war – somebody else's paradise

flying back

(war, by the way, in between)Â

the morning light is beautiful. while yesterday the Washington bridge was disappearing in the fog and pouring rain, this morning the sky and the sun were just so bright. it is very early when we leave the house. a man at the subway entrance distributes newspapers, announcing good deals and sales. i forgot, this is black friday, christmas shopping should begin. i enjoy the busride to La Guardia, Queens, the ride through Harlem, the beautiful views on the city once we cross the water. and some time later, breathtaking views on the city from the sky.

i booked this ticket quite late; what made it affordable was travelling on the friday after Thanksgiving, a time when obviously many people are taking a long weekend. but i discover that there was more that kept the price down – two overlays: New York – Chicago – San Diego – San Jose. in the clear sky and with window seats all along the way, i was all happy again to cross this country and watch it with a bird’s eye. the new part was flying all the way down to San Diego – a different landscape, i caught a glimpse of Mexico. the last stretch, from San Diego to San Jose, is amazing. the whole of Southren California, the ocean, the entire coastline. i saw Big Sur. the very last part of the journey moves me: i recognize Monterey Bay with its small towns of Monterey, Salinas, Watsonville, Santa Cruz. by the time we fly over the Santa Cruz mountains, the sun has set behind us and we fly into a maze of lights – the south end of Silicon Valley and the city of San Jose. i already felt it went it left for this trip – this piece of earth is starting to feel familiar.

christians

two morning sessions of conference before nadia and jeanette and friends have their session. i actually start going to one of the sessions, on Lebanon. but i don’t make it through the first paper, time to escape again. there’s not much time though, and so it happens that i jump on one of these Old Town Trolleys that stop in front of the hotel and do a tour of the city. many places that i visisted yesterday, but also the harbor and Charlestown (US Constitution, Bunker Hill,..). heroic “cradle of liberty” stories alternated with trivia of various kinds.

i share the trolley with what on first sight seems a model hollywood family. very blond. and very loud – the woman has one of these high pitched voices that is difficult on the human ear. they display a great interest in what the driver/guide tells us, encourage the children to take it in and comment what a shame it is that this history is not taught in school in this country – the reason why their kids attend a Christian school, so that they would know about the history and values that found this country. at almost every stop the trolley makes they check with the driver if there is a McDonalds close by, despite him assuring them he would let them know.

it began with the driver making an allusion to me in relation to a piece of his narrative taking place in Europe. we had been talking before the family got on the trolley and he had wanted to know where i was from. the woman’s attention got fixed on me – where was i from, what was i doing in Boston. a conference, i reply, in middle eastern studies. in a split second i see her adopting a particular determined and complacent posture.
– “well sarah you must understand that when we go there, it is to spread the democracy and freedom that we have to places that don’t have it.”
i couldn’t think of an appropriate respons, baffled as i was, and it just somehow came out:
– “well it isn’t really working, is it… it seems that this country is good in making a big mess of many people’s lives.”
– “but you have to understand it is with the best of intentions. sometimes it’s difficult over there, you can’t always predict how things go. but you must keep confidence that good intentions will win in the end. that’s what built up this country.”

with every sentence we trap ourselves in continuing the conversation. soon we’re on the topic of the greatness and superiority of the U.S., “the best nation on earth” as she puts it. i challenge her. for some reason we get into education – i remember feeling i wanted to move on to health care – and i’m pulling together the evidence of how classist (no, don’t worry, i’ve learned, i didn’t actually use the word) it is. from all the things i list, she picks out the tuition fees.
– “but do you know why we have such high tuition fees? because we have all these international students coming here.”
with a nice and open and smiling face. i have a moment of just shaking my head which apparently she takes as a sign to continue:
– “and why do we have all the foreigners coming here? because our education is the best. everybody in the whole world knows it, and everybody wants it. they all want to get education in America.”

this conversation deterioriates at an amazing speed. some minutes later (in which we came back from standards of education, like levels of illiteracy, to the war in Iraq) i tell her i don’t want to have this conversation. yet the determination doesn’t suffice to break it off immediately. “okay,” she responds, “but take your time to discover our country and ask any American and he would tell you the same.” “how funny that you should mention that,” i reply, “as i just come from this conference with more than 2000 Americans and i can assure you their views are very different from yours. and given that they are actually informed about the Middle East, those views make much more sense than yours.”

sigh, another senseless conversation (10 more of these and i might start sounding like juan cole…). i’m actually saved by McDonalds, priorities are priorities, satisfied by some nuggets of independence history it is time for big burgers. from the corner of my eye i see the woman scribbling busily. before she gets off the trolley, she gives me a card – “please take this. i’ll pray for you.”

curiosity wins, as usual. (fieldwork material, as nadia says) the card reads:

We are believers in the faith that was the foundation of this most accomplished (for our age) nation on the planet. Our bravery, generosity and true love for all peoples has benefitted every nation on earth. God bless you.

they are from Riverside, California.

~~~when i get back to the Marriott it is time to pack and check out. in the elevator a conference participant is talking in arabic on her cell phone, but she loses reception. she seems distressed. she turns to us and asks who was assassinated? we haven’t heard anything. she insists, yes, somebody was killed, in Beirut. while entering the room i tell nadia to put on CNN, cause somebody was killed… nadia is packing in front of television – Pierre Gemayel, she responds. trouble. ~~~the session of nadia and friends is a fine one, that doesn’t get the context it deserves: scheduled in the very last slot of the conference means little audience, and the questions go off in strange directions (but here i should shut up cause i had a question, which moreover the friends liked, when i put it to them afterwards, but i didn’t ask it during the session…) a last drink in the lobby, and time to get ourselves back to New York.

paradise now

i missed Paradise Now while it was playing in the movie theaters, so i couldn’t miss the special screening this evening. also the opportunity to check out the “outdoor movie theatre under the stars that springs up in the fields and industrial wastelands” that helps “reclaim public space and transform our urban environment into a joyful playground,” aka the guerilla drive in.

the setting: a bunch of semi-industrial buildings dropped in a piece of wasteland next to the railroad tracks. a wide white wall of one of the buildings serves as the screen. people on blankets, with wine and pizza, on the other side of the tracks. i kept thinking of how the images would be projected on a train, if one would pass by. but then, if a train would pass, the laptop, beamer and speakers on the tracks would be crushed. the thing is, trains don’t pass here. (at least not regularly.)

it was also my mood. i was folded into myself, longing to be anonymous in a movie theater. the guerilla drive-in included obligatory socializing. during the break between the shorts and Paradise Now we were called upon to meet our neighbor. i had no intentions to do so, but then of course other people considered me as their neighbor. “hi neighbor.” “hi.”

no doubt it was also my mood, but i didn’t really like the atmosphere. of course, there was lots of familiar punky d.i.y business (and i leave it up to you whether that’s part of the nice part or not…). and of course there were the stars. but there was something profoundly alienating.

it started with the shorts. two were non-american. a campaign video by Unicef Belgium in which peaceful Smurfland is all of a sudden bombed and destroyed, with baby-smurfs crying and dying. the message: “Laat de oorlog de wereld van de kinderen niet verwoesten” (Don’t let war destroy children’s worlds). the campaign was a tiny bit controversial when it came out last year (and the initial plan to have blow-away baby-smurf limbs in the picture was stopped). but not too much. but here the audience seemed impressed. someone whistled, “wow,” they said, “Unicef…” then there was the sky interview with George Galloway on Hezbollah, many of you must have come across it this summer, and if you haven’t, check it out here. (really, check it out.) i remember watching that video for the first time with nadia; we both were impressed and laughed in amazement. (and this time i saw that Galloway is a representative for Bethnal Green – emma, camille and giulia, what a neighborhood you girls moved to!) but the santa cruz crowed went almost silent, a silence that lingered on a bit after the video. bafflement or disbelief or… i’m not sure.

the other shorts were american. my turn to disconnect i guess. okay, there was some funny stuff. but what got the crowd really going was the Beavis and Butthead clip in which Beavis becomes president. (check it out here if it doesn’t put you off.) in between lots of snorty laughing on the screen, and a hilarious crowd (especially when Beavis asks who that bloke is, on television, standing next to Bush, and Butthead responds “Dick”), the extent of the emptiness of this “resistance” was striking. cause the clip was probably conceived, and for sure screened, as “resistance”. but there was no message other than showing that the discourse of bush & co is empty. the clip literary mirrored that emptiness. but 1) the fact that the regime covers up their actions with lies is nothing new, and 2) those cover-ups should not be mistaken for emptiness, it might actually be time for the left to understand a bit more of the strategies of the regime to come up with better forms of resistance, and 3) in any case effective resistance should be able formulate alternative visions, beyond denouncing. instead, i found the audience snuggling in empty sarcasm. we’ve talked before with susan about this kind of sarcasm supposedly directed against the regime (my first introduction to that was a talk by Juan Cole at UCSC some weeks after i arrived), but only preaching to the choir and failing to do any useful analytical and political work – and how infuriating it is.

and maybe i’m being too upset by a silly Beavis and Butthead clip while it really was about the audience’s respons to Paradise Now. but here i don’t know what to say – the film just didn’t go down well. at the end one of the organizers added that next week there would be more films of resistance, but “of different kind”, in a tone which gave away his low opinion about this film and made a good bunch of people laugh with complicity. and the stupid comments during the film – i’ll just give you the taste of one of them. commenting on the bad water in Nablus, a taxidriver says that Israeli settlers put something in the water that makes sperm infertile. a guy in the audience, also involved in the organization, cheers and shouts that this is the solution for overpopulation. (it kind of made me feel like shouting, what about starting to implement the solution here in santa cruz.) and then humour. there’s actually quite a bit of it in the movie, often a bit black. but i found myself laughing alone. and on other occasions the audience laughed, when i found laughter not appropriate and a bit embarassing. the aesthetics, the way of narrating and structuring the story (we’re not even talking about message, i felt)… it just did’t go down with this crowd. an alienating experience, i so much wanted “my” community afterwards.

but something made me leave the guerilla drive with half of a good feeling. this evening was co-organized with a new group that established itself this summer: the Santa Cruz anti-imperialist league. in their presentation they invoked the feeling that it was time to understand the extent of the harm done by U.S. foreign policy and react against it. if enough smart american kids start feeling that urge, if the urge is even felt in paradise santa cruz, there might be some hope…

political culture

it’s after closing time at the Resource Center for Nonviolence, the Victorian house with a peace sign on Broadway. sandino lets me in. sandino – si, it comes from augusto sandino (who headed the sandinistas). sandino’s father was all into the sandinistas, made a documentary video about them. we go to his place: he just started renting the apartment attached to the center. convenient and scary to have work and home so close. i plan to come back during office hours some other day, to learn more about the center itself.

during our quick dinner, we talk about political consciousness and organizing in the US. it started as i brought up international peace day, asking if the Resource Center had organized something, and carefully checking out what sandino thought of the big santa cruz light show for peace. he grimaces. he gets up and gets me an interview in the Good Times with the artist behind the project. read this, he insists. and i would suggest you’d read some fragments as well:

“Kirby Scudder has seen the light. Actually give him a week and we’ll all be seeing it, too. Five hundred of them to be exact, aligned along a three-mile stretch of West Clif Drive. The project is dubbed “Night-Light,” in which hundreds of battery-operated mega lights will suddenly brighten the coastline, their beams rocketing up to the heavens. It unfolds on Sept. 21 and it is, perhaps, one of the boldest, technically obtuse ventures a local has ever undertaken – all for the love of peace. And, in a day and age when American attitudes are heading south – the post 9/11 aftermcht and that thing called a war in Iraq – a local vigil for peace couldn’t come at a better time.”

“It actually has a lot to do with my upbringing as a Quaker in New York and being accountable for world events. We as citizens are accountable for who we are around the world. […] because I actually believe, whatever side of the war you are on, no matter who you vote for, were you are in the world, we are all Americans and all accountable. And I believe in accountability and that sort of spurred me to bring all these pieces together. And I thought, what can I do as an artist in this community about peace? And this is what I thought of.”

our responses to the big santa cruz international peace day event pass through grimaces and complicit glances. when sandino comments, he speaks of the need to work with what is there. given that political consciousness is so low in the U.S. every person getting out and contributing to a political cause in some kind of way, deserves support. at some point i sense his professional posture coming through: whether that means holding a silent vigil (grimace) or dressing up in black and covering your face (a supposedly neutral look, but the picture of el subcomandante on the fridge gives him away…), we need to respect these different forms. and work together. cause we already have so little political culture in the U.S., compared to other countries in the world (and i find out he lived a while in Nicaragua, and visited a number of other Latin American countries, including El Salvador). and sandino goes on with sketching the bleak picture till the point, imagine this dear friends, that i feel the need to bring up the sparks of hope in this country…
– “No wait, what about the immigrant marches. The sheer masses that got out on the streets, and at least they made the men and women in Washington DC a bit uncomfortable…”
– “Well funny that you should say that,” he responds, and bangs the flyer of the march on sunday, against the raids on undocumented people, on the table.

true. the timing is not a funny coincidence. and i learn that this was the first raid of this scale on migrants in the area. and la migra (all entities that enforce US immigration law) will be back, apparently they made that clear. repression after powerful mobilization. and it’s true that the mobilizations would need to be sustained to remain their power – something which doesn’t seem to be happening. and while where at it, it is true that it feels so very unlikely in this time and place, the idea of masses in the streets bringing a government to fall (and then i spare you sandino’s litany on the political system of the country…). but as we were on our way to a political meeting, we didn’t actually feel that disempowered at all.

feels good to get to know sandino a bit. he graduated from Community Studies, which seems to be a cool place (and where i’m trying to get in the social documentary course next quarter). he worked on alterglobalisation and his favorite medium is radio, you might try to check him out at Free Radio Santa Cruz, on Mondays from 7pm till 9pm, when he does a program called The Global Local.

peace day

today is international peace day. makes me slightly uncomfortable in this place. happy that i’ll drop by the Resource Center for Nonviolence later this afternoon, but even more happy that i’ll go to the Brown Berets meeting this evening. cause when Leta told me about the celebrations for international peace day here in SC, it made me… well, seriously sceptical. a great show of light on the ocean, and dancing together in the Veterans Hall, with the idea that if everybody did that all over the world (okay, at this point i’m sure this is Leta’s interpretation, i’m not ready to believe that the organizers would present the event like that), the world would be a better place.

hate to be cynical, and lightshows and dancing can be beautiful things, but i can’t help thinking: what about actually organizing against the warmongers called your government? and i couldn’t help thinking of one of Mazen Kerbaj‘s amazing drawings, from a tour to the nordic countries not long after the official cease-fire in Lebanon. inspired by a visit to the hippie kristiania area in copenhagen:

“what is more ugly,
war or
peace and love?”

beirut

from a phone-call with sarah in beirut last night:
the deep disappointment with how easily a new grassroots space,
born out of vital need for survival and organization,
is taken over by leftwing machoism and the sectarianism of the SWP-like…
and how life goes on
and raisha’s blog: waronlebanon.blogspot.com

beirut

cws 3

a particularly intimate session of our challenging white supremacy meetings with Sharon. just marÃa and me. we end up not talking about the texts but about difficult discussions with our political sisters and friends about the war, israel/palestine, israeli apartheid & the misuses of anti-semitism, how jews became “white” in the U.S. (with comparisons of how irish and italians became white), about the global action day against death penalty for homosexuality in iran, about tendencies within our feminist and lgbt movements not to address white privilege that end up making us complicit with white supremacist and imperialist geopolitics.

and how to do daily life in santa cruz with its sharp division between is very white character and the invisible latino labour of cleaning, care, manual labour… which is the back-bone of this town, and how to use “gate-keeping” positions – when you’re part of white privilege but for some reason have a position or connection or skill that you can use for the benefit of empowering those who don’t have white privilege, and in general how to become an ally.

and then there was New Orleans. i had spoken to Sharon on the phone just when she got back from New Orleans, and this beautiful and both fragile & powerful woman who will turn 70 later this year, said that she had only one word to capture the experience: life transforming. that her life and her way of political organizing would never be the same. this evening she shared many stories and analyses. things we had already learned about through the Reflections on Katrina conference and the events organized by the Student Workers Coalition for Justice earlier this year. but Sharon’s stories, characterized by great analytical and political sharpness and generosity, made it so much more tangible. the systematic ethnic cleansing, the amazing grassroots organizing, the complexities of the terrain in which to organize.

imagining her. she had been yearning to go back to New Orleans ever since the hurricane and the political respons hit the city, but she couldn’t because she lives with pain and needs to swim twice a day to manage the pain. she would need a swimming pool in the city to open. and the white privilege workshops she helped to organize for people from the Bay area going to reconstruct the most destoyed neighborhoods in New Orleans had added to an awareness of how to go and enter such a vexed place. then came, in the same week, an invitation from a community and organization leaders in New Orleans for a weekend of reflection on the solidarity work thusfar, and the news that a swimming pool had re-opened. a week later she left to New Orleans.

she arrived to the hotel where she had been a guest for many years, which was one of the few hotels in the french quarter of town that was up and running, and still had most of its same staff, mostly black people. happy to be supporting local business, and not to stay in the church where the Common Ground Collective volunteers were housed. the contradiction: the keys of the church were given only on the condition that only volunteers could stay there, no residents. (Sharon called this space “the colony”) but of course the contradictions don’t stop. after seeing familiar faces and hugging familiar bodies, her attention got caught by all the hugh tall men with very short hair in the hotel. then she starts seeing the uniforms. Blackwater, the private security firm, infamous for its actions in Iraq. from the one war zone to the other, operating in New Orleans under the Department of Homeland security. the hotel was one of it’s headquarters, one of the reasons it managed to stay in business. the image of the breakfast room with petite Sharon in her Free Palestine Tshirt (“i have no plain Tshirt…”) among all those bulldozers in uniform…

it had been lingering on mind and on our way back to Santa Cruz i take a decision: i want to go and do solidarity work in New Orleans.

american dream

i am driving through endless fields of waving corn. i get tired and pull over, in the shadow of an old barn. i get out the car to strech my legs and i light a sigarette while my eyes wander over the horizon. my thoughts are interrupted by laughter, which i figure must come out of the barn. curiosity guides me to a crack in the wood, and i look inside. the time my eyes take to adjust to the dark… holy shit. bush, rice, cheney, rumsfeld, wolfowitz and more of their ilk are sitting around a table. the words i managed to catch in between the bad jokes tell me that they are designing the new middle east. my eyes quickly scan the barn. some security guys, but they are all facing the table. i move away from the crack and look around me. no other soul to found. then my eye falls on some red shiny dynamite between the corn. it all happens very quick. grab the dynamite, take my lighter, shove the sissing dynamite near the crack and jump in the car. drive away as one life depends on it. the big bang, the image of the barn blown into pieces in the rearview mirror.

hours and hours of driving till the adrenaline is gone. a gas station and a diner. i slide in with the hope of not being noticed, and find myself an empty booth in a corner, with a view on the television. no need to be worried about getting noticed, i can’t even get my order taken, the few people in this place are glued to the screen. a big black whole in a cornfield. digital reconstructions of how the barn must have blown up. looks like a video-game. people are mesmerized. their mouths open, unable to produce a sound. no witnesses, no clue about the terrorist group behind this attack. i keep on driving for days and days, from diner to diner, from small town to small town. gradually people find words again, they start speaking, laughing, it’s over. whoever did it, maybe it was god, or perhaps the people, the important thing is that it’s over. a new fresh day.

i wake up in a great mood. go to pergolesi to work with marÃa, but we can’t begin before i’ve told her the dream. i also talk about the need to be in brussels now, for the first time ever i feel we need to be able to push and work the european institutions. is it about a feeling of political powerlessness connected to being in santa cruz? or connected to how mass mobilizations all over the world against the war on iraq ultimately failed to stop that war? i do not know…

real world

a message from sarah in beirut this morning makes us so very sad. sahar leaves today, our house will not be the same, i will miss this sharing daily life tremendously. wim drives us over the santa cruz mountains to the airport in san jose. a sweet message in the guestbook sahar got for the house ends like this: “now back to the real world and to people who don’t have the resources to be “healthy”, however they want that…”