Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor

The prejudice demonstrated by some parties in the immigration debates (OK, I’ll say it – the nativist parties) is galling and fills me with a rage unparalleled by any except the rage a nativist experiences when he hears Spanish spoken this side of the Mexican border. In Southern Poverty Law Center’s latest Intelligence Report, there was an article about the charges rancher Roger Barnett faced for threatening a group of American citizens, including children, who he thought were undocumented immigrants. Luckily, he was found guilty on fourteen of fifteen counts, and so is at least being held accountable for this transgression. Apparently, it is not his only one. This guy claims to have rounded up twelve thousand undocumented immigrants by himself, and is so extreme even President Bush labeled him a vigilante. There is not much I can add to this story in particular, so instead I will talk about the equally disturbing reactions of the community to Barnett’s case. From the link:

Nov. 25
Posted by “Native American”
There are many people like myself who will snap if pushed too far and if I were in this guy’s place there would be war already. If I can’t live like a civilized human being with the right to defend myself, my livelihood, and my property, then it’s simply not worth living and I would have nothing to lose by taking as many enemies down with me as possible! As more people are pushed to this point then war will be inevitable. I STRONGLY RECOMMEND EVERYONE ARM THEMSELVES … HEAVILY!

 

First of all, Native American? Really? That’s your handle? It’s entirely possible this guy actually is a Native American, but I think it’s unlikely. Putting that aside, let’s look at some of the rhetoric. He speaks of “war” twice, taking down “enemies,” and defending himself, his livelihood and his property. Defending against what? A working man or woman, drawn by the promise of America? Many on the anti-immigrant side of the debate like to cast it in terms of legality – that it is not about fear and hatred of immigrants, but about illegal immigration specifically. No, it’s clearly not. That this particular maniac refers to living like a “civilized human being,” implying that immigrants are uncivilized, is emblematic of the undercurrent of hostility towards the people coming to America, not just the methods they use. This quote is particularly frightening, both because it advocates murder and it proves the existence of an Ayn Rand devotee:

Posted by “John Galt”
Deadmen file no lawsuits. Shoot, shovel and shut up. Keep some quick lime in storage. Refuse to be a victim.

Luckily, this kind of response is fringe (I hope). Still, it embodies the spirit of irrational, disproportionate fear on the nativist side.

 

 

The recent immigration bill proposed by Senator Kennedy is making some headway as far as immigration reform, but I’m worried about “touchback” – for what purpose would we send undocumented immigrants back to their native countries if we were going to allow them legalization? I can only imagine that it would be part of a process of shutting out the “undesirable,” that is, people who for whatever reason are not considered contributive to the US economy. The grand irony is that at 4.7% unemployment, there are few people who are actually losing their jobs to immigrants. Those who are here are doing work crucial to the economy. Moreover, though the bill would ostensibly grant amnesty to the estimated twelve million undocumented currently in the US, as far as I can tell any new guest workers allowed in on a guest worker visa would have almost no paths to citizenship. We would end up with a class of non-citizens, I assume with less legal protection and certainly less (no?) services provided by the government, like we were Saudi oil magnates riding around the Gulf on the backs of their wage-slave Pakistani servants. “Guest worker” programs are highly problematic because they are the institutionalization of a separate legal class within your own country – combined with the class problems that will arise with these immigrants doing all the most menial labor for minimal pay, it begins to assume dark overtones of government sanctioned social inequality, the exact antithesis of American and democratic principles.

More on this later.

Procrastination

It’s been a long time.  I plan to update more when I finish finals, which will be after tomorrow.

I was reading Allen Ginsberg’s A Supermarket In California while failing to study for my final tomorrow.   The poem is about the narrator, possibly Ginsberg, following “Walt Whitman” around a Berkeley supermarket at night.  Though I knew Ginsberg was a beat poet and most famous in the ’50s, i hadn’t placed him in any particular time, and therefore placed him in the present or near past.  Thus, when I read his anachronistic references to Whitman, I felt that the distance the narrator felt from Whitman was much the same as my own – America’s premier poet, who lived in an America so far removed from my own he might as well be Chaucer or Virgil.  Still, he is the American Poet, and so I, like the narrator, feel close to him as if he some how matters to my life or my world.

Then I read the date on the bottom of the poem.  Berkeley, 1955.

1955!

This poem was written over half a century ago; there is nearly as great a temporal difference between me and this narrator, as between the narrator and Whitman.  What was Berkeley like in 1955?  Less homeless, hippies, liberals?  Less Asians.  Even more sleepy and suburban than it is currently?  Was there even a supermarket in Berkeley in 1955?

The profound irony of the poem, while I read it (though I have now spoiled the surprise for anyone who reads this post first) was that I identified with the narrator in many ways, only to realize that I could write the same poem today about  the Ginsberg of then.  The man is also an American Poet, someone who defined American post-war modernity in a way that perhaps shaped all American art subsequently.  References to famous writers past, in the writing of a famous writer, always strike me in an odd way.  I feel like I am somehow taken out of the fiction and brought into closer commune with the writer himself.  Famous writers are typically great writers, and a Great Writer is infallible and sometimes frightening in genius.  I wonder what it was like to be a physics undergraduate under Newton or Einstein; that’s how I feel sometimes, reading Hemingway or Solzhenitsyn.  When I read a poem by Ginsburg in his early days, about the staggeringly intimidating Walt Whitman, I can feel in him the reader and student – someone who has not yet garnered the reputation he will come to have, is maybe insecure about his own abilities, and is certainly in awe of and measures himself by the Great American Poet.  He feels like someone that I could meet in a Berkeley supermarket, rather than some kind of God-man who dominates American poetry.

Ginsburg later said he hated this poem, which is interesting to me because it is one of the few modern  poems I have ever read off hand and enjoyed immediately, without needing to delve too extensively into the meaning of the work.  It is there, I am sure, if I ever wanted to do so; but it is also immediately pleasurable in construction and imagery.  I happened upon it accidentally, and maybe some day I will return to it – for now, though, I’ll leave it be.

Garbage Generated While Trying to Write a Constitutional Law Paper

plasdigheeeididdkeghggbnswodiekeeke

I’ve always wondered if this was really art. Not because I’m one of these ‘my three year old could do better’ types but because I was simply expressing my feeling by the random pressing of letters on the keyboard. I put little consideration into it – I did not look at the shapes of the letters, think of the sounds, try to figure out how to express with letters my deepest feelings. I just pounded some shit out. At the same time, I wasn’t mashing the keyboard either – I was hitting the keys with precision, depending upon how the mood struck me. I’m feeling kinda hyper or something write now, not hyper exactly, but like really unfocused. Really unfocused, like multiple thoughts running at the same time, none of which are in any way useful to the paper I’m trying to write. This happens to me sometimes (often), especially when I most need to be focused. But here’s the deal – does this signify something if I didn’t intend it to? Is this a deep expression of my inner most feelings? I’m a firm believer in subtext – handwriting, the spelling mistakes a person makes, the ‘throwaway’ media a person consumes, etc. I think it says a lot about me that I like comics so much, and will even read superhero comics, which are 99% garbage. Maybe something about my desire for a Manichean world; or the opposite? My longing for icons and heroes; or to be one? Who knows. The point is, in general I believe that ‘stream of consciousness’, i.e. what I am doing right now, is at some level valuable, usually. Because when you just let loose, you are letting something out. However, the random letters I typed at the top not only had no intent, I’m not sure they had any significance. Does it say something about the letters I favor? The fingers I favor? Their positions spacially, on the keyboard? Spell check tells me spacially is not a word. Anyway, just throwing it out there, in the context of postmodern art and stuff where dudes just sort of throw stuff together and call it art. It’s like, great man, you really expressed yourself here, but you haven’t communicated anything to me. This is the difference between Joyce or Burroughs and a shitty pretentious college kid – those guys were trying to do something, even though they did it in a way that at first appears incomprehensible or like gibberish.

In short, I hate writing papers.

Shocked and Saddened

I have nothing new to say about the horrifying shooting that occurred in Virginia on Monday. My heart goes out to the friends and families of the victims. I hope that I can discuss what I think is an interesting linguistic note, without detracting from the gravity and tragedy of the event.

President Bush, in his address to the nation, said he was “shocked and saddened.” In nearly every news story about his statement, this was the phrase singled out. Similarly, the Queen of England was “shocked and saddened” by the news. Robert H. Tate, an alumni of Virginia Polytechnic Institute, used the same words. To extend the phenomenon beyond these exact words, Senator Obama said he was “grieved and shocked” and Jacques Chirac was filled with “horror and consternation.” What is it about these words, and the ideas behind these words, over any others, that hold appeal for world leaders? Certainly, the event was both shocking and saddening. But it was also grotesque, incomprehensible, a number of reactions are appropriate to the situation. There is also a lack of condolences, sympathies, solicitude, or what have you, expressed directly in the phrase, though they were often expressed elsewhere in statements given. What is powerful about this phrase? It’s succinct and alliterative, but those reasons hardly account for its ubiquity. It may simply be a meme, the way some words and phrases like “hegemony” or “litmus test” flow in and out of our vocabulary, erupting into popular use and fading out again. Perhaps there is something about the nature of the ideas being conveyed. Unlike giving sympathies or condolences, there is nothing about “shocked” or “saddened” that even begins to suggest insincerity. While someone could fake being either, it seems they need not – the facts of the event themselves are shocking, and saddening. It is no stretch for someone to imagine even his worst political enemies as shocked or saddened by such a gruesome event. Being “shocked,” also, implies a break with the norm – that this was unexpected and irregular.

I don’t have any clear idea of why this phrase has been locked on to by so many, but the pattern is noticeable.

RaLo

Today I sat outside on the grass to study, because it was a nice day out. Windy, but nice. Before my leg even had time to fall asleep from the awkward position I sat in, I was approached by a man I suspected was a panhandler or con man. It was the questions he started with – how long I had been at Cal, if I had ever seen him before. He was feeling me out to see if he had ever worked me before.

I often attract the crazy or indigent – I guess I look empathetic. Or like an easy mark. Many don’t ask for money, though; they just want a sympathetic ear. I once talked to a homeless man in San Francisco who walked around singing all day as he pushed his shopping cart. He told me he wasn’t really crazy, he just pretended to be.

The man who approached me today, and who later identified himself to me as RaLo, didn’t look crazy, or even like a typical panhandler – which is why I suspected him of being a panhandler. Counterintuitive, maybe, but that’s how my brain works. He was an older guy – fifty-four, he said, and I can’t imagine why he’d lie about that. His hair and beard were silver and close cropped. He did not smell. He was sober, but missing a lot of teeth, so he probably had a past with heroin. He was dressed kind of like I was dressed – jeans, sneakers, hoodie, and a jacket over the hoodie. I actually thought the jacket looked pretty cool, but I have been told by friends in the past that the jacket I have now (which I like a lot) makes me look like a hobo, so maybe I have bad taste in jackets. I did not ask him where he got it, it seemed tactless.

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RaLo began to tell me a tale that, while no doubt mostly false, probably mirrored his real life in some ways. He battled heroin for years and now was in a clean and sober program. He came out here from the South to escape the poverty and bigotry. He had a wife and three kids, and had trouble supporting his family. He’d had jobs on and off in the past, and was having some trouble securing one now. He believed in God. He believed in the devil. He believed the white man was the devil. Some of these statements seemed to me to be more likely than others.

RaLo said he was glad I was in school, since education was one of the few things they can’t take from you. He felt secure in confiding in me his hate of the white man, he said, because I too am a minority. I am not as dark as he, RaLo noted, but I must still be on the receiving end of the white man’s boot. I figured it was better not to tell him that my father was white.

RaLo said he liked the way I handled myself; that he appreciated being treated like a human being, rather than being pre-judged “for his color.” I felt like a hypocrite, because I had in fact already judged him, though not for his color. I felt sorry for RaLo, that a man would ever need to stoop to begging, which he no doubt was getting around to. I saw the weight of life in the lines of his face. I saw years of heroin addiction every time he opened his mouth. I assumed a lot of things about him.

I listened to RaLo for quite a while. It was more interesting than reading about the political economy of the Lebanese Civil War. I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, though. Behind his elaborate backstory lurked the demand he was about to place on me – he would ask me for money.

I wish this was a story about breaking down stereotypes – that after a time, he smiled at me wistfully, heaved himself up from the grass and said, “thanks for listening.” Instead, he asked me for money. RaLo claimed he had been accepted for a job at UPS, starting tomorrow, and that he needed to get his class-b driver’s license renewed. I can’t imagine that UPS would hire a truck driver without a valid license, and the DMV is closed on a Sunday. What would he do? Get the license the day he was supposed to start work? He told me how much the job would mean to him, to his family. He was almost certainly lying to me. RaLo was not a man fallen on temporary hard times – he was living on the street, making a life as a panhandler, and he may even still be using drugs.

So what?

No one wants to give money, or time, or any kind of charity to the “undeserving.” We figure that those who use drugs, or who can’t/won’t get jobs, should be cut off. No more life of leisure for them! And it makes lots of sense. Giving money to the homeless is incentivizing that lifestyle; if people believe they can have a free ride, they’ll stop working. Thus, if we removed all charity from the indigent, some people would be strongly motivated to get off their ass and get to work.

And some would die.

In modern society, the kinship, village, and tribal networks that would have once sustained a weak member are gone. Instead, there is the state, and the random kindness of strangers. Both of these give an extremely limited amount of assistance to the poor. Some people cannot sustain themselves. I don’t know why this is true. I suspect it is because of problems in the structure of society – that we allow some to fall into the cracks early, and they can never recover. Others might say these people are born lazy, or weaker. Perhaps. Even if that were true, are we prepared to agree with Ebenezer Scrooge, and allow them to die, so that they may decrease the surplus population? Will we cave to Social Darwinism? I am not so cold yet. Everyone who lives is deserving of life. This is not to say that free-riderism is not a very real problem – but like all major social problems, we will need to be careful about where we draw the lines. Unless we are prepared to institute wide-scale programs for the assistance of the homeless and indigent, we cannot simply stop giving. Not soup kitchens, not church charities, not individuals. If I gave RaLo money, he would no doubt spend it “irresponsibly,” either on more drugs or on basic living necessities while he continued to fail to get his life on track. But at least he would continue to live.

I gave RaLo what I could spare and said, “good luck.”

Antiquities, Museums, Repatriation

In the most recent New Yorker, there is an article on the problem of antiquities – who owns them, how illegal their trade is, and when they should be repatriated to their countries of origin.

Obviously, the claim countries of origin make on ancient works of art “owned” by foreign museums has as much to do with politics and economy as it does with any real “right” of ownership. Though many of these antiquities were found by treasure hunters or tomb raiders, and sold illegally to museums, countries of origin would have less interest in retrieving these ancient works if they weren’t extremely valuable. An ancient vase or statue can be as much of a draw for a tourist as the David or Mona Lisa.

Still, illegal trade in antiquities, and treasure hunting, are a worse problem than portrayed in the article. The goal of the article is to illustrate the muddy moral waters of the antiquities trade – but though the trade is ambiguous, tomb raiding is a much worse crime than the writer portrays it.

Carlos Picón, curator of the Greek and Roman department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, said this:

“In the nineteenth century, it was called treasure hunting – you would go to foreign lands far and wide and you would gather what was going to be destroyed and bring it back to a safe place in the Age of Enlightenment.”

This is so historically inaccurate, I hardly know where to begin. Not only were early treasure hunters and tomb raiders in search of profit, early archaeologists, professional and amateur (most were amateurs in those days) focused heavily on treasures because of the prestige and fortune they would bring. Much of the problem with excavating today in places that had been discovered in the nineteenth century is that the clumsy digging of treasure seekers has destroyed the site. Even the archaeologists then had no regard for real history, but instead devastated what would otherwise have been a rich source of information to get a few gold trinkets. The only people doing any “destroying” were the ones seeking the antiquities in the first place.

I don’t support repatriation of antiquities wholesale, because I believe in a world where we can all share our cultural heritage. I do believe, though, in claims of ownership. Just as an essay I’ve written is “mine,” an ancient Roman statue “belongs” to Italy – the Met has no place owning or selling it, unless they have already bought it in an entirely legal manner. However, just as I wouldn’t mind letting an essay be read by many people or distributed in libraries, I would like to see that statue at the Met, because it makes it more accessible to more parties. Then, perhaps, after a period of ten years or so, the statue can hit the road for a different museum – one in Argentina perhaps, or India. I hope for a system where antiquities can be shared internationally, without the petty claims famous museums or nation-states would put on them. In the world we do live in, though, I would give much more weight to the claims of repatriating countries. That a foreign museum could “own” something it bought from an illegal tomb raider is laughable.

Picón says:

“I thought, Let’s have a case of this sensational glass, because it is a feast to the eyes. I am sorry, but that is not Turkish patrimony, or Italian patrimony. Here am I, a Puerto Rican of French, Spanish, and Italian descent – this is as much my culture as somebody who was born in Florence. Actually, it’s more mine, because I have taken my time to study it.”

I agree that history belongs to us all, particularly given the nebulous nature of the claim of the modern nation-state on historical bloodlines. People move around; it’s hard to tell who is really descended from whom, and it shouldn’t matter all that much anyway. However, while I believe in a universal cultural heritage, I cannot shake the history of tomb raiding, which is imperial powers stealing the heritage of poorer nations. In the nineteenth century, Italy, Greece and Turkey were impoverished countries like Egypt or Iraq today (maybe not so much Iraq). They were the subject of pompous northwestern European treasure hunting expeditions, and had their claim on their own heritage – which, certainly, must at least be equal to that of a Brit or German – taken from them. Not to mention the inherent problem of amateur excavation, where more history is destroyed than recovered.

In many ways, repatriation efforts are small minded and nationalistic. But the illegal antiquities trade, and antiquities ownership by powerful, famous international museums in general, stems from an imperial legacy and promotes the exotic (treasure) over the historical (potsherds and garbage piles). Both are repugnant in their own ways, but between the two, I would rather see Roman art for the Romans.

Picón:

“If I want to spend three wonderful hours learning something about sixth-century China, I don’t want to see their Tupperware. But some archeologists only care about the dirt.”

You’re goddamn right they do. And it’s a step forward.

Makoto Shinkai

After accidentally stumbling onto the first of three parts in his 5 Centimeters Per Second miniseries, I have fallen in love with the works of Makoto Shinkai. Aside from this new series, he is known for his short film Voices of a Distant Star and his feature length, The Place Promised In Our Early Days. Overall, I was least impressed with Voices, and perhaps most impressed with 5 Centimeters, though the series is not finished so it will be difficult to pass judgment.

Voices, his first major work, centers around a middle school couple who are eventually separated – one remaining in Japan, the other sent across the solar system to wage war on an alien race. They keep in contact with text messages, which take months, and eventually years, to reach each other.

The Place Promised In Our Early Days is a full film, which takes place in a version of Japan that had been divided into two entities; the south, allied with the United States, and the North, under the jurisdiction of “the Union.” The Union has built a giant tower on its southern border, which has the ability to connect to parallel worlds, though intermittently. Our protagonists are three middle school students living in the south, who plan to fly a plane to the tower.

5 Centimeters Per Second is a series of vignettes, about a middle school boy named Takaki. It is far more “slice of life” than the other two, focusing only on Takaki’s experiences and thoughts without any real direction. It also lacks the science fiction elements that permeate his other works.

The major theme running through all Shinkai’s works is one of the longing and loneliness of separation from your love. One wonders what this says about Shinkai’s middle and high school years. In Voices and The Place Promised the science fiction and futurist elements act as a conceit for the separation. In Voices, the separation is literally one of space and time; the couple’s physical distance is also temporal, as their text messages, traveling at the speed of light, take months to reach each other. The separation is wrenching for both characters, particularly the one isolated at the ass end of the galaxy. The most interesting conflict in the film is not that of the girl waging war against a silent and faceless alien enemy, but of the young man remaining in Japan, as he attends an ordinary high school and meets new girls. It is difficult for him to wait for his girlfriend rather than move on – “Eight years,” he says, “might as well be forever.” He’s not wrong.

Similarly, in The Place Promised, the parallel worlds that operate through the dreams of Sayuri Sawatari, the female lead, are a barrier to her connection to Hiroki. In the subsequent years since Sayuri’s coma (and disappearance), Hiroki has been unable to live with himself; his failure to keep his promise to Sayuri, and his inability to be with her, weigh heavily upon him. He finds himself only being able to connect to her through his dreams. In her dreams, Sayuri is alone in a devastated world, and can only return to the real world and awake from her coma when she sees the plane she worked on with Hiroki and Takuya. Flight as liberation is a theme as old as storytelling, and is recursive within the movie as well, as the father figure, Okabe, is suggested to have worked on a plane with two friends in his youth.

One interesting motif throughout Shinkai’s works is the train. It dominates the landscape, as both connector and separator. These young people, without cars and in mass transit oriented Japan, use the train as the method to bridge spatial differences; but the great distances one must use the train to traverse also symbolize the vastness of separation. In 5 Centimeters Per Second, the train fails. With heavy snowfall, it takes our protagonist Takaki hours to see his love Akari. She even notes earlier in the episode, “It’s no longer like we can hop on the train and see each other whenever we want.” She had moved so far away that even the train, umbilical cord of youth connection, had ceased to function.

The wide angle shot, particularly when coupled with a lack of people, is also indicative of the isolation and loneliness of the characters. Shinkai often uses a broad panning technique, giving us, for example, the entire train platform, with two small individuals standing in the middle of the screen. Japan, well known for its dense population, is a desert in Shinkai’s works; no one exists but the protagonists and a few ancillary characters. It is a jarring shot because we are used to the opposite – the close up is the angle of choice for a director seeking to display emotion. By choosing the wide angle, Shinkai displays the emotions of characters in a different way – they are empty, small, alone, in a big world. A notable use of the same shot, but with the diametrically opposed purpose, is in The Place Promised In Our Early Days. Whenever the trio’s middle school days, in the bright field where they worked on their plane, is shown, it is presented as a paradise. Yes, they are the only people in the world – and they are glad of it. It is a stark contrast to later uses of the shot in the same film, and in the other two films.

I liked a lot of stuff in these movies and they were heavily layered, so if I think of anything else I’ll write about it later.

Putin’s Successor

I was a little surprised at first that Putin was against having a third term.  After all, the man has done everything possible to consolidate his power during his reign.  From the manipulation of provincial and local elections to the oppression of opposition groups, he has spent seven years trying to derail democracy.

After giving it some thought, though, his move made sense.  Few things are a better indicator of a democracy on the ropes than the extension of term limits for a sitting president.  The Russian population, though they love Putin, are highly educated and would understand such a move as a power grab.  Putin and his cohorts are already so entrenched in the Russian political structure that he could probably rule effectively behind the scenes; he would retain legitimacy for Russian “democracy” while choosing a successor who is loyal to Putin and his vision.

We should keep a watchful eye on the upcoming elections there – this may be the most important election for the cause of Russian democracy since their first.

Cuba’s Academic Advantage

That’s the title of Martin Carnoy’s new book.  I heard an interview with him on NPR recently, where he talked about why Cuban elementary school students achieve much higher on math and language tests than other Latin American countries, and what ramifications this has for our education system.

In brief, he says that by keeping a class with the same teacher for four years (like the Italian Montesorri system), close supervision of teachers and the curriculum, and higher standards for teachers, elementary school students are able to learn better across the board.

What it amounts to is more control over all aspects of education.  This may result in better elementary education, but what happens when kids get older?  American education does well in teaching some students to be flexible and innovative.  The problem comes when the rest fall through the cracks.  Can , or should, we sacrifice flexibility and choice for lock-step achievement?  I think laying a uniform basic education isn’t so bad, but once students move into junior high, and especially high school, they would need much more independence.

Other basic problems with applying such a school system to our own are the lack of social support and quality teachers.  Because we pay our teachers much less than other professionals, there’s little incentive for the highly qualified to enter the field.  Plus, the family and community network, which I believe is key in child education, is absent in poor urban areas – and unlike Cuba, we do not have an overbearing government watching parents at every turn. I’m pretty sure I’m glad of that.  It’s an odd tradeoff – intense regulation and a broad standard of education, or independence and creativity.

Mubarak’s Authoritarian Measures Approved

At least, that’s how I read this article about the “democratic reforms” passed by a “referendum.”   Chicanery is a staple of Egyptian elections; along with the boycott held by the Muslim Brotherhood, it stands to reason that the amendments went forward.  The Chicago Tribune reports:

“The amendments will, among other measures, put an end to independent judicial oversight of elections, restrict the formation of political parties and give the government powers to arrest, search and eavesdrop on citizens without a court order.”

Yeah, that sounds like democratic progress all right.