Othering Oneself

Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin, was published in 1961. It chronicles the journey of a white man who had his skin darkened to pass as black in the American deep South. I’ve known two people personally who have done a “passing” experiment and written a book about the experience: Ted Conover had already published his account of riding trains with hoboes, Rolling Nowhere, when he attended Cambridge University’s Centre of Latin American Studies to study for an M.Phil while I was the secretary there in the early 80s. The second was Norah Vincent who was a work colleague at Harvard University Press in the early 90s and who subsequently spent a year as a man, as told in Self-Made Man.

I have been reminded of this by a sentence in Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia about needing to look like a revolutionary militiaman in order to blend in in Barcelona in the early months of the civil war, and then needing to look bourgeois once he was on his way home through France after being wounded. From what I’ve read of Orwell, he could move comfortably through these different spheres, always being a little on the outside of them. When Orwell was on his way to Spain he dropped in on Henry Miller in Paris, who thought he was absolutely nuts to go and fight fascism in a country where he didn’t even speak the language—that he must be propelled by guilt or obligation. (Orwell wasn’t alone: thousands from all over the world volunteered to fight in Spain.)

And this is my big question: why do I feel the need to join the fight for those outside my group? For African Americans who have faced centuries of enslavement, discrimination, and police violence, for Mexican Americans who right now fear for their livelihoods and indeed lives? For those with less privilege than I have? A friend raised a possible answer this morning: this is what constitutes civilization. Most, if not all, animals are propelled by instinct to ensure the survival of their offspring even if it means endangering others in their own species. We have evolved as humans to become altruistic when it is in our interest to protect the group beyond our own family. But when we expand this outside the group, expand our definition of community to include everyone, this gets us labelled lunatic fringe lefties.

In a sense I’m continuing a political fight I had with my father while growing up, and he dead for more than 25 years now. The decades have taken a toll on my enthusiasm but they have never stopped my feeling that this is where, as a moral person, I ought to stand. What action to take is always the question, but it doesn’t stop the need for it. It is a comfort to know I’m not alone in feeling this way.

Homage to Orwell

I had never read Homage to Catalonia before, and I just finished it. What’s astonishing about it is its raw power in the writing: a first-hand account of someone who volunteered to fight Fascism in the Spanish Civil War but who was so determined to be honest in his writing that accounts of his time in the misery of the freezing and terrifying fray got interspersed with analysis of what was going on at the time, especially in Barcelona, despite the utter impossibility of anyone ever knowing this. His account of the infighting among the factions on the left — the wholesale annihilation of the anarchists by the communists, for example, because when uncle Josef is paying the bills for the guns, you are 100% loyal — gives a sad picture of wasted energy. What if all this aggression had been directed at Franco’s forces?

The book came out in 1938, a full year before Franco’s victory, a full year before the decades of the dictatorship. Orwell was badly wounded in the fighting and was able, after a long and tortuous bureaucratic journey, to leave Spain with his wife. There are many passages that struck me, but one in particular, the final sentence of the book, a warning to all of us in 2025, is clanging a bell in my head. May we rise out of the deep, deep sleep of bread and circuses.

Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

Drawing the Erasure of Memory

History is, famously, written by the victors. When the victors are long-lived autocrats, the omissions scream across the generations: the state apparatus of information control and terror silence any dissent. In the case of Spain, the horrors of a prolonged civil war on the very eve of World War II made the suffering worse, because powers that might have been prevailed upon to help at least with food aid were already concerned with fighting a determined aggressor and protecting their own populations.

I grew up just to the north of Madrid in the 1960s and 1970s, a mere 5 miles away from Franco’s palace in El Pardo. His motorcade was a familiar traffic inconvenience. As foreigners we were unaware of the questioning and torture of prisoners in the now-infamous cuarteles of the Guardia Civil. See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. Silence.

I tried to capture some of this in a six-page comic that was published in an anthology last year. I’m grateful for the work of Hillary Chute, author of Disaster Drawn, for giving me the idea for this comic. As we were reminded by the recent viewing of Good Night, and Good Luck and are reminded daily by an administration slouching towards tyranny, the time for the courage to speak up is NOW.

No Kings In Woodland

Pica and I today went to the No Kings protest up in Woodland, our county seat, which is a town of 62,000. We didn’t know what to expect, but were heartened by seeing people marching when we were approaching to find a parking place. This was a short march of about 4 blocks from the new courthouse on Main Street, to the old courthouse one street to the north, a building with a proper plaza in front of it. The energy was very good at the demonstration. People kept arriving from all directions, and cars driving down Main Street were honking and waving at us. We only saw one truck come past with a Trump/Vance sign; they were roundly booed.

This year I have been to two protests at the State Capitol in Sacramento; the one today felt perhaps more connected to the surrounding community than the ones in Sacramento. The space in front of the capitol building is large and protesters seem to disappear into the space. Also, Sacramento is a city with very little life in it on weekends. The protest today would have been difficult to miss by anybody headed into downtown Woodland this morning. I’m seeing an estimate of 3700 people all told today at the Woodland protest. What I am most hopeful about is how there were protests today all across the city from the largest cities to the smallest towns. There were 170 protestors today out of a total population of 912 in Bodega Bay, the fishing village on the Sonoma County coast where Pica’s mum used to live.

Good Night, and Good Luck

We had lunch a couple of weeks ago with Numenius’ family. His stepbrother is an actor and plays the part of cameraman in the George Clooney version of the above play on Broadway. This was streamed live today by CNN and we were able to watch it.

The media are very different now than they were in 1954… but scaremongering by those insatiably hungry for power is sadly still with us. Glad we saw it. And glad we saw Andy as Charlie on a screen seen by millions around the world!

Is Anti-Zionism the Same as Antisemitism?

Shifting into Comics

I can’t remember when I started exploring comics as a medium — probably in 2021? — but very quickly I discovered the Sequential Artists Workshop. Based in Gainesville, Florida, but with a Mighty online presence, it has been a tremendous resource and source of inspiration and community.

I have a piece on Franco’s suppression of memory in Spain during and after the Spanish Civil War due to appear in a SAW anthology called Troubled Histories next month. I will publish it here once it’s been printed, but for now, here are some of the comics I made to support my pitch for this submission.

Four Months Later

After the Pepper Spray Incident on November 18, 2011, which exposed sleepy Davis uncomfortably to a searing international spotlight, things slowly calmed down. The inevitable reports were delayed, almost as inevitably, by lawsuits.

But they were released today. In summary, egregious errors were made by university administration and the police force, including not ascertaining the makeup of the protesters on the Quad; use of weapons on the part of the police for which they weren’t trained and aren’t approved by university policy; miscommunication; failure to learn from errors that had been made on sister campuses just days before. But the best part, for my money, is this:

“The Task Force recommends The Office of the President should review provisions of the Police Officers’ Bill of Rights that appear to limit independent public review of police conduct and make appropriate recommendations to the Legislature. The Task Force did not have access to the subject officers. This limitation does not serve the police or the public. When information necessary to understand and evaluate police conduct is unavailable to the public, the public has less confidence in the police and the police cannot perform their duty without public confidence.”

Justice Reynoso and the Task Force panel had a hard time of it today in Freeborn Hall, but they have done their job in less than optimal circumstances. It now falls on the University to implement the report’s recommendations. My advice? Start soon.

1,010,361 and Counting

That’s the number of views on YouTube of the video of students at UC Davis being pepper sprayed at a non-violent demonstration on Friday as of this moment. We’ve made international news: here’s a story on the BBC front page. This isn’t the sort of acclaim one wishes of one’s university; we may have now eclipsed Penn State on the campus hall of shame billboard.

There are many, many excellent pieces and comments on the incident on Friday, and I have spent hours reading these. Here are some that have risen to the top for me.

This MetaFilter thread was posted yesterday afternoon and continues to be lively.

The “Wall of Shame” video. This hasn’t gotten quite as much attention as the first video above, but it may be equally powerful. Yesterday afternoon Chancellor Katehi held a press conference but excluded the students. When she left the building a couple of hours later the students were seated arms linked, allowing her a path from the door to her vehicle. The students say nothing as she goes past, shaming her with silence. She looks shell-shocked. (Linked on BoingBoing).

Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon about the roots of the UC Davis pepper spraying, setting the incident in the broader context of the history of police violence.

The Davis Wiki is providing continual on-the-ground coverage as events unfold.

In the above MetaFilter thread, one member of the MetaFilter community who is a professor somewhere shares the following letter he wrote to the President of UC, Mark Yudof:

Dear Chancellor Yudof,
Having familiarized myself with the details of the pepper-spray assault carried out against peaceful, nonviolent student demonstrators at UC Davis on Friday by Lt. John Pike and other officers under the orders of Chief Anette Spicuzza and, ultimately, under the responsibility of Chancellor Linda P. B. Katehi, and having watched the several videos of the incident in question that have been widely disseminated, and having heard the nonsensical explanations and excuses proffered by Katehi, Spicuzza, and other Davis spokespeople, I have come to the conclusion that a serious crime was committed by UC Davis police, and ordered and abetted by their superiors. It is unconscionable that a university in the United States would deploy such disproportionate use of force against its own students for acts of conscientious civil disobedience that were completely non-violent in spirit and execution.

As an academic myself, I resolve to do no business of any sort with any branch of the University of California system until
a) Chancellor Katehi is fired or resigns
b) Chief Spicuzza resigns, is fired, or faces significant discipline
c) Officer Pike and any others who used pepper spray in the above-described incident are fired and/or severely disciplined, and criminally charged if appropriate
d) Students who were assaulted receive apologies and compensation for their injuries

Until these things happen, I won’t serve on any UC dissertation committees, I will not act as a tenure referee for any UC system tenure cases, I will not recommend any students for graduate programs in the UC system, and I will not give any talks or attend any conferences at any UC campus (which means, among other things, canceling an upcoming talk at [UC Campus XXX]). Nor will I review any manuscripts for UC press or its journals. Many of my colleagues at [XXXXX university] and around the country are considering similar stances. It is incumbent on the UC system administration to take vigorous control of this situation, require Chancellor Katehi’s resignation, investigate promptly, discipline all the perpetrators of this assault, and apologize to the victims of this assault as well as compensate them fairly (including expunging any arrest records related to this protest).

Sincerely, etc.

Other academics across the land are reacting with outrage as well. Cathy N. Davidson, who is a neuroscientist and former vice-provost at Duke University, writes on Why this is a Gettysburg Address moment for higher education.

President Yudof steps up to the plate. His statement released this afternoon pleases me. Of course what the UC Office of the President says and does are two different things, but it sounds like there will be substantial pressure coming down from the top.

Given that last statement, my hunch is that Chancellor Katehi will end up having to resign, though I doubt immediately. Her leadership may just too be compromised at this point for her to manage the den of ants that is a university campus.

More important is will any reforms emerge concerning the practice of policing at the University of California. It would be all too typical bureaucratic behavior to throw a couple of bad actors in the police department under the bus, make a minor procedural change or two, and declare the matter done. This solves nothing since the problem is a matter of deep culture within the police department.

Next up: there will be a rally and general assembly on the quad at noon tomorrow. Chancellor Katehi is planning to address the students at that time.

Updated 8:20 AM, 22 November 2011

I attended a bit of the rally yesterday. The crowd was ebullient, the energy positive. This concluding paragraph from “Jonathan Eisen’s post” on the event sums up my feeling as well:

Overall the day was exhausting. But exhilarating too. I did not agree with everything everyone said or did. But that was not the point. The power and the passion of the protestors and the people of the University. That was the point. I left feeling good about UC Davis again. Not sure what will happen tomorrow. But the people on campus have risen above the pepper spraying. They have shown strength beyond what I could have ever imagined. The world is certainly watching now. But I am not too worried. I like what I see.

And I was particularly thrilled by the balloon! My geography grad student colleagues Michele Tobias and Alex Mandel used a helium balloon as a lifting platform to take aerial photographs from high above the crowd. Michele’s research involves using kite-aided photography to study beach vegetation, so this was a variant on her basic platform.

The connection of Chancellor Katehi to events at Athens Polytechnic in November 1973 has taken a deeply troubling turn. She was a student at that university when the regime used military force to suppress campus dissent, killing many students. The backlash from this event led to the fall of the regime some months later. Katehi referenced Athens in her brief speech to the crowd, saying “I was there”.

But — tthis post at Crooked Timber from today is revelatory. A couple of excerpts:

Among the legacies of the uprising was a university asylum law that restricted the ability of police to enter university campuses. University asylum was abolished a few months ago, as part of a process aimed at suppressing anti-austerity demonstrations. The abolition law was based on the recommendatiions of an expert committee, which reported a few months ago…

Among the authors of this report – Chancellor Linda Katehi, UC Davis. And, to add to the irony, Katehi was a student at Athens Polytechnic in 1973.

Ground

When the noise of
rapes and gropes and
men in power
(and men not but
wanting it SO MUCH)
gets too loud

I dig.
In earth
softened by
unhoped-for rain,
earthworms teeming
in a second spring,
tilling improbable loads of
well-seasoned manure
in through loam
and silt. Dig.

Mocked blackbirds and
squabbling swallows swirl as
mud gloms on to my
boots and barrow-wheel.
Dig in grief
for women
silenced by fear.
Fork the rage
into the earth,
go gentle.
Dig: invite
all to sit
at an ancient,
wormeaten table,
sharing the harvest.