Time Travel: Finding the Future in Native American Culture

I began writing about community cultural development when I was quite young, in support of the actual community organizing I was doing at the time. My big sister recently unearthed a few of the “Expressions” columns I wrote for my hometown’s weekly University-student newspaper, Volante (“The Oldest College Newspaper in the Dakotas”).

Here’s a piece they published in their November 13, 1973 edition (v. XCI, 10). I was 20 at the time; please forgive my youthful errors (I was working to stretch the cultural lexicon of our day, still struggling to excise sexism from our language & racism from our worldview — an ongoing project):

We are in the midst of an important phase of our country’s cultural development. After a century in which the Indian culture has been slowly strangled by the imposition of the white society, there is emerging a quiet but powerful resurgence of cultural activity by native Americans. For the first time in many native Americans’ lives, there is pride rather than shame in the culture of a people who lived and thrived in this country for centuries before the advant of a dominant white society.

Last week’s Native American Days, coordinated by [the University of South Dakota]’s Tiyospaye Council with the assistance of the National Endowment for the Arts, brought to the USD campus striking evidence of the results of this cultural reawakening among native Americans. The activities of this three-day event gave witness to the beginnings of the Indian culture’s restoration to its proper place in the American cultural scene.

Smong the artists who were on the USD campus as part of Native American Days was Paul WarCloud, full-blooded Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakotah from Sisseton, SD. WarCloud is a man who is totally committed to his art and to this reanaissance in native American culture. Along with six other artists from Sisseton — Tino Walking Bull, Roman Derby, Joann Bird, Raymond Arrow, Douglas Yellowback, and Calvin Frennel — WarCloud has been actively involved in the establishment of a gallery for Indian artists in the Pohlen Center in Sisseton. The center is named for Father John Pohlen, a German priest who lived and worked with the Indian people in the Sisseton area for 35 years until his death in 1970. It was Pohlen’s dream to found a center in Sisseton for the encouragement of Indian artists and craftsmen. This dream became a reality in 1970, with the purchase of the old library building in Sisseton. Assited by Father Leonard Baldus, the Sisseton artists began to prepare the building to become the Pohlen Indian Cultural Center.

Supported primarily by donations and two grants from the South Dakota Arts Council. the Pohlen Center has grown to be much more thatn a gallery for Indian artists. In the basement of the building is a trading post managed by Carolyn Renville of Seven Fires Enterrpises. The crafts which are for sale in this shop (some of which were displayed by Mrs. Renville at Native American Days) are produced by Indian craftsmen from the area. Classes in beadwork are held there as well, insuring that this art will be passed on to the younger generation of Indian artisans. A similar program is carried on upstairs in the building, where WarCloud and John Derby have studio space in addition to the display area.Young people frequent the studio to watch the artists at work and to learn from themtechnical aspects of their work — and their spcial pride in being part of a revitalized Indian culture.

This emphasis on passing on to the younger generation of native Americans a sense of pride in their culture is deeply felt by Paul WarCloud and others like him. He recalls the early days of his own career as an artist, when he noticed the rapid decline of his proud Sioux heritage. WarCloud had drawn throughout his teens and had planned to enter the Santa Fe Indian Art School, but his plans were interrupted by the Korean War. Upon his discharge form the military in 1958, he began pursuing his postponed goal with an even greater sense orf urgency. Never having had any formal instruction in painting, WarCloud set out to teach himself, developing a realistic style which is all his own.

In reflecting upon the precarious position from which the Indian culture is emerging, WarCloud points out the reason for its near-death. “The TV and radios blared out about the Indian as a savage, attacking wagon trains and the like,” WarCloud says. “But now the young people are realizing the contributions we have made to society.” He notes with pride the changes which have taken place among young native Americans in recent years, from a concern with hiding their Indian-ness to taking pride in it. “The young people used to dye their hair and use make-up, but now they wear the beads and learn the dances… They can say ‘I am Indian’ with their heads held high.”

WarCloud’s own feelings of pride in his Sioux heritage are brilliantly reflected in his painting. “Before I paint, I always pray to the Great Spirit,” he explains. “Sometimes I will not paint for days, because that power is not there. But then I will get an idea, and it is easy for me to finish. … I’m only an instrument for what that power tells me to paint.” The power WarCloud feels is shared by anyone who sees his work. Beneath the detail of WarCloud’s realistic style is a wealth of feeling that arrests the attention of all viewers; anyone who saw the two dozen paintings here last week would agree. [WarCloud’s exhibition was still on view at the time of this publication.]

WarCloud’s devotion to his art is matched by his and his wife Marcella’s other activities in preserving the Indian culture. He has already published two dictionaries of the three Sioux dialects and is in the process of completing a sourcebook on other aspects of the Indian culture.

Speaking to Paul WarCloud exposes a confident optimism and faith in his work that lie behind the enormous success he has achieved. in 1971, thirteen years after he began to paint, he was commisioned by [Gov. Richard Kneip] to paint a mural which now hangs in the governor’s office. Hanging now beside an older mural depicting the white man advancing across the plains, “Unity Through the Great Spirit” celebrates the coexistence and cooperation between the white and Indian cultures. A more eloquent testimony to the changes which are occurring now could not be found.

On Thursday night, ten Indian high school students from all over South Dakota presented a dance program in the [Student Union] Commons. These students were selected earlier in the fall to participate in an Indian dance workshop program under the direction of Feral Deer Skye with the assistance of the South Dakota Arts Council. Mrs. Skye, originally from Wisconsin, has worked with these students to further improve their skills in traditional native American dance. She speaks with great modesty about her own role in the workshop program. It is the desire and interest of the young people involved, she contends, which explains the program’s success. The depth of their involvement in learning and performing these traditional dances was certainly impressive.

And this depth of interest is not restricted to just these ten students. The Wacipi (a traditional Indian dance contest) which was held Saturday in the Coyote Student Center brought native Americans from all across the northern plains states. The participants represented a number of different tribes and ranged in age from pre-school children to senior citizens. The whole event was an impressive one, drawing an unprecedently large sand varied crowd of spectators — USD students, community people, visitors from other communities, both Indian and non-Indian. For many, it was a first exposure to Indian dance. For those who had attended before, it reflected the increasing interest and activity in this important element of the Indian culture. For all, it was a very exciting experience.

The Wacipi, the exhibitions of arts and crafts, the idea presented by those who spoke of the renewed activity in native culture — all these aspects of Native American Days reflect a vital, living cultural experience. The objects produced by Indian artists and craftsmen are not just empty imitations of those made generations ago. Nor do the dancers of today thoughtlessly mimic motions whose meaning was lost with their original performers. To those who attended Native American Days, it was obvious that the spirit of the native American culture burns as brightly now as ever.

Devils Tower (1962), by Kennie Fuller

I recently moved this picture to a place where I see it each morning, upon awakening, and each night before going to sleep.

My Dad gave it to me when I was 8 years old, and except for a few years in my young adulthood, I’ve had it with me ever since. But it was not to my former long-term partner’s taste, and was therefore exiled to my archival section (literally — where I keep my filing cabinets) for many years. It’s been strange to have it speak to me so regularly, after so long, and I realized tonight it’s been working on me.

I also then remembered that I can at last share here not only this artwork, but the wonderful letter I received from the artist, as a 4th grader, when I asked him to tell me what his painting was about.

“May 1st, 1962

“Dear Donald,

“Received your letter dated April 28th, asking about the ledgend of the painting your father bought from me and gave to you. To the best of my knowledge, it is as follows:

“A long time ago, before white men came to this contient, seven braves and one sqaw from the plains Indian tribe — (probably Cheyenne) were traveling to their village in the North Eastern corner of  Wyoming, when a huge bear attacked them. They jumped upon a flat rock and seeing that they were almost doomed, they began praying to Wakan Tonka (their Great Spirit) to save them. Suddenly the rock began growing in size and as it grew skyward, the bear hung on and began slipping down, leaving great crevices & scratches on the sides of the tower. He then tried to climb up and left more scratches and huge boulders beneath. The bear became angry and left, leaving this huge domed shaped tower as evidence of this story or ledgend.

“This tower is known today as Devils Tower, located North and East of Sundance, Wyoming. The tower is 865 high and 1 mile and a quarter around the base. There is 1½ acres of surface on top.

“The reason I put the old Indian in the foreground is to represent the Indians Ledgend and to more or less give the impression that he is telling the story.

“I hope this answers your question fully, thank your for your interest.

“Sincerely,

“Kennie Fuller

“#12853”

In our subsequent correspondence, Kennie also confirmed that he consciously chose to depict the bear as having a long tail, because this came before the bear’s having gone fishing in Minnesota. But that’s another tale entirely.

 

Collateral Damage: Anti-communism & U.S. Cultural Policy

Responding to recent posts, friends have asked why my blog fell silent for a couple years there. The answer is simple: I was busy writing my thesis — “Collateral Damage: Anti-Communism & U.S. Cultural Policy.” I’d be delighted if you read it! (This is a free PDF download.)

“Collateral Damage” tells the story of anti-communism through much of the 20th Century, focusing on the deep collateral damage done to US culture by our conduct of the Cold War. We have swallowed a great deal of our own propaganda since the Cold War began: here I try to clear the air and reframe the issues, in hopes that fresh, intelligent discussion might now proceed.

 

This sweeping story actually comprises many stories. I chose from among countless similar ones, most of which wound up on my cutting-room floor. The historical narrative follows from the first mass expression of anti-communist sentiment nationally, in the Red Scare of 1919 (pp. 23-53), through its later expression in the “McCarthy era” of the Fifties (pp. 133-184), and its legacy since.

 

Various approaches to cultural policy emerge throughout; but to highlight anti-communism’s impact — and not incidentally, to prove my thesis — I focus especially on contrasting the federal cultural programs of the New Deal (pp.  70-114) with those of domestic cultural agencies established in the 1960’s (pp. 303-377).

Spoiler Alert! My Conclusions

My conclusions are summed up on pp. 378-385. But I’ll summarize other key observations here.

“Collateral Damage” reveals a foundational failure of unconstitutional dimensions in our de facto national cultural policy. Politicians and policymakers in the Truman administration relied upon religious values for Cold War propaganda purposes, rather than crafting secular statements of national cultural values. In effect, we devolved cultural policymaking to the realms of organized religion — which in recent decades, has significantly reorganized itself for political purposes, often in ways that strike many of us who believe differently as irreligious. This is an important target in my next book.

 

My thesis draws out six other significant impacts of anti-communism on U.S. cultural policy since the Sixties (see pp. 340-377):

1. the primacy of the private sector over the public in defining cultural policy
2. Euro-centric bias in defining the cultural field — “the fine arts”
3. marginalization of diverse voices from outside traditional fine-arts contexts
4. proscribing engagement with social issues in the arts and humanities
5. the replacement of democracy with “free enterprise” as the driving spirit in cultural policy
6. a U.S. stance in foreign relations that reduces transnational cultural issues to questions of commerce and national security 

I conclude with an edited version of First Lady Michelle Obama’s address to the Democratic  National Convention in 2012 (pp. 385-388) — an exemplary secular statement of national cultural policy, were we to stand up as a nation for cultural democracy.

Download the complete document here.

WARNING: This is “a book-length manuscript,” laid out according to my university’s required thesis format. My academic committee urged its publication for the general reader, but I’ve already moved on to another book project, leaving this is on my back burner. So please forgive the format of this free download.

I welcome your comments & response right here. And suggestions of potential publishers are especially welcome!

Remembering the Panthers

I was 13 when I first saw the Panthers — back in 1967, folding my morning supply of the Minneapolis Tribune for delivery. They were hard to miss!

I’m not sure what the occasion was: maybe their first public appearance at the San Francisco airport — to protect Betty Shabazz, widowed by the assassination of Malcolm X, from any further predation? Or maybe when a larger contingent made their way into Sacramento’s Capitol later that spring, to testify against gun control? No matter.

Just one look, and they had you: smartly dressed, and armed to the teeth, they turned out to defend the black community like no one else ever had. California’s newly installed actor-governor certainly agreed: Ronald Reagan was on the Capitol lawn, greeting a group of school-aged picnickers, on that fine May day when the Panther caravan drove up and disgorged its cadre of armed lobbyists. The very sight sent Reagan scurrying back to his office sanctum for cover. Very quickly, that revered hero of the NRA signed California’s first law against open-carrying — an expression of racist fear.

The Panthers were not about non-violence — the prior public assumption of what black activism looked like, as the civil rights movement crested and declined. Brown v. Board of Education was decided more than a decade before, but the nation’s schools were still segregated. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were on the books at last — but America was responding by shutting down public facilities, privatizing schools, and finding other work-arounds to the challenge of constructing a post-racist Promised Land. Most crucially, the nation’s police actually stepped up their harassment of black communities — not only in the South, but everywhere black people lived. Anger exploded in urban rebellions in the North and West, Newark and Watts. This fiery anger forged and fueled the Black Panther Party.

Party founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale (pictured at the top in front of their first headquarters) met years before 1966 at Oakland’s Merritt College, and had done plenty of homework, in after-hour study groups. (Black Studies were not in the curriculum then.) They knew the long history of struggle against racism and were well-versed in revolutionary theory. So when racists met progress with resistance, they knew that reason alone wouldn’t change anything. W.E.B. Du Bois and countless others had reasoned away since the 19th Century and longer — and still the police invaded private homes at night, without warrants or restraint, terrorizing innocent black families and attacking people on the streets. It was time for armed self-defense against the violence of state power and white-racist mobs.

Huey had also read up on California’s gun laws. Open carry! So when he and Bobby and their first recruit, L’il Bobby Hutton, started tracking and publicly confronting Oakland’s vicious police, they were ready: they spoke right up — gathering amazed impromptu crowds — and they won every time, citing chapter and verse of California law. People in Oakland and Richmond (CA) saw the police confronted by these very challenging black men, backing down, and speeding off. A very new and volatile stage of the revolt against racism was on!

I won’t detail here the rest of this amazing, but ultimately devastating history. For that, I recommend a really important and timely book — the first comprehensive history of the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party: Black Against Empire (2013) by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr. You’ll be amazed at their detailed telling of the Panthers’ glorious ascent, and appalled at the levels of vicious State violence and repression unleashed in response. The authors have interviewed the survivors and combed through previously suppressed police records to reconstruct stories that will chill you to the core. Make no mistake, as we reawaken to the fact that Black Lives Matter: police violence, repression, and unruliness are truly a longstanding American dilemma. Containing and refocusing our police is surely one of our key challenges in reconstructing a respectable democratic State.

Black Against Empire proves one very important point — deflating whatever cartoon version of Panther history has been brought to you by ahistorical rumor-mongers:

The unchanging core of the Black Panther Party’s political ideology was black anti-imperialism. The Party always saw its core constituency as “the black community,” but it also made common cause between the struggle of the black community and the struggles of other peoples against oppression. … The Black Panther Party always saw itself as the revolutionary vanguard advancing the interests of the black community for self-determination within a larger global struggle against imperialism.

In its heyday — with the United States shamefully engaged in imperial misadventure in Vietnam and every other nation on this Earth, though most often under covert cover — the Party won real respect in the post-colonial international arena. They stood proudly as representatives of a black nation colonized by white racists driving U.S policy at home and abroad. The shame they exposed so excited that master of deceit — Public Enemy No. 1, J. Edgar Hoover — that his taxpayer-financed terrorism truly sealed the BPP’s own tragic fate.

Oakland police murdered L’il Bobby early on, one dark night in 1968 — after he had stripped down to show he was unarmed, hands-up in surrender. Police killed many more Panthers, sometimes in military assaults that will horrify you, if you dare to read Bloom & Martin’s careful reconstruction of this history. What we’re seeing today — in this atmosphere of resurgent racist reaction — is truly nothing new. We desperately need to face the facts and the forces we remain up against still.

The spirit of the Panthers did not die. Reading this book, I recognized names of my grantees at the California Arts Council, in Jerry Brown’s halcyon  “Gov. Moonbeam” days (1976-78). The Panthers spawned cultural activism that has reached millions in very deep and lasting ways.

We are forever changed by their bold courage in striding right up and challenging the pigs. Many Panther leaders were murdered and driven into exile at taxpayer expense — and in many more U.S. cities and much greater numbers than Bloom and Martin could tackle in one book. Not a single mention is made, for example, of the Kansas City story. Here, City Police and the FBI nipped Panther organizing in the bud very early on — in 1969, right after Chicago Police murdered Fred Hampton in his bed —depriving Kansas City of its boldest young black leaders. The profound desolation of life today on the city’s East Side stands in sorry contrast to what two Party leaders — Pete and Charlotte O’Neal — have built in exile: Tanzania’s United African Alliance Community Center. If only this had happened here; instead, we got that.

And the struggle continues. Read this book and remember. Then wipe away your tears, and stand up and strike out like a panther would — against racist attack and right-wing reaction. Can we at last begin building the diverse cultural democracy that our nation so sorely needs?

Honoring the Indigenous

How many centuries have passed — how many successive generations of colonists, turned colonizers — before We the People have finally begun to turn, at long last, to recognizing where the deepest knowledge about living in the Americas would spring? How many people — how many peoples — have passed from this life unseen — or dismissed as savage — despite the fact that so many others first came to this continent, on their shaky ships, to escape savagery back home?

Our remembrance and recognition must include such deep, deep sadness — too deep to truly fathom — of our very great losses in forging this nation.

Please do not mistake what I’m saying. In no way do I mean to blame any of those those now awakening. But we must also now honor those many generations. We must now try to remember all that we have lost — the terrible destruction of cultures shattered, bones broken, circles of life destroyed.

At the same time, we must most certainly honor all that has been retained, maintained, and reinvented from within these traditions. How many people have survived in miraculous strength, carrying these traditions forward against all odds? Perhaps as many as there are stars in the sky.

Further still, we must remember that not everyone who came from some other continent to this one was blind to the awesome reality of their own new world. Many of us have indeed learned from the people we encountered here, whom we came to respect and admire. From Jameston to 1776 was an historic period as long as the one from 1776 to 1945. That’s a lot of generations! Many colonists — still European in identity and consciousness — became captivated with native American life while living in this still-New World. (Some of them quite literally.) And once they experienced it themselves, very few decided — or even wanted — to head back home. (In historical fact, after the Revolution, fewer than 70,000 Tories.)

Those European exiles clearly saw the freedom of the originally American people who strode carelessly through their increasingly fortified encampments. Those who did venture out were able to witness mind-blowing displays of democracy and cultural practices that challenged the imagination. They saw Americans living like nobody lived back home, in their old world. They saw women standing with honor alongside men. Most were truly transformed.

So when it finally came time for them to admit that they, too, had become “Americans” — ready to throw that first Tea Party — how did they dress? Where did their new national symbols come from? Their Liberty Tree. Their bundles of arrows. The American eagle that clutched that bundle in his claws. Their statue of Freedom — some time later — high atop this nation’s Capitol, adorned in her feathered headdress. Their sainted Tammany — before his memory was swallowed by our political corruption…

In the end, this radically democratic vision proved too much to bear. Women’s rights took another 150 years of struggle for our Eurocentric colonial descendants to write into our Constitution (if not yet fully, to this day, into daily life). And 50 years after that much-storied American revolution, in rode swashbuckling Andrew Jackson, spurring countless ensuing trails of tears — all the tragic history that we later generations have tried so very hard to repress and forget, whether as imaginary victors or victims.

But today is our time to remember. May this now be our time. May we now begin to learn for our future. May we never forget, and always remember. Restore. Rebuild. Reenergize ourselves with the spirit of all our peoples.

This is my hope — and these are my prayers — on this day of honoring the indigenous people of America.

Catching Up with the Garifuna

Thanks to the Black Archives of Mid-America​ & a small battalion of local co-sponsors — but mainly to their courageous guest, Alfredo López Álvarez — I had the painful pleasure last evening of catching up with what’s been happening to the Garifuna people of Honduras.

I’d frankly lost track, since my days of working in Washington in the early 1980s, when Reagan’s CIA was active in the region. Narco-terrorism has set in, taking control of 80% of Garifuna land. And now US-financed development, through the World Bank, is threatening them further. López’s Kansas City talk at the Archives is his first stop in a Witness for Peace tour of the Upper Midwest, in progress through Oct. 23rd.

We were first shown a video — “Honduras: Ruthless Laboratory of Globalization,” produced by Mariana Gutierrez, after a tour taken by a group of Kansas City activists last May — in which a spokesman for the developers appears oblivious to the deep irony of his statement that his corporate overlord would be “developing people” by schooling them in hotel management at the Indura Beach & Golf Resort, which would “teach them how to take care of people.” (This is part of the World Bank’s “Model Cities” initiative on traditional Garifuna land. )

López described how he had been taken care of, for his leadership among the Garifuna in opposing the onslaught of narco-terrorism (and associated forays into mining, palm plantations & human trafficking), whose agents occupied their land for their illicit landing strips: he was imprisoned for three years as a presumed narco-terrorist himself. He is currently Vice President of OFRANEH — the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (this site is en español — open with Google Chrome for a rough English translation)  and coordinates radio communication among six communities of Garifuna, descendants of indigenous Hondurans and escapees, centuries ago, from the Atlantic slave trade, present in Honduras since 1797.

López told me afterwards that the Garifuna have lately enjoyed little recent support from transnational activists, apparently busy fighting fires elsewhere in Central America — hence the importance of his speaking tour. A $1 billion “Plan for Prosperity” is currently pending in the U.S. federal budget for 2016. He is hoping U.S. activists will support the Garifuna’s demands for (1) free and fair elections; (2) recognition of the Garifuna’s traditional communal ownership lands they have occupied at least since the 1950s; and (3) monitoring the use of U.S. funding for the military operations in Honduras, using the “Leahy law,” and termination of World Bank funding for the proposed “special development zone” there — a classic example of what Michael Perelman described in his 2000 book, The Invention of Capitalism, as the the brutish “primitive accumulation” necessary to force worker compliance with the “laissez faire” of capital.

The United States’ complex and complicating role in Central America is rooted in our earliest imperial forays in the region, at the turn of the last century — fueling the breakaway of Panama from Colombia, to facilitate canal construction, corporate colonization, and our steady, shady covert operations — especially since the Dulles brothers orchestrated the 1954 overthrow of democratically elected Pres. Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, whose land reforms threatened the extensive, fallow landholdings of United Fruit, on whose Board both Dulles’s sat while heading up Eisenhower’s State Department and CIA.

These were not mentioned yesterday, though the 2009 coup in Honduras was, and the subsequent presidency of Porfirio Lobo Sosa, complicit in narco-terrorism and current “development” threats to the Garifuna.  (Lobo’s own son was arrested for his collaboration with the narco-terrorist cartel, but his brother continues to play a leadership role there.) We in the U.S. clearly bear great responsibility for the problems faced by people in the region.

Much was invoked, though much had to be left unsaid, in López’s hourlong talk and Q&A. Poignantly, he was asked for advice in handling the hopelessness and helplessness audience members felt in considering how we might rein in our own U.S. government. Here, López’s action, and those of his people, speak louder than words. Yet much more talking and action are clearly needed on our part, and this is his essential message.

We bear special responsibility, as citizens of what has long been touted as the “Leader of Free World,” to install real commitment to cultural democracy — democratic freedom, participation & diversity — as against the strain of globalizing, ideological capitalism born of our self-declared Cold War. The plight of the Garifuna people offers one small, but important window into the enormous costs of our obliviousness and our silence.

The 2nd Amendment & Democratic Revolution

Eleven score and six years ago, once they got home from Philadelphia, our Founding Fathers were made to realize they’d actually overachieved in their minimalism. Critics attacked their draft for failing to include any mention of foundational individual rights in their proposed Constitution. Nervous that it wouldn’t otherwise be ratified, they slapped together a series of amendments, which the first Congress submitted to the states in 1789, and two years later, ten of these were ratified. Our “Bill of Rights” thus became the law of the land.

Second among these amendments were 27 words whose meaning (as usual) is not entirely clear. For most of our history, this was not a big deal. Hunters hunted, and the rest of us mostly remembered muskets every 4^th of July. Since the NRA went ballistically right-wing in the 1970s, though, the meaning of the 2^nd Amendment has been vigorously flogged, to explosive impact.

Things have changed since the 18^th Century. We let renters vote. We disapprove of people buying and selling other people. Why, we even let women vote! (Though men so resisted that idea that it required a 19^th amendment, after a century of focused, frustrated organizing — something we never actually did with slavery, inexplicitly swept under the Constitutional carpet in Amendments 13 and 14.) These are examples of positive change — national progress.

Not every post-Constitutional innovation has been progressive, though. For example, we have also steadily allowed corporate entities that were unimaginable in the 18^th Century — except, perhaps, for the East India Company — to step in as controllers not only of our federal government, but most state and local ones, too. At the time, East India was widely understood as a colonial appendix of the British Crown — against which we had already Declared (and won) our Independence. Since the Industrial Revolution really took off here, though — by the late 19^th Century, we’ve increasingly allowed these corporate hind-parts to wag our dog.

We have also let their mass media brainwash us — to the extent that they would try to tell us (more than a year-and-a-half prior to a national election!) that a candidate who’s electrifying popular support is “not viable.” This reveals tremendous regress. But that’s another topic — unless (perish the thought) they decide (or inspire some crazy person) to kill him.

In reality, under the guise of Constitutionality, our whole political philosophy has gone soft. Part of the American Revolutionary vision was that the men — er, “the People,” as even the Men put it in our Declaration of Independence — who would gather under our metaphorical Liberty Tree in the Nation’s capital (for which no location was fixed: the District of Columbia was created and built later) would represent our higher selves.

Our Congress, for instance, was conceived as being smarter and wiser than the hoi polloi. This is implied, though not stated, in our Constitution: no explicit mention was made of intelligence as qualification for office nor as a voting-registration requirement; in fact, the latter was left to the States — though we later had to recognize that that was stupid, since the states could be more easily controlled by racists. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was our attempted fix, though in these late days of the mass-mediated “Reagan Revolution” (formulated and sold to 25% of eligible voters in 1980), right-wingers are trying to undo that even that attempted fix and reinstall the problem.

Though inexplicit, the Framers’ assumption of wise leadership was discussed quite extensively at the “point of sale” for our Constitution — as reflected in the series of newspaper op-ed pieces widely published in the former colonies in the 1780s, then compiled and published as The Federalist Papers. Structurally, several aspects of the government it described sought to protect us from stupid people, in a system that aspires to democracy. Some of these structural elements remain, like the “Electoral College” (which is not mentioned as such in the doc, and is not a “college” at all). Others were later disposed of as undemocratic: the appointment of Senators by Governors was undone by the 17^th amendment. (The Founders assumed that Governors, too, would be smarter than the average bear.)

Well, wake up, Yogi: this, too, has changed — the proof is in Scott Walker’s and Sam Brownback’s pudding. We the Voters — men and woman, former-owners and former-slaves, Tories and Revolutionists — have for some time now been electing representatives of our Baser Beings. We have for quite some time now been electing Representatives (and since 1913, Senators, too) who actually mistake capitalism as being a political philosophy — which it is not. It is an imperfect economic system not mentioned in our Constitution: at the time, no one had even heard of it, though it was the sugarplum fairy dancing in Adams Smith’s head. Democracy is famously our national political ambition — impossible to achieve, yet truly the lamp upheld above our Golden Door of our national politics.

To the extent that such stupid beings hold public office — public officials who care more for cash than for democracy — they must be turned out. That’s what elections are for, and this is why the election-cycle our Founders dictated for the only popularly-elected Representatives in their Constitution is so very short: victories among stupid mobs in local Congressional districts were anticipated. (Some such sat in the Constitutional Congress itself, though this was mainly discussed after hours, in pubs.) It was assumed that the ineffectiveness of such craven choices would lead the public back home to wise up and elect someone better. Sadly, this has not proven the case, even among Senators (remember “Tailgunner Joe”?) — though we now have democratic media where 21^st Century people from one state can more easily tell the residents of others what they “like” (if not yet “dislike” — for that, we must still compose full sentences, though abbreviations are de rigeur — and we can also “share” memes!).

There are of course dramatically more citizens today than there were in 1776, but this does not mean that we need yet greater supplies of Stupid. Quite the contrary: we desperately require greater wisdom to responsibly lead a nation of such frightening hegemonic power as ours has commanded since the end of World War II.

The 2^nd Amendment, in my humble opinion, and in the often not-so-humble opinion of all intelligent Constitutional scholars, was intended to preserve our right to make revolution, should that become necessary. Facebook memes (frequently “liked” from Right and Left) assert that Thomas Jefferson expected this to happen regularly — say, every 50 years or so. By that measure, we are way behind schedule: I’d count the Civil War as one that failed — or rather, was undone and “spun” beyond recognition after our violently suppressed Reconstruction. The subsequent Civil Rights Movement, cresting a century later, tried to repair this failure, though we can now also say — and this is being said — that this, too, has been undone by means unanticipated by Congressional fixers in 1964 and 1965, in a new Jim Crow.

That the 2^nd Amendment was primarily meant to protect our individual right to make revolution, as I would argue, is demonstrated by its invocation of the “well regulated militia.” This is certainly not a feature of the bands of thugs now flagrantly displaying their stupidity (not to mention their mental illness — though now I have) by schlepping guns into shopping malls (also non-existent, nor imagined, nor even desired, at the time of our last Revolution), as well as on the streets, in their trucks — even where we assemble our most vulnerable citizens, for educational purposes: in our elementary schools!

¡Basta! Democracy — in its Constituted form — calls upon Us the People to manifest not some imaginary Destiny (and explicitly not our personal beliefs), but our better selves, as intelligent, informed citizens. It is from our higher consciousness that We must ask ourselves: What do we need to continue making democratic revolution today? Who are our tyrants today? How do we shake them off, so as to restore ourselves to the never-ending path toward A More Perfect Union, in a powerful nation-state of 300 million increasingly diverse People?

Banking our weapons is surely Step One on that path. Read the headlines, and weep. We have ample evidence of our failure to step up and take responsibility for our weakest links. I will summarize: We have the highest rates of gun violence on the planet. We kill each other — in the end, mainly our own family members and former friends — at rates so great that they exceed the numbers killed in our official wars. More even than in the many (actually countless) unofficial wars that our nation-state has waged since the end of Word War II.

So stupid have been the leaders of our federal government that they have actually undermined the principle of the “well-ordered militia” by sending domestic forces — what we today call the National Guard — into foreign theaters of military operation. This is why, when natural disasters have hit (say the name “Katrina”), there have been insufficient numbers of organized defense available to help our suffering fellow citizens.

Genug iz tzu genug! Let Us the People stop being stupid, already! Our insane, armed minority should no longer be granted veto-power over our better selves. We don’t have to imagine the end-state of their radical devil’s-advocacy: it is on display in our evening news — and the whole world is watching, and thinks we are nuts! And so do most of Us. Guns are controlled in every civilized nation on the planet. Many models are available to us, if we look beyond our boundaries, as we are morally required to so, after 70 years of thinking only of ourselves. But rightwing fringe people — backed by corporate arms manufacturers and their dealers — tell us that this is not a viable idea.

How do we make democratic revolution in the United States of America in the 21^st Century? We use our words. We teach this to kindergarteners in our public schools. Let’s stand up and demand this of our higher selves and of our representatives in Washington. If those representatives refuse, let’s get smart (y’see what I did there?) and send in a squadron of smarter ones in 2016.

We clearly need effective, federal gun-control legislation in the United States of America. Right now!

Finding Hope After Trayvon’s Found Guilty

“The Lord needs to deal with me on this issue. With everything I read, I grow angrier. I feel my heart hardening. To see people willfully deny the humanity of other people. To see people in a constant state of denial about the truths of American history. To see people being dismissive about the real and felt realities of other people. It’s maddening. It really and truly is. I need some divine intervention here. I’m really losing my grip…”

A friend posted this on Facebook tonight. I’ve been feeling the same way since Saturday night’a verdict in the Zimmerman case. I decided I’d see what I might say in response, having had 72 hours to digest this. Here’s what I wrote.

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There’s a ton of toxicity in the air, for sure, my friend. Truly poisonous. And (anti)social media is not helping — giving racists and gun-nuts cover to trumpet their little victory here. I’ve had to be really selective about what I read — which still doesn’t work: I got stuck earlier this evening in a frightful mob-posting against Stevie Wonder, of all people, for canceling his Florida gigs.  The original poster applauded the artist for his decision — and then everyone (apparently her “friends”) attacked!

Personally, I’ve felt leveled since Saturday night, when the stunning news came through. Everything we can muster from our spiritual traditions is essential to sustain us now, to support us in our grief, to channel our anger and address our fear.

Of what I have read, Makani Themba’s words rang truest to me. We are in the same deep struggle we’ve faced all along — generations deep, and generations to go. (Even if we have hope, and work hard — all of us: and how likely is that?) W.E.B Du Bois hoped that dealing with our racism would be “the problem of the 20th century”  — and it was, but we didn’t solve it: now it’s the problem of the 21st. So there’s grieving to be done, and anger to manage — and then there’s the challenge of social change.

But look at what we’re up against! The Right — with racism at its core, and its finger on our trigger — has a tight script. “Ours” — cultural democrats’, who share commitments to diversity and social justice — isn’t so clear. This is what drove me back to grad school three years ago (over 30 years after I last left there, in the Seventies): seeing the Tea Partiers savaging Obama (“He wasn’t even born here!”) and calling the shots with that same old script. Can we build a platform and share a script (if you will) that resonates for us like theirs resonates for them? I believe we are the (incipient) majority, and the hope for the future of whatever democracy we can create in this country. But God help us, our work is cut out for us, as the reactionary politics since Obama’s election have amply demonstrated.

In practical terms, of all that I’ve read in the last three years of being back in school, it was Martin Luther King’s last book that seems most promising — and yet difficult to achieve, given the past 33 years of politics (since Reagan’s election). In Where Do We Go From Here:  Chaos or Community? (1968), King wrote of the urgent need to move from the relatively easy, cheap, first phase of the civil rights movement — everything up to the time of his writing, and of course his assassination — into the much-more-difficult second phase. This second phase, he warned, would cost, because it was not a simple matter of desegrating lunch counters, but would require us to face the deep damage of centuries-old racism. He called upon us to commit to a national policy of economic justice that would remove the insecurity that undermines our lives, our families, our communities and our nation, and which pits poor people one against the other, along the old lines of race (mostly), region, religion, politics, or anything else that comes to hand, through manipulation by entrenched powers-that-be.

Yes, it would cost: taxes would have to be levied, and guaranteed income, housing, healthcare, education, and cultural opportunity extended to every American. But would this have cost any more than he outrageous costs of prisons and police, and a runaway national security apparatus, and bogus foreign wars — all operating as if on a blank check? Not to mention the human costs, in lives destroyed. King envisioned a national assurance of work for public service, wherever “the marketplace” didn’t want or wouldn’t pay an adequate wage for our citizens’ work. In previously poor communities, this would help us create community-service projects of every kind — including caring support for those whom King acknowledged have been too damaged by the legacy of hatred, pain, and injury from our racist, classist past to keep it together.

I’m sorry for going on so, my friend.  Handling our grief and anger do come first.  But mine can’t be quieted without knowing there’s some way forward. We need a program that’s stronger than our opposition’s. I’ve thought about it a lot, and this is the best I’ve been able to come up with. I welcome your comments and suggestions.

Letting America Work

Fulltime for just over two years, I’ve been researching and writing my next book. This multi-year project was inspired by my belief that the American Right is working overtime to redirect a refreshing, progressive political momentum —  which miraculously carried our first African-American President and his family into the White House — to suit their anti-democratic aims.

Just as they began to do in the late Thirties — following FDR’s landslide victory in 1936, and continuously ever since — corporate-supported Masters of Distraction have been exploiting reactionary sentiments and freak events to contain our ability to use government to address the serious economic crisis created by Reagan Era policies they had a hand in crafting. They are sapping our nation, bringing us down, and distracting us from the Big Picture at a time when way too many people are really suffering.

Two words might show what I mean: gun control. Everybody, myself included, is all heated up over this issue, after yet another crazy individual committed a horrific act against defenseless innocents. But really, it’s Big Picture forces that are really at work here, and they’re not mainly about guns. The economy has been destroyed by thirty-two years of relentless kowtowing to the rich — big corporations and a tiny minority of individuals and families. A bitter pill was  smoothly swallowed when that affable actor Ronald Reagan first appeared on the national scene, and we’ve all made the fool. The economic collapse of 2008 revealed how badly the nation’s wealth had been plundered.

As President Obama prepared to publicly recited his oath today, on this official commemoration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s birth, I had a dream that he might take a page from Dr. King’s last book, Where Do We Go From Here? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). I hoped that he might say something like this:

We the People need to put every American to work right away — not by the end of my term, not next year, but as soon as we can make our government take action.

Until we assure everyone in this country of the dignity of earning a living wage, we’ll fall prey to ideologues who cast aspersions on our democracy — setting one American against the other with their blaming, and our nation against the world. Shopkeepers won’t have customers. Healthcare will be postponed because of money. Children will go to sleep hungry. People will seek refuge in drink, drugs and distraction. Frustration will explode in violence against family members, neighbors, and strangers on our streets, in movie theaters and even elementary schools.

Too many of us have fallen into the danger of forgetting Dr. King’s message: that having and sharing a dream that includes every one of us is the highest ideal of our nation — not the protection of profits.

We know how we can solve this problem, as history has shown us. When corporations and businesses stop hiring, and Americans still need work, we can work for each other: in local government, in schools, and in community centers and improvement projects driven not by profit, but by our very certain dreams of how to make life better — truly worth living — in our own local communities. If business doesn’t need everyone’s talent, skills, and honorable work, the rest of us still do — our nation does.

This administration will lead the way by assuring that your government’s resources are redirected into helping everybody find a way to work for the public good — especially since businesses are struggling, and can’t yet afford to hire. Public-service employment will not only allow us to rebuild our communities.  It will allow everyone to step back into the mainstream of the nation’s economic life once again, and that will be good for business.

President Obama said quite few things in his speech that are consistent with this dream, but the dots were not connected as clearly as they were in Dr. King’s 45-year-old book. Of course, this was an Inaugural Address: the State of the Union speech on February 12th is traditionally much more programmatic. I hope there will be much more to come.

Dr. King’s final book was  subtitled Chaos or Community? Could there be any clearer indication of the woeful misdirection of our political culture than the sorry “Gun Appreciation Day” earlier this weekend? We won’t forget about the gun-control issue, now that so many people has reawakened to it; Slate reported yesterday that 1,104 Americans had died in firearms incidents since the Sandy Hook school massacre. But let’s regain our focus on the Bigger Picture, and concentrate instead on rebuilding community. That’s the only honorable work that can mobilize and harness the efforts of the great numbers of workers who are unemployed and under-employed.

Let’s put ourselves and every other American back to work on this most important national project, starting from the grassroots of every local community in the United States.

Render Unto Caesar …

Jews rarely cite the New Testament, but this morning’s newspaper brought to mind that famous piece of advice from the Christian education of my childhood: “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” (Matthew 22:21) So much of what passes for politics in America today could be cleaned up, were we to keep this guidance in mind.

A primary challenge for the State in a multicultural society is to take care in defining national identity, so as to embrace the beliefs and cultural identities of all of its citizens. President Obama took an important step last week in embracing American families that are formed by same-sex couples. This is inarguably a step forward in extending our national embrace to include countless Americans who were previously pushed to the margins, extending our sense of the national family in a positive way that reflects the values of cultural democracy.

President Obama is not only our head of state; he is also a religious man, and turns regularly to advisors in his own spiritual tradition for personal guidance as he makes his way through what must be the most challenging job of his life. In this morning’s paper, an account appears of the response of some of these advisors to his pronouncement in favor of same-sex marriage. The article highlights some of the mistaken ways many Americans look at questions of personal belief as they migrate into the political arena.

The article quotes a minister who works for “a conservative megachurch in Florida” to this effect: “Some of the faith communities are going to be afraid that this is an attack against religious liberty.” This is the essence of a common failure to render unto the state that which defines issues of citizenship, and unto our personal spiritual communities that which resides in the realm of personal belief. All those who relish or fear the possibility that Obama’s stance will lead to electoral blowback in November are focusing on a gray area that needs much better delineation.

Defending the liberty of one person does not necessarily deprive another of his or her liberty. Acknowledging that some of us fall in love with people of out same gender requires nothing of those who don’t. Each is respected. The innovation is that both are respected.

This falls squarely at the center of the history of our progress in realizing our ideals as Americans. It took us a long time, untold misery, and the shedding of much blood to get over the vile compromise — actually written into our Constitution, until it was edited out by Amendments 13, 14 and 15 — to allow slavery in a nation that declared its independence on the premise that each of us is created equal. It took us even longer to recognize that women could be trusted with the vote. It’s taking us longer still to work our way more deeply into the cultural manifestations of the core issues here — racism and sexism — to move ourselves closer to our democratic aspirations. This is the higher motive force in American history,

Liberty and respect — like love — are not limited commodities. (In truth , they are not commodities at all.) They are enlarged as they are extended. They are also deepened and refined, becoming more fully realized as they are extended: the victims of racism are clear beneficiaries as we officially cast racism out of the public sector, but the perpetrators are also freed in the process: all the energy previously spent maintaining an unnatural and unjust order become available for good — if we so choose.

This morning’s press account reports of the ministers whom Obama consulted that “A vocal few made it clear that the president’s stand on gay marriage might make it difficult for them to support his re-election, ‘They were wrestling with their ability to get over his theological position,’” one reported. Two processes are being conflated here: one political, the other theological — one lies in Caesar’s realm, and the other in God’s.

Sometimes, what is revealed when we reflect on the latter should surely affect our behavior in the former. When personal convictions lead us to deprive others of political rights — or worse, to use the apparatus of the State to oppress or even murder those different from ourselves — our personal sense of morality illuminates the wrong choice being made in the political realm. But when personal beliefs would lead to exclusion and oppression of others in the political realm, the values of cultural democracy require us to separate personal belief from public values and allow the same liberty to others that we expect for ourselves.

Obama made this point explicitly in this case, drawing on the Christian faith tradition to point out the gray area that should lead true Christians toward restraint: “… it’s also the golden rule, you know? Treat others the way you would want to be treated.”

Careful consideration must be our watchword as we consider public ethics and political rights as against personal belief and religious freedom. The latter is by no means diminished by our generosity toward others when we step into a voting booth: rather, our freedom is enlarged when we stretch ourselves to make a more generous embrace.

As a Jewish spiritual leader, Jesus himself was drawing on a more ancient teaching about reciprocity in public life in the articulation recorded on the Gospel according to Matthew — that of Hillel, who said, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.”

Here’s hoping that this will be our learning between now and November and beyond.