public space – Page 2 – somebody else's paradise

boardwalk

Berna drops by after the spa – “self/body care” as an appropriate good-bye to santa cruz. We decide there are still more santa cruz activities to do. The boardwalk. After giulia convinces us we should do some serious make-up…

The Giant Dipper, one of these old wooden roller coaster from the beginning of the 20th century. We get ourselves in the line, all excited and laughing and talking about roller coaster experiences and all the things that (almost) went wrong. Some of the friends we’re with have grown up with roller coasters – there seem to be quite a bunch of them around – and these people are really dangerous. The ride is all bumpy, our bodies get shaken and pushed back, i can’t even really scream but just hold on to giulia. Berna gets out with her stomach upset, and i have a head-ache. i don’t really see the fun in this.

So we decide to go dancing for a little while before Berna needs to go home and pack. The Dakota, the lesbian bar on Pacific Avenue. We need to explain again that giulia who arrived here recently and is not used to carry an ID around, forgot her ID at home. A (true) story which got us into the Red Room a bit earlier. Here we get a rude no for an answer. i argue that it was berna’s last night in Santa Cruz, after having lived here for 4 years, and that she just wanted to dance for half an hour in a place she used to come regularly. and that giulia really didn’t know. The doorwoman begins to resemble an aggressive pitt-bull. By the time i’m done explaining those two little facts, she insists we should dissappear from her sight immediately.

i go into a super calm (provokingly calm, according to giu) yet persistent drive. she looks as if she’s ready to explode: her tall body is one tight muscle of rage, and she’sÂ leaning over me till her nose almost touches my forehead. she searching for that one spark to ignate the fight, the small movement or gesture that would give her an opportunity to beat me up. that’s how it looked from the outside, according to the friends, who basically wented to pull me away. but i felt how my body wanted to stay, keeping the ground, feeling untouchable, protected by layer of absolute zen. “surely there must be a solution. it’s our friend’s last night in this country, she’s been living here for four years, she regularly came to this place.” by then the woman is screaming (her breath in my face). she points to a sign at the door that said one had to be over 21 years old to enter. only with a valid ID. here i made a little mistake, in an attempt to create some complicity. “oh common on, that’s just a stupid american law.” guess what… the woman actually assumed the identity. “oh yes, well you know what, i’m just a stupid american.” (in a moment of instant wiseness, nobody of us commented.)

the woman was on such a power trip. she yelled that we should get out of the sidewalk in front of the Dakota. definately a sensitive point to me (as sometimes sidewalks overhere suddenly stop because the piece of land where they obviously should continue is private property) so i couldn’t help insisting that this was a public space and that we were perfectly allowed to be in a public space as we were doing no harm. meanwhile giulia had found her international student card, but of course the bouncer wasn’t into letting us in anymore. her power trip got out of control “I’m the boss and i decide who gets in,” she yelled. and then she had it – she couldn’t make the tension into a fight, so she called the cops.
a moment of discussing among ourselves what we wanted to do. it was berna’s very last night in town and we decided we didn’t really want to spend that time with the cops and the bouncer with a passion for power and violence. so we walked away, crossing the cops on their way to the Dakota. as we are talking, bettina told the story of how her German driver’s licence was not accepted at the Dakota on a number of occassions. the more we got our heads around it, the more it seemed to us that this was an immigration issue. which identification documents are accepted and which ones aren’t. by the end of our self-empowering brainstorm, we actually feel like discussing the matter with the cops, so we turn back, crossing the cops again, as they drive away from the Dakota. oh well, better to use the time to kiss and hug and say good-bye…

on the hill

The desolation of the place. UCSC campus in summer is the next bit of evidence i have that these American-style campuses don’t work. Okay, i admit, there’s a bit of dishonestly in that claim: UCSC doesn’t count as a typical american campus. As a result of the experiment in decentralisation – i.e. the project of dropping a number of buildings randomly in a forest, in the name of having self-managed small communities (in colleges) – every attempt at creating some kind of beating heart is even more of a serious struggle against social geography than on the classic campus model with a central square.

Please don’t get me wrong, you know that self-managed small communities are not part of things i consider problematic. The problem is that, without any real decentralisation of power – especially in the case of the University of California system, where decisions affecting the SC uni are not only taken by the governing board on campus but also between the different UC governing bodies – this decentralisation of the students smells like nasty fragmentation. Then there’s the physical geography: the fact that the campus is on the top of a hill outside of town in a way that does not challenge the expression “ivory tower” further than the adjective used.

Anyway, we went to campus to today. We worked a bit, so we’re not complaining, and we ended up doing other beautiful things – there is no doubt that this is a beautiful place. But it continues to alienate me with respect to my work, it is as if i need to find all the force and courage to work despite the environment, when i know of so many environments that push me to sit down at a corner of a table or a sofa in midst of life’s joys and tragedies and business. You see, when Virginia Woolf wrote “think we must”, she was thinking of all of these places daily life takes us through, busses and streets and… But not easy to catch a bus here these days.

***

Dinner at our house. We have a new house-mate who will stay with us for a little while, Mihui, a high school friend of Cynthia’s. She’s taking refuge from the east coast; came to California, where she also grew up, to recover. Undergraduate at Harvard (bad start), law school at Columbia (got worse), working for a judge in court (Boston, New Orleans) (it gets tougher) and working for a big law firm (L.A., New York) (total burn-out). The remedy: hanging out in the house, having tea and conversation sessions with all of us, reading bad chick lit (like Mr. Maybe) with covers she tries to hide when she’s reading in public spaces, and feeding us court stories which leave us with stomach pains from laughing laughing laughing…

space

Pacific Avenue, the centre of down town Santa Cruz life, on a Monday afternoon. I’m a bit dizzy after doing some shops to find a good present for my sister’s birthday (and i found something that made me smile and think of her, but of course i can’t disclose here what that is…), and i’m a bit puzzled how i managed to get shopping dizziness in a place with one street of shops. As i’m walking direction post office i notice a typical white surfer guy walking towards me from the opposite direction. I shift my imaginary walking path ever so slightly to the left, in order to pass by each other smoothly. Just before we pass each other, the guy stretches out his right arm, in a kind of waking-up-in-the-morning-and-needing-to-stretch-out motion. His elbow hits hard against my head.

I freeze on the spot; knocked-out not so much by the pain as by the bafflement. I turn around and mumble hey or wait or something. He turns around and says “You’d better watch out” and is ready to continue his stroll direction beach. I gather my breath and continue: “Wait, i’m sorry, but that really hurts, you…” Meanwhile he takes off his sun glasses and gives me one of these “oh really…” looks and interrupts: “So?!? You’d better watch out.” At this point i get angry. I move in his direction and start shouting: “No. You’d better watch out.” He backs off, puts his sunglasses on and continues walking down Pacific, dismissing the whole thing with a gesture of his arm. People around us continue to stroll in a laid-back californian style, and i walk away in anger. Sigh, here we are, once again angry at this place. Thinking about things Berna once said about the way in which people take up (public) space here, unhindered by any notion that you might be sharing that space with others. When i get home Giulia cracks up laughing about my angry self (and reminds me, in between the laughter, that these things also tend to happen in other parts of the world. hm, i have a vague memory of that, yes indeed, but i also have memories of places i’ve lived where, the moment you start screaming, other people intervene.) And MarÃa tells stories from her women’s self-defense course at the Nelson Centre; some of the stories are precisely about this kind of male arrogant taking up of all the space. We actually conclude that the guy must have been the same as in one of MarÃa’s stories. And now that i know how he looks like, i’m determined to beat him up next time i cross his path. There you go, if i became a meat eater in Santa Cruz, i could also become a guerilla fighter, beating up the bad guys. They better watch out.

Before coming home i freeze a second time, as i see the headlines of the local newspapers. During the weekend the chancellor of UCSC killed herself by throwing herself from the 42nd floor in San Francisco.

permit

I had an appointment this morning at the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles), and i arrived well in time to find that the appointment implied having a lady point me (and all the others, whether they had made an appointment or not) to queue up in “line A”. That’s where i got a California Driver’s Examination – a different one than the previous one which i didn’t pass. Thirty-six multiple choice questions throughout which i had to demonstrate my knowledge of the California driver’s code. In the special designated examination area, hardly separated from the hall full of people doing their DMV business, i answered all the questions. After struggling over some (like the legal blood alcohol concentration when you’re under 21, euh, wait a minute, i thought drinking under 21 wasn’t allowed in the first place… i got it wrong, guessed 0.1% and it seems to be 0.5%), i returned to the line and eventually gave the sheet of paper to another lady who corrected it on the spot (oh, i got nervous at that point…)

“You’ve passed.” Only two errors. “So when do you want an appointment for the behind-the-wheel driving test?” Very good question indeed. The thing is, there’s quite a stage in between for me, as i have never driven in my life. “Well, i’ll first need to learn how to drive.” “Sure,” she said without lifting her head from the stamps she was frantically putting on papers all over the place, “just call when you want to make an appointment.” She wasn’t really into her job as the guy was the other time – i could actually imagine him saying: “Oh just make that appointment and try, you might get lucky.”

In any case, sometime mid-morning i found myself on Capitola Road, waiting for a bus to take me home, and with a driving instruction permit in my bag. Was hard to believe, alienating and exciting at once (is this actually me, on the road to driving…). Standing at the bus stop, i was thinking about the whole DMV experience. There had been far more people than last time, the DMV was crowded on a this Monday morning. And i got the impression of seeing quite a cross-section of the population around here, including the obligatory weird figures like the guy with some kind of Elvis Presley shirt, greasy grey hair tightly combed back, super heavy grey eye-brows and… two small american flags sticking out on each side of his heavy glasses. In the absence of many things public, like spaces and services and not to forget bureaucracy and waiting lines, i started thinking… but this it! This is the equivalent of a more or less central public service, much more than the Social Security office on Walnut Street. Yes, this is the closest it gets to la Maison Communale de Saint-Gilles around here. Starting to think of it: a driver’s license counts very much as the most wide-spread identification. And in the (rare, somewhat pathetic) case that you don’t have one, the DMV is also the instance that issues identity cards – you know, just like a driver’s licence but it doesn’t allow you to drive. And the DMV is also a central place where you can register to vote – you know, one of these citizenship things. And you have to wait in lines – that must mean it’s a communist, i mean state thing. Not to mention the financial accessibility of it – you can get the license for half of the amount of a monthy bus pass, and in case you fail the first behind-the-wheel driving test, it costs 5 bucks for every extry try). There i stood on the busy Capitola Road, alone at the bus stop, with a car or two slowing down and offering a ride (but i wanted to be in a bus so much), thinking about the incredible extent to which citizenship is tied up with motor vehicles in this place…

Oh, let me share some of the things i learned while studying the local driver’s code with you:

Do not shoot firearms on a highway or at traffic signs.
(under “Additional Driving Rules – Things you must not do”, p. 33)

Try chewing gum or singing along with the radio.
(under “Health and Safety – Alertness”, p. 76)

And one of my exam questions. What interrupts a smooth flow of traffic?
Among the three possible answers: c) Leaving your car at home and taking public transport.

reclaim the streets… well, trying.

saturday night on Pacific Avenue means it gets crowded and restaurants are full. we put our names on the waiting list of the Thai place, and stroll down the street as we’re waiting for our table. that’s how we stroll into a Santa Cruz Reclaim the Streets March. from Pacific Avenue to the clock tower at the intersection with Mission Street, which is where it really becomes apparent how the carpeople don’t like their traffic flow to be disturbed. but wait a minute, it is actually not very much disturbed. the crowd gathers around the clock-tower, where people dance to the sound system or burn an american flag on the police car. admittingly both things can be very fun, and in this era of war burning the U.S. flag provides a nice spectacle, and then what do you do saturday night in a small town, but frankly the sense escapes me a bit. is this a reclaiming the streets action or a playing war with the cops game? sure, the small thrills of annoying the cops are a familiar and well-rehearsed part of leftie culture. but i’m not impressed, especially not in this place where i’m mostly angry at the lack of political awareness and mobilization.

so i begin dancing in the middle of what is basically Highway One intersecting with down town Santa Cruz’ main street. a bit scary, but slowly (believe me, it seemed very slowly from the middle of the intersection location…) some people join the dance. but cars are aggressive and make people very reluctant to actually occupy the intersection. i’m getting really annoyed with the honking SUV’s, don’t feel like dancing anymore, and just sit down in the middle of the intersection. this attracks a small crowd around me, taking pictures and doing interviews. and women from the Dyke March who very friendly, addressing me as “sister”, ask me to leave the intersection.

the thing is… two marches kind of bumped into each other in Pacific Avenue and decided to join hands and march together for, well, everything. sexual diversity and taking back the streets. but the Dyke March had a permit, which Reclaim the Streets didn’t seek or have. so at the moment of arriving at the clock tower, the Dyke March people needed to have the small crowd off the intersection as fast as they could, while that wasn’t really part of the RTS people’s idea, but then again their ideas weren’t well articulated in any case. (check out the indymedia audio reportage if you want a sense of how the small bunch of people came on the street to have some fun, without much of a vision.)

i ended up doing this spontaneous one woman’s action that didn’t connect well with neither RTS nor the Dyke march (and in case you’re wondering, of course i left the intersection when my sisters of the Dyke March asked me to do so.), and that i didn’t manage to explain very well cause honestly i was a bit shaky in the middle of the intersection with the angry cars around me. but for some reason it did make me feel better, ventilate a bit of the anger against this place. so then we strolled back on Pacific Avenue and had nice Thai food. so far our saturday night adventures in small town Santa Cruz.

read and listen more on indymedia bayarea.

spiritual activism (day two) at the white house

The appointments with “our” political representatives this morning. I chose to skip them – part of me is very tempted to do participant observartion: join other people going to talk to their Californian congressmen and women, and even intervene in the conversations if i feel like it, who knows. But another part of me finds it too much, and then the jet-lag that i forgot to schedule does try to kick in. I sleep a bit longer and spend a morning walking through “political Washington”.

I get there by bus, from Columbia Heights where Jayne’s appartment is. As we’re approaching the city, it’s strikes me that i’m the only white body on this bus, and that many of the black and latino bodies are marked by a lack of various kinds of resources. In the middle of wide avenues and imposing government buildings, and suits, ties and briefcases walking briskly and purposefully, this slow bus seems somehow out of place. The people whose posture reflects a sense of entitlement to these streets and the whole world it invokes, are not on this bus. I get myself to Capitola Hill, and do the long walk to the White House. War in my head: images of war and poverty keep flashing before my eyes. It’s infuriating. The more i look around, the more men and women in suits and ties seem to transform into small and not so small agents of this giant war machine. Am i in the headquaters now? Can’t help thinking: this place should be bombed, should be flattened with the ground.

Commotion: police cars with sirenes racing in, out of nowhere, from every direction. They surround a truck with latino road workers. It seems that the truck was taking taking a road that it shouldn’t take, in order to get to the road works. The mistake is cleared out in a couple of minutes, the truck turns around, the police cars disappear as fast as they had come. Five minutes later there’s no trace of the commotion. A sense of heavy yet rather invisible surveillance remains. This place should be bombed, but when the workers’ shift is over. (is there ever such a moment, in between janitors and the construction workers?).

LaFayette Park, opposite the White House. the pray-inn, called for by the Network for Spiritual Progressives has just started. Cindy Sheehan is speaking. Then there’s Code Pink, who were gathered in Washington after their recent Mother’s Day vigil. I recognize a old grey-haired woman whom i saw in the Greyhound Station in Oakland in the beginning of this month. As she squatted on the floor besides her backpack with a tag with a Washington, carrying a peace sign and wearing quite some pink, i remembered thinking that i could guess where she was heading. Many people speak and propose prayers, some sing. Sahar, guess who was also in the crowd, the iranian guy who spoke at the NYC demo against the war in Iraq. “Long live Venezuela. Friendship with Iran”, is the message that he carries around.

At the end of the pray-inn we march to the white house. In the midst of all the imposing buildings in this neighborhood, this white house is deceptively small. Almost a bit insignificant, as if it wants to convey the message: don’t pay too much attention to me, i’m just another rich guy’s house. It also seems deceptively accessible. But as we get closer, the “police do not cross” yellow tape all around the gates becomes visible. We march with many papers, which are spread out all over the marchers. These are the names of people who signed the petition to stop the war on the Iran before it starts. as we approach the gates, people lift their arms and hold the papers in the air. Don’t Iraq Iran, is one of the slogans.

Disappointment: we are not allowed to officially hand the petition to White House. In the end people throw the papers over the gates. Some people get angry. Others get put off by the anger. They get into discussions with each other (why do you need to get angry? etc.). I get put off by the discussions, which don’t seem to lead anywhere, and which add nothing to the discussions on different tactics within a demonstration that are familiar to me. I actually get a bit upset with those who don’t like the anger – i mean, this is one of the most peaceful marches i’ve ever been to (and i’m sure there’s a reason for that, i’m sure the police would intervene massively and quickly if someone stepped over some kind of line), and the slight bit of anger against the refusal of an official reception of the petitions does not seem out of place at all. I have respect for the radical non-violence stance of some of the marchers, for whom shouting was inacceptable, only i felt that their annoying questions (do you really need to shout?) were not only counterproductive but also reflected a lack of creativity. If they wanted a different kind of energy, this was not the way; they could have tried to sing a song or something. (Coming to think of it, one of the songs was All we are saying, is give peace a chance… equally a bit tiresome…)

I turn away from the crowd and focus a bit on the police. They must be slightly amused by the discussions among the marchers, although their masked expressions don’t show it. They are filming all of us. I’m starting to feel in the mood for a little conversation. I turn to the cop near me, whom i see very well is not the leader of the gang, and ask him very sweetly:
– Excuse me Sir, can i just ask you for some information?
He gives me a friendly nod.
– The thing is, i’m a relatively new resident of this country (okay, a little lie, but it sounds better than “i’m an alien non-resident”) and i don’t really understand the situation. Could you explain me what exactely is the problem with giving the citizen’s petition to someone who can bring it to the White House?
Very friendly he explains me that it would be better if i’d spoke to his superior, to which he leads me. I repeat the thing, adding this time:
– Cause you see, i would have thought that this would have been a civic right, in line with the first ammendment?
The superior (y’r typical ugly cop):
– Well, it’s their right to accept it or not, and they won’t accept. You see, that’s your right; if somebody comes to your house, you can choose if you receive them or not.

I’m baffled by the comparison of the White House to any private house. I think back of cop-conversations when our actions were stopped around the parliament and government buildings in Brussels. Their the argument would be that we were disturbing a “neutral” zone with “progaganda”. Here the argument is connected to the sanctity of private space?
– But Sir, surely that is not the same thing. The White House is not a private house, it has a political function.
He considers for a moment, and responds:
– Okay, yes, it’s something political [sic!]. But you know, there’s always a security issue.

Ah, the saving grace of security. From the private straight to security, pushing out the public-political.
– A security issue for papers? We just want to hand over some papers?
– Oh yes, papers can be very dangerous.

In the meantime we’re surrounded by a bunch of marchers. Frankly everybody looked rather baffled. The exchange should have been filmed – the kind police officer in front of the White House saying that papers can be dangerous was quite a powerful image. (The conversation was in fact filmed, but by the police). As we continued talking among us, i understood that i didn’t quite get the thing as it was intended. In my imaginary, it was all about non-democratic regimes declaring the written word to be dangerous. My co-marchers assured me that the cop was invoking the threat of anthrax.

The march continues to Rumsfeld’s house, but the participants to the Spiritual Activism conference are asked to convene at the All Souls Church for the rest of the afternoon and evening program. As we move in small groups, i pick up more and more conversations of people who didn’t like the energy at the march, how some people were aggressive, etc. I shut up, don’t feel like arguing, pretend i don’t know these people. Then a woman addresses me and when she finds out that i’m from Europe, she asks why the EU did nothing to stop the war in Iraq. I suddenly feel like arguing – Oh, who exactely took the initiative for this war? And where exactely were all the millions and millions of people in the street in this country, as happened in many cities all over the world? (i mean, extrapolating the number of people that got together in Rome on the 15th of Feb in 2003, that would translate in about 15 million people on the streets of NYC or Washington.) And more than that, do you think those massive marches would have happened if people couldn’t overcome the “i don’t like the atmosphere of this march” feeling and got stuck arguing about “why are you shouting?”. Plus the way in which the “punishment” of warmongers like Blair and Aznar provokes a certain kind of understanding among many people throughout europe, although they don’t agree with the tactics of the violent attacks, which destablizes or interrupts a hegemonic use of “the events” like that of 9/11 in the US, for more war. I’m all about criticizing and organizing against european goverments and policies, but what about getting a bit more active within the belly of the beast instead of hoping for someone or something “from outside” to stop the US? (oh friends, i already told you, this spiritual activism conference really doesn’t bring out the best in me…) The woman politely turns away and continued chatting with the other people, pretending not to know me.

spiritual activism (day one)

A pleasant early morning walk from Jayne’s house to the All Souls Church (a Unitarian Church), which hosts the conference. More than 1000 people are gathered in the building, it’s an impressive thing to bring so much people together for four intensive days of seeking to elaborate a new and different agenda. I’m eager to understand the stakes of this project, and determined to find out how and where it might or might not work, and what is to be learned from it, either way. In this vein, and since this move is about articulating progressive politics and religion/spirituality, i want to take the spiritual side very seriously, and not merely assess it in terms of how it enables or hinders progressive politics, which would take an existing notion of progressive politics as the standard. But how to “assess” the spiritual dimension of the projects, what are the points of reference in this respect? i’m not sure, i’ll have to figure that out as i go along. But the obvious place to start is myself, and allow to feel and articulate what the spirituality that is invoked and practised here does to me.

A folder with the program and various kinds of background information – as it already was clear before coming, this conference is packed. Packed with speakers, activities, moments of prayer and meditation… We’ll be sitting in this church a lot, as we start at 9 am and go on till 11.00 pm. Tough on the body, and yet the set-up differs from an academic conference with a similar crazy schedule. Collective moments of singing, dancing, turning to your neighbor to have a conversation about what one just heard from the pulpit (of course, after all, we’re in a church). Hm, some of this is hard on the soul for me… i love singing. But the conversations with the neighbor are too soon, too forced for me. The sociability of such a large gathering is already demanding enough, i don’t feel i can do the “now take 10 minutes to discuss this with your neighbor” pedagogy from day one… The first people i feel obliged to talk to share the mixed feelings, as a couple. He is very enthousiastic to engage, while she makes it clear that she doesn’t want to talk to anyone. Yet she’s following the conversation i have with her man, and gets really interested in what i do, and clearly wants to know more (she does radio, her man tells me, and these are the kinds of subjects she likes to make radio shows about), and finds herself oscilliating between an engaged conversation or total withdrawal from the whole scene all together. A plenary session later, she has left the place. We should have met somewhere outside all of this. A reoccuring feeling throughout the day – somehow the social set-up it too much for me.

The opening talk by Sister Joan Chittister impresses, Peter Gabel’s talk doesn’t. Rabbi Michael Lerner talks about the inspiration for The Left Hand of God, elaborating on his talk in Santa Cruz. See, this is the part i appreciate a lot: re-thinking the world from the values of love, care, awe, radical amazement, generosity, gratitude and ecological responsibility (which, for people who have gathered here, are religious and/or spiritual values). A new bottom-line, as this is called here. Then comes the slippery, risky, but also exciting, part that is affirmed throughout the three talks: the need to redo the public-private distinction. How do public-private relate in a world that is fiercely private (rampant individualism) and dangerously public at the same time? (Sister Joan Chittister) We need to learn how to speak for an agenda not in the bureaucratic language of “single payer health care” but in terms of values, of why social security matters for us (Peter Gabel). By the way: i won’t be writing up my notes of all the talks on this blog, i’ll do that in a kind of more comprehensive report – get in touch if you want to have a look at that.

This desire to transform existing political culture is accompanied by two tactical moves. Splitting up in small groups of about 10 to 15 people, which are organized according to where one lives. The idea is to strenghten local networks and initiatives, maybe even local chapters- in other words, movement building. There are a couple of Bay Area groups, mine is faciliated by Irene from Beyt Tikkun. Together with her, i’m about the youngest in our group, which confirms an impression i had about age when entering the church this morning (Serious Problem #1). There’s one black woman in our group, which confirms an impression about ethnicity (Serious Problem #2). Hm, this doesn’t look good for a new movement…

The second tactic is that of influencing or impacting political bodies here in Washington DC, where the conference intentionally takes place. The Friends Committee on National Legislation, a quaker lobby for peace, holds an informative session and hands out guidelines on the process of contacting and talking to one’s political representatives. Hm, i’ll have to get my head around these particular kind of “civic lobby politics”.

The afternoon is all about preparation for meetings with senators and congressmen and -women tomorrow. Hundreds of appointments have been made beforehand, with the idea that individuals or small groups of people go and see their representatives and speak about either one or more issues that are elaborated in what this Network for Spiritual Progressives calls a new Spiritual Convenant with America (in which a new bottom-line is articulated for a number of important axes of public policy). I go to the International Relations workshop, facilitated by Rabbi Lerner. What would a new bottom-line in the field of international relations imply? Lerner proposes to start with a commitment of spending 5% of the GDP to development aid – a global Marshall plan to eliminate global poverty. The rationale: a redistribution point of departure will foster better international relations and security (“this would do far more for “homeland security” than anything else”.) Something dodgy about how that rationale posits the relationship between the economic and the political, but of course economic redistribution on a global scale is a good thing. The critical questions follow soon: what about problematic regimes? We wouldn’t want to be giving those amounts of money to regimes that support terrorism… A solution in by-passing such regimes and giving the money to NGOs (oh, more dodginess, the question of public accountability of NGOs…) and a strong affirmation that measures like these will precisely take the grounds for terrorism away. We need to make the political representatives understand that the well-being of America depends on the well-being of everybody on the planet.

Then i participate in a workshop about the new immigrant struggles, by Norma Chavez who works for JOB (Justice Overcoming Boundaries) in San Diego. The emphasis is on the Christian dimension of the recent mobilisations. Norma wants us to understand how in many places the organization of the marches was led by Catholic organisations, and think more about how these kinds of politics and spirituality could enforce each other. In fact, some participants to the workshop literally have a Bible in their hand to argue for open borders and against the illegalisation of people (Exodus and Leviticus are helpful here). She offers an overview of different laws and law proposals in the process of making people illegal, with HR 4437 as a landmark. She also vents some criticism against Rabbi Lerner, who consistently emphasizes the need for an integrated vision and warns against the trading in and negotiating over agenda points here and there, which culminated in “Screw realism!” at the end of his morning talk. Norma wanted to make it very clear that the different law proposals currently discussed would each have different material impacts on people’s lives, and that this is reason enough to advocate for the least bad proposal, even if it clearly does not express our ideal vision…

We are encouraged not to eat alone in the evening. Oh god, i was so ready to go and eat alone. But then i see the guy whom i bumped into when he was looking for the workshop on the clash of civilisations. I was curious to know how it went, and he wanted to know about the immigration one, so we decide to eat together. Before we know it some other people stick to us. Did i already mention that the kind of sociability the conference sought to foster was affecting my ability to be social in a nasty way? Moreover, some of the “feel good” spirituality had exactely the opposite effect on me.

My main dinner partner, i’ll call him S., is really interesting. He calls himself a spiritual anarchist. He came to the UK as a political refugee from South-Africa during the 1980s, and pursued his studies in Oxford, where he developed a brilliantly sharp insight in the old boys network and the workings of power especially in relation to racism. He’s a professor in sociology now, still in the UK. I fall for his language and accent, British with a postcolonial touch and a very fine sense of irony. His account of the clash of civilisations workshop is most entertaining. “Now Sarah (hm, the first one at the conference who doesn’t americanise my name…), do you know what i mean when i say that the session boiled down to a white liberal chap instructing his eager audience that islam is all about love and peace?” Oh yes. “So tell me, how useful would you say that it?” We could have talked for hours, not only about luke-warm and lousy responses to the clash of civilisations discourse, but very soon we talk about the ANC and the anti-apartheid struggle, how power and spirituality worked there, about anarchism, etc.

But that was without taking our other dinner guests into account. The Presbyterian minister, a rather young guy. On the right end of the religious spectre at a gathering of spiritual progressives – part of the people who, once they had identified to which religious tendency they belonged to, are met with surprise and gratitude, “Thank you for your presence here.” At some point the pastor asks me where i live. His eyes start to shine when i say Santa Cruz, “What a great place, i’ve lived there for a while, you must love it.” Ay ay ay, wrong move. “No, i basically can’t stand it.” He’s taken aback, and wants me to explain. When i describe the sense of isolation (politically, culturally,…) he considers for a moment and kind of gives in. Yes, he could see that, indeed, “it’s a bit away from the world.” But that, he continues on a more theological note, has it’s value, “to be away from worldly things.” He nods complacently. “And surfing,” he adds, “there is something very spiritual about surfing”. Sure, i nod (my turn to make a complacent move), “but before you know it there’s more blood on your hands than you can stand or deal with. You see, that bloody war in Iraq is not going to stop by itself while one is surfing in Santa Cruz.” Oh friends, what can i say, a spiritual activism conference doesn’t really bring out my better self, does it… But i had to come up with something, no?, here’s a theologically conservative pastor (i’m sure if we’d started talking about sexuality or reproductive rights i would not have liked at all what he was saying) giving me a lesson of the value of staying away from wordly things which is subsequently connected with an imaginary of a wonderful life (and waves) in Santa Cruz. And of course i was surrounded by people very well-trained in being patient and practising forgiveness and love so i was safe. To push it a bit further, and so we end up digging a bit in this seperation between “wordly and spiritual realms”, as it is framed in theological debates. And i take the opportunity to check out some of the hypotheses of my intellectual work, in which i take fundamentalism to be a signal of trespassing the established and “proper” demarcations between religiosity/spirituality and politics with the Presbyterian surfing dude. He tells me his church has been concerned by such “fundamentalist” (but more accurately, Evangelical) tendencies that are formulating their politics on the basis of their faith, cause though his church might share very similar theological concerns, it doesn’t like the politics these new evangelicals come up with. This is why his church is, carefully, tentively, checking out the progressive religious lines – in first instance not for their beliefs, but for their politics.

Then there are two women doing and MA in women’s pastoral work. They want to know all about my doctoral research. So what do “they” want, they kept on asking, about Muslim women. Remember that these are believing Christian ladies – their point was not one about incomprehension of why women would be believing – and slowly it’s starting to get on my nerves. S. drops a point about western and eurocentric bias within feminism and i have first have to turn to him and make the point that it all depends on which feminism and which concrete groups you’re talking about (and before i can finish the examples he’s nodding and smiling and i catch the lights in his eyes – he just wanted me to say all this…). By then the words conflict and antagonism were flying in the air and the two women were shaking their heads and saying that it was such a pitty that there were so much conflicts within the women’s movement, that we should stand strong together. As i still wanted to make the point of the bias in the things they were saying, i couldn’t help saying: “No, there are not enough conflicts! We need more conflicts that acknowlegde and work through the antagonisms which are there, now that would make our movements stronger.” By then the ladies look slighty upset and S. is holding his belly which is shaking with laughter.

At some point during the evening session, which promises to go till 11pm, i leave. I want to walk home, but people around me say i really shouldn’t. Since i’ve just arrived in this city, i don’t feel i can assess the situation very well. My intuition says it’s okay, but then all these people say no. I keep on asking the next person, and everybody says no. Whatever, i accept the lift that i’m offered. When i get back home, Jayne says it is not supposed to be a very safe neighboorhood, but that she regularly walks home at night and that it’s fine. Oh all those god-trusting people getting worked out over security…

I notice that Jayne usually goes to sleep earlier, and i’m pretty tired as well (i forgot i’m supposed to have a jetlag while booking my ticket, and the program doesn’t really allow for one), but there are still many things we need to talk about. She lived three years in Kirgistan, which i want to hear all about, like she wants to know about Tatarstan. She tells me sweet stories about being at home and happy there, feelings which got interrupted by a need to return to the USA as she realized more and more that this is the place where she can make more of a difference. And we talk about lobby politics. At first she wants me to explain my preocupations and even why i use the term “lobbying” for the civic thing of concerned citizens meeting with their political representatives. While i’m just trying to figure out whether these are dots that can be connected through a continuum. She kind of insists on a difference between citizens (civic activism) and NGOs (advocacy) lobbying on the one hand, and corporate and industrial lobby politics on the other. But our conversation leads us to into one grey zone after the other.

Jayne works in a NGO focused on small farmers in the US. Among their activities: to strengthen support networks among small farmers, and to create conditions for transnational solidarity. One of the things they do, in search of countering global neo-liberal ideologies and tactics, is to invite famer activists from Africa to tour among small farmer communities in the US and start conversations about common grounds and strategies. This is the part of the work she likes. But at the moment their energies are consumed by the new Farm Bill, which is supposed to be renewed and voted next year. Trying to raise awareness among political representatives, advocacy and the spiral of lobby politics. You know that the big agro-business are doing it, Jayne says, so you can’t afford not to try to get your vision and points on the agenda “in Washington”. A widely spread rationale, hence the crazy amount of jobs opportunities in Washington, that are, in some way or another, about influencing political agendas. Sounds a tiny bit like Brussels. But you see, i tell her, in Brussels among certain political networks and circles, there’s a strong idea that politics shouldn’t be like this, shaped on the “lobbying” model… Well, here it’s an established and widely accepted way of how the political terrain operates (Jayne studied government studies and international relations, in some Boston school focused on political science and goverment), she tells me, and putting yourself outside of it means cutting yourself off from some of the available power and resources to change things. Mind you, meanwhile she’s looking for a new job and would so much rather be working on the farm…

arriving in washington

It’s very late when i arrive in Washington DC, at the Dulles International airport. Jayne, my host, gave me very precise instructions to get to her place with public transport, always a bit exciting when arriving at night in a city one does not know. The first part of the trip takes place on a bus, where i study the public transport map. Huntington-Pentagon. Wow. i mean, the link is tangible in many respects, but to see it presente in such a direct line… my trip continues through the metro network. The style of the subway strikes me: grey-brownish concrete, uniform, minimalist. Must have been built sometime in the 1970s or perhaps the 1980s. Seems like one giant nuclear shelter to me. Feels like we’re back in the Cold war. When i surface at one of the stations, i find myself in what seems a nice neighborhood (with a rather familiar kind of urbanity, wasn’t sure toÂ expect this or not) with the friendly face of Jayne welcoming me.

mother’s day

A good chunk of public life in this place is concentrated on Pacific Ave, the one main street in town where most of the shops, a number of restaurants and bars and two cinema theatres are located. Pacific Ave on a Friday night is to be avoided, if one doesn’t appreciate a kind of compulsory small town “it’s time to go out and have fun” atmosphere. Too familiar from those American movies and series that actually make you happy you didn’t have to grow up in that place (oh mama, now i want to know why precisely you decided we shouldn’t grow up in the U.S. and move back to Belgium? will you tell me?), and too familiar from growing up in the village, where that kind of Friday and Saturday night entertainment was definately greatly aspired by the bored-to-death teenagers, an aspiration which couldn’t be met in our small village (with its public space limited to a grocery shop, a bakery, a school, a church and a cafe, and the youth movement house) and which took the kids to neighboring bigger villages.

Do you remember that you didn’t let me go out till i was 16, mama? And of course i wanted to, “going out” (from that place) sounded so promising. Did i ever tell you the truth about that first time that i could go? That i found it so stupid, so senseless, such a waste of time. That, if anything, this rural discotheque was village stupidity and boredom larger than live; it was by no means going out, rather falling deeper into it. Of course, i couldn’t tell you then, after having put up the “why can everybody go except me” routine for a while, but i stopped wanting this “going out”. Would only be satisfied with a “going (getting) out” of a more radical kind (remember the episode when i desperatedly wanted to go to school in New York…) Anyway, my first friday evening downtown in Santa Cruz, back in February – while i was walking home between the loud, drunk, behaving stupidly and vomitting teenagers (and students no doubt, they’re beginning to look so young…) – represented one of the moments of lucidity in which i knew i couldn’t stay in this place. Yesterday evening i walked on Pacific Ave again, on my way to Berna and Feza. It was early in the evening, just after dusk. I had a six-pack of Corona and a big bag of blue tortilla chips in my hands (an evening of movies!) and was addressed pretty much the whole way down the street, by underage kids and the homeless, begging for one of those bottles of beer…

We started off watching a Belgian movie, Everybody’s Famous! I hadn’t seen it before, didn’t think it was a good movie, but Berna and Feza had heard good things about it. And it was sweet, and interesting from a Marxist analysis, in which we indulged ourselves – its represenations of a post-industrial context and of class (heavily marked by differences in a spectre of Flemish and Dutch accents, which totally got lost in the subtitles of course…). And one scene made us laugh so much we almost rolled out of the sofa… on the basis of an eye-witness of one of the kidnappers of the famous singer the police makes a profile that is subsequently distributed, and according to the profile the kidnapper (a white guy with blond hair and blue eyes…) is… Moroccan. Before watching the movie we had a whole session on the recent “events” in Belgium of course – the stabbing to death of the 17 year old Joe Van Holsbeek some weeks ago which initiated an intense scapegoating of the Moroccan community until (and still after…) it seemed that the perpetrators were Polish kids, and the rambo-style action of taking a gun to the streets and killing non-white people (women and a girl basically) by an 18 year old white boy (who happens to be the nephew of a Vlaams Belang politician) in Antwerpen and the current discussion whether this is a racism or an disturbed kid (who actually declared that his mission was to kill as many non-white people as possible, but you see, he might be so disturbed that he is deluded and even if he proudly claims to be a racist, it might actually not be appropriate to speak of racism in this case, cause he’s a disturbed individual and Belgium is not really a racist society and the earth is oh-so-flat – do you understand? But i shouldn’t get on my horse now, saving the AAA (Anger, Analysis and kicking-Ass) for the Flanders blog that Nadia and me are starting soon… What was i writing about? Movies (and i had brought Yes; friends, i really want you to see Yes!) and companionship and sleeping over and making pancakes in the morning. And so today I was walking down Pacific Ave again on my way home, and all of sudden i saw and heard this bunch of old grey ladies who squatted – with a little table and banners and their somewhat fragile but impressive selves – in the middle of Saturday afternoon (shopping) business.

Armed with aprons and kitchen utensils, they were singing popular and American folk songs with modified lyrics – one of songs they had aptly entitled “The Raging Grannies”. This one i heard a couple of times (to the tune of Country Roads):Bring ‘m home, bring ‘m home
To the place, where they belong
There are children, stop the killing,
Bring ‘m home

They were from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; they even looked as if they had been part of the league since it was founded. More than that, they looked determined, “still standing”, and not planning to go anywhere else soon. Their leaflet reads: “It was the wisdom of our founding foremothers in 1915 that peace is rooted not only in treaties between great powers or even in ending the arms race. They understood that peace can only flourish when it is planted in the soil of justice, freedom, non-violence, opportunity and equality for all.” They were collecting signatures against the war in Iraq to send to senators (“Can i sign, i’m not a U.S. citizen?” “Of course, my dear, they won’t really know, will they?” she giggled. “The more post-cards we send to our senators, the more pressure they will feel.”) And they were giving out cards for Mother’s Day (“What about giving this card to your mother instead of shopping for a present?”). I’m sometimes troubled by peace-activism so rooted in a certain notion of motherhood. But not on Mother’s Day, and not here in Santa Cruz where i wished more of the students would continue to struggle and organize against the war their country is waging. And i wish i could give you the card the raging grannies made, mama, but it won’t cross the atlantic in time. So i copy the text below for you. En ik wens je fijne moederdag, mama, van ver weg, maar toch ook weer dichtbij! dikke kus, sarah

——————————————————————–
Mother’s Day began with a woman named Julia Ward Howe,
who nursed the wounded during the American Cival War. In 1870
she started a crusade to institute a Mother’s Day as a Day for Peace.
Here is her Mother’s Day proclamation:

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have
hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of tears!

Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by
irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us,
reaking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons
shall not be taken form us to unlearn all that we have been
able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.”

We women of one country will be too tender of those
of another country to allow our ons to be trained to
injure theirs. From the bosom of the devasted earth
a voice goes up with our own. It says: “Disarm, Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”

companer@s

For those of you whom i was lucky enough to meet somewhere along this beautiful and intense journey from New York to all those places in Europe, this story is not new. It is no doubt the story that caused most unbelief and laughter. It is time to tell you more about my house.

I’m not in a shared house by accident or only because the rent is cheaper (indeed, Santa Cruz rents are outrageous), there was a conscious decision to look for a communal house. Contrary to the image one might have about Santa Cruz, there are actually not so many cooperative houses in town. Rebecca, who did part of her undergraduate degree here and came back this year as a visiting fellow, could compare: while she used to live in a coop here many years ago, she found it impossible to find one now. Yes, there are the two student coops, Chavez House and Zami, and i went through the getting-to-know-each-other and interviewing procedure with Chavez House. They wanted me to come and live with them, and i did like the place. But there seemed quite gap between my desire to create a home and the prospective of living together with 21 mostly undergrads. Already during the interview, which was very entertaining and pleasant, there was a bit of an “auntie” dynamic, the role i feared i might end up playing in the house. I considered, but didn’t jump. At 615 Washington Street, where i moved in on the 1st of March, the atmosphere was different: more quiet and less political, and the emphasis on creating a home together, supporting each other’s life-styles, and even something about family.

What does living in a Santa Cruz “supporting each other live-styles” and “creating home” shared house mean? “We’re all about food,” one of the girls (ah, our boys are moving out…) keeps on saying to candidates who come to visit the house these days. We do food together. They even say that we eat together, but i find that stretching it just a bit. There are five of us in the house, and everybody cooks one evening in the week, which means the house provides (organic, wholesome, vegetarian…) food for all throughout the week. You’re not expected to be here for dinner every evening – everybody has different and busy life-styles, you see – but you can count on food being kept for you.

Translated into practice this means: after cooking the meal, people put food in tuperware containers with everybody’s name on it, and when people come home they take their tuperware dinner out of the fridge and put it in the micro-wave. Up till today i haven’t shared one meal with my house-mates. Sometimes there is not even a cook whom you could try to join – on several occassions the person responsible for cooking made the food earlier that day, or put something in the oven and ran off to an appointment, phoning another housemate asking to take the dish out the oven on time. When i first did my cooking shift, the girls came in when i was almost done, which made me happy. We could eat together. But they were just passing by. A small spoon to taste the risotto followed by: “Hm, that tastes great. I need to run off to my work-out now, i’m looking forward to eat it when i get back tonight.” It seems to me that there is a certain point when risotto has that right texture and consistency which the micro-wave is pretty much unable to reproduce. Anyway, if something tastes great, why would you need to run to a work-out? I don’t quite understand this kind of being “all about food”.

The situation in my house is not abnormal nor isolated around here. When i talked about the tuperware eating arrangement with other people, they immediately recognised our house as a “semi-coop”. More convenient and more freedom than a coop, someone added. When i talked with Rutvica on the phone about my house, she laughed and called it very Dutch. Although i’m mixing up things now – we elaboratedly talked about houses before i actually made the decision, and little did i know about the tuperware practice back then. But i knew what the “Dutch” referred to: carefully designated territories, and all the mechanisms to keep that in place. It also reminded me how little it took to change the dynamic in the house: just two of us were able to create a home in that place. Mind you, i don’t mean to say that my house-mates are not nice, they really are. On the first evening i moved in, “bienvenue” was written on my tuperware container in the fridge.

Food is only symptomatic. It’s also the house-phone that nobody uses (i had to ask three house-mates before somebody could tell me what the arrangement is for using the phone) cause everybody has cell phones, of course, but some even have land-lines installed in their room. (Can you imagine a communal house with no negotiations or arguments about who needs the phone when and for how long? It’s like a cafe without beer, as the Belgian saying goes…) It’s the sense of their individual rooms being the actual place where they live. I came to notice how i use space in the house so differently from my house-mates: it doesn’t feel as if my actual space in the house is my room, not at all, i’m using the whole house. (House-mates i say, they tend so say room-mates. But we are not sharing a room, no need to feel that threatened, we’re only sharing a house, and even that remains questionable to my feeling.) Common or collective space, it seems, is a negative function. It is void, neutral, meant to function as a buffer between well-protected selves. It barely has a quality of its own – there is no transcendence here. These fortified bodies and selves and life-styles, this suburbian architecture of subjectivity… My fortress, myself. So you can get the house out of the suburb, but mabe you can’t get the suburb out of the house? It goes way beyond Dutchness, Dutch arrangements actually look quite cute in comparison. And then there is the layer of friendliness, the point not being how thin or solid this layer is. The point is that the pleasant quotidian friendliness is constructed upon fear, upon the ever-present threat of the other, who might take away or undermine that cherished illusion of independence of the self.

Ay ay ay… no chance of a home for me in such a landscape, here we are doing fieldwork again. (And damn it, there is nothing more exhausting than doing fieldwork when you’re looking for some kind of home, even a tiny temporary one.) Sigh. Under the motto “research what you can’t defeat, or what bothers you, what eats you away,” i’ll have to start studying American individualism, and while we’re at it, liberalism.

Meanwhile in the house… for the moment we are (officially) not really “doing food together”. The house is officially “in transition” these days. Not only Chris is leaving, but also Figs. Katie and Figs had a big fight last weekend, in which Figs accused Katie of all the sins of the world. It all started with some dirt in the bath tub, but obviously it was not about dirt in the bath tub. Leta filled me in that Katie had a crush on Figs from the very start, from the interview (aha!! more of the falling in love with house-mates than she admitted before! although she probably wouldn’t call it falling in love i guess…), and that they never managed to deal with it. It has an impact on the house and so Leta thinks Figs should go (remember, the common space, the space of social interaction, should be void…). What pisses me off is the reason invoked: that he doesn’t participate much to the shared house. Using the collective, so terribly absent, as an excuse because they’re unwilling to talk about or deal with the crush?

What can i say – we might be all about food, but there are no companeros, companeras around here. You know, the ones you share your bread, your meals with. Hey, will you guys come here for a while? Like many of you? Like a whole tribe? And we’d squat all over the common space, and cook together all of the time, and make lots of noise and music, and keep the doors of the rooms open, and go to bed late, and strategize about politics, and use the bathroom with a bunch of us together, and sleep in till noon… it might be healthy for my poor Californian house-mates and their life-styles.