Strong to the Finnish - Commies and Finns and Jews, O My!

A couple months ago I heard a guy named Michael Kazin interviewed on the radio.  He’d written a book about how left-wing movements in the United States, despite appearances of having failed dismally at most of what they tried to accomplish, actually significantly influenced the politics and culture of the nation.  I was skeptical – don’t we have the most entrenched plutocracy in history, with skyrocketing inequality, deep-seated racism and widespread misery mitigated only by our position as a global empire with unprecedented firepower and technology?  Nonetheless, I thought the book would cheer me up and I had an Amazon gift card to use so I bought it.

American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation was interesting but of course practically every chapter ended with “They failed to realize their goals but did have a social impact,” which for me blunted the feel-good experience I was hoping to have.  The main lesson I drew from it was that nearly all mass left-wing movements in this country have sprung from immigrant or African American communities.  That in turn made me reflect on how effectively the U.S. elite was from the beginning and remains to this day able to substitute white racial solidarity for class solidarity across racial lines.  (That has made me watch with new enthusiasm the increasing militancy and effective action of the Dreamers and other immigrant organizers.)

But leaving aside that sweeping generalization, by far the most interesting piece of information in the book was this:  In 1923, 40% of the membership of the Communist Party of the United States were Finnish – the largest ethnic component with about 7000 members.

Huh?  What about the received wisdom that the core of the Party were Jews?

Well, timing is everything, for one.  In the late twenties, about half the Party membership was Jewish, a fact apparently lamented by the leadership, which felt that would keep it from developing an “American” identity.  To counter that problem, says Kazin, no Jew was ever elected to lead the national party in its heyday.  There was a Finnish general secretary – Gus Hall (born Arvo Gustav Halberg).  (As it happens, just before reading the Kazin book I read the autobiography of Peggy Dennis (born Regina Karasick), who told the story of how Hall finagled to assume the leadership over the dying body of her husband, Eugene Dennis (she was Jewish, he wasn’t).)  There was, apparently, in the twenties, something of a battle between Jews and Finns for the soul (or for control) of the Party.

That aside, I didn’t even know there were 7000 Finns in the U.S. in 1923.  In fact, I never thought about there being a Finnish community at all, though why would there not be?  I started reading up on them.  In the process I found out most of what I thought I knew about Finland and its neighbors was false.

Before I started, what I knew about Finland was:

They have the “best school system” (whatever that means) in the world.  They provide free meals at school and kids don’t learn to read until they’re seven.  About two-thirds of kids go to college and only the top 10% of college students get to become teachers.  (That stuff is true, as far as I know.)

They speak an idiosyncratic language unrelated to any other European language (false: it’s related to Estonian, Hungarian and some other Baltic languages like Livonian, Votic, Karelian, Veps, and Ingrian).

The scene in the movie “Reds” where Diane Keaton scales snow-covered cliffs to crawl over the Finnish border into the Soviet Union was historically inaccurate.

Here’s what I learned from my research:

Sweden – known for its excellent health care and social welfare programs, home of the Right Livelihood Award and Ingmar Berman, was a major and pretty vicious imperial power from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries.  Swedish crusaders invaded Finland on their way to Russia, and for four centuries frequently battled Russia, and sometimes Poland and Denmark as well, for control over Finland and other parts of the Baltic.  Sweden moved settlers into southern and western Finland, and the kings gave land grants to their allies in Finland’s coastal areas, thus creating a Swedish-speaking Finnish elite.

The Swedish empire lost big during the Napoleonic wars, and Sweden ceded Finland to Russia, which controlled it until Lenin recognized Finland’s independence in December 1917.  The Russian general strike and attempted socialist revolution of 1905 had a counterpart in Finland.  Some Finnish socialists made their way to the U.S. in the aftermath of that revolution, as did some Russian Jewish socialists.  Others fled to escape increasing conscription into the Tsar’s army – the same threat which brought my grandfather to this country.

In 1906, the Tsar implemented some reforms in efforts to forestall future uprisings.  One of those established the Finnish national Parliament and the Finns insisted that it be elected through universal suffrage, making it the second country (after New Zealand) to give women the right to vote.

The period between 1870 and 1930 is known as the “Great Migration” of Finns to North America.  They concentrated in the upper Midwest, especially Michigan, where they currently constitute 16% of the population of the Upper Peninsula.  There’s a television show broadcast there called “Finland Calling.”

Many became mineworkers and steelworkers, and they were heavily organized by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).  When 160 IWW activists, including Wobbly leader Big Bill Haywood were arrested and charged with treason during World War I, five of the defendants were Finns.

The Finnish Socialist Federation (FSF) affiliated with the Socialist Party in 1908, at which time they made up 12% of the Party’s members nationwide.  In 1922, the FSF (later the Finnish Workers Federation) changed its allegiance to the Communist Party, which was then called the Workers’ Party.

The U.S. government, at the deportation trial of labor organizer John Swan, introduced the argument that Finns were actually related to Mongolians, therefore were subject to the Asian Exclusion Act.

After the Russian Revolution, about 10,000 “Red Finns” left the United States and Canada to settle in Finnish areas of the Soviet Union.

Not actually Berkeley - it's Butte, Montana
courtesy drbutoni

In the first half of the twentieth century, the West Berkeley area around University and San Pablo was known as Finntown. There never were really that many Finns there – only about 650 at its peak, but they built institutions including the Finnish Hall at Tenth and Addison, where we used to hold various radical meetings in the 1980s.  Finns also started the Berkeley Consumers’ Cooperative Stores, which when I moved to Berkeley in 1980 had four massive stores (down from a high of twelve) – groceries at Shattuck and Cedar (now Andronico’s), Ashby and Telegraph (now Whole Foods), University and California (now vacant, after sojourns as Living Foods and I can't remember what other chain) and a hardware store on University.

Famous Finnish Americans include actors Matt Damon and Christine Lahti (whose grandmother, Augusta Lahti, was an early American feminist), Clan of the Cave Bear author Jean Auel, and Dr. Amy Kaukonen, who in 1921 became the first woman elected mayor of an Ohio town (Fairport).

Gillian Flynn and the Myth of the Murderous Moms

Recently a coworker who knows I like mysteries handed me his copy of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.

I was ambivalent about it because, one, I had read Flynn’s Sharp Objects, and didn’t like it that well, although it had some good elements.  I particularly didn’t like the fact that all the villains were women or girls and all the men were kind of saintly, if clueless.  And two, it meant lugging a hardback book around for a week.

In the genre fiction writing class I just took, the teacher was talking about why some genre writers “cross over” into “literary” fiction, while others don’t.  Gillian Flynn’s name came up.  He said the difference between her and all the writers stuck in the “pocket mystery” section of the used bookstores is that she has a better agent.

But Gone Girl was such a huge best-seller, and the only other mystery writer in my writing group had raved about it (though she and I don’t necessarily have the same taste).  So I decided to give it a whirl.

Near the end of the first half, I told a friend, “This book really surprised me.  I kind of love it.”  It’s extremely well written.  It’s not necessarily more “literary” than a lot of other mysteries – Marcia Muller does great place evocations, Sara Paretsky builds unforgettable characters, and they both do great issue coverage as do Walter Moseley (who may also be considered “cross-over”) and Tony Hillerman.  But Flynn’s writing combined the quality most important to me – which I inelegantly call “unannoyingness,” with a biting satire that made me want to jump up and cheer.

One bit in particular has already risen to the level of feminist classic.  If you’ve read the book or a review of it, you know what I’m referring to.  But in case anyone hasn’t, here it is (again):

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl...(How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)”

If you’re a feminist, you can’t not love a book that contains those paragraphs.  I tore through the alternating chapters counterposing the diary of Amy, the embittered trying-to-be-Cool Girl with the present-day tribulations of Nick, the apparently bumbling, lying, philandering wife-killer.  Now I knew that the story was sure to turn, because it could not be so simple as it seemed, and I had more or less guessed how.  But I was unprepared for how cheated I felt when I realized that the character I’d grown so fond of was as fictitious as Cool Girl is.

The book kept me turning the pages, I’ll say that for it, and it retained flashes of brilliance.  But by the end, I threw it across the room, saying, “This woman is anti-feminist.”

How could Flynn go from uber-feminist to anti-feminist in 200 pages?  The only possible answer is that she’s neither.  I looked online to see what other women were saying.

The best thing I found is “Gone Girl and the Specter of Feminism” from a great blog called interrogatingmedia:

Ultimately, Gone Girl is done in by its ambition. It desperately wants to do interesting, subversive things, but in trying to, falls into some really misogynist narratives and implications. …

In the end, I suppose Gone Girl is really indicative of a post-feminist mindset, wherein the problems of misogyny become somehow the fault of feminism. Perhaps this is why the novel has a weird jab at post-feminist men. Perhaps that’s how one can say brave rape victims are tired, and go on to write a novel like Gone Girl. Or how we can blame the lack of diverse female characters on girl power. It’s a strange world out there for feminism, but this particular mystery isn’t fooling me.

Unfortunately, Ms. Interrogating and I seem to be out there mostly alone in the feminist blogosphere.  Most bloggers and reviewers quote the Cool Girl passage, nod to Flynn’s formidable writing skill, and accept her skewering of feminist tropes as so much good storytelling.

“There’s a difference between writing misogyny for misogyny’s sake and pointing out that misogyny exists and is as insidious in fiction as it is in the real world, and that’s what Gone Girl gets right.” http://earlybirdcatchestheworm.wordpress.com/2012/11/22/gone-girl-by-gillian-flynn-review/

“But even with this feminist treatise hidden within, Gone Girl has no particular affiliations. It’s not really a feminist novel, nor is it a political one. It’s just a damn good book about murder, marriage, and mystery.” http://www.literarytraveler.com/books/murder-she-wrote-reviewing-gone-girl-by-gillian-flynn/

“Gone Girl is ultimately a political novel. More accurately, it is a feminist novel, and it is at its most exhilarating in this particular manifestation of its existence.
Gone Girl is a feminist novel in the elementary sense that it would have been impossible for a man to have written it. No man writing today would be allowed to take the side of a falsely-accused rapist and portray his alleged victim as not only a fraud but a vicious aggressor.” http://tychy.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/book-review-gone-girl/

Had I not read Sharp Objects, I would have dismissed Gone Girl as basically falling into the “wanting to do something different” trap and ending up being predictable in an under-analyzed way.  On her website Flynn says the reason she writes women villains is that “I’ve grown quite weary of the spunky heroines, brave rape victims, soul-searching fashionistas that stock so many books. I particularly mourn the lack of female villains — good, potent female villains.”

I don’t know what Flynn’s been reading or watching, but in the mysteries I read or watch on TV, I would say a woman is the killer eight times out of ten.  Even if it’s a guy – as in Tana French’s In the Woods – a woman pulled the strings.  There are whole television series devoted to women who do bad things, from “Snapped” about women who kill to the British hit series “Bad Girls” about women in prison to the Broadway mega-hit “Chicago,” you can’t turn around without seeing evil women.

A couple years ago I was bored one night so I decided to check out “Law & Order: Los Angeles” on on-demand.  (Okay, I was really really bored.)  I started watching the first episode.  Since the teenage actress was the first suspect, I figured she likely wasn’t actually the killer, but when it turned out to be her mother, I turned it off and went on to the second.  In that one, a young woman who’s recently been released from prison is found dead and the killer turns out to be her rapist cellmate.  Tried the one about the mistress of the Congressman.  It seemed like the woman’s ex-husband had done it, but no, the Congressman’s wife had hired him.  In the one where the female pro golfer is killed, the prime suspect is the male golfer she was besting, but of course his mother turned out to be the mastermind.  I think the series went eight for eight that night.  The only thing television cop-and-lawyer shows have more of than female killers is Black women judges.

Flynn’s fascination with female killers, she says, came from her childhood love for Brothers Grimm fairy tales.  “Screw the blonde, gentle heroines, it was those wicked queens and evil stepmothers I adored.”

The fact is that those fairy tales, just like the murderous-masterminding-mother-wife motif in Law & Order, expressed the fear of women’s power in a gender-stratified patriarchal society.  It’s not that I think anyone is sitting there saying, “Let’s make all the women killers so people will agree with taking away women’s right to abortion.”  But it’s nonetheless true that in a country obsessed with stopping women from “killing their babies” it helps to have images of murdering mothers all over the media.

Gillian Flynn may be “tired of brave rape victims,” but unfortunately, men are not tired of rape.

Newtown, Occupy and The Book of Mormon

1.  When I first heard about the school shootings in Newtown, I didn’t have a particularly strong reaction.  I saw the headlines, I saw the number 20, then it became 26, but I didn’t read the details.  When a friend said on the phone, “That’s so sad,” I agreed without really thinking about it.

Friday evening I went to a meeting at a café.  The Palestinian owner served my wine.  I noticed he looked upset.

“How are you?” I asked and he said, “Not very good.”

I asked why and he pointed to the television.  Military guys were moving around ambulances and at first I thought something must have happened in Palestine.  But the words on the screen said it was Connecticut.

He has an 18-year-old daughter.

It was only then that I stopped to feel the news.

 

Omar al Masharawi, killed by Israeli shelling
in Gaza, November 14

2.  The mainstream media is nonstop funerals, speculation about the shooter, debates on gun violence, tedious interviews with the same law enforcement people and politicians.  The progressive media has moved on to speculations about how different the discourse would be if the victims or the perpetrator had been people of color, at home or abroad.  They remind us of all the deaths we’re not grieving, from kids killed by gun violence in Chicago (117) to kids killed by drones in Pakistan (168) to kids killed in last month’s Israeli bombing of Gaza (30) (read their names).

These are totally valid things to remind us of, fair and even necessary questions to raise.  Usually I’d be right there with them.  But the efforts at parallelism are making me uncomfortable.

I think that’s because it emphasizes the profound alienation we leftists feel from the rest of our society.  It feels like we want to wallow in our alienation and fling it in people’s faces.

And I can’t help feeling that wallowing in alienation is what brought Adam Lanza to the point where he could think it was right to kill 20 children and 6 women.

Aren’t drones the ultimate expression of the alienation our society promotes?  It’s a form of warfare that alienates the actor from their actions, the shooter from the target, the person from their compassion. I don’t want to encourage any more alienation, by seeming to criticize people for their emotional response to the suffering of other parents.

I know that’s not what my friends and fellow leftists are aiming for.  They want people to feel the same compassion for the parents in Gaza and Pakistan and Oakland that they feel for the parents of Newtown.  But I can’t help feeling that heaping negative information onto people’s consciousness will only encourage them to distance more, to dull their awareness of other people.

For years, I believed that if only people knew what was happening, knew the cost of our policies, they would care, and they would do something.  But the evidence is that it doesn’t work that way.  What it usually takes for people to change their positions or their actions is deep personal contact with someone who is hurting.

Would white Americans feel the pain of Palestinian parents if they could see a Palestinian father grieving for the families in Newtown?

 

3.  In my writing class on Saturday, we discussed the first few chapters of my novel, Murder Under the Bridge.  Most people found the American peace activist highly annoying.  (Everything I do to try to make her more sympathetic seems to have the opposite effect.)

A young woman said, “I knew a lot of people like her in college.  They all went into the Peace Corps.”

“Yes,” said the teacher, “people who go into the Peace Corps are usually annoying.”

“They’re idealists,” someone else said.  “And idealists are annoying.”

That’s true, I realized.  In our culture, idealists are considered very annoying.  Why?  Because their refusal to be suitably alienated makes us question our own alienation?

 

4.  A friend and I saw The Book of Mormon on Thursday night.  (Please do not ask how much we paid!)  It’s hilarious.  It’s also deeply offensive on so many levels: casually racist, sexist, making jokes about things that aren’t funny like AIDS and rape.  A lot of its comedy is mean-spirited, but it’s sharp and the music and dancing is incredible. I couldn’t decide which I was more ashamed of: enjoying it or criticizing its political incorrectness. I’m pretty sure the fact that it’s such a huge hit says something about how we can do such terrible things to each other, not to mention those we consider Other.  Cynicism has become our religion.  Idealists are annoying.  Alienation is our god.

 

5.  Karl Marx predicted that under capitalism, workers would “inevitably lose control of their lives by losing control over their work.”  But Marx did not see capitalism continuing for this long.  He foresaw that the working class would rise up and reassert control over their lives through socialism.  Aren’t these mass shootings, at their most basic level, a response to the prolonged alienation of people from our labor, our environment and each other?

But a transition to socialism, whether by revolution or some more gradual means, can only take place if the alienation that separates us from each other is somehow lessened or challenged.

Occupy was the answer.  People were coming together, relating without the mediation of wages and commodities, representation and hierarchy.  That’s why it had to be so swiftly and thoroughly repressed.  It might also be why the crime rate in Oakland declined during the encampment at Oscar Grant Plaza.  But the repression succeeded.  The new manifestations of Occupy, smaller, targeted campaigns for foreclosure defense, debt relief, labor support, are great but they do not offer that broad, easy access to an alternative vision of what our society can be.

What the brief flame that was Occupy/Liberate/Decolonize did was cut through the cynicism that says that idealism is just annoying.  It made a space for ideals and the people who hold to them to be loved and cherished.

 

6.  Today is the Solstice, the End of the Mayan Calendar, The Great Turning.  Let it be a turning toward a world in which idealism is cherished, not annoying.

Does Mental Illness Exist? Yes!

I was trying to write something very different, something much more cerebral and complicated, about Newtown and alienation and Occupy and The Book of Mormon, which I saw the other night.  Maybe I still will.  But I just couldn't get it done because I kept being drawn to people's Facebook chatter.  A lot of it centers around this piece by Liza Long:

I Am Adam Lanza's Mother.
Three days before 20 year-old Adam Lanza killed his mother, then opened fire on a classroom full of Connecticut kindergartners, my 13-year old son Michael (name changed) missed his bus because he was wearing the wrong color pants.
“I can wear these pants,” he said, his tone increasingly belligerent, the black-hole pupils of his eyes swallowing the blue irises.
“They are navy blue,” I told him. “Your school’s dress code says black or khaki pants only.”
“They told me I could wear these,” he insisted. “You’re a stupid bitch. I can wear whatever pants I want to. This is America. I have rights!”
“You can’t wear whatever pants you want to,” I said, my tone affable, reasonable. “And you definitely cannot call me a stupid bitch. You’re grounded from electronics for the rest of the day. Now get in the car, and I will take you to school.”
I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me. Read more

Someone posted it.  I sat in the cafe where I am writing and tears ran down my face.  I resonated with it, because I grew up in a family with mental health issues.  I knew that out-of-control feeling, of knowing that someone you loved was going through something you could not get at.  Just loving them, just wanting to help wasn't doing it.  I was a kid but I saw the helplessness in my parents' eyes because they couldn't heal this deep pain and couldn't get the help they needed.

I have a friend whose sister is troubled.  We don't know exactly why or what's going on with her, but she's a sweet kid who can erupt in violent behavior.  Her mother is scared.  My friend hides in her room when her sister has outbursts, which is mostly what I did.

I was struck by some of the comments to Long's piece.  Some were preachy and blaming, others filled with vitriol for herself or her son.  Some tried to be compassionate at the same time as they were saying Long wouldn't have this problem if she were not such a bad mother, or had not gone to bad doctors.  After I posted it to my wall, friends posted other responses, like this one:

You Are Not Adam Lanza’s MotherAfter this blog post was republished on Huffington Post, I thought it necessary to summarise the main reasons why it’s a terrible springboard for further conversation on the subject.

1) The suggestion that this woman’s son is of the same type of person who would or will commit a “rage murder”, without any real evidence to back up this suggestion.

2) ...By reducing ‘mental illness’ to ‘outward behaviour’ the article dehumanises the mentally ill and completely glosses over the inner mental life and experiences of those with mental illness.

3) The article complains about mental illness stigma while reinforcing it by explicitly tying it to violence, and in particular, mass killings. The reality is that there is no such observed link: “after analysing a number of killers, Mullen concludes, ‘they had personality problems and were, to put it mildly, deeply troubled people.’ But he goes on to add: ‘Most perpetrators of autogenic massacres do not, however, appear to have active psychotic symptoms at the time and very few even have histories of prior contact with mental health services.’” And most people with mental illness are not violent, although they are far more likely to be victims of crime (see here, for instance). more

The author of that post makes good points, but its emphatic conclusion is:

You are NOT Adam Lanza’s mother. The sort of quasi-solidarity expressed in “We are [oppressed people]” or “I am [dead person]” appropriates the experiences of people who are unheard, in this case the victim of a mass homicide, and uses that to bolster a narrative that doesn’t even attempt to discover or represent the experiences of those they claim to speak for. Don't do that.

Author, did you miss something?  Liza did not claim to "be" the victim of the mass homicide, unless you are saying that Adam Lanza is the victim, in which case, who is the perpetrator?

Liza is saying she never wants to be the mother of a mass murderer.  I have friends who have said that, who held their breaths during their sons' violence-riddled teenage years.  Nancy Lanza is dead, but we should still have some empathy for her.  She didn't raise Adam to do what he did, but he did it.  It could happen to any of us who dare to raise kids in a deeply troubled society.

I have friends who deny that mental illness exists at all.  People are merely misunderstood, not challenged in school, not valued for who they are, not given the freedom to run around, too smart, too creative, too special for this one-size-fits-all society.  It's true that our first twenty efforts to solve behavior problems in kids and adults should center around trying to figure out what they need that they're not getting, give them more attention, more love, more opportunity.  It's true that the loss of empathy required to commit mass murder is fostered by capitalism and militarism.

But mental illness exists too.  I know it from painful experience and so do many of you.  For years, I felt I was teetering on the edge of it.  I was always able to pull myself back, but others in my life have not been so lucky.  A number of friends of mine have recently had to deal with suicides - more than one, by people who obviously could not get whatever they needed.  Depression is anger turned inwards.  If it turns back outward, it can be dangerous.  I don't know what to do about it, and Goddess knows, I don't want it to involve any more guns or prisons or laws (which it inevitably will).  But denying its existence will not make it go away and neither will heaping blame on the parents who are every day worrying and trying to figure out how to help their kids.

I've written about the problem of trying to isolate causes and effects before.  Saying that mental illness can cause violence is not the same as saying that all or most mentally ill people are violent.  They are not.  Not all unemployed people are poor, either - look at Mitt Romney.  But we all know unemployment can cause poverty.  Cancer can kill you, but not everyone who dies has cancer.  We need to get a lot better about this cause and effect thing.  And we need to treat the causes in a hurry.

9 (Sort of ) Revolutionary (Sort of) Gifts for the Holiday Season

A number of my friends have the misfortune to have birthdays very close to Xmas.  It's a misfortune because it’s hard to schedule parties and because people like me, who hate shopping, avoid it even more ferociously as December wears on.  But of course, the Internet has changed all that.  In the cozy privacy of my office, I figured I could be a good friend and not give IOUs or “love yas” instead of real live gifts this year.  But having made that earth-shattering decision, I was stuck when it came to where on the ever expanding world wide web I might actually find something suitable for the revolutionary who has almost everything she could want except revolution.

So I Googled “gifts for revolutionaries”.

I skipped right over the ones that were using “revolutionary” to modify an app, device, fabric or appliance – surprisingly, there weren’t that many.  I guess maybe the days when “revolutionary” got anyone’s attention are bygone, since it must by now be the second most common word in the English language.

I did get a little excited by “Redesign revolution” because boy, do we ever need to do that!  But sadly, it wasn’t a how-to guide for a consensus process that works in just 45 minutes or getting media attention for your creative direct action.  Instead it was “Gizmos, Gadgets and Gifts – Oh My! Holiday Gift Guide for Gadget Geeks.”  I am kind of a gadget geek, but I don’t wanna be so I clicked away in a hurry and went on to:

1.      The very first item was Jesus Christ Revolutionary, and it actually said “You searched for Jesus Christ Revolutionary” which I certainly did not!  But I clicked through to http://www.cafepress.com/+jesus-christ-revolutionary+gifts, which features a Jesus-as-Che Viva La Resurreccion Baseball Jersey.  The cutest thing I found there was the No Justice No Sleep baby bodysuit.  I don’t have any revolutionary friends getting ready to deliver, but when I do, I know what they’re getting for baby shower gifts.  

2.      From Amazon comes The History Channel Presents The Revolution (2006).  Revolution in a box for $49.99 would be a good deal, but sadly it’s a 13-part miniseries about The American Revolution.  No doubt I’d learn something, but not what I had in mind.

3.       Zazzle, as it turns out actually does have a “revolutionary gift” site offering everything from U.S. Army mugs to revolutionary war memorabilia to pictures of Villa and Zapata to Ron Paul bumper stickers to Socialist Party pins.  I clicked on the last and found myself at the page entitled “Home > Politics > United States > Parties > Communist” – wait, was it a socialist or a communist pin?  Couldn’t buy it unless I knew.  Oddly, the Red Star on a black field pin was not on that page, but on the “Philosophy and Belief” page.  Go figure.  At the top of my screen, underneath “Revolutionary Gifts - T-Shirts, Posters, & other Gift Ideas” it said:  “Related Searches:  vladimir lenin without, war, war cannon”.  Huh?

4.       There’s Revolution Tea:  “Revolution Tea is proud to introduce you to the wonderful world of tea. In the past, you may have experienced the bitter taste of low quality teas served in paper bags. At Revolution, we are committed to changing the way tea is served in addition to offering high quality, great tasting teas crafted to suit the taste of today's palate.”  In addition to tea, they offer tea lights, tea cups, tea servers, tea cakes but sadly not "Revolutionary Tea Party," my favorite CD by the great Lillian Allen.  You can get it on CD baby though.  

5.     Revolution Books, marketing hub of the formerly-antigay-now-only-mildly-heterosexist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), offers “shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, hats, calendars, tote bags and more with challenging and inspiring quotes from…the cutting edge work of Bob Avakian, whose new synthesis of communism envisions a radically new society that is overcoming all of the oppression of the current world while giving great scope to the intellectual work, ferment, and dissent as integral to the complete emancipation of humanity.”  Okay, just how “new” and “cutting edge” can his work be after 50 years?

6.     Maopost.com offers Chinese propaganda posters.  Site labels include “Posters”, “Calendar cards”, “Fakes & reproductions” and the ever-popular “Personalized oil paintings”:  “A revolutionary gift idea: your portrait oil painted like a propaganda poster."  I thought about it.

7.     Mug Revolution was actually kind of tempting, as both I and one of my Saggitarian friends love mugs.  These boast lead-free glazes and certified 100% non-toxic local clay.  They are hand-made in Oregon, meaning they wouldn’t be being shipped too far, but they're kind of ugly, at least in the pictures. Maybe it takes toxic clay or lead glaze to make pottery that looks pretty? (No offense meant to any of my potter friends, who all make gorgeous and I'm sure healthful stuff.)

8.    “Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Apocalypse Saga L.E.”  I gather is a Japanese animated TV series.  It’s a 3 DVD set and sounds rather gender-bending:

"Utena, fueled by her desire to protect Anthy, continues to prevail over the feeble ambitions that drive the Student Council to fight.

The Council's ambitions are reignited, however, when they hear a sound. At first, it's faint, but soon it becomes clear: the promised revolution is within reach - and the duels must go on.

And what of Utena's own ambition? To become a prince, the duels may be only one of the trials she has yet to face."

It might be just the thing for friends or kids who like anime, which I don’t.  Though for full disclosure, one of the swordswomen on the box cover is wearing a long pink gown.

9.   Revolution Brewing, a Chicago brewpub has a host of “Revolution Brewing” paraphernalia, including shirts, caps, signs, and bottle openers.  Cute for a revvy who drinks beer, but I'm going to keep looking.

The Week After the Day After

Unable to beat Obama with tried and true tactics – racist fearmongering, voter suppression and the grand coalition of pissed off white men – the Republicans are apparently going for the one thing that never fails: a sex scandal.  Somehow they are trying to tie an extramarital affair, or two, by CIA director Gen. David Petraeus to the attack on the embassy in Benghazi.  Huh?  Doesn’t matter if it makes sense.  An extramarital affair took down Clinton, it will take down Obama, even if it’s not his affair and even if House Majority Leader and superreactionary Eric Cantor also knew about the affair and didn’t broadcast it.

What’s that you say?  The Lewinsky affair didn’t take down Clinton?  Of course it did.  Just ask anyone.  History cannot be changed by the facts.

So like many of you, I breathed a sigh of relief on Wednesday.  One because the right wing did not win.  Two, because a few good things passed in California and the worst ones didn’t.  And three because it’s over.

I had been pretty sure that if Obama won, Romney would refuse to concede, demanding recounts in every state, even possibly challenging the electoral college itself.  Maybe it was the fact that that particularly anti-democratic provision of the Constitution was designed to overempower the slave states, which as a number of analysts have noted, closely correspond to today’s red states, that stopped the Republicans from pursuing that strategy.  Or maybe it was the fact that they were truly shell-shocked, caught by surprise, having 100% swallowed their own bunk so that they believed they would win fair and square by cheating and lying, and had no back-up plan.  Maybe, as the new uberman Nate Silver had suggested, their minds were in such a twist that they had lost the simple ability to count to 270.  Anyway, it’s exciting to realize I’m capable of more diabolical thinking than the Republican party!  Have to consider what havoc I can wreak with that special power.

Now as for the Obama victory, I am not so ecstatic, as I’m sure most of you are not either.  As we all know, it means more drones, more deportations, more charter schools, more gay marrying while cities burn and flood.

However, I learned something about myself this election season.  And that’s that as I get older, my appreciation for left-wing self-righteousness, purity and cynicism wanes.  Now this is kind of a shock to my system, because those have been my staple foods for many years.  It’s not that I want to hold hands and sing Kum-ba-yah.  I’m definitely not going to go out there and register voters for the Democrats, or even vote for them very much (in this election, I think the only one I voted for was Congresswoman Barbara Lee, and I’m not all that thrilled with her.)  It’s just that the ability to see the cloud behind every silver lining no longer seems radical to me, instead it seems like another way of preserving and protecting the status quo.

Here are a few posts that reflect the negativism emanating from my corner of the virtual universe on Wednesday:

“I am so fucking DONE with being subtly and not so subtly called stupid by my so called friends and comrades in and around the anarchist community for making a different choice than the one they'd like to make for me. All this campaign cycle I have been paralyzed by the ways I've internalized the shaming and silencing tactics. I've been questioning my passion and then trying to quell it. It's hard to stand up and say, yes, I am one of the people you think are morons because I make this particular choice, but I wish i'd done that. Right now I am waiting for the returns and feeling really sad that i didn't go out and fight for Prop 30, and really frightened about what's going to happen if it doesn't pass. having worked on a school budget last year. And I'm pissed at myself for allowing the opinion of people who, frankly, don't care about the same things I do, matter to me.”

--RJ, on Facebook

“…the delirium of liberals this morning is understandable: the night could scarcely have gone better for them. By all rights, they should expect to be a more powerful force in Washington. But what are they going to get from it? Will they wield more political power? Will their political values and agenda command more respect? Unless the disempowering pattern into which they have voluntarily locked themselves changes, the answer to those questions is almost certainly "no"….

“With last night's results, one can choose to see things two ways: (1) emboldened by their success and the obvious movement of the electorate in their direction, liberals will resolve that this time things will be different, that their willingness to be Good Partisan Soldiers depends upon their core values not being ignored and stomped on, or (2) inebriated with love and gratitude for Obama for having vanquished the evil Republican villains, they will follow their beloved superhero wherever he goes with even more loyalty than before. One does not need to be Nate Silver to be able to use the available historical data to see which of those two courses is the far more likely one.”

Glenn Greenwald, "Obama and progressives: what will liberals do with their big election victory?"

“I’m really ready to be done with the in-fighting among the Radical Left….Some folks voted for President Obama, albeit in a range from enthusiastic to reluctant support. Some voted for progressive third party candidates like Jill Stein, choosing to give the side eye to the binary of the prevailing two party system. Others abstained altogether, rejecting the notion that voting for the lesser of two evils is any choice at all.  The Radical Left is not a monolithic entity, but rather a diverse set of communities that approach the realization of justice in a variety of ways. I’m not suggesting that we become more alike, but I am concerned that the way we talk about our differences is not only unproductive but oftentimes a violent distraction from our shared goals….The past two years have been like a family reunion gone terribly wrong.”

Crunkadelic, "After the Love Has Gone: SomeThoughts on Radical Community After the Election"

“…there are those of us that would have rather seen Romney in the house. Imagine if he took away women's rights, then many people would surely rise up in opposition, bc it effected them directly. Unfortunately since americans don't YET feel the extent of the austerity measures, and haven't YET experienced a drone strike, killing one of their children - so it's super easy for them to ignore the daily horrors done by US (over the past several decades, but significantly advanced by Oboma!), for many in the world...”

the person writing this is too young to remember Reagan, but not to remember GW Bush

It makes me incredibly sad and angry to hear a spectacularly talented and hard-working young activist say she feels shamed and silenced by the people who are supposed to be fighting for a better world.  Isn’t shaming and silencing what we have Rush Limbaugh for?

Let’s get one thing clear: in my lifetime, people have not risen up because we had woman-hating budget-slashing right-wing presidents.  The only significant rising in my adult life came under a Democratic president – Obama, one year ago, remember?  It wasn’t a fluke.  It was because, as Frances Piven and Lorraine Minnite pointed out in The Nation a few weeks back, for a social movement to flourish, people have to feel that there’s a chance they’re going to be listened to.  In 2002-3, we had an enormous outpouring of antiwar energy, millions in the streets, tens of thousands doing civil disobedience.  Bush/Chaney made it clear that they did not care, were not listening, were never going to listen, and the movement fizzled quickly.

For whatever it’s worth, Obama and other politicians heard the Occupy movement.  It changed the conversation, suddenly 99% was on everyone’s lips.  Obama turned around on the Keystone XL Pipeline because of the thousands brought to Washington by 350.org and other environmental groups.  He changed his position again, yes, but that doesn’t negate the accomplishment.  He signed Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals one day after a group of immigrant kids sat in in his campaign headquarters.  Coincidence?  No.  He didn’t do it because he’s a nice guy, he did it because he needed the Latino vote.  Great, that’s what pressure politics is about.

People waste way way way too much time arguing over whether Obama is the most progressive president since FDR or more right-wing than Reagan.  It doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t even make sense.  As many people have reminded us over the last four years, FDR did not get elected as a progressive; he got elected as a deficit hawk, and became progressive to avoid socialism.

Who’s in the White House is not nearly as important as who’s in the streets.

If your goal is to be right about Obama, or about liberals, then congratulations.  You are.  You can go home and say Mission Accomplished.  But if you want to make change, you actually have to work at it, and you have to do it with a belief that change is possible.  As a magic teacher of mine used to say, if you can’t believe it’s possible, pretend you can.

In the next two months, Obama and the congressional leadership are going to make decisions – in the name of avoiding the “fiscal cliff” – that will have long-term important effects on the lives of millions of seniors, students, workers, on the environment, on transportation, on everything.  Left to their own devices, they will definitely make decisions that will hurt.  If everyone who attended an Occupy march last year hits the road immediately with “No Cuts - Tax the Rich” signs, banners, guerrilla ads, paid-for ads, letters, petitions, lawn signs, window signs, you name it, the leaders may still make terrible decisions.  Or they might make less terrible ones.  Only one way to find out and that’s to stop snarking and start organizing.

Don't Drink the Cool-Aid: Yes on 34

As some of you have noticed, I've been on a blogging holiday, but I just have to respond to some of the things that have been circulating recently from progressives opposing Proposition 34, to repeal the death penalty in California.

Proposition 34, dubbed “SAFE California”, or “Savings, Accountability, and Full Enforcement for California Act” is not the death penalty repeal I would have written.  I don’t support the imposition of life without parole for anyone.  I don’t support slavery in prison or anywhere else.  I hate using arguments of cost savings, efficiency and “making these criminals work and pay instead of sitting around in private rooms watching television” to overturn a horrific and immoral policy.  But none of those are legitimate reasons to vote against Prop. 34.

I understand why death row inmates have blasted the initiative, promulgated by Death Penalty Focus and the ACLU.  If the initiative passes, these inmates, who are uniformly low-income and mostly African American or Latino, will lose the right to court-appointed counsel for appeals which have not been filed.  Many of them are old and have been on Death Row for decades.  They will be sent out to maximum security prisons all over the state, far from friends, family and lawyers.  They fear they will be targeted for violence and unable to defend themselves against younger prisoners.

A friend works at San Quentin and she tells me that death row inmates can’t even sit down on their beds because they are covered with legal papers.  They live for their appeals.  It’s a heart-rending image.  But the fact is that there are 700 inmates on death row, and since 1981 only 6 have been released, while 13 have been executed.  So these guys are at least twice as likely to be killed by the state as to be freed if we do not eliminate the death penalty.

Some inmates have painted Prop. 34 as a secret plot by Jeanne Woodford, former warden of San Quentin and now executive director of Death Penalty Focus, to deprive them of their appeals and funnel more money to police.  That is fantasy.  According to law professor Ellen Kreitzberg, “Long-time opponents of the death penalty approached Jeanne Woodford and asked her to consider being a spokes person in support of Prop 34.”  I know for a fact that the ACLU and Death Penalty Focus spent a lot of time doing focus groups and workshops to figure out what they could get broad enough support for to actually have a chance of winning.  And California is not all that is at stake.  We have by far the most people on death row in the country, and if California votes to end it, that will give huge momentum to the abolition movement in other states.

People have argued that Proposition 34, in replacing the death penalty with Life Without Parole, would create a terrible new law that we would never be able to change.  That’s absolutely false.  There’s no law that we can’t change.  In fact, 34 would not create new law.  We already have LWOP in California, we already have work requirements for prisoners and prisoners’ wages are already seized by the state.  That doesn’t mean these things are okay.  We should be working against them.  If we do not have to work to end the death penalty, that would free up a lot of time for a lot of people who care about civil rights to work on eliminating LWOP or abolishing prisons.  About 300 current death row inmates would lose automatic access to court-appointed counsel for their appeals (the remaining petitions have already been filed and would still be heard).  There’s nothing to stop us from starting to raise money to fund those appeals.  For years psychologists and civil libertarians have pointed out that the conditions under which death row inmates live – 23-hour-a-day isolation in tiny cells – is a form of torture.  Now suddenly, people on both sides of the issue are romanticizing these torture cells as “private rooms” that the inmates will lose if death row is eliminated.

We are nowhere close to having the political will in this state to abolish the death penalty and life sentences, with or without parole.  We’ve had the death penalty for 30 years and it hasn’t brought us any closer to prison abolition or sentencing reform.  While I sympathize with the people on death row, we cannot risk the lives of more innocent Californians because of the delusions of 300 people that they’re going to win their appeals and be freed.  That’s like opposing food stamps because everyone’s going to win the lottery.

If passing Proposition 34 is the last thing we do for justice, that will be a travesty.  But not passing it will be an even bigger travesty.  It doesn’t require LWOP for anyone who has not already been sentenced to death.  In fact, fewer people would end up with life sentences if DAs could not use the death penalty to coerce people into pleading guilty and accepting life sentences.

However you look at it, there’s just no upside to keeping the death penalty.  Vote yes on 34.