I am standing on stage pointing to a picture of Richard Nixon shaking hands with Chairman Mao. I point to the man on the left, and ask my students what they think of him. A good guy. Then I point to Richard Nixon on the right. They also think he was a good guy. I chose the slide because we are doing a class on culture and the person writing the text talks about how her students reacted negatively to the the way Chairman Mao was portrayed in a movie about Richard Nixon. In the US there would be a variety of perspectives on these two world leaders: Conservatives would say good things about Nixon and bad things about Mao, Liberals would probably see them both as power-hungry, and there are still some leftists who might say good things about Mao and bad things about Nixon. Most of my students are fairly apolitical, and I have met people in China who voice grudges against Mao for family reasons. And this is not a secret, discussion of this is kept out of public forums, but no one seems to worry that their attitudes will contaminate the greater number of families who remember Mao positively. Nonetheless I think it is significant that among politicized people in the US, few would take the attitude of my students, generally favorably disposed to global leaders from both countries. It reminds me that one of the hangups of the left, the need to renounce American power, is not necessarily a big deal to all foreigners. When some one like Sharon Stone starts talking about the bad karma foreign governments have accumulated the Chinese may question whether it is the place of a blonde in California to second-guess Chinese decision-making. But I think people like my students are only interested in confronting Americans to avoid the pot calling the kettle black, and object to the Chinese government being held accountable to a standard no other government has demonstrated it is possible to achieve. I'm not sure my students would accept criticism of Chairman Mao and his successors just because it comes from some one who spews equal opportunity criticism against Nixon or other Western leaders. I actually had one student, an adult, who chose the name Nixon, as his English name, in tribute to the man who opened a door between the United States and what at the time was the second-most powerful nation ruled by the Communist Party. People are aware of Watergate, but the way it transformed Western attitudes toward the American government, and governments in general, is something most Chinese have been insulated from.
Later during a break between periods, one of my students commandeers the projector to show a video from American idol. It is interesting to me to observe that ideas from Hollywood and Madison Avenue about entertainment have penetrated China so thoroughly, while ideas from Washington about governance have not. Chinese movies are different from Western ones, in terms of the portrayal of sexuality, deference to authority, and familial relationships. Chinese pop music also tends to shy away from the exuberance of Rock and Roll, and sounds more like the 80s pop music I grew with. But it is interesting to see how at least college students show so much interest in imitating American pop culture, while showing much less interest in imitating American elections. People are interested in Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton just as they are in people who rose to the top in fields of sports and music—but they show less interest in importing the political game they play, than basketball and music videos.
My family were liberals in a very conservative town. I remember that in Middle School once we had a mock election in which only six or so of 300 people voted for Walter Mondale over Ronald Reagan. I was one of those six. In High School, I learned that the best way to get along with my classmates involved not discussing politics much.
When I got to college I was in a much more politically liberal environment—however I ended up with a conservative roommate. Every so often I would try to tell him about some horrible thing Reagan or Bush had done, and was honestly amazed when he refused to act ashamed. I would shout some sort of consciousness-raising slogan about “How can you think that...” and would refuse to give an inch. Now that I have been on the receiving end of that sort of easy sloganeering, I realize that communication with some one who assumes they understand what's inside your head better than you do isn't really possible. When some one assumes they know both what you are thinking and what you should think it has ceased to be a relationship between human beings and my roommate's response is the only way I've ever figured out to handle someone exhibiting the attitude I did in those moments. No one's opinions can be summed up in a single sentence, and anyone who thinks that the type of slogans you shout at political rallies contribute anything to personal relationships with people who go to other sorts of rallies is not some one it is not worthwhile to engage with. At those moments, I wasn't treating my roommate as a fellow human being, but more the way a dog barks at some one who has stepped over the line. And what really matters in a situation like that, isn't the content of what comes out of the mouth, it is whether the dog is chained up. And looking back now, I can see that, like most American leftists, I was on a leash, and it wasn't Reagan supporters like my roommate who were holding the other end.
My parents taught me a certain set of things to be ashamed of. They certainly hadn't all stuck, but in the political arena, one of the implications of those values was that Reagan was wrong. My roommates' parents had not taught him to be ashamed of Ronald Reagan. They had taught him manners: like most conservatives I met in college he was far more polite and considerate in personal interactions than I was. His parents had not inculcated the same level of self-doubt and attendant neuroses. Avoiding war, or reaching the fabled point where bombers are financed with bake sales, was not a goal he saw himself as beholden to—during the first Gulf War he helped organize students at our University to make a public display of support for our servicemen and women. I was stuck in a series of arguments with people on both sides and unable to figure out what I actually believed was the right policy either for myself or for the government. I remember going to an antiwar rally and being frustrated by the messages I heard, most of which seemed to be preaching to the choir rather than the sort of outreach to people like my roommate or the people in my hometown which would be necessary to actually stop the war. I thought it would be good to stop Saddam but wasn't sure a war was the way to do it, and I thought it would be good to stop the war, but I wasn't sure shouting “No blood for oil” was the way to do that. And if I was second-guessing the president, it didn't seem too big a step to second-guess the people organizing a political rally. I knew anything I did would be basically symbolic, and I wasn't particularly satisfied with the type of symbolism I saw my side displaying. I understood the purpose of chants, but after they died down, I stood there, listening to the people directing the meeting and thinking “We're never going to stop it this way.” There is a glass ceiling to how far up the pyramid of decision-making certain ideas will rise, even when it is men voicing them.
In addition to political values, I also picked up certain lifestyle and environmental values. In the 1990s in Boston, I saw myself as a bicyclist and public transit user standing against the plague of cars. Once I was talking with an older man, a member of a generation when it was perfectly reasonable to support both public transportation and Ronald Reagan. Riding bicycles in Greater Boston you sometimes get harassed. People in vans pull up and yell insulting things, I had a fast food coke cup thrown at me while bicycling in subzero weather. It is also true that bicyclists, including me, often flagrantly disregard traffic laws—more regularly than we get harassed. The older man had a business counting cars so that engineers and planners like I was at that point in my life could figure out how to redesign traffic intersections. He and his wife rented me a small room in a Roxbury triple decker which other than acquiring his and hers Macintosh computers hadn't changed much since the 1940s. Over dinner he once expressed the feelings which seeing my vehicle in the downstairs entrance aroused.
“You cannot watch an intersection for fifteen minutes in Boston without seeing a cyclist violate the law in a way which would get them immediately arrested in Amsterdam. They are arrogating the privilege of using a vehicle without the sense of responsibility toward others on the road which should come with it. I would like to use a bicycle here the way I do in Europe, but I cannot bring myself to identify with them. Your people need to learn lessons about responsibility from motorcycle riders. It is not a prejudice—it is a postjudice.”
My immediate reaction was to blurt out something about the guys in the vans—but I was living in his house, and I do not remember whether I bit my tongue, or began to speak and was cut off. He was my elder, a Boston native, and some one who lived his life without owning a car. His response forced me to consider that whether one is harassed and whether one should flaunt the law are separable issues. While living under his roof I actually did engage in acts of civil disobedience, organized by elder cyclists, and coordinated with Boston police officers. But that meant something different than speeding by cars who obeyed traffic laws while congratulating myself on not causing air pollution. I also recognize that his hostility towards Boston cyclists, like a hostility towards Boston drivers, was a hostility to an attitude, not to the mode of transportation as such. He wasn't saying it was wrong to identify with a lifestyle alternative, just pointing me to a European model rather than the American one—or motorcyclists, who, unlike bicycle users, often vote Republican. The phrase: “It is not a prejudice—it is a postjudice” stays with me. Living with both of these Reagan supporters forced me to recognize that some of my own attitude towards conservatives—not the ones my parents had taught me, but the ones I picked up from my peers--were prejudices. That despite the slogans we shouted back and forth at each other, there was thought, consideration, and lived experience involved in their attitudes. I was often more ignorant of their beliefs and arguments than they were about mine.
Both the younger man and the older man had working class parents. I remember talking with another student from California about why people like this supported Ronald Reagan. She had worked a year on the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign and assured me there was no need to trouble my pudgy liberal head about that. “You see, that's just false consciousness.” It is true that children of the working class who attend Harvard may not be completely representative of broader working class attitudes, but it seems odd to believe that some one else who attends Harvard and only visits those neighborhoods for political rallies understands those attitudes better. The attitudes people exhibit, and the types of decisions you see them make are different if you watch them over seventeen years solving problems related to work and family, than if you are trying to solve a different set of problems involved in creating political pressure over the course of a single year for a preacher no one expects to exercise executive power. The long-term impact of that campaign was to change certain primary rules so that the 2008 Democratic nominee was some one of African blood rather than the representative of the Clinton machine. Another time she talked about how awful it was that people had to pay their way through college doing manual labor. My roommate cleaned bathrooms in the dorms and I cleaned dirty plates in the dining hall, but she never inquired what either of us thought about the jobs, or what we thought about her implicit assumption that there could be a society in which no one had to do dirty work. The ideas she had picked up allowed her to claim the role of “voice of the oppressed” without bothering to listen to the people she claimed to be opening space for. When college-educated folks talk condescendingly about the false consciousness of working class people with conservative values, I tend to wonder if a tool of Marxist analysis designed to fight against bourgeois hegemony has instead ended up buttressing the traditional assumptions of folks with fancy resumes about the ignorance of the working class. The blue-bood of the aristocracy is often guilty of voicing proprietary attitudes about how the working class should behave, but I sense a different sort of proprietary attitude when a different sort of blue talks about how the working class should think.
Here in China, I teach about the Red State/Blue State divide our two-party system has created back home, and I think about its parallels in other countries, Likudniks in Israel, Ahmedinijad in Iran. In any multi-party democracy there are going to be some people who feel comfortable being identified with devil-may-care rhetoric, and some people who feel that more responsible language is the order of the day. These are simply different aspects of the human personality, and without an external threat, people in a representative democracy will gravitate around different poles. In a system with two political parties there are going to be highly skilled political operatives looking to corral as many people as possible into their respective herds by all sorts of means. This centrifugal force means that the search for a unitary, “authentic” political voice, actually detracts from understanding the polyphonic nature of political thought in a Republic with multiple political parties. Using wedges to splinter the general will is the point of political parties. So that the true search is not for what attitude everyone in the Republic should have, but for what stance children of families like your own should have. And, as in the West Bank and Northern Ireland, part of that struggle is for the fruitfulness which will produce those who will take their stands in the next generation. When I lived in Guatemala, I accepted the idea that politics were less advanced because there were so many political parties, and many came into being around a single politician. But I also consider that the shorter lifespan also reduces animosity a generation later. It may be a good thing that no one in Guatemala will grow up as I did, with a familial obligation to feel hostility to the successors of Nixon and Reagan thirty years after the fact.
If Francis Fukuyama was right that liberal democracy was the end of History—not in terms of events for journalists to write about but in terms of a need for novel thinking on the part of political scientists, then it seems likely that deadlocks like Bush v Gore in 2000, and similar occurrences in Mexico in 2006, Germany 2003, and Minnesota 2008 are the end of liberal democracy. The rise of men like Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee suggests that the next step may be a politician who can count on a bloc less by dint of party affiliation and more by ethnic or religious ties, that perhaps that political history will now head backwards towards the politics of the eighteenth century. It is also interesting to think about what these two men represent. Both evangelicals and left-progressives have a tendency to moral superiority and divisive rhetoric, being the most embarrassing part of their respective party coalitions. The holier-than-thou attitude derives in part from their roots, in the one case in ideas from Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell and the white evangelical church, in the other case from Dr King, Jesse Jackson and the black evangelical church. Huckabee and Obama show a possibility of retaining a continuity with the best of their respective traditions with slightly less moral smugness.
My parents taught me that Reagan was wrong—and I followed up by reading books and listening to songs written by people who took the same view to Reagan and Thatcher. For me phrases like the Dole and police brutality were words rather than personal experience, but listening to Punk and Oi music I internalized the hostility toward the government, police, and Tories which resounds in those words: “The Tory party still stands for, mass unemployment and poverty, a them and us society.”
I have met several foreign teachers from the UK: more than a decade younger than me and too young to remember the eighties. Their parents taught them to remember what Thatcher did to their people: to the working class, to the North of England, to Catholics in Northern Ireland. As my friend from Northern Ireland put it, it wasn't that Thatcher was evil, it was that she was looking out for a different group of families. Because of these bases of tribal solidarity, a generation later they view Thatcher with stronger negatives than most US citizens in view Ronald Reagan. Air Traffic Controllers are not mineworkers, what James Watt did to federal lands is different from English industry, and although Central America was much bloodier than Northern Ireland, it does not exercise the same influence over the minds of people in the fifty states. The conflict there did not get the press you achieve with tube bombings and hunger strikes in the Maze. We have also only been interfering in Central America for a century and a half, far less history than the Brits have in Ireland. Thatcher was able to hold a line, both against the IRA, and against her political opponents in her own nation, and many of the boundaries she fought to preserve on the island endured even after she and her party fell from power. I think about this reading about the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo in Cuba, who drank the same cup as Bobby Sands.
Teaching English Composition and British History I have come to reconsider Thatcher. I identified with people who attributed their suffering to her. But looking back at the alternatives, I have come to realize that people who looked at her the way my roommate looked at Reagan also had some grounds for their perspective.
The Queen of France, Marie Antoinette famously said “Let them eat cake.” It is generally understood that this was not meant as cruelly as it sounds. She lived in a world in which cake was the ever-present alternative to bread—that others might face a more limited set of options was something she never considered. It was an unrealized assumption, which we all make. Like the ones I made when consciousness raising prompted me to confront my roommate with the prejudices I projected into his head.
A similar phrase for Margaret Thatcher is “There is no such thing as society.” And I think it is instructive to compare the significance of these two phrases in both the short and the long term.
Even before political parties there were always people advocating for the needs of the dispossessed. There are also people enforcing the boundaries of the established order, who must ration things and say “no.” Within this class based functional analysis the words of Thatcher, and of Marie Antoinette have the same significance, a justification for saying no to the demands of the representatives of the disenfranchised.
But as arguments and contributions to the long-term political dialog, these words mean something different. I studied Emile Durkheim and and I know very well that there is such a thing a society—rates of suicide, crime and teen pregnancy are stable enough that it makes sense to talk about society in much the same way that it makes sense to speak about a herd of sheep or a body of water, and the recurrent patterns one notices with long-term observation. There are laws of human society which get enforced by statistically consistent population-wide behavior regardless of the laws police officers are told to enforce.
On the other hand, it it also true that the word “society” or “I blame society” was being used in a very irresponsible way in the 1980s. If an individual cannot be held responsible for his actions, it makes even less sense to hold society responsible—society cannot be given a talking to, slapped on the wrist, or sentenced to jail. There is no such accountable moral actor as society. Moreover, the very statistics which show that society is a stable quantity also show that it cannot be easily reshaped by legal fiat—changes in society are gradual and involve changes in the individuals who make it up. There is such a thing as social science, but it has not developed the level of predictive power of chemistry or physics. Thatcher had a degree in Chemistry and worked on methods for preserving ice cream. Like anyone doing practical research, she had to test and discard several mistaken ideas about the nature of ice cream, and she may have recognized that people talking about blaming society as a whole for things they did not feel comfortable blaming the individuals composing it did not understand the properties of the mixture well enough to successfully preserve it. When you describe your own culture as monolithic, external, and wholly malevolent you are not contributing to the sort of dialog necessary to successfully transform it.
Statements about society in the 1980s were often employed for political ends rather than for analytical coherence. Like “spontaneous generation” and other theories prevalent in physical science circles in the nineteenth century, it was a type of explanation, but one which actually made people less likely to find an answer. Because “society” was an incoherent concept, it was in a certain sense like the cake which Marie Antoinette thought working class families could eat, a logically reasonable extrapolation based on limited experience, but demonstrably unwarranted to people whose experience was wider. Both Thatcher and her opponents can be usefully compared to Marie Antoinette: Thatcher from a standpoint of class and power relationships and her opponents in terms of logic and analysis. Which conclusion you view as objective depends on which analytic framework you prioritize. Marie Antoinette said no in a way which attempted to show that other peoples' emotions were unreasonable. Thatcher said no by holding their arguments unreasonable without having to judge the validity of their emotions. Unlike the queen of France, the grocer's daughter from Lincolnshire managed to say no without making unwarranted assumptions about the options in other peoples' lives. It was both an argument and a function of where she was embedded in the political system. For Margaret Thatcher to cut off the representatives of the working class because she was a Tory Prime Minister also had a different significance than a Jesse Jackson volunteer cutting off my comments about what it was like to pay my way through college serving coffee because I was colonized by false consciousness.
The Tories are traditionally the party of the aristocracy and the police in their role as protectors of private property. Both groups tend to acquire experience with how large groups of people function over long periods of time—who can often observe that at the level of implementation, many of the innovative solutions proposed by social scientists are not quite as novel as they think. A social scientist or someone who works in an office can dismiss certain non-linear observations as unscientific, but a police officer or military commander whose life is on the line has to use a different analytic framework. Bad things would have happened to individual members of the working class no matter which party was in power and Thatcher used her power to ensure that these bad things would be distributed according to established patterns, so that the expertise of her allies would remain valid. The things you shout after consciousness-raising involve dehumanizing people with the goal of destabilizing the system, police dehumanize people to maintain order and stability.
Liberalism in the 1980s was supposed to help us find alternative ways of thinking. Among these I think are getting beyond “Us versus them” “Might makes right” and avoiding conflict by looking at things from the other person's point of view. I am beginning to think that these goals are actually impossible to achieve. The recent dust up between Gordon Brown and Gillian Duffy is phrased as an issue of bias, but in a certain sense it is really an encounter between two different ways of phrasing “us versus them.” We the native Britons as distinguished from dirty Eastern Europeans, or We the enlightened liberals against small-minded bigots. Each attitude can be expressed in both a reasonable and a morally superior manner, but what the encounter illustrates is that getting beyond us versus them, may not actually be possible, certainly in an adversarial party political system. The one thing which can be hoped for is that political leaders and the people they claim to speak for have a somewhat compatible vision of what the relevant version of us-versus-them is.
I endorse the heritage of King and the Kennedys, but one thing I consider is that these liberal platitudes sound somewhat out of place in their mouths. Kennedy got elected partly because of his allegations that the Eisenhower administration was too soft on communism, and there was a missile gap. There are also some things about his defeat of Richard Nixon in the 1960 election in Chicago which, if investigated, could have been blown into a Watergate. Martin Luther King differed from Gandhi in believing that military conflict with Hitler could be justified. King struggled to articulate a point of view for his people, but he knew very well that he could not expect everyone to see it that way. His most famous speech talked about the promises of the Declaration of Independence not as a fraud, but as a default, a promissory note marked insufficient funds.
Every so often every English teacher thinks about George Orwell. I think about his idea of thoughtcrime, the way people react to a certain statement as unreasonable or unwarranted. I continue to believe in the value of the liberal idealism of Kennedys and King, and in the need to maintain alternatives to the automobile. But pundits on both sides of the political divide in the US end up dismissing certain ideas of their opponents in a way that sounds like “thoughtcrime!” The sky has never fallen, but you do notice roof tiles falling to the ground with a resounding crash. But despite my feelings about people from the liberal tradition who fell to assassins bullets, I find the ideas of most of those claiming their legacy less persuasive than I find many conservative ideas. If you believe in CIA conspiracies behind those assasinations, that shows that this one may have achieved its objectives. The reasons conservatives give for rejecting certain ideas seem more solid, even when my preferred response is to rehabilitate liberalism rather than go the neo-Con route. Having worked with Creationists, I am not even sure that the limitations on discourse imposed by Creationism will prove as pernicious an influence on free inquiry as political correctness has in the parts of the academy where it holds sway. Railroads, steamships, and the telegraph were all invented before the Origin of Species was written—you can create intelligent designs for technological progress without a belief in evolution. One hundred years ago, Peter Kropotkin already pointed out that despite Darwin's own feelings, his book was deployed to buttress a bulldozer's perspective of progress, ruthless competition and exclusivity which it was worth seeking an alternative to. That my true task, as it was when I went to Central America, was to seek alternatives to particular policies and alliances of Reagan and Thatcher, without treating the words they said as an abomination. General Lee could fight George McClellan without thinking Lincoln (another president from Illinois) was a fool or a tyrant. In a tribal worldview you can see some virtues in even your deadliest opponents. In the wake of consciousness-raising, another issue is that in some cases you demonstrate your solidarity with the values of the working class more by the criticisms you refrain from making than by the criticisms you make. And sitting in the resurgent China left behind by the Great Helmsman, I wonder if our nation will be stronger if we also consider that the Great Communicator was seventy percent right.
Thatcher said that there is no such thing as society, “there are individual men and women and there are families.” It is quite probable that every country will produce some leaders whose job it is to say “no” to the the representatives of the working class. Undoubtedly they will do so with reference to how other people ought to behave. And it is better if those who do so, do so by asking people to think about families than if they do so by talking about cake and prejudice.
Tuesday 27 July 2010
Spring Break 2010
In 1999 I came to China on a family trip. I remember that much of the trip seemed to be oriented around sales—folk arts souvenirs, crafts, silk weavings, tea. We would go to a temple or museum, and then be directed to a gift shop. Then we would go to a fancy restaurant and be treated to local delicacies. It seemed that the tourism industry more than anything was designed to get wealthy professionals working in the vibrant American economy to pump money into places where the artistic traditions of the Middle Kingdom are preserved.
I've been teaching in China for three years, based around the Pearl River Delta. I've traveled to many places within about four hours: Zhaoqing where the first Jesuit mission in China was set up, Kai Ping with a local tradition of tall tower buildings found nowhere else in China, the supermodern superdense city of Hong Kong, and the village my grandfather emigrated from a century ago—living in a small, brick one-storey shed without electricity or running water, forty feet away from the four story dwelling filled with flat screen televisions, where my cousin now lives. This year, for the first time, I went to other provinces. In Fujian province, just northeast of Guangdong I ended up on another Chinese-run tour. Once again, after the museum and puppet performances, we were ushered to fancy restaurants, specialty tea shops, local handicrafts. The Chinese economy has surpassed the American one in terms of vibrancy, but the techniques pioneered with foreign tourists seem to work equally well with native-born tourists. The circulation of currency which is the lifeblood of these places continues in the same manner—even now that transfusions from the US economy are no longer necessary.
Walking around urban China I am struck by how similar it seems to America—more walkable, more urban, more bicycles. Boys follow the NBA and play basketball around the campus. Looking out bus windows as we travel the highways I notice many of the same things: rest stops, roadside attractions, which sprang up along American Highways. Basically, China seems to be living out the American Dream, from the time when your future dream was a shopping spree. I remember hearing once about a plan by the Russian communists to build a set of small towns where people would learn to think and act like people in small town America, so that the Bolsheviks could infiltrate and take over the US—I think John Travolta starred in a movie about this. Here in China it seems that not just one town, but almost the entire country, has been made part of such a project. The major difference is that America was and continues to be riven by a culture war that keeps our two main political parties in business, but because it chose the more efficient system of having only one corrupt political party, Chinese political thought has not been cloven in the same way.
Not long ago I stayed at a youth hostel. It is a sort of funky place, I stay in a room where the décor , bed, and even the door and lock had been designed in a style local to the area. At breakfast I chat with people from Europe and Australia, some using wireless Internet, then I begin to wander around. Soon I am walking a narrow footpath with old tin-roof buildings on either side. No automobiles ever venture here, but I saw lots of chickens in wooden baskets. The path is several hundred feet above a body of water and as I look down I think of how my journey in space resembles a journey back in time. This time the youth hostel was in Chongqing city and the water is the Yangtze River, but those sentences could almost equally well describe visits to Guatemala and Lake Atitlan. The sentence could have been written a century ago, and, I hope will still be possible to write centuries hence. Hostel-related tourism has a different rhythm than professional bus tours, but there is also a familiar global style in the design of the flyers and the sights they advertise. These types of funky businesses are also significant because in order to survive, they have to embrace both the multi-cultural values associated with US liberals, and goal-oriented values associated with US conservatives.
I like China. I like the people I meet at all socioeconomic levels, from the businessmen to the beggars, the people running fancy restaurants, or the people selling fried tofu from the back of a bicycle. On my trip I bought some 70s era socialist realism magazines full of pictures of smiling peasants striding confidently toward the future. I compare it to the pictures in my head before I came to China: people barred from demonstrating, jailed or beaten for making political statements. I think about Chiapas and Guatemala and the world I saw with my own eyes and the bloody pictures in the newspapers. And I think it's simplistic to assume that either set of pictures: the smiling peasants or the bloody peasants, represents the “true” story—both are true for the individuals involved. Every system for maintaining order facilitates one group of people achieving their dreams and stands in the way of other people doing so. To maintain order a government must ensure that both those whose dreams are fulfilled and those whose dreams are thwarted share some unifying symbols.
In the West the standard conflict is between a worldview advocating elections and capitalism and a worldview advocating elections without capitalism. Here in China the solution seems to be capitalism without elections. Of course, the American system of elections and lobbying tends to lead to government by businessmen and lawyers skilled in working with people, whereas the Chinese system leads to government by engineers skilled in working with objects. Capitalists have power within the sphere of business, and as a class, they are no longer officially enemies of the people. But though they can now be members of the Communist Party, the lack of lobbying means that the things which make things easier for businessmen rather than for all the classes who want enterprises to be successful, probably have less influence within the sphere of government than they do in the West. Businesses have to deal with a floor saying they must employ a minimum number of people, not that they have to pay them a minimum wage. But after both working in engineering and thinking about governmental policy, I feel it is important to point out that it is not clear that any government has ever had the choice of imposing a “0-harm alternative” in which no citizens have to suffer. Generally the choice is between policies with the harms distributed in different places, to different groups of people. Everyone in government recognizes that certain orders will be obeyed and others will not be—and in a nation of millions of people, an order that there be only smiling peasants and never bloody peasants is the type which probably can not be obeyed. King Cnut in England, tired of people talking about how much power he had, once commanded the waves to cease. The waves continued to break against the shore. It is of course possible to stop the pounding of the surf—by building a breakwater. But this is a problem for engineers with an understanding of materials science and fluid mechanics, it takes time and false starts to come up with a workable solution, and certain things about the sea will never be changed. Whatever the motives or emotions of the man in charge, the real problem is one of design.
When I worked on an organic farm one thing which struck me was how many of the people who ended up working there had been vegetarians at one point in their lives. We woke up to the fact that eating was a moral act, and refraining from taking life, for us as for the Siddharta Buddha, was a way to organize our lives to change how our needs as living beings impacted the rest of Creation. If you make the moral commitment to vegetarianism you also become aware of all sorts of patterns and connections—there are questions you have to ask, and situations in which your initial moral choice forces you to behave differently than if you had not made it. At one point in my moral journey, a Muslim friend pointed out that if it were not for the instant of violence the human race uses when they kill and eat beef, lamb, and chicken, millions of animals would have no lives at all. This is the argument Peter Singer derides as “Species Fascism” but it stuck with me. And that insight is part of why I ended up on the organic farm, trying to raise animals which had healthy lives and minimally traumatizing deaths. In mathematics: multiplication, division, subtraction, addition, problems have only one correct answer. But once Al gebra appears, the interaction of variables means that for some problems, more than one answer can be true. And that is how I feel about meat-eating: there is an integrity to both the stance of Buddhist non-involvement that of the Halal butcher's directed involvement. But while I recognize the value of the monastic vision in which portions of society adopt Buddhist principles to design lives free of violence, I am wary of a vision of social change which is achievable only if the entire human race adopts Buddhist precepts.
Shortly I will be teaching a class on American History, including a discussion of the Civil Rights struggle against Jim Crow in the Southern States. I think about this issue a lot, both because of my uncompensated work with an organization touting Human Rights as a response to events in the 1980s, and my current position in the People's Republic of China, which has declared that Human Rights are a tool of Western Imperialism. When Dr King appealed to people from places like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania to come South to witness and accompany the Colored peoples' struggle for self-determination, he spoke as the representative of an oppressed race—some one embedded in a particular struggle, a multi-generational struggle which neither he nor his children could by conscious choice escape. Under Jim Crow, a very high percentage of human beings in Dixie were marked from birth with second class status in all areas of their lives. Emmet Till was hung from a tree for just whistling at a white woman. Large numbers of people were willing to risk physical beatings just to sit at lunch counters. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, and people mustered locally available resources to provide alternative transportation. I contrast all this with a recent report I read by Human Rights lawyers in China complaining about how dependent their movement is on outside financing. From everything I have seen, Chinese citizens face far fewer limitations than Negroes during Jim Crow. Small groups face limitations, but unlike the color of ones skin, being a member of the Falun Gong or a House Church is a chosen identity, and limits enforced against such people impact the lives of far fewer citizens than suffered under Jim Crow. And it is legitimate for governments to view foreign belief systems as a threat to stability—many people believe that the spread of Christianity contributed to the downfall of the Roman Empire, or Eastern blocs dissidents to the downfall of the much shorter-lived Soviet Empire. And it was an outside perspective, such as the Northerners who gave their lives in Philadelphia Mississippi, and Dr King's exposure to ideas from India which brought down Jim Crow in Dixie. This is why Imperial China conducted occasional campaigns against Buddhism (which originated in India), and why Chiang Kai Shek was often more concerned with fighting the Communist Party than with fighting the Japanese bandit nation. Of course Both Chiang and Mao incorporated Western beliefs into their leadership philosophies, so it may be easier for the Middle Kingdom to recapture its pre-Western traditions given that neither great military leader of the twentieth century was forced to accept Unconditional Surrender. Some belief systems muster enough local resources to survive government persecution, like the followers of the Cross in Rome and the followers of the Hammer and Sickle in the Middle Kingdom--others wither and die.
During the Cold War, Human Rights provided a way of evaluating the geopolitical situation distinct from the power politics of Washington or Moscow. At that juncture it provided a Third Way. The basis for this third way was the standpoint derived from the secular Enlightenment, and it provided a framework of values distinct from the Realpolitik of Henry Kissinger. Concern for Human Rights led Jimmy Carter of the State of Georgia to withdraw support from the Shah in Iran, and from Somoza in Nicaragua. (He also, incidentally, removed a law barring a man named Jefferson Davis from holding future political office). Human rights provided a rallying point against the Apartheid regime in South Africa. All of these governments in non-European countries ended up falling to local opposition figures. Human rights are a development of the progressive movement which led to food safety laws and health inspection. The reason people listen to a health inspector is because he has the power to have some one's license revoked, and have the restaurant shut down—which is analogous to what happened in these three cases during a period of dominance by Washington DC.
But this is not the end of the story. The government which arose after the fall of the Shah embraced values, but local ones rather than those of Human Rights. The regimes which arose were less subject to the dictates of the West. They are no longer puppets of the West, so they are less likely to worry about a visit from the health inspector. Many western progressives object to Ayatollah Khomeini's views on gender differentiation, Thabo Mbeki's views on infectious disease, and Daniel Ortega's views on legalized abortion. They also object to the Peoples Republic of China's views about the Death Penalty. The human rights community has systematized one set of principles—in line with the progressive tendency of Western European governments after the Second World War. However no one has proven that it is possible to govern a country without some actions which violate the ideas of human rights, or that aspiring to a European standard is what governments outside Europe ought to aspire to. It has not been demonstrated that a transformation other than the one from the Shah to Khomeini, de Klerk to Mbeki, or Somoza to Ortega is actually possible outside Europe. It is the nature of a triangle that the angles always add up to 180 degrees, any change you make at one place must be compensated somewhere else. It may be that there are similar rules governing what is possible within a human society. In many Maya languages, it is possible to use the same word Kej, to describe both horses and deer--and in fact all four-footed animals. The symbol resembles the way your right hand looks when held in a particular way. Some languages encourage you to notice one sort of patterns, others encourage you to notice others. In 1920 the US had twenty million horses (Kej), by the endof the second World War, the rise of automobiles and tractors meant that that numver had fallen drastically. The idea of progress dominant in the West generally involves a lack of animals with any role other than that of neutered pets. But it may be that traditions developed outside Europe and sustained in areas where functional animals are still part of peoples' daily lives retain as much knowledge about the limits of a society of homo sapiens as those held to be self-evident by the people of the automobile.
In one village I worked in in Guatemala a group of masked men called the limpieza social was going out and killing transient men on a list of undesirables, and most of the college educated Guatemalans I worked with were surprised that the village families did not express great concern about this. Both attitudes seemed to me to be products of their educational background, but I was not sure that the attitude of the people who had lived in the village their whole lives represented ignorance. And since all the men involved were the same race, it did not have the same significance from the standpoint of fighting white supremacy as the actions of the Klan. I always worried that some of the aspirations we were encouraging people in Guatemala to have were really just leading them on. It may seem an odd metaphor, but Human Rights felt more like the package bus tour designed to solicit money from professionals, than the funky low-budget hostel drawing on local traditions. At some point the focus shifted away from empowering men of color to something else. And sometimes the mutterings of the progressive white women sounded more like the people with the Klan than the people working to get rid of them. When our clients received death threats, I was never sure that what we could offer for embracing the role of victim was superior to what would happen if they just “got the hell out of Dodge.” I cared but was not empowered to act—the Police were empowered to act, but did not seem to care. When I questioned the progressive white folks about this, I was simply told “I don't see why you're even asking these questions.” The people who worked with lawyers seemed to be uncomfortable with any attitude other than unquestioning obedience—which is different than what I got when I worked at the Engineering firm. Sometimes I felt that what we were doing, was just asking people to rely on reports filed by freelance health-inspectors without any enforcement authority backing them up. In Iran we are witnessing the power of such freelance revolution to transform society--as it did over time in Dixie, but both require people who embrace a claim to legitimacy distinct from the established Authority, not ones who accept Law as the ultimate arbiter.
Meanings and alliances change with the situation. In the 1750s George Washington helped add New France to the territory of the City of London, two decades later he led a successful secession movement from that city by places like Virginia and Georgia. In the 1840s Robert E Lee and Thomas Jackson helped add parts of New Spain like Utah and California to the territory of the City of Washington DC, two decades later the attempt at secession they led was less successful. The Mexican-American War also inspired New England's Henry David Thoreau to engage in the Civil Disobedience which helped inspire Mohandas Gandhi to lead his people in successful secession from the City of London a century later. A change in orientation over the decades can also be seen in human rights. During the Cold War, the Human Rights perspective allowed Western dissidents uncomfortable identifying with standing armies to organize and work to weaken Western Imperialism. In the Cold War context, it was a coherent framework by which they could avoid being either running dogs, or useful idiots, in the dichotomy formulated by Joseph Stalin, who was born in Georgia (the one with its own alphabet). It was also an umbrella which attracted people from a variety of political perspectives and moral frameworks: people whose moral ideal is the Buddhist monk, and those whose moral ideal is the Halal butcher. But now that the Cold War is over, this meat-eater believes that criticism of non-European governments from a Human Rights Perspective reinforces the hegemony of values originating in Europe. What Human Rights meant during the Cold War is different from what it means now that, in the wake of its defeat in Afghanistan, one of the major parties to that conflict has experienced a political and economic crisis and dissolved into independent Republics based on historical divisions of language and culture. In 1989 Erich Honecker discovered that the things he had relied on for decades were no longer backing him up, and Wall Street securities traders discovered the same thing in 2008. It may be that despite their universalist aspirations, all three Great Western hopes of the Twentieth century: Moscow-style communism, Washington-style elections, and International Human Rights embody a vision which can lead people only part of the way towards liberation, perhaps because the principles they held to be self-evident, are in fact not so.
I've been teaching in China for three years, based around the Pearl River Delta. I've traveled to many places within about four hours: Zhaoqing where the first Jesuit mission in China was set up, Kai Ping with a local tradition of tall tower buildings found nowhere else in China, the supermodern superdense city of Hong Kong, and the village my grandfather emigrated from a century ago—living in a small, brick one-storey shed without electricity or running water, forty feet away from the four story dwelling filled with flat screen televisions, where my cousin now lives. This year, for the first time, I went to other provinces. In Fujian province, just northeast of Guangdong I ended up on another Chinese-run tour. Once again, after the museum and puppet performances, we were ushered to fancy restaurants, specialty tea shops, local handicrafts. The Chinese economy has surpassed the American one in terms of vibrancy, but the techniques pioneered with foreign tourists seem to work equally well with native-born tourists. The circulation of currency which is the lifeblood of these places continues in the same manner—even now that transfusions from the US economy are no longer necessary.
Walking around urban China I am struck by how similar it seems to America—more walkable, more urban, more bicycles. Boys follow the NBA and play basketball around the campus. Looking out bus windows as we travel the highways I notice many of the same things: rest stops, roadside attractions, which sprang up along American Highways. Basically, China seems to be living out the American Dream, from the time when your future dream was a shopping spree. I remember hearing once about a plan by the Russian communists to build a set of small towns where people would learn to think and act like people in small town America, so that the Bolsheviks could infiltrate and take over the US—I think John Travolta starred in a movie about this. Here in China it seems that not just one town, but almost the entire country, has been made part of such a project. The major difference is that America was and continues to be riven by a culture war that keeps our two main political parties in business, but because it chose the more efficient system of having only one corrupt political party, Chinese political thought has not been cloven in the same way.
Not long ago I stayed at a youth hostel. It is a sort of funky place, I stay in a room where the décor , bed, and even the door and lock had been designed in a style local to the area. At breakfast I chat with people from Europe and Australia, some using wireless Internet, then I begin to wander around. Soon I am walking a narrow footpath with old tin-roof buildings on either side. No automobiles ever venture here, but I saw lots of chickens in wooden baskets. The path is several hundred feet above a body of water and as I look down I think of how my journey in space resembles a journey back in time. This time the youth hostel was in Chongqing city and the water is the Yangtze River, but those sentences could almost equally well describe visits to Guatemala and Lake Atitlan. The sentence could have been written a century ago, and, I hope will still be possible to write centuries hence. Hostel-related tourism has a different rhythm than professional bus tours, but there is also a familiar global style in the design of the flyers and the sights they advertise. These types of funky businesses are also significant because in order to survive, they have to embrace both the multi-cultural values associated with US liberals, and goal-oriented values associated with US conservatives.
I like China. I like the people I meet at all socioeconomic levels, from the businessmen to the beggars, the people running fancy restaurants, or the people selling fried tofu from the back of a bicycle. On my trip I bought some 70s era socialist realism magazines full of pictures of smiling peasants striding confidently toward the future. I compare it to the pictures in my head before I came to China: people barred from demonstrating, jailed or beaten for making political statements. I think about Chiapas and Guatemala and the world I saw with my own eyes and the bloody pictures in the newspapers. And I think it's simplistic to assume that either set of pictures: the smiling peasants or the bloody peasants, represents the “true” story—both are true for the individuals involved. Every system for maintaining order facilitates one group of people achieving their dreams and stands in the way of other people doing so. To maintain order a government must ensure that both those whose dreams are fulfilled and those whose dreams are thwarted share some unifying symbols.
In the West the standard conflict is between a worldview advocating elections and capitalism and a worldview advocating elections without capitalism. Here in China the solution seems to be capitalism without elections. Of course, the American system of elections and lobbying tends to lead to government by businessmen and lawyers skilled in working with people, whereas the Chinese system leads to government by engineers skilled in working with objects. Capitalists have power within the sphere of business, and as a class, they are no longer officially enemies of the people. But though they can now be members of the Communist Party, the lack of lobbying means that the things which make things easier for businessmen rather than for all the classes who want enterprises to be successful, probably have less influence within the sphere of government than they do in the West. Businesses have to deal with a floor saying they must employ a minimum number of people, not that they have to pay them a minimum wage. But after both working in engineering and thinking about governmental policy, I feel it is important to point out that it is not clear that any government has ever had the choice of imposing a “0-harm alternative” in which no citizens have to suffer. Generally the choice is between policies with the harms distributed in different places, to different groups of people. Everyone in government recognizes that certain orders will be obeyed and others will not be—and in a nation of millions of people, an order that there be only smiling peasants and never bloody peasants is the type which probably can not be obeyed. King Cnut in England, tired of people talking about how much power he had, once commanded the waves to cease. The waves continued to break against the shore. It is of course possible to stop the pounding of the surf—by building a breakwater. But this is a problem for engineers with an understanding of materials science and fluid mechanics, it takes time and false starts to come up with a workable solution, and certain things about the sea will never be changed. Whatever the motives or emotions of the man in charge, the real problem is one of design.
When I worked on an organic farm one thing which struck me was how many of the people who ended up working there had been vegetarians at one point in their lives. We woke up to the fact that eating was a moral act, and refraining from taking life, for us as for the Siddharta Buddha, was a way to organize our lives to change how our needs as living beings impacted the rest of Creation. If you make the moral commitment to vegetarianism you also become aware of all sorts of patterns and connections—there are questions you have to ask, and situations in which your initial moral choice forces you to behave differently than if you had not made it. At one point in my moral journey, a Muslim friend pointed out that if it were not for the instant of violence the human race uses when they kill and eat beef, lamb, and chicken, millions of animals would have no lives at all. This is the argument Peter Singer derides as “Species Fascism” but it stuck with me. And that insight is part of why I ended up on the organic farm, trying to raise animals which had healthy lives and minimally traumatizing deaths. In mathematics: multiplication, division, subtraction, addition, problems have only one correct answer. But once Al gebra appears, the interaction of variables means that for some problems, more than one answer can be true. And that is how I feel about meat-eating: there is an integrity to both the stance of Buddhist non-involvement that of the Halal butcher's directed involvement. But while I recognize the value of the monastic vision in which portions of society adopt Buddhist principles to design lives free of violence, I am wary of a vision of social change which is achievable only if the entire human race adopts Buddhist precepts.
Shortly I will be teaching a class on American History, including a discussion of the Civil Rights struggle against Jim Crow in the Southern States. I think about this issue a lot, both because of my uncompensated work with an organization touting Human Rights as a response to events in the 1980s, and my current position in the People's Republic of China, which has declared that Human Rights are a tool of Western Imperialism. When Dr King appealed to people from places like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania to come South to witness and accompany the Colored peoples' struggle for self-determination, he spoke as the representative of an oppressed race—some one embedded in a particular struggle, a multi-generational struggle which neither he nor his children could by conscious choice escape. Under Jim Crow, a very high percentage of human beings in Dixie were marked from birth with second class status in all areas of their lives. Emmet Till was hung from a tree for just whistling at a white woman. Large numbers of people were willing to risk physical beatings just to sit at lunch counters. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, and people mustered locally available resources to provide alternative transportation. I contrast all this with a recent report I read by Human Rights lawyers in China complaining about how dependent their movement is on outside financing. From everything I have seen, Chinese citizens face far fewer limitations than Negroes during Jim Crow. Small groups face limitations, but unlike the color of ones skin, being a member of the Falun Gong or a House Church is a chosen identity, and limits enforced against such people impact the lives of far fewer citizens than suffered under Jim Crow. And it is legitimate for governments to view foreign belief systems as a threat to stability—many people believe that the spread of Christianity contributed to the downfall of the Roman Empire, or Eastern blocs dissidents to the downfall of the much shorter-lived Soviet Empire. And it was an outside perspective, such as the Northerners who gave their lives in Philadelphia Mississippi, and Dr King's exposure to ideas from India which brought down Jim Crow in Dixie. This is why Imperial China conducted occasional campaigns against Buddhism (which originated in India), and why Chiang Kai Shek was often more concerned with fighting the Communist Party than with fighting the Japanese bandit nation. Of course Both Chiang and Mao incorporated Western beliefs into their leadership philosophies, so it may be easier for the Middle Kingdom to recapture its pre-Western traditions given that neither great military leader of the twentieth century was forced to accept Unconditional Surrender. Some belief systems muster enough local resources to survive government persecution, like the followers of the Cross in Rome and the followers of the Hammer and Sickle in the Middle Kingdom--others wither and die.
During the Cold War, Human Rights provided a way of evaluating the geopolitical situation distinct from the power politics of Washington or Moscow. At that juncture it provided a Third Way. The basis for this third way was the standpoint derived from the secular Enlightenment, and it provided a framework of values distinct from the Realpolitik of Henry Kissinger. Concern for Human Rights led Jimmy Carter of the State of Georgia to withdraw support from the Shah in Iran, and from Somoza in Nicaragua. (He also, incidentally, removed a law barring a man named Jefferson Davis from holding future political office). Human rights provided a rallying point against the Apartheid regime in South Africa. All of these governments in non-European countries ended up falling to local opposition figures. Human rights are a development of the progressive movement which led to food safety laws and health inspection. The reason people listen to a health inspector is because he has the power to have some one's license revoked, and have the restaurant shut down—which is analogous to what happened in these three cases during a period of dominance by Washington DC.
But this is not the end of the story. The government which arose after the fall of the Shah embraced values, but local ones rather than those of Human Rights. The regimes which arose were less subject to the dictates of the West. They are no longer puppets of the West, so they are less likely to worry about a visit from the health inspector. Many western progressives object to Ayatollah Khomeini's views on gender differentiation, Thabo Mbeki's views on infectious disease, and Daniel Ortega's views on legalized abortion. They also object to the Peoples Republic of China's views about the Death Penalty. The human rights community has systematized one set of principles—in line with the progressive tendency of Western European governments after the Second World War. However no one has proven that it is possible to govern a country without some actions which violate the ideas of human rights, or that aspiring to a European standard is what governments outside Europe ought to aspire to. It has not been demonstrated that a transformation other than the one from the Shah to Khomeini, de Klerk to Mbeki, or Somoza to Ortega is actually possible outside Europe. It is the nature of a triangle that the angles always add up to 180 degrees, any change you make at one place must be compensated somewhere else. It may be that there are similar rules governing what is possible within a human society. In many Maya languages, it is possible to use the same word Kej, to describe both horses and deer--and in fact all four-footed animals. The symbol resembles the way your right hand looks when held in a particular way. Some languages encourage you to notice one sort of patterns, others encourage you to notice others. In 1920 the US had twenty million horses (Kej), by the endof the second World War, the rise of automobiles and tractors meant that that numver had fallen drastically. The idea of progress dominant in the West generally involves a lack of animals with any role other than that of neutered pets. But it may be that traditions developed outside Europe and sustained in areas where functional animals are still part of peoples' daily lives retain as much knowledge about the limits of a society of homo sapiens as those held to be self-evident by the people of the automobile.
In one village I worked in in Guatemala a group of masked men called the limpieza social was going out and killing transient men on a list of undesirables, and most of the college educated Guatemalans I worked with were surprised that the village families did not express great concern about this. Both attitudes seemed to me to be products of their educational background, but I was not sure that the attitude of the people who had lived in the village their whole lives represented ignorance. And since all the men involved were the same race, it did not have the same significance from the standpoint of fighting white supremacy as the actions of the Klan. I always worried that some of the aspirations we were encouraging people in Guatemala to have were really just leading them on. It may seem an odd metaphor, but Human Rights felt more like the package bus tour designed to solicit money from professionals, than the funky low-budget hostel drawing on local traditions. At some point the focus shifted away from empowering men of color to something else. And sometimes the mutterings of the progressive white women sounded more like the people with the Klan than the people working to get rid of them. When our clients received death threats, I was never sure that what we could offer for embracing the role of victim was superior to what would happen if they just “got the hell out of Dodge.” I cared but was not empowered to act—the Police were empowered to act, but did not seem to care. When I questioned the progressive white folks about this, I was simply told “I don't see why you're even asking these questions.” The people who worked with lawyers seemed to be uncomfortable with any attitude other than unquestioning obedience—which is different than what I got when I worked at the Engineering firm. Sometimes I felt that what we were doing, was just asking people to rely on reports filed by freelance health-inspectors without any enforcement authority backing them up. In Iran we are witnessing the power of such freelance revolution to transform society--as it did over time in Dixie, but both require people who embrace a claim to legitimacy distinct from the established Authority, not ones who accept Law as the ultimate arbiter.
Meanings and alliances change with the situation. In the 1750s George Washington helped add New France to the territory of the City of London, two decades later he led a successful secession movement from that city by places like Virginia and Georgia. In the 1840s Robert E Lee and Thomas Jackson helped add parts of New Spain like Utah and California to the territory of the City of Washington DC, two decades later the attempt at secession they led was less successful. The Mexican-American War also inspired New England's Henry David Thoreau to engage in the Civil Disobedience which helped inspire Mohandas Gandhi to lead his people in successful secession from the City of London a century later. A change in orientation over the decades can also be seen in human rights. During the Cold War, the Human Rights perspective allowed Western dissidents uncomfortable identifying with standing armies to organize and work to weaken Western Imperialism. In the Cold War context, it was a coherent framework by which they could avoid being either running dogs, or useful idiots, in the dichotomy formulated by Joseph Stalin, who was born in Georgia (the one with its own alphabet). It was also an umbrella which attracted people from a variety of political perspectives and moral frameworks: people whose moral ideal is the Buddhist monk, and those whose moral ideal is the Halal butcher. But now that the Cold War is over, this meat-eater believes that criticism of non-European governments from a Human Rights Perspective reinforces the hegemony of values originating in Europe. What Human Rights meant during the Cold War is different from what it means now that, in the wake of its defeat in Afghanistan, one of the major parties to that conflict has experienced a political and economic crisis and dissolved into independent Republics based on historical divisions of language and culture. In 1989 Erich Honecker discovered that the things he had relied on for decades were no longer backing him up, and Wall Street securities traders discovered the same thing in 2008. It may be that despite their universalist aspirations, all three Great Western hopes of the Twentieth century: Moscow-style communism, Washington-style elections, and International Human Rights embody a vision which can lead people only part of the way towards liberation, perhaps because the principles they held to be self-evident, are in fact not so.
Friday 26 March 2010
Nobody In, Nobody Out
I am sitting on a wooden bench in the eighth floor apartment of a family whose five year-old I am trying to teach English. I am watching the Chinese television's English language coverage of the Honduran election. Reporting is only ever a collection of images and soundbytes, but it is interesting to observe which images and soundbytes different cultures consider relevant. The Chinese version of the story shows a man surrounded by supporters in blue shirts accepting victory on behalf of Hondurans of all colors, and a man surrounded by supporters in red shirts conceding defeat in an election conducted by a sovereign state. Then the TV shows the green flag of Brazil and a third man speaking his version of events. The newsreader goes on to mention that multinationals such as the OAS refused to send observers or recognize what happened on November 29.
Elsewhere of course I see other versions of the events. Al Giordano reports on rallies organized by the Frente Nacional Contra el Golpe de Estado rallying outside the Brazilian Embassy. Jim DeMint of South Carolina also stands by his friends in Central America--but of course he has a different set of friends. Last time I was in Central America I talked to an American who had just been in Honduras and said that the people he had talked to didn't seem to think much of either side. Journalists often try to search for the authentic story, to give us the true voice of the people. But I have come to believe that there are often multiple simultaneously valid narratives—and which version you identify with depends—in life as at Fenway Park, on which team you were already rooting for. And a lot of what people say is really just picking apart some one with a good fastball. Most of the criticisms by human rights organizations after the coup (Government violence, suppression of dissent) were the same complaints they were making prior to the coup. And by putting a national figure in the spotlight, their actions gave dissident groups a common cause to rally around—peoples' frustration could be directed in a concrete direction. Central Americans who organize with Frentes Nacionales have had better success in the long term than those who looked to International figures for deliverance. At the beginning of the twentieth century soldiers under the command of the oligarchs killed men like Sandino, Zapata, and Farabundo Marti, but Marxists were eventually able to use them to create movements based on home-grown inspiration, as opposed to concepts like international socialism, neo-liberalism or deference to the Yankees. And at the beginning of the twenty-first century Zelaya's not dead, he's only in the Brazilian embassy.
I have just begun teaching a course on the history of English-speaking countries, and just did a unit on Ireland during the troubles. It is interesting to see what the people who designed the Chinese textbooks think is worth mentioning—did you know that under the Brehon Law which applied in Hibernia prior to the arrival of the English, a woman who had borne a child was sometimes considered a better candidate for marriage because her fertility was proven? And I talked about the Troubles. I did give it a little bit of a slant—as some one who grew up listening to the Pogues, I can't help having a different attitude about what went on in Ulster than some one who grew up listening to Skrewdriver. I'm in the green corner, not the orange one—but I tried to be fair to both the Celts in the UDA and those in the Provisional IRA. I talked about Bobby Sands—who took the weapon of the Hunger Strike even farther than Mohandas Gandhi had. Of course Sands' people had had to endure more centuries of oppression by English concepts of Law and Right than Gandhi's had. The New York Times obituary on Sands talked about how Sands' actions would only prolong the conflict. It is true, but things written in places like the NYT play a role in prolonging conflicts as well—including criticisms of rebels in Catholic countries who have demonstrated willingness to put their lives on the line for their beliefs. Researching my presentation, I also found that after Sands was called home, the Islamic Republic of Iran renamed Winston Churchill Boulevard, to Bobby Sands street. Both were elected members of the British parliament who inspired the armies of their people, but for some reason the British Embassy changed the location of their main entrance to avoid putting the Irishman's name on their letterhead.
The date November 29 stood out for another reason. Ten years ago another group of rebels faced the men with guns and disrupted a different three-letter internationalist organization. People who talk about genocide of precolumbian peoples forget that what was done to the peoples of North America by the soldiers of the city of Washington DC, is not so different from what was done to the peoples of Europe by the soldiers of Rome and her successors—the tribes disappear as independent political entities and are only remembered in place names like Seattle and Tegucigalpa. Every time you say those words, you are using the vocabulary of a non-Indo European language. In the movie recently made about the encounter you can see a generational rift between the protesters of my generation, and those like Paul Schell, who faced the men with guns during the Vietnam conflict. Supposedly one influence on the protestors who orchestrated the complete collapse of the WTO in that city was Ward Churchill, author of Pacifism as a Pathology. Talking, marching documenting, speaking truth to power is a game which the system has figured out how to keep marginalized. Sometimes it is necessary to use the chinks in the neo-liberal model to slip in a Trojan Horse which becomes impossible to ignore. Vietnam era liberals have created a huge alphabet soup of organizations in which people talk, and publish documents, and pass resolutions and criticize actions from a perspective which infringes on national sovereignty without having having a coherent alternative to put in its place. And the members of the working class on both sides of the barricades in Seattle are marginalized from the discussion. The English system of Law includes a concept called “duty to retreat.” People are required to cede space to an officer of the Law as representative of the sovereign—and this expectation makes possible a certain type of order. However, in nations without a King, much has been accomplished by those involved in civil disobedience in violation of the “duty to retreat” before officials representing a government or multinationals. What the protesters in Seattle had in common with Gandhi and King was this refusal. Refusal to obey “duty to retreat” results in violence—but it also makes the violence embodied in Law and its enforcement, impossible to ignore. It is a reminder that people who say “violence never solves anything” should not be identifying with the Sheriff of Nottingham.
It was interesting to read my president's attempt to find a coherent way forward in Afghanistan. In my unit on English speaking countries we talk about government. How the English constitution evolved over time, through centuries of trial and error—and even in the American Republic the original articles of confederation had to be replaced by a constitution written in light of experience. And the role of a place called Langley cannot be ignored. CIA training helped bring down governments in many parts of the world—since they installed different native figures, it was not exactly colonialism. But it was a distortion. And many people resented it—and resolved to change the leaders which CIA operations had left them with. It is important to remember that the Islamic Republic of Iran exists not merely because of those who marched beneath the banner of Khomeini's interpretation of Islam, but also Marxist groups such as the Fedayeen-e Khalq. The CIA represents something different from the armies which have existed from time immemorial. Their trade, like that of a soldier, is overthrowing and protecting governments. But they do not march beneath a banner, and do not wear uniforms. Unlike people in an army or a color revolution, they are not risking their lives for a piece of cloth. They are, to put it in union terminology, scabs. And the current Afghani constitution, like so many documents from the latter half of the twentieth century, would not exist, without events orchestrated by those who took money from the scabs in Langley.
In the 1848 century the Maya of the Yucatán staged an uprising against the foreigners who had oppressed them for centuries. They had their enemies on the run and were about to take the city of Mérida. They suddenly stopped—a swarm of ants informed them that it was time to plant corn. It seems unlikely that some one ordered this maneuver—some actions do not have intellectual authors, they merely reflect empowered individuals acting within established cultural priorities. War can be documented in almost all human civilizations, as violence can be seen throughout the animal kingdom. But different civilizations have different priorities. The Maya did not seem to consider it a grave sin for an animal to kill another animal—but the calendar, and cultivating Zea mays was more important than continued attacks against their Spanish overlords. Bobby Sands said his revenge would be "the laughter of our children." And all kinds of people take actions which reduce the number of laughing children in future generations--some even more significantly than armies.
Even in a season when nation does not lift up sword against nation, it can still be useful to learn war to understand the conflicts going on between the various elements present within every nation. This is for the citizens of the Islamic Republic of Iran: those who renamed Winston Churchill boulevard Bobby Sands street in memory of the Irish Republic Army's officer commanding for the Maze prison. And to those with their boots on the ground, wearing my colors.
Ay-ay-ay-ay Cantan, no llores
Porque cantando se alegrese
Cielito lindo, los corazones.
Elsewhere of course I see other versions of the events. Al Giordano reports on rallies organized by the Frente Nacional Contra el Golpe de Estado rallying outside the Brazilian Embassy. Jim DeMint of South Carolina also stands by his friends in Central America--but of course he has a different set of friends. Last time I was in Central America I talked to an American who had just been in Honduras and said that the people he had talked to didn't seem to think much of either side. Journalists often try to search for the authentic story, to give us the true voice of the people. But I have come to believe that there are often multiple simultaneously valid narratives—and which version you identify with depends—in life as at Fenway Park, on which team you were already rooting for. And a lot of what people say is really just picking apart some one with a good fastball. Most of the criticisms by human rights organizations after the coup (Government violence, suppression of dissent) were the same complaints they were making prior to the coup. And by putting a national figure in the spotlight, their actions gave dissident groups a common cause to rally around—peoples' frustration could be directed in a concrete direction. Central Americans who organize with Frentes Nacionales have had better success in the long term than those who looked to International figures for deliverance. At the beginning of the twentieth century soldiers under the command of the oligarchs killed men like Sandino, Zapata, and Farabundo Marti, but Marxists were eventually able to use them to create movements based on home-grown inspiration, as opposed to concepts like international socialism, neo-liberalism or deference to the Yankees. And at the beginning of the twenty-first century Zelaya's not dead, he's only in the Brazilian embassy.
I have just begun teaching a course on the history of English-speaking countries, and just did a unit on Ireland during the troubles. It is interesting to see what the people who designed the Chinese textbooks think is worth mentioning—did you know that under the Brehon Law which applied in Hibernia prior to the arrival of the English, a woman who had borne a child was sometimes considered a better candidate for marriage because her fertility was proven? And I talked about the Troubles. I did give it a little bit of a slant—as some one who grew up listening to the Pogues, I can't help having a different attitude about what went on in Ulster than some one who grew up listening to Skrewdriver. I'm in the green corner, not the orange one—but I tried to be fair to both the Celts in the UDA and those in the Provisional IRA. I talked about Bobby Sands—who took the weapon of the Hunger Strike even farther than Mohandas Gandhi had. Of course Sands' people had had to endure more centuries of oppression by English concepts of Law and Right than Gandhi's had. The New York Times obituary on Sands talked about how Sands' actions would only prolong the conflict. It is true, but things written in places like the NYT play a role in prolonging conflicts as well—including criticisms of rebels in Catholic countries who have demonstrated willingness to put their lives on the line for their beliefs. Researching my presentation, I also found that after Sands was called home, the Islamic Republic of Iran renamed Winston Churchill Boulevard, to Bobby Sands street. Both were elected members of the British parliament who inspired the armies of their people, but for some reason the British Embassy changed the location of their main entrance to avoid putting the Irishman's name on their letterhead.
The date November 29 stood out for another reason. Ten years ago another group of rebels faced the men with guns and disrupted a different three-letter internationalist organization. People who talk about genocide of precolumbian peoples forget that what was done to the peoples of North America by the soldiers of the city of Washington DC, is not so different from what was done to the peoples of Europe by the soldiers of Rome and her successors—the tribes disappear as independent political entities and are only remembered in place names like Seattle and Tegucigalpa. Every time you say those words, you are using the vocabulary of a non-Indo European language. In the movie recently made about the encounter you can see a generational rift between the protesters of my generation, and those like Paul Schell, who faced the men with guns during the Vietnam conflict. Supposedly one influence on the protestors who orchestrated the complete collapse of the WTO in that city was Ward Churchill, author of Pacifism as a Pathology. Talking, marching documenting, speaking truth to power is a game which the system has figured out how to keep marginalized. Sometimes it is necessary to use the chinks in the neo-liberal model to slip in a Trojan Horse which becomes impossible to ignore. Vietnam era liberals have created a huge alphabet soup of organizations in which people talk, and publish documents, and pass resolutions and criticize actions from a perspective which infringes on national sovereignty without having having a coherent alternative to put in its place. And the members of the working class on both sides of the barricades in Seattle are marginalized from the discussion. The English system of Law includes a concept called “duty to retreat.” People are required to cede space to an officer of the Law as representative of the sovereign—and this expectation makes possible a certain type of order. However, in nations without a King, much has been accomplished by those involved in civil disobedience in violation of the “duty to retreat” before officials representing a government or multinationals. What the protesters in Seattle had in common with Gandhi and King was this refusal. Refusal to obey “duty to retreat” results in violence—but it also makes the violence embodied in Law and its enforcement, impossible to ignore. It is a reminder that people who say “violence never solves anything” should not be identifying with the Sheriff of Nottingham.
It was interesting to read my president's attempt to find a coherent way forward in Afghanistan. In my unit on English speaking countries we talk about government. How the English constitution evolved over time, through centuries of trial and error—and even in the American Republic the original articles of confederation had to be replaced by a constitution written in light of experience. And the role of a place called Langley cannot be ignored. CIA training helped bring down governments in many parts of the world—since they installed different native figures, it was not exactly colonialism. But it was a distortion. And many people resented it—and resolved to change the leaders which CIA operations had left them with. It is important to remember that the Islamic Republic of Iran exists not merely because of those who marched beneath the banner of Khomeini's interpretation of Islam, but also Marxist groups such as the Fedayeen-e Khalq. The CIA represents something different from the armies which have existed from time immemorial. Their trade, like that of a soldier, is overthrowing and protecting governments. But they do not march beneath a banner, and do not wear uniforms. Unlike people in an army or a color revolution, they are not risking their lives for a piece of cloth. They are, to put it in union terminology, scabs. And the current Afghani constitution, like so many documents from the latter half of the twentieth century, would not exist, without events orchestrated by those who took money from the scabs in Langley.
In the 1848 century the Maya of the Yucatán staged an uprising against the foreigners who had oppressed them for centuries. They had their enemies on the run and were about to take the city of Mérida. They suddenly stopped—a swarm of ants informed them that it was time to plant corn. It seems unlikely that some one ordered this maneuver—some actions do not have intellectual authors, they merely reflect empowered individuals acting within established cultural priorities. War can be documented in almost all human civilizations, as violence can be seen throughout the animal kingdom. But different civilizations have different priorities. The Maya did not seem to consider it a grave sin for an animal to kill another animal—but the calendar, and cultivating Zea mays was more important than continued attacks against their Spanish overlords. Bobby Sands said his revenge would be "the laughter of our children." And all kinds of people take actions which reduce the number of laughing children in future generations--some even more significantly than armies.
Even in a season when nation does not lift up sword against nation, it can still be useful to learn war to understand the conflicts going on between the various elements present within every nation. This is for the citizens of the Islamic Republic of Iran: those who renamed Winston Churchill boulevard Bobby Sands street in memory of the Irish Republic Army's officer commanding for the Maze prison. And to those with their boots on the ground, wearing my colors.
Ay-ay-ay-ay Cantan, no llores
Porque cantando se alegrese
Cielito lindo, los corazones.
mil metros sobre el nivel del mar
I am watching a movie called the Founding of a Republic 建国大业 . It is about the origins of the modern Chinese government. A scene from the beginning of the movie stays with me. Underneath a portrait of Doctor Sun Yat-Sen, two men dressed in the same Mandarin suit descend the two halves of a double staircase. Both are disciples of the father of modern China: one is Chairman Mao, the other is Chiang Kai Shek. They are holding a joint press conference, and many people in the audience express their joy at seeing the two men who focus the hopes of so many members of their race, standing together. In subsequent scenes the two are leading opposing armies, but unlike what I was expecting, no one is portrayed as a villain. Regardless of which side they are on, the pivotal figures of the nation's history are portrayed as sober leaders bravely facing difficult decisions. It is always comprehensible why some members of the Chinese race would see these various figures as worthy of loyalty. One of Chiang's generals finally decides to join Mao's cause. Chiang's final move is blocked when the Americans refuse to allow him to refuel his jets at an airbase they control in Korea, and the son of salt merchants ends up outmaneuvered by the son of a peasant.
I will shortly be teaching a course on the history of English-speaking countries. I often incorporate songs into my teaching and was thinking of one from Phil Ochs
“You're supporting Chiang Kai Shek, while I'm supporting Mao,
and when I've got something to say, sir, I'm going to say it now.”
But after seeing that movie I think I may choose a different song. And it makes me realize in some ways that there are other parts of the song which seem off-key. He is singing to college administrators about their alleged thought crimes:
“You'd like to be my father, you'd like to be my dad
and give me kisses when I'm good and spank me when I'm bad.”
But in actual fact, the hostility of the singer is obvious, while that of the authority figures being lampooned might well be a projection. It's actually possible to want to act like a father without wanting to infantilize the person you care about. Och's song represents both the best and the worst of the American 60s—on the one hand the resolve to stand by new values, and to search for them outside Western civilization—on the other hand a sneering at the paternal instinct. It is an archetypal representation of the idealism and the readiness to assume the worst about those with other ideals. This hostility towards male authority figures was an artifact of the time, and similar to that of the red guards here in China, who attacked many administrators and authority figures in the middle of the hierarchy, while professing their ultimate loyalty to Chairman Mao. Anyone in a position of responsibility learns that some orders will be obeyed and others will not be, that giving in to the demands of some people means ignoring others.
I especially like Phil Och's song, There but for Fortune, in which the folksinger takes a sentiment often expressed in Victorian England, “There but for the grace of God” and makes it accessible to people who don't believe in a personal deity. But compassionate emotions sometimes extend the circle to one group while closing to another. When I was in Guatemala in 2004 I learned to play that song. I also learned another song, one which cast aspersions on American Serviceman. I was once at a party in a house of people from Europe and Canada, the mood was jovial, I was thinking of showing off my skills, and to distance myself from the military. But when I picked up the guitar, the voice inside my head said “Don't sing that song.” I think it is both possible and necessary to separate the perspective and emotional tone manifest in different songs by the same author. Ochs' broad brush allegations about the members of the working class who served in Vietnam were picked up by white college boys. And a few years later, many of the same insinuations ended up being picked up by white college girls to be thrown at subsequent generations of college boys. Although I like Phil Ochs, it occurs to me that there are reasons to tone down the smug allegations the folksinger vows to express.
There's also the particular nature of the allegations. The dominance of mercantile interests in the Yankee economic system often required them to intervene militarily in the affairs of their more agrarian southern neighbors. The Old South's Episcopal aristocracy was driven down by men like William Tecumseh Sherman. From the land which suffered under his scorched earth policies a new group eventually arose to enforce order—and one of the chief trespasses with which they were concerned was the one Ochs chose to speak of. They paraded the flag of rebellion at nighttime rallies where they knew there was no danger of being shot--because they had ensured that the men they targeted could not use their weapons. Like the folks in white sheets, the folksinger is not talking about an action by a particular man, but painting it as a collective crime—and trying to shame an entire group of men regardless of their individual actions. For the Klan of course, it was coloreds and Catholics kept in their place by speech and theatrics about things disturbing to white womanhood.
Another scene in the Chinese movie involves a long-haired student, speaking to a rally. His arm gesticulates wildly and he shouts about the need for democracy. Later we see him in darkness. There is gunfire, and his glasses fall to the ground with the right eyepiece shattered. The conventions of contemporary story-telling place certain events off-camera. And this works to minimize the types of questions which make it difficult to repair the social fabric.
For some one who grew up in my generation, democracy and human rights were supposed to be universal values whose value should be obvious to all enlightened individuals. We watched the desire for them topple oppressive power structures in places like Berlin and Johannesburg. But looking back now, I realize that the collective nature of the oppression was a big part of why western students rallied to these concepts. Not necessarily because there was an exact identity between their ideologies and colored peoples' struggles for freedom. In our history, Mandela assumed power because of democracy and the support of an international human rights community, but it is quite likely he would have exercised a different form of power, much earlier if not for his people being sugjugated. In South Africa, human rights served as a way of restoring men of color to the authority they would have had if the great white race had never interfered. As with Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction South, a form of Protestantism which had become almost Levitical in its hostility toward joy and art, played a large role in creating ideological justification for maintaining the strict separation. Of course the flip side is that the collective nature of the struggle and the orderliness imposed by the Dutch gave symbolic acts much greater resonance. Mandela saw violence as a last resort but while at Robben Island, he justified the use of sabotage against the government which imprisoned him. When released he was able to use symbols to unify the nation. Once he was at liberty, he did not turn the Law to turn collective punishment against those who oppressed him—he sought to find truth, to document how Apartheid had functioned. Talking about Mandela with an Irishman here in China, he mentioned his attitude to the Springboks, an all-white national Rugby team which had previously been the focus of black animus. As president, Mandela donned a cap to show his support, and the team went on to win the 1995 Rugby World Cup. It sent a powerful message—and all it took was a hat.
To return to the Chinese movie, there is another symbolic resonance to the scene of the long-haired student and the glasses—to something which happened forty-some years later. It was also an issue of human rights and democracy—but it was not a European-descended minority holding back a much larger native population with different language and traditions. All the players involved were of the same race—and one with traditions far more ancient than those of any government run by white folks. And as the scene reminds us, many people in the Chinese leadership at that time might have been idealistic students themselves, or watched friends who were idealistic students fall in the struggle to build a China free of Western Imperialism. Those who died at 天安门 in 1989 had made friends with one group of soldiers, so the authorities sent in new soldiers, with no personal relationships to those who labored to build the Goddess of Democracy. At 天安门 and elsewhere, young people in Asia risked a lot more than the four who died in Ohio. Gandhi once corrected people who talked about trying to improve the world without spilling innocent blood. “No,” he said, “but it must be innocent blood.”
Mao saw that War is better understood as a battle of will than an excuse for killing people—thus when Chinese officers left Chiang Kai Shek to support him he accepted. This is the same thing which has happened for most successful conquerors from Alexander the Great to Cortez. The descendants of those who followed General Lee fought for the City of Washington DC on subsequent occasions—although they sometimes avoided blue uniforms. Navajos on the warpath were killed by the US army, but in uniform they helped us defeat the Army of Japan. Alaskan natives, including the Yup'ik tribe, have the highest rate of service of any ethnic group in the fifty states. What happened at 天安门, like so many other things the sixties generation likes to talk about in emotionally fraught ways, involved the death of individuals—but it was done to destroy a movement, a focus of opposition to the government built the principles of Chairman Mao. Like the officers who originally sided with Chiang, some of the survivors of that day have decided they can serve the Middle Kingdom better by not denigrating the legacy of Mao.
Recently I read a book critical of Zhou En Lai not for his own actions, but for his awareness of what happened under Mao. Zhou En Lai and I share the same last name, and my father pointed out that the building in Southwestern China, on the back of the fifty yuan note was saved from destruction partially through his actions. Once people feel free to speak as if Chairman Mao were the embodiment of evil, no one can escape the charge of complicity, regardless of their personal conduct. But if Mao is maintained as an exemplary figure, that regard can extend both to his able lieutenants, and even those who fought bravely and resourcefully against him. The conflict can be seen, like that between Jacob and Esau in the book of Genesis, as between two members of the same family. Later on in Genesis, when Joseph is thrown into the well, he doesn't blame the patriarch Jacob—and once he gets out of the well and is elevated by a foreign government, he doesn't even hold it against the siblings who threw him there.
In the 19th century a prostrate Chinese government had to deal with a concept called extraterritoriality. Western governments claimed the right to intervene to protect their citizens regardless of how the Chinese legal system viewed their actions. The concept of universal human rights is in a sense an extension of extraterritoriality—now foreigners can cast themselves as the protectors not merely of their own citizens, but of people born and bred in China. And this is objectionable not merely because Western governments kill black boys on mopeds. Even when the criticism is leveled by non-governmental organizations which are professionals at criticizing action, it represents the attempt to universalize a frame of reference developed in secular Europe—one which at best can trace its roots back to the French Enlightenment, and is full of concepts which have not endured the test of a single human lifetime. China has its own traditions of discourse on just governance, dating back millenia to Confucius and others.
When the Jesuit Mateo Ricci arrived in China on September 10, 1583 he spoke of the cultural continuity between the Middle Kingdom and the Catholic Europe he left behind. But different people use different frameworks of analysis when they search for universal principles. The concepts which seemed universal to a Jesuit when the Son of Heaven was an individual human being were different than those which seemed universal to Jacobins in Paris after the guillotining of the King. And the Jesuit's ideas of what to do were different than those who attempted to impose the Code Napoleon, or those who would impose any other legal code--universally, without respect for national sovereignty and cultural differences. Working in human rights I noticed that it seemed to attract people with colonialist attitudes towards other peoples' consciousness—people full of ideas for how the government should be run, how other people should think--even the words we should stop using. And so human rights may have served as a good way for us to make sure we vented those colonialist impulses on each other, rather than interfering with people with the responsibility to actually accomplish things.
Except for the Cultural Revolution—China has long enshrined the importance of filial piety—in stories from a century ago, the pecking order from the emperor on down had become an overly oppressive hierarchy. Which may be why the excesses of the cultural revolution served as an inevitable counterbalance. Most Chinese relationships are described reciprocally—one party is the head, but there are obligations incumbent on both. And from Confucius to Lao Tze, most Chinese philosophers talk in terms of principles rather than Law--which is often stressed in the West. Like many ancient discourses, there is a narrative of justifiable actions rather than individual rights. And these principles have been recognized quietly over time. In his own day Confucius was merely an advisor to a minor governor—it took time for his wisdom to percolate to the center of consciousness.
And if you look back it is not clear what China would have gained had they made concessions to the students at 天安门, or allowed them to become a cause celeb among Westerners. Russia after the fall of communism is still not renowned for free speech or freedom for dissenters. The Chinese economy is arguably more healthy than those who listened to Western experts in the wake of the fall of the Soviets. And representative democracy as a way to determine the “will of the people” has demonstrated a tendency to deadlock—which is actually what it was designed to do. At the time of Bush versus Gore I read an article comparing how the legitimate head of state for England was determined by battles between soldiers in the 18th century, with how the legitimate head of state for the United States was determined by battles between lawyers at the dawn of the 21st. And a much smaller number of people were involved in that discussion than the number who chose Hu Jin Tao. In Germany or Mexico, or Minnesota, we have often seen that even where there is no manipulation when the votes are cast, the decisive element in the number of ballots is something which, for a population as large as a modern nation-state, is statistically just noise. It becomes impossible to ignore the dominance of Judicial branch over the other two. Moreover, procedural maneuvering within the two-party system often ensures that neither the populace nor the politicians can freely voice their true beliefs. A combination of ideological polarization and a very limited range of acceptable views mean that even a politician who might not be the lesser of two evils in a different system, may very well be forced to act like one. Moreover our political system encourages the development of blocs which are dedicated to the proposition that whatever the other party does is idiotic—and a minority who voice that discontent in as offensive a manner as possible. Whether a Republican or a Democrat is in power, contemporary American democracy involves large numbers of people talking as if the head of the nation should respond to their desires like a marionette. People here in China have less reason to mutter about the motives of the person responsible for exercising headship. Whether you are a member of a nation with Monarchy, Democracy, or One-party rule, there are certain tradeoffs you cannot avoid making. And a qualitative distinction between systems doesn't necessarily imply a qualitative distinction in other measures of good governance.
Twenty years ago, Chinese students looked to Western governments for solutions. But now they might look elsewhere. Many western ideas have been readily adopted throughout the world—especially products developed by engineers working with materials whose properties they can test to the breaking point. Guns, cars, and cellphones have a utility which people from most cultures other than the Amish recognize. Wires and wheels don't need to be translated, but for institutional cultural constructs language, and even dialects, can make a critical difference. Cars and computers function as advertised because they are designed by people who work with objects and parts machine-tooled to be interchangeable. Democracy and human rights are more complicated--and often function at the expense of local wisdom and traditions. The attempt to force their adoption by the rest of the world might be compared to asking everyone to use a computer program which still has some significant glitches. Democratic systems designed by the administration put into power by the supreme court may not be what the rest of the world needs.
Mao grew up as a peasant. And in contrast to orthodox Marxists trying to foment a revolution by organizing people who lived in cities, Mao was one of the twentieth century thinkers to see the strengths an agrarian nation could draw on. He understood the wisdom of peasants and designed a concept of guerrilla warfare to allow his followers to move among peasants like fish swimming in water. His concepts inspired the people of the nation of Vietnam, who in declaring their independence from France authored a document which borrowed a great deal from Mr Jefferson's declaration of independence. Like another set of former colonies, they had to fight for their independence against a great English-speaking Empire from across the ocean. Their victory over the corrupt leaders of Saigon ensured that the initials VC will always be a reminder of the limits of the power of the city of Washington DC—a city which a French architect designed to exclude J street, as a snub to Mr Jefferson. It is one thing to advocate regime change. But some one has to end up taking the place of a dictator. Even when you have toppled a real slaveholder, those whom the Yankees would put in his place will thus always be seen as tyrants.
When I was in Guatemala it always interested me that although I was in a Catholic country, the worst crimes were attributed to a Protestant. And not merely a Protestant in the sense that the successor of Thomas a Becket, or the Catholic Priest who sought to reform the church with the concept Sola Scriptura are considered Protestants. He is part of a church which has only been baptizing for a little over thirty years. A great deal of money has been spent to try to use the judicial system of his nation to bring him to court. The legal pressure has forced the military to release some archives, and my friends in Guatemala are grateful for the documentation of what happened to their families. There is the possibility that after decades he might be tried, which would be a symbolic victory. There were many dictators in Latin America, only Peru's Alberto Fujimori has gone to trial. An Asian without the history to build family connections gets punished for things boys with European blood got away with, and the human rights community calls it a victory against impunity. But there are many types of symbolic victories, and not all of them require a lot of money, or lawyers. The man who is the focus of grievance about the violence once came to the valley of Rabinal, wearing a sombrero like the ones peasants wear. Some one who had harvested corn and beans from the mountains above Rabinal, picked up a stone. And the Protestant was no longer wearing the Sombrero.
I will shortly be teaching a course on the history of English-speaking countries. I often incorporate songs into my teaching and was thinking of one from Phil Ochs
“You're supporting Chiang Kai Shek, while I'm supporting Mao,
and when I've got something to say, sir, I'm going to say it now.”
But after seeing that movie I think I may choose a different song. And it makes me realize in some ways that there are other parts of the song which seem off-key. He is singing to college administrators about their alleged thought crimes:
“You'd like to be my father, you'd like to be my dad
and give me kisses when I'm good and spank me when I'm bad.”
But in actual fact, the hostility of the singer is obvious, while that of the authority figures being lampooned might well be a projection. It's actually possible to want to act like a father without wanting to infantilize the person you care about. Och's song represents both the best and the worst of the American 60s—on the one hand the resolve to stand by new values, and to search for them outside Western civilization—on the other hand a sneering at the paternal instinct. It is an archetypal representation of the idealism and the readiness to assume the worst about those with other ideals. This hostility towards male authority figures was an artifact of the time, and similar to that of the red guards here in China, who attacked many administrators and authority figures in the middle of the hierarchy, while professing their ultimate loyalty to Chairman Mao. Anyone in a position of responsibility learns that some orders will be obeyed and others will not be, that giving in to the demands of some people means ignoring others.
I especially like Phil Och's song, There but for Fortune, in which the folksinger takes a sentiment often expressed in Victorian England, “There but for the grace of God” and makes it accessible to people who don't believe in a personal deity. But compassionate emotions sometimes extend the circle to one group while closing to another. When I was in Guatemala in 2004 I learned to play that song. I also learned another song, one which cast aspersions on American Serviceman. I was once at a party in a house of people from Europe and Canada, the mood was jovial, I was thinking of showing off my skills, and to distance myself from the military. But when I picked up the guitar, the voice inside my head said “Don't sing that song.” I think it is both possible and necessary to separate the perspective and emotional tone manifest in different songs by the same author. Ochs' broad brush allegations about the members of the working class who served in Vietnam were picked up by white college boys. And a few years later, many of the same insinuations ended up being picked up by white college girls to be thrown at subsequent generations of college boys. Although I like Phil Ochs, it occurs to me that there are reasons to tone down the smug allegations the folksinger vows to express.
There's also the particular nature of the allegations. The dominance of mercantile interests in the Yankee economic system often required them to intervene militarily in the affairs of their more agrarian southern neighbors. The Old South's Episcopal aristocracy was driven down by men like William Tecumseh Sherman. From the land which suffered under his scorched earth policies a new group eventually arose to enforce order—and one of the chief trespasses with which they were concerned was the one Ochs chose to speak of. They paraded the flag of rebellion at nighttime rallies where they knew there was no danger of being shot--because they had ensured that the men they targeted could not use their weapons. Like the folks in white sheets, the folksinger is not talking about an action by a particular man, but painting it as a collective crime—and trying to shame an entire group of men regardless of their individual actions. For the Klan of course, it was coloreds and Catholics kept in their place by speech and theatrics about things disturbing to white womanhood.
Another scene in the Chinese movie involves a long-haired student, speaking to a rally. His arm gesticulates wildly and he shouts about the need for democracy. Later we see him in darkness. There is gunfire, and his glasses fall to the ground with the right eyepiece shattered. The conventions of contemporary story-telling place certain events off-camera. And this works to minimize the types of questions which make it difficult to repair the social fabric.
For some one who grew up in my generation, democracy and human rights were supposed to be universal values whose value should be obvious to all enlightened individuals. We watched the desire for them topple oppressive power structures in places like Berlin and Johannesburg. But looking back now, I realize that the collective nature of the oppression was a big part of why western students rallied to these concepts. Not necessarily because there was an exact identity between their ideologies and colored peoples' struggles for freedom. In our history, Mandela assumed power because of democracy and the support of an international human rights community, but it is quite likely he would have exercised a different form of power, much earlier if not for his people being sugjugated. In South Africa, human rights served as a way of restoring men of color to the authority they would have had if the great white race had never interfered. As with Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction South, a form of Protestantism which had become almost Levitical in its hostility toward joy and art, played a large role in creating ideological justification for maintaining the strict separation. Of course the flip side is that the collective nature of the struggle and the orderliness imposed by the Dutch gave symbolic acts much greater resonance. Mandela saw violence as a last resort but while at Robben Island, he justified the use of sabotage against the government which imprisoned him. When released he was able to use symbols to unify the nation. Once he was at liberty, he did not turn the Law to turn collective punishment against those who oppressed him—he sought to find truth, to document how Apartheid had functioned. Talking about Mandela with an Irishman here in China, he mentioned his attitude to the Springboks, an all-white national Rugby team which had previously been the focus of black animus. As president, Mandela donned a cap to show his support, and the team went on to win the 1995 Rugby World Cup. It sent a powerful message—and all it took was a hat.
To return to the Chinese movie, there is another symbolic resonance to the scene of the long-haired student and the glasses—to something which happened forty-some years later. It was also an issue of human rights and democracy—but it was not a European-descended minority holding back a much larger native population with different language and traditions. All the players involved were of the same race—and one with traditions far more ancient than those of any government run by white folks. And as the scene reminds us, many people in the Chinese leadership at that time might have been idealistic students themselves, or watched friends who were idealistic students fall in the struggle to build a China free of Western Imperialism. Those who died at 天安门 in 1989 had made friends with one group of soldiers, so the authorities sent in new soldiers, with no personal relationships to those who labored to build the Goddess of Democracy. At 天安门 and elsewhere, young people in Asia risked a lot more than the four who died in Ohio. Gandhi once corrected people who talked about trying to improve the world without spilling innocent blood. “No,” he said, “but it must be innocent blood.”
Mao saw that War is better understood as a battle of will than an excuse for killing people—thus when Chinese officers left Chiang Kai Shek to support him he accepted. This is the same thing which has happened for most successful conquerors from Alexander the Great to Cortez. The descendants of those who followed General Lee fought for the City of Washington DC on subsequent occasions—although they sometimes avoided blue uniforms. Navajos on the warpath were killed by the US army, but in uniform they helped us defeat the Army of Japan. Alaskan natives, including the Yup'ik tribe, have the highest rate of service of any ethnic group in the fifty states. What happened at 天安门, like so many other things the sixties generation likes to talk about in emotionally fraught ways, involved the death of individuals—but it was done to destroy a movement, a focus of opposition to the government built the principles of Chairman Mao. Like the officers who originally sided with Chiang, some of the survivors of that day have decided they can serve the Middle Kingdom better by not denigrating the legacy of Mao.
Recently I read a book critical of Zhou En Lai not for his own actions, but for his awareness of what happened under Mao. Zhou En Lai and I share the same last name, and my father pointed out that the building in Southwestern China, on the back of the fifty yuan note was saved from destruction partially through his actions. Once people feel free to speak as if Chairman Mao were the embodiment of evil, no one can escape the charge of complicity, regardless of their personal conduct. But if Mao is maintained as an exemplary figure, that regard can extend both to his able lieutenants, and even those who fought bravely and resourcefully against him. The conflict can be seen, like that between Jacob and Esau in the book of Genesis, as between two members of the same family. Later on in Genesis, when Joseph is thrown into the well, he doesn't blame the patriarch Jacob—and once he gets out of the well and is elevated by a foreign government, he doesn't even hold it against the siblings who threw him there.
In the 19th century a prostrate Chinese government had to deal with a concept called extraterritoriality. Western governments claimed the right to intervene to protect their citizens regardless of how the Chinese legal system viewed their actions. The concept of universal human rights is in a sense an extension of extraterritoriality—now foreigners can cast themselves as the protectors not merely of their own citizens, but of people born and bred in China. And this is objectionable not merely because Western governments kill black boys on mopeds. Even when the criticism is leveled by non-governmental organizations which are professionals at criticizing action, it represents the attempt to universalize a frame of reference developed in secular Europe—one which at best can trace its roots back to the French Enlightenment, and is full of concepts which have not endured the test of a single human lifetime. China has its own traditions of discourse on just governance, dating back millenia to Confucius and others.
When the Jesuit Mateo Ricci arrived in China on September 10, 1583 he spoke of the cultural continuity between the Middle Kingdom and the Catholic Europe he left behind. But different people use different frameworks of analysis when they search for universal principles. The concepts which seemed universal to a Jesuit when the Son of Heaven was an individual human being were different than those which seemed universal to Jacobins in Paris after the guillotining of the King. And the Jesuit's ideas of what to do were different than those who attempted to impose the Code Napoleon, or those who would impose any other legal code--universally, without respect for national sovereignty and cultural differences. Working in human rights I noticed that it seemed to attract people with colonialist attitudes towards other peoples' consciousness—people full of ideas for how the government should be run, how other people should think--even the words we should stop using. And so human rights may have served as a good way for us to make sure we vented those colonialist impulses on each other, rather than interfering with people with the responsibility to actually accomplish things.
Except for the Cultural Revolution—China has long enshrined the importance of filial piety—in stories from a century ago, the pecking order from the emperor on down had become an overly oppressive hierarchy. Which may be why the excesses of the cultural revolution served as an inevitable counterbalance. Most Chinese relationships are described reciprocally—one party is the head, but there are obligations incumbent on both. And from Confucius to Lao Tze, most Chinese philosophers talk in terms of principles rather than Law--which is often stressed in the West. Like many ancient discourses, there is a narrative of justifiable actions rather than individual rights. And these principles have been recognized quietly over time. In his own day Confucius was merely an advisor to a minor governor—it took time for his wisdom to percolate to the center of consciousness.
And if you look back it is not clear what China would have gained had they made concessions to the students at 天安门, or allowed them to become a cause celeb among Westerners. Russia after the fall of communism is still not renowned for free speech or freedom for dissenters. The Chinese economy is arguably more healthy than those who listened to Western experts in the wake of the fall of the Soviets. And representative democracy as a way to determine the “will of the people” has demonstrated a tendency to deadlock—which is actually what it was designed to do. At the time of Bush versus Gore I read an article comparing how the legitimate head of state for England was determined by battles between soldiers in the 18th century, with how the legitimate head of state for the United States was determined by battles between lawyers at the dawn of the 21st. And a much smaller number of people were involved in that discussion than the number who chose Hu Jin Tao. In Germany or Mexico, or Minnesota, we have often seen that even where there is no manipulation when the votes are cast, the decisive element in the number of ballots is something which, for a population as large as a modern nation-state, is statistically just noise. It becomes impossible to ignore the dominance of Judicial branch over the other two. Moreover, procedural maneuvering within the two-party system often ensures that neither the populace nor the politicians can freely voice their true beliefs. A combination of ideological polarization and a very limited range of acceptable views mean that even a politician who might not be the lesser of two evils in a different system, may very well be forced to act like one. Moreover our political system encourages the development of blocs which are dedicated to the proposition that whatever the other party does is idiotic—and a minority who voice that discontent in as offensive a manner as possible. Whether a Republican or a Democrat is in power, contemporary American democracy involves large numbers of people talking as if the head of the nation should respond to their desires like a marionette. People here in China have less reason to mutter about the motives of the person responsible for exercising headship. Whether you are a member of a nation with Monarchy, Democracy, or One-party rule, there are certain tradeoffs you cannot avoid making. And a qualitative distinction between systems doesn't necessarily imply a qualitative distinction in other measures of good governance.
Twenty years ago, Chinese students looked to Western governments for solutions. But now they might look elsewhere. Many western ideas have been readily adopted throughout the world—especially products developed by engineers working with materials whose properties they can test to the breaking point. Guns, cars, and cellphones have a utility which people from most cultures other than the Amish recognize. Wires and wheels don't need to be translated, but for institutional cultural constructs language, and even dialects, can make a critical difference. Cars and computers function as advertised because they are designed by people who work with objects and parts machine-tooled to be interchangeable. Democracy and human rights are more complicated--and often function at the expense of local wisdom and traditions. The attempt to force their adoption by the rest of the world might be compared to asking everyone to use a computer program which still has some significant glitches. Democratic systems designed by the administration put into power by the supreme court may not be what the rest of the world needs.
Mao grew up as a peasant. And in contrast to orthodox Marxists trying to foment a revolution by organizing people who lived in cities, Mao was one of the twentieth century thinkers to see the strengths an agrarian nation could draw on. He understood the wisdom of peasants and designed a concept of guerrilla warfare to allow his followers to move among peasants like fish swimming in water. His concepts inspired the people of the nation of Vietnam, who in declaring their independence from France authored a document which borrowed a great deal from Mr Jefferson's declaration of independence. Like another set of former colonies, they had to fight for their independence against a great English-speaking Empire from across the ocean. Their victory over the corrupt leaders of Saigon ensured that the initials VC will always be a reminder of the limits of the power of the city of Washington DC—a city which a French architect designed to exclude J street, as a snub to Mr Jefferson. It is one thing to advocate regime change. But some one has to end up taking the place of a dictator. Even when you have toppled a real slaveholder, those whom the Yankees would put in his place will thus always be seen as tyrants.
When I was in Guatemala it always interested me that although I was in a Catholic country, the worst crimes were attributed to a Protestant. And not merely a Protestant in the sense that the successor of Thomas a Becket, or the Catholic Priest who sought to reform the church with the concept Sola Scriptura are considered Protestants. He is part of a church which has only been baptizing for a little over thirty years. A great deal of money has been spent to try to use the judicial system of his nation to bring him to court. The legal pressure has forced the military to release some archives, and my friends in Guatemala are grateful for the documentation of what happened to their families. There is the possibility that after decades he might be tried, which would be a symbolic victory. There were many dictators in Latin America, only Peru's Alberto Fujimori has gone to trial. An Asian without the history to build family connections gets punished for things boys with European blood got away with, and the human rights community calls it a victory against impunity. But there are many types of symbolic victories, and not all of them require a lot of money, or lawyers. The man who is the focus of grievance about the violence once came to the valley of Rabinal, wearing a sombrero like the ones peasants wear. Some one who had harvested corn and beans from the mountains above Rabinal, picked up a stone. And the Protestant was no longer wearing the Sombrero.
I am Submarine U-571
They say that the bellybutton of the world is a Guatemalan lake with two volcanoes. There is a place there I like to visit, with an excellent view of two perfect blue cones rising out from the surface of the lake. Most of the hotels in the area are built in an ecologically sensitive manner, using local materials, solar power, carefully manicured grounds, and designed in a way which provides an exquisite counterpoint to the beauty of the landscape. A much more famous Guatemalan destination is the city of Antigua—also full of elegant buildings with beautiful gardens, though made of thick stones rather than stucco or recycled bottles. Hotels in both locations have staff who dress in traditional indigenous clothes. But here at the lake they dress that way because that's the way they dress all the time—in Antigua the Guatemalan staff usually wear a uniform designated by the hotel and change into Western clothes when their shift is over. It all contributes to a beautiful environment for the tourists who buy rooms and drinks—but what in the city of stone is a sort of play-acting at the way things used to be, here, overlooking the docks of Santa Cruz is something still woven into the fabric of peoples' lives.
I was there on a Saturday, a day when people are encouraged to dress themselves up in outfits from a rack of used clothes, the men often in drag. We sit in the dining hall eating fried chicken, and for dessert a younger man spending a few months working at the lodge brings out coffee. I talk to him later—and he tells me that the scenery with the lakes and volcanoes, reminds him of his home state. Later on in the evening the tables are pushed aside for dancing, and a guitar performance of the owner's favorite songs.
Later still a group of about seven guests is drinking beers under the open sky, discussing a movie called the History Boys, which almost everyone in the group has seen. I sit in a sleeveless white dress and confidently expound at length on my interpretation of whether the movie should be called “homo erotic.” In retrospect I realize that, like the boyish teacher in the movie, I am picking my arguments based more on the reaction I hope to provoke from others than on what I actually believe myself. Finally, the guy from Oregon takes a deep breath. “No, it's not OBvious. That's not the way I look at it. And why are we spending so much time talking about this when we've already established that the way you define the word is different from the way everyone else at this table defines the word?” The definitiveness of the Oregonian's response reminds me that I am advocating a point of view I'm not completely sure should be advocated. After a pause, he starts to tell us about his adventures in the kingdom he calls Saudi.
Getting to the hotel was a little complicated. It was five o'clock, and I wasn't sure when the boats stopped running, but took a chance on one going to the place nicknamed “gringotenango” in hopes that there would still be one to the hotel at Santa Cruz. One boatman, who senses my uncertainty—promises me a charter for seventeen bucks. I end up paying. I am frustrated when I learn that boats run until six, and that I have rewarded some one for deceiving me by paying him ten times as much as I should have. But I also realize that, as with so many transactions, it's an issue of information as much as morality. If the terms of service had been clearly posted when I made my decision, the opportunity for antisocial behavior would not have existed. Our culture's focus on individual responsibility and culpability, sometimes gets in the way of analyzing how social conditions involving multiple individuals creates moral hazards which make the fruits of darkness more rewarding than the fruits of light.
Earlier I had visited another program where I had worked. Because of difficulty with funds the place is currently semi-abandoned, though some of the plantings still thrive. Walking there, I am surprised that an area which was full of cornfields two years ago is now filled with Avocado trees and enclosed with razor wire. As I walk I hear some one call my name. There must be something about my gait, because he's the fourth person in my life to recognize me at a distance after several years, not by my face, but by the way I walk.
I'm surprised to see him here. When I was last here, three masked men knocked on some one else's door to deliver a message that he would be killed if he didn't leave. Now he's working next door at the avocado farm—and seems just as jovial as when we worked together two years ago. Having been through multiple situations in Guatemala where people received death threats, it's interesting to notice how things unfold. It often feels like a Victorian mystery novel in that you work through a progression of explanations, each different than the last, but each seeming consistent. The difference is that in Victorian novels some one like Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple shows up to solve the mystery, and in Guatemala you almost never get to that final chapter. Of course, Sherlock Holmes was an opium addict, and it may be that the only people who could clear things up in Guatemala, are those with skeletons in their own closets. After hearing several contradictory stories with the ring of truth, you realize that information behaves the same way whether it is true or false—and that for definite resolution, you need not just the wisdom of Solomon, but the decisiveness he used to determine the true mother of a disputed baby.
One of the explanations was that the threat came from a person we knew and worked with—some one who seemed generous and friendly and hardworking—and whom I was once assigned the responsibility of making a phone call to, but neglected to when I was sent outside the country for a week. Some one I spent an enjoyable afternoon touring lakeside cabins with a woman who later ended up in a relationship with the man who received the threat. It was odd to consider that some one whose handiwork and self-assurance I admired might have sent a message like that, and that some of my own actions may have played a part. And if it wasn't him, it might well have been some one who in the right circumstances, would have displayed an equally good-natured side. It's strange to consider that if you have one group of friends in Guatemala you report on the human side of the impoverished victims of violence—but with another group of friends you might well end up humanizing impoverished peasants who end up participating in intimidation. Sometimes you meet both in the same family. Some one once asked us to leave because he said his own sons had threatened to kill him if he kept on talking to the people from human rights. People often attribute threats to the after-effects of the civil war, but I have also heard of threats made previous to it, by members of their own village, who recognized their power being threatened by some one stirring up people with new ideas—not so different from what the elders of Athens did to Socrates. Most of these threats were conditional rather than existential, “stop what you're doing, or die,” the type of message people in the United States can afford to communicate with lawsuits. People in Guatemala habitually attribute contemporary violence to the sort of secret organizations which were active in the eighties, but now that the code has been established, even people without clandestine connections can take advantage of it. In any event, my friends' attitude suggests that he wasn't permanently traumatized. But it does mean that instead of working in the office of a non-profit, he's working outside on an avocado plantation which didn't exist when the threat was sent.
I see other things in Guatemala as well. I sit in a cornfield and discuss the plagues of caterpillars menacing the trees and gangs menacing the town. I drink wine in the Spanish cultural center with a woman I met in Huehuetenango and shake hands with a man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the emblem of the hammer and sickle.
The name of this essay is taken from a movie about World War II. It is the name of a submarine, which midway through the movie changes hands. At one point it is occupied by a group of sailors obeying the commands of the Fuhrer Adolph Hitler, the only person ever to occupy that office. Later it is taken over by sailors obeying a chain of command leading back to Franklin Roosevelt, the thirty-second president of the United States. Tom Lehrer has a song about the rocket scientist who during the Second World War, built rockets first for the Germans, and then for the Americans.
“When the rockets go up, who cares where they come down.
'that's not my department,' says Werner von Braun.”
And, depending on what vocabulary you use to analyze the situation, the change in personnel of the U-Boat is not significant. Throughout the movie, it is occupied by military men, following orders to kill people. That's why people shout “you're just like them.” You could say such an attitude is the opposite of Werner von Braun's cavalier perspective towards the machinery of death, but it shares his sense of equivalence.
Some people say we shouldn't have gotten involved in World War II. You can construct alternative histories in which Hitler's Totalitarianism burned itself out, or Hitler and Stalin eventually annihilated each other. You can point out that the end of our involvement in that war was a forty year cold war with our erstwhile allies. I have visited farms begun by C.O.s from World War II who helped create the basis for searching for an alternative to what General Eisenhower later recognized was the menace of the military-industrial complex spawned by that war--by people who thought like Werner von Braun. It is not necessary to agree with every use of American military power. Dr King opposed the war in Vietnam, but felt that he would have fought against Hitler. Joschka Fischer of the Green party sent German troops to fight with us in Afghanistan, but not in the Bush administration's preemptive strike on Iraq. But although some things can be unbundled, it is very difficult to accept the precedent of Nuremburg and the prevailing definitions of War Crimes unless you accept that American military power can serve the cause of justice.
I have many friends in different parts of the United States. Some are lawyers living in the capital, others are farmers living several hours outside. Both I suspect voted for Obama, but in terms of their political views on things like drug policy, or Israel, or social issues, their perspectives are significantly different. And despite voting for the same party, it would be difficult for the lawyers in the capital to really understand the lives of the farmers. And in many ways the farmers lives and attitudes are much more similar to those of the Republican neighbors they go to church and county fairs with. One farmer received a phone call threatening to destroy his irrigation system if he shot the wrong deer while trying to protect his bean planting from being eaten. But I suspect there were some ways his the lives of those two people living off the land, had more in common with each other, than with the lawyer in the capital. It was because of the farmers that I first learned about going to Guatemala—where I had the opportunity to witness the much bigger urban/rural divide in that country.
The organization I served with originally worked with farmers in rural areas. Studying the civil rights struggle, you notice how it took the work of generations of NAACP organizers working to make sure that some one like Thurgood Marshall could be trained not just to make arguments white men could have made, but to give the lie to the assumptions of Jim Crow by his very presence before the Supreme Court. To make sure that when Rosa Parks stayed seated when the law said she should move, there was a network of people who had her back. In the flickering light of kitchen fires I witnessed the quiet strength of a race full of individuals who, I hope are laying the groundwork to contradict their marginalization with something more definitive than verbal disputation.
Later, however our program shifted focus, and although volunteers were based in rural areas, our activities were shaped by the decisions passed down from lawyers in the capital. A chain of individually reasonable decisions often led to us operating one way in one region and completely differently in another. We were a non-violent, non-military organization, but handling the apparent contradictions sometimes forced us into odd coping strategies. At various points, after receiving assignments from the people the folks in Washington had put in charge, my partner and I would look at each other and mumble “I'm just an enlisted man.” That was the most psychologically effective model for dealing with directives which didn't make sense to us, but which we had given up trying to argue with. The Lawyers handed out T-shirts saying “Silence never changed the world, let loose your voice.” One Guatemalan I didn't meet through our organization pointed out “If it weren't for people who kept their mouths shut in the eighties, I would be dead.” On the other hand, others had similar stories about how people speaking up kept them alive. The folks in the capital often talked as if a certain way of doing things was Obvious, and peoples' lives are at stake. But you could arrive at different conclusions depending on who you listened to first. Now thankfully the organization is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay, and perhaps the energy from a city which is a cultural rather than a governmental capital, will change the patterns of interactions.
The second time I went down to Guatemala I answered a call for emergency presence, and I looked forward to spending more time in the glow of kitchen fires. After we arrived, the lawyers changed their minds. In certain circumstances foreign presence can be an asset, in others a liability. And although our organization had been founded to carry on a vision of unarmed bodyguards, when it came to the legal case, it generally seemed that the Guatemalans we worked with felt safer with a police presence. I could see why, but it also seemed like outsourcing a critical part of our reason for being. In some ways it felt like another manifestation of the urban rural divide: peasants can often find work for children to do, children in the city have little productive role, they just need to be driven to soccer games and have their braces paid for. So, a lot of my time I spent in the capital, watching movies on a DVD player which had been donated by an executive director. The people in charge distrusted mainstream movies, but I sometimes felt that they represented how it felt to be working abroad better than the statistics our administrators quoted us at our informational meetings. It was hard to tell what was really going on, many significant events happened off-camera, and it often felt that the disagreement with members of your own organization loomed larger than anything you were supposedly accomplishing. And with so much being relayed second or third hand, figuring out how to behave in situations of imperfect information seems more important than “figuring out what's really going on.” I could often see how decisions made sense individually, but when bundled together they trapped people in catch-22s. I tend to be a contrarian—and often have views which conflicted with my supervisors, whether I worked in restaurants, planning, engineering, tourism, farming, or accompaniment. It is interesting to note that the non-ideological organizations generally seemed much more accommodating of differences of opinion. They didn't necessarily change their mind when I said I thought we were wrong, but they let me vent as long as I bussed my tables, wrote my reports, or picked my vegetables, like I was supposed to do. It was odd that my supervisors in Guatemala reacted as if the frustrations of thwarted idealism were something they had never experienced themselves. Of course, unlike farms and restaurants we didn't really have a product, so I couldn't be judged on anything other than whether I was giving them unconditional personal loyalty.
Teaching American history in China last year I ran across a section on the birth of second-wave feminism a few decades ago. In addition to their frustrations at home and work, women were also frustrated when they tried to help out at radical organizations. Often they were stuck making and serving coffee while the men made plans. Understandably they felt that with their education and commitment they had more to offer than merely serving coffee, while white college boys monopolized the definition of “the movement.”
When I was in Guatemala the second time, and the representatives of the embassy came to visit, the women running our organization suggested that having a man serving coffee would be an excellent way to demonstrate their commitment to “fighting the Patriarchy!” I don't mind serving coffee, I spent many happy years working in restaurants, and it seemed better than watching another movie. But I had viewed serving coffee to businesswomen and professor's wives to pay my way through college as conforming to the assumptions of the system, not challenging them. And when I volunteered to come to Guatemala, I hadn't come to fight the patriarchy, I had come down to help the Maya people, many of whom are themselves patriarchs. There is a series of negative stories about the conquistadors told in Protestant countries, which is called the “leyenda negra.” In Latin America there is a similar “leyenda negra” about the Yankees. I sometimes got the impression that my supervisors were subjected to these stories, because when they got back from meetings with our Guatemalan allies they would make cutting remarks as if I should feel personally responsible for every native American massacred by the US Army. Once the collective punishment starts being handed out, it's not possible to be innocent, but it is possible to be innocent of casting the first stone. Making people feel discontented can be a good thing, but only if you have a plan to channel that discontent rather than just leaving it to fester into self-hatred. If you're trying to raise awareness so that people do more than just stand idly by—a good supervisor should be able to come up with something for them to do when they do make a commitment. Asking some one to serve coffee to representatives of the Bush administration and calling it “fighting the Patriarchy” strikes me as a good signpost for the limits of what “consciousness-raising” by white college kids of either gender can accomplish.
There is a mathematical concept called an asymptote—which is when a curve continually approaches a value which it never actually reaches. Sometimes that feels like a metaphor for social change movements, especially the sort rooted in progressive ideology. We were trying to find a “different” approach. For a lot of NGOs it seemed to be getting away from the profit motive. But hostility toward the profit motive often manifested itself as a suspicion of people doing things which made them happy—whether there was a direct monetary reward or not. “Trying to find a different way of doing things” served as a wildcard people with organizational power played whenever they felt suspicious of some one else's pursuit of happiness. It felt like Harlan Ellison's Invisible Man, and the narrator's encounter with “the Brotherhood”--though the gender is different this decade.
I contrast that with my time by the lake—the hotels and restaurants, and the avocado plantation, all based on the profit motive, and therefore trying to develop a product other people would be willing to pay for. And the man who served coffee had a speaking role, he actually got to talk to the people he served coffee to. Changing what it means to serve coffee, so that the person in that role can meaningfully disagree with the people he serves it to, strikes me as more significant than changing who serves the coffee. And I thought of the difference between the people who wore indigenous dress because they were paid to, and those for whom it was an organic part of their lives. If asking men to serve coffee constitutes fighting the Patriarchy—I think a lot of for-profit institutions in Guatemala served a lot more coffee than we ever did. And the fact that they don't have to apologize for being a business, or searching for things which make them or their customers happy, means that they are able to carry on playing guitar, building sustainable buildings, and creating jobs for indigenous people.
This date is famous for a surprise airborne attack on the homeland which took place some years ago. Like so many things, our conversational habits lead us to search for a single point in the system at which to place blame. It should also be remembered that it is far more difficult to ignore the heroism of the members of the working class who wear uniforms like those of the FDNY and NYPD than before that attack. When placing blame, some people blame the man who a few days later, spoke of a race between only two horses. Others, in the habit of talking as if all human beings are puppets of Langley, smugly blame blowback from the CIA. If you think about it, it doesn't do much harm to Yankee power to have people making each other afraid of the organization HW Bush used to run. And the current system traps everyone. It can't be much fun being the president of a superpower if you have to apologize for saying you don't like to eat broccoli.
In any event there were probably many individual decisions without which things might have happened differently. One was made by the rulers in Riyadh, to whom Osama bin Laden had offered his services a decade prior to expel Saddam from Kuwait. But instead of accepting the offer, the Royal house prioritized their relationship with their fellow oil barons in the Bush administration. Some would say Washington was far more qualified to deal with the situation than bin Laden and his irregular tactics—but it was outsourcing a function some one with extensive experience in the highlands of Afghanistan probably felt should have been kept in-house. It is quite possible that bin Laden's subsequent career was not what he planned all along, but would have been significantly different if the princes had placed ties of belief over ties forged by dealings with that black liquid.
A few years ago, I read a book by Muhammed Yunus, a man who studied in the state of Tennessee before returning to Bangladesh and originating the idea of mircrolending. He advocates a double-bottom line, combining profit with other goals. He talks about working in an province dominated by guerrillas. After his banks were established, some of the guerrillas became his best workers. “They just needed something to fight for, and we were able to give them something better than terrorism.” Muslim men who had studied the movements of small pieces of metal in order to end peoples' lives instead studied the movements of small pieces of metal in order to improve them. These factors determine whether young men get jobs as defenders of the social order, or create jobs for the defenders of the social order. Like the boatman who took advantage of my ignorance by the lake, carefully observed instances of antisocial behavior can also create information which can help people understand how to create a world with fewer reasons for antisocial behavior. And getting through to an understanding of the dynamics of the system and the role information plays in it can be more important than a focus on what other people “should” think or do.
Had those ruling the land currently called Saudi Arabia behaved differently, there would still be another reason to remember this day. Vive Chile! Vive el Pueblo! Vive los trabajadores! [emailed September 11, 2009]
I was there on a Saturday, a day when people are encouraged to dress themselves up in outfits from a rack of used clothes, the men often in drag. We sit in the dining hall eating fried chicken, and for dessert a younger man spending a few months working at the lodge brings out coffee. I talk to him later—and he tells me that the scenery with the lakes and volcanoes, reminds him of his home state. Later on in the evening the tables are pushed aside for dancing, and a guitar performance of the owner's favorite songs.
Later still a group of about seven guests is drinking beers under the open sky, discussing a movie called the History Boys, which almost everyone in the group has seen. I sit in a sleeveless white dress and confidently expound at length on my interpretation of whether the movie should be called “homo erotic.” In retrospect I realize that, like the boyish teacher in the movie, I am picking my arguments based more on the reaction I hope to provoke from others than on what I actually believe myself. Finally, the guy from Oregon takes a deep breath. “No, it's not OBvious. That's not the way I look at it. And why are we spending so much time talking about this when we've already established that the way you define the word is different from the way everyone else at this table defines the word?” The definitiveness of the Oregonian's response reminds me that I am advocating a point of view I'm not completely sure should be advocated. After a pause, he starts to tell us about his adventures in the kingdom he calls Saudi.
Getting to the hotel was a little complicated. It was five o'clock, and I wasn't sure when the boats stopped running, but took a chance on one going to the place nicknamed “gringotenango” in hopes that there would still be one to the hotel at Santa Cruz. One boatman, who senses my uncertainty—promises me a charter for seventeen bucks. I end up paying. I am frustrated when I learn that boats run until six, and that I have rewarded some one for deceiving me by paying him ten times as much as I should have. But I also realize that, as with so many transactions, it's an issue of information as much as morality. If the terms of service had been clearly posted when I made my decision, the opportunity for antisocial behavior would not have existed. Our culture's focus on individual responsibility and culpability, sometimes gets in the way of analyzing how social conditions involving multiple individuals creates moral hazards which make the fruits of darkness more rewarding than the fruits of light.
Earlier I had visited another program where I had worked. Because of difficulty with funds the place is currently semi-abandoned, though some of the plantings still thrive. Walking there, I am surprised that an area which was full of cornfields two years ago is now filled with Avocado trees and enclosed with razor wire. As I walk I hear some one call my name. There must be something about my gait, because he's the fourth person in my life to recognize me at a distance after several years, not by my face, but by the way I walk.
I'm surprised to see him here. When I was last here, three masked men knocked on some one else's door to deliver a message that he would be killed if he didn't leave. Now he's working next door at the avocado farm—and seems just as jovial as when we worked together two years ago. Having been through multiple situations in Guatemala where people received death threats, it's interesting to notice how things unfold. It often feels like a Victorian mystery novel in that you work through a progression of explanations, each different than the last, but each seeming consistent. The difference is that in Victorian novels some one like Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple shows up to solve the mystery, and in Guatemala you almost never get to that final chapter. Of course, Sherlock Holmes was an opium addict, and it may be that the only people who could clear things up in Guatemala, are those with skeletons in their own closets. After hearing several contradictory stories with the ring of truth, you realize that information behaves the same way whether it is true or false—and that for definite resolution, you need not just the wisdom of Solomon, but the decisiveness he used to determine the true mother of a disputed baby.
One of the explanations was that the threat came from a person we knew and worked with—some one who seemed generous and friendly and hardworking—and whom I was once assigned the responsibility of making a phone call to, but neglected to when I was sent outside the country for a week. Some one I spent an enjoyable afternoon touring lakeside cabins with a woman who later ended up in a relationship with the man who received the threat. It was odd to consider that some one whose handiwork and self-assurance I admired might have sent a message like that, and that some of my own actions may have played a part. And if it wasn't him, it might well have been some one who in the right circumstances, would have displayed an equally good-natured side. It's strange to consider that if you have one group of friends in Guatemala you report on the human side of the impoverished victims of violence—but with another group of friends you might well end up humanizing impoverished peasants who end up participating in intimidation. Sometimes you meet both in the same family. Some one once asked us to leave because he said his own sons had threatened to kill him if he kept on talking to the people from human rights. People often attribute threats to the after-effects of the civil war, but I have also heard of threats made previous to it, by members of their own village, who recognized their power being threatened by some one stirring up people with new ideas—not so different from what the elders of Athens did to Socrates. Most of these threats were conditional rather than existential, “stop what you're doing, or die,” the type of message people in the United States can afford to communicate with lawsuits. People in Guatemala habitually attribute contemporary violence to the sort of secret organizations which were active in the eighties, but now that the code has been established, even people without clandestine connections can take advantage of it. In any event, my friends' attitude suggests that he wasn't permanently traumatized. But it does mean that instead of working in the office of a non-profit, he's working outside on an avocado plantation which didn't exist when the threat was sent.
I see other things in Guatemala as well. I sit in a cornfield and discuss the plagues of caterpillars menacing the trees and gangs menacing the town. I drink wine in the Spanish cultural center with a woman I met in Huehuetenango and shake hands with a man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the emblem of the hammer and sickle.
The name of this essay is taken from a movie about World War II. It is the name of a submarine, which midway through the movie changes hands. At one point it is occupied by a group of sailors obeying the commands of the Fuhrer Adolph Hitler, the only person ever to occupy that office. Later it is taken over by sailors obeying a chain of command leading back to Franklin Roosevelt, the thirty-second president of the United States. Tom Lehrer has a song about the rocket scientist who during the Second World War, built rockets first for the Germans, and then for the Americans.
“When the rockets go up, who cares where they come down.
'that's not my department,' says Werner von Braun.”
And, depending on what vocabulary you use to analyze the situation, the change in personnel of the U-Boat is not significant. Throughout the movie, it is occupied by military men, following orders to kill people. That's why people shout “you're just like them.” You could say such an attitude is the opposite of Werner von Braun's cavalier perspective towards the machinery of death, but it shares his sense of equivalence.
Some people say we shouldn't have gotten involved in World War II. You can construct alternative histories in which Hitler's Totalitarianism burned itself out, or Hitler and Stalin eventually annihilated each other. You can point out that the end of our involvement in that war was a forty year cold war with our erstwhile allies. I have visited farms begun by C.O.s from World War II who helped create the basis for searching for an alternative to what General Eisenhower later recognized was the menace of the military-industrial complex spawned by that war--by people who thought like Werner von Braun. It is not necessary to agree with every use of American military power. Dr King opposed the war in Vietnam, but felt that he would have fought against Hitler. Joschka Fischer of the Green party sent German troops to fight with us in Afghanistan, but not in the Bush administration's preemptive strike on Iraq. But although some things can be unbundled, it is very difficult to accept the precedent of Nuremburg and the prevailing definitions of War Crimes unless you accept that American military power can serve the cause of justice.
I have many friends in different parts of the United States. Some are lawyers living in the capital, others are farmers living several hours outside. Both I suspect voted for Obama, but in terms of their political views on things like drug policy, or Israel, or social issues, their perspectives are significantly different. And despite voting for the same party, it would be difficult for the lawyers in the capital to really understand the lives of the farmers. And in many ways the farmers lives and attitudes are much more similar to those of the Republican neighbors they go to church and county fairs with. One farmer received a phone call threatening to destroy his irrigation system if he shot the wrong deer while trying to protect his bean planting from being eaten. But I suspect there were some ways his the lives of those two people living off the land, had more in common with each other, than with the lawyer in the capital. It was because of the farmers that I first learned about going to Guatemala—where I had the opportunity to witness the much bigger urban/rural divide in that country.
The organization I served with originally worked with farmers in rural areas. Studying the civil rights struggle, you notice how it took the work of generations of NAACP organizers working to make sure that some one like Thurgood Marshall could be trained not just to make arguments white men could have made, but to give the lie to the assumptions of Jim Crow by his very presence before the Supreme Court. To make sure that when Rosa Parks stayed seated when the law said she should move, there was a network of people who had her back. In the flickering light of kitchen fires I witnessed the quiet strength of a race full of individuals who, I hope are laying the groundwork to contradict their marginalization with something more definitive than verbal disputation.
Later, however our program shifted focus, and although volunteers were based in rural areas, our activities were shaped by the decisions passed down from lawyers in the capital. A chain of individually reasonable decisions often led to us operating one way in one region and completely differently in another. We were a non-violent, non-military organization, but handling the apparent contradictions sometimes forced us into odd coping strategies. At various points, after receiving assignments from the people the folks in Washington had put in charge, my partner and I would look at each other and mumble “I'm just an enlisted man.” That was the most psychologically effective model for dealing with directives which didn't make sense to us, but which we had given up trying to argue with. The Lawyers handed out T-shirts saying “Silence never changed the world, let loose your voice.” One Guatemalan I didn't meet through our organization pointed out “If it weren't for people who kept their mouths shut in the eighties, I would be dead.” On the other hand, others had similar stories about how people speaking up kept them alive. The folks in the capital often talked as if a certain way of doing things was Obvious, and peoples' lives are at stake. But you could arrive at different conclusions depending on who you listened to first. Now thankfully the organization is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay, and perhaps the energy from a city which is a cultural rather than a governmental capital, will change the patterns of interactions.
The second time I went down to Guatemala I answered a call for emergency presence, and I looked forward to spending more time in the glow of kitchen fires. After we arrived, the lawyers changed their minds. In certain circumstances foreign presence can be an asset, in others a liability. And although our organization had been founded to carry on a vision of unarmed bodyguards, when it came to the legal case, it generally seemed that the Guatemalans we worked with felt safer with a police presence. I could see why, but it also seemed like outsourcing a critical part of our reason for being. In some ways it felt like another manifestation of the urban rural divide: peasants can often find work for children to do, children in the city have little productive role, they just need to be driven to soccer games and have their braces paid for. So, a lot of my time I spent in the capital, watching movies on a DVD player which had been donated by an executive director. The people in charge distrusted mainstream movies, but I sometimes felt that they represented how it felt to be working abroad better than the statistics our administrators quoted us at our informational meetings. It was hard to tell what was really going on, many significant events happened off-camera, and it often felt that the disagreement with members of your own organization loomed larger than anything you were supposedly accomplishing. And with so much being relayed second or third hand, figuring out how to behave in situations of imperfect information seems more important than “figuring out what's really going on.” I could often see how decisions made sense individually, but when bundled together they trapped people in catch-22s. I tend to be a contrarian—and often have views which conflicted with my supervisors, whether I worked in restaurants, planning, engineering, tourism, farming, or accompaniment. It is interesting to note that the non-ideological organizations generally seemed much more accommodating of differences of opinion. They didn't necessarily change their mind when I said I thought we were wrong, but they let me vent as long as I bussed my tables, wrote my reports, or picked my vegetables, like I was supposed to do. It was odd that my supervisors in Guatemala reacted as if the frustrations of thwarted idealism were something they had never experienced themselves. Of course, unlike farms and restaurants we didn't really have a product, so I couldn't be judged on anything other than whether I was giving them unconditional personal loyalty.
Teaching American history in China last year I ran across a section on the birth of second-wave feminism a few decades ago. In addition to their frustrations at home and work, women were also frustrated when they tried to help out at radical organizations. Often they were stuck making and serving coffee while the men made plans. Understandably they felt that with their education and commitment they had more to offer than merely serving coffee, while white college boys monopolized the definition of “the movement.”
When I was in Guatemala the second time, and the representatives of the embassy came to visit, the women running our organization suggested that having a man serving coffee would be an excellent way to demonstrate their commitment to “fighting the Patriarchy!” I don't mind serving coffee, I spent many happy years working in restaurants, and it seemed better than watching another movie. But I had viewed serving coffee to businesswomen and professor's wives to pay my way through college as conforming to the assumptions of the system, not challenging them. And when I volunteered to come to Guatemala, I hadn't come to fight the patriarchy, I had come down to help the Maya people, many of whom are themselves patriarchs. There is a series of negative stories about the conquistadors told in Protestant countries, which is called the “leyenda negra.” In Latin America there is a similar “leyenda negra” about the Yankees. I sometimes got the impression that my supervisors were subjected to these stories, because when they got back from meetings with our Guatemalan allies they would make cutting remarks as if I should feel personally responsible for every native American massacred by the US Army. Once the collective punishment starts being handed out, it's not possible to be innocent, but it is possible to be innocent of casting the first stone. Making people feel discontented can be a good thing, but only if you have a plan to channel that discontent rather than just leaving it to fester into self-hatred. If you're trying to raise awareness so that people do more than just stand idly by—a good supervisor should be able to come up with something for them to do when they do make a commitment. Asking some one to serve coffee to representatives of the Bush administration and calling it “fighting the Patriarchy” strikes me as a good signpost for the limits of what “consciousness-raising” by white college kids of either gender can accomplish.
There is a mathematical concept called an asymptote—which is when a curve continually approaches a value which it never actually reaches. Sometimes that feels like a metaphor for social change movements, especially the sort rooted in progressive ideology. We were trying to find a “different” approach. For a lot of NGOs it seemed to be getting away from the profit motive. But hostility toward the profit motive often manifested itself as a suspicion of people doing things which made them happy—whether there was a direct monetary reward or not. “Trying to find a different way of doing things” served as a wildcard people with organizational power played whenever they felt suspicious of some one else's pursuit of happiness. It felt like Harlan Ellison's Invisible Man, and the narrator's encounter with “the Brotherhood”--though the gender is different this decade.
I contrast that with my time by the lake—the hotels and restaurants, and the avocado plantation, all based on the profit motive, and therefore trying to develop a product other people would be willing to pay for. And the man who served coffee had a speaking role, he actually got to talk to the people he served coffee to. Changing what it means to serve coffee, so that the person in that role can meaningfully disagree with the people he serves it to, strikes me as more significant than changing who serves the coffee. And I thought of the difference between the people who wore indigenous dress because they were paid to, and those for whom it was an organic part of their lives. If asking men to serve coffee constitutes fighting the Patriarchy—I think a lot of for-profit institutions in Guatemala served a lot more coffee than we ever did. And the fact that they don't have to apologize for being a business, or searching for things which make them or their customers happy, means that they are able to carry on playing guitar, building sustainable buildings, and creating jobs for indigenous people.
This date is famous for a surprise airborne attack on the homeland which took place some years ago. Like so many things, our conversational habits lead us to search for a single point in the system at which to place blame. It should also be remembered that it is far more difficult to ignore the heroism of the members of the working class who wear uniforms like those of the FDNY and NYPD than before that attack. When placing blame, some people blame the man who a few days later, spoke of a race between only two horses. Others, in the habit of talking as if all human beings are puppets of Langley, smugly blame blowback from the CIA. If you think about it, it doesn't do much harm to Yankee power to have people making each other afraid of the organization HW Bush used to run. And the current system traps everyone. It can't be much fun being the president of a superpower if you have to apologize for saying you don't like to eat broccoli.
In any event there were probably many individual decisions without which things might have happened differently. One was made by the rulers in Riyadh, to whom Osama bin Laden had offered his services a decade prior to expel Saddam from Kuwait. But instead of accepting the offer, the Royal house prioritized their relationship with their fellow oil barons in the Bush administration. Some would say Washington was far more qualified to deal with the situation than bin Laden and his irregular tactics—but it was outsourcing a function some one with extensive experience in the highlands of Afghanistan probably felt should have been kept in-house. It is quite possible that bin Laden's subsequent career was not what he planned all along, but would have been significantly different if the princes had placed ties of belief over ties forged by dealings with that black liquid.
A few years ago, I read a book by Muhammed Yunus, a man who studied in the state of Tennessee before returning to Bangladesh and originating the idea of mircrolending. He advocates a double-bottom line, combining profit with other goals. He talks about working in an province dominated by guerrillas. After his banks were established, some of the guerrillas became his best workers. “They just needed something to fight for, and we were able to give them something better than terrorism.” Muslim men who had studied the movements of small pieces of metal in order to end peoples' lives instead studied the movements of small pieces of metal in order to improve them. These factors determine whether young men get jobs as defenders of the social order, or create jobs for the defenders of the social order. Like the boatman who took advantage of my ignorance by the lake, carefully observed instances of antisocial behavior can also create information which can help people understand how to create a world with fewer reasons for antisocial behavior. And getting through to an understanding of the dynamics of the system and the role information plays in it can be more important than a focus on what other people “should” think or do.
Had those ruling the land currently called Saudi Arabia behaved differently, there would still be another reason to remember this day. Vive Chile! Vive el Pueblo! Vive los trabajadores! [emailed September 11, 2009]
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