Beacon Broadside

Frederick S. Lane: Bachmann's Anti-Census Fear-Mongering is Nothing New

2009-07-16T12:39:23-07:00

Today's post is from Frederick S. Lane, an author, attorney, expert witness, and lecturer who has appeared on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, the BBC, and MSNBC. His fifth book, American Privacy: The Four-Hundred-Year History of Our Most Contested Right, will be published by Beacon Press in November 2009. For additional information, visit www.FrederickLane.com

During questioning by Senator Al Franken (what a pleasure to finally write those words!), Judge Sonya Sotomayor noted that the U.S. Constitution is a mixture of broad principles ("due process," "free speech," etc.) and specific commands.

While broad principles allow room for adaptation and interpretation, the specific instructions are meant to be followed. For instance, she said, the Constitution states that an individual must be at least 30 years old in order to serve in the United States Senate. There's not a lot of wiggle room in that provision.

Another example is contained in Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution (and the 14th Amendment), which states that the members of the United States House of Representatives shall be apportioned among the various states "according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed." "The actual Enumeration," the Constitution says, "shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent term of ten years, in such manner as they shall by law direct."

The use of the word "shall" is a pretty clear tip-off that the Framers meant what they said; the nation is required to conduct a head count each decade, and Congress is given the discretion to determine how the Census should be conducted. Initially, under the direction of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Census takers limited themselves to just six questions, all of which were designed to count various categories of people in a given household. Over the succeeding decades, however, Congress expanded the Census beyond a raw headcount by adding questions designed to collect a wide range of information necessary for creating and implementing public policy. The specific questions varied from decade to decade, but popular topics included levels of education, employment, property ownership, types of illness, national origin, and so on.

Not surprisingly, as the information collected by the Census expanded beyond mere enumeration, a tension arose between civic duty and personal privacy. In 1850, for instance, when Census takers began collecting information about individuals by name, the practice of posting Census results in public locations was stopped. By the time the 10th Census rolled around in 1880, Congress was sufficiently worried about non-compliance that it established a $100 fine for individuals who refused to answer a census taker's questions (the same fine still applies today). At the same time, it also created a $500 fine for census takers who disclosed an individual's private information without authorization. In addition, individual census responses are sealed for a period of 70 years; only the aggregate data is reported to Congress and the public.

Despite Congress's clear constitutional obligation to conduct a decennial census and its equally clear authority to determine how the Census will be conducted, there are still those who bridle at anything more than a nose count. In the field, those individuals are troublesome enough, but every now and then, one gets elected Congress, where they have the potential to make real mischief. In 1938, for instance, Charles William Tobey was elected to the U.S. Senate from New Hampshire; a staunch Republican and committed foe of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Tobey became one of the most outspoken critics of the 1940 Census. Among other things, he claimed that the Roosevelt administration planned to use politically-appointed census takers to skew the results in favor of Democratic strongholds. Tobey loudly announced that he would boycott the Census and actively urged others to do so, a stance that earned him strong criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike.

Seventy years later, Rep. Michelle Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota's 6th Congressional District, is channeling the spirit of the dispeptic Tobey. Bachmann is a darling of the religious right; her successful run in 2006 was aided by a Generation Joshua Student Action Team, one of a cadre of evangelical high school groups sent around the country to aid the election efforts of "strong pro-life, pro-family candidates." In 2008, however, Bachmann nearly lost her re-election bid, in no small part because of the controversy caused by her suggestion that members of Congress (and then-presidential candidate Barack Obama) should be investigated to determine their anti-American bias.

Like Tobey, Bachmann worries that the 2010 Census takers will be tools of a Democratic administration; in fact, she specifically alleges (erroneously) that much of the count will be conducted by ACORN, a community organizating group that has been widely criticized by Republicans for its voter registration efforts. She also said that the 2010 Census is asking for intensely private information that could be misused by the government (as happened, for instance, during World War II when Census data was used to aid in the interment of Japanese-Americans). As a result, Bachmann said, she will only answer Census questions about how many people are in her household.

Recognizing the dubious legal ground on which she is standing (even her fellow Republicans on the House Census Oversight Committee have asked her to back off her refusal to cooperate with the Census), Bachmann and Rep. Tim Poe (R-Tex.) have introduced a bill called The American Community Survey Act. Under the terms of the bill, the Census Bureau would be limited to asking Americans just four questions: "a) name; b) contact info; c) date of response; d) number of people living or staying at the same address." It is highly unlikely that the American Community Survey Act will see the light of day. Nonetheless, Bachmann's high-profile protest against the Census is representative of two deeply disturbing trends in the Republican party: an increasingly fervent anti-intellectualism, and a growing disregard for the rule of law.

When the Republicans began wandering in the wilderness following Nixon's crushingly narrow loss to Kennedy in 1960 and Goldwater's simply crushing defeat in 1964, they turned to the intellectual wing of the party for renewal. In a remarkably short time, those solons (aided by the nation's social upheaval) set the stage for a remarkable resurgence of conservatism. Compared to the disarray of the Carter administration, Reagan's cheerful espousal of a relatively coherent political philosophy was enormously compelling. By the time he became president, Reagan was more a spokesperson for a movement than an intellectual leader, but he was well-grounded in the intellectual underpinnings of conservatism and particularly in the years following Goldwater's defeat, played a significant role in the movement's development.

But in one of the great political miscalculations of the last century, Republicans interpreted Reagan's election as an endorsement of what can best be described as the Nuke Laloosh theory of political leadership: "Don't think. You can only hurt the team." Exhibit A, of course, is the notoriously incurious George W. Bush, who boasted of how he kept himself in a bubble during his presidency. Exhibit B is the soon-to-be-forgotten former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, who might have been one 72-year-old heartbeat from the presidency if she had been able to tell Katie Couric the name of one newspaper she regularly reads (online or off). Tragically, the party of Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, and Barry Goldwater has so elevated vacuity as a positive value that it has marginalized, perhaps indefinitely, anyone who might try to rebuild the intellectual foundations of the conservative movement.

Even more troubling is Bachmann's suggestion that people disobey the law and refuse to cooperate with the Census. It is yet another example of how the Republicans, once the party of law and order, have increasingly been taken over by a faction that will use any means necessary to promote their goals. The shamefully-muted responses to the slaying of abortion doctors and the hysterical calls for violence and disobedience of court orders in the Terry Schiavo case are particularly reprehensible examples of this disturbing trend. It is not uncommon, sadly, for fringe and not-so-fringe Republicans like Catherine Crabill to talk openly of resorting to the "bullet box" if they don't get their way at the ballot box.

Having just finished writing a new book, American Privacy, I am deeply sensitive to the possible misuse of personal information, and both governments and corporations need to do a far better job of protecting the information they collect. At the same time, however, I am a fairly big fan of the Enlightenment. I believe that rational inquiry is an essential element of modern life and that aggregated data, if properly collected, compiled, and used, can play a critical role in the formation of government policy. Since Representative Bachmann has undoubtedly benefited from the fruits of previous Censuses (not least of which, her artfully drawn district that so carefully avoids the Keillor-infested, latte-sipping neighborhoods of Minneapolis and St. Paul), she should pitch in and do her bit to promote intellectual inquiry and respect for the rule of law.

Video: Kate Clinton the Wiseass White Woman

2009-07-16T12:12:26-07:00

If you can't see the video in your reader, click here.

Kate Clinton, author of I Told You So, is a faith-based, tax-paying, America-loving political humorist and family entertainer. With a career spanning over 25 years, Kate Clinton has worked through economic booms and busts, Disneyfication and Walmartization, gay movements and gay markets, lesbian chic and queer eyes, and ten presidential inaugurals. She still believes that humor gets us through peacetime, wartime and scoundrel time. You can see this and many other vlogs at kateclinton.com.

You can also check out Kate on the Progressive this week "reviewing" Bruno.

In the News: Former Liberian President Charles Taylor on Trial for War Crimes

2009-07-16T07:36:43-07:00

As former Liberian President Charles Taylor defends himself against charges of war crimes in Sierra Leone, you should read Philip C. Winslow's post about that's country's brutal civil war here. Winslow wrote the piece after three commanders in that war were found guilty on multiple counts of war crimes.

From Philip C. Winslow: Sierra Leone photos

Farnoosh Moshiri: An Open Door in the Bend of an Iranian Alley

2009-07-15T07:11:50-07:00

Author Farnoosh Moshiri was born in a literary family in Tehran, Iran. She holds a B.A. in dramatic literature from the College of Dramatic Arts in Tehran, an M.A. in drama from the University of Iowa and an M.F.A in creative writing from the University of Houston. Her novel The Bathhouse is the story of a young woman arrested and detained during the fundamentalist revolution in Iran.

"It's happening and I'm not there," I embrace my belly, as if having unbearable cramps of a miscarriage. I hold back tears and move back and forth like a mother on her child's grave. On the TV screen Iranian youth chant, demanding justice. The election has been a fraud and they want re-counting of the votes. They want their elected president, not the little dictator, the puppet of the old despot, the "Absolutist Ayatollah." They march peacefully, some with tapes over their mouths, meaning they are quiet, all wearing green shirts, waistbands, or bandanas, holding flags and banners, arms up, showing V signs. They are millions—men and women, boys and girls, children, babies, sitting on the shoulders of fathers, green ribbons decorating the crown of their fluffy hair. It's a massive demonstration, a reminder of 1979, when I was one of them and we fought for a republic—not an Islamic one. This was before the West aimed the spotlight on Khomeini and he was shipped from Paris with his entourage and the people's revolution was hijacked.

I watch all this, remember my youth, sway like a pendulum, and swallow my tears. But suddenly men in black shirts attack the green sea of the peaceful rally and blood covers the streets of Tehran. Cell phones capture the clubbing and stabbing. Someone's camera records the shooting of a girl. I watch with disbelief. Blood gushes out of the girl's chest, a young man presses his hand over the wound to stop it, an old man screams, "They killed her! They killed my daughter!"

After this scene, I experience a turmoil unlike any emotional crisis in my life. Anger, sorrow, and the worst—guilt and self-hatred overcome me. I sob for a moment, then I shout at my husband, "Haven't I been telling you? Haven't I been writing for years that this is a fascist regime? Haven't I? So why has no one believed me? No one ever believed me! I was right! They are fascists. Look! They're killing our children!"

He rubs my shoulder to calm me down and gently reminds me that no one has ever rejected my books; no one has ever defended this regime.

But this does not help. I'm out of my mind. I contradict myself: "I haven't done anything! Nothing!" I weep. "I escaped and they are getting killed--"

With each new image, each YouTube film clip of beatings and stabbings of innocent people, I go through another wave of rage and sorrow, guilt and self-bashing. I mumble incoherently between tears—either insisting that I'd been right writing against this regime, or lamenting that I haven't done enough.

Have I been suffering from PTSD and have never been diagnosed? Am I remembering the Revolution, my forced exile, the execution of my comrades after I crossed the border, my father's arrest and beating and his subsequent blindness and stroke? Am I remembering the harsh life of the refugee camp in war-infested Afghanistan? Am I remembering everything at once and experiencing a breakdown?

And why such back breaking guilt, such self-condemnation?

"I want to be there!" I demand childishly. "I want to be shot, get beaten up, clubbed, killed! Why am I here?"

Why am I here? A question I've asked myself many times during the past twenty-five years, whenever I've felt the indescribable pain of homesickness. But now this pain is beyond sadness or melancholy; I'm suffering from the wounds of a knife that sliced this young man's belly. I'm feeling the hot bullet of the militia in my chest. I want to be there, and I cannot.

Then I remind myself that I'm no longer twenty-five years old. How can I run briskly and disappear into a narrow alley, when the guards follow me? I calm myself with the consolation that even if I were there, I wouldn't be able to run in the streets along with young people. My role would be different. I'd leave the door of my house open so that the youth would come in and seek refuge. Strange consolation. But it works somehow.

Iranian people are hostages of a brutal regime, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the prominent Iranian film maker says in his address to the European Parliament. Help them, he pleads. His words are moving. He warns the world about the upcoming mock confessions, forced by brutal and inhuman tortures with no mercy for the ill and the old. I'm familiar with this. In the 1980s many of the political leaders of different organizations confessed after severe torture and mind-altering drugs. Staring at the camera with jaundiced faces and lifeless eyes (and at times with bruises badly covered by make up), they admitted that they'd been spies. Their followers watched them on TV and became demoralized. This was the way this regime uprooted all the political parties, even those who were not opposed them. Ayatollah Khomeini proved himself a liar after a massive execution of political prisoners in the summer of 1988. Hadn't he promised the freedom of all political parties from his shrine in Paris?

Ironically now, the hardliners, who have grown into a Mafia type operation, are planning to uproot the moderate wing of the regime. We, the first generation of the revolution, still remember when these same moderates were interrogators at Evin.

At this very moment that I'm writing these lines, brutal interrogations are happening in the infamous Evin—a prison that has been the subject of my recurring nightmares for many years. In most of my novels and short stories, either directly or indirectly, I've written about the horrors of this facility. Now the regime of coup d'état is torturing the demonstrators to force them to confess (that they were under the influence of foreigners!). They are planning mock trials and executions.

Where are the human rights organizations? Where is the Amnesty International? What is the role of the United Nations in all this? Are these organizations closing their eyes on the crimes of the Islamic Mafia? Are they sacrificing our nation for oil?

"Don't forget us!" YouTube clips, Facebook messages and Twitter send desperate pleas of the Iranian youth to the people of the world. "Don't forget us! We are trapped here! We are hostages!"

They send thousands of green balloons to the sky, because they cannot gather in the streets anymore. They climb the rooftops in the heart of the night and shout, "Allah o Akbar—God is Great!" their voices reverberate. Rooftop to rooftop they send their message. The whole city calls God to witness.

But God is not God anymore. This is only a symbol, as is "green," as is Neda—that beautiful woman whose name means "calling."

Now that three weeks have passed and the fascists have killed and jailed and robbed people of their elected government and have announced their bloody coup d'état successful, ironically, a new hope is born. This hope is green, the color of grass, and is not depending on a leader in the establishment. Even if Mr. Mousavi does not support or lead the people, they will keep raising their voices-- if not in daylight, in the darkness of the night. This has become a grass-roots movement and nothing can stop it. The taboos are broken now. Because, who could believe that one day people would dare to shout, "Death to Khamenei?" That little ridiculous dictator, Ahmadinejad, is not worth mentioning anymore, it's the Supreme Leader, the Great Satan, the Godfather of the Mafioso, with his billions in the European banks, who is the target of people's rage.

I write this on July 9, 2009, the tenth anniversary of the student uprising which was violently suppressed in 1999. Today, people in the streets of Tehran shouted "Death to Khamenei and his son, Mojtaba." This Mojtaba is the head of the Basiji militia, the black shirt, vigilante Nazis. People chanted today and wished him dead.

The masses may not be able to appear in their millions anymore, but they can fill the streets in several groups of hundreds in different parts of the city. And this is what they did today. "Don't be afraid! Don't be afraid! We're all together!" They chanted and the riot police tear-gassed them, the militia clubbed them, and they escaped into the bend of narrow alleys. Someone-- a middle-aged woman-- had kept the door of her house open for the wounded youth to seek shelter and hide from the murderers.

David W. Moore: Sarah Palin and Her Future Political Prospects

2009-07-14T07:33:05-07:00

Today's post is from David W. Moore, author of The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls (out in hardcover now, paperback with a new afterword available this fall). Moore is a senior fellow of the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire. A former senior editor of the Gallup Poll, where he worked for thirteen years, Moore also served as professor of political science at UNH and is the founder and former director of the UNH Survey Center.

If we believe the recent USA Today/Gallup poll, Sarah Palin's standing among Republicans as a presidential candidate in 2012 has actually improved as a consequence of her stunning announcement that she would resign as Alaska's governor at the end of July. So counterintuitive is this finding, it was picked up by many pundits and journalists, including Wolf Blitzer on CNN's The Situation Room, and Frank Rich in last Sunday's New York Times.

As Rich noted, the poll reported that "no less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for president."

Don't believe it! The poll is typical of many media polls, whose major objective is to provide fodder for the news, quite often at the expense of an accurate picture of what the public is really thinking.

After the jump, some reasons to be skeptical of the poll.

--The most obvious: It's more than three years before Republicans start voting for any candidate for president. The notion that 71 percent of the Republicans can predict today whom they might support in 2102 is simply ludicrous.

--As an example, the USA Today/Gallup poll, along with all the other major polls, told us in 2007 that Rudy Giuliani was the dominant front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. Even as late as the fall of 2007, shortly before the caucus and primary voting period began (with the Iowa Caucuses), polls still reported that Giuliani was the candidate to beat. In the end, he won no primaries and no caucuses, and earned no delegates to the 2008 Republican Convention. The polls misled the country for more than a year with their bogus measurements.

--The current poll on Palin was conducted on one night, Monday, July 6, rather than over a longer three-day period (which means if you weren't home that night, there was no chance Gallup could interview you on a different night).

--Palin's announcement was made just before the July 4^th holidays, which meant that large numbers of people probably had not heard about it by the time of the poll. On July 6, when they conducted their poll, Gallup and USA Today refused to measure how many people had actually known of Palin's resignation. Instead, their interviewers informed respondents of the resignation, and then asked for their immediate opinion. By informing respondents of the resignation, the sample of respondents no longer represented the larger American population.

--Contrary to Rich's interpretation, the poll did not exactly find that a large majority of Republicans would vote for Palin. According to Gallup, the poll found that "if Sarah Palin were to run for president in 2012," 35 percent of currently registered Republicans would be "very likely" to vote for her, 37 percent would be "somewhat likely," and 25 percent would be "not too" or "not at all" likely to vote for her. That does – as Rich inferred – show more than 70 percent who say they would be "very" or "somewhat" likely to support her, but 1) it does not say in what context they would support her, and 2) it includes more than half of that group who at best have only weak support ("somewhat likely" to vote for her), hardly the ringing endorsement Rich implied.

--The context is important. It could be that a majority of Republicans would support Palin only if she were the actual Republican nominee. If so, it would not be surprising that a majority of voters would support their own party's nominee for president. But that hardly means Palin is the first choice of the party's voters. The poll makes no attempt to measure whether the support is for the nomination, or for the general election assuming she gets the nomination.

By conducting a quickie one-night poll, with at best ambiguous findings, and at worst findings that have absolutely no relevance to what will happen in 2012, USA Today and Gallup provided pundits and journalists with fodder for their incessant demands for "news." But that doesn't mean the poll provided the public with any real information. CNN's Wolf Blitzer found the poll useful, because it helped spur a discussion about the possible consequences of Palin's resignation. The Times' Frank Rich found the poll useful for his larger critique of the Republican Party. For the average citizen, however, the poll is just another example of how irrelevant real public opinion is to the polling industry.

Link Roundup: Who's Qualified? Alternate reality Sotomayor hearing. Chinese quarantine.

2009-07-13T14:00:45-07:00

In the NY Times, Lani Guiner and Susan Sturm (Who's Qualified?) examine the Ricci decision.

Alan Collinge explains the student loan industry to Daily Kos-ians.

Have you been wondering what the Sotomayor confirmation hearings would be like if they were conducted by the 1977 Kansas City Royals? Well, Jay Wexler has the answer anyway.

Beacon author Jonathan Metzl was recently quarantined by the Chinese government in respose to an H1N1 scare. And regardless of what the Chinese government had to say about it, the accommodations were not five-star.

Meredith Hall's Without a Map was featured on O Magazine's list of ten recommended memoirs (along with Kelly McMasters, who wrote this post for Beacon Broadside a while back).

The Bitch Magazine blog gives The Daddy Shift a thoughtful review.

Frank Schaeffer, author of Crazy for God, loves Believer, Beware.

Blurbs don't get much better than this: "I read Love and Death as soon as it came out. The greatest gift I could give every one of you is to just tell you to go read this book." President Bill Clinton

Observation Post by Philip C. Winslow: Angola's Forgotten War, Squandered Peace

2009-07-10T09:40:52-07:00

Today's post is the latest in a Beacon Broadside series: Observation Post by journalist and foreign correspondent Philip C. Winslow. Over a career that has spanned more than twenty-five years, Winslow has reported on world events for the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, Maclean's magazine, ABC radio news, CTV News, and CBC radio. He also served in two United Nations peacekeeping missions and worked for the UN in the West Bank for nearly three years. He is the author of Victory For Us Is to See You Suffer: In the West Bank with the Palestinians and the Israelis and Sowing the Dragon's Teeth: Land Mines and the Global Legacy of War.

Angola's decades-long terror often was called “the worst war in the world.” The civil war left as many as 1.5 million people dead and millions more maimed, orphaned and homeless. The description never seemed overstated.

Following a bloody struggle that ended with independence from Portugal in 1975, Angola plunged into a Cold War-fueled regional conflict that eclipsed all that had gone before. The Marxist government of the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) was backed by the Soviet Union, with Cuban fighters and others on the ground. Jonas Savimbi's UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) rebels were armed and supported by the United States and an aggressive, interventionist South Africa. Hopes for peace flickered for an instant before ill-timed elections in 1992; UNITA lost, and Savimbi re-started the war with intensified brutality. This chapter of the tragedy lasted for the next ten years.

Whatever destruction the superpowers and their several proxies didn't facilitate or sponsor, Angolan factions managed themselves. Like a terrestrial tsunami, the fighting ground back and forth over a helpless civilian population. Beautiful and productive cities such as Menongue, Malanje, Kuito and Luena were ringed with land mines and shelled for months on end. Kuito, on the central Bie plateau, was besieged -- by UNITA and by government forces -- for nearly a year in 1993 and 1994, and again in 1998 and 1999. Artillery bombardments were so relentless that trapped families buried their dead in back gardens and eventually ate all the town's dogs, cats and even the rats. As many as 30,000 people, many of them children, died from wounds and disease in Kuito alone. Strategic centers such as Huambo and Luena and small towns like Cazombo were pounded into rubble, overrun multiple times or just slipped into isolated ruin. A United Nations map is here.

Landmines, laid by both sides, took a horrific toll, and Angola sometimes looked like a nation of "mutilados," as the amputees are called in Portuguese. On a quiet evening in almost any town (there were few cars) an inevitable sound was of bare-tipped aluminum crutches rhythmically striking the pavement. For radio broadcasts I recorded the sounds but could not convey the smell of the hospitals where exhausted doctors operated without anesthetic, nor could I find words for the sour odor of unattended despair and death. Some photos of the humanitarian crisis caused by the mines, which still claim lives today, can be seen here.

Click here to view the entire album.

Both sides forced children into their armies, tearing through villages to round them up. I once asked a cold-eyed soldier guarding a compound in the central highlands how old he was. "Twelve," he said. I asked how long he'd been a soldier. "A long time," he replied, ending the small talk without taking his eyes off me or his finger off the trigger. Twenty meters away, in the weeds between zig-zag fighting trenches lay the uniformed skeleton of another soldier. It was a very small skeleton.

As children or adults, Angolans' lives counted for little with those who prosecuted the war. From Luanda to Luena civilians sarcastically referred to the MPLA and UNITA, interchangeably, as "the owners." Civilians in most provinces depended on the UN World Food Programme and persistent international charities for food and medical aid; because of the mined roads, all aid had to be transported by air, and it was never enough.

The shroud began to lift in 2002 when Jonas Savimbi, once Washington's darling "democrat," was killed in a gun battle. Defeated on the battlefield, UNITA reverted to being an opposition movement, although with little leverage against the MPLA. After 27 years of war, Angolans were beyond destitute. More than four million people had been displaced, the country was littered with explosives, and the national health, education and transport infrastructure was reminiscent of an earlier century.

I hadn't been in Angola since 1996 and wanted to know if any of its 13 million people had gotten the "peace dividend," as the fingers-crossed phrase used to have it. With estimated oil reserves of at least 9 billion barrels, Angola is the second largest producer of crude in Africa, after Nigeria, and oil accounts for more than 80 percent of government revenues. The U.S. imports about 450,000 barrels a day from Angola, its seventh leading supplier. China imports even more.

Superficial reports looked encouraging. Oil production was up, some of the millions of mines have been cleared, life was said to be improving in some places, and the government was promising still more. A construction boom was underway, I read, to get the country moving and to prepare for hosting the Africa Cup of Nations in 2010. Roads and bridges were being built and plans revived for a $2 billion upgrade of polluted Luanda Bay, with parks and pricey hotels. I envisioned Angolans with jobs, and money circulating through the system to those devastated towns.

But beneath the headlines, the indicators of a nation's health painted a darker picture. Statistics vary slightly by agency and methodology, but all are grim.

Seven years after the end of the war, an Angolan's estimated life expectancy at birth is 38.2 years, one rung above the bottom on a list of 224 countries. (An American can expect to live to age 78, a Japanese to 82.) The infant mortality rate (IMR), the number of infant deaths per 1,000 live births, is an estimated 180, the highest in the world (the IMR in the U.S. is 6.2; in Japan 2.8). Angola's maternal mortality rates are roughly four times the world average. The incidence of water-borne, food-borne and vector-borne diseases, which contribute to the alarming death rates, remains very high.

Using the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators project, you can generate a set of tables that compare factors such as rule of law, corruption control and accountability in 212 countries. Angola hovers depressingly close to the bottom in all categories except for political stability. (The charts also show that the Angolan leadership is not unique. It has plenty of company in the world's league of bad governance.)

Why does this continue in a country blessed with rich farmland, natural resources and ocean ports? Political stability ought to facilitate economic growth, after all. In the 2008 elections, the first in 16 years, President José Eduardo dos Santos's MPLA, not surprisingly, won 82 percent of the vote. President dos Santos has led the country since 1979.

For a current perspective, I asked Paula Cristina Roque, a long time Angola and Africa security expert at the Institute for Security Studies in Tshwane, South Africa, what went wrong.

"The post-war environment, due to the military defeat of such a strong movement [UNITA], provided the MPLA with the opportunity to consolidate its authoritarian hegemonic power," she told me. "This was further accomplished after the 'legitimacy' and legality conferred [on] the government by what were deemed free and fair elections in September 2008. What has happened since has been a crackdown on the media and NGOs [non-governmental organizations]. The opposition was crushed and are trying to gain a voice but without any success. Angola has become a de facto one-party police state. The role of SINFO [Angola's main internal security agency]), certain advisers, generals, and Sonangol [the state-owned oil company] are now the pillars - with the presidency at the apex."

Are there prospects for change, hopefully through the ballot box? Change could come through a strengthened reformist faction in the MPLA, Roque said, but the picture is more complex and more worrying.

"Change in Angola will come from either the military that will want to equate their newly acquired economic power with political influence - [that is] the generals, or within a movement led by a lower-ranking officer, propelled by the need to cleanse the regime after it continues to fail the population and unrest becomes a serious possibility."

Roque pointed to another destabilizing factor: imported foreign labor. For instance, most of the 900 workers building the 50,000-seat football stadium outside Luanda are from China. As part of China's massive investment drive in Africa, driven by the search for minerals and oil, tens of thousands of Chinese workers come along with the deals. From Algeria to South Africa the practice has raised concerns about excluding local workers.

Angolan writer Artur Pestana, known as Pepetela, compared the society to a volcano waiting to erupt unless the government tackles poverty and social exclusion. "If that volcano one day explodes, we cannot say there weren't enough warning signs," he said.

The divisions in society have been clear throughout war and, now, peace. The head of a pro-democracy group said in 2007 that with power and business wealth concentrated around the highest echelons of the MPLA there are "special Angolans" and "the rest of Angolans who are part of the landscape."

Those part-of-the-landscape Angolans, the nearly three-quarters of the population who live on less than two dollars a day, are a strong people and easy to like. You can see some of the ones I met between 1993 and 1996 in these pictures.

Click here to view the entire album.

Finally, a few more images from that vivid and lovely country during the war years:

On a C-130 cargo flight from Menongue back to Luanda, the main hold was filled with wounded government soldiers and the relatives of others, plus a few reporters. In the forward hold, inexplicably, was a massive heap of broken and rusted AK-47 rifles and machine guns that had been collected from the battlefields; they were beyond use or repair. When the Hercules landed at Luanda airport, a team of small barefoot boys swarmed up the back ramp, hoping to earn a few cents carrying luggage. But when they spotted the broken guns, something came over them and they stopped in their tracks. Then, yelling like banshees, they dashed forward and began pounding and smashing the junk weapons with an astonishing fury. Hearing the commotion, soldiers arrived and shooed the boys off.

I've often wondered what became of one young fellow I met in Luanda. He was about nine, and was sitting cross-legged on a broken sidewalk next to a pile of empty toothpaste tubes he had collected. From the pile, he set aside the best-looking tube and then starting cutting open the others. With a tiny flat-tipped stick, he painstakingly scraped out the remaining tubes and began packing the lumps of paste into the one tube through its nozzle. With intense concentration he was making a full tube to sell on the street. In Angola empty toothpaste tubes, believe me, are really empty. It was going to be an all-day job.

Around the same time, in early 1994, World Food Programme flights out of Luanda were grounded due to fighting in the interior. I had a day to kill, and with my tape recorder wandered down to Luanda Bay. I fell in behind two young men, one of them blind and carrying a homemade guitar. Alongside the foul-smelling bay, where a couple of rusted half-sunk freighters shimmered in the heat haze, they sat on a decrepit bench and started singing. The blind man played, and his friend tapped out rhythm on the guitar box. I listened for awhile and then asked if they had any ballads about the war. "No, man, we don't do songs about politics. We only do songs about love." And this is what they sang.

Listen to Luanda Bay duet

Video: Katherine Newman on the Near Poor

2009-07-09T11:22:09-07:00

Katherine S. Newman is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs of the Woodrow Wilson School and Director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Newman is an expert on urban poverty, occupational mobility, and subjective dimensions of economic dislocation, and is the author of The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America and several other books on poverty, downward mobility and school violence. This video was produced by the Woodrow Wilson School's Office of External Affairs.

If the video doesn't appear in your reader, you can watch it here. And you can check out Beacon Broadside's growing Video Log here.

Audio: Irina Reyn reads "I Was a Pre-Pubescent Messiah"

2009-07-08T08:04:52-07:00

Believer, Beware: First-person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith, the second collection to spring from KillingTheBuddha.com, presents true tales of sex ed in Catholic school, witches in Kansas, sects and the city, Buddhists in the barbershop, Sufis under your nose, an adolescent Jewish messiah in Queens, and more. In a world riven by absolute convictions, these ambivalent confessions, skeptical testimonies, and personal revelations speak to the subtler and stranger dilemmas of faith and doubt-of religion lost and found and lost again.

Hear Irina Reyn read “I Was a Prepubescent Messiah" at the Believer, Beware release party on June 29, 2009. You can also read the essay here.

Stone Prairie Farm: Thrilling Evening and Foggy Morning

2009-07-07T12:22:47-07:00

Today's post is from Steven I. Apfelbaum, author of Nature's Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm. Apfelbaum is founder, president, and senior ecologist of the firm Applied Ecological Services, known for its international science-based ecological design and restoration work. He lives in Juda, Wisconsin, on Stone Prairie Farm.

Last night seems like a dream now. So where do I start? What do I remember?

This morning, as the sun slowly rose, the engulfing fog began to glow and my eyes opened to a dripping landscape, where coalescing dew slowly formed into earth-bound droplets from every plant leaf and flower around my head. The fog-muffled calls of birds were accompanied by the sound of these drips careening from upper leaves on the grape vines as I watched from my bed on our screen porch. On such mornings, my mind and the land are awash in this fog.

About the time I was preparing to go to bed last night, our dog, Willow, started pacing in circles from room to room. He sensed the low grumble of a distant thunderstorm well before I did and probably couldn’t decide which bed to hide under. Driven by his need to be with his pack-- me in this case-- he followed me out to the screen porch where I would do some reading and then, hopefully, simply fall asleep. I placed his white fabric “fuzzy bed” next to mine and settled in to read about managing our apple orchard. His unsettled behavior amplified as the storm flashed its way closer and finally arrived at Stone Prairie Farm. After a single attempt to push under my blankets, the flashes and cracks of lightning sent him into the house to hide under a real bed. I turned off my reading light and lay back to experience the show.

A wave of wind-- fresh, cold and fragrant-- roughed up the screens. The build up of the storm’s approach was like laying next to a huge breathing beast as the intensity of the wind would rise and fall.. Moments later, a heavy, nearly horizontal rain started and blasted through the screen, dousing my blankets and my face with a startling chill and an exhilarating elixir. While I remained mummy-still beneath the warmth of the sheets and blanket, the intensity of the storm raged on. Falling asleep was not possible.

Moments after the lightning, thunder and rain moved eastward, the sky cleared and stars were brilliantly beaming in the blackness. I settled into the comfort and warmth and started to doze.

I heard the sound of Willow’s claws percussively tapping on the wood floors as he walked back out to be with his pack on the screen porch. But, instead of lying down and falling asleep on his fuzzy bed, he started pacing again. At one point I awoke to a wet dog nose in my face. I extended my hand to give him a comforting pat and felt him quivering. This seemed out of place as "mister storm," as we refer to such weather events in our "dog talk" vernacular, had already passed.

As I turned on the lamp, I had the eerie feeling that I was sharing the porch with some other life forms besides Willow. Shivers started running up and down my back. My adjusting eyes then caught the swooping shadows of something flying around my head. Could these be moths that somehow got through the screen door during the day? Willow continued to quiver.

Through the illuminating beam of the bedside flashlight, I watched several bats flying tight circles in the small room. I jumped up to close the door between the house the porch was open and opened the screen door to let them outside. This didn’t work, and they kept circling within the porch rafters, not low enough to encounter the open door.

I remembered we had several butterfly nets and went into the bedroom to our equipment closet. As I was departing to go back to the porch, Willow arrived and attempted to hide under the bed. In his unsettled condition, he couldn’t coordinate his shaking body to accomplish the task. I patted him and went back to bat duty.

A minute later, with the help of the flashlight, I attempted to capture the bats for their release outside. My first attempts found them amazingly agile and dodgy, difficult to catch. After learning their behavioral pattern-- clockwise flight, just below the rafters-- I had the net waiting. Coming from the opposite direction, with one gentle swing of the net I captured two bats simultaneously, little brown bats to be exact, a common species.

Each clicked a high-frequency staccato, sounds that were off the charts of the normal audible range. And in the few steps to the open door, one let out a piercing harmonic sound, a fast chirp. A few seconds later the open, inverted net lay on the ground outside the porch beyond the closed door, and I watched them crawl from the tangles to take wing, seemingly unharmed and off to feed on the nights insects.

By now I was plenty tired and lay down again under the blanket in the fresh cool air. But the evening entertainment here at Stone Prairie Farm was not over.

Before me was a galaxy of swirling, pulsing, shooting star-like lightning bugs. Perhaps thousands winked, twittered, and pulsed in different patterns over the habitat, restored prairie lands that we have been nurturing for nearly 30 years. This dance I've read to be courtship flights, where males and females of each species emit differing signals to lure mates. Some also lure in possible meals, and some species impersonate a more delectable species and invite them to be their midnight snack.

I couldn't help but watch, awake now to this remarkable display. I could see the spectacle concentrated over our prairie and not over the neighbor’s corn field immediately north of our farm. This was a prairie ecosystem phenomenon.

In my tired stupor, I had to abandon the dazzling performance and lay back down to try to fall asleep. I found myself playing the game, opening my eyes every so often to see if the show was still going on. It was, and probably continued well into the morning hours. Willow emerged from the house onto the porch, laid down on his fuzzy bed and less then a minute was snoring loudly, finally asleep and at peace. I now followed his lead. And the pack slept off and dreamed about the events of the evening.

A foggy morning at Stone Prairie Farm in Juda, Wisconsin.

Spiderwort growing on the prairie.

Prairie flowers.

A bee on an echinacea bloom.

Link Roundup: Mary Oliver's Provincetown, Opposites Attract, Church-State Divide

2009-07-06T06:53:10-07:00

Some Beacon Press mentions in the media over the past week:

In the New York Times: The Land and Words of Mary Oliver, the Bard of Provincetown.

Profile of Sophia Raday in the SF Chronicle: Peacenik, Military Man Prove Opposites Attract.

Review of Holy Hullabaloos in the Boston Globe: Separation Anxiety: A traveling professor chronicles the church-state divide, with results that prove both comedic and unsettling. Also catch Holy Hullabaloos over at the Page 99 Test blog.

An excerpt from Mean Little deaf Queer in the Advocate.

U.S. News interviews Jeremy Adam Smith about the Rise of Stay-at-Home Dads.

Kate Clinton interviews in both Edge and the Blade.

AOL Health interview with Jennifer Culkin about her life as a critical care nurse.

Digging With Doug Video with Nancy Gift talking about her love of weeds.

Video: Kate Clinton on Comic Pride Month

2009-07-02T12:39:27-07:00

Kate Clinton congratulates Senator Al Franken on his new job. If the video doesn't appear in your reader, watch it here.

Sign up for Kate's newsletter, get Kate's latest dates, news, and Vlog archives at: http://kateclinton.com Kate also blogs at Bilerico Project: http://www.bilerico.com/

Nancy Rubin Stuart: Happy July 4th to our Forgotten Founding Mothers!

2009-07-02T11:20:16-07:00

We celebrate Independence Day this weekend, and Nancy Rubin Stuart, author of The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation, honors the often overlooked women of the American Revolution.

Traditionally, we celebrate our nation's birthday on July 4th with parades, fireworks and tributes to the Founding Fathers. Rarely do we recall the women who supported our patriots, those forgotten Founding Mothers who watched their men march off to fight for American independence, leaving them to struggle to support children, homes and farms.

Silence surrounds the lives of those nurturers. While we recall the names of "celebrity women" of that era-- Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams; Mercy Otis Warren, author of anti-British propaganda plays and historian of the American Revolution; Betsy Ross, who stitched the American flag; Deborah Sampson, disguised as a soldier who fought against the British, and Margaret Corbin, who loaded cannons on the battlefield-- we know relatively little about their personal sacrifices and those of their peers.

Before the Revolution, Abigail Adams and her historian friend, Mercy Otis Warren, shunned tea and proudly wore homespun garments in lieu of British finery. Living miles apart south of Boston with their children, the two friends spun dozens of skeins of wool which they collectively donated to the poor. So, too, did countless other women who gathered in private homes for spinning parties or participated in public spinning contests. To stir patriotic sentiment even hotter, patriotic newspapers offered suggestions about North American substitutes for imported teas, among them sassafras, raspberry and mint.

While patriotism required sacrifice, American women still needed certain manufactured goods and fabrics for their households. Since Abigail's husband, John, and Mercy's son, Winslow, lived in Europe during the last years of the Revolution, those matrons sent for certain household goods and fabrics which they sold or traded to friends and neighbors.

Many women and their children, however, no longer lived in old neighborhoods. Among those who fled from Boston during the British occupation was Abigail and Mercy's friend, Betsy Adams, wife of Samuel Adams, who hid in a humble cottage far from the city.

No less unnerving was the April 1775 flight of their friends, Hannah and Professor John Winthrop of Harvard College, as British soldiers stormed through Cambridge. After securing lodging in a "safe house," Hannah wrote about harrowing scenes of bloodshed in nearby fields and nights spent with weeping women and children crowded into a temporary shelter. Later, the Winthrops were transported in a rough wagon to rustic Andover. There, John Winthrop, 61, fell desperately ill from one of the epidemics then raging across Massachusetts emanating from the unsanitary conditions of the British soldiers in Boston. Months later, after Hannah finally called upon the Warrens to help her get him to Watertown, John recovered, but never fully regained his health.

That same April of 1775, Hannah's kindly sister and brother-in-law of Charlestown dressed wounds and provided food for British soldiers fleeing from Lexington and Concord. In June 1775 that couple was stunned to watch their home go up in flames when the British burnt Charlestown. As the Revolution moved to New York and the South, still other women wrote letters or left diary accounts of British and Hessian soldiers who broke into their homes, plundered their valuables, raped them and set their homes on fire.

Even those who escaped such a fate were plagued by loneliness. By the summer of 1775, Mercy's long absence from her husband, James Warren, the first Quartermaster General of the Continental Army and president of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, finally impelled her to leave her young sons with servants in Plymouth and ride thirty-five miles over rough roads to Revolutionary headquarters in Watertown. Shocked by James's harried and overwrought condition, Mercy made five solo trips that summer and fall to Watertown to serve as his private secretary and to write reports to their friend John Adams in Philadelphia.

In Braintree, meanwhile, Abigail not only skimped and schemed to maintain her home, children and family finances, but became an astute manager of the Adams's farm. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of other Revolutionary-era women, whose husbands left home either to fight or serve in Congress, were similarly compelled to assume their husband's former responsibilities.

Among them was Mary Bartlett, wife of a New Hampshire Congressman, who initially balked at running her husband's farm but later became so adept at it that she regarded it as "our farm." A still more famous and lonely "war widow" was Deborah Read, wife of statesmen Ben Franklin, who spent most of the Revolution abroad in his diplomatic duties, leaving her to live and die alone in Philadelphia.

While Abigail's plea to "remember the ladies" fell on deaf ears during the Revolution, her vision has gradually, if grudgingly, become a reality. Nearly ninety years ago women achieved suffrage. Today, more than half of America's college students are women. Now too, in the midst of the Great Recession, women comprise nearly half of the work force.

Nevertheless, women, especially single mothers with children, remain our most impoverished citizens— a condition strikingly similar to that suffered by women of the American Revolution.

As we sing "Happy Birthday America" today, let us remember that women quietly baked the nation's cake. They did so with rationed flour and bartered candles, whose light has burned brighter and stronger through the centuries than have muskets, firearms and bombs.

Nancy Gift: Mowing Meditation

2009-07-01T10:29:50-07:00

Today's post is from Nancy Gift, an assistant professor of environmental studies and acting director of the Rachel Carson Institute at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband, two daughters, and a lawn full of weeds. She is the author of A Weed by Any Other Name: The Virtues of a Messy Lawn, or Learning to Love the Plants We Don't Plant.

After over three full summers of using my reel mower, I have come to love the click-click-click and the flying clippings, the instant sound of kids' playing and birdsong when I stop for breath at the top of our backyard slope. I love the exercise of arms, core, and legs simultaneously, and have had visions of beginning a suburban biathalon, with the star event being mowing a mile-long course with a reel mower, following my nine-mile bike home from work.

But, despite my purchase of one of the premier brands – Brill – and despite my affections for it, it seems to be dead, with wheels turning but little corresponding mower action to match. I suspect the gears are stripped, but I am no mechanic, and I can't even seem to figure out how to break into the wheel machinery to check. I doubt many of these machines are used on as large a lot as ours – half an acre, minus gardens and house footprint – but I had always thought of them as indestructable, the kinds of machines which you find in an abandoned garage, oil a bit, and voila! Mow your way home to use them. Apparently my Brill is not that kind of reel mower.

So yesterday, just a couple of days before we head on vacation, I had to use our gas mower. This is my husband's mower, the one he uses to help me keep up, in spring, with the rapidly growing grass. It is small and light, on the scale of them, but I know that any two-stroke motor pollutes far more per gallon than even my car, a Buick inherited from my husband's grandparents. The fumes are among the worst greenhouse gases, and I have sometimes cried in frustration when I realize that the grass has gotten too tall, and I can't do the mowing that day with my beloved reel mower. As a result, I thought I would hate mowing yesterday, but it needed doing, so I went to the shed and rolled it out, and pulled the string. It started.

And, surprisingly, I had fun. I'd forgotten how much I used to love mowing my parents' yard, when I was 12 and it was still fun to act grownup by taking on a necessary chore. I'd forgotten that mowing is just plain satisfying, leaving neat swaths of fresh green behind, focussing on following the line of my path from the previous lap. I *feel* productive, even when I know that what I'm doing is environmentally corrupt, even knowing that I don't approve of the fumes, even knowing that I'd rather have a lawn of flowers, or vegetables, or meadow, or moss. I got done, all the environmental sin of it fresh in my guilty mind, afraid that I'd never get around to fixing my Brill, but mostly just glad to check another task off the pre-vacation list.

Each year, our lawn gets a tiny bit smaller. We make a new bed, mark off new space with concrete blocks or stones, fill it with compost, and seed vegetables before fencing it off from our resident rabbits. We are making progress. I have plans for a section of meadow, and for expanding the goldenrod sward which bounds the back of our yard. I have hopes that as I age – I'm still on the front side of 40, but barely - reel mowing will help keep me fit in summer, but also that I can reduce the lawn area enough so that less of it is necessary, and my yard can slowly become something really productive.

In the meanwhile, I've gotten out the manual, and found that the warranty was two years, not five as I had hoped. I'm going to call a dealer, see what can be done and for how much, and either get this reel mower fixed or find another, one which is more clearly made for larger spaces and frequent mowing. I don't approve of mowing, really, but in our lives, in this neighborhood, it is necessary for now. If I have to do it, I want to do it right, clicking gently across the yard, tossing the clover flowers in the air like popcorn as I go, and hearing the birdsong each time I take a break. I'll be back behind my mower soon, powering it with my own muscles, compromising with the suburbs the best way I know how.

Kim E. Nielsen: Annie and Helen, BFFs

2009-06-30T07:44:00-07:00

This past weekend marked the birthday of Helen Keller, and Kim E. Nielsen, author of Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller, reflects here on an enduring relathionship that began when Keller was a young girl and spanned fifty years.

The friendship of Anne Sullivan Macy and Helen Keller was not very glamorous. It lacked the men and clothing of the “Sex and the City” women. It lacked the dramatic guns and suicidal road trips of Thelma and Louise. It wasn't a fifty year slumber party of everlasting conversations, hugs, and secrets, and included no backstabbing cattiness and sexualized mud-fights. Somehow, however, the two women, remained friends— genuine friends— for nearly fifty years.

Having first written extensively on Helen Keller and now on Anne Sullivan Macy, I sometimes feel that I've lived two sides of the same story. After meeting in 1887, fourteen years apart in age, the two women quickly became the central persons in each other's lives. They became, slowly and eventually, dear friends.

Like all long-term friendships, perhaps, it was a confusing mess of a friendship. Their intense and multifaceted relationship contributed to the deterioration of the Macys' marriage— John Macy was not only Anne's husband but also Keller's editor and political mentor, and all three lived together in a house that was more Keller's than anyone else's. Even public perception of Keller and Macy was contradictory, haunted by the question of which woman enabled and created the other. Many credited the teacher with crafting her student's personhood; but as Keller grew to adulthood, others dismissed Macy as a low-status assistant.

To add to the mess, the two had all the foibles of human beings. Keller protectively held long and fierce grudges towards those who even hinted at criticizing Macy, and rarely (even long after Macy's death) said anything negative about her. Yet she could be a passive-aggressive snot, and after John and Anne Macy's separation wrote frequently about John's good looks, intelligence, and all around wonderfulness. Macy could be great fun, but her dourness, when it arrived, was intense and hard for Keller to understand. Macy admired but begrudged Keller her optimism. She also envied Keller's religious faith, but wanted nothing to do with it.

Most importantly, and what made the friendship work, was that they trusted one another. While the whole world assumed that Keller's deaf-blindness forced her to depend on Macy, my research suggests that the reverse more accurately characterizes their relationship of nearly fifty years. Macy leaned on Keller, juggling her uneasy combination of emotional vulnerability and a fierce desire for independence. Her lifelong struggle with chronic illness and depression was far more debilitating than Keller's deaf-blindness. Keller provided love, acceptance, daily assistance, an income, and a home. Their deep friendship, and Macy's willingness to allow herself to be dependent on Keller, gave meaning to Macy's life. Keller felt immense friendship, gratitude, and love for Macy, but she did not need her friend in the same way that Macy needed her.

Near the end of Macy's life Keller served as her personal aide. At one point in the 1930s any letters Macy sent had been fingerspelled (she called it dictating) to Keller who then typed them. In several of the letters Keller inserted comments in parentheses, disagreeing with or editorializing about Macy's words. My favorite example of this includes sniping between the two. In a slightly joking manner Macy complained about Keller's cheerfulness and health. While the food, drink, and heat had made the older woman ill, the younger woman had insides “made of cast iron fastened down with hoops of steel” that left her unaffected. Keller inserted her own parenthetical remarks, this time indicating that it was Macy's own *&%^ fault that she got sick because she drank too much water. Bicker, bicker, bicker!

The bickering, however, was part of the friendship; it was part of the trust. When Susan B. Anthony turned seventy, her dear friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, “If there is one part of my life that gives me more intense satisfaction than another, it is my friendship of more than forty years standing with Susan B. Anthony... Emerson says, ‘It is better to be a thorn in the side of your friend than his echo.’ If this adds weight and stability to friendship, then ours will endure forever, for we have indeed been thorns in the side of each other… I have had no peace for forty years, since the day we started together…” (Woman's Tribune, February 22, 1890).

Anne Macy and Helen Keller would have agreed. Disagreement and debate added energy to their friendship, as well as the weight and stability referred to by Stanton. For almost fifty years they lived out their friendship and their trust— as they shared a love of the intellectual life, adventured, bickered, and cared for one another. May all of us be so lucky.

Thomas N. DeWolf: What’s the Point of the U.S. Senate Apology for Slavery?

2009-06-26T10:00:07-07:00

Thomas N. DeWolf is the author of Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History, published by Beacon Press. Tom speaks regularly at schools, conferences, and other events around the country. For further information go to: www.inheritingthetrade.com, where you can also read find his Inheriting the Trade blog.

Does anyone out there know Chris Matthews, host of Hardball on MSNBC? I'd like to send him a copy of my book, Inheriting the Trade. My impression is that, like my own, his education lacked some aspects of our nation's history that have been kept hidden from students.

Most of you know that last week the United States Senate unanimously passed S. Con. Res. 26 apologizing for the enslavement and racial segregation of African-Americans.

I wrote about this–so won't repeat myself–on June 15. Read my post here. Also read my cousin James DeWolf Perry's excellent post here about why apologies are both important and troublesome.

My focus today is on the mixed reaction the apology has received. Chris Matthews certainly had a strong reaction. Watch as he interviews Reps. Steve Cohen and Jim Clyburn, embedded after the jump.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

If it doesn't display properly, you can also watch it here.

Though Matthews seems to support repairing the lingering damage from the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow he blames it all on the South. Here's what he said to Rep. Cohen (who sponsored H.Res. 194, the House apology bill that passed in July 2008):

Why should the whole country apologize for what a good half or more of the country got killed opposing, sir?

You're from Tennessee… why should anybody apologize for your sins?

Like many people, Mr. Matthews views the North as home to the valiant abolitionists who fought and died in the Civil War forcing the rebels to end the horrible institution of slavery. What's missing from this view is the fact that the vast majority of slave trading was done by northerners, with northern financing, on northern ships, out of ports in New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and other northern states. What's also missing is the fact that African people and their descendants were enslaved in the North for over 200 years. The final laws ending slavery in various northern states weren't enacted until the 1840's, less than two decades before the Civil War.

The residual effects of the legacy of slavery in the North are also not widely taught in schools. Segregation and discrimination after the Civil War were not limited to the South. Far from it. As described in detail by James Loewen in his book Sundown Towns, cities, counties, and even some entire states prohibited people of African descent from residing within their boundaries. Read When Affirmative Action Was White, by Ira Katznelson, for a clear explanation of how government policies contributed directly to racial inequity throughout the United States.

Chris Matthews, and many others like him, are in a powerful position to impact the public dialogue. Whatever we all can do to support them in understanding and explaining the full history of our nation, including the shameful parts, will be another step on the long journey to living up to the ideals upon which this great nation was founded.

So is an apology for slavery and its aftermath by the U.S. Congress appropriate and necessary on behalf of all of the United States? Without hesitation I say "Yes. Absolutely. It is a good first step."

I encourage you to listen to this interview from yesterday (June 24) on NPR's Tell Me More with Daniel Smith, a former Civil Rights worker and son of a man born into slavery in 1862, and my cousin Katrina Browne, creator of the film of our family journey, Traces of the Trade.

Daniel Smith says:

The apology represents men and women of good faith trying to come to grips with the problem of slavery in our country and the historical impact its had on the nation; not just on blacks–on this country. To me it represents a first step by the government to recognize the wrongs that were done to the citizens of this country."

Katrina Browne says:

As white folks we don't have to feel like it's a personal apology, as if we did it, but I do feel that acknowledging, having white people really see and take to heart that which was suffered and the consequences of it that are still with us today opens a channel of basic human decency and the connection and dialogue that can lead us to figure out where we go next."

Where we go next… that's the real issue.

Kate Clinton: Stonewall 40

2009-06-26T07:41:29-07:00

Today's post is from Kate Clinton, author of I Told You So. Clinton is a faith-based, tax-paying, America-loving political humorist and family entertainer. With a career spanning over 25 years, Kate Clinton has worked through economic booms and busts, Disneyfication and Walmartization, gay movements and gay markets, lesbian chic and queer eyes, and ten presidential inaugurals. She still believes that humor gets us through peacetime, wartime and scoundrel time. This post originally appeared on Clinton's CommuniKate blog.

On an early morning flight from Orlando, after appearing at the 19th Annual Gay Days at Disneyworld, I was “sirred” twice by a cab driver and flight attendant. All before 7 a.m. I would have thought the brand new faux leopard Croc flats I was sporting would have thrown them off. Or that the “Gay Day” banners everywhere would have heightened their threat levels to rainbow.

Usually I find mistaken identification an embarrassment or irritant. In past years I would correct quickly with "That's Ma'am not Sir," and then try to lessen their discomfort. But this 40th anniversary of Stonewall, I wear the gaffe as a badge of pride. I stare them down. Even if they seem remorseful, I don't help them through their moment. In solidarity with the unsung butch lesbians who were with the fags and drag queens at the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village in 1969, I have been doing my own version of butching it up.

It used to be hard to find a NY gay person of a certain age who did not claim to have been at the Stonewall Riots. I am a New Yorker of that certain age, but I most certainly was not at the Stonewall Riots. In 1969 I had just graduated from a small Jesuit college in upstate New York. Insert "Class of 69" joke here.

I was a member of the Gay Resistance. I was trying not to come out. Because of that resistance, I could not and then would not hear the news of gay liberation spreading upstate from Greenwich Village. Though pre-internet, the Stonewall message quickly reached upstate gays in the anti-Vietnam war, women’s liberation and civil rights movement. Before long even my little town in upstate New York had out gay activists organizing, educating and agitating.

And they had the best parties. At one I met a brilliant lesbian Political Science professor, fired from her tenured job because of her anti-war activism. Hesitantly, I invited her and her partner over for dinner in the apartment that by then I “shared with a teacher friend”. On the apartment tour, before I could point out my bedroom, she gleefully yelled to her partner, "Here's the fake bedroom!" Perhaps it was my cinder block bed with the Indian bedspread that tipped her off.

With my don't ask, don’t tell cover blown by my out and outrageous new lesbian friends, I slowly began to come out. First to my girlfriend at the time, to more friends and then to family. Finally, to make up for lost time, I just grabbed a microphone and have yapped about it for twenty-eight years.

Of course there had been gays and lesbian activists in the in the 1950s and early 60s: The Mattachine Society, The Daughters of Bilitis, The Society of Individual Rights, the North American Homophile Organization. I am in awe of their courage. The rage and outrage of the Stonewall Inn fags, butch dykes and drag queens, who had finally had enough, kicked the courage of early gay activists to another level of visibility.

Back in the day, only 25% of my generation came out before the age of eighteen. It was 31% in the generation after me. Today 57% come out before the age of eighteen. Our challenge today is certainly to transform gay visibility into LGBT action. The reaction to Prop Hates promises a new generation of rage and outrage that will pass trans-inclusive ENDA, overturn DOMA, abolish Don't Ask Don't Tell, and enact federal marriage equality.

But just as Stonewall and the gay liberation movement came from anti-war, women’s liberation and civil rights activism, we will only succeed if we reinsert ourselves into those activisms. To pass ENDA we must be part of the labor. To overturn DADT we must work for peace. To repeal DOMA and attain marriage equality we must work with women and people of color.

Think of it as Stonewall rebooted. It's a size fourteen and a half stiletto. Today in honor of my butch forebears, I'm wearing only two items of women’s clothing.

Kai Wright: (Traditional) Fathers Don't Always Know Best

2009-06-25T11:16:45-07:00

Today's post is from Kai Wright, author of Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay, and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York. Wright is is a writer and editor in Brooklyn, NY, whose work explores the politics of sex, race, and health. He contributes to several publications, ranging from The Nation to ColorLines magazine. This post originally appeared on TheRoot.com, where he is senior writer.

Who's your daddy? Barack Obama, that's who. We haven't seen black family role modeling like this since the Huxtables. Actually, Cliff and Clair couldn't touch the Obamas-- they didn't have Bo. Still, the president's not content with his own nuclear family bliss. He really, really wants you to have a great dad, too.

But the problem with Obama's effort to turn Father's Day into an annual conversation about the tragedy of failed fathers is that it's rooted in one of the greatest-- and most consequential-- lies the Christian right has sold the country: That “traditional” family structures are best equipped to produce healthy kids. The notion that biological fathers are essential to childhood development wasn't true when Dan Quayle asserted it in 1992, and it won't become true no matter how eloquently Barack Obama restates it.

“The hole a man leaves when he abandons his responsibility to his children is one that no government can fill,” Obama wrote in a beautifully crafted Parade magazine essay last week. “We can do everything possible to provide good jobs and good schools and safe streets for our kids, but it will never be enough to fully make up the difference.”

This is a terribly moving refrain that echoes through all of the president's rhetoric on fathers-- and it's entirely beside the point. Nobody sane would argue that government can give a child love. That truism, however, does not mean only a gendered dyad of parents are adequately equipped to do so.

The subject is no doubt a deeply personal one for the president and has long been part of his political persona. He grew up without his father in a non-traditional family: one working mom and two grandparents. As he told a group of young men he gathered in the East Room on Friday to discuss “responsible fatherhood,” he still feels his dad's absence today. That's clearly more than rhetoric; he wrote a whole book about it.

But for all the lessons we've all tried to glean from Obama's remarkable life, his childhood offers perhaps the most clear one: Love and support are the key ingredients for a healthy family. After all, Obama's fatherless family produced a president.

In fact, the most striking thing about the White House's summit on how terrible it is when traditional family structure breaks down was how many people in the room disproved the conceit. The vice president was a single dad for five years, and his kid grew up to be a state attorney general. Roland Warren-- who heads the National Fatherhood Initiative, a foundational group in the right's “traditional” family movement-- was the first victim of irresponsible fatherhood to testify. “I grew up without my dad as well,” he commiserated with the president, “and [I] went to Princeton and things of that nature, but still needed him.” Princeton. What a failure.

The point, of course, isn’t that Warren and Obama and everyone else don’t need the love a biological father can provide. It’s that biological fathers aren’t essential to getting that love.

As the president noted on Friday, a whole lot of black women are raising kids without their biological dads. But the meaningful question for Obama is this: What can law and society do to support those and all family structures? Rather than carping about absent fathers, he should celebrate and support any kind of family that’s making it work.

For decades, feminists prodded the nation along into doing just that. Legal activists chipped away in the courts at outdated ideas of how families should be built. Court rulings throughout the 1970s reshaped family law, getting rid of what was until then a legal presumption of wives' dependency on husbands. We got no-fault divorce. Gender-neutral rules for everything from Social Security benefits to alimony. The end of “illegitimate” children as a legal class. Women gained control over their reproductive choices.

Stripped of legal straitjackets, people found family wherever it naturally occurred. In grandparents and uncles and cousins. In coaches and neighbors and lovers-- even same-sex ones. We're still waiting, however, for sensible public policy that supports all of these organic families.

The fatherhood movement is one big reason for the delay. Quayle's infamous tirade against Murphy Brown’s proud moment as a single mom was first mocked. But over the next couple of years, a small, vocal chorus of conservative sociologists repeated the notion that kids suffer outside of nuclear families often enough that it sounded true. Warren's group and others began using their studies to advocate against poverty programs. And by 1996, Bill Clinton had co-opted their rhetoric to support welfare “reform” that stripped away all manner of support for poor families.

On Friday, Obama restated as facts the terrible fates to which fatherless children are purportedly damned: prison, drug abuse, dropping out. But while the absence of a father may correlate with these tragedies, so do a whole lot of other bad things.

As family law scholar Nancy Polikoff details in her 2008 book, Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families Under the Law, the broad consensus among sociologists is that there's no consensus on what determines whether a kid will thrive or fail in life. Statistically, everything from prenatal care to family income seems to matter, but it's a question that defies a hard answer. The factors are too many and too varied to accurately measure, and one of the most crucial factors can't be measured at all: love.

The only woman given the mic at Friday's East Room powwow made the strongest point of the day. “We spend so much emphasis on what's not working,” offered Rev. Barbara Williams Skinner. “How do we talk about what is working?”

Here's the answer: We focus on organic families like the one in which Obama was raised. Sure, lots of kids would be better off if their dads showed up for duty. Lots of others would be worse off, frankly. But love and support, whatever their source, are good for everybody. The father in chief should use his bully pulpit to make that point, and then go out and pass some laws that support all loving families, whether dad’s around or not.

Video: The Daddy Shift on KGO-TV San Francisco

2009-06-25T07:34:24-07:00

Click here if you can't see the video: http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/video?id=6879634.

Observation Post by Philip C. Winslow Ending Israel’s Settlements

2009-06-23T09:31:54-07:00

Ever since Barack Obama's inauguration in January, there's been talk of a looming policy confrontation with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who took office in March, over Israel's settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Headlines like "U.S., Israel square off over settlement expansion" boosted hopes or worries (depending on one's viewpoint) that the U.S. would use its considerable leverage to crack down on the continuing growth of the settlements, which are illegal under international law. At the first hint that Washington might do so, inflammatory posters popped up all over the West Bank (see this photo).

And after Obama's speech in Cairo on June 4, when he called for the settlements to stop, it seemed that the two leaders indeed were headed for a showdown over the most contentious issue in the Middle East.

Partly in response to Obama's address, a major policy speech by Netanyahu was promised. It came on June 14, struggled for lift and landed with a dull thud. "In my vision of peace, in this small land of ours, two peoples live freely, side-by-side, in amity and mutual respect," Netanyahu said. "Each will have its own flag, its own national anthem, its own government. Neither will threaten the security or survival of the other."

Some commentators made much of Netanyahu's use, for the first time ever, of the words "Palestinian state." The phrases the prime minister actually used were "armed Palestinian state" and "demilitarized Palestinian state," and pointed only to a future territory without an army, without control of its airspace, and one that provides "ironclad" security guarantees for Israel. The speech offered nothing new, and was breathtakingly ungracious to the Palestinians.

"Netanyahu spoke about negotiations, but left us with nothing to negotiate as he systematically took nearly every permanent status issue off the table," said Saeb Erekat, the long-time Palestinian negotiator. "Nor did he accept a Palestinian state. Instead, he announced a series of conditions and qualifications that render a viable, independent and sovereign Palestinian state impossible."

In the Israeli press, analysts accustomed to politicians' verbal contortions and massaging of their right-wing constituencies, were quick to dissect the underlying message.

"Welcome, Mr. Prime Minister, to the twentieth century. The problem is that we're already in the twenty first," wrote Ben Caspit, the veteran commentator for Ma'ariv. Although the speech might have been a "first small and hesitant step" it amounted to "thirty minutes of sheer right wing rhetoric."

President Obama conceded that the Israeli leader's address did contain, well, a lot of conditions. "But what we're seeing is at least the possibility that we can restart serious talks," he said politely. Not exactly a rehearsal for hearty handshakes on the White House lawn.

Amidst the revolving-door discussion over the past four decades, two issues need some daylight.

The first concerns the "unauthorized outposts," the 100 or so clusters of caravans or sheds set up on hilltops by extremist settlers as anchor points for future settlements. Outposts need to be seen in multiple contexts. They are, in fact, illegal under Israeli law, and successive governments keep promising to uphold the law and dismantle them. On the rare occasion when that happens, settlers launch what they call "price tag" retribution on Palestinians, and the outposts are quickly rebuilt. But in the international media, where the word "outpost" inevitably is confused with the word "settlement," a removal is portrayed as though an obstacle to peace had been whisked away. The outposts, although provocative and dangerous to the Palestinians, have another purpose. Debate over them serves as deflective chaff, like the aluminum strips ejected by aircraft to foil enemy radar. But the outposts are not benign. As an old Israeli friend told me, they remain "a strategic threat [because] they show that the Israeli governments (all of them) are hostages in the hands of the far right in the country . . . They are afraid of them."

Another repetitive drama that seems to have no final act concerns what Washington will or will not allow Israel to do. In a recent Washington Post article, Daniel Kurtzer, the U.S. ambassador to Israel from 2001 to 2005, factually nailed down the old story of whether the George W. Bush administration agreed to permit construction for "natural growth," that is, building in settlements to allow for expanding families. Kurtzer dismissed as "nonsense" over-the-top remarks by columnist Charles Krauthammer. Krauthammer fulminated that a "diktat" by Washington to curb natural growth would mean "strangling to death . . .thriving towns . . . It means no increase in population. Which means no babies."

A friend and colleague in Jerusalem put the two articles in a different perspective: "They might be different in tone but it seems that for both writers, the whole settlement issue is to be decided between the U.S. and Israel with no reference to the Palestinians, let alone international law."

It caught me up short. Although I spent three years in Palestine (if President Obama can call the occupied territories "Palestine," I guess I can, too), now that I'm an occasional visitor I sometimes find myself thinking in more detached strategic terms. And I do tend to write more about Israel, simply because Israel, as the occupying power, is the stronger of the two parties and should yield (not on security, but on movement toward a Palestinian state, which will bring security).

My friend, who is neither Israeli nor Palestinian, reminded me that it's all been heard before from a succession of U.S. presidents and Israeli leaders. Decades of speeches and morning-after punditry drift over the heads of those who are rarely consulted, but are merely told how much they might get, possibly, eventually, if they behave themselves and weather permitting. For Palestinians, an independent state is an ever-receding horizon.

So back to the basics, starting with a key plank of international law. The Fourth Geneva Convention says, in Article 49, "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies."

But the "transfer" part is exactly what has been happening since Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem (and the Golan Heights) in 1967. So despite the back-and-forth about the outposts, American readers are likely to miss detailed articles about the major settlements such as Gush Etzion and Beitar Illit, both near Bethlehem, Ariel to the north, or the mushrooming and strategically critical E1, which will connect Maale Adumim to Jerusalem, and where there are plans for about 3,000 housing units. More information about the settlements can be read here. Extensive reports and statistics also are available at Peace Now and B'Tselem.

As I pointed out in an earlier column, another facet of the settlement enterprise is the demolition of Palestinian homes. It's true that Palestinians often build (on their own land) without required permits, but that's because Israel makes it diabolically difficult to get a permit.

In the Jordan Valley, for instance, when bulldozers knock down homes and animal pens, there is no thought-provoking political dialogue, only rubble and dust and heartbreak. In June, Save the Children and two other agencies issued a report on the widespread demolitions.

"Facts on the ground" is an old Israeli phrase usually used to describe unpublicized settlement construction while bilateral talks rumble on in air-conditioned conference rooms. The steady growth in the number of settlers – about 5 percent a year – has been painfully obvious to several generations of Palestinians. But settlers do more than build homes with red tile roofs and scenic views: the more aggressive ones routinely destroy Palestinian olive trees, burn wheat crops and harass farmers and villagers in a variety of ways. This, too, is facts on the ground, and it's not much in the headlines.

So far, Obama's stance remains officially opposed to the settlements, including "natural growth." But one story sounded like the other shoe dropping. It suggested that officials see the issue of natural growth as so complicated that the U.S. might be prepared to show some "flexibility" about projects already underway. Successful diplomacy usually includes flexibility, of course, but the story was worrisome: construction projects are always underway somewhere in the West Bank.

When visiting Israel and Palestine, high-level U.S. State Department delegations usually make short ceremonial treks to urbane Ramallah (speeding past Qalandiya and Am'ari refugee camps), history-rich Bethlehem (skipping Deheisheh camp) or steamy Jericho (bypassing Aqabat Jabr and Ein Sultan camps). Should they seek facts-on-the-ground clarity, Secretary Clinton and President Obama would learn a lot from a visit to Nablus or Hebron where Palestinians would describe how they live under daily threat from violent settlers and are denied access to their crop lands by Israeli security forces.

Contrary to what the right-wing commentators say, helping Israel end the settlement enterprise would begin to resolve the world's longest-running conflict. It would start to redress the injustice to Palestinians, and would lay the foundation for lasting peace and security for Israel. In their hearts, most Palestinians and most Israelis know this to be true. Stick to your guns, Mr. President.

In the latest news...

Reuters, citing Israel's Army Radio, reported on June 23 that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has authorized the building of 300 new homes at the settlement of Talmon, near Ramallah in the West Bank.

Army Radio said 60 of the 300 homes slated for Talmon have already been built, and that Barak had approved plans to construct another 240 units. The defense ministry had no immediate comment, saying it was checking the report, Reuters said.