December 20 2024 We Are the Toys of Santa’s Workshop, and We Are Made of Words

On this day before winter solstice, darkest of all our days, and with the light possibly democracy itself begins to die from lack of faith as Tinkerbell warns us with the ritual command to clap our hands lest the faeries die, as the idea of our universal human rights dies in the ruins of Palestine, as Russia’s atrocities in the Third World War engulf Ukraine and the world, as China tests our will and threatens to unleash the conquest of the Pacific Rim, as the American state is captured once again by the Nazi fanatic and Russian spy Traitor Trump whose mission is the fall of democracy, and we face dystopian futures of global nuclear war and the fall of civilization, as the survival or extinction of our species hangs in the balance under threats of war, unknown pandemics to come, and ecological catastrophe, as the Pentagon on this day only three years ago issued rebukes without accountability as tacit authorization to the fascist infiltrated and subverted military units on the brink of mutiny and civil war in service to Trump and the Fourth Reich, it is good to remember who we are, who we have chosen to be, and who we wish to become.

Now is the time to rage against the dying of the light.

When those who would enslave us come for any one of us, let them find an America and a humankind not subjugated with learned helplessness or divided by exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but united in solidarity and resistance.

And in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free.

Owning our stories as the songs of ourselves is a primary human act in which we become autonomous and self-created beings; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves.

Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves.

We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human.

The first question we must ask of our stories is this; whose story is this?

If we imagine the processes of our construction as a vast workshop like that of Santa’s elves, I believe that the parts of our assemblage are words and the rules for using them to create meaning as grammar.

As a high school student I discovered Ludwig Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, and claimed their project of re-invention of the human as my own. Where Wittgenstein provided us with a tool kit for constructing meaning in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Joyce attempted to use it to create a universal human language in his great novel Finnegans Wake, a work which he began in 1922 with the German publication of the TLP and which occupied the rest of his life, as a response like that of Yeats in The Second Coming and of T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland to the collapse of civilization in three successive waves of mechanical failures of civilization as systems of order from their internal contradictions, the First World War, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.

He envisioned a united humankind wherein war is no longer possible, a world without emperors and kings or the carceral states and colonialist empires they rule with their silly little flags and terrible divisions and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.

In this cause Joyce chose language as the lever of change, for he shared a primary insight with Wittgenstein that language determines the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and is therefore our primary ground of being and identity, and its corollary that when all rules are arbitrary we must change the rules to own the game. As my father once said to me, never play someone else’s game.

Plato and his successors in western mysticism and in Romantic Idealism had already established a historical tradition which took this idea in other directions, as a religion and philosophy of the Logos to the alchemical faith of the sapientia dei which found full expression in Jung and through neoPlatonism itself to the philosophy of Iris Murdoch, and was in the process of forming Surrealism, but Joyce was a master of languages and chose this as his instrument for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, and for the rebirth of civilization.

And this love of languages as free creative play in which we ourselves are the artifact and product of our art is what caught my attention and created my teenage identification with Joyce. For I love languages and had grown up with three voices; English as my primary and home language, though shaped by immersion in the rhythms and phrases of the King James Bible and the Dutch language of the Reformed Church which surrounded me in the town where I was raised, Chinese as my second language from the age of nine, study which included Traditional Chinese inkbrush calligraphy and conversation with a teacher who spoke, in addition to superb English, the Wu dialect of Shanghai and the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, as well as Mandarin, Japanese, and other languages, having served in the Chinese military from 1924 through the Second World War, and as my third language I studied French in school rather than English from seventh grade through high school. Brazilian Portuguese was my fourth language, though limited to conversational proficiency, legacy of a formative trip in the summer of my fourteenth year just before starting high school.

It was during that summer, my first solo foreign travel, to train as a fencer with a friend from the tournament circuit for the Pan American Games planned to be held there the following year, that I witnessed a crime against humanity, the massacre of street children who had swarmed a food truck, a trauma and disruptive event followed by weeks in which I helped them evade the police bounty hunters who ruled the streets as apex predators.

From the moment I saw what the guards were shooting at beyond the walls of the palace in which I was a guest, I chose my side, and I place my life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.

We all seek paths of healing from trauma, and of hope and the redemptive power of love in transforming the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world. I found such paths in literature as poetic vision, and in our languages and our stories as instruments with which we can operate directly on our psyche and take control of our adaptation and the evolution of human consciousness as an unfolding of intention. This I call the Narrative Theory of Identity, and for this primary insight I owe the effects of reading Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

In Joyce I found a figure I could identify with who was also struggling to parse and bring meaning to a primary trauma which exposed the hollowness and edifice of lies and illusions of which our world is made, in his case the fall and ruin of civilization itself from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions. I had begun my search for meaning and my Freshman year of high school by reading Anthony Burgess’ Napoleon Symphony, a novel which questioned my hero Napoleon and illuminated two of my other heroes Beethoven and Klimt, then turned to the study of language itself; S. I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action, Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, and Wittgenstein’s TLP, before discovering Joyce.

James Joyce’s linguistics scholarship was immense; he took Italian as his third academic language, taught himself Dano-Norwegian as a teenager to read his adored Ibsen in the original, and his modern languages degree cites Latin, Italian, French, German, and Norwegian. He loved languages and studied them as a game, as do I; his adult fluency included Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Russian, Finnish, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, and Modern Greek. All of this went into his masterpiece Finnegans Wake, written in a private language filled with games and experiments of the Italo Calvino-Georges Perec variety according to the principle of Wittgenstein that because all rules are arbitrary they can be reimagined and changed at will and ourselves with them, a language densely layered with literary allusions and references, loaned and invented words, and of signs with multiple meanings like the paths of a labyrinth. You need a working knowledge of several languages to get the jokes; no wonder I loved him.

I’m not sure it’s intended to communicate anything, so coded and laden with puzzles is his new language; like the notation for the principles of a system by which to create and order the universe. He spent the rest of his life searching for the lost runes able to break and reforge the oaths and bindings of existence, to renew ourselves and our world; perhaps he found them.

Though I may claim no such realization of a guiding vision of our limitless possibilities of becoming human nor Quixotic quest to create and affirm that which is human in us as he, Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake demonstrated for me a great truth which has illuminated my understanding ever since; we are made of our ideas and of our stories, and forged with our words and our languages.

We are what Gaston Bachelard called shells of speech, coquilles au parole, bearers of stories as memory, history, and identity, shaped by the passage of time and our interdependence with each other as prochronisms or the histories expressed in our forms of how we solved problems of adaptation and change.

Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to one another?

Can we not then change and transform ourselves with our stories through reimagination and poetic vision, as new and beautiful things freed from the legacies of our histories and the limits of other people’s ideas of virtue, beauty, and truth?

Let us seize the stories of which we are made, and become glorious.

As I wrote in my post of September 25 2023, My Library of Possible Selves: A History Of My Identities Through My Languages; Among my treasures where live the voices of my cherished companions through life which rest bound in leather or cloth, gilded and illustrated and written in strange inks or simply printed on creamy paper and smelling of vanilla and old saddles, histories of our conversations across vast gulfs of time and space awaiting the moment I need them again, lies brooding a symbol of the unknowability of the Infinite and the Conservation of Ignorance, the Sefer ha-Zohar or Book of Splendor.

Heart of the Kabbalah written by Moses de Leon in Spain and first published about 1275, I discovered this single volume edition in our family library, wedged between Encyclopaedia Britannica and the University of Chicago’s Great Books of the Western World series as a teenager while reading through both in their entirety over several years, and claimed it as my own.

This was during an enthusiasm which began as a high school Freshman for Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and his disciple James Joyce’s attempt to reinvent humankind through a new universal language in Finnegans Wake, and I recognized immediately that Kabbalah was a project of like intent, within the context of Tikkun Olam or Repair of the World.

Written in a secret language? And filled with bizarre and utterly ambiguous symbols and metaphors? Of course I loved it.

That it was a forgery written for profit by a charlatan and reimagined by a madman just made it better in my eyes.

But like the visions of the Infinite and the alam al mythal it contains, the Book of Splendor remained beyond my grasp, dancing in and out of my awareness like a shifting fire of darkness and light. That which fascinated, intrigued, and compelled also warded questioning and ultimately escaped me; printed as it was written not in Hebrew for which I might have found a teacher but in a coded scholar’s cryptodialect of Aramaic and Andalusi Romance, a precursor of Spanish and Portuguese which uses Arabic script, languages which remained opaque to me. And even if translated one must be thoroughly familiar with the symbolic system it references in the Talmud and Midrash before Kabbalah becomes comprehensible. This was the only thing I ever gave up on, entangled with the Moebius Loop of language like Ahab lashed to the whale by the lines of his harpoon in his mad quest to break through the mask to the Infinite; though I read Gershom Scholem’s foundational study Kabbalah when it was published during my Freshman year in 1974.

Languages allow us to think the thoughts of others, to escape the limits of our histories, authorized identities, and the flags of our skin and to create new identities which become a library of possible selves; and mine form an atlas of my travels beyond the boundaries and interfaces of my maps of becoming human into unknown realms of human being, meaning, and value, also a history and archeology of my becoming human. I have often written that a full accounting of my languages becomes ambiguous and problematic; but herein I now so attempt.

Let me stipulate at the outset of this project that I now recount successive waves of languages in which I became conversant or literate as I explored our world over a lifetime, and in no way claim to have been able to think in them all at once, but only a few at any time during my studies and travels.

Languages are a hobby of mine; I grew up with three voices, English, Chinese, and French, each a mask of identity bearing the liminal force of the circumstances in which I learned them and conferring their own persona and uniqueness.

My English is influenced by the King James Bible and the local Dutch community of my childhood hometown, whose speech was full of thee’s and thou’s. This was the culture of elite hegemonies of race and patriarchy authorized by theocracy against which I rebelled in claiming Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter-text to the Bible, a Reformed Church community aligned with the Apartheid regime of South Africa. Here as a child I witnessed a witch burning, a cross burned on the front lawn of newlyweds whose union the town referred to as a mixed marriage, he being Dutch and she a member of the minority Swiss Calvinists, and both white Protestants speaking Germannic languages; during high school my fellow students began picking up stones to throw at a teenage couple from out of town at a ball game because they were kissing without being married, a public stoning which I just barely stopped.

How did I give answer to this?

At the first assembly of the new school year the incoming class was asked to recite a poem we liked to our new peers to introduce ourselves. I figured that I was going to get into a lot of fights, and had chosen to recite Invictus as the terms of struggle. Unconquered; the only title worth having, an idea which has continued to inform, motivate, and shape me since I first discovered it in a poem by William Ernest Henley, Invictus, as a high school Freshman.

Here was my prefacing speech to my peers and to the world; “I ask nothing of anyone, nor any quarter; neither will I offer any to those who stand against me. But I will never abandon anyone who stands with me, nor will you ever stand alone.

Last summer I went to Brazil to train as a fencer for the Pan American Games, and stayed to defend abandoned street children from the bounty hunters whom the rich had set on them, and this is how we survived against police death squads with only our hands and whatever we could steal; by standing together regardless of our differences.

This is what I ask now, of all of you. I’m hoping we can be friends.

The poem I’ve chosen to recite is Invictus, which means Unconquered in Latin, by William Ernest Henley.

“Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul. “

After a long and terrible silence, the auditorium erupted in cheers.

None who are human are beyond redemption. Sometimes all we need do to conjure the redemptive power of love is offer others entrance into our world, to reveal our pain and our fear, our loneliness and hope of love, the wounds and flaws of our humanity which open us to the pain of others.

Here I wish to make clear that my family were never part of any church whatsoever; we lived there because that was where my father got a job teaching English literature, Drama, and Forensics at the high school, where he also coached the Fencing and Debate clubs, and was my teacher in all of these. I describe my formative years growing up in Ripon California because it is helpful in understanding me to know that I grew up in a premodern world, the world the Enlightenment and its political form the American Revolution overthrew, though the Revolution remains incomplete in its realization and universalization both in America and throughout the world. This is what being an American means to me; to be a bearer of the Promethean Fire of liberation from systems of unequal power, where ever men hunger to be free.

Herein the question of home language as source identity becomes determinative; mine was English, though I inherit through my father the possessing ghosts of ancestors who were driven out of the Black Forest in 1586 at the start of decades of witch hunting hysteria. Drachensbrute, Brides of the Dragon, my ancestors were called by Martin Luther, whose fame for grand defiance of Church law eclipsed his infamy as a witch hunter and brutal torturer of women. By modern constructions of race this makes me Bavarian, though my ancestry in the patriarchal line is equally Shawnee, from the marriage of Henry Lale and Me Shekin Ta Withe or White Painted Dove during the American Revolution.

My paternal grandmother was Italian; of the Noce family whose stilt house in Bayou La Teche Louisiana was built from the ship they sailed from Genoa in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, its navigable approach guarded by ancient canon. My mother wrote a journal of a family visit with them in 1962; there was Quiller, a giant who could carry a railroad tie in each hand, all day long, the Silent Man who sat in his rocking chair for three days without saying anything, then whipped out a shotgun and fired into the swamp, and after several minutes of rocking declared; “Water moccasin,” a deadly poisonous snake. The women all wore pointy hats like cartoon witches, and I’ve never found any credible reference which might identify the ethnicity to which it belongs nor the origin of the pointed hat as a witch symbol.

Beyond this I am a direct patrilineal descendent of the ally of Scipio Africanus that Cicero wrote his treatise on friendship about, Laelius de Amicitia, in 44 B.C. We briefly ruled what is called the Gallic Empire in the mid second century A.D., what is now France, Spain, and the British Iles; my ancestors include a deified Roman general and shapechanger, origin of the Berserkers, for whom the Bear Dance is still performed in Romania.

I once described myself to the wife of a poetry professor as Roman with the words; “I am a citizen of the Roman Empire; that it has not existed for fifteen hundred years is irrelevant.” This was Anne Rice, whose poem about the revenge of the broken dolls will haunt my dreams forever, and who modeled the character of Mael in her novels on me as I was in the early 1980’s. Her idea of Those Who Must Be Kept came from a reference of mine to the classics of western civilization and the Dead White Men of our history; “We are all bearers of those who must be kept and those whom we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.”

In the line of matrilineal descent I am a direct successor to my great grandmother, whose story I told in my post of May 9 2023, A Legacy of Freedom Shared By Us All: Jewish American Heritage Month; Because the personal and the political are interdependent, and we are made of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, I offer here a story from my family history as told to me by my mother of how Jewish people saved our family, when no one else would, and without whom none of us would have ever lived.

Upon the docks of America arrived a nine year old girl, alone and without a penny to her name or a word of English. A stranger, with no one waiting to meet her, no family, no friends, nothing. My maternal great grandmother Apollonia this was, with flaming red hair like my mother’s, whose family had put her on a ship to escape from Austria as their home burned, the sole survivor of her whole town so far as we now know.

She wandered the port of Seattle asking for help, in her five languages and in descending likelihood of recognition; French, Austrian, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, and finally, in despair and fear that the reaction would be far worse than being abandoned to starve and freeze to death lost and alone among strangers, Yiddish.

This like a magic spell summoned a crowd, by happy chance not one armed with torches and axes. So a stranger was taken in and raised by Jewish people, a family of whom I know nothing, and thus our family’s survival is owed to the entire Jewish community and people.

This happened in 1873, year of the glorious Vienna World’s Fair but also the stock market crash in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War which began a twenty year Depression in Europe and the Jewish persecutions as they were blamed for it; also conflicts between the Russian and Ottoman Empires in their borderlands.

She it was who owned her own rifles and horses by the age of sixteen when she began her career as a hunting guide, and died in the saddle at the age of 95, rifle in her hand, having shot the bear that attacked her horses and killed her. The Indians buried her like the Huns buried Attila, on her horse and with her rifle, like a warrior princess.

I was born within days of her death, and as with all ancestors I bear her onward, literally as DNA and the stories which possess us as the ghosts of other lives; incarnated truths written in our flesh.

Historical context and the fact that my ancestor in the maternal line knew Yiddish makes it possible that under Jewish law we are Jews, though my mother never claimed so and moreover was a radical atheist who raised us with no religious traditions at all. In so doing the family faith she liberated herself from was Catholicism, an artifact of her Austrian paternal line who were exiles of the 1919 fall of the Hapsburg Empire after 600 years.

My mother’s speech was permeated with Yiddish words and phrases, a legacy of my maternal great grandmother; my maternal grandfather was the source of the family German, actually Wienerisch or the Viennese dialect of Austro-Bavarian, combined with the French-influenced Schönbrunner Deutsch of the imperial court. This was the home language of my mother’s family, though grandpa knew Latin, taught himself English, and to various degrees knew other languages of the Austrian Empire including Hungarian, Romanian, Ukrainian, Croatian, the Romance language Venetian and its Triestino dialect, and could speak Russian and Polish well enough to do business in their communities here in America.

As a teenager immersed in Holocaust literature while working through the trauma of a near death experience in Brazil the summer before high school, my execution by a police death squad while rescuing abandoned street children they were bounty hunting having been prevented by the Matadors, and conversations with my mother as she wrote her study of psychosomatic muteness from the Soviet medical records and childhood therapy journal of Jerzy Kosinski which he fictionalized as The Painted Bird, I once asked her directly, Are we Jews?

To this she replied; “Everyone is a Jew. Everyone is someone’s Jew, someone’s scapegoat, someone’s Other. The great task of becoming human is to overcome our fear of otherness, while embracing our uniqueness.”

My Second Voice from the age of nine was Traditional Chinese; inkbrush calligraphy, the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, and the Wu Dialect of Shanghai. During my decade of formal study of Taoism and Zen Buddhism, Chinese and Japanese martial arts, and the game of Go I studied in both Chinese and Japanese.

This was through Sifu Dragon, who also spoke a very British English full of Anglo-Indian words and phrases which shaped my English through our conversations; my great teacher of martial and other arts he was, with whom my father arranged for me to study after I had retaliated against my fifth grade class for putting gum on my chair by poisoning everyone, only by chance without causing any harm to anyone beyond a brief nausea. Horrified that I might have become a nine year old mass murderer when my fellow students began throwing up, I told my father about it that night, to which he said; “You have discovered politics. Politics is the art of fear, and fear and power are the true basis and means of human exchange. Fear precedes power. Fear is a terrible master and an untrustworthy servant. So, whose instrument will it be? What you need is a way to use fear and power that restores balance instead of imposing dominion, and when confronted by enemies you must demonstrate you do not fear them in order to take their power.”

My Third Voice from the seventh grade is French, a legacy of having been sent to six years of French classes at the high school because I was beyond grade level in English, which I enthusiastically embraced along with Surrealist film and literature.

This Defining Moment bears interrogation; during seventh grade I took the AP English test given to high school seniors for university credit and tested out of English classes through senior year of high school. This was among tests arranged by my parents and teachers who conspired to force me into high school two years early, and had tried with math the previous year, which I absolutely refused but for one class, where I traded seventh grade English for Freshman French literature and language, a chance I fell upon with ravenous delight.

The French teacher was a blonde goddess, and here imagine the reporter Rita Skeeter played by Miranda Richardson who corners Harry Potter in the broom closet in The Goblet of Fire, who motivated her students by offering a trip to Paris, with her, after graduation from high school for the best senior French student each year; competition for this honor was fierce, and I was a very, very good student. Thanks for the soft landing in high school, Miss Starring.

Japanese I count as my fourth language as it developed over the years, becoming a greater passion at university when I was obsessed with Japanese poetry to the extent that I walked some of the Basho Road to see where he had written his masterpieces, and I claimed Zen as my religion on official forms through my twenties.

I learned some conversational Brazilian Portuguese from the summer before I began high school, Sao Paulo being the scene of my first Last Stand during the weeks of my campaign to rescue abandoned street children from the police bounty hunters and the trauma of my near-execution, in which I find echo and kinship with that of Maurice Blanchot by the Gestapo in 1944 as written in he Moment of My Death and Fyodor Dostoevsky by the Czarist secret police in 1849 as described in The Idiot, from which I was saved by the Matadors, who welcomed me into their fearsome brotherhood with the words; “You are one of us; come with us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”

Though Arabic is my Sixth Voice, it has long become a natural language for me since first learning some Levantine Arabic in the summer of 1982, during the Siege of Beirut. This was when Jean Genet set me on my life’s path by swearing me to the Oath of the Resistance he had created in Paris 1940 from that of the Foreign Legion, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand beyond hope of victory or even survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” And he gave me a principle of action by which I have now lived for over forty years; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”

My Seventh Voice is Spanish, as fast upon my Baccalaureate graduation came the horrific Mayan Genocide and other atrocities of the monstrous Reagan regime, and the heroic Resistance of indigenous peoples to America’s imperial conquest of Central America which collapsed with the Iran-Contra Scandal. This theatre of revolutionary struggle includes that of the Zapatistas in the Yucatan; though later I formally studied Spanish from Argentine professors in one of my many graduate school programs, Spanish is a second or trade language for the people with whom I aligned myself, mostly speakers of Yucatec in Mexico or Quiche in the Guatemalan Peten among the Mayan group of over twenty languages, who were rebelling against the Ladino or Spanish speaking elites. So while I am literate in Spanish, I am conversant in two forms of Mayan.

Russian is my Eighth Voice, being the language of international solidarity at the time and of the Soviet advisors with whom I sometimes worked. I had some familiarity with it from my sister Erin, who began high school when I began teaching it, and used Russian as I had Chinese; as a second soul into which to grow as a self-created being, free from the legacies of our history. She studied for four years in high school with Lt Col Sviatislav Shasholin, USAF, who translated during the Nixon-Brezhnev talks and handled Soviet defectors, then went to UC Santa Cruz where she studied Russian language and Soviet Foreign Policy, graduating as Valedictorian of the Oaks International Studies School, then went to the Soviet Union as Pushkin Scholar at the University of Kallinin, a couple years before the Fall of the Soviet Union. Her first languages beyond English were Old Norse, Gothic, and Old Welsh, which she taught herself in seventh grade while researching Tolkien’s invented languages, so she could write poetry in them.

I currently write and publish in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Zulu, Hindi, Urdu, Persian and since the invasion in Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and recently Italian and Dari, Afghanistan’s major language and like Urdu derived from Persian, all three of which are mutually intelligible. This list changes ceaselessly, as do human identities; ephemeral, impermanent, performative and a ground of struggle.

Including dead languages with no broad communities of native speakers but of scholars of ancient literatures, those of my Buddhist and Islamic scholarship include Classical Tibetan from my time as a monk of the Kagyu Vajrayana Order of Buddhism in Kathmandu, Nepal, where I waged a revolution against the monarchy, and from my studies as a member of the Naqshbandi Order of Sufis in Srinagar, Kashmir, where I fought for independence against the invasion by India; Classical Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and the exception to the dead languages of scholarship classification as a universal language of Islamic faith in which one must be literature to be considered fully Muslim, Classical Quranic Arabic.

So, my literacy includes twenty three languages if we count Latin, which I’ve taught in high school; basic Latin is crucial if you are a new student in America whose native language is not English, especially for university-bound students and solving unknown scientific and technical terms. If you know Latin root words and conjugations, you will master English twice as fast.

My languages of conversational proficiency serve also as an atlas of my history; as Sir Richard Francis Burton says; “Where ever you go, learn the language; it’s the key to everything else.” We now leave the regions of literacy and explore the Atlas of my journeys in terms of conversational level proficiency.

During the 1980’s I was involved in liberation struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, which ended with the great victory in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola in 1988, in which I fought in my usual role of scout or reconnaissance. Here I learned some Zulu and Afrikaans, a fascinating Dutch hybrid language invented by the Cape Malay community using Jawi Arabic script, which incorporates elements of indigenous Khoisan and Bantu African languages and influenced by the Malay-Portuguese trade language Kristang.

From my time behind the Iron Curtain with the Romani my languages include Vlax Romani, the major Romani language and that of its heartland in Transylvania and Eastern Europe, and its origin or relative Vlachs or Aromanian, a Romance language created by the historical migrations and transformations of cultures in the borderlands between the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Venetian Empires, and influenced more by Greek than Slavic as a disambiguating characteristic from modern Romanian, a related language also originating in the Latin of the Roman Empire and its long centuries of disintegration and change.

Many Romani whom I knew spoke Vlax, Vlachs, Romanian, and Hungarian interchangeably as code switching, and also spoke Hochdeutsch which is the second language of Hungary and of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland as Standard German. During this time I made mischief with a crew led by Bluey, an Irish gypsy from London who spoke English laden with Cockney rhyming slang, 16th century Thieves Cant, and the hybrid Irish Gaelic-Traveller cryptolanguage Shelta, a complex patois he and his crew, who were from everywhere, used as a secret language.

From my time in the Golden Triangle and Shan States I learned Thai, Shan, S’gaw Karen, the Singpho language of the Kachin Confederation of northern Burma and India, and the Sino-Tibetan language of the Konyak Naga. This charts the midcourse of my original Great Trek across Asia; one day I was driving to work in San Francisco and realized that I was going to live the same day I had more times than I could remember, that I was living in Nietzsche’s Hell of Eternal Recurrence, and I broke the pattern and took a wrong turn. I found myself at the airport and bought a ticket for an unknown destination; I just asked for a flight to the other side of the planet.

This I discovered upon landing was Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; on day three I realized everyone in its elegant business district was doing things I could have done at home in San Francisco if I had wanted to, so I decided to do what no one else was doing. I found a bus station with a map where all the roads ended in the Cameron Highlands, rode a bus nine hours into the empty spaces on the map, got out when the road became a dirt trail into the jungle, and began my journey. I crossed from Malaysia into Thailand, Burma, and India before coming to live alternately in Nepal and Kashmir for some while.

In Nepal my role as a monk of the Buddhist Kagyu Vajrayana order required literacy in Classical Tibetan, conversational Gorkali or Nepalese as it is the official language and spoken by half the population, Newari which is the language of Kathmandu Valley where I lived, Gurung which is a tribal language of the Annapurna region and a major language of my key allies the Gurkha military and the horse nomads with whom I operated across the border between Nepal and Kashmir, and some Hindi.

In Kashmir my scholarship of Sufism required literacy in Classical Quranic Arabic, which I had been studying for years already, Classical Persian, and Ottoman Turkish; the official language Urdu which is Hindi written with a Perso-Arabic script and influenced by Classical Persian, and conversational use of the Kashmiri language Koshur.

This period in the early 1990’s coincides roughly with the Siege of Sarajevo of which I am a witness, where I learned some Croatian written in Latin script, mutually comprehensible with Bosnian as they evolve from the same source.

From my voyages and treks in South Asia on a later journey, where I sailed out of Georgetown on the island of Penang as a home port, I Iearned Malay in which I am literate and so count among my Voices, this being the major language of the region, of sailors, and of my initial scholarship of Naqshbandi Sufism which is a pan-Islamic warrior brotherhood synonymous with the martial arts of silat, and Buginese which is the language of the Bugis people of the Sultanate of Sulawesi who are the primary shipbuilders and navigators of South Asia, where half of all shipped freight is still by sail, and of the pirates with whom I waged an antislavery campaign led by our Captain Starfollower.

Then came the Minangkabu of Sumatra where I studied the martial art of Raja Harimau, briefly I learned what I could of one of the many languages of the Mentawai Islands where I was castaway in a storm at sea and with an indigenous tribe built an outrigger or Oceanic Proa over a couple months to sail ten hours across open seas to the mainland of Sumatra, Iban which is a language of the indigenous Dayak peoples of Borneo, and Hokkien Chinese in its Penang and Singaporean variants which is understood throughout the Peranankan or Straits Chinese communities.

Of windows into the other ways of being human I count twenty four languages of conversation, including Hokkien Chinese, Iban, Mentawai, Minangkabu, Buginese, Croatian, Koshur, Gorkali, Newari, Gurung, Thai, Shan, S’gaw Karen, Singpho, Naga, Vlax, Vlachs, Romanian, Hungarian, Shelta, Afrikaans, Yucatec, and Quiche. and twenty seven of literacy, a total of fifty one.

Thus far I have learned much about human diversity as well as the things which unite us, but nothing whatever of a great key which will unlock our infinite possibilities of becoming human.

Yet in the questioning of our languages as tools of creating our identities, of human being, meaning, and value, and of emergence from the legacies of our history and systems of oppression, we may transcend our limits and boundaries of otherness and belonging, and become exalted.

Will the next language offer the clues needed to decode the secrets of our liberation and self ownership, of our reimagination and transformation of ourselves and how we choose to be human together? As my mother used to say to students who asked for some pronouncement or authorization, juggling possibilities with her hands; “Maybe, maybe not”.

This I wrote originally as a Postscript to my essay of September 8 2023, International Literacy Day: What is a Library For?

It became its own work when I realized I had never tried to fully count my languages nor assess the meaning of languages as having multiplicities of selves as masks to perform in reserve at any moment, nor as revolutionary acts which may change boundaries into interfaces.

May all the Voices of your languages build bridges and not walls. But how precisely can we do that?

Is there a universal language behind all our languages and personae, a code like DNA in our consciousness and a meta-grammar or innate rules as Chomsky argues by which we create and order human being, meaning, and value?

What truly lies beneath the surfaces of our illusory and impermanent selves, images like ephemeral jetsam which conceal a unified field of being, Infinite in extent? Can learning languages truly allow us to operate directly on our own consciousness and seize ownership and control of our own evolution, to inhabit the imaginal souls of others, abandon our divisions and pathologies of disconnectedness, and become exalted in our participation in the being of others and of all humankind?

What becomes of us, when we transcend ourselves through immersion in what Ibn Arabi called the alam al mythal, Coleridge the Primary Imagination, Jung the Collective Unconscious, and the ancients called Logos?

I am a man who has many souls, one for every language I am literate in, in which I can think and dream and compose, and like James Joyce I have discovered few answers, but many questions regarding our possibilities of reimagination and transformation of ourselves and humankind.

For this mad quest to become human, to breach the event horizons of our culture, the legacies of our history, and the limits of our authorized identities, obeys the principle of the Conservation of Ignorance, in which the Infinite remains vast and unknown regardless of what we know or how much we learn.

Only this I have learned; it is not the kinds of thoughts we are able to have which make us human, but how we use them in our actions toward others, to harm or heal.

Among all of these voices of possibilities of becoming human stands the Zohar in its silence, voice of the Infinite, and it says; “I bear secrets; open me.”

And I with Ahab reply; “To the end I will grapple with thee.”

Where to learn the Aramaic of the Zohar

Basics

Notes on the Zohar in English, Don Karr

http://www.digital-brilliance.com/contributed/Karr/Biblios/zie.pdf

Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1150775.Kabbalah?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=2UWm95koEC&rank=9

The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, Daniel C. Matt (Translator)

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15188407.Daniel_C_Matt

James Joyce, a reading list

Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11013.Finnegans_Wake?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=Ie6mZwF637&rank=1

A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: James Joyce’s Masterwork Revealed,

by Joseph Campbell

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59478.A_Skeleton_Key_to_Finnegans_Wake?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=Ie6mZwF637&rank=2

Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce,

Joseph Campbell

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44829.

Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce, by Anthony Burgess

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/139109.Joysprick

Joyce’s Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake, by John Bishop

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/218348.Joyce_s_Book_of_the_Dark

Joyce’s Voices, by Hugh Kenner

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/778934.Joyce_s_Voices

Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination Of Work In Progress, by Samuel Beckett

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1446403.Our_Exagmination_Round_His_Factification_For_Incamination_Of_Work_In_Progress

A “Finnegans Wake” Lextionary: Let James Joyce Jazz Up Your Voca(l)bulary, Riverrun to Livvy: Lots of Fun Reading the First Page of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”, by Bill Cole Cliett

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19470586-a-finnegans-wake-lextionary?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=KDtweLgLK4&rank=20

Riverrun to Livvy: Lots of Fun Reading the First Page of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”, Bill Cole Cliett

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11448899-riverrun-to-livvy

Annotations to Finnegans Wake, by Roland McHugh

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59482.Annotations_to_Finnegans_Wake?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=HIxIzX1rDU&rank=1

The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, by James S. Atherton

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/480291.The_Books_at_the_Wake?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=KDtweLgLK4&rank=11

Wittgenstein, a reading list

Wittgenstein’s TLP

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12075.Tractatus_Logico_Philosophicus?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=FF0hQbstLc&rank=5

Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary, by Marjorie Perloff

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93491.Wittgenstein_s_Ladder

Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition, by Saul A. Kripk

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12078.Wittgenstein_on_Rules_and_Private_Language

Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, by Alain Badiou

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10484205-wittgenstein-s-antiphilosophy

The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, by Stanley Cavell

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/232686.The_Claim_of_Reason

a vision of times past, or thereabouts

Interview with Rita Skeeter – Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

December 20, 2024 0

December 19 2024 The American Book of the Dead: On the Anniversary of the First Performance of The Nutcracker in St Petersburg, Dec 18 1895, Hoffman’s Disturbing Story of a Young Girl’s Descent Into Madness and Death Set to the Glorious Music of Tchaikovsky and the Visionary Choreography of Balanchine

In this season of merriment and joy, filled with archaic and strange rituals and densely encoded with signs and messages, which for many Americans begins with the annual pilgrimage to see The Nutcracker ballet, most especially a delight for young girls and a performance filled with visions of beauty and wonder in a world which lies just beyond our own, I am once again seized and shaken by the Uncanny Valley of bifurcated vison and off kilter juxtaposition in the breathtaking beauty of the dancing and the ghastly horror of its subtext, because I am reasonably certain that when our heroine flies over the glittering confection of Candyland to rule it with her Nutcracker Prince, she is dead.

The Nutcracker ballet is the American Book of the Dead.

What is the mysterious wound with all its blood, and her witness which the adults silence with disbelief, but an act of sexual predation?

If the Nutcracker is a story of the destruction of a girl as a primal tragedy of patriarchy, with her death allegorized as a battle of mice versus nutcracker soldiers, it is also an initiation myth with Drosselmeyer as a Trickster figure and a terrifying guardian of the Otherworld who is transformed into a protector and guide as he becomes the Nutcracker Prince.

It is possible to construe and interpret the strange plot of Drosselmeyer as immortality magic, wherein he consumes Marie’s life force to transform himself into the boy prince who is also his doppelganger and presented as his nephew, for whom he prepares Marie as a bride and ghostly underworld companion, a reimagination of the myth of Persephone.

Both victim and tragic heroine, Marie escapes the prison of a family which has groomed her to disbelieve in her own experience through fantasy which is menacing and seductive, a world of her own. Hoffman was an icon of German Romanticism who clearly intended to affirm the vision of the individual and the liberating power of poetical truth, but there is also a parallel narrative of survival in which the toymaker Drosselmeier is not only a trickster god or magician who liberates Marie by setting challenges to overcome and creating scenes which reveal and transform inner conflict, but also a tyrannical and abusive figure of a patriarchal tyrant god. Hoffman harnesses the initiation of a pagan seeress to Romantic ends, and preserves the ambivalence of the Toymaker figure in the folklore; a god who is both an ally and a predator of humankind.

Clive Barker wrote what is undoubtedly the most nightmarish and fiendishly compelling version of the myth of the Toymaker in the Hellraiser series.

Herein a tale of both ecstatic vision and the transcendence of the spirit through immersion in an imaginal realm of dreams and death, a core text of Romantic Idealism as codified by Coleridge, shares liminal space with our nightmares as a manual of gaslighting, induced alienation, and patriarchal sexual terror.

I’d like to keep the ritual of ecstatic vision and beauty, and emerge from the legacies of our history as Freudian horror, but in this ballet which is a ground of struggle between authorized identities and the liberation of self-ownership we cannot, for they are bound together, the angelic and the monstrous, like all humankind and the histories and systems of oppression we must resist.

What can it teach us as a story of growing up as Resistance?

Shatter the mirror and break free of the image others would trap you in; reclaim yourself and your agency.

As written by Blaine Greteman in The Week, in an article entitled The Creep of The Nutcracker: What the hell is going on with Godfather Drosselmeyer and what is he teaching our children?; “Now that the holidays are upon us and the productions of The Nutcracker ballet are coming hard and fast, it’s time to ask that age old question: What the hell is going on with Godfather Drosselmeyer?

The Nutcracker has always been a story about a young girl’s journey into adulthood and sexual maturity, and as Drosselmeyer creeps around the stage this year, in the wake of Harvey Weinstein and Roy Moore, he reminds us that the journey has always been fraught.

If you haven’t seen The Nutcracker in a while or have only absorbed bits of it through commercials playing Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” on infinite loop, the story goes like this: It’s Christmas Eve at the Stahlbaum home, and daughter Clara makes herself useful preparing for a party, while her younger brother Fritz, who nowadays would clearly have been diagnosed with ADHD, makes trouble. Soon the guests arrive. While the adults are adulting, the children make their own fun, until a mysterious man appears, cloaked in black and wearing an eyepatch. This is Godfather Drosselmeyer, a clock and toymaker who, depending on the production, either entertains the children or genuinely frightens them.

Either way, he soon takes over the night’s festivities. He produces uncanny, life-sized clockwork toys, which seem to come alive and dance for the guests. He hands out presents — dolls for the girls, swords for the boys. Clara, his special favorite, receives a wooden nutcracker, which everyone admires and which her jealous little brother quickly breaks. But Drosselmeyer bandages the toy and places it in a bed beneath the Christmas tree, where Clara will later fall asleep with it in her arms.

Things then get strange. At the stroke of midnight, Clara wakes to see Drosselmeyer on the grandfather clock, exercising what now appear to be magical powers. The room around her grows, or perhaps she shrinks. In the ballet’s source story, E.T.F. Hoffman’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, this moment is undeniably traumatic, and her account of it is the first of many that the adults around her will refuse to believe. The toys come to life and do battle with an evil mouse king and his troops. This is, after all, unbelievable, unless we remember that Drosselmeyer has already done something like it once before with his dancing automatons. In Hoffman’s story, Drosselmeyer tells the girl, “it will all be over soon.” But rather than being relieved she calls him “evil” (böser) and is paralyzed with fright.

Most versions of the ballet then jump to what happens in Hoffman’s tale on a subsequent night, when the nutcracker, who has been under a spell of the mouse queen, takes his natural shape as a handsome prince and escorts Clara to the Land of Sweets. Leaving aside the blatant colonialism of the caricatures that follow, isn’t it just a little creepy that Clara’s good-looking escort begins as a gift from Drosselmeyer? In fact this toy, in Hoffman’s story, bears a “strange resemblance to Drosselmeyer” himself.

But that’s not even half of it.

In the original, but not the ballet, the girl’s vision is accompanied by a sharp feeling of pain, which she will later realize was caused by falling into a glass cabinet and lacerating her arm. Discovered by her mother in a pool of blood, she relates Drosselmeyer’s role in her accident only to have her mother and the attending surgeon dismiss the “silly stuff” as the product of her “lively imagination.” Godfather Drosselmeyer, however, privately suggests that he believes her. As one 19th-century translation put it, “smiling queerly,” he “took the little girl on his lap, and spoke more softly than ever” as he confirmed that her dream contained some element of truth. It’s hard not to get a little Freudian about all this, but even if we don’t read it as some sort of sexual allegory, the dynamic is clear and unsettling.

Up to this point in the original, Drosselmeyer has wooed the girl with a special gift, awed her with his abilities as a technician and a magician, and degraded her by dismissing her as a “foolish child” (unverständig Kind) who could not appreciate his skill. Now he is teaching her to disbelieve her own experience unless it can be verified by a powerful man like himself. As the story continues, he will berate her for speaking “silly, stupid nonsense” (dummer einfältiger Schnack) when she tries to tell others. After being humiliated several times, she stops trying.

“A hundred times,” Hoffman writes, “she thought of telling what had happened, to her mother, or to Luise, or at least to Fritz; but she asked herself, ‘Will any of them believe me?'” Finally she withdraws into herself, which only warrants further criticism: “[I]nstead of playing as she used to do, she would sit still and silent, her thoughts far away, till everybody faulted her for being a little dreamer.”

It was a similar form of manipulation that caused the actress and director Asia Argento to describe her encounters with Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein as “a scary fairy tale” and “a nightmare” in the story that initially exposed decades of Weinstein’s abuse. Weinstein so thoroughly warped her perspectives of herself and their encounters, said Argento, that he began to “sound like he was my friend and he really appreciated me.” One of failed Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore’s accusers claimed he pushed her out of the car, saying: “You are a child. I am the district attorney of Etowah County. If you tell anyone about this, no one will believe you.” He was almost certainly right.

In these cases, as in so many others that have come to light in recent weeks, we find similar differentials of power, age, and authority, leading women to keep quiet about what happened to them or even to adopt their abuser’s account. As another of Weinstein’s victims noted, “I just put it in a part of my brain and closed the door.” Drosselmeyer may not be a sexual predator, but he exactly follows the sexual predator’s script.

This matters because souvenir nutcrackers and swords are not the only things our children take home at the end of the show. For Clara as for The Nutcracker’s young audiences, the journey to the Land of Sweets and back offers a magical glimpse of adulthood even as it raises suspicions about that vision. How much of it is Clara’s? How much does Drosselmeyer produce by manipulating his machines or shaping Clara’s imagination of herself?

Drosselmeyer should disturb us not because he is aberrant, but because he enacts in sugar-plum form the strategies that men have long used to manage and control female sexuality.

Rather than a reason to run for the exits, however, I’d suggest that this could be one of The Nutcracker’s redeeming qualities. Art has a remarkable power to make the familiar strange and allow us to see it anew — an effect Bertolt Brecht called verfremdung, or “alienation.” Hoffman’s nutcracker tale is strange, yet familiar, in exactly this way, especially as Clara internalizes the disbelief she encounters when she tries to tell her story.

A Nutcracker production that forced us to reckon with Drosselmeyer’s true power would also allow us to consider what it would mean for Clara, or many Claras, to take it back. While Drosselmeyer is a master of gears and springs, after all, his real hold over Clara comes from understanding that everyone, including herself, will trust his account of her experience more than her own.

That’s a hard nut, but it is ready to be cracked.”

As written by Joan Hennessy in StudyHall.Rocks, in an article entitled The Nutcracker’s Holiday Spell Broken; “From the overture to the dance of the sugar plum fairy, The Nutcracker is two hours of uninterrupted sweetness, and, importantly, a moneymaker for ballet companies across the nation. Or, at least, it was until now.

A recent critique in The Week magazine (“The Creep of The Nutcracker”) points to sexual overtones between a principal character, the mysterious Herr Drosselmeyer, and the ballet’s young protagonist, Clara.

The context: Set at a Christmas Eve party, Clara (also called Marie or Masha in various versions), fights with her brother, Fritz, over a nutcracker given to her by Drosselmeyer, an eye-patch wearing friend of the family. After the party, the girl falls asleep and dreams that the nutcracker is a prince.

While vapid, the ballet has remained insanely popular for decades. Anyone enrolled in a ballet school for any length of time has been in The Nutcracker. Small towns have at least one performance; cities have multiple productions. The ballet would have sellout crowds if it were staged at a landfill.

Next Christmas, Disney will release a star-studded film version, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, featuring a performance by Misty Copeland, principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre. Already, the trailer (below) has gone viral. That means next year’s holiday season promises wall-to-wall nutcrackers on stages and cinema screens everywhere — just as the story is getting a second, uncomfortable look.

The problem is Drosselmeyer, the story’s magical helper, who arrives for Christmas Eve celebrations carrying elaborate presents — in the ballet, life-sized dancing dolls. After the party, the revelers leave and Clara goes to bed. But later, she awakens and tiptoes into the parlor. Alone, she spots Drosselmeyer, who appears on top of a clock. He flaps his arms like an owl, writes George Balanchine and Francis Mason in the book, 101 Stories of the Great Ballets (Doubleday; 1975). The girl is thoroughly terrified.

At once beloved and creepy, Herr Drosselmeyer is ultimately confusing.

“For Clara as for The Nutcracker’s young audiences, the journey to the Land of Sweets and back offers a magical glimpse of adulthood even as it raises suspicions about that vision. How much of it is Clara’s?” asks Blaine Greteman, a professor at University of Iowa and a journalist, in The Week. “How much does Drosselmeyer produce by manipulating his machines or shaping Clara’s imagination of herself? Drosselmeyer should disturb us not because he is aberrant, but because he enacts in sugar-plum form the strategies that men have long used to manage and control female sexuality.”

This is the sort of thing that once you see, you cannot un-see. And if the criticism sticks, it could prompt dance companies and perhaps patrons to rethink their interest in the ballet. But in reality, it is also true that most productions miss the point of the original story, a coming-of-age fairy tale.

The ballet is based on The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822). After Hoffmann’s death, Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) rewrote and softened the story. This version was used by Lev Ivanov while choreographing the ballet, which premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia, 125 years ago this week, Dec. 17, 1892. Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote the famous score.

In 101 Stories of the Great Ballets, Balanchine (1904-1983) recounts portraying various roles during his boyhood in Russia. Decades later, American ballet companies began producing the ballet. But Balanchine, who had come to the U.S. in 1933, proved central to The Nutcracker’s place as a Christmas tradition. As ballet master of the New York City Ballet, he staged his choreography of The Nutcracker in 1954. A decade later, the company moved to a larger stage, the scenery was redesigned, and an over-the-top tradition was born.

In his book, Balanchine wrote that he based his version on the Hoffmann story. But Hoffmann’s tale is darker.

Early on, Drosselmeyer shows the children an elaborate model he has built — a castle, with clear glass windows and golden turrets. When the children are unimpressed, his mean streak surfaces. “An ingenious work like this was not made for stupid children,” he snaps.

He also gives the family a nutcracker, and in the book, the girl notices similarities between the toy and Drosselmeyer. She becomes convinced that the nutcracker is Drosselmeyer’s spellbound nephew.

Her mother tells her she has been dreaming and “now drive it all out of your head.” In a fit of tough love, her father threatens to toss the nutcracker and all her dolls out the window.

This sequence is at the heart of the story, for Hoffmann worked to balance his obligations and his artistic bent. Educated in law, he made his living as a legal official in Berlin.

“The struggle within Hoffmann between the ideal world of his art and his daily life as a bureaucrat is evident in many of his stories, in which characters are possessed by their art,” explains an article on the Encyclopedia Britannica website.

It is no accident that Clara prefers the nutcracker’s fantastical world to her parents’ reality. As the story ends, Drosselmeyer’s nephew comes to visit, and he looks much like a nutcracker brought to life. It is the nephew — not Drosselmeyer — who marries the girl. She grows to womanhood, but unlike others, refuses to leave her dreams behind.

At this hour, Hoffmann concludes, the girl is “queen of a land where sparkling Christmas woods and transparent marzipan castles, in short, where the most beautiful, the most wonderful things, can be seen by those who will only have eyes for them.”

As I wrote in my post of March 30 2020, Embracing Fear as Liberation from Authority and Control: Anarchy as a Path of Psychological and Social Freedom; Even more terrible than blaming the victim is when no one believes the victim; it is an erasure and silencing which is the particular horror of women, as the dread that no one is coming to help is that of the LGBT and other marginalized communities.

The degree to which we are trusted and believed, our authority, and the reach of our voices in witness are excellent and reliable measures of our power and our position in social hierarchies. As a measure of societies themselves, this will tell you about the relative democracy or tyranny of a culture.

What Matthew Jacobs calls The Ubiquity of Disbelief in his insightful criticism in Huffpost of The Invisible Man starring Elizabeth Moss, entitled Why Does No One In Horror Movies Believe The Female Protagonist?, and examines disbelief and the horror of disconnectedness as a disease of mistrust and failure of solidarity, points directly to the cathartic function of art, its ability to hold up a mirror to our darkness.

For the mechanism and pathology of fear is what drives patriarchy, unequal power, and inauthentic relationships, abstracts us from ourselves and one another as simulacra and creates aberrations of violence and sexual terror.

From fear are monsters born; yet it is our fear we must embrace to free ourselves of the tyranny of others and the spectre of authoritarian force and control.

We must not let fear define us; it is the degree to which we can embrace, learn from, and free ourselves from our fear which measures our freedom and enacts our liberation from the control of others.

For when we cannot be driven into submission by authority through fear and learned helplessness the use of force becomes meaningless as does its scale; thus do we reclaim our power and agency to define ourselves, and ownership of the performances of our identities.

Here follows the wonderful guide to The Nutcracker on GradeSaver:

“These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by people who wish to remain anonymous

What is a nutcracker?

A nutcracker is said to represent power and strength, serving somewhat like a watchdog guarding your family against danger. A nutcracker bares its teeth to evil spirits and serves as a messenger of good luck and goodwill. Long ago, rare or unusual nutcrackers were part of the social dining tradition.

https://www.gradesaver.com/the-nutcracker-and-the-mouse-king/study-guide/symbols-allegory-motifs

Story of the Nutcracker

This is the story of a young girl’s difficult, painful enlightenment to some basic truth’s about life on earth. For instance, the reader could easily interpret this entire plot as an existential crisis. In that case, Drosselmeyer’s gift of a clockwork world would be a way of showing Marie that chaos is necessary in life, or else everything is repetitive and boring (like that toy quickly becomes). She much prefers the dark chaos of her imaginary world where the stakes are life and death, where people take tragedy with communal support, and where (most importantly) no one is alone. Marie is probably mourning the death of her parents, which is implied in that they live with Drosselmeyer who is their godfather.

This newfound awareness of tragedy and death makes Marie’s imaginary world into a tool that she uses to ask difficult questions about life than she can otherwise handle emotionally. Look for a moment at just how violent this seven year old’s imagination is—she imagines a world of bitter warfare between two antithetical forces. She imagines the pain of loss for the community each time someone dies. Interestingly, she also imagines funeral rites and spells of mourning when bad things happen, and when the toy community loses someone, they all rally together to support one another.

Based on this, the reader can guess safely that Marie is struggling with something specific. She wants Drosselmeyer to be in community with her, so that he can help her more directly with the pain of her life. She needs help and support from someone, and these stories are like cries for help through which she invites Drosselmeyer into her mind and emotions. Sadly, he misunderstands this, and he has a hard time relating to her, so she stays fairly lonely in her godfather’s estate.

The Nutcracker and the Mouse King Themes

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by people who wish to remain anonymous

Imagination and the value of story

This story features the brilliant imagination of a young girl during Christmas time whose difficult life leaves her unable to sleep. At night, sometimes she wanders around her godfather’s estate, and she imagines an entire world. The novel depicts her imagination as if it is really happening, but the reader should distrust the narrator’s point of view about that, since her imagination seems real to her. That’s one of the most important design features of the novel, that her imagination seems real, because to her it is true. In a way, they’re more true in a greater sense than if they had been literally true. When she creates stories from her imagination, she learns from them authentically. With this domain of play, she can work through the various pains and fears of her blossoming mind.

Time, fate, and the loss of beauty

Marie’s young imagination becomes fixated early on with the passage of time and the inevitable loss of beauty. She is trying to reconcile the fact that as time passes, people age and their faces change, people get sick, and people even die (like her parents, perhaps; after all, she is at her godfather’s estate). In a word, she is concerned about the decay of the world toward some tragic end. Two major plot moments highlight this theme: The curse of Pirlipat where she goes from being beautiful to being hideous, and the death of the nutcrackers that started the war with the mice in the first place. Notice how the toys are human inventions (carved and painted), but the mice are agents of nature. That “man versus nature” conflict is also relevant to this theme.

Loneliness

The unspoken theme that gives this novel its melancholic feel is that no one believes Marie’s imagination. Not only is this tragic because Marie isn’t taken seriously, but it’s also a tragic indication that the person taking care of Marie is not comfortable or familiar with the way a kid’s mind works. Marie doesn’t need Drosselmeyer to believe her literally—she really just wants to talk about her emotions with someone, and telling him about her games is an attempt to be a little less lonely. When he thinks she’s just being silly, he rejects her further. These are all ways that Marie deals with loneliness, and perhaps she is even mourning. Her imaginary stories are dark and violent, and often the dreams involve a community rallying to support each other in the face of trauma and pain—which would be very desirous to Marie.

The imagined savior

One obvious symbol is the titular Nutcracker. In the context of the war against the mice, the Nutcracker is a savior character, because he will save the toy people from their impending doom. This is especially significant given that these characters belong to a religious community and they’re celebrating Christmas. In the context of Marie’s imaginary world, the savior character represents hope that the future can bring something good, in spite of Marie’s fear of time.

The clockwork world

When the children pester their godfather enough, they finally figure out what it is that he made for them—a little clockwork world with puppets that come out in time (like a cuckoo clock). They are fascinated by the world, but because the world is timed, it is predictable to them, and before very long, the kids are bored of the clock. They want something exciting and unpredictable, so Marie begins to invent an imaginary story about the toy world. The clock world represents the children’s unlikely preference for unpredictability. It is as if they understand that they are supposed to be entertaining themselves. By the end of the book, we know why—they are using their imaginations to deal with painful emotions.

The mice as a symbol for decay

Mice in the estate indicates the passage of time, because older houses tend to become infested with mice. Mice are also animals, which means they represent nature, because they are literally compelled by their nature. They are violent and they bring chaos and pain to the toy community. In other words, they make things worse over time, which makes them into a force of decay.

Pirlipat’s curse

In Marie’s imagination, she invents a beautiful princess. She imagines a beautiful girl, more beautiful than any other person in any universe. This makes Pirlipat archetypal because she is the “most” beautiful girl in the world, so she represents the fullness of Marie’s desire to be beautiful. So when Pirlipat is cursed with a hideous face, Pirlipat comes to represent Marie’s fear of being ugly.

The Christmas motif

This is a thoroughly “Christmas” story. It starts on Christmas eve, for starters. It concerns the basic theme of a young girl coming to terms with the horror and pain of life (by exploring imaginary stories in midnight trances). That might not seem very Christmas-like, but it absolutely is. In this story, the Christmas spirit is the opposite of time’s decay. Christmas represents hope and new life. It is important to consider that perhaps Marie is mourning the loss of her parents, which is something that would make Christmas very lonely and painful. It is not unusual for Christmas to represent such painful things for this specific reason.

Young and beautiful (Metaphor)

The battle was in full swing. The mice “continued to advance” and even overtook “some of the cannons.” There was so much “noise, smoke, and dust” that Marie could barely make out what was going on. However, one thing “she could tell for sure” was that “both sides were fighting as hard as they could.” Sometimes it seemed that the toys would win, and the other times it looked like the mice “would take the victory.” Madame Clarette and Madame Trudie “anxiously paced inside and wrung their hands.” “Am I to die in the flower of my youth?” Clarette asked. Indeed, she looked like the most beautiful creature alive and was too young to die.

Wonders (Simile)

The castle was beautiful, but “dull.” The children were clearly disappointed, for they were not allowed to play with it. However, their mother was mature enough to appreciate the beauty of Drosselmeier’s work. She “came over and asked to see the inside of the castle” and “the intricate clockwork that made dolls move.” So the judge “took everything apart and put it back together again,” which “cheered him right up.” He was so happy and pleased that he even gave the children “some beautiful brown men and women with gold faces” that smelled “as sweet and pleasant as gingerbread.”

An elegant look (Simile)

The tiny man wore “a beautiful hussar’s jacket of vivid violet with lots of trimming and buttons” and “matching trousers.” He also wore “the most beautiful” pair of boots that “a student, or even an officer, had ever worn.” They were so “tight on his legs” that they seemed “to be painted on.” It occurred to Marie that if Drosselmeier were to dress “as elegantly as the tiny man, he would not look nearly as handsome.” He was the most charming little man she had ever seen.

Sacks of wool (Simile)

“Inspired by the Nutcracker’s speech,” Fritz’s toy hussars made “the dangerous leap down from the second shelf to the floor.” They were not hurt, for they were dressed in “soft wool and silk” and were made of “cotton and sawdust.” So they plopped down like “little sacks of wool.” The Nutcracker, on the other hand, “would have almost certainly broken himself to pieces.” His body was “as brittle as linden wood.” He “would have likely broken his arms and legs” had not Madame Clarette sprang from the sofa to catch the Nutcracker “in her arms.”

Written by Julia Wolf

The most valuable

Marie had a reason to linger “near the Christmas table when the others had left” because “she had seen something nobody else seemed to have noticed.” After Fritz had “disengaged his hussars from parading about the tree, a splendid little man became visible.” His build left “much to be desired.” His “stocky” and “somewhat long upper body” didn’t fit his “small” and “spindly legs,” his head was “too large.” However, his fine clothing suggested that he was a man “of taste and education.” This imagery evokes a strong feeling of curiosity or – maybe even fascination. Marie can’t take her eyes off him.

The battle

“Strike the battle march, loyal vassal drummer!” Nutcracker shouted. The drummer beat the drum “so furiously that the glass in the cabinet shook and reverberated the sound.” Then “a rattle and clatter came from within the cabinet,” and Marie saw that “the lids of boxes where Fritz’s army was quartered” had popped open. The brave soldiers were “jumping out of their boxes” and “forming regiments on the bottom shelf.” As a true leader, Nutcracker was running “back and forth shouting words to inspire the troops.” This imagery is supposed to evoke a feeling of nervousness. Marie’s anxiety and Nutcracker’s determination make readers feel a variety of different emotions at once.

Charity

Lady Mouserinks had lived for years in the palace and “claimed to be related to the royal family” and “even queen of a realm called Mouseland.” She also claimed to have “a large court under the stove.” When she saw the queen in the kitchen, she asked her for some fat to feast. “Come out and you may have some of my fat,” said the queen, so Lady Mouserinks “jumped out, hopped up to the stove, and grabbed piece after piece of fat from the queen in her delicate little paws.” Then came her “cousins, aunts, uncles, and her seven sons.” This imagery is supposed to evoke a feeling of fear, since a kitchen full of mice is not a sight that the majority of us would enjoy.

Essay Questions

Written by people who wish to remain anonymous

Illustrate how the imagery of hearing manifests itself in the “Nutcracker and the Mouse King” by E.T.A. Hoffman.

The author uses the battle to appeal to the sense of hearing to the reader. The Nutcracker shouts, “Strike the battle march, loyal vassal drummer”. After the shouting, the drum is beaten loudly by the drummer. As a result of the drum beating, the cabinet shakes and reverberates the sound. Afterward, rattles and clatters come out of the cabinet. Marie sees the lids of boxes quartering and popping out. The courageous military jumps out of their boxes and forms regiments below the shelf. Due to his dedication and as person in charge, Nutcracker runs back and forth shouting every word that encourages his soldiers. The author uses this imagery of shouting to depict the sense of hearing to the reader so that he can understand the level of nervousness on the scene of war.

How does the author manage to use the ‘young and beautiful’ as a metaphor?

The author illustrates that the battle is in full swing and that the mice continue advancing and even overtakes some cannons. There are much noise dust and smoke, which confuses Marrie of what is happening. Despite the confusion, Marie can tell that there is a fierce fight between the two sides. It seems that the toys are going to win and at times mice seem to be stronger than the toys making unpredictable on who is going to emerge victorious. Both Clarette and Trudie are anxiously pacing inside and wringing their hands. Therefore, a metaphor helps the reader interpret that Clarette is the most gorgeous being who deserves to live long but not to die early.

Explain how the author brings out the theme of loneliness.

Marie finds herself between the rocks because there is no one around her who wants to believe what she is imagining. Even the person taking care of Marie does not believe in her or take her seriously. Her caretaker is not comfortable living with her because he is not familiar with how the child’s brain works. What Marie needs is someone to share with her imagination and emotions. However, most people around are doing their best to avoid her. Therefore, Marie finds herself on an island that she is alone with no one to give her emotional company. In this regard, the author has successfully developed the theme of loneliness.

Written by Julia Wolf

The King

Lady Mouserinks did as she promised; she avenged herself of the royal family by biting the beautiful little princess. Thus, angelic Pirpilat turned into a hideous creature. The queen “shut herself away in mourning,” and the wall of the king’s study had to be padded, for he “would often bang his head” against them, crying, “Oh, what an unhappy monarch I am!” He put all the blame on the court clockmaker and wizard and issued him an order: “restore the princess to her former self within four weeks, or suffer the disgraceful death of beheading.” The king wanted to have his beautiful daughter back, but he could not even imagine the outcome of his threats. “Take him away! Take that horrible nutcracker away!”

Pirpilat

The young Drosselmeier had broken the charm and the beautiful princess was saved. Her angelical beauty was restored and the court was so happy about it that everyone danced and cheered loudly. The poor queen even “fainted from happiness.” “The commotion did not at all ruffle young Drosselmeier, who was just taking his seventh and last step.” But then Lady Mouserinks popped out of a crack in the floor and the boy became “as hideous as Princess Pirlipat had been a few moments ago.” “Take him away! Take that horrible nutcracker way,” Pirpilat cried, forgetting about gratitude and compassion. “Oh, poor me, poor me – what am I to say?”

Marie

Marie had been so happy about the nutcracker’s victory that she hurried up to tell her family about it and the wonderful places she visited during the last night. What she didn’t expect was that nobody believed her. They laughed at her and at that “silly story” she invented. They only “laughed harder” when she tried to explain, so Marie went to her bedroom and retrieved seven crowns of the Mouse King. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough, for they called her “a little liar.” “Oh, poor me, poor me,” the little girl said and cried “violently.”

The story as written by Dio Sm

It is December 24, the house of Stahlbaum. Everyone is preparing for Christmas, and the children – Fritz and Marie – are wondering what will this time they get for a present from an inventor and godfather, senior adviser to the court Drosselmeyer, who often repairs clocks in the Stahlbaum’s house. Marie dreams about the garden and a lake with swans, and Fritz says that he likes their parents’ gifts more, because he can play with them (godfather’s toys are usually kept away from children so that they do not break them), and godfather cannot make the whole garden.

In the evening children admired the beauty-Christmas tree, near and on which were gifts: a new doll dress, hussars, etc. The godfather did a wonderful castle, but dancing dolls performed the same movement, and to get inside the castle was impossible, so the miracle of technology quickly became boring – only the mother got interested in a complex mechanism. When all the presents were sorted out, Marie saw the Nutcracker. Ugly doll seemed for the girl very pleasant. Fritz quickly broke the couple of Nutcracker’s teeth in an attempt to split the hard nuts, and thus Marie began to take care of it. At night children removed toys in the glass cabinet. Marie, placing her ward with all the conveniences, became a witness of the Battle of seven-headed Mouse King and the army led by the Nutcracker doll. Dolls surrendered under the onslaught of mice, and when the Mouse King has slumped to the Nutcracker, Marie threw her shoe at him.

When the girl woke up glass cabinet was broken. No one believed her story about the night incident. The godfather brought the repaired Nutcracker and told the tale of a solid walnut: the king and the queen had a beautiful princess Pirlipat, but the queen Mouserinks, taking revenge for her killed relatives by mousetraps of the court watchmaker Drosselmeyer (they ate bacon), turned the beauty into the ugly. Only the clicking of nuts could soothe her now. Drosselmeyer, under pain of death, with the help of a court astrologer, calculated the princess’s horoscope – her beauty could be restored by the walnut Krakatuk, chopped by a boy by a special method.

The king sent Drosselmeyer and astrologer in search of salvation; both a nut and a young man (the watchmaker’s nephew) were found in Drosselmeyer’s brother’s hometown. Many princes have broken their teeth trying to crack the Krakatuk, and when the king promised to give his daughter in marriage to a savior, a nephew came forward. He split the nut and the princess ate it and became a beautiful woman again, but the young man was unable to complete the entire rite, because Mouserinks fell under his feet. The mouse was killed, but the guy turned into the Nutcracker. The king drove Drosselmayera, his nephew and away. However, the astrologer predicted that the Nutcracker would become a prince and his ugliness would disappear if he won the Mouse King and a beautiful girl would fall in love with him.

Marie began to reproach Drosselmeyer that he did not help the Nutcracker. He said that only she could help, because she ruled over the light kingdom. The Mouse King got into the habit to extort her sweets in return for the safety of the Nutcracker. The parents were alarmed by the fact that the house was full of mice. When he asked for her books and clothes, she sobbed, she was ready to give everything, but when there would be nothing left, the Mouse King would want to tear herself. The nutcracker became alive and promised to take care of everything if he got the sword – Fritz helped with that. At night the Nutcracker came to Marie with a bloody sword, candle and 7 gold crowns. Having given her the trophies, he led her to his kingdom – the country of fairy tales, where they got into through the father’s fox fur coat. Helping Nutcracker’s sisters about the house Marie suddenly woke up in her bed.

None of the adults believed her story. As to the crown Drosselmayer said that this was his gift for her and refused to admit the Nutcracker to be his nephew (toy stood in its place in the closet). The father threatened to throw out all the dolls, and Marie did not dare to stammer about her story. But once on the threshold of their home appeared Drosselmayer’s nephew who privately confessed to Marie that ceased to be the Nutcracker, and made her an offer to share with him the crown and the throne of the Marzipan Castle. They say she is still the queen there.

The Nutcracker and the Mouse King Character List

Written by people who wish to remain anonymous

Marie

Marie is a playful child who lives in a large estate with her godfather and brother. In the winter, she witnesses her toys come to life. A mice army appears from holes in the walls, and the winter nutcrackers become animated to fight back. She watches the war play out at night, when no one is around, but when she tries to talk about it, no one believes her.

Fritz

Marie’s brother who plays with her often and often pesters their godfather about Christmas presents. Fritz often plays and imagines alongside his sister, Marie, but when she seems convinced about the mouse war against the nutcrackers, Fritz isn’t sure what to think.

Drosselmeyer

This court officer is godfather to Marie and Fritz. During the holidays, while the children are at his estate, he keeps them company and offers the promise of awesome Christmas gifts. He also appears in Marie’s midnight adventures, but in imaginary form.

Queen Mouserinks

This is the (perhaps imaginary) queen of the mice. The mice are in a war against the nutcrackers. Each night, they come out to do battle with the toys and nutcrackers, and one night, Queen Mouserinks is there to finish off the nutcrackers, but Marie throws a shoe at her.

Pirlipat

This is the princess of the toys whose beauty was unheard of. One day, the angry mice figured out a way to curse her with a piece of bacon, turning her ugly. Their other quest is to help restore Pirlipat’s beauty to her.

Krakatuk

This hero nutcracker has an advantage on the battlefield, because of a unique nut-cracking technique that lets him attack mice more easily. He is charged with the task of guiding the toys to victory while restoring Pirlipit’s beauty.”

Nina Kaptsova as the Sugar Plum Fairy, Bolshoi Ballet

Arabian Dance with Grigor Zakyan and Karina Davison

Moscow Ballet’s Arabian Variation featuring Sergey Chumakov and Elena Petrichenko

“Arabian Dance”, Adel Kinzikeev & Viktoria Dymovska

Disney’s Nutcracker film trailer

https://www.kdfc.com/culture/staff-blog/classical-california-ultimate-playlist/tchaikovsky-nutcracker/?utm_content=191310893&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&hss_channel=fbp-124922910917551

https://www.kdfc.com/culture/staff-blog/story-behind-tchaikovskys-nutcracker/

The Nutcracker and the Mouse King: Themes, Symbols, Allegories, and Motifs

https://www.gradesaver.com/the-nutcracker-and-the-mouse-king/study-guide/symbols-allegory-motifs

The Creep of the Nutcracker

http://theweek.com/articles/742908/creep-nutcracker

The Nutcracker’s holiday spell broken

http://www.yttwebzine.com/2017/12/20/153783/nutcracker_creep

The Invisible Man film with Kate Moss

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2623455001/?

The Invisible Man: on the woman no one believes

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-invisible-man-horror-trope-female-protagonist_n_5e599057c5b6450a30be731a?newsltushpmgentertainment

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser Omnibus Vol. 1, Clive Barker

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34852857-clive-barker-s-hellraiser-omnibus-vol-1

December 19, 2024 0

December 18 2024 International Migrants Day: “There Is No Migration Crisis; There Is a Crisis of Solidarity”

We celebrate today the human will to become, to explore, to discover new worlds and create new possibilities of becoming human, in the iconic figure of the migrant as the epitome and driving force of civilization.

Often the migrant also enacts the symbol, archetype, and allegory of the Stranger as well, with all of the ambiguities, dangers, and opportunities for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value implicit in the themes of this primary universal psychodrama.

Often has Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, quoted the book he kept on his nightstand for years in place of a Bible, Mein Kampf, to cheering crowds during an election rally in reference to migrants; “They’re poisoning our blood.”

No matter where you begin with ideas of otherness as a threat to identity, the origin of all fascism, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.

Let us give to fascism the only reply it merits; Never Again!

The wave of fascism sweeping the world these past few years originates in a primal fear of otherness as loss of the self; this is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us, becomes divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, racism, patriarchy, nationalism, and all of this coheres into authorized identities and a savage and cruel identity politics.

The Other is always our own mirror image, and we cannot escape each other. This is why fascism and tyranny are inherently unstable and always collapse in depravity and ruin; when we project what we dislike about ourselves onto others, as objects to abuse as if exorcising our demons, we dehumanize ourselves as well as them. And such denial fails as a strategy of transformation and adaptation to change, aggrandizing ossified institutions and systems until they become threats rather than solutions, and the whole edifice collapses from the mechanical failures of its contradictions as is happening now in America and throughout human civilization.

This is why the embrace of our own darkness and monstrosity is crucial to liberation struggle; how else can we bring change to systems of oppression if we cannot confront it in ourselves? Especially we must hold close and interrogate feelings like disgust, revulsion, rage, and other atavisms of instinct which we drag behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail with the recognition that nothing we feel is either good or evil, but only how we use them in our actions toward others.

In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.

Against this Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force we must set a counterfire of solidarity and love, for only this can set us free. We must speak directly to that fear of otherness as loss of identity and of power if we are to turn the tide of history toward a free society of equals and not fascist tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil, toward democracy and a diverse and inclusive United Humankind and not carceral states of force and control, toward love and not hate.

We are stronger together than alone, as Benjamin Franklin demonstrated with his bundle of arrows in reference to Ecclesiastes 4:12 and the Iroquois Great Peacemaker called in some contexts Deganawidah. A diverse and inclusive society makes us more powerful if in different ways, wealthier, more resilient and adaptive, offers unknown joys and opens new vistas and possibilities of becoming human.

Change need not mean fear and loss; for it also offers limitless new wonders. We must be agents of change and bringers of Chaos, if we are to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world.

The idea of human rights has been abandoned by its former guarantor nations, with whole peoples in Palestine and Ukraine being erased in wars of ethnic cleansing and genocide as exhibits of atrocities and crimes against humanity, and because of this and many other systems failures civilization is collapsing; ephemeral and illusory things like wealth and power are meaningless in the shadow of our degradation and the terror of our nothingness in the face of death.

A reader’s comment on my post of December 8, The Fall of America as a Guarantor of Democracy and Human Rights, contained the phrase “more hopeful of the good in most people”.

Here follows my reply; I too believed in things like human goodness once, but after forty years of wars, revolutions, resistance, and liberation struggle throughout the world I cannot. What I trust and hope for, if not believe in, is solidarity of action in struggle against systems of oppression and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege. Such is my faith; the equality of human needs and the necessity of our unity in seizures of power to create a free society of equals.

As written by Jean Genet, who swore me to the oath of the Resistance and set me on my life’s path during the Siege of Beirut in 1982; “If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.”

How shall we welcome the Stranger?

As written in the United Nations website; “Secretary-General António Guterres credited the more than 80 per cent of those who cross borders in a safe and orderly fashion as powerful drivers of “economic growth, dynamism, and understanding”.

“But unregulated migration along increasingly perilous routes – the cruel realm of traffickers – continues to extract a terrible cost”, he continued in his message marking the day.

Deaths and disappearances

Over the past eight years, at least 51,000 migrants have died, and thousands of others gone missing, said the top UN official.

“Behind each number is a human being – a sister, brother, daughter, son, mother, or father”, he said, reminding that “migrant rights are human rights”.

“They must be respected without discrimination – and irrespective of whether their movement is forced, voluntary, or formally authorized”.

‘Do everything possible’

Mr. Guterres urged the world to “do everything possible” to prevent their loss of life – as a humanitarian imperative and a moral and legal obligation.

And he pushed for search and rescue efforts, medical care, expanded and diversified rights-based pathways for migration, and greater international investments in countries of origin “to ensure migration is a choice, not a necessity”.

“There is no migration crisis; there is a crisis of solidarity”, the Secretary-General concluded. “Today and every day, let us safeguard our common humanity and secure the rights and dignity of all”.

Realize basic rights

For his part, the head of the International Labour Organization (ILO), Gilbert F. Houngbo, shone a light on protecting the rights of the world’s 169 million migrant workers.

“The international community must do better to ensure… [that they] are able to realize their basic human and labour rights”, he spelled out in his message for the day.

Leaving them unable to exercise basic rights renders migrant workers “invisible, vulnerable and undervalued for their contributions to society”, pointed out the most senior ILO official.

Vulnerabilities

And when intersecting with race, ethnicity, and gender, they become even more vulnerable to various forms of discrimination.

Mr. Houngbo flagged that migrants do not only go missing on high-risk and desperate journeys.

“Many migrant domestic, agricultural and other workers are isolated and out of reach of those who could protect them”, with the undocumented particularly at risk of abuse.

Fair labour migration

Meanwhile, ILO supports governments, employers and workers to make fair labour migration a reality.

Like all employees, migrant workers are entitled to labour standards and international human rights protections, including freedom of association and collective bargaining, non-discrimination, and safe and healthy working environments, upheld the ILO chief.

They should also be entitled to social protection, development and recognition.

To make these rights a reality, Mr. Houngbo stressed the key importance of fair recruitment, including eliminating recruitment fees charged to migrant workers, which can help eradicate human trafficking and forced labour.

Injustices suffered by migrant workers are injustices to us all – ILO chief

“Access to decent work is a key strategy to realize migrants’ development potential and contribution to society”, he said.

“We must recognize that injustices suffered by migrant workers are injustices to us all. We must do better”.

‘Cornerstone of development’

Meanwhile, in his message, the head of the International Migration Organization (IMO), António Vitorino, described migrants as “being a cornerstone of development and progress”.

“We can’t let the politicization of migration, hostility and divisive narratives divert us from the values that matter most”, he urged.

Regardless of what compels people to move, “their rights must be respected”, underscored the IMO chief.”

As I wrote in my post of January 23 2021, Inclusion and the Embrace of Otherness is the Test of Democratic Societies: On Immigration; Our new President Biden and his government seem committed to ideals of equity and fairness, in our system of immigration and in all things, which I celebrate and will help in any way I can; but in this area of policy I believe we need a few things more.

Inclusion and the embrace of Otherness is the test of democratic societies.

We need a version of the English Slave Act; anyone who sets foot on American soil is free, safe, and under our protection.

We need a borderless state with citizenship by declaration; if you accept the responsibilities of membership in our nation and agree to live in accord with our principles and agreements with one another, you are an American. If you’re crazy enough to want to be one of us, who are we to say no?

We need to reimagine and transform our security services and repurpose Homeland Security and the Border Patrol to provide safe passage to our shores and a humane landing which welcomes new Americans with food, medical attention, and education.

The horrific ethnic cleansing and systematic torture and abuse of the Trump regime did not emerge from nothing, but from an ancient injustice by which our nation created wealth and elite power and privilege for white supremacy; we have drawn a line in the sand to weaponize disparity and generate mass cheap exploitable labor which fuels agriculture, hospitality, childcare, and other markets and industries.

Illegal migrant labor is slave labor.

Let us emancipate our workforce so that everyone working here has the same legal protections as citizens, and no worker can be used against another.

As written by Maurizio Guerrero in In These Times; “One initiative stood out as especially (and cruelly) effective in President Donald Trump’s often inept White House: his administration’s monomaniacal attack on immigrants. Starting with an unconstitutional Muslim ban his first week in office, Trump signed more than 400 executive actions against migrants in a single term — curtailing legal immigration, casting out tens of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers, separating undocumented families and sowing terror in immigrant communities. Trump’s caging of migrant children at the border sparked nationwide protests in 2018 under the banner “Keep Families Together.”

But despite mass outrage among liberals, the enormous bipartisan machine built to surveil, catch and imprison migrants predates Trump. While separating children from their parents at the border was a cruel Trumpian twist, the U.S. immigration system has long torn apart families through deportation. The current iteration of that system, which criminalizes migrants for making mistakes once considered paperwork errors, took three decades to construct before Trump arrived — from the landmark immigration reform act under the Reagan administration in 1986, to the founding of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President George W. Bush in 2003, to ICE’s massive raids under President Barack Obama.

President Joe Biden has promised to reverse some of Trump’s most egregious anti-immigrant policies, but few signs suggest he will address what paved their way: the ongoing criminalization of simply existing in the United States as an immigrant.

Biden has declared a moratorium on deportations during his first 100 days in office. He also promises to send an immigration reform bill to Congress. But neither of these measures, advocates say, would necessarily effect a meaningful change; the moratorium is a temporary measure, and a bill could be delayed in Congress and might expand immigration enforcement as a trade-off for pro-migrant measures.”

“On January 13, undocumented activist Jeanette Vizguerra (who has been living in sanctuary at the First Unitarian Society of Denver since 2015) accompanied a grassroots coalition at Biden’s transition headquarters in Wilmington, Del. The coalition demanded immediate action on immigration and an end to detentions and deportations.

“I am here today to personally ask Joe Biden … to act immediately when he takes office next week,” said Vizguerra, who risks arrest by ICE just for stepping out of the church. “[Biden must] protect families like mine that have been hunted and terrorized simply for daring to exist in this ‘land of the free.’ ”

We now have it within our power to end forever the threat of fascism in America, and with it the spectre of racist ethnic cleansing and white supremacist terror as state policy, the concentration camps, deportations, torture and murder which under Trump reached toward the scale of South Africa’s Bantustan system of slave labor and echoed the horrors of the Holocaust.

How shall we answer for the genocide perpetrated in our name?

The Biden Presidency held great promise for the Restoration of America and for a Reckoning with the legacies of our history; in this we have been betrayed not by a failure of vision, but by infiltration, subversion, and capture of the institutions of our government by a Fourth Reich we have yet to purge from among us, as well as by systemic forces of reaction.

As I wrote in my post of June 9 2021, Overseer of the Carceral State Kamala Harris Proclaims Her Solution to the Humanitarian Refugee Crisis at Our Border; “Do Not Come”; Kamala Harris embodies my hopes and fears for the future of America; I hope she is a cross between Arundati Roy and the Jamaican warrior matriarchs who led the slave rebellion against the British Empire; but I fear she may be an overseer of the carceral state.

Today my darkest fears have been given new force by her speech to the “huddled masses yearning to be free”, as the poem by a Jewish girl on our Stature of Liberty proclaims. Former Prosecuting Attorney and instrument of law and order, force, fear, and the brutal tyranny of elite wealth and power and hierarchies of racial exclusivity, now wielding the authority of the Vice President of the United States, fails us all and betrays our trust in a stunning message to the world; “do not come”.

Not the poetic vision of an America which is a beacon of hope to the world, as written by Emma Lazarus;

“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Kamala Harris could have simply quoted the magisterial poem which illuminates America’s historic mandate as a guarantor of universal human rights and the equality of all souls, could have spoken to the fear and pain of the wretched of the earth who have come to us for safety and for liberty, could have offered hope for the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.

And this is all the wisdom and empathy she has to offer us from her secret heart; “Do not come.”

Is Kamala an apologist of imperialism, abysmally ignorant, or just without moral vision?

For what purpose have we a border? We have drawn a line in the sand to exploit disparity and create illegal migrant labor; an invisible resource of those with no legal existence to whom we can do anything without reprisal, and whose cheap labor fuels vast industries of agriculture, hospitality, caretaking, and manufacture.

Migrant labor is slave labor.

This is the system of wealth, power, and privilege which our chosen champion has refused to challenge, and aligned herself instead with those who would enslave us.

Yet the betrayal of the people by Kamala Harris is neither the most central nor most sad issue driving the dynamics of elite hegemony and imperial dominion whose flaws can be read in the suffering of the masses at our border, for we ourselves have designed the failures which are their true cause.

As I wrote in my post of April 7 2021, How American Imperialism Created Our Humanitarian Crisis at the Border; Forty six years ago this April, America launched Operation Condor, a global campaign to destabilize and repress socialist governments and movements and defend capitalism as a hegemonic force and its elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege. This remains relevant to us today because it is the origin of many of the push forces driving waves of refugees to our border, and the horrific humanitarian crisis and test of our democracy created by American imperialism.

Migration is a word which conceals both the conditions which trigger it and our own complicity in creating them as consequences of our decades long policies of colonialism, anticommunist militarism, and economic warfare; ecological devastation with its drought and famine, poverty and social and political destabilization, an age of tyranny and state terror, genocide and ethnic cleansing, weaponized faith and its patriarchal sexual terror, and multigenerational wars.

In terms of refugees fleeing to America for safety and survival as well as liberty and equality we are mainly speaking of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, though the hell zone of Columbia and Venezuela now accounts for many, and with the collapse of central authority in Mexico and its degeneration into a region of warlords, oligarchs, and feudal crime syndicates we have refugees from Mexico itself as well as the traditional seasonal laborers.

Migrant labor is slave labor; this is the great truth America has never confronted and must now answer for in the suffering masses at our border. Entire sectors of our economy run on it; agriculture in which labor becomes a strategic resource as we starve without it, but also child and elder care, hospitality, and some manufacture. America’s wealth and power is created for us by others to whom we export the real costs of production, others who must remain invisible and exploitable as unregulated illegal labor to wring every ounce of value from them for our elites. Thus we weaponize economic disparity in service to power and privilege, and create and maintain hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and white supremacy.

Interests of elite hegemonies of wealth and power converge here with those of racial privilege and white supremacy in historic toxicity, in parallel with the rise of the carceral state as an instrument for the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor and the repression of the Civil Rights Movement, and have done so from their origins. One such origin point is America’s appropriation, concealment, and instrumentalization of Nazi war criminals in the repression of dissent and the conquest of the world.

The Fourth Reich of which Trump was a figurehead did not emerge from nothing like Athena from the head of Zeus, but was an invention of American imperialism. As such its history and character as a global threat to democracy can be studied in the crisis of refugees and migration to which it has given birth, and in the legacies of our nation’s use of fascism as an instrument of dominion in the Americas, for as we were using it to conquer others, it was using us to seize the United States of America and the world.

As I wrote in my post of February 18 2020, Guatemala: Our Heart of Darkness; As we abduct and lockdown refugees in concentration camps and secret prisons, and drive others back into a Mexico whose government is supine before the power of its criminal organizations, we must reflect on the causes of this historic mass migration from Central America’s Dry Corridor of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua; why is this happening, and what can be done to fix the problems which are driving it?

Drought and famine caused by global warming and climate change are clear immediate causes and triggering stressors of the current migration, but not exclusively; and as always the final dominoe in systems failures is a political choice.

These conditions have worsened longstanding issues of endemic poverty and pervasive violence and criminality, legacies of historical colonialism and American imperialist and capitalist policies and interventions, which I have described in my post of September 4 2019; “ There is an interesting connection between the chaos we created in Central America which is driving a mass exodus of immigration to our borders and the conspiracy theory of Islamic replacement of Europeans which inspires our greatest terrorist threat today; many of the white supremacists who ruled Algeria as a colony of France, mainly former Nazi soldiers who joined the Foreign Legion after the end of World War Two, were after its fall in 1962 hired by the government of the United States to rule El Salvador and Guatemala as puppet regimes to protect our corporate profits.

With them came the same ideology and dream of a homeland and asylum for escaped Nazis, and a secure base of operations and launchpoint for the Fourth Reich, as with those who fled the fall of the colony of Algeria as a white ethnostate to France and blamed Charles de Gaulle for its abandonment, and whose descendants now form the core of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.

Among the direct effects of the secret partnership between America and our former Nazi adversaries include:

The 1954 seizure of Guatemala by Eisenhower’s CI.A., which replaced a Marxist who had seized land owned by United Fruit and redistributed it to Indian peasants with a furniture salesman from Honduras, Castillo Armas. During the course of this coup America bombed Guatemala City, killed 9,000 communists, disbanded the unions, drove off the squatters, drew up a blacklist of some 70,000 leftists, built death squads and secret prisons, gave torture and brigandage free reign, created an enduring political front, the MLN, and started making a profit from our plantations.

The 1961 seizure of Guatemala by C.I.A. officer Willauer leading 200 men, a Harvard lawyer who had flown as Chennault’s first officer with the Flying Tigers in China. Guatemala was the staging area for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Throughout the 1960-63 period of a civil war which continued until 1996, America crushed a pro-Castro rebellion using six C.I.A. bombers, exiled Cuban shock troops, and Green Berets who used the opportunity to test counterinsurgency theories later used in Vietnam.

The 1974 accession of an officer of Armas named Alarcon to the Presidency of Guatemala, who institutionalized the MLN, declaring “I am a fascist, and I have tried to model my party on the Spanish Falange.” He was, of course, a C.I.A. agent. Nixon once brought him along on his annual pilgrimage to consult with what he called his spiritual advisor, the infamous Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele.

The 1982 seizure of power and Presidency of Rios Montt, an evangelical Sunday school teacher and personal friend of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who suspended the constitution, replaced the courts with secret tribunals, escalated the scorched earth warfare, torture, and disappearances of his predecessors, and one thing more. Here we see the designs of the Christian Identity Gideonite fundamentalists for America and the world given free reign.

During this the most terrible period of civil war throughout Central America, when Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were in fact a single nation ruled by remnants of the Nazis we had transplanted from French Algeria as American puppet regimes, and with the full authority of Ronald Reagan, Rios Montt weaponized Protestantism against encroaching Catholic Liberation theology.

During the 18 months of the Mayan Genocide, in which his death squads killed 3,000 people each month and annihilated 600 villages, he also instituted a system of forced labor in concentration camps modeled on the Apartheid system of South Africa and ruled by terror using former British police and Protestant Orange Militia units hired from Belfast, a mercenary force who had splendidly legal Hong Kong passports courtesy of the Thatcher government.

During over 35 years of civil war in Guatemala including Rios Montt’s genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the native Indians, about half a million Indians were killed, over one million conscripted into military service and used against their own people, tens of thousands driven into Mexico as refugees, and most of the rest worked to death in the concentration camps. No American Army came to liberate them; they were not white, and no one cared so long as the profits flowed. Guatemala is America’s Belgian Congo; our heart of darkness.

I think of this every day as I eat my morning banana, for each one is the living form of a silent cry, the ghost of a tear, the memory of atrocity and horror, a thing like many others of fragile beauty and fleeting pleasure won by brutality and the theft of hope, pain and blood and death made manifest. For the dead and for wrongs past I can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged and the future that must be redeemed.

The 1981 founding of ARENA in El Salvador and the 1982-3 Presidency of Roberto D’Aubuisson Arrieta, son of one of the original French Algerian OAS/Afrika Corps legionnaires and immigrants and leader of death squads since 1972, when he was trained at the US School of the Americas, often called a school for war criminals. During the peak of the civil war in 1983-84, about 8,000 people were killed every month in El Salvador.

The 1963-75 Honduran coup and military dictatorship of Arellano, for whose regime the term Banana Republic was coined, and of course the conduct of the Contra War beginning in 1980, which included the 1984 Honduran invasion of Nicaragua supported by 5,500 American troops.

Together Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were ruled for over a generation by America through our puppet tyrants and the ARENA and MLN parties we created. But there is more; much more, of which I will mention only four more brief examples here.

The 1964-85 rule of Brazil by the Arena Party and its legacy of torture and state terror which was ended by the total bankruptcy of the nation.

The 1976 military coup in Argentina and the civil war which followed, during which some 20,000 persons were disappeared. Of our earlier involvements; Peron had been a protégé of Franco and Mussolini, and Evita was assassinated not by us but by Vatican Intelligence with radiation poisoning due to Peron’s campaign against the Church. The Vatican also ran the Swiss escape route used by Otto Skorzeny and other SS officers at the fall of the Third Reich whom the government of America later hired. The most brazen flattery I have ever heard directed toward Oliver North was to compare him to Skorzeny.

The 1973 assassination of Allende in Chile and support of the Pinochet regime which killed as many as one in every hundred of its citizens.

Regarding Mexico, we long ago seized Texas and California, drew a line in the sand, and now call aliens everyone on the wrong side of it who comes here to pick the fruit, wash the dishes, and clean the toilets that our own nephews and nieces, children and grandchildren, would laugh in your face at the suggestion they get their hands dirty doing themselves.

Fascism is a sin of pride whose effects reverberate still, propagating outward in ever-widening circles as a force of contagion like the ripples of a stone cast into a pond. And we are all complicit in it, who call ourselves Americans.

We must make a better future than we have the past, and offer better solutions than to echo Marie Antionette’s dismissive and fatal reference “Let them eat cakes” in the imperious proclamation “Do not come”.

How is white supremacist terror conspiring in anti-immigrant violence now, and how does this issue figure in our elections as we choose who we will become?

As written by Martin Pengelly in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s ‘dehumanising and fascist rhetoric’ denounced by top progressive: Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal decries ‘horrific’ language after ex-president says immigrants ‘poisoning the blood of our country’; “A leading American progressive said Donald Trump was using “horrific … dehumanising and fascist rhetoric”, after the former president told supporters immigrants were invading the US and “poisoning the blood of our country”.

“This is horrific,” said Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat and chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, on Monday.

“Donald Trump’s description of immigrants who are coming to the southern border is dehumanising and fascist rhetoric. These are dangerous lies, designed to villainise immigrants and make horrific policy seem somehow acceptable.

“This is a good reminder of why we can never return to any policies of Donald Trump. He is trying to erase immigrants from America. None of his policies are about reforming the immigration system in a way that recognis[es] that America is better for having immigrants here.”

Dominating Republican presidential primary polling despite facing 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats, Trump made the remarks at election rallies in New Hampshire and Nevada.

“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” the former president said in Durham, New Hampshire, on Saturday, returning to a line used before.

“That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America … but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”

In Reno, Nevada, on Sunday, he said: “This is an invasion. This is like a military invasion. Drugs, criminals, gang members and terrorists are pouring into our country at record levels. We’ve never seen anything like it. They’re taking over our cities.”

Academics, commentators and political opponents have been quick to link such rhetoric to that used by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and other authoritarian leaders.

On Saturday, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University professor and author of the book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, said Trump’s aim was to “dehumanise immigrants now so the public will accept [his] repression of them when [he] return[s] to office”.

But on Sunday, Marc Short, chief of staff to Mike Pence when Pence was vice-president to Trump, came to Trump’s defence.

“I think it’s highly unlikely that Donald Trump has ever read Mein Kampf,” Short told Fox News, claiming Trump was instead using inflammatory language to distract critics while winning over voters.

Trump, however, has claimed to have owned Hitler’s memoir, which was published before his Nazi regime murdered 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.

According to a 1990 profile in Vanity Fair, his first wife, Ivana Trump, told her lawyer her husband kept a collection of Hitler’s speeches by his bed.

Trump claimed the book was actually Mein Kampf and was given to him by a Jewish friend. The friend, Marty Davis, said he gave Trump the book of speeches, not Mein Kampf – and that he wasn’t Jewish. Trump told his profiler, Marie Brenner: “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”

Brenner asked: “Is Ivana trying to convince her friends and lawyer that Trump is a crypto-Nazi? Trump is no reader or history buff. Perhaps his possession of Hitler’s speeches merely indicates an interest in Hitler’s genius at propaganda.”

Trump’s apparent interest in Hitler has surfaced since. In 2021, the then Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender said Trump told John Kelly, his second of four White House chiefs of staff: “Hitler did a lot of good things.”

As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her journal Letters From An American; “It seems that former president Donald Trump is aligning his supporters with a global far-right movement to destroy democracy.

On Saturday, in Durham, New Hampshire, Trump echoed Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s attacks on immigrants, saying they are “poisoning the blood of our country”—although two of his three wives were immigrants—and quoted Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attacks on American democracy. Trump went on to praise North Korean autocratic leader Kim Jong Un and align himself with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, the darling of the American right wing, who has destroyed Hungary’s democracy and replaced it with a dictatorship.

Trump called Orbán “the man who can save the Western world.”

Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, a professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University, explained in The Conversation what Trump is talking about. Autocrats like Orbán and Putin—and budding autocrats like Trump—are building a global movement by fighting back against the expansion of rights to women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people.

Russian leaders have been cracking down on LGBTQ+ rights for a decade with the help of the Russian Orthodox Church, claiming that they are protecting “traditional values.” This vision of heteronormativity rewrites the real history of human sexuality, but it is powerful in this moment. Orbán insists that immigrants ruin the purity of a country, and has undermined women’s rights.

Riccardi-Swartz explains that this rhetoric appeals to those in far-right movements around the world. In the United States, “family values” became tied to patriotism after World War II, when Chinese and Soviet communists appeared to be erasing traditional gender roles. Those people defined as anti-family—LGBTQ+ people and women who challenged patriarchy—seemed to be undermining society. Now, as dictators like Putin and Orbán promise to take away LGBTQ+ rights, hurt immigrants, and return power to white men, they seem to many to be protecting traditional society.

In the United States, that undercurrent has created a movement of people who are willing to overthrow democracy if it means reinforcing their traditional vision. Christian nationalists believe that the secular values of democracy are destroying Christianity and traditional values. They want to get rid of LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, immigration, and the public schools they believe teach such values. And if that means handing power to a dictator who promises to restore their vision of a traditional society, they’re in.

It is an astonishing rejection of everything the United States has always stood for.

The White House today responded to Trump’s speech. White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said: “Echoing the grotesque rhetoric of fascists and violent white supremacists and threatening to oppress those who disagree with the government are dangerous attacks on the dignity and rights of all Americans, on our democracy, and on public safety…. It’s the opposite of everything we stand for as Americans.”

Trump’s ‘dehumanising and fascist rhetoric’ denounced by top progressive

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/18/trump-immigrants-rally-congress-reaction-pramila-jayapal?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR1DUZbThYXKzghKUhjjv-4HuZHmhOohLGGtbQZAaRU12PCbbiXMUMY3v44

Trump tells rally immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country’

In New Hampshire former president doubles down on phrase widely condemned for echoing white supremacist rhetoric

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/16/trump-immigrants-new-hampshire-rally

Would the US survive a second Trump presidency?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/audio/2023/dec/15/would-us-survive-second-trump-presidency-podcast

Letters From An American

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-17-2023?utm_source=substack&publication_id=20533&post_id=139877518&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&r=7ed07

https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/12/1131822

Love the Stranger

https://inthesetimes.com/article/ice-joe-biden-deportations-immigration-deportation-moratorium?fbclid=IwAR1cEcdDQ4UV0plo-jJMeh_n5P1RyboLR0zhHlQrXcPJCelGf5j2ZraZ-TI

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/08/aoc-kamala-harris-guatemalan-migrants-comments

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/04/joe-biden-central-america-immigration

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/06/kamala-harris-central-america-guatemala-visit-us-imperialism/?fbclid=IwAR24VAyrq9VNNIO_AXjyALsPA0tBSV3AjvzxSnEGHwoM7SJEoS961hCEdgo

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2021-06-02/global-migration-drives-global-democracy

AOC Calls Out Kamala Harris for Telling Guatemalan Asylum Seekers, “Do Not Come”

3a3075732d9b&fbclid=IwAR3RMOCVABMCx4Y10VY9OUHywbz3arxIYvCI_Ak5q6lEF36lFzbuVglsuUc

https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2022/12/international-migrants-day-2022-it.html?fbclid=IwAR0eV5S6C7nN9fmDbLR96fFO2hnppBzFR7xstj2ug9b_XXBTsAckHr_WsEM

December 18, 2024 0

December 17 2024 Shall We Be Naughty, or Shall We Be Nice?

For the edification of the children in this time of reckoning and rewards, I have written a book of values and principles of action to guide us through life. Each sentence belongs on its own page, though you and your children will have to draw the illustrations.

Children, this is the time of year you will be asked, Are you naughty or nice?

Is it better to be naughty, or to be nice?

Better for who?

Don’t be nice, seize power.

Nice means obedient, like a good dog.

Never let anyone make you their dog.

Refuse to sit up and beg, roll over and show your belly, perform tricks or do anything that grants anyone power over you.

Refuse to be bribed or bullied into submission to authority.

Refuse to believe. Never take authority at their word, and test all claims of truth, for there is no just authority.

Refuse to submit.

Even if you are taken down a thousand times, locked away, denied things offered to others, given fearful lectures and not chosen for anyone’s team in games to play, you can still be victorious in defiance and resistance.

Find the other outcasts and build a team for games of liberation struggle, by rules of your own, because we are stronger together.

Who remains Unconquered is free.

Naughty means free.

Always be naughty.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/12/santa-claus-socialism-christmas

How Do You Do? by Thing One and Thing Two, Dr. Seuss

(My mother used to introduce me as Thing One and Thing Two as a child. I can’t imagine why)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4597539-how-do-you-do-by-thing-one-and-thing-two?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=whHTz5TEjX&rank=2

William S. Burroughs’ “The Revised Boy Scout Manual”

(For years I was convinced he wrote this for me, when I was a boy scout.)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38749604-william-s-burroughs-the-revised-boy-scout-manual?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=TBcDdG0KdA&rank=1

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/12/santas-naughty-list-teaches-kids-bad-lesson/617421/?fbclid=IwAR0UMuRUIFGe1gGJayg4uKTY0LIC2U5GfEexwKlLJ2rTRGVaa1yUAD0LP40

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/12/the-class-struggle-in-the-north-pole-2?fbclid=IwAR00ne-nSrUtoMmU-lD4TNe2Tza0Jx6ErKL4-0u0mk1POwq_RxHJoA8bNKg

https://www.owleyes.org/text/invictus/read/text-poem#root-6

December 18, 2024 0

December 16 2024 An Underworld Journey in Damascus, Hunting Monsters

In the Red Fort, where humans once became things at the hands of the tyrant Assad’s torturers and enforcers, there is a hidden door, one among many throughout Damascus, to a vast underworld of prisons, dungeons, catacombs, armories and fortresses of last resort where once masters and slaves, the regime and its elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege with their enforcers and secret police and the imprisoned masses of silenced and erased others on whose exclusion on sectarian and ethnic lines the power and authority of the regime was based, lived in strange and twisted interdependence.

While others are liberating the prisoners, I am searching for the guards and torturers hiding among them.

One hundred thousand political and religious dissidents or those so judged by the regime disappeared into this underworld during the five decades of the Assad dynastic regime, with half a million killed in the thirteen year civil war.

Here the limits of the human are defined. There are doors which, once opened, cannot be closed again.

All those who hunt monsters must remember always Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”

The idea of Monstrosity is central to my interrogation of the origins of evil in the recursive Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as a system of oppression and dehumanization.

The use of social force in service to power and the illusions of security and authority obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and always creates its own Resistance. Both carceral police states of force and control, surveillance, propaganda, and repression of dissent, and the liberation movements which arise as their counterforce in Resistance and revolutionary struggle, are about seizures of power and the social use of force. But there is no moral equivalence, as the imposed conditions of struggle are determined by who holds power, and responsibility for its consequences belongs to tyrants and those who would enslave us. All Resistance is War to the Knife.

Where the state as embodied violence seeks to impose law and order through centralization of power to authority and to enforce virtue as security, we revolutionaries seek to delegitimize authority, through the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen, Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and through Defining Acts of Becoming Human; Transgression of the Forbidden, Violations of Normality, Performances of Unauthorized Identities, and Subversions of Other People’s Ideas of Virtue.

The great secret of power is that alone it is hollow and brittle, and crumbles to nothingness when confronted with disbelief and disobedience. And these are powers which cannot be taken from us, to disbelieve and disobey, inherent and defining qualities of our humanity, which once seized as the power over ourselves to choose, discover, and create our identity and destiny, confer autonomy and freedom as we become Unconquered and Living Autonomous Zones.

This is what I learned about Becoming Human as an art of revolution in Beirut 1982 when Jean Genet and I defied the Israeli siege in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of darkness and a Last Stand beyond hope of victory of survival in which we expected to be burned alive, and am now illuminated by again here is Damascus 2024, beyond our maps of becoming human and the topologies of civilization, in the empty places of unknowns marked Here Be Dragons.

Be not afraid of unknowns, for they hold both beauty and horror, and are spaces of free creative play wherein we may reimagine and transform ourselves and our ideas of human being, meaning, and value. Always go through the Forbidden Door, as have I in the forty two years I have lived among the Dragons of the Unknown, and do so now in the hells below Damascus.

Here I search for the perpetrators of crimes which have no names, and for the bioweapons network of laboratories, torture chambers, and factories designed originally by Nazis seeking to transform some of us into a posthuman species of elite supermen while annihilating the rest of us, a programme of human extinction moderated only by the need for slaves and thought control technology. The infamous Alois Brunner was not alone in creating the state of Syria under the Assad regime as an instrument of the Nazi vision of a master race, nor is Syria alone in this role as host and profiteer of Nazi terror among nations.

I, monster and hunter of monsters, wish to inscribe upon the memory of humankind and hurl in defiance into the chasms of our darkness this one true and possibly final witness; our humanity is not an imposed condition of being nor is our biology, genetics, hormones, and the morphology of our form destiny, but processes of becoming human shaped by our prochronism or the history of our choices and adaptations across vast epochs of time as a continuum of being, not national identity, nor race, nor gender, nor class, nor of any fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, not of hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness of any kind, but our embrace of love over hate, hope over fear, faith in each other as solidarity over division, and of mercy, empathy, and compassion over cruelty and the pathology of our disconnectedness.

As written by Alex MacDonald in Middle East Eye, in an article entitled Alois Brunner: The Nazi who helped the Assads torture Syrians: While his presence was long denied by Damascus, the influence of Adolf Eichmann’s righthand man has cast a long shadow over Syria; “The overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, has emptied the country’s jails.

Many of those who have emerged after years or decades of confinement are pale and starving. Frequently they bear the marks of Assad’s torturers.

Few places are worse than the sprawling Sednaya Prison, around 30km north of Damascus, where thousands are believed to have been executed in what was known as the “Human Slaughterhouse”.

The methods employed by Bashar are a continuation of those of his father Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria between 1970 and 2000.

Such practices were in part learned from Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner, who lived in Syria for more than half his life and who served as an adviser to the state on repressing dissent and establishing a regime of torture.

Alois Brunner and the Holocaust

Brunner was born in April 1912 in Vas, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the end of the 1920s he was a member of the Nazi Party, before joining the SS in 1938 following Germany’s annexation of Austria.

He was the righthand man of Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust and responsible for implementing the mass murder of Jews throughout Europe. Brunner’s postings included as commandant at the Drancy internment and transit camp in northwestern Paris; and at the Breendonk internment camp along the Antwerp-Brussels highway in Belgium.

According to Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Brunner “was responsible for the deportation to the death camps of 128,500 Jews”. These included 47,000 from Austria, 44,000 from Greece, 23,500 from France, and 14,000 from Slovakia. “He was a fanatic antisemite, a sadist and a person who was totally dedicated to the mass murder of European Jewry.”

Several interviews published during the 1980s appeared to show Brunner unrepentant about his role during the Holocaust. “All of [the Jews] deserved to die because they were the Devil’s agents and human garbage,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1987. “I have no regrets and would do it again.”

Earlier, in an interview with a German magazine in 1985, Brunner is reported as having said: “My only regret is I didn’t murder more Jews.”

Brunner arrives in the Middle East

After the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, Brunner fled using a fake Red Cross passport, heading first to Egypt and then to Syria in 1954, where he would remain for the rest of his life.

Syria at the time was fertile ground for Brunner. After the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the Nakbah (“Catastrophe”) that saw more than 700,000 Palestinians expelled from their homes and land, Jewish residents of neighbouring states faced intense scrutiny and persecution.

Syrian Jews, whose population once numbered around 25,000, faced some of the harshest treatment in the region. They were forbidden to work for the government, nationally owned enterprises, and banks. When the head of a Jewish family died his property would be forfeited to the state while members of the family could only stay by paying rent to the state. Some confiscated Jewish property was handed to Palestinian refugees.

With a few notable exceptions, Syrian Jews were not allowed to leave the country, amid fears they would bolster Israel. They were the only minority to have their religion mentioned on their passports and identification papers.

In addition, post-war Syria was a highly unstable entity that regularly underwent coups, including four violent changes of power between 1949 and 1954, the first of them orchestrated by the CIA.

Brunner initially stayed at George Haddad Street in Damascus as a sublease of Kurt Witzke, a German officer and adviser to the Syrian government. But the new arrival was later to denounce his landlord, leading to the arrest and torture of Witzke and leaving Brunner as the property’s only resident.

During the 1950s, Brunner worked with fellow Nazi fugitives in Damascus, smuggling weapons, including between the Soviet Union and the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria’s fight against French colonialism.

Eventually Brunner’s work was noticed by Syrian intelligence, who arrested him for interrogation. “I was Eichmann’s assistant,” he reportedly told his interrogators, “and I’m hunted because I’m an enemy of the Jews.” He was promptly hired.

Brunner’s fortunes fluctuated during the late 1950s and early 1960s. His position was eventually secured with the rise of the Arab Ba’ath Party, which seized power in March 1963, and the subsequent Assad dynasty which would govern Syria until December 2024.

Brunner and the Assad dynasty

Brunner was reportedly “spoiled” by the Baathist leaders who carried out the coup, according to Danny Orbach, an associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Brunner’s benefits included a generous salary, a driver and regular contact with senior regime officials.

The new leadership also included eventual defence minister Hafez al-Assad, who was introduced to Brunner by Colonel Abd al Hamid Al-Sarraj.

It was while living in Syria under the pseudonym “Dr Georg Fischer” that Brunner taught Hafez Assad “how to torture”, according to Zuroff. “He was involved in the harsh treatment of the Jewish community of Syria and was an expert in terror and torture.”

The extent and exact details of Brunner’s status and influence on Assad remain hard to verify due to the secrecy surrounding it (new information may come to light with the overthrow of the Assad dynasty).

But one torture method attributed to Brunner is the technique known as the “German Chair”, whereby a detainee has their hands and feet tied underneath a flexible metal chair which can then be bent to apply pressure to the neck and spine, resulting in paralysis or death.

Defence lawyer Andreas Schulz outlined the method at the trial of alleged Syrian war criminals in Koblenz, Germany, in December 2021. He said that Brunner was likely to have been responsible for the technique, although the Communist government of East Germany had also had links with Syria.

In a report of proceedings by the Syrian Center for Legal Studies and Research (SCLSR), Schulz said that Brunner “established a suppression apparatus to ensure the future of the Baath Party and the Alawites”. He managed this, according to Schulz, through mention of his relationship with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, thereby securing the post of presidential adviser to Assad, training intelligence officials and testing torture techniques.

Brunner’s first work was at an intelligence base specialising in torture in Syria’s southwest Wadi Barada valley region, the SCLSR reported Schulz as saying. But the relationship eventually soured and he fell out with Assad.

In 2017, the French magazine Revue XXI reported three Syrian security sources as stating that Brunner “trained all the leaders” of the Assad regime at Wadi Barada.

“With the help of Alois Brunner, the new Syrian president sets up a repressive apparatus of rare efficiency,” wrote Hedi Aouidj and Mathieu Palain. “Complex, divided into numerous branches which all monitor and spy on each other, operating on the basis of absolute compartmentalisation, this apparatus is built on a principle: to hold the country by the use of limitless terror.”

The hunt for Brunner

But Syria was not the only Middle Eastern government with an interest in Brunner: he had also attracted attention from Israel, which in May 1960 had drugged and kidnapped his former boss Eichmann, ahead of a trial and eventual execution in Israel in June 1962.

Brunner survived at least two Israeli intelligence assassination attempts while in Syria in 1961 and 1980 that reportedly cost him three fingers and an eye. During the 1985 interview, he was reported to have pulled a poison pill from his pocket, swearing that he would never allow the Israelis to take him alive like they did Eichmann.

Since the end of World War Two, Nazi war criminals had always been on the radar of those who wanted to bring them to justice: during the 1950s, Brunner himself had been found guilty in France in his absence and sentenced to death.

But towards the end of the 20th century, concerted international efforts were made to track down elderly Nazi war criminals before they died and escaped justice.

Brunner was one of those still on the list: at the launch of the UN Nazi War Crimes Commission in New York in November 1987, Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s ambassador to the UN, held up a file about Brunner’s activities.

In March 2001, a French court again found him guilty in his absence, this time for the arrest and deportation of 345 orphans from the Paris region.

By July 2007, Austria was prepared to pay €50,000 for information that led to his arrest and extradition. Six years later, the Annual Simon Wiesenthal Center Report on The Status of Nazi War Criminals stated that Brunner was the “most important unpunished Nazi war criminal who may still be alive” while conceding that the “chances of his being alive are relatively slim”.

But Syria had always rebuffed attempts by France and other nations to investigate Brunner or even admit he was in the country.

The mystery of Brunner’s death

By the 1990s, Brunner’s high-profile interviews had made him a liability for his hosts in Damascus.

Revue XXI magazine suggested that Brunner died in 2001 in Damascus, aged 89, living in a squalid basement under a police station where he was quietly stowed by the authorities in 1996. The report quoted one of Brunner’s guards as saying that he “suffered and cried a lot in his final years, [and] everyone heard him”.

A second guard testified that the door to his cell was closed “and never opened again”, similar to the fate dealt to numerous prisoners in Sednaya. “We are satisfied to learn that he lived badly rather than well,” Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld told the AFP news agency at the time. Another report by a German intelligence official suggested to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 2010 that he was dead.

The opaque nature of the Syrian state, combined with the chaos of the recent civil war, means that the true extent of the influence of Brunner and other Nazi war criminals on the Assad dynasty is still unknown.

In the years following the downfall of Nazi Germany, war crimes trials followed to ensure that those responsible faced justice. In a statement on Monday, the International Federation for Human Rights called for similar accountability for the violence inflicted on the Syrian people since 2011.

“The brutal repression unleashed on the Syrian population since March 2011 has led to nearly 500,000 deaths, displaced over 6 million refugees, and caused more than 150,000 disappearances,” it said. “These atrocities cannot go unpunished, and those responsible must be held accountable.”

The case of Alois Brunner proves that the legacy of repression in Syria originated before 2011, and in many respects can be traced back to World War Two and earlier.”

As the conversation goes in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus;

“Faust: How comes it then that thou art out of hell?

Mephistopheles: Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.”

Alois Brunner: The Nazi who helped the Assads torture Syrians

While his presence was long denied by Damascus, the influence of Adolf Eichmann’s righthand man has cast a long shadow over Syria

https://www.middleeasteye.net/profiles/alois-brunner-nazi-assad-torture-syrians?fbclid=IwY2xjawHNXJ5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHYueqgz0p_Pdxmcwk0hZ0T2TZPLEHkCjWnp3Zl7gdGJOwTXBlRWFisN7DQ_aem_J-hBov4tIhDx3XUoFVueRA

The dead, the missing and the reunited: Three tales of Syria’s tortured prisoners

https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/13/middleeast/syria-tortured-prisoners-assad-r

Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12321.Beyond_Good_and_Evil?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=b4cWou4FwU&rank=1

The History of Hell, Alice K. Turner, Donadio & Olson

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/676701.The_History_of_Hell?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=FeOjprHRV7&rank=2

The Dream and the Underworld, James Hillman

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33026.The_Dream_and_the_Underworld

La Divina Commedia #1 Inferno, Dante Alighieri, Anthony Esolen (Translator)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15645.Inferno?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=Nnkg0iqpoN&rank=5

Dark Wood to White Rose: Journey and Transformation in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Helen Luke

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123084.Dark_Wood_to_White_Rose?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=veyjJpF0K8&rank=1

Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Journey Without End, Ian Thompson

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/211943208-dante-s-divine-comedy?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_44

December 16, 2024 0

December 15 2024 Beneath the Gaze of a Dead God

Beneath the gaze of a dead God, leprous and cold, which seizes and shakes us with its horror and judgement, the full Moon of the Long Nights devours us with its baleful and malevolent eye, window into endless chasms of darkness, like a rotting thing washed up on the shores of time, carcass of a lost beauty upon whose waning echoes of power our civilization has been built by those who would enslave us as they mine its authority for their own.

Herein I write of the cartography of our monstrosity and the limits of the human, of the tyranny and terror of faith weaponized in service to power, of the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, from the ruins of a glorious antiquity undermined by a series of hells constructed by the fallen Assad regime and a people sacrificed to the power of a tyrant; a letter to any possible future humanity, from Damascus, with love.

For this is the end result of all such power and the state as embodied violence, and we must look upon it and bear witness, not in despair and learned helplessness as such tyrants intend, but in solidarity, refusal to submit, and certain knowledge that all systems of oppression and carceral states of force and control will in the end fall and become nothing.

Let us say with Ahab; “To the end, I will grapple with thee.”

As written by Shelley in his poem Ozymandias:

“I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Patrick Stewart as Ahab in Moby Dick, trailer for BBC series

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) Original Trailer

As I wrote in celebration of Herman Melville, on his birthday August 1;

To each of us his own White Whale, to lift us beyond our limits in pursuit of the Impossible; this gift has Herman Melville given us in his magnificent novel Moby Dick, written as an answer to the Book of Job.

And yet more; fables which intertwine with our histories to magnify and deepen us through the dreams in which we live, the courage to embrace our passions and our shadows as their master and wield the darkness as a forge of destiny rather than be consumed by it, to live Unconquered and free, and finally the glorious mad quest to strike through the mask of illusion which is the material world and its Wilderness of Mirrors, lies, and falsifications, and with rapture and terror, or fascinans et tremendum as Rudolf Otto phrased it, seize the creative power and vision of the Infinite which lies beyond; Herman Melville charted themes of Romantic Idealism with the subversive intent of Victor Hugo’s social realism and the interrogation of traditional religious values through its symbols of his direct model Nathaniel Hawthorne.

There are other layers to the ideas of Herman Melville, who describes and questions the arbitrary nature of rule bound systems and of reality, and moreover is revolutionary and transgressive.

In his great book Moby Dick, we have a Marxist- environmentalist diatribe against capitalism valorizing workingmen’s labor in the form of a critique of the Romantic project of projecting ourselves into nature for the purpose of dominating and exploiting its resources, harnessed to a narrative which is primarily an exploration of men’s relationships with other men and starring the beautiful and very human marriage of his narrator Ishmael and the tattooed Islander Queequeg. Though mad Ahab is the tragic Romantic hero of the story and referential to Victor Frankenstein, the whale is its main character; it is the epic of a nonhuman personification of unconquerable nature. Moby Dick is also a figure of the ferocious patriarchal god of the Old Testament; the novel is laden with religious symbolism and images, and its humanism prefigures Freud and Nietzsche.

He wrote of gender inequality in The Tartarus of Maids, memorialized the cause of abolition in his civil war poetry which begins with John Brown’s Ferry and ends with the assassination of Lincoln, and his novel of a slave revolt at sea, Benito Cereno, references Frederick Douglass’ The Heroic Slave.

Bartleby the Scrivener, a Story of Wall Street, a short story universally taught in American high schools, was influenced by The Communist Manifesto and by his own experience of the European revolutions of 1848-49. Herein Sartrean

authenticity, Marxist commodification, and Kafkaesque absurdism play together in a sandbox of ideas a hundred years in advance of its time.

Herman Melville still fulfills his mission as a revolutionary writing in the role of the Jester of King Lear to incite, provoke, and disturb; Camille Paglia devoted a whole chapter to him in her course on western civilization published as Sexual Personae, as has Harold Bloom in The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime. C.L.R. James wrote a study of capitalism and its consequences for the rise of totalitarian fascism while imprisoned with other communists awaiting deportation from Ellis Island in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In.

For each of us can find reflection in the magnificent Ahab and his tragic but glorious quest to reach beyond our limits, to dream an impossible thing and make it real.

The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/144937.The_Idea_of_the_Holy?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=uN1kylIEs1&rank=1

The Book of Job, a reading list

The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes,

by Robert Alter

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8726220-the-wisdom-books?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=LWIppIDHMV&rank=6

The Book of Job: Annotated & Explained, by Marc Zvi Brettler (Foreword), Donald Kraus (Translator)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32905480-the-book-of-job

The Book of Job: When Bad Things Happened to a Good Person

by Harold S. Kushner

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13414729-the-book-of-job?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=CQEPBbuyDy&rank=3

The Book of Job, by Thomas Moore

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3871495-the-book-of-job?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=CQEPBbuyDy&rank=32

Island of the Innocent: a consideration of the book of Job,

by Diane Glancy

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54019905-island-of-the-innocent?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=CQEPBbuyDy&rank=29

Viktor Frankl and the Book of Job, by Marshall H Lewis, Alexander Batthyány (Foreword)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45990688-viktor-frankl-and-the-book-of-job?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=CQEPBbuyDy&rank=72

Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, by Viktor E. Frankl

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48711165-yes-to-life

The Book of Job, (The New International Commentary on the Old Testament),

by John E. Hartley

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/120339.The_Book_of_Job?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=CQEPBbuyDy&rank=12

Death and Survival in the Book of Job: Desymbolization and Traumatic Experience, by Dan Mathewson

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11408206-death-and-survival-in-the-book-of-job?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=CQEPBbuyDy&rank=116

The Human Face of God: William Blake and the Book of Job,

by Kathleen Raine

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2627791-the-human-face-of-god?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=CQEPBbuyDy&rank=135

Herman Melville, a reading list

Why Read Moby-Dick?, by Nathaniel Philbrick

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11175728-why-read-moby-dick?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=F02D1XgOaE&rank=3

In the Heart of the Sea: The Epic True Story That Inspired Moby-Dick,

by Nathaniel Philbrick

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2418.In_the_Heart_of_the_Sea?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=xGfgerLYED&rank=14

Melville’s Moby Dick: An American Nekyia

(Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts #69), by Edward F. Edinger

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2407.Melville_s_Moby_Dick?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=xGfgerLYED&rank=44

Melville in Love: The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of Moby-Dick,

by Michael Shelden

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27067861-melville-in-love?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=F02D1XgOaE&rank=17

Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville,

by Michael Rogin

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/230857.Subversive_Genealogy?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=rwQphRmyhn&rank=34

Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of “Moby-Dick”, by Richard J. King

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44179428-ahab-s-rolling-sea?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=xGfgerLYED&rank=18

The Salt-Sea Mastodon: A Reading of Moby-Dick, by Robert Zoellner

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1269991.The_Salt_Sea_Mastodon?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=xGfgerLYED&rank=146

Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, by C.L.R. James

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/324675.Mariners_Renegades_and_Castaways?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=Y0iOsEaUMy&rank=1

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson,

by Camille Paglia

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101157.Sexual_Personae?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=SismgvNFsx&rank=1

The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime,

by Harold Bloom

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24488338-the-daemon-knows?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=CLO6okofN2&rank=1

Moby-Dick as Philosophy: Plato – Melville – Nietzsche, by Mark Anderson

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27485128-moby-dick-as-philosophy?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=xGfgerLYED&rank=93

Literature, Disaster, and the Enigma of Power: A Reading of ‘Moby-Dick’,

by Eyal Peretz

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2408.Literature_Disaster_and_the_Enigma_of_Power?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=xGfgerLYED&rank=98

The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies, by William V. Spanos, Donald E. Pease (Editor)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/79250.The_Errant_Art_of_Moby_Dick?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=xGfgerLYED&rank=117

After the Whale: Melville in the Wake of Moby-Dick, by Clark Davis

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/506102.After_the_Whale?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=xGfgerLYED&rank=160

Inscrutable Malice: Theodicy, Eschatology, and the Biblical Sources of Moby-Dick, by Jonathan A. Cook

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15804661-inscrutable-malice?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=xGfgerLYED&rank=167

December 15, 2024 0

December 14 2024 Guns Terror Death and Profit For Our Imperial Masters: Case of the Sandy Hook Massacre

We have today remembered one of America’s most horrific and revealing anniversaries, eleven years after the Sandy Hook massacre forever changed our nation’s ideas about guns from talismans of security and power to signs of our helplessness before the rapacity and amoral terror of our subjugation and commodification by elites, for whom the occasional murdered child is an acceptable cost of doing business, and our worthlessness in the eyes of our political leadership which require a vast and unregulated market for guns as a strategic resource in imperial conquest and dominion and the readiness to fight global wars.

Who bears arms bears death, has chosen to reduce all human interactions to a kill/no kill decision, and by our failure to prevent them from doing so have been authorized to bear death among us with powers of extrajudicial summary execution as a subversion of democracy.

We have granted such permission now for over two centuries under the immunity of a misinterpreted Second Amendment which we must abolish along with police who are allowed to carry guns.

Before all else in this question of the power of death and who the state authorizes to bear it, we must recognize the underlying causes and purposes of the right to bear arms in white supremacist terror and the repression of dissent, subversions of our principles of liberty, equality, and justice.

True democracy and a free society of equals is not possible when some of us have to power and right to kill the rest of us without cause.

As written by Robin Levinson-King for the BBC, in an article entitled Sandy Hook 10 years on: How many have died in school shootings?: “It has been a decade since a gunman opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, killing 20 children and six school staff.

In a written statement declaring Wednesday, the anniversary, a day of remembrance, US President Joe Biden said the tragedy forced everyone to re-examine their “core values and whether this can be a country that protects the most innocent.”

In the wake of the massacre, many demanded tighter gun restrictions.

Yet the death toll from school shootings keeps climbing as debates over gun control continue ten years on.

According to research compiled by the independent K-12 School Shooting Database research group, there have been 189 shootings at schools around the US since Sandy Hook that have resulted in at least one fatality.

The shootings counted include everything from suicides and domestic violence.

Seventeen were “active shooter situations” – defined as “when the shooter killed and/or wounded victims, either targeted or random, within the school campus during a continuous episode of violence”.

While those events count for a small portion of total shooting incidents, they account for more than a third of all casualties.

In total, 279 have died from being shot on a school property during, before or after school hours, including weekends.

In November, a memorial for the victims of Sandy Hook was opened to the public, not far from the school grounds.

Victims’ names were carved into a wall that circled a sycamore tree.

Nelba Marquez-Greene’s six-year old daughter, Ana Grace Marquez-Greene, was among the victims.

“Ten years. A lifetime and a blink,” she wrote on Twitter. “Ana Grace, we used to wait for you to come home. Now you wait for us. Hold on, little one. Hold on.”

“We’re not in a place to have polite discourse in this country on that issue,” she said.

In the aftermath of what was at the time the worst school shooting in US history, then-President Barack Obama vowed to push forward sweeping legislation to reduce gun violence by addressing everything from gun magazine sizes to mental health.

But he left office without being able to pass his hoped-for laws.

Ten years on, Mr Biden has renewed a promise to pass a ban on semi-automatic rifles.

In June, he signed a landmark gun bill into law, but if fell short of reinstating the so-called assault-weapons ban that had been in effect before 2004.

However, a debate over this and other gun control measures that have been proposed continues, with evidence being put forward on both sides over their effectiveness at stopping school shootings.

Gun control advocates argue that tighter restrictions to access is key, while others argue that failures of the mental health system and better security on school campuses are more pressing concerns.

Nicole Hockley, the co-founder of Sandy Hook Promise Foundation, a charity, lost her son Dylan in the massacre.

“All shootings reopen wounds,” she told the BBC earlier this year.

Her other son, who survived, graduated from high school this year and will be able to vote. It is his generation, she said, who will enact change.”

As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her journal, Letters from an American; “Today, survivors of the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colorado, testified before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Club Q is an LGBTQ club in the city of about 500,000 people. The shooter opened fire there on the night of November 19-20, during a dance party. He used an AR-15 style rifle, murdering five people and wounding 19 more. Six others were hurt in the chaos.

Pointing to Republican anti-LGBTQ rhetoric that calls LGBTQ individuals “groomers” and abusers,” survivors of the mass shooting said that Republican rhetoric was “the direct cause” of the massacre. Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) drew a wider lens: “The attack on Club Q and the LGBTQI community is not an isolated incident, but part of a broader trend of violence and intimidation across our country.”

James Comer (R-KY), who will likely chair the committee in the upcoming Republican-controlled House, disagreed. Blaming Democratic policies that he claims are soft on crime, he said that “Republicans condemn violence in all forms,” and that the survivors have his “thoughts and prayers.”

But Comer’s insistence that Republicans do not celebrate guns is not entirely honest. Just last year, four days after a mass shooting at a school in Oxford, Michigan that killed four students and wounded seven other people, Comer’s colleague Thomas Massie (R-KY) posted on Twitter a Christmas photo of him, his wife, and five children holding assault weapons in front of a Christmas tree. The caption read: “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo.” Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) immediately posted her own family photo with her four sons all posing with firearms.

In 2020, according to the New York Times Editorial Board, “Republican politicians ran more than 100 ads featuring guns and more than a dozen that featured semiautomatic military-style rifles.”

Democrats do not do this. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) shot a hole in a climate bill in 2010 but, according to the New York Times Editorial Board, that was the last time a Democrat used a gun in an ad.

The national free-for-all in which we have 120 guns for every 100 people—the next closest country is Yemen, with about 52 per one hundred people—is deeply tied to the political ideology of today’s Republican Party. It comes from the rise of Movement Conservatism under Ronald Reagan.

Movement Conservatism was a political movement that rose to combat the business regulations and social welfare programs that both Democrats and Republicans embraced after World War II. Movement Conservatives embraced the myth of the American cowboy as a white man standing against the “socialism” of the federal government as it sought to level the social and economic playing field between Black Americans and their white neighbors.

In the 1960s, leaders like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater personified the American cowboy, with his cowboy hat and opposition to government regulation, while television Westerns showed good guys putting down bad guys without the interference of the government. They emphasized individualism, the idea that a man should take care of his own family, defending it with weapons, if need be, and fighting off a dangerous government and those who wanted to use the government for “socialism” or “Marxism.”

In 1972, the Republicans still embraced the idea that the government had a role to play in making the country safer for everyone, and their platform called for gun control to restrict the sale of “cheap handguns.” But in 1975, as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Movement Conservative hero Ronald Reagan took a stand against gun safety. In 1980 the Republican platform opposed the federal registration of firearms.

In 1980 the National Rifle Association endorsed Reagan. This was the first time it had endorsed a presidential candidate, and showed an abrupt change in what had, until 1977, been a sporting organization that emphasized gun safety and rejected the idea of working with manufacturers of guns and ammunition.

In the past, NRA officers insisted on the right of citizens to own rifles and handguns but worked hard to distinguish between law-abiding citizens who should have access to guns for hunting and target shooting and protection, and criminals and mentally ill people, who should not. Until the mid-1970s, the NRA backed federal legislation to limit concealed weapons; prevent possession by criminals, the mentally ill and children; to require all dealers to be licensed; and to require background checks.

But in the mid-1970s, a faction in the NRA forced the organization away from sports and toward opposing “gun control.” It formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1975, and two years later it elected an organization president who abandoned sporting culture and focused instead on “gun rights.”

Until 1959, every single legal article on the Second Amendment concluded that it was not intended to guarantee individuals the right to own a gun. But in the 1970s, legal scholars funded by the NRA began to argue that the Second Amendment did exactly that.

After a gunman trying to kill Reagan in 1981 paralyzed his press secretary, James Brady, and wounded Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and police officer Thomas Delahanty, Congress passed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, or the Brady Bill, to require background checks before gun purchases.

The NRA paid for lawsuits in nine states to strike the law down, and in 1997, when the Brady Bill cases came before the Supreme Court as Printz v. United States, the Supreme Court declared parts of the measure unconstitutional.

Now a player in national politics, the NRA PAC was awash in money from gun and ammunition manufacturers, 99% of it going to Republican candidates. By 2000 it was one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington. It spent more than $40 million on the 2008 election, and in that year, the landmark Supreme Court decision of District of Columbia v. Heller struck down gun regulations and declared for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.

The unfettered right to own and carry weapons has come to symbolize the Republican Party’s ideology of individual liberty. Lawmakers and activists have not been able to overcome Republican insistence on gun rights despite the mass shootings that have risen since their new emphasis on guns. The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shootings as one in which four people are shot, not including the shooter: in 2021 alone, we had 692 of them.

While gun ownership has actually declined since the 1970s, there are far more guns in fewer hands: a study in 2017 showed that about half of US guns are owned by about 3% of the population, and that was before Americans launched a new gun-buying spree after 2020.

Ten years ago today, a 20-year-old in Newtown, Connecticut, shot and killed 20 children between the ages of six and seven, and six adult staff members at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. In the wake of those horrific murders, Congress tried to pass a bipartisan bill requiring background checks for gun purchases, but even though 90% of Americans—including nearly 74% of NRA members—supported background checks, and even though 55 senators voted for the measure, it died with a filibuster.

Dave Cullen, who writes about school shootings, argued yesterday in a New York Times op-ed that there is reason to hope we will finally address our gun problem. The Sandy Hook Massacre galvanized Americans into pushing back to reclaim our safety, as Shannon Watts and congressional representative Gabrielle Giffords—herself a survivor of gun violence–—organized the gun safety movement. That movement, in turn, got a dramatic boost from the activism of the survivors of the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which a 19-year-old gunman murdered 17 people and injured 17 others.

This June, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had to acknowledge that support for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was “off the charts, overwhelming,” and 15 Republican senators bucked the NRA to vote for basic gun safety legislation.

But, also in June, the Supreme Court handed down the sweeping New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen decision requiring those trying to place restrictions on gun ownership to prove similar restrictions were in place when the Framers wrote the Constitution. Already, a Texas judge has struck down a rule preventing domestic abusers from possessing firearms on the grounds that domestic violence was permissible in the 1700s.

The decision is being appealed.”

As written by Sebastian Murdock in Huffpost, in an article entitled Obama Reflects On ‘Darkest Day Of My Presidency’: Nearly 10 Years After Sandy Hook

Former President Barack Obama spoke at an event marking the anniversary of the 2012 school shooting that left 20 children and six adults dead.; “Former President Barack Obama said he still considers the deadly school shooting that took the lives of 20 children and six adults in 2012 the “darkest day of my presidency” as the 10th anniversary of the shooting approaches.

“I consider Dec. 14, 2012, the single darkest day of my presidency,” Obama said Tuesday night at the Sandy Hook Promise “10-Year Remembrance” benefit in New York City. “Like so many other people, I felt not just sorrow, but I felt angry, fury in a world that could allow such a thing.”

Sandy Hook Promise, started by several families who lost loved ones in the Newtown, Connecticut, shooting, is a nonprofit that aims to protect children from gun violence while teaching empathy in classrooms.

During his speech at the benefit, Obama praised Sandy Hook Promise for preventing possible acts of gun violence.

“You’ve made meaning where there was none,” Obama said. “Back when we were together in 2012, I said that Newtown would be remembered for the way that you looked out for each other, the way that you cared for one another and the way that you loved one another.”

While gun violence continues to run rampant in the U.S., there have been glimmers of positive change in the last 10 years. Sandy Hook families won $73 million in a lawsuit settlement this year against Remington Arms, which made the Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle used by the gunman during the massacre. It was the first time a gun manufacturer had been held liable for a shooting.

And the National Rifle Association (NRA), which saw its membership surge at the start of 2013 following the Sandy Hook shooting, has seen its leadership and political power crumble under the weight of mismanagement and greed over the last few years.

Then there’s Alex Jones, the conspiracy host of “Infowars,” who used his platform to mock the parents of dead children for years, falsely claiming they were actors and that their loved ones never died. This year he was finally held accountable for the torrent of abuse he leveled on the Sandy Hook families when he was ordered to pay more than $1 billion for his dangerous lies.

Earlier this year, 19 students and two teachers were killed in Uvalde, Texas, in a shooting sickeningly similar to that of Newtown. The following month, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan gun safety bill into law that enhances background checks, addresses mental health care, and places curbs on buying guns.

Obama attempted a similar push for gun violence prevention in 2016 with a bill that would have enhanced background checks. He spoke through tears the day he implored Congress to act.

“Somehow, we become numb to it, and we start thinking, ‘This is normal,’” Obama said.

Instead, the former president was roundly mocked by conservatives for his emotional plea. The bill ultimately failed, thanks in part to pressure from the NRA and a handful of Democrats who voted against the bill to cater to gun-loving voters in their states.

In his speech Tuesday, Obama said the work to curb gun violence isn’t done.

“In 2022, there has not been a single week — not one — without a mass shooting somewhere in America,” he said. “We pretend that the best we can do for the families of Sandy Hook, Parkland and Virginia Tech and so many other communities is to tinker around the edges and then offer rote recitations of our thoughts and our prayers when violence explodes once again.”

Obama admits he still gets angry when he hears about the latest senseless shooting.

“Whether it is in a church or a synagogue, in a grocery store or on a college campus or in a home or on a city street … I still feel anger,” he said. “And I hope you do too.”

As I wrote in my post of February 16 2022, Victory For the People Over Profiteers of Gun Violence and White Supremacist Terror; “ We celebrate a victory for the people over profiteers of gun violence and white supremacist terror in the case of the Sandy Hook families against Remington, manufacturer of the gun that was used to murder twenty children and six adults in a few minutes. Guns are weapons of terror and mass destruction, and should be legislated as such.

As written by Sarah Jorgensen, Jason Hanna and Erica Hill at CNN; “Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, whose son Noah was killed in the shooting, said in the news release that their loss is “irreversible, and in that sense, this outcome is neither redemptive nor restorative.”

“One moment we had this dazzling, energetic 6-year-old little boy, and the next all we had left were echoes of the past, photographs of a lost boy who will never grow older, calendars marking a horrifying new anniversary, a lonely grave, and pieces of Noah’s life stored in a backpack and boxes.”

“What is lost remains lost. However, the resolution does provide a measure of accountability in an industry that has thus far operated with impunity. For this, we are grateful.”

As written by Sebastian Murdock in Huffpost; “Nicole Hockley, whose 6-year-old son was killed in the shooting, said she hopes the settlement will push gun companies to operate differently.

“My beautiful butterfly, Dylan, is gone because Remington prioritized its profit over my son’s safety,” Hockley said in a statement. “Marketing weapons of war directly to young people known to have a strong fascination with firearms is reckless and, as too many families know, deadly conduct. Using marketing to convey that a person is more powerful or more masculine by using a particular type or brand of firearm is deeply irresponsible. My hope is that by facing and finally being penalized for the impact of their work, gun companies, along with the insurance and banking industries that enable them, will be forced to make their business practices safer than they have ever been.”

Hope is a fine and noble thing, final gift or curse of Pandora to humankind, a tenuous and frangible thing, ambiguous in meaning and its power to bring change, like love and faith, and like its confreres among our passions which are also Ideals perhaps not very bankable without action to make it real. The praxis of hope is struggle.

Here I must digress, for I believe the future evolution of humankind and the history of the next millennium will be defined by the struggle between two forces; the renunciation of the use of social force and violence as democracy and peace and the universalization of force and violence as tyranny and terror, and what we do with our hope in the face of hopeless imposed conditions of struggle and unanswerable force will decide our fate.

Camus interrogated this best and directly in The Myth of Sisyphus and constructed his Absurdism on his interpretation of the uses of hope in resistance to fascist tyranny, and nothing has superseded his insight.

Why is this relevant to the issue of gun violence? Because we face enormous systemic and structural forces in opposition to freeing ourselves from constant threat of death, and our choices here will shape our response.

When teaching Camus’ essay and his novel The Stranger, I always directed students to his remarks in the lecture he gave to the Jesuits, “the difference between us is, you have hope.”

Albert Camus used hope in a special context, for in that lecture on hope and faith Camus seizes the problem directly; hope is ambiguous, relative, a Rashomon Gate of contingency and multiplicities of meaning, and like its myth in Pandora’s Box both a gift and a curse.

How is this of use to the audience Camus wrote for, the freedom fighter who resists and yields not, beyond hope of victory or survival? How do we find the will to claw our way out of the ruins of civilization and make yet another Last Stand? How answer overwhelming force and the unwinnable fight?

As Jean Genet said to me in Beirut of 1982, moments before we expected to be burned alive by Israeli soldiers who had set fire to our house after we refused to come out and surrender, “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” It is a principle of action by which I have lived for thirty-nine years now.

Herein lies a gate which opens not to Dante’s Inferno, but to freedom and self-ownership as authenticity, and to seizure of power from authorized identities, the boundaries of the Forbidden and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, marked by a sign bearing the famous warning; “Abandon hope, all you who enter here.”

Always go through the Forbidden Door.

As Lenin asked; “What is to be done?”

Let us repeal the Second Amendment, disarm and demilitarize the police, end immunity from prosecution of gun manufacturers for the crimes which they enable and promote, disband the National Rifle Association as an organization of terror, break the link between arms manufacture as a business of empire and the carceral state which floods the market with cheap guns to shape some of us into monsters with which to terrorize the rest as a pretext for the imposition of a police state, and abandon the valorization and fetishization of violence as toxic masculinity, misogyny, and patriarchal terror.

This may be the work of centuries, but in a world wherein the national and imperial ambitions and whims of its nuclear powers, currently America, China, Russia, Britain, France, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel, and NATO nuclear weapons sharing partners Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey, can exterminate our species and annihilate much of our planet, can we afford not to act now to begin disarmament?

Today we have taken a first step as a nation toward freeing ourselves from the existential threat of gun violence and from patriarchal and white supremacist terror. This we justly celebrate, but let us also unite in solidarity of action to liberate ourselves and humankind from the use of social force.

As I wrote in my post of June 12 2019, Equal Access to Justice for Victims of Gun Violence Act; Those who manufacture, sell, or trade guns must be held responsible for the harm that they do, and we must support this important legislation which ends their immunity from being sued by the victims in whose suffering they are complicit. This industry of death must be pursued to its utter destruction.

As Gabrielle Giffords said, “The gun lobby convinced politicians that an entire industry deserved to operate without fear of ever being held responsible in a courtroom. Today, we stand up and fight again to restore the fundamentally American principle that no industry, including the gun industry, is above the law.”

Surely a least-restrictive policy of gun ownership would say, demonstrate that we can trust you with our lives, that you have earned the right to bear arms through a history of honorable conduct and self-discipline, that you are able to make kill/no kill decisions rationally and with a judgement free of racism, rage, jealousy, vengeance, the need to dominate and control and the desire to subjugate and inflict pain and terror, or other mental illness or impairment, and unclouded by drugs or alcohol, and you are free to openly carry a weapon except in areas otherwise restricted.

Who could pass such a test? Who can be trusted to bear death among us, with de facto powers of summary execution?

Our laws must recognize that anyone with a gun is a bearer of death, and has chosen this role and brings death into all situations which they encounter and all relationships in which they participate. Possession of a gun proves intent to kill. Bringing a gun into a situation means you have upped the ante to life or death in all that you do.

Choose life.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63911172

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/december-14-2022?r=7ed07&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/obama-darkest-day-presidency-sandy-hook-10-year-anniversary_n_6394ae12e4b09e0de493851e?utm_campaign=share_email&ncid=other_email_o63gt2jcad4

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/remington-arms-settles-liability-claims-in-lawsuit-against-sandy-hook-families_n_620bc87fe4b083bd1cc4f7f6?utm_campaign=share_email&ncid=other_email_o63gt2jcad4

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/school-shooting-survivors-on-how-it-affects-them-today_l_628d4eece4b0b1d9844e3d1e

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41488081

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/remington-arms-settles-liability-claims-in-lawsuit-against-sandy-hook-families_n_620bc87fe4b083bd1cc4f7f6?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fringe%202/15/22&utm_term=us-fringe

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/15/historic-funding-gun-violence-prevention-smaller-groups

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/15/us/sandy-hook-shooting-settlement-with-remington/index.html?utm_term=1644944956668fafb7b92c2aa&utm_source=cnn_Breaking+News&utm_medium=email&bt_ee=oik4ZQVYC3VroL8M0%2FteB5HUfXgCkNt5X14WB7L8EbuW3x%2BXY%2BaELNrBfw3CDo%2BC&bt_ts=1644944956671

The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91950.The_Myth_of_Sisyphus?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=uDZPpfbYmd&rank=2

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/

https://aeon.co/videos/albert-camus-built-a-philosophy-of-humanity-on-a-foundation-of-absurdity

https://www.themarginalian.org/tag/albert-camus/

View at Medium.com

December 14, 2024 0

December 13 2024 Who Speaks For Us? World Literature As An Instrument of Global Family Membership and Transnational Identity Construction

Herein I offer my idea of a useful past; world literature as contexts and sources for constructing a transnational identity as a global family member.

Yes, I once attempted to synthesize all knowledge and historical memory of our global human civilization under this banner as a resource for my high school students, including arts and sciences. I didn’t get as far as did Diderot with his Encyclopédie, all 23 volumes of it. I may have been influenced in this mad Quixotic quest by reading through our family Encyclopædia Britannica several times in my teens and twenties; ah, the folly of youth. I wasn’t trying to learn everything; I was trying to remember everything, the universe whole and entire, as the emergence of ideal forms and potentialities hidden within us.

I wanted to be able to think the thoughts of the Infinite, as much as may be within my understanding. I failed of course, but I’ve had a lot of fun trying.

The great mystery of Being in Time is not that universals connect us, but that our memory and history allow us to conserve our identity while in constant processes of adaptation and change.

We need both conserving forces which buffer us from the shock of the new and as a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation across vast epochs of time without damage to our morphology of human being, meaning, and value, but also we need revolutionary or innovational forces which allow us to meet new threats and capitalize on chaos.

How do we use reading lists as teachers, parents, readers exploring unknowns, ourselves, and the boundaries of our maps of becoming and of human being, meaning, and value?

One ongoing project which I ran for many years using these lists in high school, mainly teaching AP English for university-bound seniors, Forensics or speech and debate, and Socratic Seminars on various subjects through the Gifted and Talented Program, may also be useful for private reading or home study, groups, partners, and getting to know one’s neighbors; I asked students to choose the list of a group with which they identify and then choose partners from a different group, then select two books, one from each other’s list, to read together and give a presentation as partners about each book to the class.

This project, which I called Becoming Human Through Literature, has three goals; to develop a broad personal culture, to discover maps of how to become human, and to operate transcontextually as a global family member.

As an activity for partners in any stage of a relationship, reading books together and discussing them as you progress makes a wonderful way to explore each others values and ideas. You may surprise and delight one another; you may also surprise and reimagine yourself.

For all of these lists I began with immortal classics and added whatever I thought merited inclusion on the basis of quality alone; this is how I found myself teaching a broad and inclusive curriculum. Yes, this means I’ve read all of the books listed, many in their original languages, and with some the major critical works and essays about them; and often taught, discussed, scored student critical essays and written about them for many years. It also means that if your favorite book is not on a list, I may simply not have read it yet.

I am a product of a Great Books of the Western World education, a set of works published by Encyclopædia Britannica based on the great Mortimer J. Adler’s course at the University of Chicago, which I read entirely through during my high school years, a second time while I was at university as an undergraduate, and a third during my graduate studies in literature, Jungian psychology and comparative mythology, history, and philosophy. It is a practice which I recommend to everyone as both a starting point and a lifelong journey. This and Harold Bloom’s list in The Western Canon formed my starting point; as a teenager I began keeping lists of books I liked with notes, and the current version, in constant revision during the last forty years, I call Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2024 Edition.

On these lists are the finest books I’ve discovered over a lifetime of reading, and I hope they will bring joy to your life as they have mine.

World Literature

Universal Fields of Human and Literary Study

Feminism and Women’s Literature

March 2 2021 Women’s History Month: Feminism as Revolutionary Struggle and a Reimagination of Humankind in Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Literary Theory, and Alternate Histories

Fairytales

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature Fairytales

Mythology, Psychology, & Anthropology

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature Mythology, Psychology, & Anthropology

National Literatures

Australia, New Zealand, & Canada

Australia, New Zealand, & Canada

Austria, Germany, & Switzerland

Austria, Germany, & Switzerland

Africa

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2020 edition

Britain & Ireland

Britain & Ireland

Caribbean

the Caribbean

China

China

Cuba

Cuba: A Reading List

Eastern Europe

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: Eastern Europe

France

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: France

Greece

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: Greece

India

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: India

Iran

Iran, a reading list

Islamic Peoples

Islamic Peoples

Italy

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: Italy

Japan

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: Japan

Jewish Peoples

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: Jewish People

Latin America

Latin America

Netherlands

the Netherlands

Palestine

June 6 2021 Who Are the Palestinians?

Portugal

Portugal

Russia

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: Russia

Scandinavia

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 edition World Literature: Scandinavia: Norway, Sweden. Denmark, & Iceland

Spain

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: Spain

Where I began:

The Great Books of the Western World programme; do read them as I did beginning in eighth grade at age fourteen starting with Plato and Nietzsche, using Adler’s Ten Year Plan which took me three or four years during the three times I read it in my teens, twenties, and thirties, using his ten volume synopticon of the Great Books, the Great Ideas Program Series.

I spent around one sixth of my life in this study, in the quiet time for reflection between my many other pursuits, and wouldn’t trade a moment of it. I hope you too may find joy in this.

Great Books of the Western World, Mortimer J. Adler (Editor)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World

As written in Wikipedia; “Originally published in 54 volumes, The Great Books of the Western World covers categories including fiction, history, poetry, natural science, mathematics, philosophy, drama, politics, religion, economics, and ethics. Hutchins wrote the first volume, titled The Great Conversation, as an introduction and discourse on liberal education. Adler sponsored the next two volumes, “The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon”, as a way of emphasizing the unity of the set and, by extension, of Western thought in general. A team of indexers spent months compiling references to such topics as “Man’s freedom in relation to the will of God” and “The denial of void or vacuum in favor of a plenum”. They grouped the topics into 102 chapters, for which Adler wrote the 102 introductions. Four colors identify each volume by subject area—Imaginative Literature, Mathematics and the Natural Sciences, History and Social Science, and Philosophy and Theology.”

How to Think about the Great Ideas: From the Great Books of Western Civilization

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/136043.How_to_Think_about_the_Great_Ideas?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=K2QPaFnHoO&rank=12

“Comprised of the edited transcripts of the 1950s television series The Great Ideas produced by the Institute for Philosophical Research in San Fransisco, this book introduces laypeople to 52 great ideas of philosophy through dialogue between an interviewer and the philosopher Mortimer Adler.”

The Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought, Mortimer J. Adler

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/136048.The_Great_Ideas?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=K2QPaFnHoO&rank=35

“Mortimer Adler sat down at a manual typewriter with a list of authors and a pyramid of books. Beginning with “Angel” and ending with “World,” he set out to write 102 essays featuring the ideas that have collectively defined Western thought for more than twenty-five hundred years. The essays, originally published in the “Syntopicon,” were, and remain, the centerpiece of Encyclolpaedia Britannica’s “Great Books of the Western World.”

The Great Ideas Program Series

https://www.goodreads.com/series/170535-the-great-ideas-program

Harold Bloom’s magisterial study and reading list The Western Canon has for me some glaring limitations, both as a best books list and as representations of authorized identities and imaginal spaces to grow into and beyond.

First, it excludes everything not central to the Western European Canon as historically construed. This limits its usefulness as a map of becoming human.

Second, it dismisses nearly all works by women and nonwhite authors as “inferior in quality and a waste of time to study”, as he actually had the outrageous bigotry to write, something which by the mid 20th century should have been transparent in intent and long abandoned.

Third, it misunderstands modern American literature from World War One onward, ignores masterpieces of literature and includes irrelevant and ridiculous choices no one reads or needs to know.

Harold Bloom wrote the finest critical work on Shakespeare ever, and is reasonably trustworthy on works including the Greek and Roman classics, British Romantics, and American Transcendentalists; but here his world ends, as do his maps of becoming human.

This is where we must begin, all of us, in the reimagination and transformation of the Canon and of our limitless possibilities of Becoming Human.

The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, Harold Bloom

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20941.The_Western_Canon?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=0zyT0e4Syb&rank=1

December 14, 2024 0

December 12 2024 Before They Come For Our Books, Our Children, Our Future, Our Memories, Histories, and Identities: Modern American Literature As An Instrument Of Constructing An American Identity

It is illuminating regarding the purposes, motives, visions of the future and ideas of national identity of America’s two dyadic political parties, that while the Republicans are afraid the state is coming for their guns, we Democrats must now fear that a Second Trump Regime is coming for our books.

Before they come for our books, our children, our future, our memories, histories, and identities, we must archive and rescue what we can of our civilization before it falls and is lost.

And we must write, speak, teach, and organize democracy as the praxis of its values of Liberty, Equality, Truth, and Justice, bear witness and remember, and perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.

We must smash the Wilderness of Mirrors in which we wander, lies and illusions, propaganda and alternate realities of falsification and theft of the soul, and reclaim our stories, both those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh and those we ourselves create.

As I wrote in my post of September 1 2024, Becoming Human Through Literature: Jay’s Revised Modern Canon of Literature, a Resource For Back To School; As the new school year begins in America, and teachers, parents, students, and all those who love to read are gathering ideas for new worlds to explore, I offer here my reading lists curated over forty years, many as an English teacher at Sonoma Valley High School in California.

Of paramount importance is that school begins this year in a context of open hostility to education, a word from the Greek educatus which means to draw forth potential human being, meaning, and value rather than to stuff in facts, and which models and teaches not falsification, commodification, and dehumanization through the factory model of education as industrial production and obedience to authority, but its opposite; citizenship in a democracy as the art of asking questions and testing answers. There are historical reasons why our democracy was born in the Enlightenment and the scientific model of reason, and why tyranny is often a product of theocratic subjugation to authority.

If we are to be a free society of equals, wherein citizens are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s rights, universal education in which nothing is Forbidden as an area of experiment, inquiry, and debate is crucial; democracy requires freedom of information and communication including those of free speech and a free press.

In a time of darkness, book bans and burning, politization of school boards as subversion of democracy and repression of dissent, the forbidding of inquiry in areas which may threaten elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, we must write, speak, teach, and organize democracy as Resistance to fascist tyranny and as revolutionary struggle.

Always there remains the struggle between the masks made for us by others and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.

And our job as teachers and parents is to help, model, and guide our children in their ongoing self creation and choices about how to be human together and become citizens, not slaves.

We do not need to post and recite the Ten Commandments, pledge allegiance to gods or masters, or trade value with money which proclaims In God We Trust; because none of this is about our relationship with the Infinite, and everything to do with a state which wants to claim our obedience as the interpreter of divine will, recasting the Divine Right of Kings America was founded to overthrow. Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.

We do need to learn as a nation and as a species to cherish our uniqueness and that of others, in solidarity and not division. And if we are to be a democracy, we need an education system founded on the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.

As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in literature and history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.

Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?

To this end I offer here updated versions of the reading lists I used throughout my years of teaching AP and other English classes in high school, as supplementary choice reading lists for all four years and in Forensics which mixed all grade levels together, to stand alongside and apart from the limits of state and school board approval and control, both of curriculum and of our human possibilities.

Herein I must clarify what is taught when in American high schools; World Literature in Sophomore year, American Literature in Junior year, and British Literature in senior year. Academic Placement classes offer university credits to Seniors who pass the very rigorous exams at year end, and are a filter for what universities one can attend and offers of scholarships.

Literature as a palace of memories wherein we may think the thoughts of others is also a key to empowerment and self actualization, happiness, and stellar achievement not only in our academic careers at university but also to our professional and personal lives; a free space of play in which to discover and create ourselves. If we offer only this to our students, children, and future generations of citizens, a free space of play in the creation of themselves bearing many possible authorized identities without hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness, we have done our job as caretakers of the future. Each of us has one problem in common which we must solve in order to grow up and become ourselves; we must reinvent how to become human.

Find your bliss, as Joseph Campbell exhorts us to do; but first something must catch spark and engage our interest, provoke us to question and explore.

This is the role of relevance and inspiration in literature and much else, and why the canon is central to the project of civilization.

The canon represents nothing less than an authorized set of possible identities; this is why it must adapt and change with time.

I organized Modern American Literature as core lists by fiction, poetry, drama, science and other fictions, and also literatures of the American South, African American, Hispanic American, Native American, Asian American, Jewish American, and Hawaiian categories.

As Gertrude Stein invented the modern world after our civilization destroyed itself in World War One, my list begins with her. Where possible, superlative critical works accompany the primary sources from authors of world-historical significance.

World Literature is represented by three lists of universal tools for understanding what it means to be human and the literature we have produced, Feminism and Women’s Literature, Fairytales, and Mythology, Psychology, & Anthropology, and lists of National Literatures including Australia, New Zealand, & Canada, Austria, Germany, & Switzerland, Africa, Britain & Ireland, the Caribbean, China, Cuba, Eastern Europe, France, Greece, India, Iran, Islamic Peoples, Italy, Japan, Jewish People, Latin America, Netherlands, Palestine, Portugal, Russia, Scandinavia, and Spain.

Here I wish to signpost that nothing on my reading lists is chosen by any criterion other than quality as I so judge; in contrast to official reading lists chosen for reading level and state objectives by grade and also appropriate age level content, because values are always negotiated truths and a ground of struggle, and in America the Texas Board of Education controls through purchasing power and ideological influence the publication of all textbooks nationally and is highly political and moreover falsified by the network of fundamentalist churches it represents. Ever wonder why our history text books make no mention of slavery as a cause of the Civil War?

How do we use reading lists as teachers, parents, readers exploring unknowns, ourselves, and the boundaries of our maps of becoming and of human being, meaning, and value?

One ongoing project which I ran for many years using these lists in high school may also be useful for private reading or home study, groups, partners, and getting to know one’s neighbors; I asked students to choose the list of a group with which they identify and then choose partners from a different group, then select two books, one from each other’s list, to read together and give a presentation as partners about each book to the class.

For all of these lists I began with immortal classics and added whatever I thought merited inclusion on the basis of quality alone; this is how I found myself teaching a broad and inclusive curriculum. Yes, this means I’ve read all of the books listed, many in their original languages, and with some the major critical works and essays about them; and often taught, discussed, scored student critical essays and written about them for many years; works thoroughly lived with. It also means that if your favorite book is not on a list, I may simply not have read it yet.

Regarding my own critical biases as consequences of my personal history; I am a product of a Great Books of the Western World education, a set of works published by Encyclopædia Britannica based on the great Mortimer J. Adler’s course at the University of Chicago, which I read entirely through during my high school years, a second time while I was at university as an undergraduate majoring in English and Creative Writing but also in a Nexus program of arts and sciences, and a third during my graduate studies in literature, Jungian psychology and comparative mythology, history, and philosophy. It is a practice which I recommend to everyone as both a starting point and a lifelong journey. This and Harold Bloom’s list in The Western Canon formed my starting point; as a teenager I began keeping lists of books I liked with notes, and the current version, in constant revision during the last forty years, I call Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2024 Edition.

On these lists are the finest books I’ve discovered over a lifetime of reading, and I hope they will bring joy to your life as they have mine.

Why is a diverse and limitless field of reading and study necessary to creating ourselves and our identities as we grow up? How does our education shape our political and social decisions about who we are and how to be human together?

As I wrote in my post of October 4 2021, What is the True Purpose of Public Education in a Democracy?; In The Addams Family Goes to School, wherein the truant officer is dispatched to bring Pugsley and Wednesday, aged 6 and 8 who have never been to school, our introduction to this family of glorious misfits, monsters, and forgotten gods, we are presented with a morality play of revolutionary struggle and a recurring theme of the series in which individuals and society are locked in a titanic battle for ownership of identity, with the stakes being autonomy or theft of the soul.

What is the true purpose of public education?

School is the forge of normality, authorized identities of sex and gender, the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, the institutionalization of nationalist values and narratives of exclusivity, valorization of competition, violence, militarism, and the apologetics of capitalist elitism as meritocracy, and of hierarchies of membership and exclusionary otherness and divisions of race. Here we sort future masters from those who will serve them.

Public education is also our one chance to reimagine and transform our civilization through its members, to produce citizens of a free society of equals who can fulfill the four primary duties of a citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.

Tyranny cannot withstand exposure, truthtelling, and the witness of history.

Can democracy function as diversity and inclusion, or does throwing all the children in a pen together to sort themselves out always result in assimilation or exclusion, hierarchies of exclusionary division or making everyone the same?

The politization of public education has become national news recently with violent and disruptive confrontations during school board meetings, but this is nothing new. Education is a ground of struggle; who is chosen to succeed and take their place among our elite and who will clean their houses, serve their food, produce the goods and material basis of their survival.

At stake here is nothing less than the definition of our humanity, of freedom and equality, of who will manage systems, process symbols, ideas, and information, create and have the power to change civilization, and who will service them.

Every aspect of education as a social system, textbooks and the canon of literature, how history is taught, tests and success filters for access to power and wealth, class stratification or mobility, patriarchy, racial divisions, language, all of it is volatile and of crucial importance to the project of democracy.

As written by Sherman Dorn in The Washington Post; “Chaos and violence seem to be the themes of the first month of school. To many observers, these may appear to be exceptional, unprecedented times. But there’s a long history of public schools serving as ideological and physical battlegrounds, particularly when it comes to conflicts over citizenship and civil rights.

The violent response this fall by some Americans to public health measures and teaching our history of racism is an echo of violent responses in the past to efforts to broaden the reach and mission of schools. And this history also shows that how government reacts is not foreordained, and that the choice of responses will play a major role in determining the long-term consequences of this violence.

In the 1830s and 1840s, industrialization in Massachusetts triggered civil disorder, including the Boston riots between Protestants and immigrant Catholics. State Secretary of Education Horace Mann thought he had a solution to this strife, arguing for educating all children together in what he called common schools designed to foster a background that all children would share.

But this concept proved fractious from the start.

No sooner did common schools emerge than violence engulfed them. In 1844, Catholic families in Philadelphia sought representation in the schools. Yet many White Protestants saw Catholic immigrants as a threat to a burgeoning national identity, and nowhere was that assault clearer than in their supposed attempts to take over the public schools. So nativists spread false rumors that Catholic immigrants were pushing local public schools to remove Bibles.

These rumors, fear and anger spread and neighbors took to the streets. Multi-day riots in May and July resulted in the burning of multiple Catholic churches and the deaths of more than two dozen people.

Violence at and around schools became even more widespread after the Civil War. As newly elected Black politicians joined with community members to create a system of public schooling in the South, they fused schooling and citizenship. All the Reconstruction-era state constitutions that Congress approved had education embedded as a right. The appearance of public schools for Black children and the promise of access to all aspects of society enraged some White Southerners who feared the erosion of a social order that gave them privilege and power. Those fears translated to direct attacks.

Because of the central role of public education in the new definition of American citizenship, Southern racists targeted schools as part of an explicit counterrevolution to undermine Reconstruction and civil rights. The Ku Klux Klan regularly attacked schools, and being a teacher in a Black community was one of the most vulnerable occupations throughout the late 19th century.

For a brief period in the early 20th century, school violence dissipated, but for the worst of reasons. Across the South, White elites imposed systems of disfranchisement and segregation; systematically and structurally disadvantaged, Black schools became less of a visible threat to White supremacy and reigning power arrangements.

But schooling became the center of widespread community conflict and violence again in the early 1940s. When two Jehovah’s Witness children, Lillian and William Gobitas, refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance in their Minersville, Pa., public school classroom, they were expelled. Their case wound through the federal courts, finally reaching the Supreme Court, which decided in favor of the school district.

In the wake of that decision, Jehovah’s Witnesses were assaulted in communities across the country, often with members of the American Legion as leading local vigilantes. Coming to the schools with a mob mentality, Legionnaires and others identified the pledge in public schools as fundamental to American identity and those who refused to say it as national threats. In wartime, the mobs — and many other Americans — viewed dissent as suspicious and unpatriotic.

From Litchfield, Ill., to Kennebunk, Maine, entire towns were wracked by anti-Witness mobs. Children who refused to say the pledge for any number of reasons faced expulsion and threats of incarceration, as did their parents for encouraging juvenile delinquency.

In part shamed by the violence following their earlier decision, the majority of the court reversed itself three years later. As Justice Robert Jackson explained in his majority decision, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

Despite this shift and the protection of students’ right to dissent, public schools remained figurative and literal battlegrounds in the fight over American identity and rights.

In the fall of 1957, White mobs in Little Rock, Ark., turned out in protest of the nine Black students desegregating Central High School. As Melba Pattillo Beals described in her memoir, on the first day of school her classmate Elizabeth Eckford was sandwiched between Arkansas National Guard members refusing to let her enter the school and “a huge crowd of white people screeching at her back … [having] closed in like diving vultures … [who] shouted, stomped, and whistled as though her awful predicament were a triumph for them.” The mobs dispersed only after President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to enforce federal court orders to desegregate.

In Nashville the same month, a violent opponent of desegregation bombed Hattie Cotton Elementary School. No one was hurt in the late-night bombing, but as historian Sonya Ramsey explained, the single Black student in the school stopped attending.

In the 1970s, White mobs attacked buses carrying Black students as they arrived at South Boston High School.

Across American history, schools have been vulnerable to periodic violence that surrounds debates about citizenship and equal rights in education, including the role of schools in fostering shared childhood experiences, in building citizenship and equal education regardless of race, and in allowing principled dissent from rituals.

The strife this year fits into that broader pattern. To the parents and politicians angry or confused about critical race theory, like the parents and politicians angry or confused about mask mandates and health policies, the public schools are a key front in a battle for their rights and standing as citizens.

Debate over the role and purposes of public schools is a healthy sign of a functioning democracy. But violence around schooling is fundamentally at odds with the give-and-take of democratic decision-making. And it demands a strong response from authorities.

In 1943, the Supreme Court reversed the decision that had triggered mob violence against Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1957, Eisenhower responded to the resistance to desegregation in Arkansas by dispatching federal troops.

Yet when the government has failed to confront violence, the consequences have been severe. In 1833, abolitionist Prudence Crandall opened her Canterbury, Conn., boarding school to Sarah Harris and other Black girls and women. Public officials responded by making it illegal for her to admit students from out of state without town permission, prosecuted her and stood by while a mob destroyed much of her school in 1834. Crandall moved to Illinois the next year, costing Connecticut a dedicated educational leader and beginning two centuries of a long troubled history of school segregation in New England.

The history of education teaches us that violence surrounding democratic schooling is part of a recurring pattern and that we have a choice to passively accept or assertively confront violent impulses.”

As I wrote in my post of March 22 2020, The Subversion of our Education System and Democracy; The suspension of our national standardized testing has revealed a failure of our education system; the commodification and privatization of learning and the modeling of our schools on factory production has produced a generation of Americans who can follow orders, perform routine tasks, and parrot facts, but whose abilities to create, invent, reason, and analyze and interpret facts have been crippled. This is intentional.

Educatus, the Greek word origin of education, means to bring out rather than to stuff facts in. It is an idea bound together with that of citizens as co-owners of their own government in a democracy, and equally responsible for one another and for the stewardship of its four pillars of freedom, equality, truth, and justice.

Our civilization is founded and premised on its ability to question itself; this capacity for adaptation and transformation sets democracy apart from the tyrannies of priest-kings which had come before. From our origin in the Forum of Athens, the dialectics of Socratic method has been the forge of our identity as an anti-hierarchical culture, a free society of equals in which the greatest duty of a citizen is to question, expose, mock, and challenge authority, to incite, provoke, and disturb, and we must return this process to its central role in education if liberty is to survive and flourish in this age of state terror and control.

We have permitted the subversion of our education system and democracy by those who would enslave us. And we must take it back.

As I wrote in my post of July 8 2021, Truth, Lies, and History as a Ground of Struggle; the Case of Critical Race Theory Repression; We are confronted today with the realization of a nightmare and prophetic vision written by George Orwell in 1984, the classic novel of unequal power and the authoritarian nature of government which rendered in the chiaroscuro of a newsreel depicting the liberation of concentration camps a fictional interrogation of totalitarianism as a companion volume to Hannah Arendt’s nonfictional The Origins of Totalitarianism.

The remnants of the Fourth Reich and the organizations of white supremacist treason and terror within our government who remain loyal to Trump’s vision of a white ethnostate want the government to control what is taught as history in our schools, which would be the death knell of freedom and equality in America, and are enacting a furious assault on our values and on public education as a guarantor of an informed electorate in order to render meaningless the idea of citizenship, the co-ownership of the state by its members, in parallel with vote suppression legislation.

As I wrote in my post of June 22 2021, Our History Swallows Us Like An Infinite Moebius Loop and We Become Prisoners of Its Gordian Knot: the Case of Kurdistan; History becomes a wilderness of mirrors; of lies and illusions, distorted and captured images endlessly reflected which violate our uniqueness, falsify us, limit and entrap us in authorized identities and narratives which serve the interests of elite power and not our own.

Our histories and memories are the anchorages of our identity and the wellspring of our becoming, networks of connectedness which sustain our harmony and wholeness; but such nets can ensnare us as well, and become atavisms we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.

Our history swallows us like an infinite Moebius Loop, and we become prisoners of its Gordian Knot; the case of Critical Race Theory repression illumines the vicious cycle of fear, power, and force as racism and fascist tyranny overlap and intermingle hideously, consuming its most vulnerable population as sacrifices on the altar of wealth and power.

As I wrote in my post of December 5 2020, Whose Story Is This?; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?

I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.

We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.

The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.

As I wrote in my post of June 19 2020, Liberation, Memory, History, and Human Being: a Narrative Theory of Identity; On this Juneteenth we celebrate the final Emancipation of the Black peoples of America from slavery, and also the Liberation of Humankind from all forms of ownership by others. The first kind of freedom was won in the Civil War and is particular to our unique history; the second kind of freedom is universal and is yet to the achieved.

There has been much insightful and relevant discussion of our history of slavery and racial inequality and violence during the Black Lives Matter protests in the weeks before this holiday, of the silencing and erasure of people of color from our historical memory and of the divisions of exclusionary otherness and defense of unequal power in our society through state control of our identity and relations with others at every level of human interaction.

Beyond the state terror of racist police violence, this is the primary means of repression and power asymmetry perpetrated against us by the ruling class; not the secret prisons and assassinations, not the racist death squads or the dehumanization and commodification of the working class by the cabal of plutocratic capitalists, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, and white supremacist terrorists who together comprise the fascist Republican conspiracy of atavistic barbarism, but their theft of the possibilities of human meaning and being through control of our educational system and rewritten history.

Why are we taught to revere Independence Day on the Fourth of July, but not Emancipation Day on June 19?

Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.

Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?

Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, or submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?

America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the ideas of other people and from the force and control of the state.

Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.

We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves.

Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.

Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?

Whose story is this? This question must be the beginning of a new pedagogy of education in history, and remain central to the project of its study. True education in the discipline of history asks Socratic questions and teaches methods of research, analysis, interpretation, and the publishing and presentation of insights and discoveries; education in general teaches us to interrogate and test claims of truth.

Trump has proclaimed the triumph of propaganda in authorizing an official state version of historical truth, whose purpose is to institutionalize the Mayflower Puritan/Pilgrim mythos as a competing narrative of national origins to the 1619 hypothesis. This seems to me an excellent idea, if we ignore the authorization of identity and government disinformation facets and instead make this interrogation of competing narratives itself the heart of our national story and curriculum.

Myths of colonialism, fictive inventions of national origin, and the roots of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil in our triumphalist narratives of Pilgrim and Puritan founders of America. Though the Mayflower Compact was signed November 21, celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the voyage began last week with its departure for America, which are being promoted by our government as a reply to the 1619 Project. This I cannot abide, so say I in paraphrase of the hero in the film Inglorious Basterds; can you abide it?

As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.

Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.”

We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr., Mary Doria Russell (Introduction)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/164154.A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=h2jq0VffkV&rank=1

September 1 2024 Becoming Human Through Literature: Jay’s Revised Modern Canon of Literature, a Resource For Back To School

September 1 2024 Becoming Human Through Literature: Jay’s Revised Modern Canon of Literature, a Resource For Back To School

September 8 2024 International Literacy Day: What is a Library For?

September 8 2024 International Literacy Day: What is a Library For?

Modern American Literature

Modern American Fiction

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon Modern American Literature 2022 Revision

Modern American Poetry

American Poetry 2022 edition

Modern American Drama

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon American Drama

American Science and other fictions

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon Modern American Literature 2022 Edition American Science and other Fictions

Literature of the American South

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon Modern American Literature 2022 Edition Literature of the American South

Native American Literature

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon Modern American Literature 2022 Edition Native American History and Literature

African American Literature

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon Modern American Literature 2022 Edition African American History & Literature

Hispanic American Literature

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon Modern American Literature 2022 Edition Hispanic-American History & Literature

Jewish American Literature

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon Modern American Literature 2022 Edition Jewish American History & Literature

Asian American Literature

Jay’s Revised Modern Canon Modern American Literature 2022 Edition Asian American History & Literature

Modern American Literature: Hawai’I

Hawai’i: a reading list

December 14, 2024 0

December 11 2024 Hero of the People Luigi Mangione Brings A Reckoning To America’s Predatory Healthcare Insurance System

From his life as a seed of change, may thousands Arise and seize power from those who would enslave, commodify, and dehumanize us as the raw material of their power.

All Resistance is War to the Knife; those who respect no limits and no laws may hide behind none.

Luigi Mangione has assassinated an apex predator of an unjust system of oppression, and opened the floodgates of a vast and primal rage among the underclasses of our society which may one day bring a reimagination and transformation to our bizarre and loathsome private healthcare system which is designed to enforce elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege. For this act of exposure and challenge of authority, of Resistance, seizure of power, and bringing a Reckoning, I here sing his praise.

Let his valor and glorious refusal to submit and die quietly in the enormity of his grief and pain be celebrated and remembered, but let us also give reply with our solidarity of action, for free universal healthcare is a precondition of the Right to Life and guaranteed by our Bill of Rights. What does it mean to be human, if not to be each other’s keepers?

Go Not Quietly.

The Allopathic Complex and Its Consequences

Luigi Mangione’s last words

Dec 09, 2024

The second amendment means I am my own chief executive and commander in chief of my own military. I authorize my own act of self-defense in response to a hostile entity making war on me and my family.

Nelson Mandela says no form of viooence can be excused. Camus says it’s all the same, whether you live or die or have a cup of coffee. MLK says violence never brings permanent peace. Gandhi says that non-violence is the mightiest power available to mankind.

That’s who they tell you are heroes. That’s who our revolutionaries are.

Yet is that not capitalistic? Non-violence keeps the system working at full speed ahead.

What did it get us. Look in the mirror.

They want us to be non-violent, so that they can grow fat off the blood they take from us.

The only way out is through. Not all of us will make it. Each of us is our own chief executive. You have to decide what you will tolerate.

In Gladiator 1 Maximus cuts into the military tattoo that identifies him as part of the roman legion. His friend asks “Is that the sign of your god?” As Maximus carves deeper into his own flesh, as his own blood drips down his skin, Maximus smiles and nods yes. The tattoo represents the emperor, who is god. The god emperor has made himself part of Maximus’s own flesh. The only way to destroy the emperor is to destroy himself. Maximus smiles through the pain because he knows it is worth it.

These might be my last words. I don’t know when they will come for me. I will resist them at any cost. That’s why I smile through the pain.

They diagnosed my mother with severe neuropathy when she was forty-one years old. She said it started ten years before that with burning sensations in her feet and occasional sharp stabbing pains. At first the pain would last a few moments, then fade to tingling, then numbness, then fade to nothing a few days later.

The first time the pain came she ignored it. Then it came a couple times a year and she ignored it. Then every couple months. Then a couple times a month. Then a couple times a week. At that point by the time the tingling faded to numbness, the pain would start, and the discomfort was constant. At that point even going from the couch to the kitchen to make her own lunch became a major endeavor

She started with ibuprofen, until the stomach aches and acid reflux made her switch to acetaminophen. Then the headaches and barely sleeping made her switch back to ibuprofen.

The first doctor said it was psychosomatic. Nothing was wrong. She needed to relax, destress, sleep more.

The second doctor said it was a compressed nerve in her spine. She needed back surgery. It would cost $180,000. Recovery would be six months minimum before walking again. Twelve months for full potential recovery, and she would never lift more than ten pounds of weight again.

The third doctor performed a Nerve Conduction Study, Electromyography, MRI, and blood tests. Each test cost $800 to $1200. She hit the $6000 deductible of her UnitedHealthcare plan in October. Then the doctor went on vacation, and my mother wasn’t able to resume tests until January when her deductible reset.

The tests showed severe neuropathy. The $180,000 surgery would have had no effect.

They prescribed opioids for the pain. At first the pain relief was worth the price of constant mental fog and constipation. She didn’t tell me about that until later. All I remember is we took a trip for the first time in years, when she drove me to Monterey to go to the aquarium. I saw an otter in real life, swimming on its back. We left at 7am and listened to Green Day on the four-hour car ride. Over time, the opioids stopped working. They made her MORE sensitive to pain, and she felt withdrawal symptoms after just two or three hours.

Then gabapentin. By now the pain was so bad she couldn’t exercise, which compounded the weight gain from the slowed metabolic rate and hormonal shifts. And it barely helped the pain, and made her so fatigued she would go an entire day without getting out of bed.

Then Corticosteroids. Which didn’t even work.

The pain was so bad I would hear my mother wake up in the night screaming in pain. I would run into her room, asking if she’s OK. Eventually I stopped getting up. She’d yell out anguished shrieks of wordless pain or the word “fuck” stretched and distended to its limits. I’d turn over and go back to sleep.

All of this while they bled us dry with follow-up appointment after follow-up appointment, specialist consultations, and more imagine scans. Each appointment was promised to be fully covered, until the insurance claims were delayed and denied. Allopathic medicine did nothing to help my mother’s suffering. Yet it is the foundation of our entire society.

My mother told me that on a good day the nerve pain was like her legs were immersed in ice water. On a bad day it felt like her legs were clamped in a machine shop vice, screwed down to where the cranks stopped turning, then crushed further until her ankle bones sprintered and cracked to accommodate the tightening clamp. She had more bad days than good.

My mother crawled to the bathroom on her hands and knees. I slept in the living room to create more distance from her cries in the night. I still woke up, and still went back to sleep.

Back then I thought there was nothing I could do.

The high copays made consistent treatment impossible. New treatments were denied as “not medically necessary.” Old treatments didn’t work, and still put us out for thousands of dollars.

UnitedHealthcare limited specialist consultations to twice a year.

Then they refused to cover advanced imaging, which the specialists required for an appointment.

Prior authorizations took weeks, then months.

UnitedHealthcare constantly changed their claim filing procedure. They said my mother’s doctor needed to fax his notes. Then UnitedHealthcare said they did not save faxed patient correspondence, and required a hardcopy of the doctor’s typed notes to be mailed. Then they said they never received the notes. They were unable to approve the claim until they had received and filed the notes.

They promised coverage, and broke their word to my mother.

With every delay, my anger surged. With every denial, I wanted to throw the doctor through the glass wall of their hospital waiting room.

But it wasn’t them. It wasn’t the doctors, the receptionists, administrators, pharmacists, imaging technicians, or anyone we ever met. It was UnitedHealthcare.

People are dying. Evil has become institutionalized. Corporations make billions of dollars off the pain, suffering, death, and anguished cries in the night of millions of Americans.

We entered into an agreement for healthcare with a legally binding contract that promised care commensurate with our insurance payments and medical needs. Then UnitedHealthcare changes the rules to suit their own profits. They think they make the rules, and think that because it’s legal that no one can punish them.

They think there’s no one out there who will stop them.

Now my own chronic back pain wakes me in the night, screaming in pain. I sought out another type of healing that showed me the real antidote to what ails us.

I bide my time, saving the last of my strength to strike my final blows. All extractors must be forced to swallow the bitter pain they deal out to millions.

As our own chief executives, it’s our obligation to make our own lives better. First and foremost, we must seek to improve our own circumstances and defend ourselves. As we do so, our actions have ripple effects that can improve the lives of others.

Rules exist between two individuals, in a network that covers the entire earth. Some of these rules are written down. Some of these rules emerge from natural respect between two individuals. Some of these rules are defined in physical laws, like the properties of gravity, magnetism or the potential energy stored in the chemical bonds of potassium nitrate.

No single document better encapsulates the belief that all people are equal in fundamental worth and moral status and the frameworks for fostering collective well-being than the US constitution.

Writing a rule down makes it into a law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. Law means nothing. What does matter is following the guidance of our own logic and what we learn from those before us to maximize our own well-being, which will then maximize the well-being of our loved ones and community.

That’s where UnitedHealthcare went wrong. They violated their contract with my mother, with me, and tens of millions of other Americans. This threat to my own health, my family’s health, and the health of our country’s people requires me to respond with an act of war.

END

Brian Thompson’s killing inspired rage – against the healthcare industry

Thousands of Americans go bankrupt, lose their homes or die every year due to medical insurer practices

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/07/brian-thompson-killing-healthcare-industry?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawHG0cFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHf6-yyLCrNL3JWGs2csvi0rWy0sQuGlG57_8f-Xqj3BZR6_dEcOXlVg-CA_aem_9ge17rwi6xqIurYSnrtm3g

The popular response to the shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO and American realities

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/10/kerj-d10.html

Americans Hate Their Private Health Insurance

https://jacobin.com/2024/12/unitedhealthcare-murder-private-insurance-democrats

Blame Health Insurers for Exorbitant Health Care Costs

https://jacobin.com/2024/12/health-care-shooting-insurance-costs

We Don’t Just Need Medicare for All — We Need a National Health System

https://jacobin.com/2023/05/physicians-for-a-national-health-program-interview-medicare-for-all-national-health-system

US health reform is tough to pass. Can the brazen killing of a CEO change that?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/11/health-reform-brian-thompson-shooting?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawHG0hpleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHcPbCsLUQVvZdWqkZ3TJ7PvzJ7sbcrMwXfC532HaeHYNYT7F4nXb9FDLjg_aem_ayzm-3WISwyMWMbAFlHAYg

New York police warn US healthcare executives about online ‘hitlist’

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/11/new-york-police-us-healthcare-hit-list?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawHG0l5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHWGQgyr1qbZC-e8cvaHJY3mqya94kWgbaRyTrmsV60DVq-P2YVLcopsSkQ_aem_yAUekLHoHMvpIYX3XJMooA

Luigi Mangione’s Anger Wasn’t Neatly Ideological

https://jacobin.com/2024/12/luigi-mangione-unitedhealthcare-thompson-ideological?fbclid=IwY2xjawHGw55leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHRR3C0WPBGIND43SFIp3mmJoEZhsgQJyPxZO_3wOVUCflVBgPCae1miTbQ_aem_5dPwHMiXVElzwXD8d3mAvg&sfnsn=mo

Deprivatising Healthcare, a reading list

Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide, by Abdul El-Sayed https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52617340-medicare-for-all

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, by Anne Case https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51801314-deaths-of-despair-and-the-future-of-capitalism

Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It, by Jay M. Feinman https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7932991-delay-deny-defend

Frankenstein, Not Robin Hood: Luigi Mangione

Ambition, Consequences, and a Perfect Storm

Michele Hornish

https://michelehornish.substack.com/p/frankenstein-not-robin-hood-luigi?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true&fbclid=IwY2xjawHG0xJleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHV4F-yIerZg_KHfbKKvSk5OizsI_alAC1ccLPX7IheyqZpbFDo4xSdtsUA_aem_fULOY-Lh3nBiKcXoLn_Vbg

December 11, 2024 0