Civil rights days

We've spent this past week in New York City, too busy to blog, and will be going home to Andalucía (Andalusia) in a few hours. Besides seeing friends and picking up our Spanish permanent residency visa from the consulate here (which obliged us to return), we managed to see the production of Tracey Scott Wilson's The Good Negro. (See review at backstage.com. More reviews at Critic-O-Meter.)

Most of the audience were, like us, old enough to remember the early, dangerous days of the civil rights movement, how precarious every little victory seemed to be, the spying and false information spread by FBI men to disrupt the movement, the murders, the exaggerated and impossible expectations everybody had of those bold, scared men and women who dared to lead. The play simplifies the history, but wonderfully complicates the accepted myth -- that somehow Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy and the others in the Southern Christian Leadership Council were always virtuous, always sure of themselves, always focused only on the movement. It couldn't have been like that -- these were human beings, just like us, with all our common frailties. That's important to remember, because otherwise we will forget what June Jordan reminded us, that we are the ones we have been waiting for.

On a personal note, the play reminded me of an episode from my own past, which I've recounted here.

We were no heroes or demigods, but we dared, and in our bumbling and sometimes frightened ways, we did what had to be done. And even when victory looked most remote, we kept telling ourslves "Yes we can." And, finally, we could and did.

Frittering away a good crisis

My friend and colleague Don Monkerud sent a NYT article, March 16, 2009, Fruit Picking Causes Strife in Andalusia as Natives' Job of Last Resort, by VICTORIA BURNETT. Other American friends may be interested in my response, how things look to somebody (me) who lives there.

Thanks, Don. I hadn't see this article, but I have known about the problem. It's also serious in Jaén, olive country. Spanish bricklayers and plasterers trying to learn how to pick olives (their grandparents knew, but they've forgotten) and competing with all the Moroccans and others. Locally, in Carboneras, some of the Romanians we had come to rely on -- especially a very skilled electrician -- have gone home. There may be no work for them back in Romania either, but at least they have a home there and it's familiar. People from Mali and Mauritania are still arriving, however, risking their lives in overcrowded open boats to get to the Canary Islands, or joining the Moroccans to try to dodge the Guardia Civil patrols and land on some Andalusian beach.

So far, there hasn't been much anti-immigrant violence -- nothing on the scale of the vigilante patrols in the U.S. Southwest. But tensions are building. The Spanish Socialist government is limited in its options by its membership of the EU and the euro (the European Central Bank won't let its members devalue the currency or take other unilateral measures to stimulate exports etc.), and it is afraid to exercise the options it does have or to test the limits. And as you know if you've been reading Krugman, or even if you haven't, the ECB is far too conservative in a climate that demands bold measures.

My impression is that the U.S., China and Brazil are the countries best positioned to weather this crisis. Of the major economies, that is. Brazil and China are still growing (economically), though much slower than last year. Meanwhile, European socialists have forgotten what socialism was all about and, by fearing to break with their "liberal" (in Europe, that means pro-business conservative) colleagues, are letting this perfectly good crisis go to waste.

Venezuela's disunited "opposition"

Recommended: The Venezuelan Opposition Musters Up a Lot of Nothing on "Jewbonics". This seems to me an exceptionally clear-headed analysis -- as far as I can tell from here ("here" being New York City this week). But then, the view of Venezuela's complex politics has to be clearer, if less detailed, from outside the country than within that overheated turmoil.

Anti-Semitism, left and right

Here's a good, sober analysis of an explosive subject: Anti-Semitism in Venezuela, A Taboo Subject for the Left? by Nikolas Kozloff. Those of us who are enraged by Israeli aggression in Gaza, the encroachment of settlements and carving up of Palestinian territories in the West Bank and other abuses have to be wary of alliances with racist kooks who blame Jews for everything. As though military aggression and territorial expansion were especially Jewish traits (hardly the image of Jews back when Marx wrote his famous essay, see below).

The president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain, Jacobo Israel, made the point in a recent interview that Israel is held to much higher standards than aggressors in, for example, Sudan, who have caused ten times as many victims as the Israelis in Gaza. True, but the reason may have less to do with contempt for (or is it fear of?) Jews than with contempt for Africans, from whom we expect no better. For a similar reason, many activists are quicker to excuse Hamas rockets and Muslim suicide bombers than Israeli bombs and bulldozers. In current U.S. and European mythology, Israeli Jews are imagined as a civilizing force upon those more barbarous Semites, the Arabs.

And that is the problem: Anti-Arab anti-Semitism, that is, hostility to the Semitic Arabs, in some diplomatic and business circles is stronger than their anti-Jewish anti-Semitism. The people running the U.S. have tried to use Israel to police the region, and those running Israel have used that support to advance policies that benefit themselves and their friends, but not the region, or the U.S., or even the Israeli population as a whole.

Jews are no better than any other people, and no worse. No more deserving of security in their homes, and no less. We either hold all human beings to the same moral standards, or we don't really have standards. Qassam rockets hitting an Israeli home or school are as horrible as aerial bombardments on apartment buildings and other schools in Gaza or Lebanon. BUT those with greater power -- in this case, those with the bigger army -- have the greater responsibility, because they are better able to take the risks of peace.

Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question (1844)

Devil from codshit.com

Photo: Interior of vandalized synagogue in Caracas last month.

Clip: The animated documentary Waltz With Bashir is Israeli filmaker and Lebanon (1982) war veteran Ari Folman's way of coming to terms with that violence and responsibility.

Meanwhile, in Central America...

The news from Nicaragua has been disheartening: a multi-voiced liberation movement we could believe in, and in whose 1979 victory we rejoiced, now transformed into a machine for the personal power of Daniel Ortega, excluding the best and brightest and most generous of his erstwhile comrades. So it is with relief I turn to look north from Managua to its smaller neighbor, El Salvador. There too a multi-voiced, valient force of guerrillas waged a long war. It ended not in total triumph for the FMLN, but in a negotiated settlement that at least created a wide opening for the Left to operate politically and far more safely than before. And if Mark Engler is right, the goals of liberation and greater equality of opportunity are still driving forces in the movement. Check out Mark's article on the coming elections, the FMLN's candidate Mauricio Funes, and his chances of victory. (I hope Mark isn't responsible for the cliché of the headline -- his analysis is more original than the title would suggest.)

If you understand spoken Spanish, check out Mauricio Funes's noisy website Mauricio Funes Tv. The current video is devoted to the problems of the overworked and underappreciated peasant women. Sounds promising. He's not a warrior, but a TV journalist, so video is his medium.

Dangerous shame

While in New York we had the pleasure of meeting the young India-born novelist Kiran Desai. Later, when I read her 2006 Man Booker Prize novel, I was a little surprised that such a sweet, gentle-seeming person could imagine in such specific detail the violent emotions of internal colonialism (Indians exploiting other, poorer Indians) and class and racial humiliation, and how that humiliation can fuel violence. The subtlety of the psychological portraits, more than the lush (to my mind, overwrought) descriptions of the mountains and valleys at the foot of the Himalayas, are what make this book memorable.

Desai, Kiran. The Inheritance of Loss. New York: Grove Press, 2006. (Click on the title for my summary.)

Photo: Rock garden in Darjeeling, from Eastern Himalayan Tourism Foundation

Venezuelan politics seen from Venezuela

This piece by Max Ajl in the current NACLA gives another perspective on Hugo Chávez's latest electoral triumph: Venezuela: Local Reactions to the Re-Election Reform. Some interesting ideas here, though one of the oddest arguments in this collection of opinions has me perplexed:

And two, as Venezuela scholar Julia Buxton notes, there is something "fundamentally wrong in thinking that democracy is judged through reference to the procedural mechanics of liberal democracy," which is often understood as demanding pluralism, in which the opposition controls some political levers. Buxton argues that democracy simply is not measurable using the yardstick of mainstream U.S political science, and that it should be understood as popular control of decision-making and popular engagement within the society as a whole. On those scales, Venezuela is no lightweight.

If that's what she's saying, she's confusing democracy with plebiscite. Aside from the logical and political ethics problems (democracy without freedom to dissent? Come on!), there's the pragmatic problem of running a successful regime. If there are no constitutional checks, and no guarantees of pluralism, you lose the synergy that only a multiplicity of energies and ideas can create. Stupid ideas occur to everybody, even very smart people (remember Fidel Castro's "10 million tons" campaign? Or the coffee trees he ordered planted all around Havana? Or, to take a very different smart man's blunder, how about Winston Churchill's World War I strategy at Gallipoli?). If there's nobody around to talk back to the smart (or unsmart) strongman, disasters are more than likely.

Catcher in the Rye

I finally got around to reading Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. 1951. New York: Bantam Books, 1969. (Click on title for my plot summary.) I had long intended to read it, but if I did years ago, I've forgotten. It was this month's selection in our reading club in the Carboneras public library, so I read a (very good) Spanish translation for the first chapters, until all our books (and other things) arrived from New York last week and I found this copy. Our Spanish partners in the reading club found it amusing, I guess, but were not much impressed. I think we're all too old and have seen too much to be shocked by another adolescent crisis of a very privileged kid. (His parents are well off and buy him anything he wants, and his much more stable siblings love him, so what's his problem?) Some of Holden Caulfield's observations of social types are spot on, though, and his irreverence and slang (even in Spanish translation, but better in English) are sometimes very funny.

Venezuela: preserving or imperiling reform?

I'm impressed by the argument of Venezuela Beyond the Referendum by Nikolas Kozloff. By identifying his "Bolivarian revolution" so strongly with himself, Hugo Chávez may be putting the whole operation -- the re-orientation of the country's wealth toward solving the problems of the poor -- in peril. He has also alienated a lot of people who had been, and wanted to be, allies, but who disagreed with him on some issue or strategy.

This happened in Cuba, too: people who considered themselves revolutionaries and strongly supported what we all understood were the basic principles of the revolution were driven into exile or even into armed resistance (the case of Gutiérrez Menoyo, the most famous example) because of some disagreement with Fidel Castro. Or, mainly, because they wanted different voices to be heard. Fidel survived all those mutinies; Hugo may not be so fortunate. How much better it would be if revolutionary socialists really practiced the democracy they preach. They might still make mistakes, but the mistakes would be shared. And talented, energetic people with independent minds could contribute to the common goal.

The Job

Thanks to Dirk van Nouhuys for sending this commentary on the financial crisis, from the Festival international de très courts ("very short" videos):

The Job

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