Archive for conflict
The Greeks and Us
Lately I’ve been beginning my mornings reading the Greek Tragedies. It has been a joy! Perhaps the biggest theme in the Aeschylus and Sophocles I’ve read so far: the pressure of justice upon children. I’ve been reminded of something I wrote on that topic awhile ago about more modern times:
Compared to how often parents denounce and disown their children, it is remarkably rare to see them do so in print. Why? Perhaps because, to anyone outside the writer’s particular family orbit, slagging one’s offspring utterly undermines one’s standing as a parent, and hence one’s authorial credibility, too. (The father of cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, Lionel Dahmer, saves his harsh judgments for himself.)
I can think of only one example in the genre: Famous atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s rejection of her first son, William Murray, after he became a born-again Christian. (This son was the “Murray” in the Supreme Court Case Murray v. Curlett in which the court banned prayer in United States schools.) O’Hair wrote: “One could call this a postnatal abortion on the part of a mother, I guess; I repudiate him entirely and completely for now and all times. He is beyond human forgiveness.”
Books by adult children attacking their parents, on the other hand, are everywhere. Parents, even if they are not dead, can’t fight back without bringing upon themselves righteous fury and dishonour. This genre, then, allows justice for those children among us who could never defend themselves before, but for the rest it provides a template for cowardice and disgrace that is tempting for a time. [4 June ’04]
What needs to be done
My son, Miles, on race in the United States:
After welcoming my son into the world a little over a month ago I’ve felt my life change immediately. Every decision and every thought now goes into the wellbeing of our tiny boy. There is no doubt in my mind that I will spend my life ensuring that he is able to have every single chance and every possible advantage in life. I will do all that I can to protect his safety, to afford him every opportunity and to provide him with the most happiness a father can.
But it is hard to not consider one alternative reality: what if my son was black? On my walk through the NICU every day I pass multiple black children, each in the loving arms of their mothers. The thought that they will have less access to the same dreams and aspirations that I have for Colby is heartbreaking. Having a child in the NICU is terrifying enough on its own. I cannot even imagine being a parent of a black or brown child, knowing that the fight for life does not end after eventually leaving the hospital. This is devastating and wrong.
To be born in the United States is to be born into a racist nation. This is just a simple fact that is as American as fireworks on the 4th of July or apple pie. Our inability to come to terms with this simple truth, to live in denial, is to not acknowledge the smoldering fire that we as Americans refuse to extinguish.
Before the United States was even a nation, from the time the first Africans were forcibly relocated to our shores in 1619, America relied on the forced labor of a people whom were ripped from their homes and made to live painful lives of servitude. The writers of our constitution literally traveled with slaves as they wrote the words that so many Americans like to pound their chests to while reciting. Choosing not to address this hypocrisy in our founding documents is the first of many examples of Americans choosing to turn a blind eye to blatant atrocities. For the next 250 years, America (not just the South) benefited from this historically brutal practice. America was literally built on the backs of slaves whom lifted our country to a status she would have never achieved if not for the forced labor of a people who did not chose to be here. Our rise to a world power would have been impossible without this immoral source of labor.
And this was only the beginning. After “emancipation” the type of slavery only changed. Even Lincoln himself felt that freed slaves should be relocated to Africa as he saw no way for the mingling of two races—once again refusing to acknowledge a people’s inherent humanity. For the next 100 years blacks faced government sanctioned racism and terrorism. It wasn’t until the mid 1960’s that we as a country even started pretending to consider African Americans as equal. THE MID 60s! This means that for me, my parents still lived in a time in which blacks were legally discriminated against. The thought that all Americans are gifted the same inalienable rights is laughable and insulting to one’s intelligence. For the vast majority of our history from a colonial state to a modern country we weren’t even pretending to hide our racism.
After the end of the abhorrent practices of Jim Crow, we as a country decided to start decimating communities of color by locking generations in jail, by economically paralyzing an entire race, and by suppressing their right to vote for change. “Pick yourself up by your bootstraps,” Americans like to say. Blacks had their boots ripped off their feet in the 1600s and have been forced to walk barefoot for generations.
Are blacks the only group that have faced or faces significant discrimination in our country? Absolutely not. Poor white people, Latinos, Jews, and basically any immigrant group in our history have fallen under the cross hairs of discrimination within our boarders. As with most complex issues, there are multiple truths. Discrimination targets people of many creeds AND systemically and profoundly targets African Americans. The lives of poor white people matter AND Black Lives Matter. There are police officers that defend those whom they are sworn to protect and do so honorably. There are also those who are a product of 400 years of racist principles—fearing all blacks as criminals and ignoring our most basic tenant of presumed innocence—and target, harm, and murder African Americans in alarming numbers.
ALL of us, myself included, each have our blind spots and inherently racist tendencies. I’ve long felt blessed coming from an accepting family that I was immune to the white supremacy that plagues our nation. Fortunate enough to continue my education through medical school, I cherished meeting a diverse group of friends from all over the country and the world. “I’m above the problem,” I would think. “My eyes are open, and this is a problem for other less ‘woke’ Americans,” I ignorantly thought. This mentality is wrong, lazy, ignorant and a prime example of white privilege. I am a product of generations of hardworking ancestors whom with time have been able to improve the quality of life for subsequent generations of our family. This ability to accumulate generational wealth—part of the American dream– is a privilege so many blacks are not afforded. I was given the opportunity to work hard at a great college to get closer to a degree that would continue this trend of generational advancement, and I was able to do this while graduating from a state school with zero debt. Again, I began the race of adulthood before the starting gun was even shot while countless others are forced to start with their shoelaces tied together.
As we’ve been seeing this past week, it is no longer acceptable to not be racist. We must all be vocally anti-racist. This tactic is our only hope to erase centuries of pain we as a flawed country have collectively experienced. Each of us as individuals need to evaluate ourselves thoroughly and look for our own blind spots and to work to acknowledge and correct them. We as a society need to come together and demand change on a national level and on a human level. Not voting (in national, state, and local elections) is no longer an option. Addressing police brutality, mass incarceration, and income inequality are urgent issues that require our collective efforts. Ending voter suppression. Having a legislative body that reflects our population at large. Keeping an entire cohort of our society less healthy and more susceptible to chronic disease, as COVID has once again reminded us, is just another iteration of the same tactics we as a country have utilized for far too long. These are all enormous problems that will take an enormous effort by every single American.
Enough has to be enough. We all need to be better as humans and as a society. It starts by acknowledging hard truths and admitting that to be American means to share the original sin of systemic racism. As a new father, I refuse to let my son live in such an unjust world.
originally published on Miles Basil FB page
“I’d rather leave the room quietly than seriously injure someone.”
I am teaching a conflict-resolution module to my advanced-communications class tomorrow afternoon. I love this Pam Grier interview.
Suddenness
Yesterday in New West I had lunch with friends and got a doggy bag with half a roast beef sandwich and a bunch of fries. Walking toward the Skytrain station I saw a couple of bedraggled guys and asked them if they wanted it. They said no, and then one of them pointed to an older, intoxicated fellow a few yards away and said “he might.” That third fellow said he did and reached out for the food. Then one of the original pair jumped over and yanked the bag from my hand: “Nothing for him!”
The third fellow wailed: “You took it from me!” That angry complaint was aimed *at me*, I realized with some fear. He started after me as I hustled up the stairs to the train. The stairs must have deterred him.
I’ll feel safe when I get on the train, I told myself. But I didn’t feel safe … for the rest of the day, unable to return to the quotidian habit of forgetting the suddenness that surrounds us.
“Big Drive”
I utterly love this animated short. Reminds me of my families and where we were and went.
Friendship
The commentator Fran Lebowitz, a longtime friend of Toni Morrison’s, recounted times when Morrison would comfort her after a bad review. Morrison herself was impervious to criticism, Lebowitz said, so she “assigned myself the task of holding Toni’s grudges for her.”
(PS: I wonder how *author* Lebowitz feels about the word “commentator.”)
Neighbours
Great footage. The wolf watching in the background makes it perfect. God bless British Columbia!
“pure capitalist intent”
This tweet by Kwantlen Polytechnic University colleague and marketing instructor @AndreaNiosi is my April favourite:
Showing my students the dark side of marketing. Cultural appropriation, mis- & under-representation, stereotypes, & the pure capitalist intent lurking behind (some) cause marketing campaigns. I’m now writing an open book to go as deep as I can into this.
Saudi “scholarship students” leaving Canada
I’ve had a number of superb students at Kwantlen Polytechnic University from that country. This is awful news.
From Inside Higher Ed this morning:
Saudi Arabian students in Canada are caught in diplomatic crossfire.
Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Education is making plans to transfer students out of Canada to institutions in other countries after a diplomatic meltdown between the two countries sparked by Canada’s criticism of the kingdom’s arrest and detention of human rights activists.
A spokesman for Saudi Arabia’s education ministry said on Twitter that the ministry is “working on preparing and implementing an emergency plan to facilitate the transfer of our students to other countries.”
CNN reported that 7,000 Saudi students on government scholarships in Canada will be relocated.
Dan Drezner of the Washington Post has three “not mutually exclusive” explanations for the Saudi action:
– Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is “trying to demonstrate that he is in control [in his country], even if these sanctions will not lead to any Canadian concessions.” …
– “Another possibility is that these sanctions are less about compelling Canada and more about deterring other Western countries from criticizing Saudi Arabia.”
There is one final, more speculative explanation. There has been some recent international relations research into “prestige goods” or “Veblen goods,” things that states spend costly sums of money on with little tangible return. … As I explained this summer: “Veblen goods are positional goods, in which demand increases along with price because the good is seen as a display of prestige. Veblen goods can explain why some countries choose to invest in aircraft carriers or space programs when they should be allocating scarce resources elsewhere.” …
Maybe, just maybe, economic sanctions themselves have become a kind of Veblen good. Not many countries have the resources to impose economic sanctions of any kind on another state in world politics. The United States sanctions a lot, the European Union sanctions some, so do Russia and China, and then . . . crickets.
Except for Saudi Arabia. If Saudi Arabia is seen as a country that can sanction others, it starts to look more like a great power. The very fact that these sanctions are costly is what makes them such a compelling Veblen good. According to this logic, it does not matter whether they work: Most sanctions fail anyway. What makes them successful is that Mohammed has demonstrated that he can impose them in the first place.
Obviously not obvious
If you throw everything *but* the kitchen sink at your problem, you will surely fail. You always need a kitchen sink.
Bobbie Louise Hawkins
Bobbie Louise Hawkins called poet Robert Creeley “the most interesting man I ever met.” Their marriage and divorce – “Bob and Bobbie” – were famous among his students at SUNY/Buffalo, where I studied under and befriended Creeley. I was told that Bobbie once tried to run over Bob with a car. I knew Creeley was angry and quarrelsome as a young man, but this scene was still hard to picture.
Ms. Hawkins passed away on May 4. I had been reading about her on that very day (she appears prominently and vividly in Joe Brainard’s “Bolinas Journal,” found in Brainard’s Collected Writings).
From the New York Times obituary:
“When Bob and I were first together, he had three things he would say,” Ms Hawkins said. “One of them was ‘I’ll never live in a house with a woman who writes.’ One of them was ‘Everybody’s wife wants to be a writer.’ And one of them was ‘If you had been going to be a writer, you would have been one by now.’ That pretty much put the cap on it. I was too married, too old and too late, but he was wrong.”
She added: “I think a part of what attracted Bob to me was competences I had within myself, but it was as if once I was within his purview, those competences were only to be used for his needs, in the space where we lived, and not as though they were my own.”
“What I was really fighting for wasn’t the right to be some kind of brilliant writer,” she said. “I was fighting for the right to write badly until it got better.”
It did, once she and Mr. Creeley separated around 1975 and she stopped writing surreptitiously.
I like how the obituary ends:
Ms. Hawkins could bluntly revert to her Texas frontier forthrightness, as she did once when Neal Cassady, the wheelman in the cross-country trips that Jack Kerouac chronicled in “On the Road,” came for a visit and commandeered her car. …
“Get in back, Neal,” she is said to have declared. “It’s my car and you’re a lousy driver.”
Here’s a video of Bobbie reading from one of her memoirs:
Solidarity
West Virginia’s teachers and school personnel get their salary increases to end their strike.
One down, countless more to go …
And yet a long ways to go …
… certainly in my home province. From the CBC a few minutes ago:
B.C. Liberal MLA Mike Morris is under fire after comments he made in the legislature on Monday, suggesting that funding committed to Indigenous languages in the province would be better spent on policing resources.
The province announced $50 million in funding toward preserving and revitalizing Indigenous languages throughout the province in the NDP government’s budget last week. …
Morris is the former B.C. public safety minister and before entering politics spent 32 years in the RCMP. …
“They’re sad comment from the Liberals, but it’s not surprising, and that’s the saddest part of it all,” said Bob Chamberlin, chief councillor for the Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis First Nation and vice-president of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs.
Chamberlain said instead of attacking the funding for Indigenous languages, the investment should be applauded.
“It’s a way to save a vital component of our people, all the way across British Columbia,” he said.
“The fact that the MLA spoke about the alcoholism, the drug addiction and so on — and the need to take this money for better policing — it just perpetuates a negative stereotype that needs to be overcome.
“I think that he needs to do a lot more reading on the history of Canada and relationship to First Nations people.”
Merry morning reading …
… from two favourite bloggers.
I do think one element of conservatism is imagining that they’d win the post-apocalyptic feudal games. …
Let’s suppose you’re minding your business in a lovely suburb of Honolulu. Honolulu gets ALL BLOWED UP. But, hey, you don’t die in the initial fireball. OK let’s say you don’t die of radiation poisoning within the next week or two. You’ve survived! That cancer will be along in a few years, but, hey, no worries for now.
Best case scenario, you live in current day Puerto Rico for a bit. No electricity, no water, but, hey, you’re alive. Also, nobody is going to get near your radiation zone. No rescues, no supplies, no nothing. Enjoy your last couple of weeks on Earth, I guess. I suppose you can forage for fruit, for a bit, and as a good conservative you own guns so you can shoot all the “looters” who are trying to take “your” fruit, but…
No, I do not want to survive the initial blast.
A cultural apparatus always arises to serve the needs of capital. It’s not a conspiracy of any sort, of course. People intuit what would make them more competitive and promote these qualities in themselves, declaring them socially desirable.
What does capital currently need? A rootless labor force that won’t he held back by networks of human relationships from picking up and going whenever capital needs it at this point.
In order to create such a labor force, human relationships need to be devalued and come to be seen as fraught, dangerous, and really not worth the hassle. Remember all these checklists of “How to Support a Bereaved Colleague?” or “How NOT to Talk to a Special Needs Child’s Parent” variety? Obviously, nobody is going to memorize all those laundry lists of prohibitions and exhortations for every occasion. It’s easier to pretend that the bereaved colleague or SNC parent don’t exist.
Another strategy is to displace liquid capital’s qualities, such as unpredictability and endless mutability, onto human relationships. It’s not capital that’s making you feel confused and like you can’t keep up. Oh no, not at all. It’s the changing nature of dating norms and workplace flirtation.
Workplace as a space where people work together for protracted periods of time is positioned as extremely dangerous. Capital prefers self-employed, alienated workers who simply don’t have colleagues they know in person and could, say, form a union with. The next best thing (for capital but clearly not for workers) is a revolving-door office where nobody stays long enough to create any meaningful links.
Enjoy your day, everyone!
[Addendum: My daily feed.]
Abuse Ranking
From the wonderful Melissa McEwan:
My go-to strategy as a younger woman was always to turn incidents of sexual harassment and/or assault into “humorous” anecdotes, which allowed me to talk about what happened without really talking about what happened.
This instinct is the result of, in part, policing women’s lived experiences, a central piece of which is inevitably abuse ranking.
It goes like this: Your harassment wasn’t as bad as being hit and your being hit wasn’t as bad as being raped and being raped by a boyfriend isn’t as bad as being raped by a relative and being raped by a relative isn’t as bad as genital cutting…
Until many of us feel as though we aren’t allowed to say anything, unless it’s in the context of saying “I didn’t have it that bad” — to express our “good luck” if our suffering hasn’t passed some arbitrary threshold past which survivors will allegedly be allowed to express that we were affected by abuse.
This idea can be expanded: I’ve seen lots of “pain ranking” and “poverty ranking” in my day.
Safekeeping
In this amusing piece on book “acknowledgments,” New York Times writer Jennifer Senior includes this bit of real wisdom:
Family members often make the best editors, because they can speak most bluntly to authors, and they have the next-highest stakes. Guess who has to live with you if your book gets savaged?
An editor needs to protect his or her author from ignominy.
Bad Mess at Evergreen
The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington has earned its renown as an experimental – indeed avant-garde – institution; its ‘progressive’ bona-fides have been warranted as well. Back in the day, I explored the possibility of taking a faculty position in entrepreneurship there. Although it didn’t come through, this institution has remained close to my heart.
A recent controversy at Evergreen has made national news and has placed at least one professor as well as students and staff in potential peril. From the New York Times:
[Professor Bret] Weinstein, who identifies himself as “deeply progressive,” is just the kind of teacher that students at one of the most left-wing colleges in the country would admire. Instead, he has become a victim of an increasingly widespread campaign by leftist students against anyone who dares challenge ideological orthodoxy on campus.
This professor’s crime? He had the gall to challenge a day of racial segregation.
A bit of background: The “Day of Absence” is an Evergreen tradition that stretches back to the 1970s. As Mr. Weinstein explained on Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, “in previous years students and faculty of color organized a day on which they met off campus — a symbolic act based on the Douglas Turner Ward play in which all the black residents of a Southern town fail to show up one morning.” This year, the script was flipped: “White students, staff and faculty will be invited to leave campus for the day’s activities,” reported the student newspaper on the change. The decision was made after students of color “voiced concern over feeling as if they are unwelcome on campus, following the 2016 election.”
Mr. Weinstein thought this was wrong. The biology professor said as much in a letter to Rashida Love, the school’s Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services. “There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles,” he wrote, “and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away.” The first instance, he argued, “is a forceful call to consciousness.” The second “is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.”
Seattle’s The Stranger reports on the “campus lockdown” ordered at Evergreen late this week “after local law enforcement officials received a call with a “direct threat to campus safety'”:
Student activists say they’ve been unfairly maligned. “While it is probably true that some of our strategies were very passionate, they were also peaceful,” an Evergreen student, who wished to remain anonymous, wrote in an e-mail. “And while it might be true there was some ‘harassment’ (a subjective term), it was on the lines of condemnation and scorn, rather than threats and stalking.”
One student, who asked to remain anonymous out of safety concerns, said death threats to campus activists followed Weinstein’s media appearances. “A swastika appeared on campus. Student personal information was published on 4chan channels and other neo-Nazi and violent racist internet communities,” the student told The Stranger.
Said another student: “Calling these people ‘Weinstein supporters’ would be irresponsible of me. These people are mostly organized racists from off campus that use internet presence, anonymity, and misinformation to disrupt a narrative, and the threat of violence to suppress those who would fight back.”
Professor Weinstein fears that his and other students have been placed at risk:
On Twitter, [he] claimed that his student supporters were being threatened online by his critics. He subsequently tweeted: “I’m told people are doxing those that protested against me. I don’t know if it’s true. If it is, *please stop.* No good can come from that.” The biology instructor also said that Evergreen campus police warned him that he was “not safe on campus. They can not protect me.”
Student demonstrators refuted Weinstein’s claims that their supporters had attempted to dox the teacher’s supporters. They believe the media’s focus on Weinstein is a distraction from their chief concern: ongoing issues revolving around racism, sexism, and transphobia at Evergreen.
Many of Weinstein’s faculty colleagues want him punished.
Look at Bret Weinstein’s “Rate My Professors” page.
Here are some of the demands from students who objected to Weinstein’s published statements .
A member of the State Legislature has introduced a bill to de-fund and privatize Evergreen.
As a professor and as a person with many fond memories of the energetic intellectual and moral debates I shared or witnessed as a young student at SUNY/Buffalo and Stanford University, I find this Evergreen mess dismaying to the point of heartbreak.
h/t LH
The discussion has left the room
My friend Clarissa writes,
As a long-time blogger, I know that there is a number of subjects you simply don’t write about if you don’t want to attract a bunch of unhinged fanatics. Breastfeeding, homeschooling, and sexual dysfunction are such subjects. Climate is another. I simply don’t engage and find the whole subject repellent because there’s no upside to talking about it. It’s become the sole purview of disturbed people who use it to soothe their psychological traumas.
There can be no doubt that the climate cause is losing. One would think that after decades of abject failure those who care would at least consider trying to do something other than screeching maniacally at whoever departs half an inch from their orthodoxy.
And it’s not just climate, either. Diversity was a great idea until it was overrun by crazy and vulgar people who destroyed the concept in the service of their dysfunction.
I would add “naming individuals on the ‘gender continuum’” to that list of subjects. Alas.
Sharing a friend
Sharing a friend demands profound courtesy. Enough so that it never shows, or rarely.
“If you are pro Black, pro Hispanic, or pro Asian, why don’t you say so … ?”
After we got back in touch with each other in 2009, Lorraine sent me the correspondence below – between me and a ‘literary agent’ – which she had kept after leaving Prometheus Books decades before.
Lorraine wrote me: “In one of my periodic cleaning binges, lo — my Prometheus ‘DO YOU BELIEVE THIS’ file re-emerged this week, after a disappearance of nigh onto twenty years! The attached provided me with a cascading set of giggles. I hope you will still find the exchange as amusing as I did.” I did, and do. Thank you, Lorraine.
(I’ve obscured my antagonist’s information.)
Note #1 to my students: The approach I chose here is generally not recommended for your own workplace correspondence. Please stay courteous! Your goal, almost always, is to foster and maintain relationships.
Note #2 to my students: You also might want to avoid misspelling *your own job title* in workplace correspondence. I was the senior “Acquisitions” editor for a year before I remembered that “acquisitions” has a “c” in it. (That was around the same time I was shocked to see that “smooth” wasn’t spelled “smoothe.”)
PS – The “LMP” is The Literary Marketplace guide.
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