letters to anyone, self-published

A couple of letters I may have well have just put up here and saved sending to the Times Magazine, but I have a hard time leaving stuff like this unchallenged, even if I'm just talking to myself for now.

Latest:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/magazine/19Religion-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin

Mark Lilla (Aug. 19) represents Muslims as the only true threat to the Great Separation, Americans (people from the United States) instead settling their "potentially explosive religious differences. . . within the bounds of the Constitution." He fails to consider current US Christian fundamentalists' aim to destabilize the Great Separation through a religious network heavily engaged in electoral politics. The army of the Lord has adapted to modern instruments of state, but it has not ceased to be interested in the fate of the material-political world. The fruits of their labor, of course, can be seen in the election of their man, and in the worries of primary candidates who must determine how to relate to faith in a campaign process which has become increasingly a contest about image (of which faith is a part) and not about policies (which can be judged on their merits independently of the religious identification of the author).

Later, maintaining the distance of one "coming upon an ancient inscription written in hieroglyphics" he discusses Muslim renovationists working from within a community of believers to create a renewed faith compatible with the coexistence our diverse world requires for peace. While understanding that they are allies, he presents these people who believe that their faith should guide their actions in the social and political world as inherently inferior and alien to his reader: "Their reasons are not our reasons. But if we cannot expect mass conversion to the principles of the Great Separation. . .The best should not be the enemy of the good."

This is an article written to promote understanding of the so-called "Opposite Shore" which ends up marking Them more strongly than ever as foreign and unknowable and perhaps insults them. It ends with the words of the great Academic Man, bastion of Reason in a world of savages: "All we have is our own lucidity, which we must train on a world where faith still inflames the minds of men." As a young woman who is, perhaps, more intimately familiar with belief, and also committed to rational political organization dedicated to just protection of the well-being of all citizens, I wonder if he might more accurately analyze the religious-political nexus from a nearer place than that of the old anthropologist gazing at the wild men.

And the one before that:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20370

Freeman Dyson’s giddy biotech salvation fantasy demands a response from a human being with a more broadly communitarian vision for the future of our species and others, particularly given then way he couches his piece in the language of community interdependence.

Dyson’s invocation of a glorious evolutionary past, before the “evil day” when a certain one-celled organism stopped sharing and became a species to get ahead, back when horizontal gene transfer made evolution “a communal affair” aims to ally his vision with justice and equality. Similarly, his talk of biotech solutions for “the mainstream of economic development” presents biotech as the way forward to equality through greater production, enough for everyone. Reading it, I was reminded of an old episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, robots in space laughing at the hilariously naive voiceover man’s thrill about the future of the last green revolution.

His is a paternalistic mission to “ameliorate the human condition all over the earth” without addressing inequality, except with a naïve or calculating claim that because sunlight is more equitably distributed than oil, the benefits of harvesting it will be, too. This claim however founders against all the evidence that at this stage in the game, the physical location of resources in a particular community has little to do with who reaps the rewards from the sale of the energy—that’s why we call mining an extractive industry. The boom in corn production for ethanol isn’t providing the rural poor with enough profits to sustain rural livelihoods because large-scale consumption of energy requires large-scale production and history hasn’t provided the rural poor with democratic access to land and capital. Technological fixes are not meant to fundamentally shift power dynamics, they are meant to preserve them; and yet Dyson giddily suggests that in allowing us to burn more, faster, cleaner (efficiency) biotech will also lift up the rural poor simply because “bio” is a sort of naturally rural prefix. And what on earth makes him think that broad access to “small and domesticated” biotech will not go right alongside corporate control and massive capitalization for the already-rich on all these new products? Or maybe that is not what he meant to imply when he said, “It is likely that genetic engineering will remain unpopular and controversial so long as it remains a centralized activity in the hands of large corporations.” For Dyson, given our moment in the awesomely fast cultural evolution (“a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution”!) of our species, profiteering on the production of new life-forms must be nothing more than the natural response of our system to the technological wonders men manage to produce while the housewives are at home with the babies.

He talks democratization and community empowerment, but he’s selling an approach that offers nothing but more and faster play in the same game, the god-game he joyfully recommends to all of our grandchildren (the ones who are already playing with their PCs), the god-game which turns on our exclusion from the global community of organisms (in his world “species other than our own will no longer exist”) to take the seat to the left of Jesus and manage (exploit) the rest right down to their very genetic material in our quest to stay ahead of our limitless needs.

news trip to Bernay's banana republic(s)

Well the Guatemalan elections are just a couple of weeks away and it looks like there is real danger of Otto "ex"-military "Hard Hand of Justice" Perez Molina winning by the skin of his teeth:

"It was all so different five months ago- Alvaro Colom looked like he was going to walk it. Now with less than a month out from the first round of the Guatemalan elections, it's anyone's guess. Although Otto Pérez Molina is predicted to be at least 10 percentage points off the pace in the first round, it all changes with forecasts for a second round run off between Pérez Molina and Colom. The gap narrows to just 2 percentage points- Colom is first with 41.4 per cent, followed by Pérez Molina with 39.3 per cent." (http://gsn.civiblog.org/blog/_archives/2007/8/18/3166649.html)

There is a serious malnutrition crisis in Zacapa on the front page of Prensa Libre, and while the paper bemoans the sad tight faces, it does not mention what the most recent human rights commission report revealed: that the Constitutional Court recently declared unconstitutional a popular consultation that showed that Zacapa residents oppose a hydroelectric plant on their river; construction is of course set to go forward contrary to the wishes of the people of Zacapa who were asked their opinion through official channels only to be promptly ignored.

It all makes sense when you assume that the people are stupid and that government and media exist to manipulate them to its ends. A little retrospective on Bernays, the originator of PR, in the form of this documentary clip is up on the Guatemala Solidarity Network.

http://gsn.civiblog.org/blog/_archives/2006/10/2/2379575.html

a relevant account today I think for the US and Guatemala both that shows how much our histories are linked. . . should remind us how so many people in power think about citizens.

In slightly better news, the case against genocidal ex-dictator Rios Montt got a boost when a court ruled that a set of leaked documents could not be kept from the trial under a state secrets doctrine because the crime had already been committed and the release of the documents would not compromise national security. "The documents detailing Plan Sofia clearly illustrate an explicit chain of command, with Rios Montt at its head, through which orders of mass extermination were communicated at the height of the conflict" said Catherine Norris, an organizer with the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala (NISGUA) in Washington D.C." (http://gsn.civiblog.org/blog/_archives/2007/8/17/3164102.html)

Now we have only to wait and see what the US Court of Appeals rules in our own parallel case, Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. President Bush, regarding warrantless spying on US islamic charity organizations. Bush's Dept. of Justice guy makes the case that letters which were accidentally sent to these organizations revealing the spying program to its targets (woops) are protected as ultra-classified so that the prosecution on behalf of these groups can not even use the memory of these documents during the trial, hence the groups have no proof they were ever spied on, hence there is no case, case dismissed. Will the Court of Appeals uphold the Bush Administration's apparent right to no-oversight based on the State Secrets Doctrine? unclear.

anxiously awaiting September 9th and November 8th.

Wave of the future: vines

Well looks like I jumped ship on this blog for not too far off a year, and here I'm back with a new project, a whole new time and place so that it feels a little like letting someone see a picture of you in middle school to leave around all those old posts, but hey, onward into the blog of the future. yeah, right! The location has changed, going to be in Philly again at the start of the month, across town, across the Schukyll, in the West just out past where the train goes so that it is a kind of precarious ten blocks to the last major SEPTA outpost, precarious in the sense that it matters which roads you pick to go down on the way. Our neighbors are good, a guy with an artificial heart and occaisional seizures who spends a lot of time on his porch, keeping an eye out and watching the street change over many years, and a couple and their little boy up from the islands, working at the Marriot mostly nights and playing a checkers relative called Draft (or maybe just Draf?) on the porch in the day while we sip peanut punch like they make in Trinidad.

But before I get too comfortable there, I figured I better come back and spend some time in the old home place, and so I'm in Kentucky and reaquainting myself with the youth of Clark County all in their new haunts, watching all of us figure out what the new deal is with parents, because it seems like it's changing again for a lot of friends, some just out of high school, some older, and me with that fancy education from far away kind of late really striking out into the world of jobs and apartments and sink or swim.




So my new project: it's a habitat reclamation project of sorts, letting the termites finish what they started in a little building that has been a lot of things—an early office for the lean beef company for one, now storage for the flotsam of consumer spending and an ex-husband and an old house. I'm going to sell anything saleable on ebay (check stuff under newlifeforoldthings) once I get back to my camera upload cord in Philly, plant vines, salvage the tin roof, pull up the carpet, open the window, give the wisteria a new route up on to the top of the building and let the plants and animals eat the building and the old books that are already full of tunnels. I scavenged some good stuff—records, an old recipe box—already, and am picking up more plants at the garden center here in a few since everything is half-off for the end of the season. Vines are the wave of the future.