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The Vixen

· Beyond the Tree Line ·

Two nights ago I heard a fox bark in our garden. There had been sightings according to our neighbor’s gardener, but I was skeptical. With so many coyotes around, maybe they just saw a young one, still small? But this sound was identifiably “fox” when I went to Google to check against my memories.

It felt like an affirmation of my – long debated – decision to include the image of a fox into a montage about The Cunning Little Vixen, an opera by Leo Janàcek. I hesitate to be too literal, but I also have a fascination with plucky characters, and if there ever was one, it is the fox heroine in this piece of music. She does deserve place of honor, or at least some visibility.

Janàcek’s opera is a romp, composed late in life, daringly taking a newspaper serial/comic strip as a basis for the libretto that includes all kinds of animal characters featuring nature’s life cycle and humans’ ties to it, in good and bad ways. The score is gorgeous, influenced by Czech folk music and language, animal sounds that the composer ardently recorded, and the fluidity of the Moravian landscape, its pine forests and lakes. It is also about the lives and interactions of generations, one’s place in a chain alternating between life and death.

Janàcek lost his son at age two, and his wife took his daughter away from him after separating, the girl subsequently died at age 20. The opera can be seen as one way of trying to come to terms with the legacy left through one’s children, literally and symbolically. I got to know the music in intimate detail when I sat through the rehearsals of the Portland Opera Production in 1999. I was no longer doing the super-text calls during actual performances, which also required rehearsal attendance. Instead I was accompanying my then eleven-year old who had been selected for a solo performance of one of the young fox roles, and the chorus of fox cubs. The mix of parental pride and anxiety was intense.

As parents we were intent on not pushing our children into activities, or force them to excel, or make their days endlessly structured outside of school, with little room for exploration and/or boredom (which I consider an important part of creative development, in many ways.) Years of adolescent time spent in front of computer games, without sports or social contacts, were quite worrying, yet we did not change our approach. We offered options, and any time some interest emerged, a passion for theatre camp, a new hobby of rock climbing, or the like, we had the privilege to enable them to participate, schlepp them there, funding equipment and the like. We also had the privilege of school choice – whether we chose the right one, who knows. But the boys did end up, eventually, with an education that suited their interests and talents, now doing meaningful work, these two amazingly cool human beings. With partners the same!

I have been thinking about Michelle Obama’s DNC speech which included a quip about “the affirmative action of generational wealth.” It is not just about parent’s money. It is about the time they are willing and, importantly, able to invest, the education that they themselves received and that now opens doors for their children, whether directly passed on around the dinner table, or linked to networking in academic communities and the like. It is about the willingness and ability to move into a good school district even if it means leaving a neighborhood you love, or stretching your funds beyond comfort level. It is about access.

It is about access to education at all – just look at the mind boggling numbers, newly published, that show how state-provided bikes for girls has impacted the rates of attending and finishing high school in rural areas around the world. Cycling, rather than walking miles on end, empowered female students.

It is about access to the education you wish to receive. In the context of voucher scams and political reemergence of publicly rooting for segregated schools, it becomes a burning issues connected to racism. (Here is an informative essay about school choice published this week in ProPublica.)

It is about access to education that is tailored to the needs of the disability community. We are not just talking about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a conservative administration. It includes the elimination the Department of Education altogether and drastically cuts federal funds for schools. The plan includes proposals to phase out the $16 billion Title I funding program over the next 10 years, convert the $13 billion IDEA program for students with disabilities to block grants or a private school choice offering. This means that students with disabilities no longer have the protections during public school education imposed by law. Vouchers for private schools? Does not include the cost of transportation, schools can throw them out at will, with no oversight, these schools are not accountable for outcomes, and they can reject students whose disabilities are particularly severe. (Ref.) Note that these are not just future possibilities. Last May House Republicans proposed to “Reduce Support for Students with Disabilities.” Under the proposal, as many as 7.5 million children with disabilities would face reduced supports—a cut equivalent to removing more than 48,000 teachers and related services providers from the classroom.

The montage is based on a photograph of a pine forestc like those in Bohemia, reflected in an icy lake, with several pale suns traversing the horizon to indicate the change of seasons. The vixen is peeking through the tree trunks, their pattern of repeated bars reminiscent of a cage (one she escapes in due course in the opera, as kids escape into adulthood.) Whether we continue to erect barriers like this towards equal opportunity education for all remains to be seen. Vote accordingly!

Here is the Orchestral Suite that gives you a glimpse of the music.

Here is the full opera.

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Dramatis Personae

This time of year. Perhaps you were even waiting for them. Another go-around with the main characters of the late summer fields: the sun flowers.

I took the images with one of those obscure settings on my iPhone, called mono stage lighting. It brings out the gorgeous architectural structure and patterns of these plants, but it also seemed fitting given the symbolism of the sunflower for Ukraine – times are dark and not getting any lighter for David defending itself against a Goliath.

I can no longer count the number of text messages and emails I get these days asking for donations towards the Presidential election campaign. The one ask I complied with this week came from a different source and about a different need: Historian Timothy Snyder and actor Mark Hamill are raising funds to provide mine sweeping robots for Ukraines regions that are contaminated with explosive ordinances.

It is not just the danger to life and limb, estimated to last for at least a decade even if the war stopped tomorrow. It is also about food security – if you cannot plant the fields because of the mines, you cannot plant the necessary crops to feed your – and other – people.

Hunger has been a weapon of war or political oppression in that region as much as anywhere else in the world. Stalin’s imposed starvation of Ukrainians in the early 1930s cost the lives of almost 4 million people. And contemporary hunger is not restricted to their own country. Millions of people across the world are dependent on Ukrainian food exports and now lacking. These are often the same people who are experiencing starvation tactics in their own recent or current conflicts in Ethiopia, Mali, Myanmar, Nigeria, South Sudan, Syria, Yemen and now Gaza.

“In 1998 the International Criminal Court Statute codified starvation methods as a war crime in international armed conflicts. A 2019 amendment expanded this doctrine to cover non-international armed conflicts – conflicts between states and organized armed groups, or between organized armed groups. In addition to food, the legal definition of starvation also includes deprivation of water, shelter and medical care. A few months back, the United Nations’ human rights chief said in an official statement that Israel’s policies regarding aid in Gaza might amount to a war crime.” (Ref.) Russia is believed of doing the same to Ukraine. Investigative reports by international human rights lawyers are right now presented to the International Criminal Court. (Ref.)

Russia is accused of

“… having engaged in an ever-lengthening list of starvation tactics, besieging entrapped populations, attacking grocery stores and agricultural areas and granaries, deploying land mines on agricultural land, blocking wheat-laden ships from leaving Ukrainian harbors and destroying a critical grain export terminal in Mykolaiv. Moreover, although the U.S. and E.U. exempted fertilizers from sanctions (Russia and Belarus are two of the world’s largest producers), Russia has decided to withhold fertilizers from the market.” (Ref.)

And here I thought to escape doom and gloom in the sunflower field…. but there is still hope. I have a cache of color photographs that radiate yellow optimism! Let’s include one.

And here is the Second Piano Rhapsody on Ukrainian themes (1877) by Mykola Lysenko.

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Getting rid of the Junk.

I did not publish a blog on Monday because I spent my entire Sunday on the phone and on text messages, processing the momentous shift in our political landscape, instead of writing about how our brain works – the initial plan. My friends’ comments ranged from “Just resign yourself to a Republican win, the world is going up in flames everywhere, so try to enjoy your last year(s) to “Why are you so pessimistic about the chances of a new candidate to infuse life into a shriveling campaign?” and everything in-between.

I had been squarely in the “It’s safer if Biden stays” contingent, and was emotionally rattled with his withdrawal. My fear had been (and to some extent still is) that abandoning the boat this late in the game would lead to an onslaught of ever more open racist and misogynistic attacks which, in turn, model for those in everyday life to go after people in vulnerable populations, and that we lose the ever important mid-western Independents. I had also worried that there would be no circling of wagons around Harris and thus a danger of losing the Black and women’s vote, fears now allayed.

I had once again forgotten Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano‘s insistence: “Let’s save pessimism for better times.” Was shaken enough, though, that I felt physically ill on Monday. So much at stake, so little margin for error, so many unpredictable variables. Even my go-to soporific Venn-diagram didn’t work.

I feel better today, given the barrage of positive reports on youth engagement, and statistics showing that the millions of $$ sent by small donors were 60% from first time donors (!). 39% of poll respondents said that they are now more likely to vote (and 49% equally as before.) Vote.org saw over 38.000 new voters sign up in the 48 hours since Harris’ announcement.

It will be an uphill battle, nonetheless, but I am willing to concede we have a chance. Particularly if we are able to filter out the junk that is already descending in waves on social media and talk shows, etc. Here is a truly informative piece of research from the Wilson Center that makes it clear how women politician are denigrated and what one can do to identify and confront the accusations. Malign Creativity: How Gender, Sex, and Lies are Weaponized Against Women Online is a valuable read at this very moment.

And speaking of filtering out the junk, let us at last turn to the brain and its mind boggling ways of accomplishing just that, not just metaphorically. (I’ll summarize what I learned here.)

Scientists have figured out the process that allows the brain to push its waste, a byproduct of our 170 billion cells doing their work, from deep within to the surface, where it gets picked up by the bloodstream in a nifty interface, which brings it to kidneys and liver for removal. Slow electrical waves set that process in motion while we’re fast asleep, pushing the debris within some fluid to the brain surface where the bad stuff gets sorted and flushed away.

Understanding this process has been of great interest to researchers concerned with Alzheimer disease. A lot of the debris that needs to get disposed of is amyloid, a substance known to form plaques in the brain associated with that form of dementia. There are reasons to believe that a malfunctioning waste removal system could be at the root of the disease. Thus, understanding how stuff gets removed might be a valuable step towards figuring out where things go wrong with this glymphatic system and how to fix it.

We know that our bodies get rid of problematic substances with the help of the lymphatic system, where tubes transport the waste to the bloodstream. Th brain, however, lacks these tubes. Here is what scientists discovered:

“By measuring the wave, we are also measuring the flow of interstitial fluid, the liquid found in the spaces around cells. It turned out that the waves were acting as a signal, synchronizing the activity of neurons and transforming them into tiny pumps that push fluid toward the brain’s surface.”…. Tests showed that the waves increased the flow of clean cerebrospinal fluid into the brain and the flow of dirty fluid out of the brain. They also showed that the fluid was carrying amyloid, the substance that builds up in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.” (Ref.)

Let sleep find us and the dance of electrical waves begin! Maybe a junk-free brain has more time to remember the important stuff:

Here is to joyful candidates, and power regained. Here is to having a brain fit enough to learn about youth culture, brats, coconut trees and other memes associated with our new nominee. We’ll go there some other time. For now, we understand our assignment.

Today, 7/24, is a virtual meeting organized by Showing up for Racial Justice (SURJ) at 4pm Pacific time (7 EDT) for White women to learn how to show up for the moment. You can sign up for the zoom call here or follow on FB livestream if they reach capacity.

Music today was sent to me by my dear friend Leila – and it’s perfect.

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Deep Breath

Too hot to use what’s left of my brain, still in shock over the developments of the last days. I said to my guy across the dinner table that one of these days I will buy that we all live in a simulation, with some scientists watching us carefully to figure out when we finally learn from history. A simulation that has to go to extremes to have us stare at the fact that the bad players seem to get away with everything and have serendipity at their side when it comes to a playing hand, ever. Expecting us to sink into passivity and despair amid the chaos, as we have been known to do too many times. Maybe this time we’ll learn.

Instead of my own commentary and analysis, I leave you with the words of two people who I regularly read. Many of you are familiar with Heather Cox Richardson, who I admire greatly, for learnedness, insight, clarity and speed of writing, and all around levelheaded sensibility. Her comment on the 7/13 events:

As Maine writer E. B. White famously wrote to a man who said he had lost faith in humanity: “Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.”

The other writer is John Ganz from Unpopularfront.news. He can be pompous at times, but is often witty and very sharp about putting things into perspective. His latest commentary can be found here. As a non-paying subscriber I have only access to parts of his essays, but I thought what I read here was a good pointer towards how we can make it through the next days without hysteric break-downs or permanent depression:

“Today, of course, is Bastille Day, so I’d intended to focus today’s newsletter on France and the recent election, but history has intervened and I feel I should comment on the terrifying events of the 13th. I don’t think I can possibly be first to deliver this news to anybody in the world, but, just in case, there was an assassination attempt on former president Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. The shooter and a bystander were killed. This is obviously a grave development. It takes no sentimental regard for Trump to feel relief that he was not more seriously injured or killed: the consequences for the country would have been dire. Now there is a great deal of speculation about what will happen next, some of it guided more by emotion than reason, some of it irresponsible, and some of it deliberately designed to mislead, inflame, and enrage. People have predicted everything from an a blowout Trump victory now to a national descent into violence. Both have degrees of plausibility, but I’m not certain of either. The same Trump who had the presence of mind to make this a propaganda coup can also fritter away his gains quickly. The fact is neither I nor anybody else know what will happen next. No matter what anybody tries to tell you about their hunches or premonitions, nobody knew that this would happen. That’s the nature of history: it’s highly contingent and unpredictable; events always outstrip our capacity to imagine or reason them out. In situations when dire predictions are being made, I think of this passage from Hannah Arendt’s 1954 essay Understanding and Politics: 

“Just as in our personal lives our worst fears and best hopes will never adequately prepare us for what actually happens-because the moment even a foreseen event takes place, everything changes, and we can never be prepared for the inexhaustible literalness of this “everything”-so each event in human history reveals an unexpected landscape of human deeds, sufferings, and new possibilities which together transcend the sum total of all willed intentions and the significance of all origins. It is the task of the historian to detect this unexpected new with all its implications in any given period and to bring out the full power of its significance. He must know that, though his story has a beginning and an end, it occurs within a larger frame, history itself. And history is a story which has many beginnings but no end. The end in any strict and final sense of the word could only be the disappearance of man from the earth. For whatever the historian calls an end, the end of a period or a tradition or a whole civilization, is a new beginning for those who are alive. The fallacy of all prophecies of doom lies in the disregard of this simple but fundamental fact.”

ONWARDS! say I. While we are still able to vote.

Mozart to the rescue today: a shining sonata full of energy and hope, with interim passages of contemplation. This was written shortly before his death during a period in his life that saw him with severe financial difficulties, illness and other personal challenges. He could still “hear” the beauty.

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Stick-People against Nazis.

I found today’s title photo years and years ago on the net. The little old lady’s tagging says: “Nazis are garbage. Believe me, I have experienced them myself.”

It is somewhat ironic that I now AM that old woman and can report that the experiences are no longer just in the past. How dreadful is that. Luckily there are plenty of people resisting.

German cartoonist Tobias Vogel, known under the tag name @Krieg Und Freitag, is in the middle of a fundraising campaign to support an organization that fights Nazis. (The name translates as War and Friday, and was coined when the artist looked for war and peace on his phone and mistyped Frieden – peace – as Friday.)

Vogel has created a signature collection of little stick people who comment on the travails of everyday life and politics online and with prints that can be purchased. He received multiple prizes, including the Grim Online Award, for his work across the last years.

Gallery exhibition of Tobias Vogel at Affenfaust

The current project raises money for a non-profit with the name of Kein Bock of Nazis (KBAN, No Desire for Nazis.) Since 2006 they support, network and inform adolescents and young adults on the topic of the extreme right, racism and the Neo-Nazi scene.

” In recent years, we have distributed hundreds of thousands of free youth magazines and more than one million information flyers. We organize concerts and protest actions, and we continuously provide initiatives, groups and individuals who are committed to fighting the right with information material, posters and stickers. Through our social media accounts, we help to mobilize protest actions. We finance our work exclusively through donations.”

Here is the idea: A little stick person appeared on social media with a sign: Stick-People Demonstration against Nazis – where are all the others?

For each $5 donation, one stick-person gets added to the group, and there will be a life session of the artist drawing all these “participants” across the span of several days in an art gallery, Affenfaust Gallery, in Hamburg. The drawings will be projected against the walls, and there is a live stream of the event at https://www.twitch.tv/affenfaustgalerie, starting on July 12, and the mural can be visited during the following week. (The name of the gallery is a pun: monkey’s fist refers to a nested knot used in merchant shipping to weigh down the sweatline during mooring of ships. They see themselves as knotting art and culture together creatively.)

Gallery at Paul Roosen Str.

So far, they have collected over 6000 “people” for the anti-Nazi demo, and I wonder if the artist will get severe tendonitis from drawing them all live. All proceeds go to the non-profit. I just marvel at the conceptual cleverness of having people create a visual mass, representing what it could look like if we all got our act together and ourselves out into the streets.

I contributed two litte stick-people at the link below, who I will never be able to identify, but then again that is a good thing during political demonstrations, ain’t it? https://www.betterplace.org/de/fundraising-events/47070-strichmenschen-demo-von-kriegundfreitag

Music today: The Revolution will not be televised – perfect call for action, and perfect foil for the fact that the stick-people WILL be televised.

From my Hamburg Series (2018) Seeing Strange. Those containers are water recycling plants in the harbor, colloquially know as rotten eggs. Wish Nazis old be described as a few rotten eggs, but there are just too many and counting…

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You up there – We down here.

A German author and an investigative journalist teamed up in 1973 to publish their experiences after prolonged interactions with the very rich and with members of the working class, respectively. Bernt Engelmann and Günter Wallraff wanted to shed some light on the sizable discrepancy of accumulation of riches and power on one side, and the dependency and exploitation of workers on the other side. It was called You Up There – We Down Here, and the title came back to me when thinking through today’s blog observation, half a century later when that discrepancy has reached unimaginable proportions

(Wallraff went on to write one of the most famous and all-time translated non-fiction books in Germany a few years later, in 1985. Lowest of the Low (link leads to free English translation) describes his years of working disguised as a Turkish guest worker and the racism and unequal treatment he experienced, like for example not being provided with safety gear while working in a nuclear plant, even when his German colleagues did. He provided shelter for Salman Rushdie when the novelist was threatened, and is still actively doing undercover investigations, now in his eighties.)

“Up” and “Down” were prominent when I chanced at a perfectly beautiful spot at the North Umpqua River recently, looking for a break off I 5 on my drive to Southern California. A dam created a rushing waterfall, with a smooth lake on top and the entrance to a fish ladder on the bottom, presumably helping fish to get to their spawning grounds upstream.

You could watch the fish and read about fish counts, with some educational bits around you to inform about the life cycle of the salmon, should you have forgotten your 5th grade curriculum. 80.000 visitors a year pass through here. One wonders how many of them hear about the real story. As always, it pays to look a bit closer.

Winchester Dam was built in 1890 as a hydropower dam to provide hydroelectricity to the city of Roseburg. Fish and tribal nations be damned. The dam changes hands among various power companies, with a fish ladder being built in 1945. In 1969 the dam is sold for $1 (!) to the Winchester Water Control District (WWCD) owned by private citizen and offering no transparency for their decisions and meetings despite being required by law. Condemned in 1976, the dam provides no hydropower, irrigation, or flood control. Its sole purpose is to create a private water ski lake for the 99 members of Winchester Water Control District (WWCD), some of the state’s wealthiest citizens and owners of the condemned Winchester Dam.

DEQ inspects over and over and finds multiple hazards, leveling fines for millions of dollars and insists on an emergency plan. After 34 years of stonewalling, WWCD comes up with one three years ago. The dam is now rated “high hazard, a rating based on downstream hazard to people and property, not just on the condition of the dam. 

Calls for removal are ignored, even though the dam poisons the drinking water for Roseburg and impedes migratory native fish, the fish ladder being rated one of the worst in the country. One of the owners of WWCD was paid $ 3.000.000 to do the repairs for the leaking structure required by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife last year. He made grievous mistakes when draining the lake for the repairs (Ref.), with ODFW watching and not interfering (the agency director was forced to resign due to his mismanagement this April). Water was released way too quickly from the lake, killing 550,000 Pacific lamprey. There is speculation that the faulty drainage was undertaken to remove evidence of illegal application of herbicides to the lake, toxic to fish and the humans (!) downstream, to kill plants that obstruct waterskiing. The repair disaster resulted in an unprecedented $27.5 million fine brought by the Oregon Department of Justice (DOJ) on October 7, 2023, against the Winchester Water Control District and their contractors. Since this is now a lawsuit, ALL discussions of the future of the dam, including possible removal, are tabled.

If anyone of us from below tries to contact the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Oregon Water Resource Department, or the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, with concerns about the Winchester Dam, agency officials respond by explaining that, because of the DOJ’s $27.5 million lawsuit, they cannot questions pertaining to the condemned dam or discussing the matter.

Those above have years of waterskiing safely ahead of them.

Roseburg is located in Douglas County, considered to the right of Attilah the Hun, when it comes to politics. Further South is Josephine County, competing for the description. You might not have heard of Josephine Country, but you have heard, I presume, of Grants Pass, the city that has been given green light by last week’s decision of the Supreme Court, to criminalize public sleeping by those who are houseless, even if no shelter or other options available. Talk about the lowest of the low. And yes, it is ambiguous if I am referring to the houseless or the radical majority of the Supreme Court.

“In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court ruled that cities enforcing anti-camping bans, even if homeless people have no other place to go, does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Gorsuch was joined by the rest of the court’s conservatives, including Chief Justice John Roberts.”

For the history of how we got here and the future implications, read here.

Grants Pass has a larger than life cave man statute. I assume those were permitted to sleep outside without being condemned to life in a hole….

Three things stand out for me: By criminalizing people now, people who have nowhere to sleep other than the park or the street, you will make it harder for this population to land housing at any point in the future, given their criminal record. So the claim that it is about decreasing homeless populations is logically fallible.

Secondly, if you have the option to crack down punitively, you will likely ignore more structural remedies, since they would cost you more money. Building housing, the ONLY way out of the catastrophe we are experiencing here on the West Coast, will take a backseat. So will upping universal rental assistance, repairs to public housing, and funds for eviction prevention.

And last but not least: this is about the ability to make our city centers attractive for business and commerce again, with people feeling free to spend and consume without the – however irrational – fears for their safety, and with pleasant views that don’t disturb their curbside dining.

Here is the website of the National Homeless Law Center where you can find more details.

Music today is a song from the Three Penny Opera, sung by Brecht himself. Text translated into English on the video, not the best translation, but you get the gist.

I just bought a screen print at Just Seeds about one of Brecht’s lines I have cherished my whole life: In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” (Two PDX artists I have reviewed before, Roger Peet and Thea Gahr, are members of this cherished artist cooperative as well.)

A good daily reminder of practicing hope. If we sing together, we are not alone in this. And France has just shown us that coalitions can still hold the bad guys at bay. At least for now!

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Juneteenth 2024

Today is Juneteenth. We mark the day in 1865 when the last of enslaved Black Americans in Texas first learned of the Emancipation Proclamation – more than two years after it was issued. It is a day that reminds us that change is not just desirable, but possible. That liberation is to be celebrated as a shift from a status quo – slavery – to a goal, however compromised in its evolution: freedom and equality for all.

Photographs today were taken 10 years ago when I still worked as a volunteer photographer with dance groups for teaching kids African dance, drumming and customs.

Seems like the perfect day to ask the question why so many powerful forces in this country, most densely represented in the current Supreme Court constellation of judges, want to revert from the change that we celebrate to a situation that enshrines the status quo at the very time when slavery was alive and well.

I am, of course, talking about the embrace of Originalism, the legal theory that judges should interpret the Constitution exclusively in ways the Founders meant it.

Let me count the ways in which this approach, heavily promoted by right wing forces across the judiciary, is problematic. For a more in depth discussion of the issues I strongly recommend a new book by Madiba K. Dennie, The Originalism Trap. The legal commentator, previously a counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice and professor at New York University School of Law, is now a deputy editor and senior contributor at the critical legal commentary outlet Balls and Strikes, which I follow closely. Her new book reveals the many inherent faults of this supposed intellectual theory that treats civil rights gains as categorically suspect, eager to roll them back, reverting the country to the inequitable version of the past.

Here are the bullet points as expressed by her:

  • Originalism is the idea that the meaning of the Constitution is fixed in time, locked in when the Constitution’s provisions were ratified. If you asked an originalist how you should interpret the Constitution today, they would tell you there’s only one way you can legitimately interpret it: the way it was interpreted 200 years ago. Originalism is ostensibly tied to a single point in time, and as a result, it bakes the biases and bigotries of that time into constitutional interpretation. 

  • Even if there was a single objective historical meaning of the Constitution (and there isn’t), and even if the Court relied on the finest historians to unearth that meaning (and it doesn’t), it would still be irresponsible to cast aside all the ways democracy has evolved in the intervening centuries and relinquish our right to self-governance. A well-intentioned liberal originalist would still be outsourcing constitutional interpretation to 18th century men who couldn’t possibly imagine a modern pluralistic society. That does a disservice to the whole nation, and poses an unique threat to historically marginalized people.

Dennie favors an alternative approach dubbed inclusive constitutionalism. It focusses on the fact that our nation adopted the Reconstruction Amendments in the wake of the Civil War. The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments were added to the Constitution and abolished slavery, granted equal rights to formerly enslaved people, and enshrined the right to vote for people of all races.

In the scholar’s words:

“They instruct us to create an equitable multiracial democracy in which everyone can live freely, equally, and with dignity. Inclusive constitutionalism argues that the whole Constitution must be interpreted through that lens. Legal interpretation should be guided by the Reconstruction Amendments’ expansive principles and their unfinished mission to foster a democratic society with equal membership for all.

Inclusive constitutionalist courts would protect people’s right to make decisions about their own bodies and to live with dignity. They would protect people’s right to make decisions about their communities and participate in the political process. And they would recognize all people as legitimate members of their communities.”

Of course all 300 million of us are currently ruled by nine unaccountable people, the majority of whom want to turn back the clock and have the power to do so for the rest of their lives. There will have to be structural reforms like court expansion and term limits as some limitations on the court’s authority in addition to demanding a retreat from originalism as selectively applied as it is right now. It would truly be in the spirit of Juneteenth, or the promises of democracy, providing equal rights to all marginalized or hierarchically locked in place groups.

Happy Juneteenth! A federal holiday. Never mind that in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, Republicans have passed laws to prevent teachers from teaching kids why. It’s not just the Judiciary …..

Ok, time to turn away from doom and gloom to celebrate the spirit of Juneteenth: here is Jean Baptiste to the rescue, with music to dance to!

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Tales from the Backyard

Yesterday I had a few visitors in the backyard, which suited me just fine. I figured ending the week with tons of pictures rather than ever more words would do us all good.

You know me, though. Words snuck back into my head – words, alas, that refuse to make their way into print in this family friendly blog. So use your imagination as to what I was thinking when I learned that the North Carolina Senate voted along party lines Wednesday to ban anyone from wearing masks in public, even for health reasons. House Bill 237 would extend to everyone, not just protesters towards whom this ban is of course directed, to wear medical masks.

A proposal to amend the bill to ban hate groups — explicitly the Ku Klux Klan and Proud Boys — from being allowed to wear masks in public, which the law currently allows them to petition for (!), was shot down by Republican lawmakers with no debate or explanation, as were calls by Democratic lawmakers to amend the anti-mask bill to protect people who want to wear masks for health concerns. So for immune-compromised people like me there is now the additional worry to either be arrested for wearing a mask or risking infection that can basically kill you. Not that I will ever see North Carolina again, but how many people who live there and can’t leave will be affected? and how does that not violate Federal laws, like the Americans with Disabilities Act?

“The federal disability law requires governments to provide people with disabilities equal access to government programs, services and activities — including public transportation, schools, voting precincts and town meetings. Banning masks could diminish access to those kinds of services to people who are covered under the ADA, such as cancer patients who may need to wear a mask due to a weakened immune system, disability rights advocates say. It could also limit their day-to-day activities.” (Ref.)

I wasn’t the only one watching the deer decimate the apple trees and then leisurely chew cud while resting on the grass, ignoring a cacophony of noises – my dog barking his head off, the Thursday Pickup garbage trucks circling the neighborhood, and my neighbor using a chainsaw to deal with the winter windfall. Be glad to have these pastoral scenes without the sound track!

The crows watched as well, eventually doing some up and down flying maneuvers to get their own luncheon, served on my balcony. Up and down triggered the notion of upside-down, another image eliciting a number of words in my head, “We’re living in a FARCE,” among them.

The upside down flag, a symbol for “Stop the Steal!” used by Trump supporters, was apparently flying in front of Justice Alito’s home. According to the New York Times, the flag was up in January 2021 for multiple days, while the court was still contending with whether to hear a 2020 election case. We are, of course, still waiting on two other cases to be decided by the Supreme Court, involving the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, including whether Mr. Trump has immunity for his actions. So far, no recusals.

Concerned neighbors took the photos and informed the Court at the time – what say you, Justice Roberts? We do know what Justice Alito had to say:

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

Isn’t it funny how Supreme Court Justices are completely fenced off against the dealings of their wives, while the sitting President is supposed to be responsible for alleged misdeeds of his adult son? Just wondering.

Here is a crow’s reaction – you may use your imagination once more.

If your blood pressure reacts like mine to these news, here is the perfect music to bring it down.

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Mothers’ Day Revelations.

Mothers’ Day is a fraught occasion for many. Those who want(ed) children but are unable to have them, might suffer. Those who don’t want to have children but were forced to carry them, might feel rage once again. Those who are mothers estranged from their children, might re-experience the pain. Those who lost their children to illness and death will freshly mourn. And those who lost beloved mothers will be raw with longing, at times. Loss through natural death is one thing, loss through forced family separation or violence another. Think of the tens of thousands of orphans currently surviving in Gaza and Ukraine, who will face a life without their mother.

Those who rejoice in being remembered by their loving kids, like I did this Sunday, have that nagging feeling that they are privileged, compared to those who feel particularly alone that day. Come to think of it, the only one who currently completely capitalizes from the occasion, is the flower- and greeting-card industry.

“Silent sentinel” Alison Turnbull Hopkins at the White House on New Jersey Day.

Imagine my surprise when I learned from historian Heather Cox Richardson this Saturday, a day before Mothers’ Day, that the origin of this celebration had nothing to do with familial relationships, but was instead a political movement started in the 1870s by Julia Ward Howe. The reformer had enough of the carnage produced by wars, the Civil War and Franco-Prussian War among them, and felt women needed to gain power to affect some change.

Mary Winsor (Penn.) ’17 [holding Suffrage Prisoners banner]

When the 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution without allowing women to participate fully in the political (or for that matter, economic) arena in 1869, Howe and like-minded women soon founded the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association, respectively, to promote women’s right to participate in American government.

It was first about the desire to counterbalance what they perceived to be male lust for war, power and aggression, with a female focus on peace. Howe called for a “festival which should be observed as mothers’ day, and which should be devoted to the advocacy of peace doctrines.”

It soon became clear that that could only be achieved if there was a movement towards equal rights for all. This included a change in how women were treated, among others, when they desired to leave abusive relationships, which at the time resulted in them losing all access to their children. And, at the core of it, it included the right to vote. The Suffragette movement was born.

Women marching in national suffrage demonstration in Washington, D.C., May 9, 1914.

As Richardson relates:

Howe had a new vision, she said, of “the august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities.” She sat down immediately and wrote an “Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World.” Men always had and always would decide questions by resorting to “mutual murder,” she wrote, but women did not have to accept “proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror.” Mothers could command their sons, “who owe their life to her suffering,” to stop the madness.

“Arise, women!” Howe commanded. “Say firmly: ‘We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.’”

I was looking at the historical photographs of women protesters I found at the Library of Congress archives and wondered what they would be thinking if they could see how the spirit of their path blazing efforts is systematically undermined today.

There are increasing demands that women should not be allowed to vote, or that it would be better to go back to a time where women lacked that right, as per Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson  after earning the Republican nomination for North Carolina governor, for example. John Gibbs, a Michigan candidate for the US House backed by former President Donald Trump railed against giving women the right to vote, arguing that America has “suffered” since women’s suffrage. He praised an organization trying to repeal the 19th Amendment which also argued that women’s suffrage had made the United States into a “totalitarian state.”

Party watchfires burn outside White House, Jan. 1919.

Rights to bodily self-determination that we had finally gained, have been taken away. It is not just about abortion per se, mind you. Birth control in all forms is the next target. There are also new Republican proposals on the table for a federal bill that establishes a registry for pregnancy. There are state law requirements that ask people about the dates and other statistics around their periods (often in the context of admission to a sports team.) There are serious concerns around period tracking apps which can be used by third parties to detect pregnancy and abortion, hence putting women at risk of being prosecuted. There are worries by Senators like Ron Wyden (OR) and Ed Markey (MA) that computerized car location data are freely shared by car makers with law enforcement (requiring only a subpoena, not a warrant signed by a judge.) If you are traveling in your car across state lines for medical treatment, you can be stopped or legally pursued. Privacy principles completely shattered.

No-fault divorce, a huge step towards women’s independence and ability to get out of a relationship that no longer work for them, is under threat as well, just look at legislative proposals in Texas, Nebraska, Louisiana and South Dakota. Details here, but the most extreme danger is for women in abusive relationships. If victims of domestic violence need to go through the lengthy and expensive process of court proceedings proving that they are being harmed, they will be exposed to prolonged and even aggravated abuse during the time it takes to get a verdict, or face prohibitive costs that will silence them. This affects not just the spousal victims, but also the children.

Of course the backlash against women’s rights is not restricted to the Western world. Women in Afghanistan or Iran have seen what few rights they had gained virulently taken away, with widespread discrimination and violent human rights abuses the order of the day. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres bemoaned just 2 months ago about the ruling Taliban having barred girls from education beyond sixth grade, from employment outside the home, and from most public spaces.

Women Ask President for Equal Rights Legislation. Fifty prominent members of the New National Woman’s Party called at the White House today to ask the president’s aid in passing an “Equal Rights Bill” in the next Congress. The bill would give women full equality in the government

Over 30 years ago, Pulitzer prize-winning author Susan Faludi wrote a book about Backlash. Much of what was discussed then is still an issue, or has become even worse, including the fracturing of a feminist movement that limits how much we could act and vote as a strong, united block.

At the time she observed: “In the past, women have proven that they can resist in a meaningful way, when they have had a clear agenda that is unsanitized and unapologetic, a mobilized mass that is forceful and public, and a conviction that is uncompromising and relentless.”

We will see how the absence of an organized mass movement will shape the November election. I hope we will nonetheless make our historic protesting sisters, the ones that initiated Mothers’ Day, deeply proud.

Help us to win the vote. George Grantham Bain Collection, 1914. 

Music about the Suffrage movement and the 19th Amendment.

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Dilemmas

Imagine waking up from a dream with nagging questions. This happened to me a few days ago, when I dreamt that a full headshot of me was plastered across the front side of the New York Post (!) with the caption, “Retired professor admits: I should have said freedom, not …”

Not what? What did I say instead? What was I talking about? Why did I make my way into a conservative tabloid? Then an immediate association to a German idiom, “nicht jedes Wort auf die Goldwaage legen,” “Don’t put every word onto a gold scale,” best captured as “Don’t take everything so literally or with a specific meaning.”

I guess the dream pointed to a deeper issue for me right now, the fact that I am hesitant to write about politics and the unfolding catastrophes caused by political and military decision making in Israel, Gaza and their proxies. The overriding reason for my silence is that I cannot face the horrors on a daily basis and so don’t gather the information necessary to write something sufficiently informed. I have also gotten a lot of feedback that readers could use some cheer in these dark times and so are perfectly excited to see yet another photograph of nature.

But another reason has to do with the choice of words and how much they weigh – a certain amount of censorship in my own head. If I’d commit to a particular vocabulary – genocide, apartheid, anti-zionism, zionism, etc. I would need to write at length how these terms are defined, and how the various, differing definitions are (un)acceptable. It’s too much for me, during times of emotional upheaval. What I have done instead, just so I don’t drift into apathy, is to establish a file where I am collecting many different voices that have thoughtfully and passionately argued about the issues around the student protests and the perspectives of both Israelis and Palestinians on what is unfurling in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks and the now 7 months of war. Maybe there comes a time when we can dig into these sources together. Not now.

That said, I do have one political beef I need to get off my chest. It concerns our upcoming local elections. Specifically, I am aghast at how information that might very well influence our vote, can be hidden until it is too late, if you, like I, vote when your ballots arrive at home, long before the actual election date, 5/21. Portland has a few hotly contested races this year, among them a competition for the 3rd Congressional District in the Democratic primary (not my district, btw.) Former Multnomah County Commissioner Susheela Jayapal, a progressive, runs against Maxine Dexter, a state representative and medical doctor, who all of a sudden received financial support to the tune of $1.7 million, from a 314 Action Fund.

The fund, claiming to want to support science backgrounds for office, conveniently waited to donate until April. Why? That makes it legal to delay the disclosure of its donor until May 20th, a day before the election. Now, if you are like me, wouldn’t you want to know WHO funds certain candidates? What if we learned that those organizations to whom the candidate is obliged pursue politics incongruent to our own goals? Or that we realize someone we agree with stands firmly behind one of the candidates? (As it turns out Dexter’s campaign is financed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, which funneling money into the race through 314 Action Fund.) (Ref.)

For some strange reason, in another critically close race, for Multnomah County District attorney, we have heard a lot about the funding for the progressive incumbent, Mike Schmidt, who I – could you guess? – support. Headline in The Oregonian 2 days ago: Multnomah County DA Mike Schmidt campaign gets boost from progressive philanthropist George Soros. If you take the effort to dig into the article, you learn a bit more: it’s $213.000 in in-kind contributions, by the working families party of Oregon. They, in turn, received money from the Working Families Party National PAC, who in turn was given money by the Democrat PAC, which was given funds for its first quarter by Soros’ Fund for Policy Reform, Voila, Soros supports Schmidt!

Schmidt’s challenger, a DA who is campaigning against his own boss, and who used to be a Republican until he became an Independent in 2017 and has registered as Unaffiliated since 2023, endorsed no less by Portland’s police union, has raised much more money than Schmidt. Do we hear much about his sources? Rhetorical question. A hunk of his funding comes from Portland’s business elite, including Nike co-founder Phil Knight, Columbia Sportswear’s Tim Boyle, and Schnitzer Properties. His largest contributions come from Leadership PACs, as opaque to me as the 314 Action Fund mentioned above.

Maybe it was all about freedom of information in my dream.

Better back to pigeons …. who were courting with abandon yesterday at the park,

the river slow and steady,

Public art glowing with light,

and the young sunbathers, blooming like flowers on the grass, oblivious to the damage done to their aging skins. Then again, maybe they were all covered in SPF 70 sunscreen and just eager to escape the ravages of the real world. Let’s end on that positive thought!

Music for the mood….

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