the cassandra pages

Permutations of the Same Thing

It's been two months since I last wrote here, the longest break I think I've taken in the twenty-plus-year history of this blog. During the summer, we cleaned, packed, and sold my family home at the lake in central New York. Since coming back to Montreal, I've needed some time to rest from that labor, both physically and emotionally, and reconnect with my life here. I feel like I'm still doing that.

Just recently, I got out my oil paints and began working again on a small painting I started several months ago. I hadn't been happy with it, but put it aside for a while, not being sure what was wrong. When I looked at it again recently, I realized that there was too much going on in the foreground, which detracted from the main subject - the white cliffs - and that the composition wasn't working, and needed to be simplified. The finished painting is above, and the video below shows the process this piece went through. This view of dramatic cliffs and and olive trees is along the road from Patras to Corinth, Greece, and I must have taken some pictures out the window of the car as we sped along the highway. 

 

 

Even though personal affairs have been in the foreground of my own summer, I haven't been ignoring the political landscape. Like so many American voters, I was dismayed by Biden's performance in the debate, and relieved when he finally stepped aside because I was certain he could not win the election. I will vote for Kamala Harris, but unlike many Democratic voters, and, it seemed, almost everyone at the made-for-tv spectacle that was the Democratic Convention, I am not jumping up and down with enthusiasm. I wish I could be -- a woman president, at last, and of a younger generation? And a person of color as well -- these are very good things, which I welcome. However, the picture that we have all been looking at, throughout Biden's presidency, needs a radical reworking. Only Bernie Sanders named the elephant in the room, when he called for an end to the horrendous war in Gaza; there were no Palestinian voices at the convention, which was deliberate of course, in spite of the thousands of protesters outside. I understand and share the relief that many feel in having a viable ticket with Harris/Walz; the alternative is unthinkable. But the problems America faces are so deep and so entrenched now, and these candidates, I am sorry to say, do not represent real change. I wish them well, I hope they win, but militarism, rampant capitalism, and a belief in American exceptionalism are not going to solve the problems facing ordinary people, abroad or at home, or save this fragile planet. 

Gathering the Summer Fruits

Edge of a cornfield, central New York.

It hasn't been a normal summer for any of us, but it's been a whole lot better than last year, and for that I'm grateful. Vaccination proofs and passports in hand, we crossed the Canadian -U.S. border in July, for the first time in 18 months, to visit my father. My sister-in-law also drove over from Massachusetts to see us for two days, which was a special and unexpected pleasure. Dad and I were so happy to see each other again, and even though he's having trouble with his legs and back -- very difficult for someone who was always so athletic -- he's still doing remarkably well for his age. I wish I could say the same for the United States. I was shocked to see and hear the polarization expressed so vehemently, and often crudely, on lawn signs and in conversation even in the small rural towns we visited. The vaccination levels are nowhere near what they are in Canada, (but far better than the U.S. South) and with Delta the cases are rising fast, but people were acting as if the pandemic were over. It was, to say the least, pretty disturbing to witness what seem to be two distinct realities between our countries. Nevertheless, finally being able to see family and friends in person, both there and here at home, has made a big difference in my emotional equilibrium.

A corner of G.'s garden.

Last week we went out to the Eastern Townships to visit our friend G., which is usually an annual pilgrimage, but one that we missed last year. We enjoyed his gorgeous perennial garden, in the last flush of summer bloom, and shared a memorable meal of fresh sweet corn, tomato and basil salad, duck confit, and blueberries. While there, the three of us picked the black currants that the squirrels and deer had left on G.'s bush, and later that weekend I managed to eek out four jars of intense, deep purple jam, to be shared with G.

Picking black currants, photo by J. - my new favorite photograph of myself.

A few days after that we hosted a tiny candlelit terrace dinner party for our friend V., with just four of us; Julia Child's butter spongecake (French Cooking Vol 1) was the hit of that evening, filled with mascarpone cream and sliced Ontario nectarines and topped with whipped cream and more nectarines and raspberries.

Our terrace garden is mostly flowers and leafy plants, heavy on the begonias, but it's also yielded a bumper crop of grape tomatoes and non-stop herbs, of which I've especially enjoyed the Thai basil and regular Genovese basil and its small-leaved Greek cousin.

Of course some of these summer scenes and bounty have made their way into my artwork. I spent several hours one afternoon sketching the hemlock trees on my father's front lawn, above the lake:

And on the non-edible side of things, yesterday I did a painting of a branch of monkshood, Aconitum, from G.'s garden, and found myself struggling to find the patience to do that sort of detailed botanical painting after a long hiatus.

But I'd wanted to capture its fantastic shape - those dark blossoms that are so evocative of the monk's hoods for which they're named, and because it feels somewhat connected to G. himself, who lives an intentionally contemplative life. Monkshood has quite a history. The botanical genus name Aconitum (there are 250 species) is most likely from the Greek word for "dart," because it was used in antiquity and throughout history as a poison on arrow-tips for hunts and in battle. A couple of grisly anecdotes: in 1524, Pope Clement VII decided to test an antidote for this plant -- also known as the "Queen of Poisons" -- by deliberately giving aconite-tainted marzipan to two prisoners; the one who received the antidote lived but the other died horribly. And in 2020, the president of Kyrgyzstan touted aconite root as a treatment for COVID; four people were hospitalized before his suggestion was debunked.

So in the middle of the summer harvest, it felt rather exotic to learn all of that about a common plant of northern gardens -- in fact, there's quite a bit of it in one of the city's gardens in a park near my home.

I think the limitations of the pandemic have created greater pleasure in these small things; I find myself paying closer attention, and appreciating the first ear of corn, the succulent strawberries, the succession of bloom and the phases of the moon. I dreamt the other night that I had awakened at my father's house at the lake, and looked up through the bedroom window to see the sky glittering more brilliantly than I'd ever seen it, with millions of stars.

People here are still being very prudent, and not gathering in large groups; masks are required indoors, and everyone is bracing for the fall as cases due to the variants begin to rise, even though 84% of the population has had at least one dose, and over 70% have had two. As elsewhere, almost all the hospitalized people are unvaccinated, but there are breakthrough infections and we can all transmit the virus. Please get your shots and be careful, wherever you are.

Hermit Diary 60. Full Circle

When I began writing this blog, eighteen years ago today, it seemed appropriate to name it after the Trojan princess Cassandra, cursed by her spurned lover, Apollo, to utter prophesies that would always be accurate but never believed. That was on the eve of the Iraq War, the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks, which I was certain would plunge the world into an endless war between cultures, and a great destabilization that would cause untold human misery through civil war, destruction, loss of life and livelihood, and migration that would be rejected by much of the western world, which would also refuse to admit they had caused it. I am not happy to say that I was right; I would have loved to be wrong.

At the time, I couldn't have predicted the exact shape that the far right would take in the United States, or in other countries: this has been worse than I ever anticipated. Climate change has accelerated even faster than I feared, and I never would have thought the United States would actually withdraw from international environmental agreements - thankfully, this decision has been reversed. I didn't know that I would not only move to Canada, but become a Canadian citizen, though it was a possibility. I'm appalled but not surprised by the racism, ethnic hatred, misogyny, and violence of these years,  as I wrote in that first blog post in 2003:

And so I’ve spent the day -- this day that feels like an ultimate Good Friday -- trying to work, trying to do "normal" things, well aware that nothing is normal, that it may be a very long time before the world feels normal again. As a pacifist and a liberal Christian, I’m wracked by two conflicting emotions: the desire to be peaceful and centered ... and an intense anger at everyone who has contributed to bringing us to this abyss. On this day of self-examination I don’t exempt myself. Somehow it doesn’t help in these final hours to know that I’ve been a dedicated antiwar activist, to know I’ve tried. All I have to do is look around at my comfortable home, or hear the oil-burning furnace come on, or draw some clean water from the tap. All I have to do is walk over to the filing cabinet and take out last year’s tax return with my signature at the bottom, authorizing the use of my money for whatever purpose my government decides. What percentage for tanks and bombs and depleted uranium shells? I could do the math and figure out my personal subsidy. If I really wanted to go crazy, I could do the math.

The anger persists, and toward mid-afternoon I realize a lot of it is anger at that particular kind of high-testosterone male aggression that is fueled by revenge. It cannot see the victim, cannot empathize, cannot imagine another way other than striking out with violence. It feeds on itself and on talk with other like-members of the species, enlarging, encouraging, exaggerating, moving inexorably toward a violent, cathartic release...

This is the maleness that has given rise to, and perpetuated, all patriarchal systems. Theirs is the personal patriarchy that treats women as property but insists it is only protecting them. Theirs is the patriarchy that institutionalized oppression of women, and allowed slavery, and fought tooth and nail against emancipation and equal rights for any groups other than itself. It is the patriarchy that destroyed native cultures, and gave rise to colonialism and empire-building. It is the patriarchy that chooses theory over empathy, the patriarchy that always knows best.

Eighteen years later, I wonder how many deaths will it take. The United States has glossed over so many, from the bombing of faraway innocent children to the murders of its own Black, Asian and Hispanic citizens; deaths in the desert and at the border and in prison camps; deaths of women from domestic violence; deaths during an invasion of the nation's Capital;  even -- incomprehensibly -- the deaths of little American children gunned down in their classrooms. Right-wing hatred is continually directed at The Other, but the perpetrators of this terrorism, in almost every single case, have been angry white men.

Still, I never would have predicted what the world has lived through over the past year: a pandemic of such magnitude that it brought the entire world to its knees, cost the lives of millions, and caused untold human suffering that has been unjustly borne by the poor, by people of color, the elderly in care homes, those working in high-risk professions without proper protection, and those without access to technology. 

Because I am not in those categories, I have been safe throughout this long year. Two days ago, I had my first vaccination. It was given in a huge conference center here in Montreal, the Palais des Congres: Quebec has made a commitment to vaccinate all adults with a first dose by our national holiday, June 24, St-Jean Baptiste Day and they are moving very fast toward that goal. The nurse who gave me my shot seemed to be about my age, and I asked her in French if she had been working throughout the pandemic. No, she replied, I'm retired, but I volunteered to come back and do this because I have the training. Merci beaucoup, I replied, and our eyes smiled at each other above our masks. I felt overwhelmed with gratitude -- for the scientists who dedicated themselves to developing the vaccine, the people who were working to deliver it, for being in a country that believed in science, planned well enough and has the money to provide for its citizens, and for reaching this point of greater safety. And I felt overwhelmed, at the same time, with sorrow for the loss, suffering, separation, and disrupted or damaged lives that may take years to recover, if they ever do.

--

I also couldn't have predicted that I would have spent this year making music with a virtual choir, or that an online reading group I organized would have just finished reading Aeschylus' Agamemnon via Zoom, where we can see each other and talk easily in spite of physical separation. The final words spoken in that play by Cassandra, before she dies at the hands of Agamemnon's wife, remind me that human beings haven't changed that much since this lament was written 2500 years ago:

Alas, poor men, their destiny. When all goes well

a shadow will overthrow it. If it be unkind

one stroke of a wet sponge wipes all the picture out;

and that is far the most unhappy thing of all.

 

 

So, as with the images I've posted here, it's a question of holding both the darkness and the light. It's been a year since I began my pandemic diary here. We will continue to be very careful until we've had our second shots, and I think today of my many friends in Europe who still have no access to vaccines, as well as the people of Mexico and Brazil and so many other countries who are having to wait, and wait, while the virus continues to surge. But the light is returning to the north, and to our lives, as we begin to see a way out and a way forward. I'm working on several creative projects that will attempt to express and preserve something about this time, and I may consider publishing a collection of the essays I've written here -- it would be good to know if any of you would be interested in that. I also want to try to encourage others who are younger and having difficulty seeing their way into the future. It's somehow easier when you've lived a long time. Life, you find out, is always unpredictable in both collective and individual ways, and part of living is learning to deal with uncertainty -- not that any of us are able to do that with perfect equanimity, or all the time. Here is a final excerpt from that first blog post, which I think still holds true:

Yet I believe the days of patriarchal power are numbered. The ranks of women and men in all cultures who understand and voluntarily choose a different way of being are increasing. Threatened people will instigate huge battles to maintain the old systems, and for a time it may feel that we are going backwards. It’s unlikely that these changes will happen in our lifetime; perhaps they will take another hundred years or more. But the ultimate trend is clear.

If I am going to deal with my own anger constructively, perhaps I can dredge up some compassion for people who sense, even dimly, the threat to the only system they know, the only way of being they can comprehend... they are locked in a cage that only they can see. How horrible it must be to experience life this way, whether you are Osama bin Laden, hating and fearing the West with its personal freedom, its emancipated women, and its lack of understanding of all the traditions and values you hold dear, or George Bush, thinking that friendship and loyalty can be bought with dollars, terror quelled by violence, and true democracy established by the forced occupation of a sovereign people and the repression of your own.

The world sees through them both, as it begins to see with clearer and clearer eyes all patriarchal systems that promise protection in exchange for economic or political or sexual submission. On this eve of destruction, perhaps we can try to look forward, far forward, seeing these terrible and tragic events as part of the death-throes of patriarchy: a crucial step toward real freedom and justice for all the earth’s people.

 

Hermit Diary 53. Few Words for this Horror.

I'm thinking tonight of particular photographs of yesterday's storming of the U.S. Capitol: the image of the burly white guy carrying a confederate flag through the Capitol rotunda. The image of a blonde white woman and her friend, seated on the dais of the Speaker of the House, taking selfies. A line of Capital Police on the steps, two of them jostling each other and laughing as the mob ravaged the building and milled around below them. A video of the President of the United States and his family in a tent, keeping time to loud pop music, while watching the rally on large screens, like it was a party. And then inciting that mob to unprecedented actions in the history of the country, before retreating into the White House, behind the barricades.

A friend posted the phrase that this would go down as "one of the whitest moments in American history." Many of us are well aware what would have happened if the people storming the Capitol had been black.

The Italian newspaper, La Stampa, published its front-page story today with the headline, "Once Upon a Time, there was America."

I'm afraid that sums up how I'm feeling.

Is there a road back from this abyss? Perhaps, partially. But I think a line was crossed yesterday: the culmination of four years of permissibility and normalizing of hate speech, violence, lies, militarism, white supremacy, injustice and cruelty toward everyone who isn't white or male, and total lack of respect for law and democracy.

The saddest thing is that this enormous damage to American democracy was predictable, and preventable. The pandemic has shown us how selfish, self-serving, and irresponsible a great many people are. In politics too: Every one of the elected Republicans. The administration officials who agreed to serve, and are now deserting the ship like rats. Prominent former officials who've refused to speak out.

But all the ordinary people who voted for Trump and have made excuses for his behavior are the ones who are truly complicit in this. All the people who have refused to understand that Black Lives Matter, and do something about it. All the people who refuse to believe climate change is real, and work against the clock to reverse it. All the people who continue to support drone strikes that kill brown children, or turn their head the other way when migrants are put in indefinite detention in warehouses, or children put in cages on the southern border. All the people who think they deserve good health care, but poor people don't. The people who don't think women are equal, deserving of respect, safety, and autonomy, or, likewise, the people who refuse to accept those of different sexualities and genders. I don't know. I could go on...it's a long list.

Unfortunately that list includes vastly more people than those who subscribe to conspiracy theories. It comprises all the well-meaning people who have seen what was happening, and thought it was wrong, but did nothing because they had their own problems, or, more likely, because they weren't really being hurt directly -- or perhaps even benefiting. Because they were comfortable in their own privilege.

Tonight I just want to ask each of us to look in the mirror and ask, Where was I, and where am I going to be? Because if you think Joe Biden and the Democrats alone are going to fix this cancer that has been growing for decades, of which Trump is merely a symptom and a mouthpiece, you are very badly deluded.

 

 

 

Hermit Diary 40. Devoid.

Tonight I'm reeling with anger at the despicable remarks of the desperate and reckless narcissist who is president of the United States. Apparently, to him, people who have died of COVID are like those dead, maimed and captured soldiers he called "losers." And not only have his inaction and denial caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans, he's now blatantly risking the lives of those who've been closest to him. We hear about the staff members who've been exposed and tested positive, but what about the White House chambermaids who clean up after his family, the janitors and handymen, the secretaries and mail clerks and security people, the cooks and servers, pilots and drivers, to only mention a few? What are their names? What kind of medical care will they receive?

For those of us who have known people who died of this virus or are suffering either because of its longterm or indirect effects -- loss of work and security, lack of healthcare or insurance, displacement, grief, loss, separation, prolonged and intense loneliness --  the president's words are utterly revolting. But you don't have to have a direct connection to the pandemic's victims be an empathetic person, to see what has happened in the world because of it, as well as in so many other areas of cruelty, neglect, violence and suffering that this administration has caused and encouraged. I've never witnessed a leader and band of syncophants so devoid of empathy and compassion; it sickens me.

I don't wish death or this virus on anyone, including any of them: I want to see the Republicans resoundingly defeated in November and for the present inhabitant of the White House to go to court and be convicted. I want to see them fail to confirm their Supreme Court nominee. Whether any of that will happen or not, none of us know. Let us not demean ourselves by wishing ill on others, but let's not delude ourselves either. They will stop at nothing until the bitter end, and I'm sure we haven't seen the last twist in this tortuous road.

Meanwhile, it's even more imperative to take care of ourselves and each other.

Hermit Diary 39. Deer and Nasturtiums

Like everyone I know, I've been thinking a lot about Ruth Bader Ginsburg: saddened by her death, immensely grateful for her life, concerned about the future. If there's one legacy I'm sure she wanted to leave with us, it is that we must be just as courageous and determined as she was, and never give up, even in the face of enormous obstacles and opposition.

As 2020 continues to throw challenges at us, both in the world sphere and in our personal lives, how do we keep going? It all felt like too much several months ago! But keep going we must. For me, that means going back to the wells that nourish me. My wells may be different from yours, but they include music, art, books, and nature, all of which have an aspect of contemplative practice. Being with people is also nourishing, and like you, I've had to adjust the ways in which that can happen. It's not ideal, but cutting myself off from friends and family doesn't work at all, so I've gotten used to seeing people (mostly) online, and am grateful for it. I've decreased my social media activity a great deal, and it's definitely had a beneficial effect on my mental health and equanimity, slowing and quieting my mind as well as giving me more time.

The first leaves are beginning to turn here in Montreal, though it will be another month before they've fallen. The air and especially the nights are chilly, but the sun is bright and warm. Spending some time with these nasturtiums cheered me up. I look at my cat and realize she is just living in each moment; the nasturtiums, like the lilies of the field, "neither toil nor spin", and they certainly have way less awareness than the cat, but are simply beautiful for their brief lives. The other day, during a visit to a national park near the city, we had an encounter with a doe grazing in the forest: she reminded me of the deer on this little Greek pot.

Obviously we must try to protect the life on our planet, and each other, and work toward governmental responsibility and change, but we also need to take care of ourselves and find ways to take breaks from the spinning, obsessive anxiety that is so pervasive right now. No one can live, and certainly not contribute to solutions, within a constant barrage of negativity and anxiety. So I need these moments, which remind me how much of life is still beautiful, graceful, and quiet.

How are you doing, and where do you find some solace these days?

 

Hermit Diary 38. The times are out of joint: Seamus Heaney, Ballymurphy, and Kenosha

Yesterday I was reminded by Teju Cole that it was the anniversary of the death of Seamus Heaney.

This morning, as I sat with the cat and the peaceful light, I took down my copy of Heaney's North (1975), which is both about the idea of North, and Northern Ireland. Opening the book at random, I read “Whatever You Say Say Nothing”

The poem begins:

I’m writing just after an encounter
With an English journalist in search of ‘views
On the Irish thing’. I’m back in winter
Quarters where bad news is no longer news,

Where media-men and stringers sniff and point,
Where zoom lenses, recorders and coiled leads
Litter the hotels. The times are out of joint
But I incline as much to rosary beads

As to the jottings and analyses
Of politicians and newspapermen
Who’ve scribbled down the long campaign from gas
And protest to gelignite and sten,

Who proved upon their pulses ‘escalate’,
‘Backlash’ and ‘crack down’, ‘the provisional wing’,
‘Polarization’ and ‘long-standing hate’.
Yet I live here, I live here too, I sing...

and it ends:

O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,

Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,
Where half of us, as in a wooden horse
Were cabin’d and confined like wily Greeks,
Besieged within the siege, whispering morse.

--

This morning from a dewy motorway
I saw the new camp for the internees:
A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay
In the roadside, and over in the trees

Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.
There was that white mist you get on a low ground
And it was deja-vu, some film made
Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.

Is there life before death? That’s chalked up
In Ballymurphy. competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and sup,
We hug our little destiny again.

 

Then I opened the precious book to the page with Heaney's inscription (to the original owner, a man in Toronto), my left hand holding the curl of the facing page flat, and thought: his hand held this book just like that, before his pen touched the paper, on a day in March 1986 when he was still very much alive.

I hadn’t read the news yet; I wanted a few more minutes of the soft light on the oxalis and spirea, the seeping red of the begonia blooms, the slightly heavy lift of coffee to lips. Better, I thought, to listen to the poet speak of humanity’s endless appetite for conflict, while he manages, genius that he is, to work in Shakespeare and the Greeks, the Russian camps, the endless clamouring for news on the way to Ballymurphy or Kenosha, and have his company this morning as I “hug my little destiny.”

I copied out the poem and wrote this far. Then I looked up the details about “Ballymurphy.”

Eleven civilians were killed in the Ballymurphy massacre in August, 1971, by members of the Parachute Regiment of the British Army, which had already been in Northern Ireland since 1969. Britain had just launched “Operation Demetrius” which had the objective of interning without trial anyone suspected of being a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army.

Members of the regiment said that as they entered Ballymurphy, they were shot at and returned fire. An account by Mike Jackson, who later became head of the British Army, stated that those killed in the shootings were Republican gunmen. This account was emphatically denied by the Catholic families of the people killed, all of whom were civilians. They included a Catholic priest, Father Hugh Mullan, who was trying to aid a wounded man, reportedly waving a white flag as he did so, and a woman, Joan Connolly, who was standing near the army base and then was left lying in a field for hours without medical attention, where she died.

None of the soldiers were held accountable and there was no investigation at the time.

45 years later, in 2016, an inquest was requested by the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland. Funding for the inquest was “deferred” by the ruling party, and hearings did not begin until 2018. The last witnesses were heard in March 2020 after 100 days of testimony. A report is expected “in the coming months.”

--

Now, I’ll summon the courage to turn to today's news.

Hermit Diary 27: A Summer Already Ablaze

At Barack Obama's inauguration, Washington D.C., January 2009

 

The year was 1968. On April 4, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Two months later, in June, Robert F. Kennedy, the U.S. senator and former attorney general who had campaigned for civil rights his entire career, was also killed by an assassin. The Vietnam War was raging; the country deeply divided, angry, and hopeless. After Dr. King died, riots erupted in all the major cities, and continued. Like 2020, 1968 was also an election year. The Democratic convention, held in Chicago in August, was the scene of a massive clash between 10,000 anti-war demonstrators and 23,000 National Guardsmen, called in by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. Later, the independently-headed "Walker Report," appointed to study and report on what had happened, said:

"...(there was) unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence on many occasions, particularly at night. That violence was made all the more shocking by the fact that it was often inflicted upon persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no threat. These included peaceful demonstrators, onlookers, and large numbers of residents who were simply passing through, or happened to live in, the areas where confrontations were occurring."

“Individual policemen, and lots of them, committed violent acts far in excess of the requisite force for crowd dispersal or arrest. To read dispassionately the hundreds of statements describing at firsthand the events of Sunday and Monday nights is to become convinced of the presence of what can only be called a police riot.”

I was 16 then and already a committed activist; I remember it all very well. The summer of 1968 was when it all boiled over, but the violence continued right through 1970, when the Kent State Massacre -- in which four innocent students were shot and killed -- finally seemed to mark a turning point in the protests against the war. Those of us who were alive then cannot forget Richard Nixon's unpalatable policies, and how his rightwing, law-and-order rhetoric fueled these confrontations -- but Donald Trump is orders-of-magnitude worse.

In spite of all that has happened since, no period of time I've experienced has come close to matching the frustration, anger, tension, fear, suffering, and deep sadness of those years, until now. 2020 is going to go down in history too. And it's going to be a long, hot summer.

Fifty years, and it feels like white people have learned nothing. Nothing. When are we going to wake up and make not only the systemic changes that need to happen, but start to address the wrongs that have been done? Will there EVER be a Truth and Reconciliation process in the United States? I very much doubt it, not with governments like the present one, which encourage and promote hatred, seek to turn their own people against each other, and have empowered and emboldened right-wing white supremacists, fascists, and the most conservative elements within police, military, and border-control forces. But the roots of racism in America run so deep that not even a black president of impeccable character and eloquence could make significant inroads against it. Now, not only do we have police killing blacks on the streets, and a justice system stacked against them, we have black and ethnic minority people dying in hugely disproportionate numbers from the virus, while they also serve in a disproportionate number of low-paying and dangerous jobs in health care and the service sectors -- not to mention the countless other injustices to which they are subject.

Here in Canada, I've observed the Truth and Reconciliation process with the indigenous community. Although America has perpetrated even more injustices, including genocide, against its native people, this did not feel like "my" issue when I moved here; because of the time when I grew up, I was more concerned, more familiar, and more invested in the struggles for civil rights, women's rights, peace and nuclear disarmament, gender equality, and the rights of immigrants and religious and ethnic minorities -- all of which had been major issues in the United States during my lifetime.  But I have seen the painful steps toward truth-telling and reconciliation here, as well as in South Africa, and I believe that this is the ONLY way to begin to redress the wrongs that have been done, and to bring a society into greater understanding.

Yet in Canada, in spite of believing that we're better than our neighbors to the south, we have our share of racism and hatred, especially directed against Muslims and Jews. Just this week, in one of the worst attacks in recent memory, a synagogue here in Montreal was violently ransacked, its religious objects desecrated -- a Torah had been cut up and stuffed into a toilet -- the floors covered in red paint, and the walls with antisemitic graffiti.

Meanwhile, the poor, and people of color and of ethnic minorities are dying at higher rates of COVID-19, while they fill a greater number of poorly-paid service and health care jobs. The same Quebec government which recently threw out three years of immigrant applications just had the gall to start a new fast-track program for immigrants who are willing to come here and work in the deplorable care homes for the elderly, where the virus has spread like wildfire, resulting in 80% of the deaths in the province. The message is clear: we didn't want you before, but now we need you to take care of us, so we'll make you a deal.

We white people of conscience have no choice: we have to stand for justice and against racism in all of its forms, against violence, against oppression, and for equality for all people regardless of race, religion, gender, or sexual preference. And you know what? It is not the job of black people, or Muslims, or Jewish people, Asians, Arabs, or any other minority group, to educate us about why their lives matter, and what needs to be done. It's our job, and we had damn well better get on with it.

In Memoriam

Photographer Robert Frank died yesterday at the age of 94.

Jennifer Lewis, artist, photographer, ceramicist, and one of our closest lifelong friends, died a year ago this week, at the age of 68; the day the photograph above was taken, we were together at the 2008 Robert Frank show at MoMA, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Franks' masterpiece, The Americans.

Aaron Moore, historian, professor, and husband of my dear friend Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, died on Sunday at the age of 47 -- just half that of Robert Frank.

I have no way to make sense of the unfairness of life, the time we're each allotted, or the way each of us meets our fate. What I do know is that each of these people used the time they had to be creative, to be productive and engaged, to connect with others, to try to make a difference, and to be courageous. Each of them touched me, in quite different ways, and I will always be aware of them and remember them.

Jonathan and Jenny looking at Robert Frank's contact sheets, New York City, 2008.

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It's September 11th, a day of remembrance that goes beyond any one person. That morning, Jennifer called us in Vermont, from her roof in lower Manhattan: we were on the phone with her when the second plane hit the tower.

And on this day, I think, too, of what Robert Frank photographed in his iconic book, The Americans. Like Dave Heath, whose photographs we saw earlier this summer at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, like Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg, all of whom knew each other, Frank was trying to express something tragic and destructive that he sensed at the heart of American life in the 1950s and early 60s -- something that would explode into violence later in the 1960s, and has never been resolved. Frank showed us America's racism, economic inequality and insensitivity, its feel-good culture, and above all, its denial. Now, much of the divisive toxicity that became an undercurrent after the 60s has been allowed, and encouraged, to boil over and come to the surface. So I think a post entitled In Memoriam today is also a requiem for an idea of America that is dying, and must die eventually -- but how long that will take, and at what cost, none of us can predict.

 

Never forget: Dorothea Lange's repressed photographs of Japanese internment

Dorothea Lange's caption: "May 2, 1942 — Byron, California. Third generation of American children of Japanese ancestry in crowd awaiting the arrival of the next bus which will take them from their homes to the Assembly center."

In 1942, the United States government hired photographer Dorothea Lange to document the rounding-up and internment of Japanese-Americans. But when the military and intelligence officials saw what her humanitarian lens had captured, the photographs were impounded and themselves "incarcerated" in the National Archives, only to be released to public view in 2006.

A desert garden created by professional gardener William Katsuki outside his dwelling in the Manzanar Relocation Center, California, 1942. Photograph by Dorothea Lange

Editor and Lange biographer Linda Gordon of Anchor Editions has published a selection of the photographs in the book Impounded, and writes about them on her blog at Anchor Editions. She is also making a limited number of prints available, with 50% of the proceed going to the NILC and ACLU, for their work on behalf of present-day immigrants. Gordon writes:

Lange worked nonstop for the next months, traveling to many cities and towns around California to document the Japanese people as they prepared for “evacuation,” as they were herded onto buses and trains, and moved into temporary housing in barracks and stables at horse racetracks and fairgrounds across the west coast. She then spent time at Manzanar, one of the largest concentration camps, situated in the eastern desert of Southern California where she continued to document the conditions and the people who were imprisoned. Despite much resistance from the camp authorities and military police, and several constraints on what she could photograph, she produced over 800 photographs during her assignment.

As I looked at Lange's images, of course they led me to consider what not only what they say about power and race, but also about our continuing need to victimize and make inhuman those who represent the "other." How many people in our world today are living in refugee or internment camps, or are forced to live behind walls that separate them from their former homes, lives, and loved ones? And while some groups have the funds and organizations to keep their past suffering in the public eye, most do not. How many will ever receive reparations for what has been done to them? Or will we, in fact, forget, and continue the forgetting?

Lange's caption: "June 16, 1942 — San Bruno, California. This scene shows one type of barracks for family use. These were formerly the stalls for race horses. Each family is assigned to two small rooms, the inner one, of which, has no outside door nor window. The center has been in operation about six weeks and 8,000 persons of Japanese ancestry are now assembled here."

“I remember having to stay at the dirty horse stables at Santa Anita. I remember thinking, ‘Am I a human being? Why are we being treated like this?’ Santa Anita stunk like hell.… Sometimes I want to tell this government to go to hell. This government can never repay all the people who suffered. But, this should not be an excuse for token apologies. I hope this country will never forget what happened, and do what it can to make sure that future generations will never forget.”

— Albert Kurihara, Santa Anita Assembly Center, Los Angeles & Poston Relocation Center, Arizona