History

Consider the Speed

History
Jan 10, 2019
2 Comments

What a difference 4 years make. It was only 2014 when one of the most spectacular buildings in all of South America was inaugurated. Filled with powerful hope then, with people seeking coalitions, with reminders of solidarity and progress across nations, it now approaches the status of a ghost town.

I am referring to the headquarters of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) near Quito, Ecuador. It strikes me as a singular example of how history can turn on a dime, leaving ruins behind in more ways than one, even if they are futuristic looking. Actually the building is not quite a ruin, the Ecuadoran government wants to convert it into an indigenous university with the UNASUR members who claim ownership, refusing so far. It is the idea of UNASUR that has been ruined by hostile, increasingly nationalistic reality.

https://www.star-telegram.com/news/nation-world/national/article224065275.html

UNASUR, founded in 2008 as a project of regional economic and political integration, was championed by progressive leaders such as former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa. It has faced challenges as a surge of right-wing governments have begun to oppose it. Chavez is dead, Lula de Silva is in jail, and members are dropping (out) like flies. Of late, six member countries – Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Peru – announced they were abandoning the bloc.

The goal had been to create better lives for all South American citizens, to improve their health, and, as the mission stated, create an environment of peace, equity, inclusion and justice. Lots of health-related progress was made under the aegis of UNASUR; the inability to intervene or mediate in the various growing conflicts, particularly with regard to Venezuela, however, led to the demise of the organization. They were not even able to elect a secretary general to lead integration efforts, and so the whole thing fractured.

Gloating from the likes of writers linked to below, is in no short supply.

A Requiem for UNASUR

I am struck by two things that I associate with these reports: one is the general tendency, across the world, to question or actively undermine bodies that look for ways to unite nations rather than isolate them. Name one that has gotten stronger rather than weaker in the wake of rising populism. It stands in such jarring contrast to the fact that multinational corporations in late stage capitalism have become supranational powers.

Secondly, the speed of the demise is truly scary. While we pay attention to each passing individual scandal or manipulation in our own country, history flies towards much larger fractures, almost unnoticed.

Photographs of modern architecture in CDMX, since I had no camera when backpacking through Ecuador some 40 years ago.

Consider the Monkey

This week I will try to convey how singular examples can bring a point home, and sometimes pave the way to understand a larger pattern. At least they do so for me. often provoking thoughts about how we are repeating history in one way or another.

I will start with the case of Ota Benga, a Congolese pygmy of the Mbuti tribe, who was bought by an American explorer from African slave traders in 1904. After having been displayed at the St Louis World Fair, he was brought to the Bronx zoo. Together with his pet chimpanzee he was locked in the Orangutan cage and exhibited to visitors as a kind of animal, his teeth filed to sharp pints by the zoo keepers and with bones added to the cage to hint at cannibalism.

Clergy eventually protested and had him moved to an orphanage for non-white children. By 1910 he was forced to work at a tobacco company in Lynchburg, VA where he later killed himself, having built his own pyre beforehand, with a stolen gun.

https://www.powells.com/post/original-essays/consider-the-monkey

Treating someone who looks different from the white norm as subhuman has not stopped, even if we don’t put exemplars in the zoo these days. We still put them behind bars, in large numbers, caging them for the purported fear of their wild, dangerous impulses. We call them animal names – remember George Allen, Republican Senator from Virginia, who called Indians at his rallies Macaques? Or Roseanne Barr decrying Valerie Jarrett as the child of an ape? Or he who shall not be named calling Omarosa Manigault a dog?? And if you are a soccer fan you’ll know about the 1000s of European fans making monkey noises in stadiums when the scoring opposing-team player is a black person.

Psychological research, originally looking into Nazi use of dehumanizing language in preparation for the Holocaust, has shown that merely listening to it increases the willingness to use violence; some international agencies even consider that kind of naming a precursor to genocide. Once a class of people is dehumanized, the usual compassion and empathy that we extend to fellow human beings is weakened. The part of your brain that controls social relations becomes less active, a physiologically measurable effect when you are exposed to this kind of language. The door to systematic mistreatment is then wide open.

http://theconversation.com/the-slippery-slope-of-dehumanizing-language-97512

One of the ways we try to expose the past and help overcome it, is by creating museum exhibits that show the consequences of racist behavior. Case in point is the The Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice , a public memorial of the lynching of Black people in Alabama. By all reports – I have not been there – it is an astoundingly emotional site that brings the relevant points home. At a cost, though, that few of us probably considered.

Kunta Kinte – Alex Haley – Roots Memorial

The disturbing article attached below talks about the re-opening of wounds for those who lost family members to lynching. More generally, it describes how watching the exhibits can become itself a kind of voyeurism, or entertainment for those taking selfies with the displays. “This memorial, intentionally or not, reproduces the opportunity for white onlookers to engage in the spectacle of lynching.”

When a Lynching Memorial Becomes a Photo Opportunity

It makes you really wonder, what can be done to provoke change. One thing we can start with, I think, is to watch our own language and eradicate the spontaneous use of animal terms during denigrating fits – myself included.

Photographs today from Annapolis, Maryland, where a memorial celebrates the first African-American Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall.

And Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday, in commemoration of the lynchings.

Resentment

History, Politics
Jan 4, 2019
1 Comments

A lot of people want change. That is true for the Left and also applies to the Right. If you think about it, the two are really on opposing trajectories – the Left fights, among other things, for structurally disadvantaged people’s rights to access, for them to be able to rise to a place of equal opportunity in society, to ascend to equality from their place at the bottom of the heap. They want a future filled with justice.

The Right is, to large parts, constituted of people who fear a descent, a decline in their status, a loss of privileges, a replacement by others they deem non-legitimate. They want a return to a past they perceive to be their birthright. Opposing trajectories, as I said, both with regard to the experienced direction of change, up or down, and the respective times, future or past, under consideration.

What both movements share, though, is some kind of resentment (no clue why they call it the fancier ressentiment, but they often do.) It’s not about an individual’s desire simply to have what others have (that would be envy. ) It is about generally and collectively questioning the legitimacy of the principles of distribution of goods and rights: who is justified to own/have access/call the shots and who is not. And, in the case of the Right, it’s often about seeing one’s own displacement or descent as directly caused by the ascent of specific others – women who work, migrants who come into the country, etc.

Resentment grows when there is a discrepancy between what you consider your right and what your actual life provides. And it becomes particularly strong if you feel you’ve played by the rules, and those are changed mid-game, or the other team is cheating.

.https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/whats-ressentiment-got-do-it.

Unfortunately, these emotions are often stirred by easily manipulated beliefs rather than facts: if your job is gone, it is easier to blame the women who you see working all around you for displacing you, than questioning an economic system that relies on automation and outsourcing to continue to reap profits. If you believe that South American migrants will deprive you of your share of limited resources you don’t even look at the facts that show this to be untrue. And those emotions mobilize: You see yourself attacked as a class, no longer as a failing individual, and that unites you with the many who share your view. Rather than apportioning blame to yourself as not being competitive, you can blame a shared out-group enemy – making for these dangerous movements that are now sprouting across the US, movements that are willing to consider even violence to defend what they believe is ripped from them.

I’m musing on this because I promised to report on my readings and because I think it is essential that we understand the psychological underpinnings of what leads to populist movements. If we want to have a chance to reach these people we must convey, among other things, that we are not playing a zero-sum game, where you either win or lose.

Source, alas, in German (and I only reported on a smidgen of the entire argument….https://www.freitag.de/autoren/der-freitag/der-blick-nach-unten

Photographs today from NYC’s streets in honor of our new congressional members who will hopefully shake things up and seem to have a sense of humor.

Music is self explanatory…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7qQ6_RV4VQ

Learning from History

He who shall not be named tweeted something along the lines of ” there will ALWAYS be walls and ALWAYS be wheels” in recent days. The statement relies on the notion that there is something inevitable, like a law of nature or a law of history that will happen or will continue to happen regardless of our political aspirations.

The assumption of immutable forces were at the root of totalitarian movements, the law of history for Stalin, the law of nature for Hitler. As Hannah Arendt put it (and I paraphrase to my best ability) the ideology underlying totalitarianism assumes that there are inevitable necessities ruling the course of history. These can be laws of race or class, but they are immune to individual desires or political goals. You can either act in accordance with those necessities, or you’ll be swept aside by the forces of history.

https://www.wallstein-verlag.de/9783835331921-hannah-arendt-the-modern-challenge-to-tradition-fragmente-eines-buchs.html

In a truly totalitarian society that ideology is supplemented by terror which tries to eradicate any aspect of human freedom and divergent thought. We are certainly not at this point. But I think it is important to realize that people who have lost a sense of community, a sense of predictability in their world when threatened with a decline in status or loss of what’s familiar, are open to ideologies that relieve them of a sense of (failed) responsibility of their own fate. They are open to totalitarian organizations that make them feel part of inevitable history rather than superfluous human beings. What will be, will be, no use resisting. So, enjoy the ride (sounds like a familiar tweet as well, doesn’t it?)

State-organized terror might not be on for us right now, but it did happen in history, as we know. And being reminded of it helps us to be forearmed, or so one hopes. Usually museums and memorials do that for us. We visit them, however, only on occasion. Perhaps it’s better to make reminders of the consequences of terror more visible in our every day life. In Berlin, for example, a project, Places of Remembrance, by Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock put signs on street lamp posts which depict images of daily scenes and profession on one side and display condensed versions of anti-Jewish Nazi regulations passed between 1933 and 1945 on the reverse side. They remind us of shared human experiences before people were divided into those allowed to live and those violently put to death. All in keeping with an ideology that “necessitated” pure blood lines. I wonder what the equivalent might look like in this country.

‘Jews Aren’t Allowed to Use Phones’: Berlin’s Most Unsettling Memorial

Description and images from that art project are in the link above.

My photographs today are of Berlin and its Jewish memorials.

Music: Dies Irae from Verdi’s Requiem –

and a documentary/concert performance for those who have more time to watch, recalling the requiem being performed at Theresienstadt concentration camp.

http://site-323590.bcvp0rtal.com/detail/videos/new-on-dso-replay/video/5430233815001/defiant-requiem:-verdi-at-terez%C3%ADn?autoStart=true

2019!

History
Jan 2, 2019
0 Comments

One hundred years ago, the month of January began with hope. Nations across the world met in Versailles for a Peace Conference, to deal with the catastrophic results of the down-fall of major empires after World War I. The reign of the Russian Tzars was finally over, as was that of the Ottomans; the German and Austrian-Hungarian Empires were done.

President Woodrow Wilson was a rising star, riding on proclamations for self-determination of nations. Non-Whites, both from the colonies exploited by Europe and in the U.S. called for emancipation in the wake of their military service contributions in the Great War.

Women, who had taken on major labor roles replacing those who had gone to fight, were unwilling to go home meekly and be but sheepish housewives again.

So much hope, all around, that the Treaty of Versailles would ring in true change. We know how that ended. The US did not ratify the treaty and abstained from joining the League of Nations. The Middle East was nilly-willy partitioned by the Brits and French, with disastrous consequences. Colonies abroad and Blacks here at home were given the middle finger. China was shorted in favor of Japan, leading to the justified assumption that the West could not be trusted. And the Germans, well, they felt betrayed and humiliated, economically with a boot on their neck, but more importantly psychologically abased, paving the way for the rise of Hitler and his minions.

Here we are, a hundred years later, wondering if democratic hope will be abandoned for good in favor of the reign of autocratic systems. For this first week of the year I will try and summarize some of the things I’ve read to see if we can learn from history. Perhaps that helps to plan action for change beyond whipping out a checkbook, or (wo)manning phone banks, although I suspect both will be needed.

Photographs today are of graffiti in Paris, as close as I got to Versailles…..

The blurb in this photograph says: Those who are born to obey will obey even when on the throne – it is a citation from Les Chants de Malador, the single book published by 19th century author Isidore Ducasse, under the alias of Comte Lautramont. It was a strange volume by a strange author on the phenomenology of evil, later taken up by the Surrealists, particularly Max Ernst who used quotes from it to explain his paintings. Let’s hope evil can be at least held in check in 2019!

https://sites.dartmouth.edu/library/2014/08/01/surrealists-inspired-by-lautreamont-2/

For music, it shall be Poulenc who fragmented his music segments and built layer upon layer, as did the surrealist painters (even though they declared music anathema…..) something I’ve never understood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKIyLlI9XFY

Things to read on Kristallnacht

History
Nov 9, 2018
1 Comments

We all face the choice between right and wrong, responsibility and recklessness, conscience and complicity.

This from David From in today’s Atlantic writing on the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/eighty-years-after-kristallnacht/575410/

Here is another worthwhile (loooong) read about why historical evaluation of the past can be useful in our very own present.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/21/blood-and-soil?mbid=social_facebook&fbclid=IwAR1r2nYeDp0U25RdjWhacgGnVSAgzkSCd2tkMMFK4o61OiS8S6F3I00OZdc&fbclid=IwAR2ZzpjaF6I8a9sLPKRS25qryslH57Nj8Io43poaPeM3ZhnIWcuhFILugg0

And here is why it matters in our own country:

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/2018-midterms-voter-suppression-democrats-voting-trump

And this album says it all

Photographs are of the Neue Synagogue in Berlin, now a memorial/museum

The New Synagogue (Neue Synagoge), along with the Jewish Museum and the Holocaust memorial is one of Berlin’s most significant Jewish landmarks. Built in 1866, to seat 3200 people as the largest Jewish place of worship in Germany, the Neue Synagogue was literally a symbol of the thriving Jewish community. With 160,000 Jewish citizens in 1933, Berlin was the centre of Liberal Judaism.

Today the building houses the Centrum Judaicum foundation which opened in 1995, an institution for the preservation of Jewish memory and tradition, a community congregation centre for study and teaching. The museum and information centre houses exhibits including Torahs and scrolls which were excavated as late as 1989 during the restoration phase. Only one prayer room remains in use today, with mixed seating in the reformed Judaism tradition. A guided tour is available here to see the open space which lies behind the restored facade of the building where the former huge, main Synagogue room once was. A glass and steel structure secures the remaining fragments of masonry of the former synagogue. The original ground plan dimensions can be seen by a traced perimeter which give an idea of the size of the destroyed sections.

Carlisle, PA

History, Travel
Oct 9, 2018
2 Comments

When you amble through the streets of Carlisle, a town of less than 20 000 inhabitants in Cumberland County, PA, you get an impression of a sleepy past. Well maintained and beautifully restored buildings exhibit plaques showing their age.

Quiet porches beckon.

People shout friendly Hello’s and Halloween decorations sprout wherever you look.

The air smells sweet of cider and pumpkin spices (little do you know that you are also inhaling a pollutant called PM2.5 – because of Carlisle’s location at the intersection of two major trucking routes (I-81 and I-76), air pollution within the borough often falls within the range considered by the United States Environmental Protection Agency as “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups.”)

Little do you also know, or at least I did, until I read up on the history of the place, that this small place was involved in major events in US history. Founded in 1751 by American pioneer John Armstrong it soon became headquarters for army expeditions in the French and Indian Wars and Pontiac’s War in 1761. It housed the munitions depot in the American Revolutionary War (which later became the US Army War College which to this day educates officers.)

In 1787, Anti-Federalists instigated a riot in Carlisle in response to a planned march in favor of the United States Constitution. George Washington assembled his troops there during the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. During the Civil war, an army of the Confederate States of America, under General Fitzhugh Lee, attacked and shelled the borough during the Battle of Carlisle on July 1, 1863 as part of the Gettysburg Campaign – Carlisle also served as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

One of the signers of the Constitution, Benjamin Rush, founded Dickinson College, these days an excellent liberal arts college. (Oh, Wikipedia, what would I do without you….)

None of that is apparent when you walk through quaint alleys, colorful mews, in a town proud of its annual car shows (whose majority of attending car salesmen seemingly decided that my hotel floor was the perfect place to congregate at 3 am in the morning, drinks and all…)

You do notice the large number of old shade trees lining the streets, making it a beautiful green place to walk. Turns out Carlisle has the distinction of being a tree city, which implies having a tree board or department, an established community ordinance for tree care, a community forestry program with an annual budget of at least $2 per capita and an Arbor Day observance and proclamation. That care for the protection of nature almost lets you forget that Cumberland County votes solidly Republican, straight down the ticket.

I was there for a lovely, lovely wedding; its happiness blotted out, thankfully, all thought of war, constitutions, American politics for a blissful weekend. Taking my breaks, where I can find them.

Here is a folk song from the Civil War era.

Confutation

History, Nature
Apr 18, 2018
2 Comments

A confutation is the act of refuting someone’s point forcefully – so I learned when I looked the word up; it had been flitting around my brain and I wasn’t quite sure if I had the definition right. It came to mind because I was reeling over the fact that something I long believed to be true – that there had been a tulip mania wrecking the Dutch economy in the 17th century – has now been refuted.

Here you can read all about it for yourself: historians and economists are setting the record straight. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-tulip-fever-180964915/

Why then, you wonder, was there all this talk about a full scale destruction of the Dutch economy due to mad speculation around those bulbs? The article above points to the moralizing Calvinists; the source was “propaganda pamphlets published by Dutch Calvinists worried that the tulip-propelled consumerism boom would lead to societal decay. Their insistence that such great wealth was ungodly has even stayed with us to this day.”

Pride goes before the fall, and all that.

It’s worthwhile to dig out Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987) to read up on the religious evolution in the Netherlands after the war with Spain. I liked the Guardian’s description of the author who teaches at Columbia University: erudite to the point of self-parody. His books sure make me feel in awe.

Confutation was also on the weather’s mind this week, telling the flower fields that their assumptions about the arrival of spring were inane. You could see the havoc reeked by the deluge, the hail, the cold. And yet the tulips’ beauty shone through, as it always does. They seemed not to mind, for the most part.

Which could also be said for the various visitors I encountered at The Wooden Shoe who were willing to be photographed in all their colorful outfits matched to the occasion. India, Thailand, China, Mexico – and Massachusetts. Keukenhof (the Dutch tourist attraction par excellence https://keukenhof.nl/en/) it ain’t, this farm in the middle of nowhere, OR, but it sure attracts a lot of people.

And yes, I have gone slightly manic with the number of tulip photos, to make up for the now refuted historical tulip mania…..

Large Numbers of Blossoms

History
Mar 27, 2018
3 Comments

If you walk along Portland’s waterfront park right now the wind and rain will often make the air around you twirl with petals of cherry blossoms. The area around the Japanese American Plaza – commemorating the internment of the Japanese during WW II – is filled with blooming cherry trees that were imported from Japan, a gift of the Japanese Grain Importers Association, planted 28 years ago.

Giving these trees as a gift is not a new tradition – after all, in 1912 Washington D.C. received 3000 of them as an expression of goodwill from Japan. 5 years ago, Takamichi Okabe, Consul-General of Japan at that time in PDX, explained: “Sakura [cherry] is one of the most beloved flowers in Japan… it is a symbol of Japanese sensitivity of natural beauty, and it is also a symbol of the friendship between the U.S. and Japan.”

Large numbers of blossoms, then, matched by an almost equally large number of photographers. This weekend you could not walk amongst the trees at the north end of the parkway without bumping into someone with iPhone or camera.

At the south end of the parkway it was a completely different scene. Potluck in the Park set up their free Sunday meal under the ramp of the Hawthorne Bridge, with endless lines of the homeless waiting to get something to eat. The Non-Profit has been fighting hunger even before those cherry trees were planted – since 1991 nobody in Portland needs to go without a warm meal on Sundays – the numbers of people fed on that day range between 400 and 600, all based on donations and volunteers who provide the food and serve. They lost their original space at O’Bryant Square and so the off ramp of a bridge has to do.

Get to know all about how we are feeding Portland homeless

I got to talk to a relatively young woman who had decorated her place setting on a fence post above the river with flowers. She had her walking (and defense) stick adorned with found objects to make it beautiful. A poignant expression of creativity thriving amidst all the adversity.

Large numbers of tears suppressed, when I walked away, feeling privileged as hell. This really was the weekend for crying – during the marches, when hearing the speeches, when seeing the homeless scurry, regardless of what they left behind, to quell their hunger.

The skies agreed, ready to let the drops fall. In large numbers.

Bright Spots

History, Nature
Oct 20, 2017
6 Comments

The Pacific Northwest light is once again dark grey and streaked with rain. Sheets of rain, really. Needs to be counterbalanced and with what better topic than the history of the sunflower – which I knew nothing about but had to explore since I have such a cache of cool pictures of this plant. You take your cheer, where you can get it, right?

And what did I learn? Helianthus Annuus sure likes to travel.

The plant was cultivated since 3000 BC by Native Americans in New Mexico, perhaps even earlier than corn. Seeds and oil were used for food and body painting, stalks for building and other plant parts for medicinal purposes.

In the 15oos some Spanish colonialist took it back to Europe, with the English recording a patent in the 1700s for squeezing the oil. Seeds moved to Russia and under Peter the Great commercial production began – with the blessings of the Orthodox Church which exempted sunflower oil from the list of forbidden oily foods during lent. By the 19th century over 2 million acres in Russia were devoted to sunflowers with much scientific breeding for increasing yield, disease resistance and quality of the oil.

Of course,if you had it with placid sunflower fields you could always turn to St. Petersburg, the city built on bones. You didn’t expect me to be silent on czarist politics, did you? Just saying….

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/13/st-petersburg-three-centuries-murderous-desire-jonathan-miles-review

The return trip to the US happened in the late 1800s, seeds brought over by waves of Russian immigrants. During our own time European demand of the product was so big that over 5 million acres were planted in the US for export, so the seeds traveled eastwards again. They even went upwards: into space in 2012 to be planted at the space station.