who they personally have been in the past — Jews who have never bothered to attend religious services — and embrace them for who they promise to be in their moment of desperation.

One might expect Zalman, who was never a fan of Herschel, Itzik, or their queer bond, to accept the “good Jew” card, to privilege imagined history over active, selfless participation in the Jewish community. But Zalman’s explanation as to why he will allow Herschel to stay is telling about the myth of the “good Jew” and the futility of bartering Judaism:

Here the only question is Jew or not. And now I am asked by people who never stepped into a synagogue to do them a favor. They all have friends, relatives who need an apartment. Each and every one a good Jew. Promises left and right about how they will come to the synagogue. I’ve heard these promises before. And they say, “With so many good Jews who need apartments, why should Herschel be allowed to stay?” This is not my concern. My concern is ten Jewish men. If you want 10 Jewish saints, good luck … They should know I don’t put a Jew who comes to synagogue in the street. Homosexuals, murderers, liars, and thieves — I take them all. Without them we would never have a minyan.

Ironically, in casting himself as non-judgmental, Zalman, by equating gays with criminals and other immoral types, implies that some forms of morality — and sexual preferences — are inferior to others, even within the Jewish community.

At best, then, Bezmozgis leaves us with an open-ended final answer in the final pages of Natasha. That is, attempting to articulate a more coherent, more universal definition of Jewish identity — or any identity category, for that matter — only raises more questions. Sure, we can conclude that being a “good Jew” is less productive for the community than simply being a Jew on one’s own terms and showing up to ensure that the community lives on. But inevitably it’s impossible to call oneself a Jew and avoid being scrutinized by others who consider themselves more Jewish as they fall back on their own understanding of what it means to be a Jew.

Maybe the question we should be asking, then, isn’t what it means to be a Jew. Perhaps it’s time instead to ask why we as individuals and sub-communities define our shared identity in particular ways. For instance, why does being a Jew mean you have to remember the Holocaust above all other instances of anti-Semitism and all other manifestations of community and tradition? And how does the way that we identify ourselves in comparison to others impact the constitution of the Jewish community by creating divides within?

Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that, on some level, we’re all strangers living in a strange land — even if our passports suggest otherwise.

To read Laura Nathan’s interview with David Bezmozgis about Natasha, click here.

STORY INDEX

BOOKS >
Order through Powells.com, and a portion of the sale goes to InTheFray to defray publishing costs

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0316769177

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0679723161

Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0374281416

Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0679756450

HISTORY >

Operation Exodus
URL: http://www.jewishgates.com/file.asp?File_ID

World Jewry: Ethiopian Jewry and Soviet Jewry
URL: http://www.rac.org/issues/issuewj.html

REVIEWS >

“One man shock-and-awe” by Chris Nutall-Smith
URL: http://www.quillandquire.com/authors/profile.cfm?article_id=5795

“

Laura Nathan-Garner

(Registered members of the site are invited to read Justin Clark’s exclusive interview with Benjamin Weissman. If you are not yet a registered member, please register now. If you are a registered member and would like to read the interview, please click here).

It helps the satirist’s cause if he has at least some warm feelings for the culture he intends to skewer. Twenty years have passed since the short stories of Benjamin Weissman first appeared in such literary journals and art magazines as The Santa Monica Review and The Village Voice Literary Supplement.  In that time he has published two story collections, Dear Dead Person (High Risk Books, 1994) and Headless (Akashic Books, 2004), both featuring the same grotesque gallery of serial killers, pederasts, porn stars, neo-Nazis, and average dysfunctional Americans.  Both also consist of interior monologues, usually under ten pages and often as short as two, and read like a pastiche of the abject voices of William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, and Dennis Cooper — writers who subject the reader to a prose as tortured, hypersexual, and banal as their characters’ twisted lives.  

Take, for instance, “Flesh is for Hacking” (1986), Weissman’s deadpan description of a pedophile copulating with the severed head of a young murder victim:

I twirl the head around like a slow pinwheel.  When was the last time he brushed those teeth?  I know it’s been at least two days.  Teeth feel good.  I like it when it hurts.  Yes, yes, just like that.  Uh huh.  Oh you little fuckhead, you dead little shit.  My God, you can’t do this to me.  And when I’ve suffered as much pain as I can stand I pull out and squirt on your eyelids.  Killing, cutting up boys has made me a better person.  It took me so long to notice.  For instance, now I give without expecting something in return.

The results, it goes without saying, are sometimes unfriendly to the reader.  Five years after the story’s publication, many people reacted squeamishly toward Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, a serial killer novel that likewise aimed at illustrating how inured our society has become to suffering.  It is easy to see why readers were even less sympathetic to Weissman’s first serial killer stories, which take readers so far into the perpetrator’s mind that evil becomes uncomfortably banal, and not, as with Ellis, monstrously ironic.

Writing violence

Weissman has matured with regard to the style and content of his prose. Writing sentences that seem to be more syntactically complicated, lush even, with more adjectives and clauses, Weissman seems to have found a literary voice, while also achieving what his work was looking for: Sublimity in abnormality, an immersion in violence that leads beyond “dark humor” into the violent egotism of a book like Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.  

Consider, for instance, “Morality Play (Six Hours in Length)” from Headless, “an old-fashioned fable of the unendurable man known only as (raises his arm) … who wakes up one morning sick to his stomach.”  Not unlike the protagonist of Albert Camus’ The Stranger, “this unendurable man” goes on to commit casual violence:

He shoots his daughter and son, strangles his wife, and heaves their newborn infant against the wall; clutter, he screams, every person takes up so much room … the world is passive, he says as smoke rises all around him, I am the active one, the spring rain of contempt, a swift morose icon, my gift is misguided love, I’m the only person who’s truly supposed to be here.

The prose’s lyricism gives the story’s violence an entirely different meaning. If “Flesh is for Hacking” is, as its critics accuse, only a hair’s breadth from being pornography, and if “Dear Dead Person” is a darkly humorous psychological cartoon, “Morality Play” longs to be like a grandly violent Renaissance painting — “The Rape of Cassandra” set in the modern living room.

At a few moments in Headless, Weissman becomes unexpectedly clever.  In subject matter, “Of Two Minds” is familiar territory: The tale of a boy who exacts his revenge on his mother’s bullying friend. But here Weissman plays a game with the point-of-view, alternating at every sentence between the first and third person, until the difference between inhabiting a violent mind and watching it is negligible:

Even at the collection’s smartest moments, the violence grows tedious, because Weissman seems so intent on exploring it at the cost of other themes.

There are strange lacunae in Weissman’s style, however.  

In “Marnie” Weissman adopts a more conventional voice to relate the story of a friend’s accidental death on a ski slope — a woman for whom the narrator had secretly pined. Here Weissman seems less concerned with displaying a less perverse vision. After so much blood and guts, Weissman’s readers may be shocked by the narrator’s vulnerability when he describes the paramedics who tear into his friend’s clothes in order to save her life. “They needed to get to her heart. Didn’t we all?”

With Weissman teetering on regarding the human heart as something more than a horror movie prop here, one can’t help but wonder what it is that ties ”Marnie” to the other stories in Headless. Written to honor a friend who died in a skiing accident that Weissman witnessed, “Marnie” is what Weissman terms “my kind of Vietnam,” a terrain for the author to struggle with the excruciating experience of witnessing death for the first time. If “Marnie” seems out of place in a book full of masculine sadism, it is only a testament to Weissman’s quest to push readers “in a different direction,” to challenge their sensibilities, and keep them reading.

Stomaching Weissman’s violence in a post-9/11 world

In light of the allusions to war and terrorism predominating the media today, those looking to do a little leisure reading might prefer something a little lighter and fluffier than Headless. Many readers may even contemplate putting Weissman’s book down before making it to the final page. But while the simultaneously ironic and banal tenor of Headless, like most of Weissman’s work, can be difficult to stomach, this discomfort is reason enough to continue reading — both the pages of Headless and the cultural and political milieu of Weissman’s seemingly fictional world and the stranger-than-fiction reality of post-9/11 America.

That is, like Michael Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine,  Headless provides a fascinating domestic parallel to the destruction America has become entangled in overseas since 9/11. While the body count in Iraq and Afghanistan increases daily, the media avoids presenting the more graphic evidence of the conflict. An outcry ensued after the recent beheading of 26-year-old businessman Nick Berg in Iraq was posted on Salon.com, yet nightly news stories of murder-suicides and serial killers continue to titillate audiences without evoking the same indignation. Domestic violence in America is necessarily upstaged by news involving troops overseas, and yet graphic depiction of battles and their aftermath is censored.  

Though it does not depict violence America realistically, Weissman’s work provides an interesting snapshot of the frightened, aggressive, and sometimes callous mental atmosphere that has developed since 9/11 and redefined the domestic landscape. That is reason enough to seek refuge in Headless rather than our usual comfort zones, where violence, for many of us, seems rather distant — at least until it strikes a little too close to home.

STORY INDEX

MARKETPLACE >

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0679735771

Dear Dead Person: Short Fiction by Benjamin Weissman
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=1852423307

Headless by Benjamin Weissman
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=1888451491

Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0395925037

The Stranger by Albert Camus
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0679720200

Commentary >

“Jumps of Imagination” by Juliet Waters
URL: http://www.montrealmirror.com/ARCHIVES/2004/021904/books.html

Interviews >

Interview with Benjamin Weissman by Raul Deznermio
URL: http://www.akashicbooks.com/benwintv.htm

Justin Clark’s interview with Benjamin Weissman
URL: content/view/479/39

“

Justin Clark