Is Failure the Chicken and Success the Egg?

(Thinking about chickens because of Nevada's new law that you can't wear a chicken costume to the polls.)



More reflections on Budrus, the Movie.

After seeing the movie, I went back and looked at my journals from those early days of action in Budrus. Here is a little bit of what I wrote after the first day:

After two hours or more, another group of soldiers arrived with two police jeeps. Ayad asked us to get in front. Ted and I did. The army commander came toward me and I pointed the camera at him.

He said, “You can put away the camera because I didn’t come to make a scene.”

“Why did you come?” I asked.
“You know why.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I came here to build the Fence.”
“Well, I did know that, but I meant right now, why did you come?”
He said, “We both know the Fence is going to be built. We can do it today, or tomorrow we come in with hundreds of soldiers, we close the school, put the village under curfew. But my government wants to build the Fence, and I know and you know we are going to do it.”

I got a sinking feeling, because of course he is right. If they want it, they can do it. But I said, “No, I don’t know that.”

Reading that now, of course, I think, “I should have had more faith.” But nothing in my experience gave me reason to. And this is the little piece that I think doesn’t come through so well in the film: People did not go out there knowing or even believing that they could win. The villagers did not tell their kids to go to the fields that day instead of to school because they knew no one would be shot. Iltezam didn’t jump into the hole and sit there under the blade of a bulldozer, and her father did not stand there and encourage her to do it, because they knew the bulldozer would stop. Quite to the contrary, they knew that Rachel Corrie had recently been killed, in a situation not so different from theirs.

I can’t help wondering what international reaction to the film would be like if that were the story. (Of course, probably there would have been no film if that were the story.) Would Ayad and Naami be known, not as the brilliant organizers of nonviolent resistance who raised a brilliant daughter to follow in their footsteps, but as proof that Palestinian parents don’t value the lives of their children enough to keep them from sitting in front of bulldozers? What would all those people who say, “This film is so wonderful, these people are so brave, if only the Palestinians had used this nonviolence from the beginning, they would have won in a day,” be saying then? Presumably the same things they are saying about Rachel Corrie and Tristan Anderson, who were equally nonviolent and brave: they shouldn’t have been there. What happened to them was their fault, because they had an irrational hatred of Israel and the Jews.

I’ve said this before, but people have a tendency to read social movements through their outcomes. Working backwards, we make a coherent narrative out of their strategies and tactics, their power struggles and organizational styles, leading inevitably to their successes or failures. We subject both our own and other people’s movements to this torturous dissection, and we pretend that we are deciding what to participate in based on our clairvoyant ability to determine which movements are going to succeed. All of us would have stood with Mario Savio on Sproul Plaza, but none of us would have been killed at Haymarket; all of us would have joined the French Resistance and none of us would have joined the Judenrat (the Jewish Councils in Nazi-occupied Europe, which cooperated with the Nazis in the belief that they would be able to help their people survive). A few years ago, I asked my friend’s son, who was 9 at the time, if when they taught him about Martin Luther King, Jr. in school they made it clear that the government, and many of its citizens, did not approve of what King was doing at the time. He said no, they teach that everyone always loved King. Okay, I said, then do they tell you that they put him in jail? Yes, he said, but I’ve never understood why.

The movements that succeed are not only a result of their forebears which succeeded. When we credit Gandhi’s march to the sea with helping to win India’s independence from Britain, we should also remember that he opposed the creation of Pakistan and that his hunger strike failed to prevent a bloody civil war.

The campus anti-apartheid movements in 1986 were no different from the ones in 1979. I was part of both, and I can absolutely tell you that. The 1986 movement didn’t succeed because it had better strategy than its predecessor. It succeeded because the movement of eight years earlier, along with so many other things, most of them in South Africa but some as far away as South Korea, had changed the conditions under which the students were struggling. And nonetheless, in 1987 it did not look like that movement was going to succeed in helping to dismantle apartheid.

My favorite book is Gone to Soldiers, Marge Piercy’s tapestry of interconnected stories of World War II. Toward the end of the book, one of the heroines, a captured resistance fighter, with her fellow prisoners is forced to watch the execution of inmates who carried out an act of sabotage at Auschwitz. She says, “No one cheered.” When I read that, I thought, well of course not. Why is she saying that? And then I realized that she meant they wanted to cheer, not for the execution but for the resistance. They were not standing there thinking, how stupid and reckless those women were to do something that could result in not only their own deaths but others’ too. It’s not that every act of resistance is the right one, but sometimes you don’t know which is going to be the right one until you’ve taken a few or many wrong ones.

Everyone loves a winner, and we especially do in this country. We don’t like to be reminded of our failures. But next time you hear an inspiring story of resistance and triumph, take a minute to think about how you would be feeling about the resistance if there was no triumph. Because most of the time, that’s likely to be the case.

Ordinary People Can Change the World

(Photo: Iltezam and Hanin)

A couple weeks ago, the movie "Budrus" had its west coast premiere at the SF International Film Festival. This was an event I’ve been eagerly anticipating. I would probably have loved the movie even if it were terrible, because it's about people and a place I’m very close to. But it’s not terrible, it’s great. What’s great about it, besides being exciting and infinitely watchable and featuring the oh-so-lovable Iltezam Morar, is that it is the true story of an ordinary village which defeated the Israeli army using nonviolent protest.

Now of course, everyone wants to know, if this could be done in Budrus, why didn’t every village do the same thing, and why didn’t they all win? Those are hard questions to answer, and producer Ronit Avni did a great job of answering them without pretending that the truth is neater than it is. The truth is that Budrus was a special village to start with, a small village that is more unified than many. They benefited from the experience of some other villages which had resisted the wall earlier, and the fact that by that time, there was an international-Israeli presence that they could call on for consistent support. They were able to sustain the daily demonstrations partly because no one was killed in their protests, which may have been because of the high number of women participating but was also partly luck, because there were plenty of live bullets fired at people, as you can see in the film. They also won because the leadership was not held in prison for a long period of time, and whether that was because they had better legal support or just luck again, I don’t know.

Certainly, one of the reasons they had the strength to persevere was that the women were able to break through the army lines on the first day that their trees were being uprooted. What happened – I was right there, so I know – was that Iltezam, who was only 15 years old at the time, ran around the soldiers, jumped into the hole that the bulldozer was digging, defiantly opened her schoolbook and pretended to read it (I assume she could not have been so calm that she could actually read). And then other women broke through and swarmed the bulldozer, climbed into the bucket of the digger, opened the cab door and shouted at the Palestinian driver. The presence of so many women and especially schoolgirls that day probably accounted for the fact that the army pulled out that day instead of using a higher level of force to get rid of the opposition. I think if they had not succeeded that day in driving the bulldozers off the land, everything might have gone very differently. And since Budrus ultimately inspired Bela’in and Ni’lin, the whole course of nonviolent resistance in Palestine might have been changed by the events of a few seconds.

And that is what is so great about the film, because it actually captures (and I can claim a little credit for this, because I helped the producers track down a small bit of critical footage) the serendipitous moment when history was changed. Of course it’s an oversimplification to suggest that what happened was the result of one moment. It would certainly have been possible for the people to have won that day but lost the next. In some other villages, the bulldozers came in the middle of the night to avoid protests. On the other hand, if the women had not succeeded in getting in front of the bulldozers that day, someone else might have found a way to stop them, that day or another. But there is no question that that one incident both infused the people with the idea that "We can do it!" (as they would chant over and over in English) and instilled in the army a sense of what can only be called awe.

The last few weeks have been dominated by another story about a moment that changed history, this time not for the better. This of course is the oil spill in the Gulf, a disaster of unprecedented scope, in a region that seems like it can hardly withstand another environmental catastrophe. I’ve noticed something about the coverage of the spill, and some people’s reaction to it. It’s something I noticed during the first Gulf War as well. The media – especially the mainstream media, but even the progressive media does its part, for different reasons – promote the idea that dangerous offshore wells are drilled and wars for oil are waged so that we in this country can drive our cars and watch our televisions. And that in turn has a silencing effect on people who might otherwise want to criticize those policies. I heard someone essentially say on KPFA the other day that if you drove a car to work today, you have no right to complain that somewhere between half a million and 2 million gallons of oil are leaking into the Gulf every day.

I beg to differ.

Neither Deepwater Horizon nor the Iraq/Afghanistan war are being waged for my benefit. I like having a car, but it’s not because I love cars. In fact, I would much rather be driven, whether in a bus, a minivan or a horse-driven cart (okay, forget about the cart, but only because it’s cruel to horses). I think I need a car so I can get to meetings after work without taking an hour’s worth of buses, which would cause the meeting to be over by the time I got there, and so I can get home from KPFA at 1:00 a.m., after the BART has stopped running. I think I need a car because I don’t live skating distance from a grocery store that carries the products I like to buy, which are grown semi-locally without pesticides. In San Francisco I never had a car and I never really thought I needed one, because it’s so small that I could get wherever I wanted to go by skating, walking, BART or occasionally a bus. I like watching television, despite the fact that there’s nothing on it I can really stand to watch a lot of the time, but that doesn’t mean I’m willing to go to war for it. If that were really the choice, I would give up the TV and read mysteries by lantern.

U.S. policies are not proof that Americans are so selfish that we want to keep using fossil fuels despite their enormous cost to the planet and its inhabitants. We want to live well, sure. But so do the people of every other country on earth. No one says, "I want to be starving and cold and bored all day and die a miserable impoverished death." (Well, maybe Gandhi, ….) We are told that the only way we can live well is by stealing resources from other people, and/or by stripping away at the earth’s protective layers, and so we say okay, if that’s what it takes. Few of us are going to decide to make our lives a lot harder than they need to be, like No Impact Man, unless maybe we see it as a chance to star in our own reality series or something. But most of us would just as happily climb into shared taxis if they were zooming around our streets the way they do in Palestine, and avoid the hassle of parking our cars. Pretty much all of us would be happy to take solar showers in the sunny middle of the day if we were not expected to be in some other town performing meaningless wage slavery at that time.

Our lifestyle is at least as much a product of our addiction to oil as it is a cause of it. That is, it’s the economy which has grown up around oil, and coal, and dams, and nuclear reactors, that makes it hard for us to do without the convenience of being able to get places fast and eat fast food from disposable containers. Many people I know are very happy to grow their own lettuce and tomatoes and even corn, pick apples from their trees and sew quilts made from their old clothes, but these are not people who are having to work two minimum wage jobs and somehow get their kids to school across town.

We do not have to accept that just because this is the way things have been for the last 150 years or so, it’s the way it needs to be for the next 150. We do not have to simply swallow bad news with our morning coffee. We can be like the women who stood in front of the Israeli army that day in Budrus and said, no, we won’t accept reality as you have declared it to be. We are going to change reality.

My coworker, who is sort of a bad news junkie, insists that protest can't accomplish anything, ordinary people cannot make a difference, we need to wait until someone with power decides to take action. But I know that ordinary people can win, even against tremendous odds, because I've seen it. It just takes an Iltezam, to step into the void and lead the way.

I decided I am going to collect stories of seconds that changed the world, and maybe think about a short film. Do you have any? Please comment if you do, or if you have an idea about where to look.

You Got Feelings, I Got Feelings - An Open Letter to My Jewish Community

To my Jewish community,

Last night I sat in a room filled with passion as I watched the UC Student Senate listen to arguments on its very modest proposal to divest from two U.S. companies which sell arms to the Israeli military. As I listened to Palestinian students pour out their stories of the abuses and humiliation and terror endured by their families, I was moved sometimes to tears. As I listened to Jewish, Muslim, secular, Christian, queer, African American and many other kinds of speakers argue that this is nothing more than a call for justice, I was filled with hope and pride. But as I listened to you talk about your fears and feelings of victimization, I was filled with sadness and despair.

One after another of you got up to say that you feel targeted because of this resolution. You feel unsafe, you feel unwelcome.

You asserted that the green stickers worn by those of us who supported the resolution somehow made you feel attacked. Those green stickers bore the names of the people who had sent in messages of support, and were meant to remind the Senate how many people each of us who was there represented.

One of you complained that we who were wearing green stickers never asked him how he feels about Palestinians, or about a Palestinian state.

As I sat there, feeling alternately moved and hopeful, and sad and despairing, I thought of what I wanted to say to you, and wished I could make you hear it.

If I could, this is what I would say.

I am sorry that you feel attacked. I am sorry you feel threatened by our simple desire to end a 60-year-old injustice. I am sorry that our green stickers somehow make you feel silenced. But this debate is not about how you feel. It is not about how you feel about Palestinians, or how I feel about you, or how either of us feels about Israel.

It is about what we are doing with our money, or in this case, simply what the University of California is doing with its money. And what they are doing, whether you want to admit it or not, whether they know it or not (though by now they certainly must) is profiting from the sale of white phosphorous, an internationally banned weapon, to a military that has shown itself willing to use that banned weapon in densely populated civilian areas – a war crime.

You say that you oppose this resolution not because you don't oppose war crimes, but because we, the divestment movement, reject the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, which you persist in describing as a "democratic Jewish state." It is true, I do not believe that a Jewish state can be democratic, any more than an Islamic state or a Christian one can be democratic, and I believe in democracy, so I reject the idea of a Jewish-only state. But in fact, this resolution said nothing about that, and nothing in its language was intended to reward or punish Israel for characterizing itself as a Jewish state, or even to address the newest attempt to curtail freedom of speech for Arab citizens of that so-called democracy, known as the Nakba Law. There are people who are supporting this resolution who believe in two states and who do not accept the right of Palestinian refugees to return home. You can support this resolution and still believe apartheid is the way forward.

If it is true, as you allege, that there is any connection between the divestment resolution and swastikas on Jewish students' doors or rocks thrown through the windows of a kosher bakery in Oakland, that is completely unacceptable. The people who took those actions certainly do not speak for, and have no place in, the movement for divestment from Israeli war crimes. But you have presented absolutely no evidence that any such connection exists. It is much more likely that these acts of hatred are part of the general rise in racism and white supremacy that is rampant in our country. Why do you focus all of your fear and outrage against Muslim and Arab communities and critics of Israel? Why aren't you busy demanding the resignation of Russell Pearce, the Arizona state assemblyman who both authored the state's hideous new anti-immigrant law, and circulated a letter complaining about "the inerrant nature of the Jewish 'Holocaust' tale"? If you decided to make that your struggle, I think you would find that every green-sticker-wearer in that room was happy to join in coalition with you.

If you feel isolated and marginalized, it is only your actions that are causing you to feel that way. You say that it is anti-Jewish sentiment, masquerading as criticism of Israel, but hundreds of Jews sat in that room feeling otherwise.

You have an answer for that. You say that we are not "real" Jews, that you and only you can speak for the Jewish community. Unlike your claims about what we mean to communicate by wearing green stickers (which, for those who were not there, said things like "Another Jewish mother for human rights. Divest from war crimes."), I am not simply interpreting your words. This is a quote from the talking points which members of the Zionist Jewish organizations circulated in advance of the meeting two weeks ago: "There will always be dissenters; they don't represent the voice of the Jewish community. WE are the voice of the Jewish community at Cal…." Numerous speakers seized onto this talking point and made that claim, that those of us – many more of us in fact than there were of you at the debates at Cal – are not part of the Jewish community.

How do you think that makes ME feel? I grew up in an observant, Zionist family. It was also a family very committed to human and civil rights. As I grew up, I realized that some of these values were inconsistent, but I did not reject Judaism or my Jewish identity. Most of my family disagrees with me about a lot of issues in regard to Palestine, but we are still family and Jewish culture remains a very important part of my life. Now you tell me that I must choose between my Jewish identity and my identity as someone who believes in human rights and equality for all. How is this any different from members of my queer community who have been told they must choose between the LGBTQ parts of their identity and their religious or cultural identities? How do you think it makes me feel when you stand in front of a room full of people and assert that the entire Jewish community is unified in its support for a country that has killed over 1,400 children in the last nine years?

In the war of feelings, you, my sisters and brothers, are doing more harm to Jews than the people you accuse of anti-Semitism.

Democracy of Art

Happy International Women’s Day, which I’m doing nothing about for the first time in I can’t remember how long. Very strange. (The photo is from an IWD protest in San Antonio, organized by a multiethnic coalition. Why can't we have that? They've been doing it for 20 years. Read about it.)

On my way back from Montreal, where I spoke at an excellent panel and a queer workshop organized by Tadamon, QTEAM and other very well-organized Palestine solidarity groups, I was thinking about my little self-publishing venture.

Someone was saying at a party the other night that they never go to movies any more because they have a friend that can download every movie as soon as it comes out.

My friend’s boyfriend said, “Well soon there won’t be any movies to see any more, since no one is willing to pay to see them. Only big Hollywood blockbusters will get made; no one else will be able to get any financing.”

I thought about that.

“Or maybe,” I suggested, “filmmaking will become more a labor of love, and more interesting stuff will get made because people’s ideas won’t be being stifled by the commercial gate-keeping establishment.”

My friends, who are young counterculture types, quickly agreed.

“But,” objected an older friend, “artists should be able to make a living from their art, and not be forced to slave away at meaningless jobs. In other countries, art is state subsidized.”

I’m sure a lot of great art is subsidized, but I can’t help wondering how much great art is also stopped at the door, even in those progressive European countries we love to compare ourselves to. One of the amazing things about the process of seeking agents and publishers is accumulating proof that “good” and “bad” are subjective categories. How can one reputable agent say she “loves loves loves” my main character (but she can’t do anything with it right now) while another rejects the manuscript sight unseen? One feminist publisher says, “We found it very well written and well researched, but we feel we cannot adequately market it,” and recommends another publisher who responds tersely, “We do not want to publish it.”

Nothing can make you go so quickly from Cloud 9 to the Slough of Despond (boy, a Pilgrim’s Progress reference – not something I ever thought I’d use – must be all those years rereading Little Women).

So what do I do with all those homilies about “The way to get published is to write well?” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read that assertion. Here are a few examples:

“Good writing LEAPS out at editors (or interns) who sift through stacks of unsolicited articles.”http://www.mariahburtonnelson.com/FAQ/faqWriting.htm

“Publishing is changing — all entertainment media is changing — but good writing tends to find a home.” http://booksquare.com/what-have-you-done-for-me-lately/

“As Micole Sudberg, Assistant Editor, Tor Books says, "...the best way to get your manuscript looked at is to write well." http://www.tarakharper.com/k_factor.htm#writing

Okay, so if my manuscript hasn’t found a home, that means it didn’t LEAP off the page, right? Or does it mean, as a friend of mine wrote on his blog, that “the editor … is crabby and hung over when it rises to the top of her to-read list”?

We have the same arguments about the radio show I work on, Women’s Magazine. Some people say it’s terrible, some people say it’s the best thing on the station. We are constantly talking about how to improve our “quality,” but the fact is that we don’t agree on what is good quality. There are certain things that most of us agree aren’t good, and fewer things that we all agree are good, but there’s a huge range in between that depends on what we’re interested in.

What might happen to the art world if we removed the emotional highs and lows that come from that quest for external validation? Sure, it would probably mean that you wasted a few minutes looking at something that should never have seen the light of day. But you might also find a diamond that a bunch of editors and agents mistook for a lump of coal. It would democratize the art world, and some of its denizens don’t want that. We’re taught not to value publication in journals that print all submissions, or books that are self-published. But some of those categories are starting to blur. I’ve been trying to figure out the difference between “self-publishing,” which I heard described the other day as a form of the newly fashionable “DIY,” and “vanity press” which still has a really negative connotation. But why do we assume that a person who paid to have their book published is doing it for “vanity,” while the person who got paid to do it isn’t? Aren’t both doing it because they believe they have something to say?

A friend of mine who’s been taking art classes for the last several years just gave a show for her 60^th birthday. She sold her paintings and drawings, nearly all of plants or flowers, to her friends, and the proceeds went to a relocation fund for a friend who is about to get out prison. By the time I got there, nearly everything had been bought up. Now I don’t know, maybe if she had submitted her work to a gallery, they would have said, “Oh yes, these are exactly what we’re looking for.” But they also might have said, “Sorry, not good enough.”

A movie that has just come out, Budrus, which is winning awards all over the place, includes a couple minutes of footage that I shot in Palestine. This is the third film I’ve sold footage to. Although the money I’ve made is negligible (and I always donate it to Palestine, as my opinion is that the footage belongs to them), it’s way more than I’ve ever made from writing. And yet I know that my camera work is not very good and I believe my writing is not bad.

So what’s the lesson of that? I suppose it proves that utility might count more than aesthetic quality. Or perhaps it’s that art that is collective can make the best of material that isn’t that “good” by itself, that art, like many other things, is more than the sum of its parts.

What's the line between hope and fantasy?

Okay, so one night last week, I was driving home and as usual, I had on KPFA but the fund drive pitching was annoying me – I already gave so I felt justified in turning it off, so I switched to KALW, and they had on that boring legal show – well, it’s not always boring, but their guest was condescending, so I switched to KQED. I was just in time to hear a debate from Intelligence Squared US on the proposition “California Is the First Failed State.” I was riveted to the radio, such that when I got home, I sat in my car until it was over (Brian Edwards-Tiekert taught me to call that a “parking lot moment,” the epitome of good radio.) The team in favor won by a landslide.

The first thing that was interesting about this debate was who was arguing against the proposition. The team included Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC, former governor Gray Davis, who was ousted by the right-wing recall that brought us the Schwarzenegger disaster, and Van Jones, former Green Jobs Czar and erstwhile revolutionary youth leader here in the Bay. Says something about where Van might be, or at least thinks he is, headed.

The second thing that was so intriguing about this debate was that everything the yes team had to say simply proved their opponents’ points. Gray Davis emphasized the fact that Californians are using the initiative process, the one that brought us Proposition 13 and ultimately the huge budgetary quagmire we find ourselves in now, not to mention 3 Strikes, English-Only, the anti-immigrant Prop. 187, and don’t forget the all-important (not) anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8, to call for a Constitutional Convention to, presumably, reform this initiative process. Okay, we won’t even get into the convoluted logic of using the tool that created the failure to solve the failure. Instead, I’ll just mention that one, the Con. Con. probably won’t even be on the ballot because it’s been put on hold for lack of funds, and two, as the debaters on the “pro” side kept pointing out, the fact that we need to “Repair California” – the name of the organization formed to promote the Con. Con. – proves that we’re broken. Not to mention broke.

The crux of the Van Jones-Gray Davis arguments was, “We Californians are good, creative, smart people, who want to fix our state, so don’t give up on us.” Van used the word “optimism,” I can’t remember exactly but it was something like “don’t kill our hope,” by voting for the motion. Now first of all, it’s not people voting for the motion that’s killing our hope, it’s the brokenness of our failed state. The fact that kids have no art supplies or music classes in school, that college students can’t get the financial aid or classes they need to graduate, that there’s a generation of young people who have never had a job, that people are getting thrown off of the inadequate General Assistance that was keeping them in their SROs – those are the things that are destroying hope. No one is saying that Californians are not good, interesting, hard-working, smart, talented people, any more than we are saying the people of Zimbabwe are not all those things. That doesn’t disprove the fact that our state is not fulfilling the functions of a state, which is to nurture and protect, house and promote the health of those creative, smart, talented, hard-working people.

It’s more of that magical thinking that conflates believing in something with the ability to make it happen. (Okay, reading this over, I realized that I shouldn't dis magical thinking. I'm a witch, at least some of the time, so I am supposed to believe that believing in something means we can do it. But I guess I would say magic can help create the conditions under which change can happen but it doesn't make change on its own.) Do Californians have the ability to turn our political system around? Of course. But having the ability doesn’t get it done. We have to have the will, and we have to have the movement, and right now we don’t seem to have either, although we have the kernels of them. Notably, while the Con. Con. is on hold, the campaign to repeal the 2/3 majority rule to pass a budget or raise taxes, is gathering signatures and has a chance to make it onto the ballot if EVERYONE who supports democracy signs it at www.californiansfordemocracy.com. DO IT TODAY AND TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS.

The other interesting thing about the debate (which in my opinion spent too much time on the question of what “first” means) is that many people seemed to accept that the mess the initiative process has led to in California proves that direct democracy can’t work. I argued when Hamas won the Palestinian elections and I’ll argue in the face of the Tea Parties and the Taxpayer Revolt that there’s no such thing as too much democracy. There is such a thing as false democracy. Unfortunately, none of the debaters pointed out that that’s what we have in California, as we do in the U.S. as a whole. Just because you can vote doesn’t mean you have a democracy. Not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, not in Iran and not in California. To have a real democracy, we need a level playing field, and we’ve never had that because all our elections are financed by corporations. Every election season, I fantasize about putting up a billboard that says, “If they can afford a billboard, they’re not on your side.” But of course, then people would assume that I’m not on their side.

So what do you all think? Does the “failed state” analysis do anything to help us find a way through?

So I was starting to write about a debate I heard last night on KQED on "California is the first failed state." It was on Intelligence Squared, so I went to their website to look something up and lo and behold, found this one lurking in their recent broadcasts:

THE US SHOULD STEP BACK FROM ITS SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP WITH ISRAEL

And here's the great news: Before the debate, the live NYC audience voted 33% for the motion, 42% against and 25% undecided. Following the debate, 49% voted for the motion, 47% against and 4% undecided. Roger Cohen & Rashid Khalidi carried the day.

So sounds like we all want to catch it! You can download the full or edited audio and watch the video by clicking here.

The Enemy Is Ourselves

I don't like using this blog to criticize other activist groups, but today I feel like I have to.

This morning, the radio show Letters to Washington had a round table on the anti-war movement, inspired by the report (not quite accurate, according to Democracy Now!) that the U.S. death toll in Afghanistan topped 1,000 in the last couple days. My friend David Solnit was on the panel, as was Medea Benjamin, founder of Code Pink, and some other people I can't actually remember right now. So they started out talking about how in order to reenergize the anti-war movement, we need to make alliances with people who are affected and outraged by the economic and budgetary crises in the country. They talked about making connections with the students organizing the March 4 protest of the dismantling of California's educational system.

Now that's obviously an idea I agree with; just today, I was making stickers for March 4. But it's not a new and untried idea. Back in the 1980s we were chanting, "Money for Jobs, Not for War," "Money for Health Care, Not for Warfare," "Money for Schools, Not for War," "Feed the People, Not the Pentagon." That was when the wars were in Central America, something the students organizing March 4 probably never even heard of. Back then I remember going to meetings where people explained and adjured and harangued each other that if we wanted poor people and people of color to join the movement to end the wars abroad we needed to start talking about the "war at home." In 1983, people from the various anti-war and social justice groups formed a Coalition for Jobs, Peace and Justice, which had an annual demonstration by the same name. It was a nice coming together for a day, but it did not succeed in creating a unified movement, and it certainly didn't succeed in putting an end to imperialist wars or the war-based economy.

So if it's not clear by now, I was kind of peed off right off the bat.
But then Medea Benjamin started talking about how we need to reach out to the Tea Party people, because they're also against the wars because we can't afford them. The host of the panel asked her if we were going to see joint Code Pink-Tea Party actions, and she said that that was being discussed. And then I lost it. As it happens, just last night I was at a meeting where someone said something similar about the movement for single-payer health care, that we should be able to make an alliance with the Tea Partiers because they hate the corporations too. My friend Deeg laid out very succinctly and eloquently why that's not possible. I sure wished she had been in that round table, and I also wished they were taking call-ins, since no one else on the panel decided to point out that the Tea Parties may hate corporations (though they are funded by them), and some of them may think the wars are too expensive, but they also hate "welfare cheats," which in their mind means (all) Black people, and they also hate paying taxes so that the children of immigrants can go to school, and they also hate that the President is an African American whom they believe is a socialist and a Muslim.

That an anti-war movement could even be considering for one moment reaching out to a group whose folk hero and keynote speaker is Sarah Palin shows that it is not serious about making alliances with the groups they started out saying they needed to ally with, groups which are largely people of color, immigrants, and people who need public financing for their education.

Moreover, a legitimate anti-war movement is not going to align with people whose opposition to the war is based on the cost, because a true anti-war movement knows that once we withdraw our troops, we cannot simply keep all the money at home. We are going to owe – we already owe – massive reparations to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. And you are never going to sell that to the Tea Party people.

Are we so afraid of poor people, people of color and youth that we would rather join up with gun-toting bigots? If so, we have met the enemy and it is us.