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History

Happy Birthday, Eugene Debs

One of the most remarkable historical figures on the American Left was born to French immigrant parents on this day in 1855 in Terre Haute, Indiana. Growing up comfortably middle-class, supported by family throughout his life-time (his brother Theodore did the bulk of his administrative work forever, his wife was a strong supporter and intellectual soul mate,) Eugene Debs grew from being a moderate to being a socialist, a labor organizer, fighter for militant unions and a founding member of the Socialist Party of America.

Never heard of him? Here is a short documentary narrated in the late 70s by none other than Bernie Sanders.

During his three presidential runs in 1900, 1904 and 1908, Debs embraced the proclaimed ideals of American democracy – popular sovereignty, equality, republican liberty) – but argued, with speeches that were in turn hopeful and criticizing, full of revolutionary as well as religious fervor, that one could only reach these ideals if one broke the hold of industrial bondage, the reign of unevenly distributed power on the basis of capitalism. That revolution, he was convinced, was in the hand of the working class who had to realize its potential for changing an undemocratic system.

Democracy, under attack in what we currently are witnessing, in all of the vote suppression, manipulation of voting, legal attacks on voting and vote counting, was defined by Debs as the drive to replace unaccountable hierarchies with something approximating an equality of power. He understood that this could not be done without a broad coalition of forces fighting for change, and his party included an enormous range of constituents: Jewish garment workers in New York City, German brewery workers in Milwaukee, white tenant farmers in Oklahoma, black lumber workers in Louisiana.

In fact, outspoken anti-racist arguments filled a lot of Deb’s work.

The Socialist Party would be false to its historic mission, violate the fundamental principles of Socialism, deny its philosophy and repudiate its own teachings if, on account of race considerations, it sought to exclude any human being from political equality and economic freedom . . . Of course the Negro will “not be satisfied with ‘equality with reservation.’” Why should he be? Would you? Suppose you change places with the Negro just a year, then let us hear from you — “with reservation.” (Ref.) )1904!

In 1918 he gave his famous Canton Speech linking capitalist mechanism and war efforts, calling for freedom for workers, and expressing hope for a commonwealth and fervor for Internationalism. It landed him in prison, sentenced for 10 years, serving 3 (his sentence eventually commuted, but his citizenship stripped) for “trying to cause and incite insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny and refusal of duty in the military,” as well as for trying “to obstruct the recruiting and enlistment service of the United States.”

He died a few years later, his health never recovering from the prison ordeal. A posthumously book, Walls and Bars published in 1927, spelled out his primary belief in the need to abolish the hierarchies that had come to replace those of ancient kings and feudalist lords, hierarchies that held people in bondage even if they were no longer owned by chattel slavery.

One of his rightful heiresses, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, framed the political goals of Democratic Socialism in terms relevant for today.

“I believe that in a modern, moral, and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live. So what that means is health care as a human right. It means that every child, no matter where you are born, should have access to a college or trade school education if they so choose it. And, you know, I think that no person should be homeless if we can have public structures and public policies to allow for people to have homes and food and lead a dignified life in the United States.”

Seemingly straightforward, acceptable goals. We will not achieve them if we do not face, as Democrats, whom we are beholden to and how the distribution of power interferes with a pursuit of these goals. A democratic administration – should we be so lucky to get one – and a democratic party going into the next rounds of elections in decades to come, has to reckon with where their true power will come from and who to court as allies. As Eugene Debs would have it, true democracy should be our guiding principle, and reforms should be sought that tilt the balance of power away from those who unjustly wield it. (Ref. – the link here is to a superb historical overview of Deb’s life and the basis of much of my summary today.)

Now let’s continue to bite our nails hoping for the least worst outcome of this election. And listen to the people sing….

 

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Teaching history.

Two nights ago, purportedly enraged about what Columbus Day represents, some protesters in Portland, OR, toppled two statues in a city park and vandalized the Oregon Historical Society to the tune of $25.000 or more. Sheer lunacy. OHS has been involved in uncovering and teaching about the history of our state from a progressive perspective, most recently examining in depth the racist roots of so much what has happened in Oregon, including quarterly publications that were frank and unflinching in confronting an ugly past. This year they unveiled a cornerstone exhibit in cooperation with the nine federally recognized OR tribes, called Experience Oregon.

I will not enter the debate of when and whether violence and vandalism ever have a role to play in a struggle where power is unevenly distributed. But I will say, that actions like these – broken windows, fire torches thrown into the building, a mid-centennial quilt by African-American women stolen and left in the wet streets further down the block – undermine a larger struggle that has been heating up in the last few years: the fight for the integrity of history education, historical research, national identity, and collective memory.

If you blindly rage against any kind of “official” site or organization that engages in historical education you provide grist for the mills of those who are really actively trying to constrain and direct the kind of history we all are supposed to accept, and our children are supposed to learn.

There is an ideological divide between those who want to uncover historical truth, however shaming, ugly and unnerving it may be, on the one hand, and those who want to maintain an ideological view of our nation that distorts, white-washes or erases historical truth to be more in line with their preferred mode of operations, some of which include a active program to undermine democracy.

Making it harder for the former, in whatever fashion, vandalism included, plays into the hand of the latter. This is, of course, not just a theoretical consideration. Look at the very real 1776 Commission appointed by Trump with the mission to create a history curriculum for American schools, intended to be “pro-american,” and feared to deliver state-sponsored propaganda averse to true scientific historical research, just like all the other anti-science initiatives of this administration.

Add to this his promise to defund schools that use the 1619 Project (an in-depth exploration by numerous writers and historians of our slavery- defined past presented by the NYT) as well as other curricular platforms that bring attention to historical facts and truths that counter the “official” curriculum, and you put the nation’s collective historical memory under siege, with public education bearing the brunt. 

Let me cite some important words from an insightful article, History Under Siege: Trumpism, Counter-Memory And Schooling by Eric Weiner, which is worth reading both for the facts and his passion about them.

Here are Trump’s words:

“Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda that if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country.”

And here is Weiner’s assessment:

“The Trumpist crusade against American history education needs to be understood against the backdrop of the administration’s recent actions against refugees, Black Lives Matter protestors, Muslims, and working people of all races and ethnicities. All of these actions suggest an administration hell-bent on breaking the civic bonds between whites and blacks; new immigrants and old; Christians, Jews and Muslims; LGBTQ peoples and heterosexuals; and the poor, working and middle-classes. Trumpism is an ideology of disunity, ignorance, and division; it thrives on conflict, dis-information, mis-education, and social chaos.”

We don’t have to add fuel to that chaos by rowdy actions that are politically unwise, providing grist for the mills of those trying to silence the truth.

Music today by Native American Artists in honor of Indigenous People Day!

The piece above is on target…

And here are others that I like.

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MaestraPeace

The Women’s Building in the Mission district features one of the most frequently visited murals in all of San Francisco.

Panoramic photo fron their website

I walked by there on my way to the pharmacy yesterday, another errand within the two mile radius that I am determined to walk in this city, given that I am on war footing with the parking situation. War footing? Outright war more likely…. although the mural tells me to seek peace.

The building is a community center led by women, a safe space to engage in services and advocacy for women and girls, focussing on immigrant issues as well. They offer a weekly food pantry, finger printing for family reunion, and, pre-Covid 19, also tutoring for job seekers and those trying to figure out technology and provide access to computers and internet. Wellness classes and free consultation with immigration attorneys were slated, as were counseling for domestic violence situations, health care, housing information and job training, also before the virus shut everything down.

In short, an amazing program, in a building that has been chosen as one of the sites for this celebration:

This year, as the nation marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote, Benjamin Moore, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation are celebrating this historic milestone with a new program focused on the preservation of sites in the U.S. where women from all walks of life have made history. We are so excited to announce The Women’s Building as one of those sites, and we’re very happy our organization is recognized as trailblazers in the role of women and their impact on U.S. history. Our colorful mural façade depicts the power and contributions of women throughout history and the world. This year-long project will enhance the grand staircase that showcases the building’s colorful mural as it makes its way from outside, into the heart of the building. 

The mural on the outside of the building is called MaestraPeace (Woman Teacher of Peace.) Juana Alicia, Miranda Bergman, Edythe Boone, Susan Kelk Cervantes, Meera Desai, Yvonne Littleton and Irene Perez painted the 5 stories high mural in 1992; it was restored to full glory in 2012. When I walked by, on an intensely sunny day, it almost felt like walking the streets of Mexico City again, the colors and motifs familiar from that hispanic context. A trip that now feels like a lifetime ago.

The mural brims with life and encouragement, a celebration of women, their skills, their roles, their courage. And no parking in sight – glad I walked!

Music today are some feminist songs from a variety of musicians.

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(Still) Waiting for the glow of justice

“A Tribute to Ida B. Wells” published in The Chicago Defender on April 18, 1931.

Weeping for you is lost—worthless

As a veil of sorrow tinged despair

That comes from the foul air

Of a clime where man’s access

Is defeat, hushed and desertness.

Your future is no turmoil bare

Of reward, etched in the glare

Of right and wrong, bubbling for

redress

Of black men. Yours is no death,

For you are not dead, but yet

With us in this realm where blatant

woc [sic]

Is out of its ken. buried beneath

Your always vibrant shining web.

Where the glow of justice yet will go.


Wallace Webb Scott

*

On Monday, Ida B. Wells was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, posthumously. Here is a link to a short biography and below a moving documentary, laying out the details of her political engagement, social activism, relentless pursuit of justice and truth, and above all her courage.

Born into slavery, she, too, lived through a pandemic – yellow fever – loosing both of her parents and a sibling to the illness. Only 16, she decided to work as a teacher to support her siblings. At every junction where despair hit, including losing anti-discrimination lawsuits at the Supreme Court, her anguish turned to fury and motivated her to increase her efforts to fight for social reform, to educate and to seek justice. She soon thrived on the work of being a journalist, even though it led to her losing her teaching job.

Lynch Laws were used to terrorize the Black population, and three of Well’s friends were murdered by a mob in 1883 when they opened a grocery store competing with White interests across the street. It is strongly believed that the local criminal court judge himself was one of the lynchers. No-one was brought to justice. And if you think that it’s all long ago: Read up on the modern day lynching of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, three months ago. A Black jogger hunted down and shot by two White men, three DAs doing nothing, the last of whom only convened a Grand Jury after a video of the crime surfaced two days ago. A reminder that nothing but nothing lies in only in the past. Wells is probably turning in her grave.

Wells took her power to the pen, and with her understanding of the politics of economics called for Blacks to leave Memphis – as they did by the thousands, migrating to Midwest locations. The White establishment was enraged, hit by the loss of business. Within Memphis she organized a boycott of the Trolley system that hurt the public transport people enough that they came to beg her to end the strike – she refused. She had discovered the power of organizing and devoted efforts towards it for all her life.

Lynching, of course continued and increased in numbers, attended by crowds up to 10.000 people who got voyeuristic pleasure out of the murders. So did violence against those who spoke out: Wells’ offices were ransacked, the printing presses destroyed, her life no longer safe in the South – she was in exile for a full 30 years before she returned, writing and organizing in NYC, creating the first national anti-lynching campaign (eventually she settled in Chicago). Her insight that slaves’s bodies were economically too valuable to be sacrificed, and therefor only harmed, not killed, but that freed Black bodies only represented competition and therefor had to be eliminated, drew national attention. People like Frederick Douglass started to correspond with her and acknowledge her contributions, although many Black leaders decried her for rocking the boat (and also having a problem with a woman being so powerful.)

It was when she visited Europe and founded an international-lynching organization that threatened to curtail the import of American cotton, an industry at the heart of the South, that lynchings became part of public debate among Whites and trailed off in reaction to the economic pressure. Her fight on two fronts – racism and sexism – continued. She joined the suffragist movement as well. The fight within the Black community – between the Radicals represented by DuBois whom she joined, and the Accommodationists, aligned with Booker T. Washington’s mission to keep segregation as a protective sphere for Blacks, also took a lot out of her, but she did not back down.

Before she died in 1931 she wrote about the Arkansas Race Riots, where her work had brought justice to 12 imprisoned, tortured men who had tried to unionize Black cotton-farmers. It’s worth a read if you care about organizing. Or justice.

She was a phenomenal woman, and the late recognition is something that should encourage us all.

Music from the South.

Tulips from years gone by – the farms are closed because of the virus….

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Freedom From vs Freedom To

Bullypulpit here. Essential reading. Sweetened by the sweetest birds, I believe Wilson warblers, photographed from my window during their fleeting, skipping, hopping, fluttering visit on Saturday. Tired of birds yet? Tired of politics of racism? Granting the former, but we don’t have the luxury of fatigue for the latter. As I said, bullypulpit today.

In a friendlier, pleading voice: please read this short essay by Ibram X. Kendi. It is enlightening, non-belligerent, and so, so timely. (Alternatively, I put the key paragraphs below to get the message in plain view.)

In a nutshell he argues that we see parallels between the American history of slaveholding mentality and the division in approaches to containing the Covid-19 pandemic today. Embedded in some plain teaching about historical facts of our founding fathers and the Civil War is this core insight:

Slaveholders desired a state that wholly secured their individual freedom to enslave, not to mention their freedom to disenfranchise, to exploit, to impoverish, to demean, and to silence and kill the demeaned. The freedom to. The freedom to harm. Which is to say, in coronavirus terms, the freedom to infect.

Slaveholders disavowed a state that secured any form of communal freedom—the freedom of the community from slavery, from disenfranchisement, from exploitation, from poverty, from all the demeaning and silencing and killing. The freedom from. The freedom from harm. Which is to say, in coronavirus terms, the freedom from infection.  

From the beginning of the American project, the powerful individual has been battling for his constitutional freedom to harm, and the vulnerable community has been battling for its constitutional freedom from harm. Both freedoms were inscribed into the U.S. Constitution, into the American psyche. The history of the United States, the history of Americans, is the history of reconciling the unreconcilable: individual freedom and community freedom. There is no way to reconcile the enduring psyche of the slaveholder with the enduring psyche of the enslaved.

*

Much has been written about the origins of individualism, the settler mentality, the connection to the belief in the doctrine of exceptionalism and the fact that it is a specifically Western value, so different from the rest of the world which cherishes communal values.

Here is another take that I found quite interesting. New research published six months ago explores a connection between the teachings of the Catholic Church and the rise of individualism, including its specific beliefs in independence, agency and autonomy, starting in the 6th century. In essence there was a church directive to cease intrafamily marriages – to stop marrying your cousins, eventually up to the 6th degree (so not just an incest taboo,) or their widows or adopt their orphans, which changed the traits shared by most people in the world to something different, individualistic, specifically Western.

The research used an enormous range of data to look at correlations between time and intensity spent under the directions of the church, and development of these Western values, including comparisons within one and the same country (Italy) that provided two parts differentially dependent on the church, the industrial North and the poor South. The data “included historical records of church exposure in every nation on Earth, beginning in the first century and ending in 1500 C.E., when European society had become nearly fully Christianized. They also looked at they consulted anthropological data to assign a kinship intensity score to each of the world’s major ethnolinguistic groups. This score was based on historical rates of cousin marriage, polygamy, and other factors. Finally, they drew on dozens of studies that used established psychological measures such as the World Values Survey to determine modern population-level scores for traits such as individualism, creativity, nonconformity, obedience, and ingroup/outgroup trust.”

The large family clans that had been constituted by these family connections guaranteed survival. Growing crops and protecting land required cooperation, and marrying cousins was an easy way to get it. When these kinship systems were broken apart it had enormous consequences, not all good. On the one hand, less dependency and obedience to clans, elders, community did lead to more freedom of choice for the individual, less forced obedience and conformity. Individualistic people working together across family boundaries (and thus with less in-group conformity) formed a precursor civic society that eventually enabled democracy.

The disruption of extended family systems in favor of a nuclear family, however, also meant less security in case of emergencies, famine, disease, with no familial system to fall back on. This is where the church jumped in, corralling the poor in their alms/work houses. Depriving folks of the leadership of their elders left space for the church to take over as authority, requiring obedience, extending influence. The disruption of family ties also led to less land consolidation among the intermarried, from which the church benefited by snatching it up for itself. This was particularly the case during the demise of entire family branches when the lack of succession through adoption was blocked and the estates fell by default to the church.

And, of course, the prime value that we eventually put on individualism weakened the values attached to communal existence.

The interconnection between human psychology, religion, economy and politics never ceases to amaze me. As does our willingness to ignore history and look away from causal factors – like the ongoing effects of slavery or the disadvantages of individualistic societal structuring – when we try to move towards solutions in crises. The worst thing, though, is the fact that so often the price for acting in our self-interest is paid by others, the masses who are granted neither: the freedom for or the freedom from.

And here is freedom-related music – in an old but still unmatched version by Otto Klemperer:

And here is to someone who saw it all early and clearly: Happy 202nd birthday, dear Karl.

TRIER, GERMANY – MAY 05: Some of the 500, one meter tall statues of German political thinker Karl Marx on display on May 5, 2013 in Trier, Germany. The statues, created by artist Ottmar Hoerl, are part of an exhibition at the Museum Simeonstift Trier commemorating the 130th anniversary of the death of Marx in 1883. Marx, who was born in Trier, is the author of The Communist Manifesto, and his ideas on the relationship between labour, industry and capital created the ideological foundation for socialist and communist movements across the globe. (Photo by Hannelore Foerster/Getty Images)

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Liberation Day

Last Saturday, April 25, 2020 marked the 75th anniversary of Italy’s Liberation from the Italian Fascists and Nazi occupation of World War II. Lots of remembrances, celebration and photographs of members of the Italian resistance in the news, often accompanied by renditions of Bella Ciao, the communist partisan song used by the Resistance (before the music got ridiculously usurped by Money Heist, the movie.)

Risiera di San Sabba, Trieste, Italy
Archival photograph

By chance I came across some remarks by Maaza Mengiste, an Ethiopian – American writer, Fulbright scholar and social justice activist. Mengiste published her second novel, The Shadow King, last year to rave reviews. I have not yet read it, but have moved it up on my to-be-read-list when I encountered Mengiste’s thoughts around Liberation Day.

The book is set in 1935 during the Italo-Ethiopian war with Mussolini invading Addis-Abbeba, the precursor to World War II. It focusses on the role of women in war, their ability to fight while being subjected to various forms of oppression. The shadow king of the title is a look-alike of Haile Selassi, who is shown from afar to the Ethiopian soldiers to give them courage and remind them of their duty to sacrifice. All this while the real king sits in exile in Bath, England, running out of money and existing on charity for himself and his entourage.

At its core, say the reviews, is the role memory plays in our understanding and interpretation of history. The way we want to or do remember, just as much as the way we intend to forget those aspects of history that don’t fit into our narrative (be that the narrative of victims, or heroes.) (All this sounds dry, but it was one of Times books of the year….and people say you can’t put it down once you start it.)

*

The complexity of memory culture was only part of the remarks that I picked up by Mengiste on Sunday. A lot of her research in preparation for the book concerned the relationship between the racial segregation laws that were established in Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea and Libya, and Italy’s anti-semitic laws that took effect a year later, in 1938. Mengiste considers bigotry as the shared source for the scourges of colonialism and anti-Semitism. And she celebrated the commemoration of the acts of those courageous resistance fighters who put an end to Mussolini’s reign. As one should.

What resonated was her description of the Italian concentration camp Risiera di San Sabba where some of the Jewish soldiers who had fought as Italians and massacred Ethiopeans during the invasion of Ethiopia, and their families, were imprisoned only a few years later before being sent off to Auschwitz. It was the only camp in Italy where people were killed and then cremated, most of those political prisoners. (Photos today from the memorial.)

“I felt in the presence of ghosts,”Mengiste reports. So did I. A short account of my visit two years ago can be found here.

After reading up on the history the Risiera it became clear that the Italians have some of the same problems around public memory of political darkness as do Germans, independent of the formers’ dedicated resistance. Risiera di San Sabba began its life as a contested site of memory almost immediately after the war’s end, in 1945, when the Communist Counsel on the Liberation of Trieste organized a ceremony at the Risiera that established it as “an icon of the Communist resistant.” In 1965, when the site became a national monument, it was reframed as a site of memory for the anti-Communist wartime resistance. In 1975, the ceremonies accompanying the resurrection of the Risiera memorial emphasized the sacrifice of all victims, describing all as war heroes. The ahistorical nature of these narratives meant that there was no differentiation between victims of racial persecution and political persecution (The carnage done to Yugoslav partisans was omitted.)

After the 1976 war crimes trial in Trieste, the site of the Risiera was used to perpetuate an anti-Communist narrative that emphasized the deportation of Jewish prisoners to death camps in Germany and Poland and portrayed Yugoslav partisans as “non-innocent” victims. In other words, the trial contributed to the image of Italians as contributing only minimally to the maintenance of the camp and to the atrocities committed there. (I learned all this here.)

What I really want to say: it is not all black and white, good and bad, perpetrators and victims. Decisions about who is victim and deserves remembrance and who is not emerge when nations try to justify their actions. The fact of resistance by some also does not wipe out the fact of collaboration by many others. Which is of course a lesson some Germans are still trying to figure out while others are attempting to whitewash much that has occurred. In the meantime all power to those who resisted fascism! May they be remembered forever.

And why Aida as today’s musical choice? Haile Selassi is said to have listened to Aida in the years of exile in Bath. And I’m a sucker for Verdi, in any event.

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Fashion History

On my walks I often encounter jays. They pop up left and right, strutting about, flitting in and out, curious, loud and full of themselves. Not quite peacocks, but almost. Vain.

So it was last week. Thoughts turned to vanity displayed in other species, Homo sapiens among them, regardless of gender. That in turn, reminded me of a recent article that had me amused, discussing Egregious Renaissance maleness, from the inside out. (His title, not my words, alas…)

Voilà, the history of the codpiece. A fashion accessory that came into being as a functional piece of triangular cloth tied to your waist on one end and affixed to your long stockings on the other, trying to keep it all together and covered in case your upper garments slid up or apart, revealing the family jewels. Cloth eventually became pouch stuffed with something or other. The article was funny, but restricted to the 50 years or so in which the fashion item was en vogue, as documented in numerous Renaissance paintings, before it pretty much disappeared again. As fashion is want to do.

Portrait of Antonio Navagero (1565) with an accentuated codpiece, oil on canvas by Giovanni Battista Moroni, 

The short clip below draws a longer arc, from the 1500s to the fashion choices of various Star War characters, Heavy Metal Bands and fashion idols of the Gay community in contemporary design. It has an impressive collection of art on display, devoted to the fashion pride of the subjects….worth watching for that alone.

It, too, is funny – I wonder if witty people are drawn to strange subjects, or if that kind of revealing item brings out the wit – but I digress.

And here is an NYT interview with one of the people who still produce codpieces…

The most interesting thing about the codpiece is that form signaled but also contained function. It was not just a signal, announcing status, prowess, (lots of them attached to body armors claiming military might) gendered power, however you want to call it, but had a medical function as well. It turns out that syphilis was treated during those years with bandages holding an application of a messy mix of mercury and lard ointment, which could be safely contained in these bulging contraptions. Your clothes were protected from stains, bandages were demurely hidden. Or deceptively.

The demise of the codpiece was eventually brought about, among other factors, by prominent literary voices, Shakespeare’s among them. Ridiculing its attempt to signal masculinity was perfectly captured in 1628 by Robert Hayman.

Two Filthy Fashions

Of all fond fashion, that were worne by Men.
These two (I hope) will ne’r be worne againe:
Great Codpist Doublets, and great Codpist britch,
At seuerall times worne both by meane and rich:
These two had beene, had they beene worn together,
Like two Fooles, pointing, mocking each the other.

A more in-depth exploration of the way gendered fashions of all kinds have been elevated or struck down by cultural voices can be found here (assuming you have currently time for unanticipated but interesting reading….) – codpiece included.

And for music we have a nice compilation of Renaissance tunes, although that picture looks suspiciously like an ouud and not a mandolin…

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Gardens

By all reports, people are emptying nursery shelves of edible plants and seed catalogues are running out of products to ship because we are back in Victory Garden mode. With all that war-related terminology – fighting the invisible enemy – it’s no wonder that old war concepts are making a come-back.

Planting additional gardens to provide food was originally started in WW I, ironically to save our European allies from starvation- their farms had become battlefields and their farm workers soldiers. US citizens were asked to grow their own food so that we could send more industrially produced foods to Europe. During WW II 20 million additional gardens produced 40% of the nation’s food; the process included administrative manuals to help citizens with planting and pest control, and instructions for canning and preserving to help with excess crops. Here is an interesting re-counting of the history. And here is an incredible historical propaganda video sporting a patriotic family doing their share towards the war effort in a HUGE (quarter acre) victory garden, mostly dug by a horse and tended by a 14-year old who inhales enough pesticides to be guaranteed lung cancer – (as a side commentary, every one in the film has a name, Dad and Grandpa Holder, Dick and Jane, and then there is…. mother! Also, Jane likes to garden in penny loafers. Just saying.)

Food insecurity is indeed a monster raising its ugly head even higher in times of mass unemployment and disrupted supply chains. Yes, I’m speaking of today, not 1944. The statistics from just 2 years ago are staggering – over 37 million Americans, including 1 million children, lacked consistent access to enough food for an active healthy life. African-Americans are hit twice as hard compared to Whites when it comes to hunger. (Which reminds me: if you read one single thing today that I link to, read this: Kendi on the causes for disproportionate suffering experienced by minority populations facing Covid-19.)

Extra vegetable gardens, with now so much more need for food arising, are indeed a good idea. That is if you have a plot, as small as 2 by 6 feet, that gets 6-8 hours of sun a day, an inclination to get your hands dirty and a nursery that can still provides some seedlings and bags of soil or other stuff to plant in. Never gardened before? Luckily you don’t have to rely on James Burdett’s 1943 book, The Victory Garden Manual. He was the founder of the National Garden Bureau, a non-profit organization “that exists to educate, inspire, and motivate people to increase the use of plants in homes, gardens, and workplaces by being the marketing arm of the gardening industry.”

Yes, they market, oh do they market, but they do so cleverly to help the un-initiated find the joy of gardening. Their latest effort, Victory Garden 2.0, is a step by step internet tool that I can actually see being successful in adding food to the food banks. They offer instructions for raised-bed or container gardens of various types, a salad garden, a kitchen garden, a high yield garden and a giving garden – for the hungry. Everything is spelled out – from soil preparation to pest control to what kinds of seed you need, how to plant, space, water, pollinate – you name it. Example below. The link goes into way more detail.

Way to go.

While waiting for vegetables to grow, I’m getting anticipatory pleasure from fruit-tree blossoms – not my own, since my garden is too shady, although I have one ancient pear tree that yields about 4 exemplars per year, worm-eaten in my pesticide-free zone, but pears none-the-less….

Music today by Béla Bartók who seemed to appreciate certain kinds of vegetables:  

“And then, after moving to America in 1940, he and his wife visited Los Angeles where he first encountered the avocado pear while eating a version of Waldorf salad. ‘This is a fruit somewhat like a cucumber in size and colour,’ he carefully recorded. ‘But it is quite buttery in texture, so it can be spread on bread. Its flavour is something like an almond but not so sweet. It has a place in this celebrated fruit salad which consists of green salad, apple, celery, pineapple, raw tomato and mayonnaise.”

Schiff’s playing is tight, and the second movement of the 3rd piano concerto sounds at times as if the ducks have gotten lose in the garden…

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Happily ever after?

Several large wedding ceremonies were held over the last weeks in New York City in the Orthodox Jewish Community, despite the city’s requirements of social distancing and federal recommendations to avoid large groups. As of last Saturday more than 240 participants registered as fallen ill, in three clusters in Borough Park and Williamsburg. Not only is this a tragedy for the families and neighborhoods involved, but the insistence on large communal events is also sparking fears of anti-Semitic reprisals.

Blaming the Jews is, of course, nothing new. (I am not endorsing holding mass weddings right now, mind you, even if religious laws are cited to justify them. Last I looked, a primary pillar of Judaism is the value of life, which allows all kinds of abandoning of rules associated with Shabbat, fasts, etc., when a life is to be protected.) I am more interested in the fall-out from irrationality and behavior in the face of looming, uncontrollable diseases.

Here are some of the historical facts. Jews were persecuted in huge numbers, whole communities, whenever epidemics broke out (and particularly through out the mid-1300s with the first wave of the Black Death), accused of malevolent well-poisoning. This was done by the local gentile populations even if the Church or the worldly rulers warned against it, partially driven by the convenient fact that the confiscated belongings of the murdered would be distributed among the villagers. Hundreds of Jewish communities were massacred, even though as a group they had been harder hit by the plague than most. Their constrained living quarters in ghettos and lack of access to clean water made them a sitting target for the fleas that brought the disease.

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Blaming the Other is, however, not a preoccupation solely reserved for non-Jews. There is plenty of evidence of irrational accusations to be found in Jewish history as well. Natan M. Meir, the Lorry I. Lokey Professor of Judaic Studies at Portland State University, is about to publish a book that lays out in great detail how Eastern European Jewry resorted to fear management via scapegoating marginalized figures in their own communities. Stepchildren of the Shtetl, The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939 will be published in July, 2020. Assuming we are still home-bound by then, it might be just the right thing to read when we need to convince ourselves that things could always be worse….(Having spent some time with Natan when we were both panelists discussing text and translations of Jewish sources, I can vouch for the passion and learnedness he brings to everything he tackles.)

It seems that during the 1866 cholera epidemic, some Hasidic communities “declared that Jewish women wearing crinolines and earrings were to blame for the epidemic,” with physical attacks on them following in short order. More generally, Rabbis blamed adultery as causal factors with some stories told that adulterers, reported by community members, were killed to help abate the disease.

And then there was the magical thinking tied to a completely different approach: the cholera wedding also known as the black wedding, believed to mitigate the impact of the scourge. (Excerpts from a review of the upcoming book here )

“The cholera wedding generally involved finding two of the most marginal residents of the town (whether orphans, beggars, or the physically handicapped) and forcibly marrying them, usually in the cemetery. The cholera wedding, also known as a shvartse khasene (black wedding) or mageyfe khasene (plague wedding) was presented as an ancient Jewish rite, but Meir argues, it was a newly invented, modern response to what was then a newly arrived disease. Because it was a late-developing belief and not textually based, the mechanism by which it was believed to work is open to interpretation.

The last one we know of over here, happened during the flu epidemic 1918, in Winnipeg, “at one end of the Shaarey Zedek cemetery in the city’s North End, a ceremony that drew more than a thousand Jewish and gentile guests, with a minyan of 10 Jewish men conducting a funeral for an influenza victim at the other end of the graveyard.”

The cholera wedding didn’t have one single interpretation. For example, some rabbis felt it was efficacious because helping to marry off a needy bride was a great mitsve that would please God, all the more so for the marginal of the community who were unlikely to marry in any case. However, what comes across in many of the appalling descriptions of the forcibly married, and their reactions to each other, is that the act was far more callous than charitable. But it was enabled by traditional attitudes around communal charity. Those who had relied on it were seen as being, quite literally, property of the townspeople and thus had no say when their (previously reviled) bodies were needed to protect the town.”

Who owns whom, and who owes what is a topic that really emerges in many contexts in these pestilential times, beyond issues of magical thinking, religious beliefs and despairing search for ways to ward off the worst. We’ll look into more of that during this week in the context of economy and power structures. At least that’s the plan.

Music from London-based She’Koyokh which will bring a spring into your step on another lonesome Monday.

If I could only visit to photograph you all dancing while liberally applying disinfectant to the surfaces of your homes….

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