Since the day Obama walked into the White House, people have been quoting the story, which he himself told on the campaign trail, about FDR’s alleged challenge to A. Philip Randolph to “go out and make me” end discrimination against African Americans in government hiring. (The story may be apocryphal; it was apparently told to Tavis Smiley by Harry Belafonte who heard it from Eleanor Roosevelt.) Every left-wing commentator points out ad infinitem that if we want Obama to do anything, or if we want Congress to do anything, we need to create a movement to make them do it.
That goes without saying. It did before Obama and it will long after Obama.
What I don’t hear people talking about nearly enough is what it takes to build such a movement. It’s not as simple as 1-2-3. Okay, we need a movement, let’s go buy one at Wal-Mart or log on and sign up at createamovement.org. Wanting it doesn’t get it done, and neither does believing it’s necessary.
One thing I had forgotten, is that Obama told the story in response to a question about finding a just solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. That’s pretty significant, because that is one issue on which we know Obama has flip-flopped since coming into public life. So we can assume that the policy he’s pursuing, of total appeasement toward Israel, is based on opportunism and not deeply held belief. Does it matter? Well it might, especially since policy toward Israel, as people like Walt and Mearsheimer have pointed out, is one area on which elite interest and the interests of justice could be made to, or made out to, coincide. And on the other hand, it’s one issue on which the interests opposed to justice are highly mobilized to stop any change from occurring. But so were the Dixiecrats. Kennedy and Johnson and their allies were deeply beholden to the southern Democrats, and for years they tried to ignore, marginalize, criminalize and defuse the civil rights movement until they couldn’t any more. The civil rights movement made them do it.
It’s also a popular myth – professor Chomsky, among others, spreads it – that U.S. policy toward South Africa changed in the 1980s because the government simply changed its mind, that the U.S. government was an early opponent of apartheid. Not true. U.S. policy towards South Africa changed because of several years of intense organizing following the Soweto uprising in 1976, and that organizing built on decades of less intense but no less critical organizing by groups such as the Committee of Americans for South African Resistance (AFSAR), of which Philip Randolph incidentally was an active member, and the Congressional Black Caucus. The Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act was only passed in 1986 (by overriding a veto by president Ronald Reagan), 14 years after the first anti-apartheid legislation was introduced by Ron Dellums, 25 years after the first boycott legislation was passed in Europe, and 24 years after the International Olympic Committee voted to exclude South Africa.
So by that standard, the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions to end Israeli apartheid is doing pretty well right now. But what hasn’t happened, at least certainly not in the Bay Area, is any upswelling of activism aimed at, or with a prayer of, making Obama (or anyone else in officialdom) change his policy toward Israel.
Why not?
In thinking about this question, I Googled “How to make a successful social movement” and the first thing that came up was something I’ve read a bunch of times before, “8 Stages of Successful Social Movements” by Bill Moyer. Well worth re-reading. One of the things that’s helpful about Moyer’s movement trajectory is that he incorporates down-turns as well as up-turns. So Stage 4 is “Take-Off” at which time “A catalytic (“trigger”) event occurs that starkly and clearly conveys the problem to the public” – think the invasion of Lebanon in 2006 or the assault on Gaza a year ago, or the threatened collapse of the U.S. economy – as a result of which, building on previous organizing by the movement, “The problem is finally put on ‘society’s agenda.’”
Most of us assume that once that happens, it’s full steam ahead. We think of the Montgomery Bus Boycott as the trigger and wiping out six years of ups and downs before the lunch counter sit-ins began, we see an inexorable urge toward the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But Stage 5, in Moyer’s outline, is "Movement Identity Crisis — A Sense of Failure and Powerlessness,” during which time “Those who joined the movement when it was growing in Stage 4 expect rapid success. When this doesn’t happen there is often hopelessness and burn-out.” And, says Moyer, “It seems that this is the end of the movement; in fact, it is now that the real work begins.”
So if I look at any of the movements I’ve been focusing on in the last few years: Palestine solidarity/BDS, anti-war, anti-torture, health care, I would say they’re nearly all in Stage 5 right now. Okay, so what does Moyer say to do in Stage 5? “Recognize that movement is nearing Stage Six and pursue goals appropriate to that stage.”
What’s Stage 6?
“Winning Majority Public Opinion. The movement deepens and broadens, finds ways to involve citizens and institutions from a broad perspective to address this problem. Growing public opposition puts the problem on the political agenda; the political price that some powerholders have to pay to maintain their policies grows to become an untenable liability. The consensus of the powerholders on this issue fractures, leading to proposals from the powerholders for change (often these proposals are for cosmetic change). The majority of the public is now more concerned about the problem and less concerned about the movement’s proposed change. Often there is a new catalytic event (re-enacting Stage 4).”
Wait, so if we’re at the stage of hopelessness and burnout, dwindling numbers at actions, that means we’re on the verge of winning majority public opinion? Maybe, maybe not. But part of the equation is that “new catalytic event,” and I think we can pretty much count on those. Israel will for sure take some new aggressive action before too long, because when has it not? The U.S. economy is too unstable not to have another, bigger crisis (not that this one is anywhere near over). Certainly Haiti could have been a trigger if the movement were in a position to remind people about Katrina.
So the real question is, what do we need to do to be ready to respond to the next catalytic event in a way that pushes us forward, instead of backward?
One of the things that occurs to me in looking at the movements that have been successful in this country is that nearly all of them have been strongly rooted in a specific community and culture. So, for instance, I looked at the website of the Building Movement Project, which looks at case studies of five nonprofits which moved to incorporate a social change agenda into their social service work. The stories are fascinating and inspiring, and one of the things I noticed about them are that they are all working with or in a very specific community. Several are primarily immigrant-oriented, all are limited to a pretty narrow geographic area (a city or neighborhood).
When I think about social movements in this country that have succeeded in bringing about significant social change, I think of the anti-apartheid movement, the civil rights movement, the United Farm Workers, the women’s movement, the AIDS treatment access movement, the retirees movement. And all of these movements were fairly culturally homogeneous, not necessarily in terms of who participated, but in terms of where their leadership was coming from and having a strong cultural base in one community or another. I mentioned this to a friend who said, “What about the labor movement?” But I think that the labor movement actually illustrates this point perfectly. We call it “the labor movement,” but in fact, it was many different movements. It’s not like “labor” suddenly rose up and demanded respect and contracts and got it. Every industry, often every workplace, had to be organized uniquely (and still does) and the organizing had to take into account who the people were who were working in that industry. The UFW involved thousands of organizers from many different backgrounds, but its heart and soul were in the Chicano community. The New York garment industry was organized by Jewish and Italian immigrant women, drawing on Eastern European and Italian traditions of labor militancy. The civil rights movement, of course, was rooted in the Black church, the anti-apartheid movement in the African American intelligentsia. The feminist movement had its base in primarily educated middle-class women, the AIDS movement among middle-class white gay men.
I am not trying to say that movements should be homogeneous, but I think one problem nowadays is that too many of the movements I’ve been part of have had as one of their goals being something they are not. We’re embarrassed about being who we are, we are not coming out of a place of pride in our community and wanting to flex our power, the way that the immigrant rights May Day marches have been. Instead we are well-meaning people who want to help others, or we are people who are ashamed of what our country is doing, or we are professional organizers “working with” a population we are not part of, or we are trying to become part of another culture because we don’t have one we identify with, or we are leftists who basically feel alienated from our whole society. And I just don’t see any of that as a recipe for success.
One of the things I always try to do with groups I’m in is look at who we are, and then try to figure out who we can influence. I think the trend in social movements right now is to do the opposite – to do power mapping, to look at who has the power to change the policy we’re focused on, who has influence over those people, and then try to craft a strategy to reach those influential people. So, for instance, I’ve sat in too many meetings where everyone insisted that the key to a successful movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel is campus activism, and we talked about that for two hours before recognizing that we had no students in the room. Or people were determined to target Lockheed Martin, which is really hard if you don’t know anyone who runs an airline. On the other hand, QUIT! (Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism) set a goal as getting our local queer film festival to stop taking Israeli money, and we’ve been successful in getting them to take the issue seriously and recognize that it is not going away.
If FDR in fact told Philip Randolph to make him act to eliminate federal job discrimination against African Americans, he knew that Randolph had the constituency and the clout to do that. Randolph was the leader of the first African American trade union, and together with Bayard Rustin and A.J. Muste was threatening to organize a March on Washington in 1941 to demand integration of the armed forces. Obama, on the other hand, knows that we don’t have the base to make him change his policy on Palestine or on health care or end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We can’t bring a million people to Washington, not for single payer, not for justice for Palestine, not against the war. So why should he listen to us?
Either we are going to go home and wait for someone who does have a base to build a movement we can cheer from the wings, or we’re each going to give some thought to who we are and whom we can bring with us. I don’t mean the kind of “What 5 people are you going to bring to the next meeting?” exercise that the Organizing Institute people always make us do, but that we all do come from somewhere, we all live somewhere, almost all of us work somewhere, we all have people who care about us, and it’s time we start thinking seriously and strategically about how we can get those people into our movements. Because that’s what it will take to “make them do it.”
Monday, February 8, 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Open Letter to Democracy Now! - Stop Promoting Queer Militarism
Dear Amy and producers of Democracy Now!,
As a loyal listener, I have been shocked and appalled at your coverage of the controversy over whether LGBT people should be kicked out of the military.
Now, as a lesbian, and as a progressive and a supporter of human rights, of course I support people's right not to be fired from their chosen profession. That goes without saying. It's a civil right to be in the military. But the position of the group I work with, LAGAI - Queer Insurrection, and of most other progressive queer people, is that it's a human right to stay out of the military.
You would never have a heterosexual soldier on your show uncritically talking about their work, and not even ask them one question about why they want to be part of an institution whose purpose is to oppress and repress people all over the world and maintain U.S. control over the world's resources. By having those gay people on air, and not even challenging them, you are treating them - us - as less human than straight people. You are reinforcing the very policy that Don't Ask, Don't Tell is based on - that gay people are less moral, or cannot be held to the same ethical and human rights standards, as straight people.
There are many queer organizations that work against discrimination AND for human rights. In 1991, during the first Gulf War, we launched "We Like Our Queers Out of Uniform," a counter-recruitment packet for LGBT youth, and did tabling in the Polk District of San Francisco, where a lot of gay youth hang out. In 1993, we led a "Queers Out of Uniform" contingent of over 100 people in the LGBT March on Washington, carrying signs that said, "The U.S. Military: It's Not Liberation." We were even on the Sally Jesse Raphael show, but were ignored by the left.
As far as I can recall, you have never had an openly queer person on your show as a spokesperson for the antiwar movement. You have never had anyone from our group on your show, and it's not because we haven't tried. But you don't have to have us. There's Stephen Funk, a gay man who became a military resister, was in prison and has made connections with Israeli military resisters. There's Ryn Gluckman, author of the article "Ten Reasons Why Militarism Is Bad for Queer People," from Hampshire College. There's Sarah Lazare, who used to work for you, who is now an organizer with both Courage to Resist and the Queer Youth Organizing Project. There are so many people to choose from, you could probably have one on every day for a month.
Please stop promoting the image of gay people wanting to assimilate into militarist, heteronormative, nuclear family based society. You owe it to your listeners, you owe it to yourselves, and you sure owe it to us, the queer liberation movement.
In struggle,
Kate Raphael
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Could We Create a Liberated Zone in the U.S.?
The other day on "Democracy Now," Amy Goodman had her annual sit-down with her former partner (not sure what exactly their relationship was or is, but the guy she went to East Timor with all those years ago), Allen Nairn. They were talking about Obama's first year, and Nairn was certainly devastating to anyone who still cherished some illusions or hope about Obama as a force for progressive change. For me, he said nothing that I hadn't known for a long time, and I ultimately had to turn it off.
The next day I was talking to a friend who had found the interview fascinating and inspiring, and she asked why I turned it off. I said it was demoralizing. But that isn't really true. What I found it was simplistic. He made a list of things "Obama" has done in foreign policy which are against U.S. and international law, and he kept saying that "Obama could turn off the killing machine but he has chosen not to." While that's technically true, I guess -- the president is the commander in chief, as we all know, and has the power under the constitution to unilaterally set foreign policy to an extent -- it doesn't accurately describe how U.S. foreign policy has ever been made in my lifetime. Let's just imagine that Obama, having been elected on his promise to bomb Afghanistan and Pakistan, etc., etc., walked into the White House last January and said, "Okay, we're leaving Afghanistan starting tomorrow?" Would the Powers-That-Be -- more on that later -- have simply shrugged and said, "Okay, well he's the president, nothing we can do about it?"
This is not to say that Obama couldn't and shouldn't have done better. Certainly he didn't need to expand the military spending, and he didn't need to try to fulfill his pledge to close Guantanamo by sending more people to indefinite detention in places like Afghanistan, Illinois and the countries they were kidnapped from in the first place. But it felt to me that by focusing on Obama and on the law, Nairn was skirting the thorny issue of WHY Obama, along with every other president we've had in my lifetime (and probably before) has kept the killing machine working so smoothly. And that's that there's not the political will in this country to turn our society into one that cares about people, in this country or any other. People who campaign on those promises -- Jesse Jackson, Cynthia McKinney, Dennis Kucinich -- get somewhere between 1% and 25% of the vote.
So the question that I was plagued by, as I listened to Allen Nairn, was how do we create the political will to live differently? To be honest, even most of the leftists who oppose U.S. militarism don't imagine a society not governed through violence. They only imagine the guns in the hands of people they like.
Nairn did say one thing that stuck with me as I turned off the TV. He was running down a list of countries where the U.S. has backed repressive regimes, and he mentioned Honduras, where the oligarchic leader Manuel Zelaya decided to abandon his fellow oligarchs and pursue more social equity. And of course we know what happened to Zelaya, and I think that is exactly what would happen to Obama if he were to make the same decision. Maybe it wouldn't look overtly like a military coup, but Obama would be gone, probably dead, and someone the oligarchs liked would be in the process of becoming the democratically elected president.
So the first thing I thought about after I turned off Democracy Now was that we need to get that this is an oligarchy, not a democracy. I mean, I know most leftists know that on some level, but we keep convincing ourselves that our "democratic institutions," whether in the form of mainstream candidates, third parties, legislators, legislation, legal action or protest, can be made to work. But if we understand that this is fundamentally an oligarchy, then we understand that it doesn't matter how they dress it up; ultimately, you cannot do anything that undermines the power of the oligarchs. Protest, such as we are doing now, actually helps them because it makes people believe we have democracy. Electoral campaigns help them even more because they not only promote the idea that we have democracy but they tie up humongous amounts of time and money and leave lots of demoralized people when they fail. And armed resistance, be it stupid unfocused armed resistance like setting fire to SUVs, or plots like the one embodied by underwear bomber, helps them immeasurably by convincing ordinary folks that they're in danger, and need the oligarchic power structure to keep them safe.
I'm not trying to say that we can't have minor victories. I'm not even suggesting that I'm going to stop organizing protest or that my friends who do environmental or civil rights law shouldn't keep trying to stop the worst abuses (my friend Lisa just won a big victory in court, protecting the Desert Tortoise -- congratulations!). But I have started to think about what it would really take to create the political will to have a different type of society. And that has made me start thinking seriously of building alternative institutions.
Now I have never been very big on alternative institutions. I've done my share of volunteering, there are some organizations I love, but I've never gotten really into the community garden thing or the community food coop thing or the free clinic thing. I admire people who do them, but I've never thought I had anything to contribute and somehow I've always felt that they would take time away from my political activism. And too often, I have felt like the people creating those alternative institutions are anti-political, acting as if it's possible to fundamentally change this society through volunteerism or charity work.
One question that now occurs to me is how alternative any institution that is coexisting with the dominant institutions can be. Pretty much, every time we try to set up alternative institutions we either:
· end up founding nonprofits, which if they are really successful, such as the rape crisis centers or domestic violence programs, end up becoming an arm of the state
· end up creating something that is underfunded, understaffed and therefore doesn't provide whatever benefit it's meant to provide as well as the corporations do
· end up creating something that has too many internal contradictions because it's only accessible to people with lots of leisure time or people willing to dedicate all their non-work time to social projects
· have to abandon the project because we can't fund it; or
· spend all our time fundraising and not much doing what we're supposed to be doing.
Whether our alternative institutions succeed or fail (and they seem to mostly fail), they inevitably end up shoring up the dominant institutions by plugging some hole that it is supposed to fill, and/or proving that "the system works" -- i.e., charity is a viable way to get social needs met, or lack of childcare isn't a problem because people can just set up coops.
But what if we could really separate ourselves from the dominant institutions, withdraw both our money and our labor from them, and completely reject their services?
Everyone I know fantasizes about leaving this country. We know that we can't change its policies, and we neither want to be supporting/funding them nor be repressed by them. We feel dispirited and disempowered by continually ramming our heads against the wall of collective indifference. A few of my friends have actually moved to other countries -- some more happily than others, but for most of us it's not really an option. Where would we go, how would we make a living (do we want to teach English?), would we end up doing anything more worthwhile in some other country or would we be even more alienated because we would not even be citizens and most of us wouldn't know the language?
I have always felt that self-imposed exile would be nothing more than an abrogation of responsibility by a privileged few.
But what if instead of taking ourselves out of the U.S., we could take the U.S. out of us?
Could we create a liberated zone within the territory held by the U.S.?
Imagine:
Everyone within a certain community -- town, street, neighborhood -- stops working for corporations or the nonprofits they fund and stops paying taxes to the U.S. and the State. With our combined unpaid taxes as seed money, we free ourselves from the need to work for them. We declare that we do not want their protection, their schools, their hospitals, their roads. We begin to create our own economy, put our own labor toward building our own schools, roads, hospitals, as if we lived in the free country we want to live in, and in fact, we declare that we are a free country, we are not part of the U.S., we are not subject to their laws, we have our own governing agreements..
We open our borders to whoever wants to join us, regardless of their country of origin, we demilitarize, we educate our kids in the ways that make sense to us, we grow our own food and heat our houses with solar and wind and whatever.
If the U.S. doesn't mow us down before we get established, then we start visiting other towns and explaining how our community works. We invite them to join the experiment, trade with us, start some complementary industry to ours, and so on and so forth.
Okay, obviously, I realize that we would not be allowed to do this. Probably within a year or two, the federal and/or state governments would come in to collect their taxes, bringing their soldiers to throw us out of our houses, raze our schools, repossess (or steal) everything of any value, and imprison everyone in town if they couldn't figure out who the "leaders" were. Or they would just shoot their way in and kill us all. But let's just imagine for a few moments that that didn't happen. Let's play with the idea that we could do it. What are some of the issues that would need to be resolved, just among us, if this experiment were going to get off the ground?
· Where do we get water? Gas for our cars? Are we going to use animals for transportation? Food? Are we vegan?
· What other resources would we need that would be hard to come by?
· How large an area would we need to control? How many people would we need to include to start? What would we need to have gotten together before we could start?
· If all the land and property in town were owned locally, would that be enough to ensure that we couldn't be evicted right away?
· We would presumably need some kind of industry that provides us enough capital to start off with, and some way to deliver our product. What could that be? Software? Websites? Data entry?
· How would we protect ourselves? If we have weapons, then we quickly become Ruby Ridge or Wounded Knee. If we don't, then what happens when some group of people, governmental or otherwise, decides to attack us, for whatever we have, for the political example we are setting, or just because?
· Could we raise enough food to withstand the inevitable siege from the U.S.?
· What happens if people join us and won't follow the "rules"? What if we ask people to leave and they won't?
· Presumably if we had open immigration, the U.S. government would use the possibility of al-Qaeda or other operatives sneaking through our borders into theirs to invade us. And indeed, if we're demilitarized, how would we make sure that people aren't doing that?
· What if someone won't work?
· What happens when the kids grow up (assuming that there are kids, and assuming we last that long), and want to go to college in the U.S.? How would we establish their credentials? Would they all leave, and we would die out like the Shakers?
· What would we do for entertainment? Presumably we wouldn't be able to get much television, or Netflix, if we aren't going to buy them from U.S. corporations. Bootleg DVDs? Would that become a premise for the FCC to invade us?
· Would we give every person in town an hour a week on the local television or radio station to do whatever they wanted with? Would people do interesting things, and would we watch or listen to them?
· If we create our own passports and manage to get other countries to agree to accept them, where do we fly out of? What if the U.S. won't accept our passports?
· Could we create enough medical infrastructure? I guess if we couldn't, we could send people to hospitals in the U.S., just as people do in countries where there isn't enough medical care.
I have to say that all these questions have only whetted my appetite to get started. I keep wondering where we could try it. A coastal area seems best, or at least access to a coast. Emeryville? Alameda? Pacifica? West Berkeley? Treasure Island, with all that new housing created after the Navy left?
Anyone want to get together and discuss how we could make this happen?
The next day I was talking to a friend who had found the interview fascinating and inspiring, and she asked why I turned it off. I said it was demoralizing. But that isn't really true. What I found it was simplistic. He made a list of things "Obama" has done in foreign policy which are against U.S. and international law, and he kept saying that "Obama could turn off the killing machine but he has chosen not to." While that's technically true, I guess -- the president is the commander in chief, as we all know, and has the power under the constitution to unilaterally set foreign policy to an extent -- it doesn't accurately describe how U.S. foreign policy has ever been made in my lifetime. Let's just imagine that Obama, having been elected on his promise to bomb Afghanistan and Pakistan, etc., etc., walked into the White House last January and said, "Okay, we're leaving Afghanistan starting tomorrow?" Would the Powers-That-Be -- more on that later -- have simply shrugged and said, "Okay, well he's the president, nothing we can do about it?"
This is not to say that Obama couldn't and shouldn't have done better. Certainly he didn't need to expand the military spending, and he didn't need to try to fulfill his pledge to close Guantanamo by sending more people to indefinite detention in places like Afghanistan, Illinois and the countries they were kidnapped from in the first place. But it felt to me that by focusing on Obama and on the law, Nairn was skirting the thorny issue of WHY Obama, along with every other president we've had in my lifetime (and probably before) has kept the killing machine working so smoothly. And that's that there's not the political will in this country to turn our society into one that cares about people, in this country or any other. People who campaign on those promises -- Jesse Jackson, Cynthia McKinney, Dennis Kucinich -- get somewhere between 1% and 25% of the vote.
So the question that I was plagued by, as I listened to Allen Nairn, was how do we create the political will to live differently? To be honest, even most of the leftists who oppose U.S. militarism don't imagine a society not governed through violence. They only imagine the guns in the hands of people they like.
Nairn did say one thing that stuck with me as I turned off the TV. He was running down a list of countries where the U.S. has backed repressive regimes, and he mentioned Honduras, where the oligarchic leader Manuel Zelaya decided to abandon his fellow oligarchs and pursue more social equity. And of course we know what happened to Zelaya, and I think that is exactly what would happen to Obama if he were to make the same decision. Maybe it wouldn't look overtly like a military coup, but Obama would be gone, probably dead, and someone the oligarchs liked would be in the process of becoming the democratically elected president.
So the first thing I thought about after I turned off Democracy Now was that we need to get that this is an oligarchy, not a democracy. I mean, I know most leftists know that on some level, but we keep convincing ourselves that our "democratic institutions," whether in the form of mainstream candidates, third parties, legislators, legislation, legal action or protest, can be made to work. But if we understand that this is fundamentally an oligarchy, then we understand that it doesn't matter how they dress it up; ultimately, you cannot do anything that undermines the power of the oligarchs. Protest, such as we are doing now, actually helps them because it makes people believe we have democracy. Electoral campaigns help them even more because they not only promote the idea that we have democracy but they tie up humongous amounts of time and money and leave lots of demoralized people when they fail. And armed resistance, be it stupid unfocused armed resistance like setting fire to SUVs, or plots like the one embodied by underwear bomber, helps them immeasurably by convincing ordinary folks that they're in danger, and need the oligarchic power structure to keep them safe.
I'm not trying to say that we can't have minor victories. I'm not even suggesting that I'm going to stop organizing protest or that my friends who do environmental or civil rights law shouldn't keep trying to stop the worst abuses (my friend Lisa just won a big victory in court, protecting the Desert Tortoise -- congratulations!). But I have started to think about what it would really take to create the political will to have a different type of society. And that has made me start thinking seriously of building alternative institutions.
Now I have never been very big on alternative institutions. I've done my share of volunteering, there are some organizations I love, but I've never gotten really into the community garden thing or the community food coop thing or the free clinic thing. I admire people who do them, but I've never thought I had anything to contribute and somehow I've always felt that they would take time away from my political activism. And too often, I have felt like the people creating those alternative institutions are anti-political, acting as if it's possible to fundamentally change this society through volunteerism or charity work.
One question that now occurs to me is how alternative any institution that is coexisting with the dominant institutions can be. Pretty much, every time we try to set up alternative institutions we either:
· end up founding nonprofits, which if they are really successful, such as the rape crisis centers or domestic violence programs, end up becoming an arm of the state
· end up creating something that is underfunded, understaffed and therefore doesn't provide whatever benefit it's meant to provide as well as the corporations do
· end up creating something that has too many internal contradictions because it's only accessible to people with lots of leisure time or people willing to dedicate all their non-work time to social projects
· have to abandon the project because we can't fund it; or
· spend all our time fundraising and not much doing what we're supposed to be doing.
Whether our alternative institutions succeed or fail (and they seem to mostly fail), they inevitably end up shoring up the dominant institutions by plugging some hole that it is supposed to fill, and/or proving that "the system works" -- i.e., charity is a viable way to get social needs met, or lack of childcare isn't a problem because people can just set up coops.
But what if we could really separate ourselves from the dominant institutions, withdraw both our money and our labor from them, and completely reject their services?
Everyone I know fantasizes about leaving this country. We know that we can't change its policies, and we neither want to be supporting/funding them nor be repressed by them. We feel dispirited and disempowered by continually ramming our heads against the wall of collective indifference. A few of my friends have actually moved to other countries -- some more happily than others, but for most of us it's not really an option. Where would we go, how would we make a living (do we want to teach English?), would we end up doing anything more worthwhile in some other country or would we be even more alienated because we would not even be citizens and most of us wouldn't know the language?
I have always felt that self-imposed exile would be nothing more than an abrogation of responsibility by a privileged few.
But what if instead of taking ourselves out of the U.S., we could take the U.S. out of us?
Could we create a liberated zone within the territory held by the U.S.?
Imagine:
Everyone within a certain community -- town, street, neighborhood -- stops working for corporations or the nonprofits they fund and stops paying taxes to the U.S. and the State. With our combined unpaid taxes as seed money, we free ourselves from the need to work for them. We declare that we do not want their protection, their schools, their hospitals, their roads. We begin to create our own economy, put our own labor toward building our own schools, roads, hospitals, as if we lived in the free country we want to live in, and in fact, we declare that we are a free country, we are not part of the U.S., we are not subject to their laws, we have our own governing agreements..
We open our borders to whoever wants to join us, regardless of their country of origin, we demilitarize, we educate our kids in the ways that make sense to us, we grow our own food and heat our houses with solar and wind and whatever.
If the U.S. doesn't mow us down before we get established, then we start visiting other towns and explaining how our community works. We invite them to join the experiment, trade with us, start some complementary industry to ours, and so on and so forth.
Okay, obviously, I realize that we would not be allowed to do this. Probably within a year or two, the federal and/or state governments would come in to collect their taxes, bringing their soldiers to throw us out of our houses, raze our schools, repossess (or steal) everything of any value, and imprison everyone in town if they couldn't figure out who the "leaders" were. Or they would just shoot their way in and kill us all. But let's just imagine for a few moments that that didn't happen. Let's play with the idea that we could do it. What are some of the issues that would need to be resolved, just among us, if this experiment were going to get off the ground?
· Where do we get water? Gas for our cars? Are we going to use animals for transportation? Food? Are we vegan?
· What other resources would we need that would be hard to come by?
· How large an area would we need to control? How many people would we need to include to start? What would we need to have gotten together before we could start?
· If all the land and property in town were owned locally, would that be enough to ensure that we couldn't be evicted right away?
· We would presumably need some kind of industry that provides us enough capital to start off with, and some way to deliver our product. What could that be? Software? Websites? Data entry?
· How would we protect ourselves? If we have weapons, then we quickly become Ruby Ridge or Wounded Knee. If we don't, then what happens when some group of people, governmental or otherwise, decides to attack us, for whatever we have, for the political example we are setting, or just because?
· Could we raise enough food to withstand the inevitable siege from the U.S.?
· What happens if people join us and won't follow the "rules"? What if we ask people to leave and they won't?
· Presumably if we had open immigration, the U.S. government would use the possibility of al-Qaeda or other operatives sneaking through our borders into theirs to invade us. And indeed, if we're demilitarized, how would we make sure that people aren't doing that?
· What if someone won't work?
· What happens when the kids grow up (assuming that there are kids, and assuming we last that long), and want to go to college in the U.S.? How would we establish their credentials? Would they all leave, and we would die out like the Shakers?
· What would we do for entertainment? Presumably we wouldn't be able to get much television, or Netflix, if we aren't going to buy them from U.S. corporations. Bootleg DVDs? Would that become a premise for the FCC to invade us?
· Would we give every person in town an hour a week on the local television or radio station to do whatever they wanted with? Would people do interesting things, and would we watch or listen to them?
· If we create our own passports and manage to get other countries to agree to accept them, where do we fly out of? What if the U.S. won't accept our passports?
· Could we create enough medical infrastructure? I guess if we couldn't, we could send people to hospitals in the U.S., just as people do in countries where there isn't enough medical care.
I have to say that all these questions have only whetted my appetite to get started. I keep wondering where we could try it. A coastal area seems best, or at least access to a coast. Emeryville? Alameda? Pacifica? West Berkeley? Treasure Island, with all that new housing created after the Navy left?
Anyone want to get together and discuss how we could make this happen?
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Where is your Avatar?
In keeping with the traditional Jewish/atheist observance of December 25, I went to the movies with friends yesterday, followed by dinner at an Asian restaurant (Thai being the Chinese food of the West Coast). We saw "Avatar" in non-3D, because one of my friends can't deal with the 3D thing. Now maybe with the benefit of 3D glasses, this movie has some subliminal content that is new and different, but the version I saw should be called "Dances With Wolves in Space," though to be fair, the infinite battle scene comes straight out of Star Wars with some Lord of the Rings thrown in, the computer-generated animals bear some resemblance to The Golden Compass, and people who saw Pocahontas say there's a passing similarity there too.
Now I am curious whether the film's seemingly anti-imperialist message will get across to the millions who will flock to their local IMAX over this holiday season. If indeed the throwaway lines about the resource under the ground which justifies the foreign military attempting to drive the indigenous peace-loving "savages" off the land which gives them life translate into increased activism to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. aid to Israel, I promise to eat my words. Compared to "Lord of the Rings," the movie had good roles for women, especially Trudi, the fighter pilot, though of course the noble white guy gets to give the orders in the end.
I also have to acknowledge that I didn't actually fall asleep or look at my watch during the 2.6-hour movie, though I considered doing both. (Most of my friends did one or the other, some did both.) So if that's the standard by which we judge a movie, I guess it wasn't that bad. But when you consider that it took ten years and $500 million dollars – yeah that's right, twice the cost of one day of war in Iraq, I can't help asking if there wasn't something the undisputedly talented James Cameron, not to mention my beloved Sigourney Weaver and Michelle Rodriguez, could have been doing with themselves for the last decade.
But the worst part of the movie was not the feature itself, but the previews. Some I have mercifully blocked out, but "The Book of Eli" and "Legion" definitely seem like ones to miss (in fact, both bear some similarities to "Avatar," but as far as I can tell without the redeeming beautiful scenery and groovy messaging). So when I got home, I read for a while, and then turned on the TV, but there was of course nothing I wanted to watch playing, so I started surfing through the On-Demand titles, and found a movie that looked kind of amusing, called "The Truth About Charlie." I started watching it and it was okay, but then I realized it was a remake of "Charade." Now "Charade" is one of the great movies of all time, I watched it twice during my chemo months, would probably watch it again if it happened to be on TV, but why would I want to see a remake of it? Either it's going to be the same, in which case I already know it too well to get anything much out of it, or it's not going to be as good.
This all brings me to a question I have grappled with for years now: Why do they keep making the same movies over and over? Do they think there are just so few stories to tell, that they have to keep telling the same four or five again and again? I think the answer is yes, they do think that. In fact, in my days of attempting to be a screenwriter, I read a number of books that pretty much make that claim. All stories can be reduced to a few critical elements – the hero, the quest, the sidekick, the totem, the turning point, the misstep, the resurrection, the romance, the confrontation and the redemption. If you want to be cutting edge, you can throw in the character flaw, which of course the hero miraculously overcomes in the course of two hours. If you want to seem really brainy, you can add some just-for-its-own-sake existential dialogue, and then your movie will qualify to be called a "film" and may even get the sobriquet "carnivalesque." Okay, it's not a bad thing to keep in mind, that every story should have an arc, that there should be some kind of fulfillment, that we can't keep track of too many characters so you probably want to have one or two people who embody the qualities your protagonist doesn't have, and that characters should have clear, believable motivations. But that doesn't mean that there all stories are really the same retelling in different scenery; it just means that all stories have certain things in common.
So while I was unsatisfiedly watching "Avatar," I came up with a list of movies that I would like to see made, and my recommendation to whatever studios or producers or whoever has millions lying around to make movies with, would be to give two or three million to each of 150-200 people (possibly chosen at random - they couldn't do worse than the pros) and see what they can do with it, the only requirement being to make a movie that has NOT been made before.
Here's a short list of possibilities, just what popped into my mind yesterday:
A feature based on the documentary "Burma VJ," about the massive popular uprising in Burma in 2007 and the underground videography collective that brought it to the world (I know I said movies that haven't been made before, but "Burma VJ" is a documentary with subtitles, and not apt to draw a big American audience, so a feature film would do something different).
The story of Specialist Suzanne Swift and her mother, Sara Rich, who brought the issue of sexual harassment in the Army to the fore by refusing redeployment to Iraq and went to prison for it.
Crows Over a Wheatfield, by Paula Sharp, is a feminist adventure story dealing with the issues of domestic violence and child sexual abuse in a nonmelodramatic and complex way. When I read it 14 years ago, I thought it would make a great movie, and I'm really surprised that it has never been made into one.
Any and all of the Maisie Dobbs books (Maisie Dobbs, Birds of a Feather), about a woman detective in the aftermath of World War I, would make great movies, as would Laurie King's Kate Martinelli series, set in San Francisco, especially A Grave Talent and Night Work.
Michael Nava's mysteries starring gay lawyer Henry Rios deal sensitively with gay life in the age of AIDS, in a non-stereotypical way. The Hidden Law and The Burning Plain are my favorites. These have the advantage of being set in LA, so since Hollywood's favorite subject is itself, they should appeal.
There are tons of books about the Triangle shirtwaist fire in 1911, three that come to my mind are Elana Dykewomon's Beyond the Pale, Meredith Tax's Rivington Street, most recently Katharine Weber's Triangle, and all use the disaster to bring out the context in which the modern women's and labor movements were forged. Some hybrid of the three would make a great blockbuster movie.
Okay, that's it for today's rambling, but feel free to add your own movie ideas as comments here.
Now I am curious whether the film's seemingly anti-imperialist message will get across to the millions who will flock to their local IMAX over this holiday season. If indeed the throwaway lines about the resource under the ground which justifies the foreign military attempting to drive the indigenous peace-loving "savages" off the land which gives them life translate into increased activism to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. aid to Israel, I promise to eat my words. Compared to "Lord of the Rings," the movie had good roles for women, especially Trudi, the fighter pilot, though of course the noble white guy gets to give the orders in the end.
I also have to acknowledge that I didn't actually fall asleep or look at my watch during the 2.6-hour movie, though I considered doing both. (Most of my friends did one or the other, some did both.) So if that's the standard by which we judge a movie, I guess it wasn't that bad. But when you consider that it took ten years and $500 million dollars – yeah that's right, twice the cost of one day of war in Iraq, I can't help asking if there wasn't something the undisputedly talented James Cameron, not to mention my beloved Sigourney Weaver and Michelle Rodriguez, could have been doing with themselves for the last decade.
But the worst part of the movie was not the feature itself, but the previews. Some I have mercifully blocked out, but "The Book of Eli" and "Legion" definitely seem like ones to miss (in fact, both bear some similarities to "Avatar," but as far as I can tell without the redeeming beautiful scenery and groovy messaging). So when I got home, I read for a while, and then turned on the TV, but there was of course nothing I wanted to watch playing, so I started surfing through the On-Demand titles, and found a movie that looked kind of amusing, called "The Truth About Charlie." I started watching it and it was okay, but then I realized it was a remake of "Charade." Now "Charade" is one of the great movies of all time, I watched it twice during my chemo months, would probably watch it again if it happened to be on TV, but why would I want to see a remake of it? Either it's going to be the same, in which case I already know it too well to get anything much out of it, or it's not going to be as good.
This all brings me to a question I have grappled with for years now: Why do they keep making the same movies over and over? Do they think there are just so few stories to tell, that they have to keep telling the same four or five again and again? I think the answer is yes, they do think that. In fact, in my days of attempting to be a screenwriter, I read a number of books that pretty much make that claim. All stories can be reduced to a few critical elements – the hero, the quest, the sidekick, the totem, the turning point, the misstep, the resurrection, the romance, the confrontation and the redemption. If you want to be cutting edge, you can throw in the character flaw, which of course the hero miraculously overcomes in the course of two hours. If you want to seem really brainy, you can add some just-for-its-own-sake existential dialogue, and then your movie will qualify to be called a "film" and may even get the sobriquet "carnivalesque." Okay, it's not a bad thing to keep in mind, that every story should have an arc, that there should be some kind of fulfillment, that we can't keep track of too many characters so you probably want to have one or two people who embody the qualities your protagonist doesn't have, and that characters should have clear, believable motivations. But that doesn't mean that there all stories are really the same retelling in different scenery; it just means that all stories have certain things in common.
So while I was unsatisfiedly watching "Avatar," I came up with a list of movies that I would like to see made, and my recommendation to whatever studios or producers or whoever has millions lying around to make movies with, would be to give two or three million to each of 150-200 people (possibly chosen at random - they couldn't do worse than the pros) and see what they can do with it, the only requirement being to make a movie that has NOT been made before.
Here's a short list of possibilities, just what popped into my mind yesterday:
A feature based on the documentary "Burma VJ," about the massive popular uprising in Burma in 2007 and the underground videography collective that brought it to the world (I know I said movies that haven't been made before, but "Burma VJ" is a documentary with subtitles, and not apt to draw a big American audience, so a feature film would do something different).
The story of Specialist Suzanne Swift and her mother, Sara Rich, who brought the issue of sexual harassment in the Army to the fore by refusing redeployment to Iraq and went to prison for it.
Crows Over a Wheatfield, by Paula Sharp, is a feminist adventure story dealing with the issues of domestic violence and child sexual abuse in a nonmelodramatic and complex way. When I read it 14 years ago, I thought it would make a great movie, and I'm really surprised that it has never been made into one.
Any and all of the Maisie Dobbs books (Maisie Dobbs, Birds of a Feather), about a woman detective in the aftermath of World War I, would make great movies, as would Laurie King's Kate Martinelli series, set in San Francisco, especially A Grave Talent and Night Work.
Michael Nava's mysteries starring gay lawyer Henry Rios deal sensitively with gay life in the age of AIDS, in a non-stereotypical way. The Hidden Law and The Burning Plain are my favorites. These have the advantage of being set in LA, so since Hollywood's favorite subject is itself, they should appeal.
There are tons of books about the Triangle shirtwaist fire in 1911, three that come to my mind are Elana Dykewomon's Beyond the Pale, Meredith Tax's Rivington Street, most recently Katharine Weber's Triangle, and all use the disaster to bring out the context in which the modern women's and labor movements were forged. Some hybrid of the three would make a great blockbuster movie.
Okay, that's it for today's rambling, but feel free to add your own movie ideas as comments here.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Where do queers go when we die? (For Andrea)
The other night I attended the memorial event for Andrea Lewis, renowned journalist at KPFA, New American Media and the Progressive Magazine. It was an evening chock full of inspiring performances, wonderful music, decent poetry (you know me and poetry) and heart-felt testimonials before a standing-room-only crowd of hundreds at the lovely First Unitarian Church in Oakland. The SF Symphony Chorus, of which Andrea was a long-time member, showed up en masse – that must have been 70 people right there, Poet Laureate Al Young performed some pretty good spoken word, and Krissy Keefer and Dance Brigade finished up (batted clean-up, as Andrea would say) with some amazing drumming that could have gone on a lot longer. And running throughout, the rich melodic tones of Andrea's voice, mostly from the radio.
Though I didn't know Andrea well, it was an emotional and satisfying evening for me. I interacted with her at KPFA just enough to admire her profoundly. I was interviewed by her once, on International Women's Day years ago; it was short and not memorable for either of us, though even then, I was impressed by her seamless transitions and easy manner in the studio. In retrospect, knowing what I do about the difficulty of doing live radio, I am more impressed because she made it look so effortless when it really is not.
Last night, in going through piles and piles of papers from the last few years in search of a paper I needed to travel to Canada (we won't go into that now, but suffice it to say that when Andrea's brother talked about her pack-rat-itis, I made a note to myself to try to throw some stuff away before I die), I ran across a handout from a class about interviewing. It said, "An interview is not a conversation, though it may sound like one after you've edited it." I always try to make my interviews sound like conversations, but they rarely do, even after editing. I've learned to use notes instead of a full script, but it's still too obvious when I'm asking a prepared question, and even my candid responses too often sound like speeches.
Andrea prepared superbly for her interviews – insofar as I did know her, it was because I do most of my work at KPFA on weekends, and when I was there on Saturday nights, Andrea was almost always there late into the evening getting ready for her Sunday show. But she always managed to make it sound completely spontaneous. I just listened to a bunch of her old shows, for a tribute that aired on Women's Magazine last week (pretty good, if I do say so myself – hear it at http://kpfawomensmag.blogspot.com). I was struck by how quickly she could create a rapport with her guests. Even if there were times when she didn't do all the research herself, but was handed a pile of papers by her producers – after all, that's what producers are for – but you could never tell. She would say, "I was looking at your website and I noticed …" or "The thing that really grabbed me when I was reading your book," and you believed it 100%. She would always find something to bond over, even if she was less than inspired by them. If she met someone for the first time at 7:35 and interviewed them from 7:40 to 7:45, it was five minutes of intimacy, and that intimacy was irresistible to the listeners. That's why at her memorial, when people tried to engage the crowd by saying, "Raise your hand if Andrea had a nickname for you," "How many of you got one of those 30-minute phone messages from Andrea?" only a few scattered hands went up. Hundreds of folks came out not because they knew her personally, but because they felt like they knew her, and more, because she had enriched their world.
When I started volunteering at KPFA, one of the things I hoped for was to get to know Andrea. I can't say that happened. We would say hi in the kitchen or downstairs, exchange a few words about our shows. Once she admired the Thai food I had brought for the women who were working on our show, and I invited her to join us. She declined, to all of our disappointment. I had two substantive interactions with her. The first was when Lisa and I were trading a DVD of "The L Word." Andrea asked what we were doing with it. Both of us were working on documentaries, and we were both basically using the TV series about high-fashion, mostly rich and white, lesbians in LA to illustrate everything that's wrong with the mainstream gay movement. Andrea defended the show. She had been at some of the shootings, I think, in LA, and had gone to a party to watch the last episode, and she said it moved her to tears. As a Black progressive lesbian from Detroit, she certainly didn't feel like those women represented her, but she just liked that they were out there, on mainstream television, being dykes and having sex. She was inclined, I think, to focus on the positive in popular culture and not expect it to be more than it was.
Then, a couple weeks ago, I was working with some younger lesbians of color who have started producing with us. They were saying that there are not lesbians of color on the radio, which is certainly true in general, and I thought, "Oh, I should make sure they meet Andrea so they know at least they're not the only ones here." I was on my way downstairs, and she was in her office with Mickey, debriefing the show they had just finished and the door was slightly open. I was nervous about interrupting, but I stopped in and asked if she could come by on her way out. She said she was not feeling well, but she would try. When I came back upstairs, she was in our office chatting with Christine and Kiki and Olga about the Richmond homecoming rape, which Kiki has been organizing around. When she left she told them to let her know if they had any extra material that might be good for her show, or if she could help them in any way, and thanked me for making the connection.
If you asked me about Andrea, the first words out of my mouth would be African American Lesbian Feminist. So imagine my surprise when in three hours of people talking about her on Tuesday night, neither the "L Word" nor the "F Word" were spoken. There were a couple oblique allusions to her being lesbian – Larry Samuels said she referred to him as "her weird straight guy friend," and a number of people mentioned that she always called out "racism, sexism and homophobia" (always listed in that order). In the two tributes that aired on the two shows she worked on, The Morning Show and Sunday Sedition, the word "lesbian" was barely mentioned, and only Krissy Keefer spoke about how important the women's movement was to her.
It's pretty amazing because Andrea was not someone to whom feminism or lesbianism were unimportant. There are women at KPFA who are feminists, and probably even lesbians, who don't necessarily consider those core parts of their identities, but Andrea wasn't one of them. She got her start in Bay Area journalism working for a Plexus, a feminist newspaper. Krissy Keefer mentioned in her tribute that Andrea called her a good friend, though they never socialized, and Krissy said she thought that was because they were connected through the women's movement.
In a short interview Lisa did with Andrea about feminism, which aired as part of our tribute, she talked about how she came to feminism as a young teenager, admiring people like Gloria Steinem, and appreciating the songwriting talents of Carole King. When her father denied that a woman could have written all the songs on an album, and told Andrea she shouldn't waste money on college, Andrea says "I just knew he was crazy." She also talked about believing that lesbianism and feminism were "part of the same package, not separate." When I was looking for pieces for our show to illustrate this commitment to women's and queer issues, I didn't find a single show that didn't have something that would have been appropriate. No matter what she was talking about, she always brought those lenses to it.
So I left the memorial asking, "Why is the first thing out of my mouth about this woman I barely knew the last thing out of the mouths of the people who knew her well?" I wasn't alone. As I made my way out of the church, I heard other women talking about how weird it was. This is not the first time I've had this experience relating to KPFA. When Mike Alcalay, a gay activist and doctor who reported on AIDS issues, died a couple years ago, his brother was interviewed on Democracy Now! And did not say that he was gay. In Mike's case, it was even stranger, because he had been married (to a woman) and had twin sons, which was mentioned in the obits. At that time, I wrote in my blog, "When I die, don't let anyone talk about me and not say 'lesbian.'" And some of you were nice enough to make that promise.
I think there are several reasons this keeps happening. One is that, even in 2009 and even in progressive circles, straight people still have trouble saying the words "gay" and "lesbian." I believe they still feel like it's saying something negative. No one thought that saying Andrea was Black or African American or a woman was diminishing her, but I think they felt like alluding to her as a lesbian feminist would make some people not like her, or make her less important than focusing on her love of the arts and sports, her golfing, her singing, and her journalistic brilliance. There's still a belief, in left journalism as well as in the mainstream, that a "lesbian" journalist or a "feminist" journalist is a "niche" journalist, not as "universal" as a straight woman who doesn't identify with those angry, man-hating feminists. Which makes me think of Harvey Fierstein's comment in "The Celluloid Closet," that when people say, "Your work isn't gay, it's universal," his (private) response is "Up yours."
The other piece of this straightwashing phenomenon is that Andrea wasn't married or domestic partnered. If she had a lover or six, no one seems to know about it. If she had had a wife or girlfriend, that person would have been central to her memorial and on air tributes. But when single people die, in our coupleist, nuclear-family-oriented society, it's our families of origin that tend to be centered and most of our families of origin, in Andrea's and my generation certainly (she was 52, two years older than me), even if they are very accepting, are not that comfortable with our sexual orientation. It's like we revert to being kids, and kids are not seen as having sexual orientation.
I had hoped this would be the year when I would conquer my awe of Andrea and find a way to make her a friend. Maybe that's why her death has touched me deeply, maybe it's because I've been around so many others who are grieving deeply for her, or maybe it's the public Andrea I'm grieving: the publicly unapologetic fat lesbian feminist African American woman who incidentally sang and played golf.
Go in peace, cherished sister.
Though I didn't know Andrea well, it was an emotional and satisfying evening for me. I interacted with her at KPFA just enough to admire her profoundly. I was interviewed by her once, on International Women's Day years ago; it was short and not memorable for either of us, though even then, I was impressed by her seamless transitions and easy manner in the studio. In retrospect, knowing what I do about the difficulty of doing live radio, I am more impressed because she made it look so effortless when it really is not.
Last night, in going through piles and piles of papers from the last few years in search of a paper I needed to travel to Canada (we won't go into that now, but suffice it to say that when Andrea's brother talked about her pack-rat-itis, I made a note to myself to try to throw some stuff away before I die), I ran across a handout from a class about interviewing. It said, "An interview is not a conversation, though it may sound like one after you've edited it." I always try to make my interviews sound like conversations, but they rarely do, even after editing. I've learned to use notes instead of a full script, but it's still too obvious when I'm asking a prepared question, and even my candid responses too often sound like speeches.
Andrea prepared superbly for her interviews – insofar as I did know her, it was because I do most of my work at KPFA on weekends, and when I was there on Saturday nights, Andrea was almost always there late into the evening getting ready for her Sunday show. But she always managed to make it sound completely spontaneous. I just listened to a bunch of her old shows, for a tribute that aired on Women's Magazine last week (pretty good, if I do say so myself – hear it at http://kpfawomensmag.blogspot.com). I was struck by how quickly she could create a rapport with her guests. Even if there were times when she didn't do all the research herself, but was handed a pile of papers by her producers – after all, that's what producers are for – but you could never tell. She would say, "I was looking at your website and I noticed …" or "The thing that really grabbed me when I was reading your book," and you believed it 100%. She would always find something to bond over, even if she was less than inspired by them. If she met someone for the first time at 7:35 and interviewed them from 7:40 to 7:45, it was five minutes of intimacy, and that intimacy was irresistible to the listeners. That's why at her memorial, when people tried to engage the crowd by saying, "Raise your hand if Andrea had a nickname for you," "How many of you got one of those 30-minute phone messages from Andrea?" only a few scattered hands went up. Hundreds of folks came out not because they knew her personally, but because they felt like they knew her, and more, because she had enriched their world.
When I started volunteering at KPFA, one of the things I hoped for was to get to know Andrea. I can't say that happened. We would say hi in the kitchen or downstairs, exchange a few words about our shows. Once she admired the Thai food I had brought for the women who were working on our show, and I invited her to join us. She declined, to all of our disappointment. I had two substantive interactions with her. The first was when Lisa and I were trading a DVD of "The L Word." Andrea asked what we were doing with it. Both of us were working on documentaries, and we were both basically using the TV series about high-fashion, mostly rich and white, lesbians in LA to illustrate everything that's wrong with the mainstream gay movement. Andrea defended the show. She had been at some of the shootings, I think, in LA, and had gone to a party to watch the last episode, and she said it moved her to tears. As a Black progressive lesbian from Detroit, she certainly didn't feel like those women represented her, but she just liked that they were out there, on mainstream television, being dykes and having sex. She was inclined, I think, to focus on the positive in popular culture and not expect it to be more than it was.
Then, a couple weeks ago, I was working with some younger lesbians of color who have started producing with us. They were saying that there are not lesbians of color on the radio, which is certainly true in general, and I thought, "Oh, I should make sure they meet Andrea so they know at least they're not the only ones here." I was on my way downstairs, and she was in her office with Mickey, debriefing the show they had just finished and the door was slightly open. I was nervous about interrupting, but I stopped in and asked if she could come by on her way out. She said she was not feeling well, but she would try. When I came back upstairs, she was in our office chatting with Christine and Kiki and Olga about the Richmond homecoming rape, which Kiki has been organizing around. When she left she told them to let her know if they had any extra material that might be good for her show, or if she could help them in any way, and thanked me for making the connection.
If you asked me about Andrea, the first words out of my mouth would be African American Lesbian Feminist. So imagine my surprise when in three hours of people talking about her on Tuesday night, neither the "L Word" nor the "F Word" were spoken. There were a couple oblique allusions to her being lesbian – Larry Samuels said she referred to him as "her weird straight guy friend," and a number of people mentioned that she always called out "racism, sexism and homophobia" (always listed in that order). In the two tributes that aired on the two shows she worked on, The Morning Show and Sunday Sedition, the word "lesbian" was barely mentioned, and only Krissy Keefer spoke about how important the women's movement was to her.
It's pretty amazing because Andrea was not someone to whom feminism or lesbianism were unimportant. There are women at KPFA who are feminists, and probably even lesbians, who don't necessarily consider those core parts of their identities, but Andrea wasn't one of them. She got her start in Bay Area journalism working for a Plexus, a feminist newspaper. Krissy Keefer mentioned in her tribute that Andrea called her a good friend, though they never socialized, and Krissy said she thought that was because they were connected through the women's movement.
In a short interview Lisa did with Andrea about feminism, which aired as part of our tribute, she talked about how she came to feminism as a young teenager, admiring people like Gloria Steinem, and appreciating the songwriting talents of Carole King. When her father denied that a woman could have written all the songs on an album, and told Andrea she shouldn't waste money on college, Andrea says "I just knew he was crazy." She also talked about believing that lesbianism and feminism were "part of the same package, not separate." When I was looking for pieces for our show to illustrate this commitment to women's and queer issues, I didn't find a single show that didn't have something that would have been appropriate. No matter what she was talking about, she always brought those lenses to it.
So I left the memorial asking, "Why is the first thing out of my mouth about this woman I barely knew the last thing out of the mouths of the people who knew her well?" I wasn't alone. As I made my way out of the church, I heard other women talking about how weird it was. This is not the first time I've had this experience relating to KPFA. When Mike Alcalay, a gay activist and doctor who reported on AIDS issues, died a couple years ago, his brother was interviewed on Democracy Now! And did not say that he was gay. In Mike's case, it was even stranger, because he had been married (to a woman) and had twin sons, which was mentioned in the obits. At that time, I wrote in my blog, "When I die, don't let anyone talk about me and not say 'lesbian.'" And some of you were nice enough to make that promise.
I think there are several reasons this keeps happening. One is that, even in 2009 and even in progressive circles, straight people still have trouble saying the words "gay" and "lesbian." I believe they still feel like it's saying something negative. No one thought that saying Andrea was Black or African American or a woman was diminishing her, but I think they felt like alluding to her as a lesbian feminist would make some people not like her, or make her less important than focusing on her love of the arts and sports, her golfing, her singing, and her journalistic brilliance. There's still a belief, in left journalism as well as in the mainstream, that a "lesbian" journalist or a "feminist" journalist is a "niche" journalist, not as "universal" as a straight woman who doesn't identify with those angry, man-hating feminists. Which makes me think of Harvey Fierstein's comment in "The Celluloid Closet," that when people say, "Your work isn't gay, it's universal," his (private) response is "Up yours."
The other piece of this straightwashing phenomenon is that Andrea wasn't married or domestic partnered. If she had a lover or six, no one seems to know about it. If she had had a wife or girlfriend, that person would have been central to her memorial and on air tributes. But when single people die, in our coupleist, nuclear-family-oriented society, it's our families of origin that tend to be centered and most of our families of origin, in Andrea's and my generation certainly (she was 52, two years older than me), even if they are very accepting, are not that comfortable with our sexual orientation. It's like we revert to being kids, and kids are not seen as having sexual orientation.
I had hoped this would be the year when I would conquer my awe of Andrea and find a way to make her a friend. Maybe that's why her death has touched me deeply, maybe it's because I've been around so many others who are grieving deeply for her, or maybe it's the public Andrea I'm grieving: the publicly unapologetic fat lesbian feminist African American woman who incidentally sang and played golf.
Go in peace, cherished sister.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Peace March in Richmond Responds to Homecoming Rape
A Peace March will be held in Richmond this Saturday
November 7, 11:00 a.m.
Richmond High School, 1250 23rd St, Richmond, CA (get directions)
For more info malupresents@gmail.com
Richmond girl raped outside homecoming dance
BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
Richmond
Richmond girl raped: A 15-year-old Richmond girl who had left the homecoming dance was hospitalized in stable condition after being assaulted and allegedly raped by several men on the Richmond High School grounds, police said.
Police received several reports shortly before midnight Saturday and when officers arrived at the high school several men ran away. One was caught.
The 19-year-old Richmond man was in the county jail in Richmond on rape charges, said Richmond Police Sgt. Bisa French. She would not release his name, saying they were trying to get more information from him and police were concerned that if his name were known he might be more reluctant to talk.
The girl was unconscious and flown by helicopter to a hospital.
French said police believe the girl was raped by several men an they are looking for "at least" four males.
"She left the dance at some point and that's when this occurred," French said.
She said the girl apparently knew at least one of her assailants.
Mike Taugher
Expanded mainstream media coverage
News and Commentary from savvy sista
Rape seen as almost inevitable
Friend of survivor speaks out on CNN
November 7, 11:00 a.m.
Richmond High School, 1250 23rd St, Richmond, CA (get directions)
For more info malupresents@gmail.com
Richmond girl raped outside homecoming dance
BAY AREA NEWS GROUP
Richmond
Richmond girl raped: A 15-year-old Richmond girl who had left the homecoming dance was hospitalized in stable condition after being assaulted and allegedly raped by several men on the Richmond High School grounds, police said.
Police received several reports shortly before midnight Saturday and when officers arrived at the high school several men ran away. One was caught.
The 19-year-old Richmond man was in the county jail in Richmond on rape charges, said Richmond Police Sgt. Bisa French. She would not release his name, saying they were trying to get more information from him and police were concerned that if his name were known he might be more reluctant to talk.
The girl was unconscious and flown by helicopter to a hospital.
French said police believe the girl was raped by several men an they are looking for "at least" four males.
"She left the dance at some point and that's when this occurred," French said.
She said the girl apparently knew at least one of her assailants.
Mike Taugher
Expanded mainstream media coverage
News and Commentary from savvy sista
Rape seen as almost inevitable
Friend of survivor speaks out on CNN
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Health Care Activism: Mobilizing to Lose?
It's been forever since I blogged, I know, and I'm sorry about that. I've been sooooo swamped, mostly with organizing, but also with some difficult personal stuff. A good friend of mine, Rosemary Lenihan, whom I worked with at Brobeck years ago and stayed in touch with through a lot of tough times for both of us, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in August and died less than two months later. I went to her first and just about only oncology appointment, and was planning to put in motion all the great support I learned from you all when I had b.c., but didn't really get a chance to because she declined so quickly. Her sister, Eileen, and a couple of her other friends and I mainly tried to keep her company in the hospital for the last couple weeks as she essentially wasted away. I've witnessed a lot of difficult deaths, my father's, from brain cancer, and of course Stephen and Ron and David and all the others we lost during those early years of AIDS, my aunt Brina from lung cancer, and even the "easy" ones, like my friend Joan, who dropped dead of a stroke at 51, are not easy when you're losing someone you loved. But this was about the worst for me, although she was apparently not in pain once they got her on methadone.
There's been quite a lot of other death in the last few months, two friends lost their mothers, one of whom I also knew and was fond of, my coworker's long-time lover died of HIV complications after being in a nursing home for 15 years, two women I knew slightly died suddenly of heart attacks, and Nancy Redwine, a writer and activist I admired a lot who was close to friends of mine in Seattle and Santa Cruz, died of breast cancer after battling it for years. She and I were the same age and of course, my cancer experience made me feel more connected to her.
So this Halloween/Day of the Dead promises to be a highly emotional time for me. I planned to go to the Spiral Dance, but due to the Bay Bridge closure I just can't face taking that much public transportation in San Francisco on Halloween. Last night on BART I felt truly homicidal. I'll just have to light my own candles and think about my gone-beyond people while enjoying some much-needed solitude and calm quiet time, oh, and cherishing that extra hour of sleep.
I went to two pretty good actions for health care this week. One I was heavily involved in organizing – a blockade of Blue Shield in San Francisco on Wednesday, part of the national mobilization for health care for all. We worked really hard to get about 30 people to risk arrest – I had hoped for 50 but still it was good, and there were about 200 people at the rally, also good but a little disappointing because I’ve been to some very large pickets for single payer and I think a lot of people didn’t hear about it because of infighting among the various groups here in the Bay. We publicized the action for a nearby building that houses United Healthcare, where we rallied for about half an hour before marching to Blue Shield, and that worked out really well because they had no idea they were the target so they didn’t lock everything down ahead of time. They didn’t make a complaint so the cops ignored us and after about an hour, we decided to call it a day, leaving behind a lot of crime scene tape and sidewalk chalking. Everyone had a good experience, and a lot of different groups participated together for the first time, which was excellent. (Check out the great video and photos.)
Then on Friday there was an action organized by the San Francisco Labor Council at the office building which houses Cigna (and also Aetna, although the group didn’t seem to know that). This one was fun because we wore costumes and went into the lobby of the building, but of course didn’t get anywhere near Cigna’s second-floor offices; the security guards informed us that the elevator would not go up with us in it.
Incidentally, the reason I had pushed for Blue Shield as our target was specifically because they have a whole building, with their logo prominently displayed all over the outside of the building, in contrast to these other companies which are hidden in the bowels of generic office buildings. I think that a lot of activists are not as attentive to the visual impact of their actions as they could be. It’s fun to go chant in the lobby, and I’m sure the companies that are targeted hear about it, but is pissing off the security guards of highrises really our goal?
Yesterday’s action was politically all over the map – some people were all about public option, some were saying single payer one minute and public option the next. Our action was very consciously supporting only single payer, and some people went ballistic because one of the national organizers put out an email telling people about our action in which she said people should demand the public option. I personally think that it doesn’t make that much difference, I mean, of course it makes a difference, I’m totally for single payer, but we’re not going to get either, and I think we should not let the divisions within our movement overshadow the main points which are, 1) that we need health care for all, and 2) thirty cents of every health care dollar goes to insurance company profits. I’m sure all those tea party people don’t agree on everything, in fact I know they don’t, some of them are complaining about Wall Street bailouts while others are busy demanding and grabbing those same bailouts, but they don’t let that stop them from coming together to destroy their enemies – Obama and the Democrats.
Now people are gearing up for more actions next week, to pressure Pelosi, Waxman and Miller, the House leadership, to restore the Kucinich Amendment (allowing states to elect a single payer system) to the bill that will go to the House floor. Some people are saying we have to do them on Monday because the decision is likely to be made that day, others that we should wait until Tuesday because we don’t have enough time to organize for Monday, and others that it doesn’t matter because we can’t influence the legislative process anyway.
Myself, I think that we need to pressure Pelosi in her home district, remind her that she still works for us, even if she doesn’t think so, and that she can’t be speaker of the House if she doesn’t represent San Francisco at least occasionally. But more than that, I just think it’s great that there are rowdy well-organized health care actions several times a week in this area and in a number of cities around the country. Okay, so the mass media are not giving us as much hype as they did the right-wing-nut-cases, but when did they ever? We are making noise, we are coming together, we are building a movement, and that’s what we need to do, even if it’s late. Until National Nurses Organizing Committee, Physicians for Single Payer and Health Care for All started interrupting Congressional hearings, Pelosi, Reed and Obama were sure that they could just tuck the public option and any other concession to the idea that insurance companies are not our pals in a drawer and say no more about it. The activism has forced them to at least give lip service to what they once claimed to believe. And as my friend Deeg says, we need to start reminding people that win or lose, and it’s almost assured we will mostly lose, the vote is not the end, it needs to be the beginning.
I don’t really know whether I hope the Democrats win or lose the health care vote. If they lose, that is, if they don’t succeed in passing a plan, they’re pretty much through. The Republicans will doubtless take back Congress next year, and then even if Obama wins a second term, he’ll be like Clinton in his second term, hamstrung and moving ever to the right – and let’s face it, he doesn’t have that far to go. And while we can say that it doesn’t make any difference, they’re all the bourgeoisie (which they are), they’re all sold out to the corporations (which they certainly are), they’re all warmongers and robber barons and liars and torturers and imperialists and Zionists, all of which they are, it’s also true that there are some differences, and the small differences matter most to the people who are the closest to not making it in this country. My friend Jean mentioned the other day that in 2000, she was going around West Berkeley campaigning for Nader, and an older Black woman said to her, “I can’t afford that.”
If the Democrats and Obama lose the battle for health care, it’s not going to get written as a victory for the progressive forces, punishing them for writing us off. It’s going to be seen as a massive victory for the Republicans and the insurance industry, which despite their posturing (“We were the first to call for health care for all” claims the CEO of Blue Shield, who did in fact author a plan in 2006 which is very similar to the one Obama is pushing now) and their back-room deals with the Democrats, are really hoping to derail any reform. I voted for Nader in 2000, and I probably would have voted for him even if I lived in Florida, and I would probably do it again. But the fact is that voting for Nader that year did not bring us closer to being a real democracy or to breaking the two-party stranglehold. It certainly didn’t make the left look strong. It proved that going all out, with a celebrity-level candidate, the left could muster 2.75% of the vote, not even enough to qualify for federal funding. Erstwhile Republicans John Anderson and Ross Perot did much more to challenge the two-party hegemony in their third-party presidential bids, getting 7% and 18.9% respectively, in 1980 and 1992. (And Perot can take credit for getting Clinton elected, which I’m sure is something he wants on his epitaph as much as Nader wants electing Bush on his.)
So working to make sure the Democrats don’t succeed in passing a crappy health reform bill, with or without a lousy public option hardly anyone has access to, is not going to help win single payer, nor is it going to prove that the left is a force to be reckoned with in this country. At best, it is going to make the less-right-wingers in Congress look more like a house divided than it already does. At worst, the 40 million people and rising who currently have virtually no access to health care will have even less as the public health systems continue to be eroded and the numbers of people dying for lack of health care will climb.
On the other hand, if the Democrats do succeed in passing some form of health reform, they are going to be unstoppable in their drive to run over anyone who tries to challenge them from the left. It’s going to prove that Rahm Emmanuel and Max Baucus were right to bulldoze over the progressive caucus and the single-payer advocates and the people who pointed out that the main beneficiaries of this bill are going to become gods. And realistically, barring some major upheaval in this country, it will be at least twenty years before we will be able to build a major movement for reforming the reformed health care system.
It seems pretty clear to me that whatever passes, if something does, is likely to double or triple the costs of health care coverage for people like me, people with pretty good employer-paid health insurance. It’s likely to cut quality and drive up costs of care to people on Medicare – the Republicans are not actually lying about that (of course, they are lying when they claim that they are the defenders of Medicare, when they have consistently voted to privatize or kill it). In exchange for all of that destruction, some people who currently can’t get health insurance, or who have insurance but can’t use it to get health care because of preexisting conditions, etc., will actually be able to see doctors. We can’t let our principled objections to bad compromises obscure that important point.
People say, “Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good.” No one could call this plan good. But one might say that we should not let the good become the enemy of the slightly better. True? Who knows?
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