the cassandra pages

Departures

Palm and Agaves, National Garden, Athens.

I've left my June sketchbook behind and started on a new path, and it feels a whole lot better. Today's painting is of a subject and place that I love, and it was done on a pad of 140# Cold Press Fabriano watercolor paper that I bought in Lisbon, with which I had no trouble at all. I'm pretty happy with the result (I wasn't able to capture the subtlety of the colors when I photographed it, unfortunately); it's expressive, looks a lot more free, and like I was having a good time, which I was. This month I'm going to be doing some paper tests to see what I like best, and also to compare paper bought in sheets with the supposedly-identical papers bought in blocks or pads. So that's the first departure.

A detail, approximately life-size.

The second departure is me from Facebook. I'm doing a trial of being off the social media platform for the next two months, except for Phoenicia Publishing news and posting links to my blog, where I will be doing most of my online writing. My reasons are twofold. First is that it was adding to my unhappiness about the state of the world and contemporary society, not helping, and I don't need that. Second, in spite of the liberal views expressed by most of my online friends, if we really care about the world and society, none of us have any business being on Facebook and participating in this extremely destructive company's policies, or supporting its contemptuous founder and high-level staff. It's a moral issue. I don't think I can get off completely because it is still helpful for my publishing business, but placing ads there is a business transaction and I have a lot less of a problem with that than with being used by a company I have come to detest, and which allows society to be manipulated in terrible ways. So I feel like I have to make my own small stand, and make a significant change, just like our decision to use our car as little as possible, eat less meat, and try to stop using single-use plastics. In none of those areas am I "pure," but I'm trying to act on my beliefs rather than just talking about them. I'm sorry that this means I won't be receiving news from a few friends who only use Facebook; I'll be writing to them and asking them to stay in touch by email, but I know I'll feel more out-of-touch with some people I care about.

I'll also be using Instagram less. Although I don't find it nearly as offensive or depressing -- in fact I really enjoy its quiet method of sharing images with a community quite a lot -- the ads are proliferating, and I can't get around the fact that it's owned by Facebook. As the people I follow have increased, it takes a lot of time to scroll through their posts every day. I'm going to check in once a day or less, and instead of posting art or photography there every day, as I have been, I will post when I've written a new blog post. 

What will I do with the time that's about to be freed up? I'm actually not sure how much time that is, but certainly I can write more, do more art, play the piano, or improve my French. My husband suggested that I could take up a new instrument! I don't think we're talking about enough time for that, but it's a tempting idea. After two months, I'll re-assess and see how I feel, and I'll certainly write something about it.

My blog posts are also cross-posted to Medium, where I have a very small group of followers. I'll make a point of posting the "friend links" here, so that anyone who wants can read at Medium without having to be a member.

Thanks for your responses at any time, either here or over there! I'm curious about your opinions on this topic. 

Read at Medium: https://medium.com/@cassandrabeth/departures-a-new-direction-for-my-art-and-why-im-leaving-facebook-almost-2706bac77f45?source=friends_link&sk=7518986aa1adb2140b3308d12f86ec33

Why is 3-D Compassion So Hard?

Pieta, Igresa de Sao Domingos, Lisbon.

Holy Week has coincided this year with the fire at Notre-Dame, and the resulting debate about what the billionaires and governments of the world should be supporting. Each day, I've read the arguments on social media and op-ed pages. Every night, I've gone to the Anglican cathedral where I sing, put on my red cassock and white surplice, and participated in ancient liturgies that commemorate a great miscarriage of justice 2,000 years ago, when the powers of religious establishment and the government of the time came together to crush the leader of a movement whose teaching was based on entirely different values, and different authority. Thursday was the observation of the Passover supper when Jesus established the practice of the Eucharist, knowing he would die soon; on this night he told his followers that he was giving them a new commandment, more important than all the Jewish laws: "Love one another as I have loved you." If you do this, he said, I will know that you are my disciples. Sitting in a dark church hearing those words, it's impossible not to feel like an utter failure -- as his disciples often were, too. Loving was not enough to save Jesus from death. And yet, trying (and failing, and trying again) to keep that simple commandment has been enough to form the basis of my entire life, and many other people's lives. Lent is an annual time to think about this more intentionally, and Holy Week is its culmination. These seasons of penitence are not about guilt; they're about Love: seeing what blocks us from loving better, and committing to a renewed sense of love for all people, and for the world in all of its failings and ugliness, and its beauty and miraculous joys.

The gasps of genuine shock and dismay that accompanied our first awareness that an 800-year-old medieval cathedral was burning were shortly followed by self-serving comments by French politicians, hoping to use it as a unifying  point in a society fragmented by racism and division. Hatred of the Catholic Church came next; many people didn't realize (or take the time to find out) that the French state owns Notre Dame, not the Catholic Church or the Vatican. Then, when French billionaires came forward with enormous pledges for the reconstruction, social media really heated up. In the UK, there were cries of "Where were the billionaires when Grenfell Tower burned?" In the US, it was "Where were they when the black churches burned?" We were admonished for not caring enough about Yemen, or Aleppo. Internationally, pictures were posted of dead coral reefs, with the poignant and appropriate caption "Rebuild this Cathedral!" 

Every one of these reactions is understandable and, to my mind, worthy. What bothers me is that we don't seem able to hold them all together, without shaming those who expressed sadness at the loss of irreplaceable architecture and art. As my friend Dick Jones said, "We don't seem capable of 3-D compassion." The reaction to the Notre Dame fire was only one example of this phenomenon.

When I lived in Vermont, for many years I was part of a grassroots activist group working to revitalize our poor neighborhood. Early on, we went door-to-door canvassing the residents, most of whom lived in run-down rental apartments. When we asked them what should be our priorities, they named things like better sidewalks, playgrounds, streetlights and safety, but the overwhelming consensus was on the need for beauty: they wanted trees and flowers, places to sit and see something other than the pavement and poverty that created a sense of shame and isolation. And they wanted to know their neighbors; they wanted a sense of community. It took time, and some grants from the local government and the state to accomplish some of those things, but building community and creating a more beautiful environment began immediately, from within ourselves and our own resources, not from outside. It is not either/or. Human beings need dignity and respect, they need decent housing, food and work, they need education and equal opportunity for their children, clean water, and health care. We also have an innate desire for beauty, whether it is found in nature, or in the arts. Somehow, we have to find a balance where we can hold all these human needs together, and have compassion and zeal whenever they are threatened or destroyed.

We are living in depressing and frustrating times, surrounded by increasing economic inequality and government inaction on the most pressing issues that affect all of humanity, such as climate change and the health of the oceans -- and nothing that we do to demand change seems to have an effect; the forces arrayed against the common people seem overwhelming, just as they did 2,000 years ago. So it's not at all surprising that people's anger is directed at powerful institutions, like the Catholic Church, or wealthy individuals who choose to give their money to a high-profile cause. These outbursts of frustration point out conflicts of priorities, but they also fail to acknowledge the many philanthropic individuals and small and large organizations who are already working tirelessly and often almost anonymously to support the environment, scientific and medical research, racial and ethnic inequality, the arts and education, and many other causes.  

More than that, though, I am concerned about the division created among good people through the tactic of shaming. The Left is particularly susceptible to this, and it's incredibly destructive. Ironically, the same people who totally get "Black Lives Matter" and were outraged when conservatives countered with "Blue Lives Matter" or "All Lives Matter" are doing the exact same thing when they insist that their cause is more worthy, and others should be ashamed of their own feelings.

Shame never brings people together, or creates lasting change of heart. We are individuals; each of us is drawn to different aspects of life, and it's natural for us to put our emotions and energy there; these proclivities should be complementary, not competitive. Some of us are meant to be guardians of the arts, or of children, or the elderly, or nature, or of immigrants, or of animals, or of human history...the list is long, because human beings and human culture are varied and complex.

I come back to that neighborhood group. At our very first meeting, which happened after a shooting, a lot of anger was expressed at "the authorities." People blamed the schools, the police, the town government, and they clearly expected these outside institutions to step in and fix the problems. But as we talked more, we began to see that if we waited for that, we might wait forever: we had to start within our own community, with ourselves, and with what we had in common. We had to talk to each other, ask questions, express our hopes and fears, get to know each other's strengths and limitations, and work together. In other words, we needed to "love one another."

It's worth remembering, perhaps, that medieval cathedrals were not built by like modern-day skyscrapers by multi-national corporations, or even by wealthy centralized church institutions. They were built by people who came together to try to do something greater than themselves that lifted their spirits and short lives above the difficulties of feudal societies beset by plagues and wars that spared no one. Yes, wealthy donors gave money, and so did peasants, each according to their abilities, and all were able to see the progress and feel part of a great process that would extend well beyond their own lives. It still astounds us that these huge works of art were built essentially by hand, and have lasted through the centuries.

The point is not that a western cathedral is inherently more precious or worthy than art of any other part of the world, or more important than insuring the safety and well-being of the neediest among us, or rebuilding black churches, or caring for the oceans. It is that human beings can do astonishing things when they work together, and when we decide to make love of something greater than our own selves a priority. The question for each of us is where we want to put our energy, and how to care for one another during these difficult times so that we can actually work together for the common good.

 

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

Complicity: The FB Scandal and Our Individual Responsibility

I haven't yet finished the entire investigative story about FB in today's NY Times, but have read the articles in the Guardian and recently watched a documentary about the company's troubles. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg come off as even worse than I thought. And I wonder how, in good conscience, any of us can stay here on this platform that touts liberal rhetoric about openness and connecting the world, while actually being capitalist and self-serving to the point of hiring conservative firms to spread fake news against its detractors, let alone ignoring information about Russian hackers and fake-news farms and hacking of their own users' "secure" information, and failing to take action until after the damage was done. They have turned into what they say they hate, and are using all of us for one primary purpose: to make billions of dollars.

My activity on FB has never been great, but it's decreased, quite deliberately. I rarely write direct posts there, and only occasionally "like" something my friends have posted. Its main usefulness to me, other than allowing me to see some family and friends who don't keep in touch any other way, is in publicizing events for the cathedral (which, if we really looked at it theologically, has no business being on FB at all) and cross-posting links to new blog posts. As I've written before, most of the comments I get at The Cassandra Pages, and a lot of the traffic, now comes via social media. I have fewer problems with the way Instagram works, which FB owns, and with the community there, because I am not constantly peppered with ads (they can be blocked), news, and opinions and the community where I interact is much quieter and more concerned with the same values as I am.

But the bottom line is this: what FB is doing is wrong. George Soros is right when he says it's a threat to democracy. Yet we have all become hostage to it because it preys on all our deepest insecurities and desires. I don't want to lose the blog traffic I have. I don't want to lose the ability to publicize events, or a new book from Phoenicia -- though buying paid advertising is a business transaction, and I am more OK with that. And I don't want to lose touch with certain friends -- but, you know, email still exists. It just takes a little more effort.

It's like so much else that's wrong with our world. We choose convenience and connection and take the easy way out, even when it makes us complicit in data-mining schemes or the spread of fake news, even when it enriches unscrupulous people, even when our actions harm the planet. We are sheep. Human beings don't seem to have the will to do what is right in large enough numbers to make the differences that needs to be made, or to send the message to both government and business that we won't tolerate their behavior any longer. If I delete my FB account, it will be a useless gesture that will have no effect other than making a statement like this one; I'll only be hurting myself. But it still may be the right thing to do.

Bright Faces of Hope, and a Long Uphill Road Ahead

The first two Native-American women. First two Muslim women. First Somali-American, a former refugee. Youngest woman ever, a Latina. First black female congresswoman from her state...They are the hope for me today: the brown female faces of those who won seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, along with many white women who also won races, and the first gay male state governor. These are the faces of the future — though their majority power may be very far away, beyond my lifetime even.

When I look at the map, the polarization is depressingly clear, and I can’t even feel smug about Quebec being better, after our last election. It was just the same: most of the rural, homogeneous French-Canadian areas went conservative, while the diverse metropolitan areas (chiefly Montreal) were solidly progressive. The real question in so many places today seems to be: do you want someone who will actually work for the things that benefit all people, or do you want someone who looks like you, expresses the same fears, and wants to go back to the past?

There were a lot of “firsts” yesterday. That’s very significant, though it made me simultaneously weep with happiness at seeing those faces, and rage that it’s taken so long and come with such a hard fight –- which will, of course, have to continue. And I'm not naive. These are modest gains, and even a Democratically-controlled House will, at best, create a stalemate with the executive branch and Senate, that will of course be blamed for blocking legislation and starting investigations. I'm appalled at the support this president still enjoys, and in some parts of the country, it seems more solid than ever, with a looming possibility of re-election in 2020.

--

Looking at the Senate and House electoral maps today caused me to reflect on the election of Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church of the United States, ten years ago. The church’s polity is set up the same way as Congress, with a House of Bishops, one from each diocese, and a much larger body made up of lay delegates and clergy, equally represented by four of each from every diocese. In every single step toward inclusivity — allowing the ordination of the first black priest, the first woman, the first openly gay priest, and then bishops in each of those categories — the House of Deputies voted positively years before the House of Bishops did, and in exactly that order: blacks, women, gay. And of course, representation in the House of Deputies was itself reflective of that diversity long before there were black, female, and gay bishops. But it did happen. The people in the churches elected the delegates and changed those bodies; the lay delegates pushed the clergy to be more progressive, and eventually even the House of Bishops changed. It's inevitable, but it took a long, long time even in one of the most progressive religious denominations in the United States. Ten years later, however, a great deal has changed in attitudes toward homosexuality in the general population, friends and colleagues, and forced them to confront a choice between love or rejection of real people. We should see this as an indication that change is absolutely possible.

--

I've been on the side of immigrants and non-whites all my life, and especially so since marrying into an Arab/Armenian immigrant family, with multiple personal histories of genocide and narrow escapes from persecution to begin life again in new places. Twelve years of being a Canadian-American, and having opportunities to travel, especially in Latin America, have only made me MORE sympathetic and more identified with migrants and refugees. I’m grateful for my life experiences and fervently wish I could share them with a lot more people, because I think if you don’t live it, or have very close relationships with people who do, it’s hard to really get it. Thus, the map we keep seeing, and the fears that keep being exploited.

Besides this endemic hatred of "the other", the environment is the other issue that creates ongoing despair for me. There is so little time, and so little will on the parts of governments -- in fact I believe we've already passed a critical window where reversal was possible.  So much of what I have valued and loved about the Earth is in danger of being lost forever. To me, this is the fundamental issue of our time, and even here in Quebec, where many people say they do care about the natural world and live close to it, the new government feels it is not important, and secondary to economic concerns. How shortsighted can we be?

Today is a day to rejoice in a first step back from the precipice Trump's presidency has placed us in. Frankly, though, we can't let up for a minute. 

Summer Art Report

It's high summer, and those colors and shapes are just begging to be drawn and painted!

Peaches, mangoes, and Mexican ceramics. Pen and ink on paper, 6" x 9".

This has been a really busy summer for me, but not so much in the artwork department. We've been traveling, and hosting guests a fair amount; I'm serving on the search committee for the new music director at the cathedral, which is time-consuming; and then there's the combination of the extreme heat/humidity and the overheated political situation, which have made it hard for a lot of us to focus on creative work. However, I'm making an effort to get back into it, for therapy and solace as much as anything else. When I (re)turn to drawing or painting, I'm always reminded of why I do it, and have done it my whole life: because it is an all-absorbing meditative time, apart from daily thinking and concerns, that gives happiness. It's pretty simple.

 

Bonsai, Palestinian pillow and Knitting. Pen and ink on paper, 6" x 9".

 

Rhodian plate and succulent: after a dinner party. Pen and ink on paper, 6" x 9".

The drawings shown above were done at home, while this watercolor and cut-paper collage was a studio project, one day when I just felt like I had to put some color onto paper, without any prior idea. It's not meant to "be" anything. It started out like this:

and became this:

That particular day, I didn't really care how it came out - what this piece did was break a logjam where I felt like I couldn't make anything, because I was too depressed about the world. Since then, I've felt better, and am back to drawing often, even though I'm still too busy to paint. Sometimes the hardest part is just starting again.

A view of the studio with cat brush. Pen and ink on paper, 12" x 9".

 

Book press and Jade Ink bottle. Oil pastel on paper, 12" x 12".

Finally, this is an oil pastel I haven't posted here yet -- there's a problem with the colors; if I had used black or dark blue instead of brown and that ugly mauve, I'd be a lot happier with it. But there are things about this piece that I like, and learned from. It may prove to be a stepping-stone to future work.

It's been good to post these here and write about them: it shows me I haven't been as unproductive as I thought, and gets me thinking about where to go next. What about you? How are you doing this summer?

"We Will Take America Without Firing a Shot" --Nikita Khrushchev

Like many of us, I watched Trump's performance in Europe, and then with Putin in Helsinki, with astonishment that quickly gave way to anger and revulsion. His spineless Republican defenders in Congress and the media did break ranks to a greater degree than usual, with remarks like "“The dam has broken,” from Senator Bob Corker, a Republican from Tennessee. After the backlash of criticism, Trump did his usual halfhearted backtracking, which only confused things more. Though a lot of critics hope otherwise, I doubt that even the extraordinary and shameful spectacle of an American president siding with a Russian dictator against his own intelligence community, and America's allies and friends, will bring about the downfall of this seemingly interminable nightmare of a presidency. What does that say about us?

At this point in life, as I watch what's going on, I wonder about the fleeting quality of collective memory. My childhood was shaped by two things in particular: the fact that WWII was still vivid for my parents' generation, and by the reality of the Cold War that became equally vivid for mine, as we hid under our desks or lined up against school corridors during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Eastern Europe fell under the so-called Iron Curtain, and China rose as a Communist power in the east.

My father, a tank driver in Patton's army in WWII Europe, had fought against fascism to keep Europe and the rest of the Western world free; he landed at Normandy the day after D-Day, was in the Battle of the Bulge, liberated concentration camps, spent long months in a hospital in Belgium, and was fortunate to survive. I wept when I visited the memorials in England's cathedrals to the Americans who had helped defend Britain, which would almost certainly have fallen to Hitler if our country had not entered the war, and to Britain's own astonishing courage in defense of their homeland.

Therefore it was perhaps not surprising that I was deeply offended by a photograph from last week of Trump sitting in Winston Churchill's leather chair, with a smug smile on his face, looking like a latter-day Napoleon. Neither Churchill nor Franklin Roosevelt, a man of great personal courage and the architect of compassionate American progressivism, would have anything but contempt for him.

But after insulting the European heads of states, and threatening the alliances and friendships that have endured to defend and support democracy since the end of WWII, Trump marched on to Helsinki, incredibly calling the European Union "our foes." His news conference with Putin, and his behavior during their completely opaque summit, convinced me that he is not only a dangerously erratic sycophant, but a puppet, carrying out -- wittingly or unwittingly -- Putin's careful and deliberate undermining of the western alliance, its governments, and its democratic institutions.

And so it was not surprising, either, that I was deeply offended, astonished, and grief-stricken by what happened in Helsinki. I remember the Civil Defense drills of my childhood, and being certain that a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was inevitable. I remember exactly where I was when I heard that Nikita Khrushchev had taken off his shoe and pounded it on the podium at the United Nations. This was the man who once said the chilling words, “We will take America without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the U.S. We will destroy you from within....” In the 1950s, those words were met with outrage and defiance. Today, they sound not only prophetic but like a description of current reality.

My father's Civil Defense helmet, just like this, lived in our coat closet throughout the 50s and 60s - I doubt if today's young people can imagine town- and city-wide air raid drills in America, but they were normal for a number of years then.

Yes, there was glasnost, the Berlin Wall came down, Eastern Europe became free again -- but a great deal has happened since Putin came to power with his new cadre of thuggish oligarchs. How have we possibly moved in half a century to a point where millions of Americans, let alone elected American politicians, are defending and excusing the president for choosing someone like Putin as their friend while dismissing our own intelligence agencies, dismantling the State Department, and repudiating the country's most cherished values and the principles on which it was founded? The only answers are ignorance and gullibility, refusal to learn from history, racist fear of the latest version of "otherness", blatant self-interest, and subservience to power. None of those human characteristics can be blamed on the Russians -- but they are all being skillfully exploited by them.

Barack Obama gave a good speech in South Africa, but it was too long for most people to digest, and far too obscure - if he wants to really help, he's got to name names and say clearly and succinctly exactly what is happening without surrounding the uncomfortable truth with erudite words. Obama too often uses lofty rhetoric that sounds positive and makes us feel good, but doesn't address fully the historical sins and great flaws and hypocrisies of America itself. Tragically, what could be called hypocrisies during Obama's administration have become cornerstones of policy during Trump's.

Many people besides myself feel that Helsinki was a watershed event. But will it actually result in a final push toward ending this disgraceful presidency and turning around a ship that is about to crash onto the rocks, or will this episode too be glossed over and forgotten? Only John McCain, who no longer has anything to lose, was brutally honest about the grave danger and permanent damage that may result from Trump's actions. I urge you to read his whole statement:

“Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory. The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake.

“President Trump proved not only unable, but unwilling to stand up to Putin. He and Putin seemed to be speaking from the same script as the president made a conscious choice to defend a tyrant against the fair questions of a free press, and to grant Putin an uncontested platform to spew propaganda and lies to the world.

“It is tempting to describe the press conference as a pathetic rout — as an illustration of the perils of under-preparation and inexperience. But these were not the errant tweets of a novice politician. These were the deliberate choices of a president who seems determined to realize his delusions of a warm relationship with Putin’s regime without any regard for the true nature of his rule, his violent disregard for the sovereignty of his neighbors, his complicity in the slaughter of the Syrian people, his violation of international treaties, and his assault on democratic institutions throughout the world.

“Coming close on the heels of President Trump’s bombastic and erratic conduct towards our closest friends and allies in Brussels and Britain, today’s press conference marks a recent low point in the history of the American Presidency. That the president was attended in Helsinki by a team of competent and patriotic advisors makes his blunders and capitulations all the more painful and inexplicable.

“No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant. Not only did President Trump fail to speak the truth about an adversary; but speaking for America to the world, our president failed to defend all that makes us who we are — a republic of free people dedicated to the cause of liberty at home and abroad. American presidents must be the champions of that cause if it is to succeed. Americans are waiting and hoping for President Trump to embrace that sacred responsibility. One can only hope they are not waiting totally in vain.”

Oil Pastels: Further Experiments, and a Temporary Refuge

View toward Palermo, from Segesta. Oil pastel on paper, 12" x 8.5".

This is a picture I started last week. Yesterday I worked on it quite a bit more, and am ready to call it finished. 

 

I'm finding oil pastel to be a strange medium and hard to get used to, but I rather like how it fits somewhere between painting and drawing. The technique is more like drawing, but the result more like painting. These details are a little larger than life-size, so you can see how the creamy, crayon-like pigment functions quite a lot like artist's oil paint. It sits up on the surface, can be applied quite thickly, but also blended with a finger or a rolled paper stomp. You can scratch through it to reveal lower layers, or rough it up with a contrasting color, applied quite lightly and dryly.

These days, I find the news has required concentration on something else, a different world of values, especially for us up in Canada. I must say, I'm not one for being very nationalistic (a common trait up here) but there's nothing like being insulted and threatened to bring us together. Listening to male bullies also makes me want to find refuge in something that's flexible, pliant, under my own control, and has a chance at being beautiful and reflective of a better world.

The Silencing of Thoughtfulness

Last night, I read an interview in El Pais with the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, who is now almost 89. It's well worth reading. I don't read a lot of pure philosophy, and I don't know Habermas' work, but I was interested in what he was saying about journalism, writing, reading, and the media. "There's a cacophony that fills me with despair," he said. Yes. Me too.

Lest we get off on the wrong foot here, Habermas doesn't dismiss contemporary media, or specifically the internet and social media. He brings up and praises many aspects of new media that have helped humankind already, from the ability to organize from the grassroots to creating connections for support and research among people with rare diseases, saying that there are "many niches where trustworthy information and sounds opinions are exchanged." He's not a Luddite, and he doesn't seem to have a fear of technology or change. What he's concerned about is the same trend that concerns me.

He states the problem succinctly: "You can't have committed intellectuals if you don't have the readers to address the ideas to."

This is exactly what bothers me, as a thoughtful person who likes to write seriously about various topics. For about a decade, there were writers like me -- I wouldn't go so far as to call myself "a committed intellectual," but you know what I mean -- who used blogging for this purpose, and found a wide community of like-minded readers and other writers. Because our attention wasn't nearly as fragmented as it is now, we also had time to read newspapers and journals, and to read longer pieces on the web.  Because the world didn't seem as frightening or chaotic, I think we didn't feel the need to escape into superficiality as much, and substantive conversations were welcomed. I still find this among certain groups of friends, but I'm dismayed by "the cacophony" which seems to drown out most everything, and has pretty much destroyed what we used to call journalism.

Habemas describes this in his own words: at base, you need to have an infrastructure of "alert journalism, with newspapers of reference and mass media capable of directing the interest of the majority toward topics that are relevant to the formation of public opinion, and also the existence of a reading population that is interested in politics, educated, accustomed to the conflictive process of forming opinions, and which takes the time to read quality, independent press."

"That infrastructure is no longer intact in most places," he says -- and of course we all know this. What he calls "the splintering effect of internet" has changed the role of traditional media and "triggered the disintegration of the public sphere." However, what he's even more concerned about is "a much more insidious model of commercialization in which the goal is not explicitly the consumer's attention, but the economic exploitation of the user's private profile."

But it's not just the top-down manipulation that worries him, it's what's happening to us.

"From the time the printed page was invented, turning everyone into a potential reader, it took centuries until the entire population could read. The Internet is turning us all into potential authors and it's only a couple of decades old. Perhaps with time we will learn to manage the social networks in a civilized manner...I am too old to judge the cultural impulse that the new media is giving birth to. But it annoys me that it's the first media revolution in the history mankind to first and foremost serve economic rather than cultural ends."

He agreed with the interviewer that the internet is being used aggressively to encourage a new kind of illiteracy, especially by Trump, and especially in America. Hebemas goes on to talk about his own politics, Europe, the migration crisis and economics, compassion, government, religion. It's well worth reading.

But I'm mainly concerned about the silencing effect this overall trend has on thoughtful people: myself, and many of my friends. Who wants to shout into a whirlwind? For that matter, who wants to shout at all?

On Guns, Men, and Fear

7,000 pairs of shoes were placed on the U.S. Capitol lawn on Tuesday to symbolize the number of children killed by gun violence in the United States since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December 2012.

This week I've read three loosely related articles that I wanted to recommend to others who may be thinking, as I am, about the continued and unabated rise in U.S. gun violence, the factors that drive white male rage, and the rise of far-right political ideologies in the western world. These are all thoughtful pieces, well worth your time. I'm trying to educate myself about where these trends can actually go, if unchecked, but also to understand the forces that attract people to guns, violence, and far-right ideologies in the first place. Not all gun violence is the same: many of the school shooters have been male loners who have targeted white children, and have not subscribed to a particular political ideology, while other mass killers have been politically motivated. Most, however, seem to have felt powerless in current society, and turned to guns as the ultimate means of expressing themselves.

Why are White Men Stockpiling Guns? Scientific American (thanks to Lorianne DiSabato at Hoarded Ordinaries for the link.)

According to a growing number of scientific studies, the kind of man who stockpiles weapons or applies for a concealed-carry license meets a very specific profile. These are men who are anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market, and beset by racial fears. They tend to be less educated. For the most part, they don’t appear to be religious—and, suggests one study, faith seems to reduce their attachment to guns. In fact, stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in their lives. Taken together, these studies describe a population that is struggling to find a new story—one in which they are once again the heroes.

White Supremacists are Increasingly Using Public Banners to Spread their Message New York Times

From May 20, 2017, through this Monday, the A.D.L.’s Center on Extremism found, there were 72 such episodes. Before that period, the A.D.L. had not documented any white supremacist banners since Dec. 11, 2016...Most of those documented in Thursday’s report were racist or anti-immigrant in nature, with messages ranging from “America first: End immigration” to “‘Diversity’ is a code word for white genocide.” Others were anti-Muslim (a banner displayed on an overpass near Dearborn, Mich., home to one of the largest mosques in North America, read “DANGER: Sharia city ahead”), anti-Semitic (“UNjew HUMANITY”) or misogynistic (“Feminists deserve the rope”).

The Fascist Movement that Has Brought Mussolini back to the Mainstream The Guardian

"CasaPound presented itself as the house of the ideologically homeless too. Iannone said it offered “a space of liberty, where anyone who has something to say and can’t say it elsewhere will always find political asylum”. It adopted a pose of being not a part of the debate, but the receptacle of it. It reminded some of Mussolini’s line that “fascism is the church of all the heresies”.

 

A friend from a while ago, now an Episcopal priest, had a mantra I've never forgotten: "All anger is fear; all fear is fear of loss." While it's an oversimplification, it holds a lot of truth -- as I've found when asking myself, at times, what is the source of my own anger. And of course I'm angry when I look at the news of the world and, especially, in my former home of America. When I look deeper, I can see that this anger has its roots in a profound sense of fear that the entire fabric of American life is unraveling, and that the principles on which the country was founded have been irrevocably undermined. There has also been fear for individual people I know and love, including members of my own family, and myself by extension.

Of course, for a fairly large number of other Americans, the exact opposite fear is evoked: they feel that America was founded for, and should be run by, white men like themselves, and that immigration and racial diversity, as well as equality between men and women, and open acceptance of gender diversity, are all grave threats to their country and their own safety, security, and identity. Many liberals seem to believe the pendulum is going to swing back to some sort of tolerable middle, if we could just get rid of the current administration.

I think that's incredibly naive. The cat is out of the proverbial bag, and growing into a hungry, noisy, muscled tiger that can't be domesticated. Perhaps it will always stay on the fringes, growling and occasionally coming into the village under cover of darkness to claim some victims. You can believe that if you want to; history has often showed us otherwise. When human beings are afraid, they resort to behaviors that always blame, demonize, and eventually dehumanize "the other", allowing unacceptable acts. Those range from the establishment of police states (which can be overt or subtle) that excuse and allow the breakdown of privacy laws, to covert and open wars and genocide, to deportations and incarceration of people on ethnic or religious grounds, to forced interrogations and torture, and the rise of fascist political movements that make formerly illegal actions not only legal, but accepted as necessary.

And, as the article about the resurgence of neo-fascism in Italy points out, the new alt-right is clever and astute, opening itself not just to a narrow political spectrum, but as a home for anyone who feels forgotten, voiceless, politically disenfranchised. The leaders are savvy about media and popular culture, using unlikely strategies to reach converts, as well as squishy messages -- drawn even from left-wing causes -- to popularize their groups and their message.

Canadians tend to look south across the border with a kind of well-meant, pitying bemusement, and we all tell ourselves, "that couldn't happen here." Maybe not - I certainly hope not - but there are far-right groups in Canada too. Until twenty years ago, I never thought I'd see what is happening in the U.S. happen there: I thought the people would never allow it. I was completely wrong. It's possible that #TurnThemOut will triumph in the U.S. mid-term election, but the power of groups like the NRA will continue, as will the spinelessness of most members of Congress who care more about being re-elected than about children's lives, and who refuse to stand up against hate crime, hate speech, privacy violations in the name of "security", and torture -- to name just a few of the actions that ought to be completely unacceptable and illegal in a modern democracy.

Regardless of what country we live in, we have to see clearly that western democracies are presently under a serious threat. This does not mean that those governments were formerly blameless, without major issues, blind spots, and ongoing grievous sins that that they have failed to address throughout their own histories. I think you know what I mean. But we have to open our eyes and stop fooling ourselves that the forces that threaten the very underling principles of freedom and equality will slink back into the darkness, as the world becomes more migrant and more brown: they won't.

We need to remember, over and over, that only pressure from the grassroots will ultimately change governmental policies. The far-right is, after all, a grassroots movement that has been emboldened by the likes of Trump and Bannon and the resurgence of neo-Nazi and fascist groups worldwide: they are angry and fearful people who are racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim, believe in white supremacy, and see their worldview threatened by immigration, black presidents, women in power, diversity in formerly white cities and towns that threatens to become diversity in one's own family. Why do progressives tend to trust in top-down solutions? Why do we think that a vote alone is enough to combat such an ideology? We had eight years of Obama's presidency and what we are seeing now is not an aberration, it is in part a backlash by people who absolutely hated seeing a black man in that office.

It's been proven that people who experience and live with diversity have the most positive attitudes toward those who are different from themselves. It's also true that we tend to form into groups and communities with those who are like us. This makes it obvious and imperative that diversity must be encouraged by individuals, and be brought by us to all our organizations and social structures -- families, churches, informal and formal civic groups, workplaces, institutions and organizations. Within these structures, we can bring awareness to the ways in which we ourselves fail to see with the eyes of the other. Some people have hidebound attitudes, but it is crucial to believe that fundamental changes of heart are possible -- the ability to change is one of humanity's greatest attributes. If talk doesn't get us anywhere, we must openly live within the spirit of our convictions, and by doing so, we can actually gradually effect lasting, long-term change: I've seen this over and over again in the greater acceptance of homosexuality and gender diversity over the past few decades.

So some questions for today are these: how many friends do you have who are of different religions, different ethnic origins, different genders or sexual orientations? How often are you in the position of being in the minority, of listening to and learning from others who are different from yourself? How do you bring your own changed and evolving views back to your family, your circle of friends, your workplace, and the organizations to which you belong?