Someone once called propaganda the art of selling lies. It’s a catchy summary but obscures the extent to which communication can be used to influence public opinion. Sure, our beliefs can be manipulated with lies, but also with truths, half-truth, loaded language or simple omission of facts. Propaganda seeks to influence us, persuade us, and often drags us into emotional rather than rational reactions.
Now why would I want to muse about propaganda on 1/20/2025, when we should be celebrating Martin Luther King and the lives of Black Americans like Thurgood Marshall, Booker T Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Travon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Kendrick Johnson, George Floyd Emmett, Freddy Gray, Michael Brown, Ahmaud Arbery? Can’t quite put my finger on it.
Propaganda is, at its best, indeed an art, but it uses art as well. You may remember my recent writings about propaganda art which blossomed in the beginning of the 20th century before WW I and then surged to power in Russia and Germany in the years to come. The mass production capabilities of printing posters and the technical advances in the movie industry made it possible to reach millions of people.
Of course, visual propaganda had been around for centuries before that, with roughly two messages, still in action today:
“Be part of the struggle! Belong to those fighting for a better future! Join!”
Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (1830)
-or-
“Resistance is futile! Revolt and you’ll get crushed! Withdraw!”
Two Assyrian soldiers forcing Babylonian captive to grind bones of his family, 7th – 6th c. BCE. From Nineveh palace.
The topic called me again when I came across an enticing painting last week. It was posted on social media as Paul Klee’s An Allegory of Propaganda from 1939, obviously titled about propaganda, not propaganda itself. I was not familiar with it, and puzzled about the imagery in the context of the title. Ok, I thought, what can I make of it? (Screenshot of text and image below.)
Oranges and yellow dominate in a warm color scheme, a golden era upon us, preying on our need for hope? The person’s face looks rather androgynous, but is dressed and bejeweled like a woman. (“Propaganda” was actually a term for the most male of concepts: the name for a congregation of cardinals originally, established in 1622, charged with the management of missions. But in German, the word is female – perhaps because of the stereotypes of seduction and manipulative lying associated with the gender. Just speculating.) She holds a flower, often a symbol of magic (providing mystical powers in fairy tales). Or a symbol of innocence to be taken, the veritable deflowering. The woman’s dress is strangely configured. My first association was court jester costume shapes (they are hired to tell lies, amuse, distract, but ensure allegiance to the king.) Then I thought it could be a hint at rags, in German “Lumpen,” which immediately gave rise to the idea of Lumpenproletariat. The term, coined by Marx, can be roughly translated as the mob, a class of “outcast, degenerated and submerged elements that make up a section of the population of industrial centers. It includes beggars, prostitutes, gangsters, racketeers.” (Ref.) Well, mob and propaganda make a good pairing, as recipients of same, or, racketeers and propaganda, as seen in full view at the time of this writing.
OOPS.
Started to look at the date on the canvas. 1906, not 1939. Checked the title of the work on museum sites. Klee’s Allegory of Propaganda turns out to be an altogether different painting, created the year before he died, namely this:
Paul Klee An Allegory of Propaganda or Voice from the Ether,and you will eat your fill! (1939.)
(Some serious sleuthing revealed the 1906 painting as Klee’s Hesitation, which is a far better match between content and visual imagery. )
So here I was fooled into accepting false information, mentally elaborating on it in perfectly sensible ways to make it work (note, how you can make up an interpretative narrative out of thin air as guided by a presumed title…), and only rescued by an ingrained habit to look closely and to check the facts before I disseminate them to a larger circle of readers.
The true portrait’s subject is obviously salivating at the propaganda from the radio, words promising wealth and “Lebensraum,”( eat your fill!), as the Victoria and Albert Museum describes it, having purchased the painting in 1965. Alongside a matchstick that fronts fiery clouds in the back, his hair resembles barbed wire, his saliva could be mistaken for blood, his ears are open to the SS, and his cheeks flare pink in excitement of a new dawn, and a chilly palette overall, despite the prevalence of reds and browns.
***
The voice from the ether spills words, promising or threatening, dependent on the minute of the day and the target of manipulation. One of the most famous and most reproduced “art” works of the Nazi era, in itself propaganda but also about propaganda, was Hermann Otto Hoyer’s In the Beginning was the Word (1937).
Herman Otto Hoyer In the Beginning was the Word, (1937). United States Holocaust Museum, courtesy of U.S. Army Center of Military History.
The painter drew on two sources: the Gospel of John which reads: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” Secondly, the word is by Hitler, found in Mein Kampf, “All great, world-shaking events have been brought about, not by written matter, but by the spoken word.”
Hitler, now as the god-like figure, uses oratorial magic that keeps the listeners enthralled. In real life as well, not just an imagined painting.
We will be flooded with words in the coming years from on high, in the form of administration pronouncements, threats, executive orders, legislative proposals, commission summaries, Supreme Court contortions, brown-shirt fashion advice and media reporting that is already bending to the will of the newly empowered (and paying into oligarchic coffers in the meantime).
Flooded with words arriving from social media that spread disinformation far faster, and in higher frequency, than any posters and art reproductions in the history of politics ever could. Words from bots that proliferate like mushrooms, for every blocked one another one popping up in the next dark, moist corner.
Words from a state that, in the wonderfully sarcastic voice of Catherine Rampell, “now owns the memes of production.” Loathsome AI will make it (near) impossible to distinguish the false from the real, creating a sense that reality can no longer be grasped, just as Hannah Arendt predicted in the words I posted at the entry of this blog.
Yet we do not have to surrender to words.
We do not have to buy into propaganda. We do not have to believe every lie, every threat, every hint, every bribe, a tsunami of misinformation to the point where we throw up our hands, withdraw in sheer exhaustion, give up the good fight and quit, walking away fearfully into a steadily hotter sunset.
We still have the power to think and judge, (and check our sources critically, I’ll add, having myself been duped not just once.)
They might win their battle to enshrine inequality and forsake justice, but at least they will have to fight, if we don’t capitulate in advance.
Music on this Martin Luther King Day is chosen to celebrate hope. Let’s be a chorus to Sam Cooke’s “Change is gonna come.”
Christmas is upon us, and I thought I would remind us of the disconnect between the deeper truth of the narrative contained in the Christmas story on the one hand, and the way those newly elected are ignoring it despite professing to be eager to return to the “real” lessons of Christianity. I know, not what you really want to hear – “Can’t she be uplifting at least this week?”
The way I see it: after hearing what I have to say, maybe you’ll be in the mood of uplifting others a bit more, and so on net, there’s going to be more uplift in our community. For those who need it the most.
Here’s a Blitz recap of the biblical story: poor, pregnant folk forced to travel for census, (and later forced to flee to Egypt to escape King Herod’s order to kill all baby boys born in Bethlehem over the last years) seek refuge at the inn, which is denied. Birth happens in a stable. Inherent to the narrative: there are some who get in and some who don’t, there are those who are worthy and those who get to make decisions about who is and who isn’t. The moral imperative, when you read the story in the larger context of the redemption narrative, is, I believe, this: we have collective and moral responsibilities to protect the powerless and weak, to extend our support to those who suffer.
The Holy family suffered through stages of displacement and incremental, existential danger. So do millions of displaced people in 2024 – 120 million, to be precise, according to the latest report by the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, covering both internal displacement and refugees crossing borders due to ongoing crises and newly evolving conflicts. The report was done even before the last 6 months of the Gaza and Lebanon wars.
Despite – or maybe because – of these ever increasing numbers, the sentiment in favor of closing borders and rejecting further immigration has been steadily rising, fanned by the propaganda of right-wing sources who see a convenient tool in the scapegoating of others and by inflaming racist resentments. Curiously, you hear these sentiments even from immigrants themselves – many Latino voters explicitly turned to Trump for his promises of closing the border, firmly believing that it would not endanger them or their families as well adjusted community members, and threats of deportation were overblown. What explains this pulling up the ladder behind you, once you’ve reached a certain point?
In a more tragic example, the perpetrator of the Christmas Market attack in Germany this weekend was an immigrant from Saudi Arabia, a psychiatrist who had renounced Islam and fully embraced the neo-Nazi party’s agenda of closing the borders to asylum seekers. He killed 5 people, a child among them, and seriously hurt hundreds more, full of rage that Germany allowed an influx of Muslim refugees.
(His twitter account with 47.000 followers was conveniently cleaned of the years of comments that worshipped the AfD, the neo- Nazi party, applauded a genocide of Palestinians and threatened to kill Ex chancellor Merkel for her openness to refugees, after the attack.)
The Saudi government had warned the German authorities about his threats three times; the Twitter folks had been peppered with warnings and complaints about his racist outcries, only to ignore them. Musk, of course, just this week, gave his endorsement to the AfD in the upcoming German elections.) Is this identification with the perceived strong men in hopes they might accept you in your idolation, called by some racist assimilationism?
Let’s look closer to home, though. Last week, the citizens of Lincoln county found a personally addressed letter in their mail box, urging them to do this:
The authorities as well as some in the community reacted with an outcry, and the “Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office noted that Oregon law does not allow the inquiry of collection of a person’s immigration or citizenship status, explaining that is why deputies do not document or share that kind of information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“One of the things we tell each person when they join our team is to ‘do the right thing,’” officials said. “We are encouraging our community members to do the right thing and use compassion as we encounter these types of messages.” (Ref.)
Compassion to combat racism. Hmhhmmmm.
How about education? Here are two sources that really help us understand the myths around immigration – so many of the factual assumptions that folks use to justify a closing of borders are simply wrong. Here you can read a summary by a U. Penn Wharton professor of economics, and here is a fact sheet about the myths from the folks at the International Institute at New England, neither hotbeds of radicalism….
Let me just summarize the main findings:
Immigrants are less rather than more likely to be criminals compared to US born individuals.
Immigrants are not a drain on the US economy. Quite the opposite, they contribute in many ways, taxes and the founding of new businesses which provide jobs, included.
Immigrants are not taking jobs from the US labor pool. The reality is that the labor market is absorbing immigrants at a rapid pace, while simultaneously maintaining record-low unemployment for U.S.-born workers. In addition, they take the back breaking jobs that US citizen won’t.
Asylum seekers are not just coming here for the jobs.
The Democratic Party did not “import” immigrants to sway the election.
It is, of course, not just a discussion concerning the admission of further people seeking to live in the U.S. It is clearly about ridding ourselves of those who are already here – if they are undocumented, brown, or even born here to parents not officially part of the citizenry. We will see what will happen come January 20th and if the deportation threats delivered during the election campaign and spelled out in Project 2025 will be fully enacted.
No room at the inn? Certainly room at the prisons. We know that ICE detains an average of 37.000 people per night. Here is the history of immigration detention, from the early 1900s to know. Even the Wall Street Journal is worried about how the private prison complex gears up for the expected mass deportations and what damage it will do to the economy, much less the moral fiber of the country. Then this here from FORBES:
“WHY PRIVATE PRISON STOCKS ARE UP SO MUCH
Boosting CoreCivic and Geo Group stocks further Monday was Trump’s appointment of Tom Homan as his “border czar,” with the former acting ICE director an advocate of a “humane” but “necessary mass deportation operation.” In a conference call last Thursday, Geo Group chairman George Zoley said he expects the government to fund 70,000 to 100,000 beds in ICE detention centers, roughly double the 41,500 beds now funded. Geo Group can up its operational ICE detention center beds from 13,000 to 31,000 by next year, forecasts Brendan McCarthy, an analyst at independent research firm Sidoti. McCarthy projects $3 billion in revenue for Geo Group in 2025, a 24% jump from its blended 2024 sales.”
Merry Christmas to those who celebrate! We should all become inn keepers, with open doors and even overcrowded rooms, not cages. Ethics, if not religion, demand it.
Photographs today are montages from an old series The Immigrants’ Dream.
1: an exhibition of optical effects and illusions 2: a constantly shifting complex succession of things seen or imagined 3: a bizarre or fantastic combination, collection, or assemblage
- Merriam-Webster
Since March of this year I have been working on an art project that tries to capture where we are as a nation, and speculate about some of the factors that led us to our current status quo. Trying to think out loud about it today, so bear with me, it’s going to be all over the map.
It started by renting a house in L.A. that had belonged to artist Jirayr Zorthian (1911-2004). The living room was lined with small prints of an originally large mural, Phantasmagoria of Military Intelligence, which he had been commissioned to paint by the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the U. S. Intelligence Agency preceding the CIA,) during WW II. How did someone who fled the Armenian genocide at age 11, received an MFA from Yale and studied art in Italy during the late 1930s, become enthusiastic about Psy Ops for the military, serving first in the 603rd Camouflage Engineer Battalion and then at Camp Ritchie, working for army intelligence? I guess – and it is only my guess – when you have escaped a murderous regime, and encountered the stirrings of early fascism, and now see the country that gave you safe haven engaged in a war against fascism, you surely want to give back and join the forces. (He went on to be a successful muralist and painter, a bon vivant on friendly terms with many of the rich and famous of his time. He was known for bacchanalian parties on his sprawling property in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, and a close friendship with the physicist Richard Feynman.)
In any case, I looked at the facsimile mural each day for a month, seeing depictions of legions of young men squeezed into pipelines of preparation for masculine jobs, a surrealist depiction of a process meant to harden and prepare them, both physically and psychologically, for battle. Allies and enemies were clearly delineated and the presented tribal conformity of the young men hinted at belonging, rather than necessarily brainwashing. Not that one excludes the other, mind you. Below is a short video about the history of the mural and provides a view of the panels.
As my readers know, for much of this year, a short burst of mistaken hope in October excepted, I had feared that this country would vote for a convicted felon and usher in the beginnings of a slide towards oligarchically-led authoritarianism. The question then and now is, of course, how this could happen. The margin of the popular vote was very, very small nationally – less than 1.5%, not a resounding mandate.
But he won news desert counties by a massive average of 54 percentage points. So there is the factor of what messages get sent, who gets reached and who has managed to find means of communication that seem to penetrate more (and are believed more) than the traditional media. The role of social media, talk shows and podcasts was important, depicting or even creating realities that would not be recognized by the opposing parties.
Of course, other factors might be equally or more important. I think one has to differentiate between a loss incurred because people did not show up to vote (1), and a victory secured because new constituencies moved towards the radical right wing (2).
(1) A lot of people who used to vote for the Democratic party or would have voted as first-time voters, decided to sit this one out. Why? Let me count the ways, all connected to varieties of hopelessness which made voting seemingly irrelevant. A large basis of the Democratic party experienced some degree of state-sponsored safety net during the pandemic, which was taken away from them in the early years of the Biden administration. What seemed to be perfectly doable was now gone, government once again forsaking a struggling group of people, and yes, the price of eggs went up. More importantly, though, since the price of eggs is not existential for the larger part of the Democratic base, solidly middle class, we were seeing no intervention by the administration regarding the skyrocketing prices of housing, health insurance, child-care support. There was no accountability – not for the industries given free reign to fleece the middle class, nor for those flouting the law, our President elect among them, who got away with everything from illegal enrichment to insurrection, thanks to Republican obstruction and AG Garland’s decisive running out the clock. The dread that the majority of Americans feel regarding climate change was ignored, for the most part, by the Biden administration, an existential fear for many that increased a sense of hopelessness. What the administration did to protect the environment did not get communicated sufficiently to the base either. And then there was Gaza – with significant swaths of voters incredulous that Harris would simply adopt Biden’s support of a state they perceive to perpetrate genocide.
(2) As it turns out, the Biden administration did pass the most economically progressive legislative agenda in two generations. Why did that not score? Because study after study finds that ‘racial resentment’ is a far bigger motivator to vote for Trump than ‘economic anxiety’. Which brings us to a factor that has nothing to do with economics: the psychological need, felt, and now expressed, by many to exist within a social hierarchy where someone is beneath them. The far-Right worked hard to reinforce and establish those structures. If you look at who benefits from turning back the clock to an earlier age of White male supremacy in this nation, you find who flocked to vote for everything promised by and associated with Project 2025, including abandonment of any efforts towards equality, diversity and inclusion: male voters.
Indeed, male Black and Latino voters as well, because they, too, are happy to abandon any notion of social equality if they can find a rung on the ladder that is not the lowest one. Anti-Black racism, the strongest historic impulse in our nation’s existence, can certainly be found in Hispanics as well, not just Whites. And who might be on the bottom? Why, a small new class of people labeled as enemies of our culture, namely trans people, an easy target. Immigrants, wrapped in narratives that were misleading at best and propaganda at worst, regarding their influx, their contributions and their purported criminality, never mind their racial origins. But then there was also a much larger group, some 50% of the population: women. Women who could be and were deemed unequal to men.
Again, the added new votes that led to the victory of the Republicans were not so much votes against the neo-liberal policies of the Democrats, but votes in favor of a promised world of domination, of identification with high-status males, and in hopes of belonging to some part of a tribe that knew to keep others in their place and keep them out of the professional realm in which they increasingly and threateningly competed with men.
Women have been deprived of the right to bodily autonomy by a Supreme Court dominated by Trump-installed conservative judges. Not satisfied by that, there are now calls for the death penalty for women who have abortions and the doctors who help them. Women have died from ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages not attended to, and infant mortality has gone up in the states that ban abortion after the Dobbs decision. Doctors are leaving those states in droves, with pregnant women increasingly deprived of gynecological care. Access to contraception has become more difficult, and there are laws proposed to hinder pregnant women from traveling to states where they can obtain an abortion. Texas is now suing health providers in other states who provide Texan patients with plan B medication. A federal complete abortion plan with no exceptions for rape or the life of the mother has been called for in republican circles.
Conservative voices are calling for a repeal of the right to no-fault divorce, and some even for abandoning the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote. House Republicans will have not a single woman in committee leadership positions (nor any person of color.)
Last week a study identified 30 000 pieces of deepfake pornography-related content targeting members of Congress, 25 women and 1 man. 1 in 6 women are targeted compared to 1 in 386 men. The new administration has numerous members proposed for Senate approval that are associated with sexual misconduct allegations, either adjudicated as the President himself, or with non-disclosure agreements after payments, or still under investigation. This includes the Secretary of Defense, Health and Human Services and Education Department, as well as one of the advisors in DOGE.
Broader attacks on women’s rights have historically always been associated with democratic erosion.
Here is a summary from a Carnegie Democracy, Conflict and Governance program essay that tackles the linkage between misogyny and far-right authoritarianism. (It’s long, but a riveting read since it explores the issue internationally.)
” …authoritarian views—which are associated with an embrace of traditional values, submission to authority, and a perception that the world is a dangerous place—are linked to both paternalistic attitudes about women (“benevolent sexism”) and feelings of antipathy toward women who seek equality (“hostile sexism”). The same link exists for individuals who display a strong social dominance orientation, defined as a preference for inequality and group-based hierarchies. ”
So, voters who hold these traditional views are drawn towards candidates who espouse them, display strong masculinity, and sanction their sexist beliefs.
“..Trump made concerted efforts to appeal to young male voters especially, tapping into their economic anxiety and sense of cultural dislocation and taking advantage of liberals’ general reluctance to speak to the struggles of men.”
Once elected, the leaders push forward regressive policies and legislation on gender-related issues that are out of sync with majority opinion or threaten vulnerable minorities. They use misogyny, endorsement of gendered violence and hate speech to intimidate and silence critics and opponents.
***
Back to my art project, then. Zorthian’s pipelines of military recruits struck me as perfectly symbolic for the scores of young men flocking to authoritarian institutions. The indoctrination by right-wing radio hosts, piping fake news and hate speech through their channels, also seemed to be captured by the convoluted apparatus. I decided to bury snippets of those murals into classical still lifes for a number of reasons. For one, I never forgot a lesson received as a 12 year-old from a Hungarian refugee, trained by Joan Miró and inexplicably ending up as an art teacher in a small German village, about the role of still lifes. Firmly established during the Dutch Golden Age, with riches accumulating from colonial exploits, these paintings provided a voyeur’s description of what the rich possessed and the poor envied. They assured the wealthy, who commissioned and paid for those beautiful renderings of their belongings, of their status and reminded those who struggled that there was something to aspire to. A notion of hierarchy, class defined.
But still lifes also remind us of domestic beauty, care of the household with the provision of food or flower arrangements, all “women’s work.” This is particularly pertinent with regard to the current fashion of “trad” wives, women who long for the traditional role assignments of earlier times, trying to serve their husbands and family and create feminine beauty round them, preferably instagrammable for lots of clicks. It is about aesthetics, but with the hidden content of ideological beliefs, just as the early still lifes were.
(Let me flag one important exception: the phenomenal 17th Century painter Rachel Ruysch who was one of the few successful women artists of the time and whose botanical still lives sprang from a distinct interest in botanical and biological sciences. My European readers can visit a first major retrospective of her work until mid-March in Munich’s Pinakothek. By mid-April it will be available in Toledo, Ohio, and by mid-August at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Something to look forwards to! )
The combination, then, tries to capture the horrid regression of gender-related norms, the renewed assignment of gender-specific roles (battle-field/home) and our fixation on the beauty displayed in the foreground, at the expense of hate looming in the background and violence lurking in the shadows. Whether it is ignorance, indifference or fear: we blind ourselves to new realities at our own peril.
Last but not least, I added photographs of glass and porcelain electrical insulators to some of the montages. Zorthian was an avid collector of these things, and embedded them in all of his various building projects, inside and on top of walls. When I asked his foreman, who is still alive and active on the property that houses descendants and docents, what the story was with these antique beauties, he thought they just caught the artist’s interest when he bought a bunch of telephone poles to be wired for electricity lines on the ranch and they were lying around in the scrap yard. I have no idea if that is all that’s to it. They sure are perfect phallic symbols.
But for my own purposes the idea of insulation – something being prevented from affecting something else – made perfect sense for my question about the politics of the moment. We are insulated from half of the nation, not knowing what they believe or how they could possibly believe it (and vice versa), no longer experiencing a shared reality, with large swaths of the population living in some kind of phantasmagoria, a landscape of hate, sprouting conspiracy theories fertilized by denial of and hostility towards science, extending so far to question the validity of vaccines, and religious fervor that preaches the superiority of men over women, Whites over all other races.
I was surely not the only one who did not realize how many young, disaffected, perhaps economically, but certainly socially anxious men would be ready to shout “Your Body – My Choice” after the election, freed to voice misogynistic dominance by permission (and example) of the very leader they had chosen.
Today’s images are a sampling of the new series.
Music today is from Wozzeck. That opera tells the story of an impoverished soldier, abused by his superiors and traumatized by war, who murders the mother of his child for fear that she’s cheating on him.
The latest report on domestic femicides was published by the UN less than a month ago, on November 25th, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. In 2023, globally 140 women and girls died every day at the hands of their partner or a close relative, which means one woman killed every 10 minutes. Lives, stilled.
Imagine yourself on a mountain ridge between two deep canyons. The city is spread out at your feet, the mountains behind you.
You are surrounded by olive, palm, eucalyptus and pine trees, with an occasional sycamore thrown in.
The vegetation is dry to the bone ,
and when you marvel at the fiery sunrise in the mornings your heart goes out to all those affected by wildfires, enraged by the thought that soon we will have a president and his minions who will make disaster help contingent on political lockstep, as announced by them.
Worse, they will do away with environmental protection and pollute as long and as hard as they can, climate change be damned, its science ridiculed or overruled by the demands for profit.
You feel privileged, up there on that beautiful ridge, to be able to look at the changing sky,
to hike down the small private trail to the city, along the waterline, sandy, steep, surrounded by dead yuccas and a landscape filled with luminous rusty colors. The only official access is a one-lane dirt road crossing the canyon with a small bridge, your car soon anticipating the worst potholes and getting the hang of serpentine curves.
Imagine yourself waking up in the middle of the night to the acrid smell of fire, loud crackling and popping noises, flames already sky high. You don’t know what is burning in your vicinity, one of the other structures, and how far away it is. You grab your meds, your purse, your computer and the car keys, and race down that hill fully aware that once a firetruck comes up you are stuck on the ridge.
This happened to me Tuesday night. I am still processing, rattled to the core.
The first fire-police jeeps came within a minute after I had exited the lane onto the street, where I had stopped the car, shaking too much to drive safely. The firetrucks, later, could not cross the bridge. The fire was extinguished with hoses on site and helicopters dumping their load, onto the vicinity as well, to prevent the spread of fire into the wilderness. One person hospitalized, some non-human life lost.
I went back the next day, still in my nightshirt, to pack up my unharmed stuff, my house completely unscathed as all the others in the neighborhood but that one structure and parked truck that burnt to the ground. I can no longer envision myself up there without fear, forever hyperalert to the smells and sounds. And I cannot help myself but thinking of the symbolism mirroring our current situation, ever aware of potential catastrophes and then, in a flash, they have arrived. Yes, it could have been far worse here, but in many instances it HAS been and WILL be far worse, with so many people affected, around the world for lack of appropriate leadership.
I lost nothing other than a cherished place to spend my time in SoCal, and even that loss is entirely psychologically grounded in my own fear to return to the place. I don’t want to think about how it must feel for people who lost loved ones, or their entire material existence, or a community that will never again cohere, thrown into the winds, and still floating many years later. In fact, I don’t want to think about it much at all, since I still get these waves of flash-backs of that drive down the mountain, the overpowering noises still in my ears.
I had meant to visit the World Forestry Center’s current Exhibition Following Fire once back in Portland. Can’t see myself doing that, either. Subtitled A Resilient Forest/An Uncertain Future it is a photography project by photographer David Paul Bayles and disturbance ecologist Frederick Swanson, documenting the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire that burned 173,000 acres along the forested McKenzie River canyon in the Cascade Range of Oregon. You should, though, if only to get motivated to help protect our world against the dark forces.
Onwards. With the appropriate musical accompaniment.
“We do not know what will happen. But we can know who we can commit to be in the face of what happens. That is a strong beginning.” – Rebecca Solnit
So who do we want to commit to be in view of being surrounded by voters willing to tolerate or invite fascism, voters manipulated into ignorance about the consequences of their actions, or non-voters indifferent enough to fail to prevent it? (I think it is important to remember how many people did not vote at all.) Who do we want to commit to be in anticipation of the catastrophes brought to our neighborhoods (and the world) by agents of hate, retribution and lust for power?
In my own case, I want to commit to nourish community, in my real as well as my digital life, as expressed here on the blog. I will stand on principle and not make compromises halfway between the truth and lies, as appeasers in the media would like to have us. I will continue to use the tools I have, to stimulate thinking about politics and history, to use my background as a scientist to educate about the domains of psychology, health and climate change. I will also add a new feature once a week, Does this makes sense?, linking to one or two long-form pieces of writing that were particularly thought-provoking in my perusal of the week’s publications (and not necessarily something I agree with), perhaps prompting a community discussion in the comments. I will post reading recommendations from people who are smarter and more organized than I am, geared towards the issues at hand. You’ll find some at the end of today’s blog. Solnit’s encouragements are a good way to start. Mind you, I completely understand if reading is too much now, or ever; it’s just my frantic default option….
I will commit to balancing the reports on the frightening with all that we can still be grateful for, the beauty around us, nature that models resiliency, indigenous wisdom that guides us, art that encourages resistance, poetry that fortifies us. Today’s choice, written during the horrors of the Civil War, describes adaptation as a form of resilience, not defeatism. Let that be the manner in which we tackle our current universe!
We grow accustomed to the Dark-
We grow accustomed to the Dark – When light is put away – As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp To witness her Goodbye –
A Moment – We uncertain step For newness of the night – Then – fit our Vision to the Dark – And meet the Road – erect –
And so of larger – Darknesses – Those Evenings of the Brain – When not a Moon disclose a sign – Or Star – come out – within –
The Bravest – grope a little – And sometimes hit a Tree Directly in the Forehead – But as they learn to see –
Either the Darkness alters – Or something in the sight Adjusts itself to Midnight – And Life steps almost straight.
I am currently in Southern California, surrounded by nature in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. The noisiest birds that visit me are the California acorn woodpeckers. I wrote at length about this fascinating species here two years ago. They are perfect models for what we have to learn: to live in “bushels” of community, tending to our broods and granaries as a cohesive group, rather than fixating on individual success. They are a prime example of the evolutionary benefits of cooperation, across many generations, both with regard to breeding patterns, raising the young and creating, using and restoring granaries for acorns, riddling oak trees with custom-sized holes which provide storage for food during winter. Cannot think of a better symbol for the road ahead.
Walk with me along the Promenade, along the Willamette river under an ever changing sky (all photographs from yesterday morning). Friendly taggers on the Steel Bridge reminding us of the important things in life…
…which made me think of voting. Election ballots are on their way to us who vote by mail in Oregon. In addition to the nail biter on the national scene, we have some major changes to the political landscape in Portland. I figured for today’s blog, I’ll make some information accessible that you are likely to dig out for yourselves otherwise, saving you some time. There is, of course, always the Oregon Voter Pamphlet, which provides more information, including the slate of endorsers that might have your trust for having done the relevant research into candidates. (You can access it digitally from the link above, with info specific for your county.)
Bridges in full display, drying out after early showers in a warm October sun.
For those of us in PDX: Two years ago, we voted to change the city’s charter and shift from a commissioner-run government to a collection of four districts, each represented by a group of three council members. A new mayor and an appointed city manager will oversee the 12 city councilors. There are 19 candidates for mayor, and 98 candidates for 12 city councillor positions, all up for rank choice voting, which is also newly introduced.
For starters: if you don’t know which district you live and vote in (given that they have been newly configured) go here https://www.portlandmaps.com and enter your address. A pop-up window will deliver information, including your district number. I live in district # 4, so some of the examples below will relate to that district.
Given the fact that I, like presumably many of you, do not know all of these candidates or their history, I base my choices on what they have to say about the three things that require most action (and changed approaches) in my opinion. These are the housing crisis, transportation alternatives and tackling climate change. (The latter two obviously related.) You might have different targets, of course.
How do I know where the candidates stand? Several local and national news organizations have published interviews (with those who responded) and offer them in the context of their own endorsements.
Here are some of the links from Portland Mercury, Willamette Week and the Oregonian. I have left them assigned to district, when offered, so you don’t have to read all of them, just the one that pertains to you.
With regard to the mayoral choice I do know exactly who I do NOT want, and need to be convinced who to vote for as plausible candidates. It is important not to rank the candidate you abhor, so they do not gather points in the ranked choice. Pick the three you think work out, leave the rest options blank.
I am not making recommendations for candidates, but I will certainly be voting NO on one particular measure that is fraught with unintended negative consequences: Measure 118.
It proposes to give every single Oregonian (regardless of age or income) an estimated $1,600 per year that would be funded by a new corporate tax on really big businesses. One can debate whether it makes sense to give money to all, regardless of income level or need, wasting sparse resources. But the real problem with the measure derives from tax laws. Oregon state law says that corporations only have to pay the higher of two taxes—the tax on their profits, or the corporate minimum tax. Measure 118 would skyrocket the cost of the corporate minimum tax, so big business would have no choice but to pay that one in order to fund all those $1,600 rebates. That would leave significantly less money paid by corporations into Oregon’s general fund, which provides fundamental services like K-12 public education, health care, child care, and public safety, all of which are already gravely underfunded. The state’s analysis predicts Oregon will lose out on well over $1 billion in future budget cycles that could have funded social needs. It will shaft the ones who need support most.
Below is a detailed review of the measure’s potential impact – note that opposition comes from the left as well as the right, in some rare display of shared rejection.
“But I have found that where there is a spiritual union with other people, the love one feels for them keeps the circle unbroken and the bonds between us and them strong, whether they are dead or alive. Perhaps that is one of the manifestations of heaven on earth.” – Alice Walker, Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973- 1987 as cited by Intisar Abioto.
Want to walk with me? I invite you to a place where we have been before, and then some steps beyond it. You will be taken in by the beauty of the landscape, and perhaps taken aback by what I encourage you to read, admittedly difficult, but important fare on the issue of memory politics.
Imagine a strong sun, still air as clear as can be, a deep blue river reflecting a cloudless sky, except for some contrails.
An ochre landscape, summer drought visible, resilient flora still hanging by a thread.
Hexagonal columns of Wanapum basalt flows that were scoured by the Ice Age floods some 10,000 years ago surround the lake, their darkness dissolving into myriads of colors from different species of lichen when you take a closer look.
We are on the Washington side of the Columbia river, a bit east of The Dalles bridge, at Columbia Hills Historical State Park, specifically Horsethief Lake. There is a public trail there, close by the railway, which offers a selection of petroglyphs moved from various places that were destroyed when damming the river began in earnest.
This time around I was invited to a private visit of petroglyphs that are only accessible in the company of a tribal guide. The trail winds through shrub-steppe and in parallel to the river’s shoreline, and brings you to petroglyphs that are still located on their original surfaces of basalt rock. The most famous among them is Tsagaglalal (“She Who Watches”.)
It is said that the trickster-hero Coyote put her there with luminous eyes and a broad face, when she, a chief of the Chinook tribe, worried what would happen to her people when she could no longer look out for them. Before he tricked her, he insisted there would be no longer female chiefs in the future, and then, having put her into rock, he said “…now you shall stay here forever to watch over your people and the river…” According to some sources, “She Who Watches” they called her. She became a symbol of conscience and of death. “She sees you when you come,” they said, “she sees you when you go.”
I was thinking of what I had learned earlier about petroglyphs from Lillian Pitt:
“Petroglyphs/pictographs are not art. They are sacred images that represent significant cultural themes, messages, beliefs to a Tribe. They were not created for aesthetic purposes. They were created to teach, warn, or record those not yet born. Even though we may think that they are pretty, beautiful, pleasant to look at, those are not the values inherent in the images you see. those are the values that you as the viewer are placing on the image. Please stop calling them rock art. “
I was also painfully aware how little historical knowledge we have in general – when my Native American friend and guide did a land acknowledgement by means of unfolding a rope where every millimeter stood for a year of historical Native American existence in these parts, I could only marvel at the numbers expressed in unending length.
We know, of course, only what we are taught, and teaching about Native American History has been overall a sad affair, when you look at general public education. Here is a comprehensive article on the need for reform. Things are changing, slowly, with curricula developed and available from private and public sources, like the Native Knowledge 360º Project initiated by the National Museum of the American Indian. Tribal members themselves have always kept the memory alive and transmitted to next generations. It is no coincidence, that a recent Tsagaglalal (She Who Watches) Scholarship was established in 2022 in honor of Lillian Pitt (Warm Springs/Wasco/Yakama), who was instrumental in teaching tribal history as an artist, mentor and advocate.
Looking at the landscape, at these sacred images that convey a message, at the spottiness of my understanding of American history, I could not help but think of memory culture from my own, very different background. The immediate source for these thoughts circled around the October 7th anniversary of the Hamas attack and subsequent Israeli war actions. Two very different essays I read around the politics of memory related to the fate of the Jewish and the Palestinian/Arab/Lebanese/Syrian people have me still think long and hard. Written by an anti-Zionist Jewish intellectual and activist, Naomi Klein, and a Zionist Jewish novelist, Dara Horn, respectively, they outline assumptions about appropriation of Holocaust narratives and memory culture that can harm rather than elucidate the complexities of history (links to the essays under the authors’ names). Long and complicated, but truly important work that will open perspectives you might not otherwise come across.
The core that spoke to me was Klein’s analysis of the politics of mourning (and is easily transferable to historical conflicts of all kinds of cultures, our own destruction of Native American tribes included):
“When experts in mass atrocities speak of the importance of “bearing witness”, they are referring to a specific way of seeing. This kind of witnessing, often of crimes that have been long denied or suppressed by powerful states, is an act of refusal – a refusal of that denial. It is also a way to honour the dead, both by keeping their stories alive, and by enlisting their spirits in a project of justice-seeking to prevent a repeat of similar atrocities in the future.
But not all witnessing is done in this spirit. Sometimes witnessing is itself a form of denial, marshalled by savvy states to form the justification for other, far greater atrocities. Narrow and hyper-directed at one’s own in-group, it becomes a way to avoid looking at the harsh realities of those atrocities, or of actively justifying them. This witnessing is more like hiding, and at its most extreme, it can provide rationalizations for genocide.” (Ref.)
Much to contemplate during these days of Teshuvah, the days of repentance leading up to Yom Kippur, our holiest day. A time to contemplate ways of ethical being. Maybe the love one feels for others keeps the circle unbroken, as Alice Walker stated above, but so does true, non-performative mourning – whether they are dead or alive, those victims of hatred and genocidal fury.
Here is Max Bruch’sKol Nidre. (Unfortunately there is an interruption by advertising at some point, but it can be prompts skipped. I just favor this performance by Argerich enough that I was willing to tolerate it.)
This Floridian communication came in close to midnight at the start of the weekend. Stepford Wives? Handmaids’ Tales?
Happy lives? Not if the SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act) returns for vote like a bad penny, having failed to pass once, so far. You might have heard what this Republican-demanded Act is all about: it attempts to add further measures to prevent illegal immigrants and other noncitizens from voting in federal elections.
Except: we already have legislation for that.
The wording of the SAVE act slickly allows to question voter registrations of an entirely different constituency: married women. If a married woman with a name change wants to vote, she will need to show either a passport or other proof of citizenship with her name on it, or must produce both a birth certificate (with the seal of the state where it was issued; no copies allowed) and a current form of identification—both with the exact same name on them.
That could instantly disqualify about 90 percent of all married women without passports or other proof that matches their birth certificates or proof of a legal name change.
Here is a report by the National Organization for Women on how Republican voter suppression efforts harm women.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, one third of all women have citizenship documents that do not identically match their current names primarily because of name changes at marriage. Roughly 90 percent of women who marry adopt their husband’s last name.
That means that roughly 90 percent of married female voters have a different name on their ID than the one on their birth certificate. An estimated 34 percent of women could be turned away from the polls unless they have precisely the right documents. And since this is a proposed federal law, states cannot protect against a Presidential effort to purge the voter rolls from women.(Ref.)
According to the Center for American Women and Politics, Women have registered and voted at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980, with the turnout gap between women and men growing slightly larger with each successive presidential election. They also tend to lean more liberal than their male cohort. And that was before their right to bodily autonomy and healthcare decisions was taken away by radical Republicans.
Some extremist voices even question the 19th Amendment, having given women the right to vote some 100 years ago, but our participation can obviously be curtailed by administrative, political tricks rather than a change to the Constitution.
What will come next?
Music about women marching. Not backwards, either.
Two days ago I mentioned that I would write about the spread of falsehoods regarding the consumption of stolen pets by Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Little did I know that everybody and their uncle would jump onto the lie after it was uttered by a former President during the Trump/Harris debate (and is now repeated during campaign rallies as we speak.) Whether you read the NYT, The Washington Post, the Atlantic, Vox, Politico, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, or countless essays on Substack, people express horror, disgust and step deep into analysis, why this kind of lie is spread, believed, and exceedingly dangerous.
What can I possibly add? Maybe a basic primer on the function and use of memes? A check on historical sources that understood the value of propaganda? Lucky for me, all of that is spelled out in detail in the teaching materials of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, which I will summarize, applied to the case in point.
Here is where we stand right now: the rumor started in late August during a march staged by the nearby neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe and a diatribe in front of the Springfield city commission about the savagery of the Haitian immigrants. It was posted on Facebook.
A flood of memes followed (created by Republicans and their wing men), many indirectly alerting to the issue by making Trump the heroic rescuer of barnyard menagerie. J.D. Vance then spread the lie via tweets, careful to insert an “if rumors are true” in the margins, not so the House Judiciary GOP, and Elon Musk tweeting to his million of followers. Trump locked onto it, publicly disseminating it during the debate. He was fact checked, at the debate, (and again during the last two days when he continued to utter the claim during rallies), by multiple official sources from Springfield, including city hall and the police, that the rumors are not true.
(I have consciously left out the memes that depict Blacks in the background in more savage fashion than the one above. They are horrifying in their attempt to ride on stereotypes of black violence.)
Meanwhile, Vance insists on keeping the memes coming.
And wouldn’t you know it, threats of violence against multiple actors in Springfield have multiplied as of today. Bomb threats against administrative offices (the one who denied the veracity of the claims), the media, threats against schools, now sending kids home early. Fear is spreading among the Haitian population, called on keeping their kids inside and not expose themselves to potential harm at night.
Rightwing extremists are stoking the potential for violence by announcing bounties.
NONE OF THIS IS NEW.
“Propaganda is a truly terrible weapon in the hands of an expert.—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1924).
And the more cruel and politically expedient, the more it is employed. By definition, it is biased or untrue information intended to shape people’s beliefs and behavior. In racist societies propaganda plays a major role in establishing who is included and who either belongs to the margin, or should be irrevocably excluded. The means by which propaganda is applied, and the receptivity of the audience are both factors that shape how successfully the manipulation proceeds. For the Nazis, rallies, print material, the radio and film were all used to spread the message.
These days, we also have so-called memes that are disseminated across the internet. Like all propaganda, memes simplify complex issues, and speak to emotions. Moreover, they help to construct collective identity, give us a feeling we belong because we “get the joke.” They grab attention, they establish or prolong a cultural discourse. (In fact, the term was coined by Richard Dawkins some 50 years ago; he believed that cultural ideas, like genes, can spread and mutate, fostered by a surge of dopamine when we recognize what is expressed and emotionally react to it.)
In societies as divided as our’s, these seemingly humorous images act both as a formation for in-group belonging (remember the meme of Bernie sitting with his hand in mittens, transported into all sorts of weird situation, and we smiled every time?) and as a jab at the other side, which is ridiculed for its ignorance or negative reaction.
Memes are not inherently bad, depending on content. But memes breed partisanship, and when they gleefully ignore the absence or distortion of facts, in fact are passionately indifferent to truth, and open the gate wide to racism, they do harm. Trump himself posted this today.
They fall on fertile ground, since the slander that immigrants have unacceptable dietary habits is as old as this country. Across the ages, Asian immigrants have been accused of eating dogs. Jews, of course, have been accused of eating something altogether different and more heinous.
Haitian immigrants are particularly vulnerable, however. They immigrated en masse in the 1980s, and were treated as economic migrants despite fleeing the repressive rule of the Duvaliers. In the 90s they were stashed in a camp at Guantanamo to process asylum claims. David Duke and Pat Buchanan railed against the immigration of non-Whites, and reports on high numbers of HIV infections among the Haitian refugees elicited panic in the American public. Extremists had picked a definable out-group and today’s heirs to this thinking pursue it without remorse.
Legal immigrants have massively contributed to the American economy ever since. Temporary Protected Status Holders from Haiti, Honduras and El Salvador contribute a combined $4.5 billion annually to our GDP. Some 15,000 Haitian immigrants have moved to Springfield, helping revitalize the local economy and filling the pews of local churches. They came legally and are doing all the right things, but are the perfect target for dishonorable smears, however far fetched.
It is hard to deny that once again things boil down to the color of skin, and gleeful racism amuses those who found what looks like an easy target. As Ken White, a first amendment litigator and criminal attorney points out:
Engaging on the same level cannot be the answer. How can you reach across the divide, though, when it all boils down to beliefs and emotions, rather than on a willingness to establish facts?
Nope, not talking about the absurd claims that Haitians are feasting on neighbors’ cats and dogs. That will be discussed in the next round.
I’ll report instead on a walk the morning before the Presidential Debate, trying to shed irritated thoughts. It was actually quite serene in the wetlands, with a hint of fall, cooler temperatures and sparks of coloration pointing towards the blazing beauty to come.
Various pieces of news have combined to trigger thoughts about violence. You will read this after the debate has happened, with no current prediction from my end of what will be or won’t be said.
I still reel from the fact that during the most recent campaign stop, Florida man uttered the words, with glee, that the planned rounding up and deportation of 20 million immigrants “will be a bloody story.” At an earlier rally in Ohio, the former President stated that “there will be a bloodbath” if he does not win the election. It is all couched in terms of righteous violence, including his persecution of political adversaries that are suggested more and more frequently, setting a stage with thinly veiled stochastic terrorism.
With that topic hanging in the air, some data mavens at the Washington Post had nothing better to do than analyzing data from Google searches across two decades about what Americans want to kill. How to kill time, wouldn’t you know it, is a favorite search question on the internet.
As it turns out, searches about how to kill ants score high, closely followed by fleas and flies, with mosquitoes surprisingly low on the list. However, they are shockingly topped by searches about how to kill cats or dogs. Crabgrass, mold, and ivy, amongst other invasive species, are the most frequently searched organisms beyond fauna. Horrifyingly, on top of the pyramid used to be searches for means of suicide, but the search for how to kill another human being has now merged to that level (we are talking peek month of searches in the graph.)
We know, of course, what factors promote violence in a political context and how desensitization contributes to disinhibition towards harming others. Re-summarizing from my many previous musings: when societies are politically divided, particularly with an emphasis on identity, the potential for violence goes up. If we don’t interact with people who are different from us or hold different beliefs, and instead stay in partisan bubbles (aided by geography here), vilifying and dehumanizing the unfamiliar others is easy. That becomes, in turn, a gateway to accepting that they deserve harm, righteously meted out by us. What we are seeing is a call for partisan violence in these rallies, really. This is particularly the case when we fear loss of status, rights, or access to resources (realistically or just imagined, won’t make a difference), while political radicalization is touted by the politicians we align with or by the in-group that surrounds us. Planned or condoned state violence interacts with individual political violence, mutually reinforcing each others’ belief that it is all justified.
“Righteous” violence is, alas, not exclusive for the political arena. The Pacific Northwest is now on route to killing close to half a million barred owls across the next 3 decades. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has approved that plan in order to protect spotted owls, threatened by territorial take-over from their larger cousins.
“The shooting will be conducted in forest habitats spanning 24 million acres, including six national parks, 17 national forests, and thousands of pockets of private lands. It will, as planned, be the largest massacre of birds of prey ever attempted by any government.” (Ref.)
Scores of wildlife protection groups are protesting the decision, claiming that the plan makes no sense. For one, barred owls are being punished for human actions (climate change, deforestation, urbanization etc.) that pushed them, as well as the spotted owls, into new territories. Expanding their range, as a species native to North America, is a normal survival strategy, and will not be stopped by culling. The surviving owls will just return to the territories that sustain them under new climate conditions, with the competing spotted owls ultimately having little chance. That is what ecological systems are all about, with our interference perhaps just changing the allotted time for a single species (a species that we put into harm’s way in the first place….) Barred owls are also notoriously difficult to hunt and easily mistaken for other species that could be hurt.
Here is the detailed list of complaints and suggestions by the wildlife organizations.
The government argues that the cull, by licensed hunters only, ” will remove less than 1% of barred owls’ predicted U.S. population during the proposed time frame, resulting in fewer casualties than other, more aggressive management options proposed by the FWS, which suggested culling almost twice as many of the birds. The cull will also be limited to around half the areas where barred and spotted owls overlap, and intends to safeguard California spotted owls as well.”
“It’s not about one owl versus another,” Kessina Lee, an FWS state supervisor in Oregon, said in a statement.
It sure is about a lot of dead birds, if you ask me, killed with the righteous justification of protection of an endangered species. Now where have we heard that argument before? They shall not replace us?
Yes, I am sarcastic and you don’t have to tell me that these are two very different cases. Just soooo much violence in the air. Locally, nationally, world wide. How can we take a step back?
