When Are You Not in My Mind?

When are you not in my mind,
or your hand not in mine?
I am grateful that none of my nights
I am now away from you.

If things are that difficult there,
sell the heart, give up life,
Don't such conditions exist, my friends,
in my lover's neighborhood?

The swagger with which one enters
the execution chamber - that hubris
lives on; life comes and goes,
this life is not such a big deal!

Faith's arena is not a palace,
no one cares for the name or genealogy;
no one is named Lover,
love is not the caste of anyone.

If this is a contest for love,
lay down what you can, without fear
wonderful if you win,
If you lose, it is not a defeat.
-Faiz Ahmed Faiz

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Jean Jaurès on Workers' Power and War

Give the working class confidence in the power of progress through law. Design mechanisms by which it will have access, as a class, as an organized and united collective, to the vast wealth of modernity. Draw a broad, straight path before it...And as the republican nation makes an effort to attain justice, it will be the duty of the working class, in return, to voluntarily organize and discipline itself. It will also be in its interest. It has nothing to gain by putting its protests into a brutal form...Acts of destruction not only have the effect of betraying humanity...but by giving the illusion of immediate power, they also distract the workers from the pursuit of true power, which lies in forming ever larger groups and in taking ever more methodical action.
Jean Jaurès, L'Armée Nouvelle, p 36

"Among Europe's elite, many captains of industry speak openly of a war to end the movement for workers demands."

"Your violent and chaotic society even when it pretends to seek peace carries within it war just as rain clouds carry the storm."

"At a time when we are threatened with murder and butchery, there is but one hope of saving the peace and that is for the proletariats to join ranks, workers of France, England, Germany, Italy, Russia let us implore these millions of men to unite to dispel this horrible nightmare."

Brownness, Mental Health, and Masculinity

So "American Sniper" happened. The backlash against the Muslim community was completely unsurprising. There was more even of the same racist slurs and death threats against Muslims. Some of these were depicted in the Facebook preview for an article that was distributed rather widely in the wake of that fallout.

The same article asked a very a propos question: where were all of the "moderate Americans" to stand up against this violence? Perhaps they were in the same place as the "moderate Muslims" - that same deep, long-ignored echo chamber where journalists who value their jobs daren't venture for fear of exposing brown people as patently un-frightening.

Then we had those infamous white people at the apex of the two great white masculine adventures, sports and über-nationalistic jingoism, confirming their status as bigots. Gratitude to Khaled Beydoun for covering this despicable quote.

Jim Harbaugh, Michigan's Football Coach: "Michigan Football will watch American Sniper. Proud to be an American and if...
Posted by Khaled Bey on Thursday, April 9, 2015

On the other extreme were those who, lacking other words in their vocabulary to express disgust at hypermasculine portrayals of White Saviour men rescuing white women from the non-existent threat of scary brown bodies, lashed out in the most excruciatingly ableist of furies. I was infuriated when I saw in my Facebook feed someone taunting Kyle Cooper as someone who went to Iraq to kill many innocents and then came home and cried about it.

I live with PTSD. If anyone were ever to refer to me as the one who went off to some other state to be severely abused and then come home to cry about it... Well, to be perfectly honest, I would probably cry about that. Because that isn't how people are supposed to treat each other - mocking each other's illnesses. After all, we don't make fun of cancer, or asthma, or diabetes. Why should mental illnesses be singled out for this kind of ableism? Another article - this one nearly as ableist as the post which I observed, complained about the ahistoricity of the movie.

The original poster's commentary was worse than the language contained in the article preview.

Some level-headed critique of the movies was available, however. The Guardian, a United Kingdom newspaper with an online presence, carried a two-part series analysing "American Sniper" along with to other movies. The author's focus was masculinity, which made the series interesting for me. Excerpts below as a very unceremonious end to this blog post.

Boyhood, Selma and American Sniper: race meets masculinity on film – part one
Steven W Thrasher, The Guardian
19 Feb 2015
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/feb/19/boyhood-selma-american-sniper-race-part-one

Indeed. Should we consider, then, the repeatedly constructed innocence we cheer for of the semi-fictional Mason’s boyhood in comparison to the presumed guilt (with mortal consequences) of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, or Trayvon Martin’s boyhood? Or Renisha McBride’s girlhood? Or young John Crawford’s manhood? Can one accept Boyhood’s message unquestioningly and still believe black lives matter? To quote hooks again: “I don’t think we will get much further in terms of decolonizing our minds” unless people like me who liked Boyhood can also critically examine that accepting Mason’s white privilege is indissoluble from his transition from boyhood to manhood.

men depicted in black and white – part two
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/feb/20/selma-american-sniper-film-oscars-race-part-two

Disappointingly, given it is one of the few feature films to be directed by a woman in any given year, Selma moves away from those girls and on to the men for the bulk of the film. Manhood – as it also is in American Sniper – is constructed in Selma largely in the absence of women, save for the frozen-out wife. Except for a supporting role from Carmen Ejogo as Coretta Scott King, and an even smaller role for Oprah Winfrey as Annie Lee Cooper, Selma takes us to the civil rights domain of straight men.

Oyelowo’s King is a black man in full. He is sexual and not a neutered saint, his marital affairs acknowledged with a refreshing frankness. Personally, he has many doubts (including of white politicians). Professionally, he is assertive and pragmatic, utilizing radical non-violent resistance as an offensive strategy and not, as oft portrayed a half century later, out of passivity and defensiveness. He butts heads figuratively and literally with white men.

Much more so than Selma’s dream of pacifist, transnational blackness, American Sniper is a perfect fantasy for our current conception of manhood in the United States, a nation where violence against women is too often dismissed; where violence by individuals in ethnic groups swiftly casts aspersions on all its members; and yet, where no number of mass shootings by white men – waged in movie theaters, elementary schools, neighborhood congressional meet-ups, or sovereign countries – will ever allow white manhood to be seen as anything but as innocent and pure as young Mason heading off to college at the end of Boyhood.

We Want Democracy. NOW!

The anti-occupationists, the pacifists, the anti-war crew, the Palestinians, Iraqis, Chechens, Kashmiris - they don't want the return of any regime at all. We don't think that we should be forced to choose between evil and worse evil. Given a choice between Bush and Saddam, there are people who would choose death. Both are illegal - one broke 16 UN resolutions, and the other violated the UN charter. And then Israel has violated at least 72, and still has an illegal stockpile of 200-400 nukes. The world community of pacifists does not see the difference between an Arabic-speaking tyrant and a Hebrew-speaking one or an English-speaking one. We want all of them gone, and real elections where every vote is counted (unlike 2000, where about 175,000 were not counted or were refused access to vote in the first place). One of the reasons that the literacy rate in Iraq dropped from 85% before the 1991 invasion to 58% today is because the sanctions prevented decent health care, shut down the economy needed to run schools and universities, and cast the infrastructure into ruin. Constant bombing ofIraq from 1991 to today - it never really did stop - has returned Iraq to before the days of the first cities. How can I possibly say that I am proud to be an American, when I know that my country is the one that did this to a proud, ancient, Semitic people?

When tens of thousands of Iraqis go to the streets where they could very well be shot by occupation forces and demand elections, my opinion is that it is high time to listen to them. They want to elect their leader. They don't want their leader to be chosen for them by occupation forces, puppet councils, or any of the such. As a matter of fact, considering the amount of American lives that have been lost whose funerals Bush has not attended - not a single one - and whose coffins Bush refuses to allow to be filmed by the media and whose health care Bush has willfully slashed into last millenium, I would say that it is high time that the American people start showing some compassion for these men and women and demand that they be allowed to return home. And considering that tens to hundreds of millions of people all over the world took to the street to protest this invasion on the 15th of Februrary in 2003, I suggest that we Americans start listening to them - especially since hundreds of thousands of those people were Americans in cities such as NYC, San Fran, LA, Houston, Detroit...

Another thing that NEEDS to be said is that at the same time we send our men and women to die in other countries supposedly to defend the Constitution and Bill of Rights, GW has been shredding the very same things every time he pushes through a Patriot Act-type bill, or a line item from Patriot Act II (he does this by having them included in budget bills)...the very freedoms for which we fought against the British in the Revolutionary War - freedom of speech, assembly, press, trial by peer and judge, attorny, humane prison conditions - we are putting them for sale to GW to do with them as he wishes. And he has been shredding them.

Saddam's regime was bad enough. I do not see the need to turn Iraq into worse than Saddam's regime, much less impose Saddam-like strictures on our Constitutional freedoms here. The Iraqis want to run their own democracy. I do, too.

Now

I had a dream while listening to the radio. And on the radio a debate ensued about whether it was ok to parade Saddam - a POW, debased, humiliated, in front of millions of TV viewers around the world as part of a bloodthirsty land thirsty oil thirsty campaign of imperialistic terror. And then music ended the debate. And as the last stanzas were sung, I woke from a dream in which I was running away from my very own sister, and I feared for my life. And I was reminded of a dream that I dreamt long ago as a child. I dreamt that I was a Spanish solider, overseeing the deaths of Cathars in white robes singing holding candles unafraid. When I woke from that dream, I made a promise to myself. I promised that I would never ever let it happen again. But the voices of the mature called for me to remain silent. And so silent I fell, until the day when I saw it all happen in front of my eyes again. NOW.