Moscow Dispatch: Smoke and Roses
The Park Kultury train station smells like smoke and roses this evening. This was the first warm day after a winter that was brutal even by Moscow standards but people seemed to scarcely notice. There are thousands of flowers on the station’s lower platform, arrayed in an impromptu shrine to the memory of twelve Moscow commuters who were killed here yesterday. The rush hour is uncommonly silent, a quiet that seems to drown out even the clamor of trains entering the station. And candles. Dozens of memorial flames flickering in the defiled atrium of the building.
The world knows by now that two suicide bombers detonated explosives in two train stations during the Monday morning, rush hour, killing thirty-eight people, wounding more than a hundred and sending riots of black smoke furling to the surface. There is still an acrid quality to air this evening, a hint of charred metal that catches you at random moments. Moscow’s subways are a thing to behold. Designed to be functional museums, the stations have marble floors, massive stained glass panoramas and epic scale sculpture of revolutionary war heroes. But for several hours that morning those floors were given over to a less noble task as the dead were pulled from the carnage of the south bound red line train and laid out to be counted and removed.
The government declared this a national day of mourning. The president and prime minister of Russia have convened emergency meetings, offered condolences to families and vowed to bring justice to the as yet unknown perpetrators. Cell phone companies refunded the cost of text messages sent between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. yesterday, reasoning that no one should have to pay to check on a loved one. And today a new Russian flag hung outside the station as a sign of national unity in the face of tragedy. Still the people outside the station wore a kind of stunned resignation on their faces. This is a city given over to floral expressions. In some places it’s difficult to travel more than a few hundred feet without passing a sveti shop, its stands crowded with roses, carnations and tulips. A line of people stretched outside the shop beside Park Kultury and near the front a young woman pushed past me carrying two white roses and a face full of anguish.
Inside, the police, always a heavy presence in the subways, were virtually an army of occupation today, eyeing passengers, inspecting random bags but mostly trying to create the image of order where bedlam reigned 24 hours earlier. It was a losing battle. I saw women weeping as they rode the escalator up to their transfer points, I saw a man take a knee, overcome with grief near the entrance. Random travelers, young and old, genuflected as they made their way off the subway cars. The trains arrive every two minutes, which meant that the platform started to resemble a wake for a head of state. Thousands arrived at those two minute intervals, most stopped for a reflective moment at the memorial, a few adding to the harvest of roses and then weaved their way through the crowd heading home.
I am a visitor teaching American history at Moscow State University; I knew none of the victims, but there were all kinds of personal resonances. I’m a native New Yorker, who grew up with the World Trade Center as personal point of reference. Last week I taught about violence in the Jim Crow South and told my students that lynching was a form of American terrorism. I pass through the Park Kultury station a half dozen times per week. I will be there again on tomorrow, coming off the brown line from Octoberskaya, transferring to the south bound red line. The same one that exploded as it entered the station yesterday.
The early news reports were hesitant to ascribe the explosions to terrorism but coordinated blasts roughly thirty minutes apart left little room for any other conclusion. About an hour in they began saying it was the work of two suicide bombers and I immediately recalled reading about the grim algebra of bomb investigation. (Gather all the body parts and the head that is missing a torso is your prime suspect.) Later they made cryptic reference to evidence that suggested they were from the Northern Caucuses. Not that the public had drawn any other conclusions.
Vladmir Putin vowed to “destroy” the people responsible for these actions. It seemed a very Putin-esque thing to say but I doubted “destroy” was the verb Russia needed. At least not at that hour. This was not an act of random mania. The roots of the Lubyanka and Park Kultury bombings go far past the topsoil of current events; they were the latest installments in a conflict the runs deep into Russian history.
Days before the attacks I began reading Robert Service’s History of Modern Russia and simultaneously beginning work on a book about 9/11. Service points out that the Russian empire staggered into the 20th century as a collection of peoples sharing little sense of common national identity. The tsars were plagued by the nationalist ambitions of various parts of the sprawling empire. When socialist radicals toppled Nicolas II in 1917, their provisional government immediately split into factions over the question of how much autonomy each of the small states would be granted. That question reemerged eighty years later in the wake of Communism’s fall and been the bitter source of conflict ever since. Chechen demands for independence run counter to Russia’s economic needs – Chechnya has the nation’s only warm water port – but, more importantly, it is seen as an assault on the Russia’s identity. A nation that once helped define the history of the 20th century saw itself collapse and dissolve in the 1990s. Chechnya has become a sort of line in the sand for Russian politics: the nation will grow no smaller.
In my time here I’ve heard offhand comments, a kind of ambient racism directed at Chechens and other people from the Caucuses. The term “Caucasian” means something completely different here than it does in the United States. The olive-skinned, dark-haired people from the region are derogatorily referred to as “blacks” and accused of stealing jobs from Slavic Russians. They work in the lowest tiers of the economy, many of them, ironically, operating flower stands on Moscow’s streets. Yelena Khanga, a black Russian journalist in Moscow told me that these tensions are exacerbated by the bad economy and the belief among some business owners that the predominantly Muslim people of the Caucuses make better employees. Islam forbids alcohol and this is a country where alcoholism is a big enough problem that it is driving down life expectancy for Russian men.
But politics and history mean nothing to the families of 38 people who rode the red line yesterday. The scenes of people streaming up from the smoke-belching tunnels took me back to September 11th. I was teaching an American history class when the first tower collapsed. I told my students that the sum total of evil in history stems from the ability to view human lives as abstractions. None of those people on the train mattered to the two women who strapped on explosive belts yesterday morning. They were animate symbols, gears in the machinery of Russia. And thus another digit added to the tally of human failure, misery and, yes, evil.
A journalist told me that the red line was targeted because of the number of Russian civil servants who ride it. The first bomb was detonated in the Lubyanka Station, which runs beneath the headquarters of the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency. But it also goes to Moscow University. The second blast struck just four stops away from the campus. I have been preoccupied with the thought that students may have been on the train ever since.
People have asked if I plan to cut my trip short. Interestingly, the thought had not occurred to me. I made a commitment to my students; I intend to keep it. And I would be trading this experience for the false security of home. In the cruel lottery of terrorism, none of us is ever really safe. But I appreciated the question. After answering it I felt calm, rational, resolved. Like the Russians who I saw lined up at Shabolavka this afternoon to buy passes for the orange line, fully aware of what had happened and equally intent upon continuing with their lives. That’s what I felt this afternoon.
What I feel on Wednesday as the southbound red line leaves Kropotkinskaya and slips into the station at Park Kultury is another matter entirely.
Uncle Josef
History, like beauty lies in the eye of the beholder but ugliness is universal. Or at least it would be easy to believe so. Sometimes, though, the muddy reality finds you and complicates your assumptions.
I teach in a suite at Moscow State University dedicated to Franklin Roosevelt. Given the national regard for FDR I actually managed not to notice how significant this was on my first day at MSU. But after one of my classes I thought about how Russia’s premier university has devoted an area to our 32nd president but you would never find so much as a bathroom bearing the name of his WWII ally Josef Stalin in an American University.
The reason for that is fairly unambiguous: in America Stalin’s reputation is synonymous with dictatorship, anchored to the agricultural collectivization programs that cost the lives of millions of Russians and shorthand for the grand scale evil that the 20th century witnessed. But in Russia, the story is, predictably more complex.
I asked a graduate student what Russian youth are taught about Stalin and her reply was “the truth.” Her version of this truth is that Stalin erred in excess and brutality, but his ideas for economic development were sound. His elimination of his rivals in the 1930s weakened the Soviet Union on the verge of World War II and was partly responsible for the huge losses the country suffered. It was a portrait composed in grays.
Another student told me that Stalin was “the most controversial figure in our history,” and asked if he was similarly viewed in the United States. I replied “No — because there’s no opposing opinion.” Nor does there appear to be much controversy in the West in general.
Here, for instance, is how a BBC documentary summarized the life of Stalin:
His forced collectivisation of agriculture cost millions of lives, while his programme of rapid industrialisation achieved huge increases in Soviet productivity and economic growth but at great cost. Moreover, the population suffered immensely during the Great Terror of the 1930s, during which Stalin purged the party of ‘enemies of the people’, resulting in the execution of thousands and the exile of millions to the gulag system of slave labour camps.
These purges severely depleted the Red Army, and despite repeated warnings, Stalin was ill prepared for Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. His political future, and that of the Soviet Union, hung in the balance, but Stalin recovered to lead his country to victory. The human cost was enormous, but was not a consideration for him.
After World War Two, the Soviet Union entered the nuclear age and ruled over an empire which included most of eastern Europe. Increasingly paranoid, Stalin died of a stroke on 5 March 1953.
Add a few notes about the early Cold War, atomic espionage and the show trials and you more or less have the American assessment of Stalin as well.
But one thing that becomes apparent if you spend any amount of time here is that World War II is present in a way that it simply is not in the United States. This might be expected given the fact that some 400,000 American soldiers died in that war but the USSR lost nearly 25 million soldiers and civilians. The 900 day seige of Leningrad was, itself, worse than anything the US suffered during the war.
The popular view seems to hold that no matter his other flaws, Stalin is also the man responsible for defeating fascism. And that, at least in this country, still counts for something.
Moscow Dispatch #1: First Day of School
* For those who don’t know, I am spending the semester in Moscow as a Fulbright Scholar. I’m teaching a course on African American history at Moscow State University. These are my observations about the city, the country and the people.
The day started with me breaking the buckle on my belt as I left for campus, so I was forced to walk around Moscow with pants sagging like a rapper. Then some students escorted me to the subway and I stopped at a newsstand and requested a bottle of “vodka” instead of a bottle of “water” (the words are similar in Russian because “W” is pronounced as “V”). Then after making it onto said subway with one of the students I managed to trip and land squarely in the lap of a Russian Army officer.
But the students loved my talk on slavery and the origins of the civil war so I’m putting this one in the “W” column. Even the other situations had silver linings — I learned the word for “belt” (pronounced Ree-Mean”), learned that the difference between vodka and water is largely in the accentuation and that Russian military look very dour in those gray uniforms and fur hats but can be very tolerant of uncoordinated Americans.
On the other hand, not everyone on Moscow mass transit is so tolerant. I had a fascinating experience on the trolley. An elderly man looked at me and then began speaking curtly to the student I was with and abruptly turned his back to me for the rest of the ride.
Thinking like an American, I assumed this was something racial but it was something far more subtle and interesting than that. The only word I caught during his tirade was “Americanski.” The student (who introduced himself to me as “Andre, like Dr. Dre”) later told me that he’d said “At one time Americans knew not to come to Russia and speak so loudly.”
Yesterday was “Red Army Day,” kind of the Russian equivalent of Veteran’s Day. I’m told that crowds, distinctly skewed toward the older set, gather to chant old slogans and praise the “protectors of the motherland” in tones that betray a strong sentimental streak for the old days.
Come off that kind of sugar high onto a crowded rush hour trolley car to see a large American laughing it up with a young Russian who speaks perfect English, is writing a thesis on Lyndon B. Johnson’s civil rights policies and carrying a copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in his hand and you can see how it might make a man go Kruschev, so to speak.
I suspect he was, in effect, pining for the good old Cold War days when Americans were kept at arm’s length, not invited to campus to help shape the minds of Russian youth. It goes beyond simply the stark lines of East and West that were perilous but, ultimately, fairly simply to comprehend. Yuri Rogoulev, a historian at Moscow State who specializes in FDR and the history of the New Deal, told me that people long for the status and sheer geographical size of the world power that they once lived in.
But there were also practical considerations. The breakup of the Soviet Union meant the dissolution of more than political bonds. Families were strained as relatives in one place found themselves in a separate country from their siblings, aunts, children. It’s as if people in New England one day woke up and found that they needed a passport to get from Connecticut to Massachusetts to visit relatives and depending upon how the two states were getting along they might not be able to enter at all.
Moscow itself is a fascinating blend of those currents. There are staid Soviet era buildings being crowded out by high rises and bathed in pink neon light from the billboard ads for Samsung computers or the latest BMW sports car. (I told Andre that I have a habit of taking photos of advertisements when I’m abroad because it gives me insight into what people think about. He said “Yes,” and then pointed to a sign above a medical office and said “We Russians think about gynecology.”)
I thought it superficial but the first thing I noticed about Moscow was how incredibly well-dressed people are. I mean, they are, like, New York stylish. (I saw a woman wearing a purple fur coat and managing to make you wish more people knew how to wear a purple fur like she did.) But even that is part of this dynamic of pushing the old ways deeper into the recesses of history. As Yuri pointed out to me “For nearly a century we were forced to dress like proletarians. Now people want to run in the opposite direction.”
Interestingly, Andre wouldn’t translate the old man’s outburst until we got off the trolley (and I do wonder if he told me everything the man said) but I burst out laughing at the thought of me be decried as an agent of western encroachment, globalization and probably espionage for good measure. “Dre” felt a bit of empathy for him, though. “There are really old people who miss those days. It’s sad.”
As for the lecture, I talked, they took notes; I cracked jokes, they laughed. They asked questions, I answered. A cellphone went off and I was polite but firm about them being on silent during class and they all were eager to talk to me more afterward.
Happy about all of it.
Crime, Taxes and Politics: Three Questions for Ceasar Mitchell
My car was broken into last week. Under normal circumstances this would be a routine hazard of urban living. You see a parking spot; someone else sees an opportunity. But these are not normal circumstances – or even more disturbing – they may come to be. This is the eighth break-in on my block this summer (one neighbor’s car was stolen, likely used in a robbery and then totaled in an accident.)
These are the nuisance crimes but they’re also part of a much bigger picture: the friend who looked out the window to see someone kicking in the door of her neighbor’s house, the gang-related shootings and armed robberies. The general feeling of peril, or at least lack of safety, that seems to be creeping across the city.
I suppose that it is something of a left-handed blessing that if you’re going to have a crime wave at least it can occur in an election year. One, the people in office are forced to pay attention to the issue. Two, there’s always a chance that you might just elect someone capable of making serious improvements.
I met city council rep Ceasar Mitchell last year at the Democratic convention (he’s now running for President of the Atlanta City Council) and it occurred to me that it might be worth talking to him about what he thinks it will take to move the city beyond these bullet days and back toward something at least a little less forboding.
WJC: A neighbor’s car was stolen for the 3rd time. A cop comes and says that there are only eight officers patrolling the entire zone. If two crimes occur in the zone at the same time they cannot possibly respond to both of them. Now, I’d hate to have my car stolen but on the other hand what if I called the police and they get to my house and are then delayed responding to a homicide across town? How does the city council president address that?
CM: I think that’s part of our experience. We’re not just elected officials. We live and work in the community. We’re impacted by taxes and water rates and crime just like everyone else. In December I went to an event at Hammonds House and when I came out my car window was broken. They stole only one thing – my computer was in the car, my checkbook, they only thing they took was my Ipod. It didn’t matter that I was a councilmember. I had to call 9/11 like everyone else. We bring our experiences to bear. I live in West End, my experiences there are not different from anyone else there.
The city charter says we have to provide for the safety, health and welfare of the residents. I served as chairman of the public safety committee for years. My father was a police officer. Years ago I authored legislation and got it passed despite a mayoral veto that requires all graduates of the police academy to spend 8 weeks on neighborhood foot patrol. That’s about community policing. That came from having a father who patrolled in Perry Homes and from hearing residents in South Atlanta saying they wanted to see police officers walking in the community because that has an impact on crime. Community policing makes a difference. It’s really about preventing crime, not responding to crime.
The original plan was to create a program called COPTAP to create a foot patrol over in every zone in Atlanta over a 16-month period. I still hope to do that. I want to see that happen. I plan to really push that as council president.
WJC: How can you pay for these programs given the state of the budget?
In this current environment we’re faced with a somber choice about whether we want to raise taxes in order to continue delivering services at a certain level plus eliminating furloughs. Right now furloughs are killing our ability to deliver services. We’ve rolled back taxes for the last 6 years. We have to continue to look for other sources of revenue. For instance, we fired the person handling parking enforcement and now are not generating any revenue from parking. When I was chair of public safety I introduced legislation that would require a fee for pre-trial intervention for ordinance violators. If you violate a city ordinance and go through a pre-trial intervention we should collect revenue. We’ll have to be creative about fees and revenue.
Every year the city council is required to draft a resolution with our budget priorities. This year I took the leadership and drafted a resolution communicating one priority — to fully fund public safety and eliminate furloughs. We reserve the right to institution a tax increase if we deem it to be appropriate. But how does that impact the community?
One of my ideas was to host two town hall meetings in zone four. I did that for two reasons. The first was to give residents a chance to interact with public safety officials. The second was to really show and exemplify just how big zone four is. We had two meetings, 15 miles apart, both in the same zone. That was to make the point that the zone is too big. The problem that the police officer was trying to express to you is that you have a zone and a beat. You have a number of officers in a beat and umbrella officers without any particular beat. When you have eight officers, you don’t have umbrella officers on that shift, there are beat officers missing. It means that the police officers are undermanned. If we had two officers per beat and an umbrella, I think we can improve the situation and prevent crime.
WJC: This sounds like it would require a serious increase in taxes. To the ordinary resident in Capitol View, for instance, worried about a break in or another crime, it would look like he or she was being penalized because the city didn’t budget correctly in the first place.
CM: The old saying is that you never raise taxes in an election year. We could easily skirt the issue and try to save our political hides and fake the funk with the people telling them that they’ll have a city government that can actually deliver services. I think we’ll put ourselves in a real state of emergency if we don’t make up for the revenue that didn’t come in because of the economy. The focus is on public safety and we’re going to continue to look for ways to cut costs.
Series Finale: The Media & Michael Jackson
A handful of thoughts on the final act in Jackson’s career — originally posted on EbonyJet.com.
The final episode in the series that was Michael Jackson’s life aired last week and as you would have expected the ratings were gold. It’s easy to forget that in addition to his widely credited musical innovation Jackson is the godfather of a much more dubious offering to modern life: the reality series. He started out stealing plays from PT Barnum’s book, turning himself into a spectacle knowing that adoration generates even more money when it’s mixed with a touch of condescension. Thus the storylines – each of them as real as cubic zirconium – about sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber and buying the bones of the elephant man. Those were the things you could get away with in the old three-network and daily paper days. But it was his skewed fate to actually become more eccentric at the precise moment when media became the new Jesus.
Back when the ten-year old Michael trilled and crooned with an old soul’s knowledge and a master artist’s self-possession, the television was built to more human dimensions. It shut down in the wee hours, as if transistors needed shut eye too. But the arc of Michael’s life is a curious Benjamin Button series of events. Go back to that clip of the little man with his brothers on the Ed Sullivan show singing “I Wonder Who’s Loving You” and you see no raw talent. It’s the level of nuance and dexterity, the effortless blend of lilt and coarseness, that still gives you chills. To simply call him a prodigy would be to diminish him somehow. Now reconcile that man-child with the childish man – the taupe-skinned curiosity dangling a newborn over a balcony. The grown ass man in need of a mama’s rebuke, “Boy, act like you got some damn sense”. The one eating through money and having his face carved into abstract art. Then consider that all this occurs within a media that has become a digital deity of sorts – never tiring, perpetually in motion, twenty-four hours, omnipresent, all-knowing.
John Steinbeck surveyed the wreckage of the Great Depression and observed that a bank was more than the sum of its human parts, that where individual men might feel sympathy toward those whom they evicted and dispossessed, the Bank was immune to such sentiments. Jackson’s demise illustrated that media is our version of a bank. Some lone soul with a pen, iPhone and laptop might have recognized that he was part of precisely the kind frenzy that drove Jackson into the abyss but that is a fleeting thought. Pixels have no conscience.
The complete piece is posted here
On Slavery and Apologies
I continue to work at finishing my book but I did take time to knock out this “Thanks, but no thanks,” piece on the Congressional apology for slavery for politico.com.
Here’s the cornerstone:
The House is likely to soon pass legislation offering a formal apology for slavery. The Senate passed the same resolution on June 18, acknowledging the “injustice, cruelty and brutality” of slavery.
The timing was a sad irony — it passed the Senate the day before Juneteenth. June 19 marks the annual commemoration of the day when slaves in Texas received word of emancipation, more than two years after Lincoln issued his proclamation.
The response to the resolution has been a sort of inverted Juneteenth. The holiday recognizes a grand federal proclamation about slavery that was deliberately withheld from black people. Now Congress is on the verge of passing a grand federal proclamation about slavery, which black America simply chose to ignore. The primary effect of this apology has been the synchronized rolling of 66 million eyes.
Quote of the Day: Salman Rushdie
In 1989 the Iranian regime put a contract on Salman Rushdie’s head because he wrote a book. In 2009 millions of Iranians took to the streets to with freedom of speech as a prominent demand. Progress, perhaps.
Two years after Ayotollah Khomeini of Iran declared a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses the author made a surprise appearance at Columbia University at a forum on the First Amendment.
Maybe he was ahead of the curve.
“Sometimes I think that, on day, Muslims will be ashamed of what Muslims did in these times, will find the “Rushdie affair” as imporbably as the west now finds martyr-burning. One day they may agree that — as the European Enlightenment demonstrated — freedom of thought is precisely freedom from religious control, freedom from accusations of blasphemy…
‘Free speech is a non-starter,’ says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”
– From Rushdie’s speech “What is My Single Life Worth?”
Then Again…
I just pulled this off Andrew Sullivan’s blog and Matt Steinglass seems to present a counter argument to the question I raised in my earlier post:
Iran has an electoral system that is similar in some respects to China’s or Vietnam’s. Elections are held periodically, but the lists of candidates are carefully vetted by the real controlling power structure — in Vietnam or China’s case, the Communist Party; in Iran’s case, the clergy — to ensure ideological compliance and loyalty. Moussavi passed through this system of ideological control; he’s no radical reformer. But what’s happened is that simply by representing an alternative, Moussavi became a vehicle for the expression of the hopes of people who are far more radical in their reformist hopes than anyone in the dominant power structure. Even though the players in the Iranian elections were all screened for their personal views, the simple fact of an election became a forum in which radical and unacceptable political views could express themselves and ultimately co-opt one of the candidates.
Before We Get Excited About Iran
I’m far from an expert on Iran but I have to ask a question that I think may have been overlooked in the frenzy of election fallout. What is the end game here?
On another level I’m asking what do Mousavi and his supporters want because that it likely the key to how this will play itself out. And finally, on its most basic level, the question is: will Mousavi press his demands even if it places him in direct conflict with the Ayatollah?
Inspirational as they are there is a contrary logic to the protests — they demand new elections from the same government they believe stole the previous one. And if the Iranian government wants to be smart about stifling democracy they’ll hold new elections immediately. Despite the anger and the amazing displays of rebellion (for instance the hackers who responded to the shut down of twitter and facebook by crashing the government’s websites and the Tehran University faculty who resigned en masse) their demands are fairly conservative. This may not be a fatal flaw (the American Revolution began with demands for fairly simple reforms, as did the Cuban Revolution; the Montgomery Improvement Association initially fought for a more humane form of segregation, not its complete eradication.) But that said, the Iranian protests might not ever take such a radical turn.
The Obama administration has probably considered all this which probably explains the tepid tone of their criticism. The prevailing logic is that when the dust settles we will still be dealing with Iran’s ruling theocracy and the president of their choosing.
Even if the Iranian protestors succeed in their demands and even if Mousavi were to win a new election, the end result would likely be the reinforcement, not the weakening of the theocrats. Flexibility, or even the appearance of flexibility, benefits even the most repressive regimes.
On some level it would be in the regime’s interests to have Mousavi, who is — whether justly or not — quickly becoming a Guevara figure in the West, succeed Ahmadinejad as President. Mousavi favors women’s rights, two weeks ago President Obama singled out women’s rights as a key concern in the Islamic world. You can imagine some future edict bolstering the status of women in Iranian society and a flurry of cable news commentary about whether this constitutes a diplomatic overture or not.
But since the real power rests in the hands of the governing clerics, Mousavi could just as well make for nice reformist window dressing — a situation that would make it that much harder to pressure Iran on nuclear weapons. Certainly it would complicate the PR angle of any Israeli attack on their nuclear sites.
Despite the reports of casualties from the protests and the threat of police using live rounds the regime has yet to go Tiannemen on the protesters. The arrival of tanks and a brutal crackdown would certainly be a bad sign. But the arrival of ballot boxes and new campaign posters might be even worse.
Time Out
I’m busy trying to finish this long delayed book on the 44th President so I won’t be updating AE for a while. In the meantime, here is an excellent piece from Gary Sick on the likelihood of a soft coup taking place in Iran yesterday.
If the reports coming out of Tehran about an electoral coup are sustained, then Iran has entered an entirely new phase of its post-revolution history. One characteristic that has always distinguished Iran from the crude dictators in much of the rest of the Middle East was its respect for the voice of the people, even when that voice was saying things that much of the leadership did not want to hear.
In 1997, Iran’s hard line leadership was stunned by the landslide election of Mohammed Khatami, a reformer who promised to bring rule of law and a more human face to the harsh visage of the Iranian revolution. It took the authorities almost a year to recover their composure and to reassert their control through naked force and cynical manipulation of the constitution and legal system. The authorities did not, however, falsify the election results and even permitted a resounding reelection four years later. Instead, they preferred to prevent the president from implementing his reform program.
In 2005, when it appeared that no hard line conservative might survive the first round of the presidential election, there were credible reports of ballot manipulation to insure that Mr Ahmadinejad could run (and win) against former president Rafsanjani in the second round. The lesson seemed to be that the authorities might shift the results in a close election but they would not reverse a landslide vote.
The current election appears to repudiate both of those rules. The authorities were faced with a credible challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, who had the potential to challenge the existing power structure on certain key issues. He ran a surprisingly effective campaign, and his “green wave” began to be seen as more than a wave. In fact, many began calling it a Green Revolution. For a regime that has been terrified about the possibility of a “velvet revolution,” this may have been too much.
The entire piece is available here.
Obama, JFK and Gay Rights, Part II
I did this piece on Obama and gay marriage on CNN.com. Basically I argue that Obama’s approach to gay rights has some broad resemblances of the way Kennedy stiff-armed the civil rights community after he got elected. Here is the lede. The entire piece is available here.
(CNN) — Last week Gov. John Lynch signed a bill making New Hampshire the sixth state to legalize same-sex marriage.
It was a paradoxical moment. The new law is a reminder that same-sex marriage is the civil rights issue of our era and just how far the movement for marriage equality has come. It also highlighted the unexpected and remarkable silence from the White House on this issue…
But to date he has taken no significant action on this front and, more critically, his administration is actually being outpaced by state legislatures around the country.
Granted Obama has been in office for just 4½ months, but given the developments in Iowa, California and New Hampshire, they have been among the most significant months in the struggle for marriage equality.
The administration likely wishes to avoid the culture war debacle of Bill Clinton’s early presidency. But gay rights are a national issue in a way they weren’t in 1993. Thus the clouds of disappointment we already see gathering.
We long ago overdosed on comparisons of Obama and previous presidents, but it’s hard to miss the way his administration had begun to echo that of John F. Kennedy. And not in a good way.
The Obama Wars
I’ve been saying for years that there’s something wrong when you get a group of intellectuals and critics together and everyone is in agreement. Conflict produces progress. Or, more specifically, the competitive market of ideas forces everyone to step up their thought game.
It’s no coincidence that the most productive points in black history have also been points where there were serious, deep disagreements about policy, tactics and direction.
On that level, it should’ve almost been a foregone conclusion that Obama would be at the center of the next great debate. it’s long overdue that we had the kind of crossing of swords that Tavis Smiley’s “Stand” documentary inspired. Last week Ta-Nehisi Coates responded in the Atlantic to Dyson’s critique that Obama was using his black cool points to avoid dealing with substantive black issues.
The latest installment is Melissa Harris Lacewell on CNN.com. Here’s the cornerstone:
The film and its participants (two of them my senior colleagues at Princeton University) appropriated the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to implicitly claim that they, not Obama, are the authentic representatives of the political interests of African-Americans. They used King’s images and speeches, gathered on the balcony where King was assassinated, and explicitly asserted their desire to play King to Obama’s LBJ, and Frederick Douglass to Obama’s Lincoln.
On its face, this is not a bad model. Presidents are deeply constrained by the structural and political limitations of their office. A robust administration needs an active and informed citizenry to engage, push, cajole, criticize and applaud its efforts.
But this appropriation misrepresents rather than preserves King’s legacy. King was a powerful questioner and, at times, ally of President Johnson because he was at the helm of a massive social movement of men and women who were shut out of the ordinary political process. It was not King’s intellectual capacity or verbal dexterity that made him an effective advocate for racial issues; it was his own accountability to that movement.
This is not true of Smiley and his “soul patrol,” who are mostly public personalities and tenured professors largely unaccountable to the black constituency. King’s meager income, though supplemented by the lecture circuit, was grounded in the voluntary contributions of black churchgoers.
Smiley is backed by powerful corporations, like Wal-Mart and Nationwide, that have troubled relationships with these communities. The college profs on the bus are comfortably supported by well-endowed universities. This does not invalidate their views on race, but it does make the analogy with King a poor fit.
The whole piece is here.
This Is How It Should Be Done
Yeah. This one is worthy of a Rakim reference.
At some point heads will come to terms with the fact that the greatest writer of my generation might just be an ex-hustler from the Marcy Projects in Bed Stuy.
Once upon a time we referred to hip hop as a youth culture. What does it say when a bona fide middle aged man is putting down this kind of heat — and daring twenty-somethings to keep up?
The Other Shoe Drops in Jerusalem
So, yeah, this is what we’re up against.
Someone critiqued Obama for talking over the head of the target audience with yesterday’s speech. I disagreed until this made me think twice. TNC raises a good point about this being the irrational ravings of intoxicated youth. Right. Exactly. But here’s where my own biases come into play. I’ve always found it hard to believe that people are capable of saying nigger insincerely.
Ick.
That aside, nigger isn’t even what stood out the most to me about this clip. It’s the recalcitrant insistence that Obama has no say in Israeli affairs. That might be the case were it not for that $3 billion aid subsidy Obama just signed off on in the most recent federal budget.
On another level, drunk or not, this clip can’t help but bring up unpleasant echoes of how exactly Itzak Rabin met his demise.
Almost Makes Bankruptcy Look Like Fun
Caught this on tv last night. Admittedly wasn’t paying much attention until a pic of Joe Louis flashed across the screen. I guess they’re going for a theme of American icons that have (at least in Louis case) literally been knocked down but still got up and won.
Obama in Cairo
I recently started contributing to “The Arena” section of Politico.com. This is my response to Obama’s Cairo speech.
This may well be the most important foreign policy speech of the post Cold War era. I would give it an A.
There were any number of statements which individually could have been taken as significant. In its sum total it was quite remarkable.
We know the structural hallmarks of an Obama speech by this point — the balance of poetry and policy, making use of his unique biography as an advantage, offering the panoramic view of a complex problem, arguing that we have been mired in false dichotomies in approaching the problem and then offering common sense, pragmatic, non-ideological alternatives spiced with just enough idealism to spark the imagination of young people.
For all that, this may have been the most brilliant iteration of that approach.
On its most basic level, his speech made it that much more difficult for the caricatured view of this country to persist. You saw him hit that theme repeatedly — the references to the role of Islam in American history and the number and prosperity of Muslims in the US. The statement “There is a mosque in every state in our union,” his support for Muslim charitable giving for instance, the reference to Rep. Keith Ellison being sworn in using Jefferson’s Quran. The same is the case with his argument that the US policy of democracy promotion is a human rights initiative, not an imperial one. Ditto the cultural touches — beginning the speech with the greeting “A Salaam Alaikum.”
His oblique mention of the CIA’s role in the overthrow of the Mossadeq government in Iran was particularly important. Rarely do we engage other nations of the basis of their sometimes rightful contempt for our actions.
The President’s deployment of African American history and the lessons of non-violence as well as his cleverly turned phrases about suicide bombers surrendering moral authority were probably the most forthright statements we’ve seen on that subject.
Possibly the clearest criteria for the speech was just how flat Osama Bin Laden’s audiotaped statements appear in comparison.
My minor quibble is that I would have liked to have heard a bit more framing of this conflict as a result of modernity and the fact that within the US there are strong debates about how much sexuality should be on television or the best ways to preserve the values of family and community.
That said, I believe we will be studying this speech for years if not decades to come.
The video is available here.
M.E. Dyson: You’ve been played by Obama
Well, those aren’t the precise words. Dyson visited my friend Davey D’s Hard Knock Radio to discuss President Obama last week. His actual statement was: He (Obama) is willing to sacrifice the interests of African Americans in deference to a conception of universalism because it won’t offend white people.
I’m turning up the open mic on this one — what say y’all?
Lacewell on Tiller and Anti-Choice Terrorism
Here is Melissa Harris-Lacewell on the recent murder of George Tiller.
I believe the murder of George Tiller was an act of domestic terrorism whose aim was not only to assassinate a single man, but also to frighten a generation of doctors and to shame and terrify women and families who are making difficult choices. While the murderous rage of Tiller’s assassin is not representative of the broader anti-choice movement, I believe that the anti-choice community operates with a totalitarian impulse that generates a culture of terror rather than a culture of life.
Hannah Arendt suggested that totalitarians generate terror in part by cultivating profound loneliness among their targets. Loneliness locks human beings in isolation and hampers discourse, connection, and shared experience. When we believe we are alone and misunderstood we cannot form the bonds necessary to organize and resist. There are few experiences more lonely and isolating than facing an unintended pregnancy or facing the need to terminate a desired pregnancy in order to protect maternal health. The anti-choice discourse labels the women and families who chose abortion “baby killers.” It is a strategy that dehumanizes these women and the doctors who care for them.
The strategy is effective because abortion still carries tremendous social shame in addition to its personal psychological burden. Activists for reproductive rights have a hard time convincing women and families who have terminated to be part of a movement that protects the right to terminate. Many understandably prefer not to be publicly associated with the stigma and potential violence that comes with standing up for choice.
The entire piece is available here.
Tiller and Obama
I’m not generally inclined to pray but I find myself doing something akin to that of late. I noticed at some point that observing Obama’s presidency has been akin to encountering turbulence on an airplane — intellectually you know things will probably be o.k. but that doesn’t make the minor knot in your stomach dissolve.
I went to South Carolina to canvass just ahead of the primary last year and encountered a number of Huckabee supporters who saw our Obama signs and began chanting that our candidate “wants to kill babies.” I snapped a picture of them not because I found the moment to be significant but precisely because it wasn’t. “Baby killer” seemed like a distant pejorative, a cliche echo of an earlier point in the abortion debate and the Huckabee people were still behind the historical curve. My bad. Like most of us, I am revising my assumptions about the abortion debate.
And for the first time I’m more worried about Obama’s safety because of his pro-choice politics than because of his race. My friend Ta-Nehesi Coates reminded me about the skinhead assassination plot in Pittsburgh last year but I’ve still tended to think of the white nationalist types as what Donald Rumsfeld once called “bitter-enders.” It may be wishful thinking on my part but it seems like they’ve been losing their extremism market share for years now.
The pro-life movement is another story. In the span of a month we’ve seen people trying to block his entry to Notre Dame, another (black!) woman try to fling herself at him to give him a pro-life letter and then lay prostrate to prevent secret service from removing her and now the murder of a physician.
It is as if the (false) hopes that the Bush administration would end abortion have necessarily dissolved leaving a harder, more bitter edge to the discussion — if it can yet be called a “discussion.” The implication seems to be that if eight years of governance by a born-again Christian could not undo the abomination of legalized abortion the only option left is to resort to arms.
Does this seem like an escalating threat to anyone else?
Maybe this is all just paranoia. Imagine that. A paranoid black man. Quite a novelty.
Nonetheless, in January 2017, I’ll be like those people who applaud when a plane touches down at the sight of Barack and Michelle getting into the Marine helicopter to leave DC.
Safely.
As If New Orleans Hasn’t Suffered Enough Already
I’m told that a stereotype company went out of business and gave Wernor Hertzog all it’s inventory at 90% off. Unfortunately I’m told they cut the scene with the monument to Al Jolson. I could dissect what’s wrong with this or I could devote that time to eating watermelon. I think the latter would be more socially productive.
Final thought: Sean Penn said it best: “Nic Cage has effectively ceased to be an actor.”
Grown A$$ Man
This, um, more or less speaks for itself.
States’ Rights and Gay Marriage
Last November the state of California awarded its 55 electoral votes to the first black Presidential nominee on the same day it voted to outlaw gay marriage. On Tuesday, May 26, 2009 we witnessed the first nomination of a Hispanic to the Supreme Court — while the California Supreme Court upheld that decision banning gay marriage. Timing isn’t everything, but in this case it is a hell of a lot.
It has become increasingly apparent that gay marriage is the civil rights issue of our era. And as with previous civil rights causes, this one has been defined as much by cultural precedents as legal ones. Last week we saw the Rev. James Favorite of Beulah Baptist Church make headlines for his outspoken opposition to gay marriage. The angle, of course, was that the Tampa clergyman was also an outspoken Obama supporter. It is an echo of the early, and largely discredited, arguments that African Americans in California turned out to support one product of the civil rights movement (Barack Obama) while assaulting another (the movement for gay marriage in the state.)
Given the fact that Obama supports civil unions, but has not endorsed gay marriage, Favorite’s position might not be as contradictory as it appears to be on the surface. Nevertheless you can’t help but see a pattern. I’ve frequently seen gays compare their struggles to those of blacks in the 1950s and 60s. I’ve also seen any number of black folk take serious offense at that comparison. The standard reply holds that gays have the option of remaining in the closet, that it is infinitely more difficult to discriminate against someone for something as private as sexuality than skin color. A version with slightly more heft points out that the architecture of the Constitution was designed to specifically ensure black inferiority through the 3/5ths and fugitive slave clauses as well as the protections for the slave trade.
But on another level both sides of this argument completely miss the point. The struggles of African Americans and gays are not the same — but they don’t have to be. The 14th Amendment was drafted in part to guarantee citizenship to ex-slaves. It is currently the primary protection for undocumented workers whose children were born here as American citizens. The struggles of ex-slaves and immigrants are not identical, but the principle beneath them remains the same.
The gay rights vs. civil rights debates also tend to overlook one huge factor that they have in common: the role of states’ rights as a roadblock in their struggles. The power to regulate marriage is a recognized right of the states which is why we have such a patchwork of set of divorce laws and some states that still allow teens as young as 14 to wed with parental consent. For the seven decades between the end of Reconstruction and Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights was effectively treated as a states’ rights issue and we saw a similarly varied set of state laws in terms of black voting, access to public accomodations, education, employment and yes, marriage.
The founders of this country knew that a nation where power was diffused among a wide number of people could be as unjust as one where it was concentrated in the hands of only a few. (Which is why they came up with things like the electoral college in the first place.) It’s no coincidence that the most antigay measures have been passed by statewide referendum, not by a vote in the legislature. Marriage laws were left in the hands of the states who have in turn placed them in the hands of their individual voters. And the results, at least thus far, remind us that often the only thing worse than states’ rights is local rights.) Initial reports hold that the California Supreme Court was reluctant to overturn the will of the voters, but this is precisely why the state Supreme Court and separation of powers exists — to overturn laws that have enough support to pass but violate some principle of the law. In this case, it is the principle of equal protection.
The story of the civil rights movement in the United States is the story of the federal government overruling local jurisdictions time and again. Even Eisenhower recognized this fact. His decision to send in the Army to protect students integrating Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas had nothing to do with his less than progressive views of African Americans and everything to do with his belief in the centrality of the Constitution.
And it is precisely because of the importance of the federal role in this struggle that Barack Obama’s silence on the matter is damning. During the campaign I worked with literally dozens of gays and lesbians in the Atlanta Obama office; I ran for delegate with a gay activist who worked tirelessly for his election. Thus far he has remained comparatively silent on the issue — a stance that is even more troubling after asking that constituency to show Rick Warren far more tolerance than he generally affords them. Obviously this is a problem.
Unlike civil rights, gay marriage really is a state level issue. But that doesn’t mean that there is no role for the federal government. The President should begin by making a clear statement on the issue and following it with a revocation of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
For the Obama administration this is not simply a political issue, it is a moral, historical and human rights one.
So a black guy and a Puerto Rican walk into the Supreme Court
Amazing how yesterday’s punchlines become today’s headlines. Just after the Iowa caucuses last year I pointed out that the term “Black President” had scarcely ever been taken as a serious term. There’s a reason why that theme has been a staple of black comedians. Recall: Chris Rock and Chris Tucker’s late 90s race to develop their competing scripts about the first black man elected the the presidency. Now add to that Cedric the Entertainer’s skit about a black Chief Executive legalizing weed and putting the national debt on an installment plan. And Richard Pryor’s bit where the presidential news conference dissolves into a literal media fight.
Maybe those sketches belonged in the truths-said-in-jest catalogue, that there was a deep aspiration for such a moment to arrive just not one that could be voiced in earnest for fear sounding ridiculous. Best to get ahead of the cycle and ridicule the idea yourself.
I mention this because the idea that said black president would then immediately nominate a Puerto Riquena to the Supreme Court fits right into the comedic arc. But here we are.
The possibility of a conservative assault on this nomination, though, is no laughing matter. The Democrats have enough votes to confirm on a straight party-line vote, though they probably don’t want to. And it’s doubtful that the GOP would filibuster this nomination — her biography would raise too many charges of hypocrisy about their professed belief in hard work and education for poor minorities living in communities like the South Bronx. The real question is how much ugliness will attend her eventual confirmation. Even now the lines of argument are beginning to take shape. Judge Sotomayor’s comments about her background and ethnicity factoring in her judicial perspective has already bounced around various media outposts in the 55 minutes since she was nominated.
Look to Bill Bennett to paint this as another echo of the 90s identity wars. There will be a pretend question as to whether this is desirable or even permissible on either count. The obvious answer to the absurd question: of course it is.
A few weeks back I posed a facebook question about whether Obama should nominate an openly gay justice to the Supreme Court and the general reply was that he should “pick the best person,” regardless of the demographic slice that person might represent. If only decision-making were that simple. The reality is that we often find ourselves in circumstances where there are dozens of more or less evenly qualified persons vying for a single position. And the reality is also that for the first 176 years of its existence every single member of the Supreme Court was a white male. There was certainly a quality of perspective, if not ideological uniformity, that was associated with these men, at least in the eyes of those who nominated and confirmed them.
There isn’t a one-to-one ratio between identity and ideas but it’s also hard to believe that there isn’t some correlation between that monochromatic court and the hostility toward civil rights, citizenship or even freedom during those years. At the end of the day, there are dozens if not hundreds of people who would make for at least competent Supreme Court justices; this happens to be the only Latina who grew up in the South Bronx. It need not be the only thing we think about when we hear Sotomayor’s name but it is certainly something that matters.