SuperWeed

Down in South Carolina, baby-faced Newt Gingrich bemoans the inexplicable failure of the masses to see him as the savior-of-civilization he believes himself to be. Meanwhile in North Korea, chubby-cheeked Kim Jong-Un steps forward as the new “supreme leader” of the Democratic People’s Republic, ready to protect the people from all who menace them.

As North Koreans acclaim their new leader and U.S. voters assess the ideological purity of the Republican candidates for President, now might be a good time to look at the similarities between North Korea and the United States. While self-consciously poised as antipodes—one triumphantly capitalist and the other ostensibly communist, each at times condemning the other as the embodiment of evil—these two “democracies” share more features than either would care to acknowledge. Chief among these is what B.R. Myers, writing about North Korea, calls “paranoid nationalism.”

Former DPRK Kim Jong-Il’s death and his son Kim Jong-Un’s accession have drawn a new round of attention to Meyers’ colorful 2010 treatise, The Cleanest Race, which purports to clarify the North Korean “cult of personality” for befuddled foreigners who might be tempted to write off that nation’s aggrandizing rhetoric as insane or insincere. According to Myers, North Koreans mean it when they revere their leaders, whom they see as embodiments of the essence of their own inherent superiority. In other words, when North Koreans sing the praises of leaders such as Kim Il-Sung or Kim Jong-Il they are actually praising themselves. Like true-red-white-and-blue Americans, North Koreans see themselves not only as uniquely virtuous but also everlastingly endangered. Hence the need for a strong-armed leader with his finger on the nuclear trigger.

American candidates for office routinely state that the United States is “the greatest country in the world,” sometimes going so far as to retroactively include all of human history in the comparative assessment. To hear FoxNews tell it, we are persistently besieged by terrorists who hate our freedom and by immigrants who will pollute our culture unless kept in check by English-only laws and a militarized border. Meanwhile, the mediocre thinkers who pass for our intellectual class debate with straight faces the concept of “American exceptionalism” as if this notion were anything other than manifestly fantastical.

How different is this, really, from North Korean claims of inherently exceptional (and always endangered) purity?

Let me put that another way: If any other country were to rank 37th in the world health care, 17th  in the world in educational achievement, and 36th (tied with Cuba) in life expectancy while insisting that all candidates for the highest office in the land make counter-factual statements concerning the country’s overall superiority, what would you call that?

If the citizens of any country other than the United States assumed that it was their natural right to lead the world on every issue—not sometimes lead, sometimes follow, and most of the time cooperate, but actually take charge on every matter of international concern—what would you call that?

I call it delusional hubris. And so I am curious to understand the roots of such self-aggrandizement elsewhere, in case it might shed light on the psychological forces that lead our country and its leaders to behave so dangerously. (Yes, I mean you Barack Obama—don’t think you’re off the hook just because the Republicans are so flagrantly deranged. The current chaos in Pakistan comes courtesy of your arrogant insistence on death by drone when the true allies of democracy in the region could have told you what to do instead.)

I found The Cleanest Race to be illuminating albeit imperfect. The basic premise of the book is sound: What looks like nonsense from the outside often proves to be both internally consistent and psychologically meaningful. (That’s true, by the way, not only for popular political delusions but also for personal psychoses.)  Myers marshals masses of illustrations of the key themes he sees in recent and current North Korean propaganda and pop culture, all of which spring from and flow into what he sees as the fundamental motif: “The Korean people are too pure blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader.”

Myers stresses the maternal characteristics attributed to the male leader of North Korea

So far so good. But Myers’ own biases betray him when he sets about explaining themes such as mistrust of foreigners or the maternal characteristics attributed to and expected from the male leader. Myers treats Korean history as if it were blank before the era of Japanese colonization, mistaking the absence of a self-consciously national or ethnic identity among the inhabitants of the peninsula for the lack of a distinct culture. This leads him to neglect indigenous traditions when reckoning the sources of the collective psychology he aims to analyze. Of course, all human groups create cultures—that’s the nature of social animals. Like island cultures, peninsular cultures tend to be idiosyncratic. I don’t know enough about indigenous Korean culture to know what Myers missed, but it cannot possibly be the case that no vestiges of pre-colonial Korean culture persist in the psyches of the people today.

Myers simultaneously overstates and minimizes the impact of the 40-year Japanese occupation of Korea, denying the traumatic effect of colonization while at the same time attributing virtually all of the characteristics of post-colonial Korea to ideas and practices borrowed from Japan. Similarly, Myers acknowledges but denies any impact of American activities on the peninsula, which have included occupation of South Korea and indiscriminate bombing of North Korea. Myers concedes that the United States committed war crimes in Korea yet does not take the ensuing trauma and legitimate fear of further aggression into account when assessing North Korean attitudes towards Americans.

“War crimes in North Korea?” I can hear mystified Americans asking. Myers notes the North Korean unwillingness to judge themselves as guilty of any wrongdoing, but there’s one country that carries the presumption of innocence to truly psychotic proportions. Educated Americans—left, right, and in between—debate “immigration” as if the very borders of the nation were not established through an explicitly genocidal process of displacement of the original inhabitants of the land (including the ancestors of many so-called “illegals.”) American soldiers march into other people’s homelands expecting to be greeted as liberators and then feel sincerely aggrieved—innocently outraged—at any resistance they encounter. American consumers gobble up far more than their fair share of the world’s resources and then accuse environmentalists of evil intentions.

And don’t get me started on whiteness. Suffice it to say that it’s no surprise to me that Ron Paul’s right-wing racist newsletters haven’t kept even self-proclaimed progressives from supporting him.

I’ve not yet seen the book that adequately plumbs the “brain trouble” that historian Oscar Ameringer identified as a key determinant of American history. Since we’re the more dangerous rogue nuclear state, that’s a glaring gap. (“Brain Trouble” was the title of my original dissertation. Maybe I’ll have to pick that project back up.)

Despite its shortcomings, The Cleanest Race has helped me to make better sense of the stories and pictures coming out of North Korea in the wake of the death of Kim Jong-Il. I can see in the ways that Kim Jong-Un is conducting himself and being presented a replication of the persona previously occupied by his grandfather and father. And many of his subjects do seem to be sincerely hailing him as the latest incarnation of the the heroic and protective genius of the nation.

That’s gotta be killing Newt.

January 15th, 2012 | Tags: book review, Politics, psychology | Category: Books, Politics, Psychology | Comments (1)

January 10th, 2012 | Tags: Politics | Category: Gender, Politics, Race | Comments (1)

I teach a community college course called “Women Respond to Violence” in which we examine varieties of violence and the multiplicity of ways that women (and their male allies) have struggled to understand and intervene in its causes and consequences. (Here’s the syllabus for the upcoming semester.)

Most of the students are survivors of some form of violence, such as sexual assault, domestic battery or war. Most are women; many are refugees.  Most are poor or working class; some are or have been homeless. Many live in violent neighborhoods; all, along with you and me, live in a dangerously deranged biosphere in which babies are born with (literally) hundreds of industrial chemicals (many of them neurotoxins) already floating in their blood.

In other words, most students come into the class with substantial real-world experience of violence. And yet, about halfway through each semester, the class collectively pronounces itself stunned (and overwhelmed) by the extent and variety of abuses human beings have and continue to inflict on each other (this is before we get to violence against animals and ecosystems, which tends to prompt another round of horrified surprise).

No, I don’t leave them in that lurch. The point of the course is empowerment, not demoralization. But true empowerment can only come within a real assessment of the situation. Otherwise, it’s all pep talks and smiley faces—superficial succor instead of substantial skill-building. So we face the facts squarely, knowing that doing so is a requirement for figuring out what we can do that might actually have a chance of making a difference (rather than just making us feel better).

As a new year begins, I find myself wanting to make a similar but broader assessment of inconvenient facts. I want to pile them all up together and then see where the chinks in the wall might be. This might be what Joanna Macy recommended as a spark to anti-nuke activism: Directly confronting, rather than shiftily avoiding, the sources of despair.

I think that I’ll start by recapping some of the distressing facts that I and my students wrestle with every semester. (I’m about to launch into a new 15-week cycle of that class, so various topics will be especially fresh in my mind as the exercise unfolds.) Then, I’ll tally up other troubling realities that I often wonder whether social change activists in various movements are adequately accounting for. Probably, I’ll need to go offline and non-linear at some point, but I can scan and post any scribbles or sketches.

The hope is that looking at the aggregation of inconvenient facts—and looking especially at the connections among them, at the ecology of violence—might help in crafting more realistic social change strategies. Whether consciously or not, all social change strategies are rooted in assumptions about what people are like and how the world works. If these unspoken assumptions are inaccurate, the strategies may be inherently unlikely to achieve their aims. Real-world change can only come through an accurate assessment of the facts on the ground.

I invite you along with me on this exercise. What facts, when they come to mind, tend to punch your morale in the stomach? What thoughts lead you into the temptation to throw up your hands and quit trying? Share them with me in the comments, and I’ll be sure to include them in the process.

(This is the first of what will be I-dont-know-how-many parts  in the “To Be Real” series. I’ve created a new category—Facing Facts—for the series, and I’ll go back and add relevant past posts to that category for our mutual reference.)

January 7th, 2012 | Tags: social change, strategy, teaching, Violence | Category: Facing Facts, Teaching, Violence | Comments (1)

The death of a man who evidently caught bird flu by jogging in a wetland (!) prompts me to remind us all that, unless we radically change our orientation to animals, it’s merely a matter of when (not if) the next influenza pandemic will strike.

Say what? Yes: The 1918  influenza epidemic that killed more people than World War I was a bird flu—and a less virulent virus than the bird (and hybrid pig-bird)  viruses that now mutate more rapidly and race around the world more easily thanks to the one-two punch of factory farming and trade globalization.

And yes: It’s our predilection for eating animal flesh that has gotten us into this mess.

So, let me share with new Superweed readers four past posts related to bird and pig flu as well as the sometimes surprising links between these menaces and other issues, such as animal abuse, poverty, racism and even homophobia.

• Bird Flu and You
•  Pig Flu Pandemic? and Pig Flu Pandemic Update
• Deadly Intersections

The latest case brings up a connection I didn’t stress enough in those previous pieces: the erosion of and human encroachment into animal habitats. As people sprawl into the increasingly small areas into which free-living (aka “wild) animals have been squeezed, the likelihood of viral swapping increases. Ditto when displaced or disoriented animals roam into cities or other human settlements.

January 5th, 2012 | Tags: bird flu, disease, swine flu, zoonoses | Category: Intersections | Comments (1)

Wangari Maathai (1 April 1940 – 25 September 2011)

Derrick Bell (November 6, 1930 – October 5, 2011)

Marti Kheel (August 25, 1948 – November 19, 2011)

Legal scholar Derrick Bell called his 1987 book on the persistence of racial inequality “And We Are Not Saved,” prefacing the text with this Old Testament quotation:

“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”

That was more than ever true after this past anguishing autumn, when we lost three people who devoted their considerable gifts to the challenge of saving us  from ourselves. They were very different people who used different strategies to tackle different problems, but all three shared two characteristics: the ability to see connections and the generous willingness to act in solidarity with others, even at considerable cost to themselves.

Wangari Maathai plants a tree

Wangari Maathai

Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, using literally radical (roots in the ground) direct action to empower women, promote democracy, and restore the ravaged environment by planting trees. These efforts brought her into conflict with Kenya’s dictatorial government of the time, and she suffered both slander and imprisonment before seeing her work bear fruit in terms of improved political, economic, and environmental health for her country. In 2004, the Nobel Peace Prize committee saw what Wangari Maathai had seen 30 years before: Everything depends upon ecology.

The outpourings of grief and commendation following the death of Wangari Maathai were so plentiful and eloquent that I found that I had nothing more to say beyond “I second that emotion.” I was heartened to see how many heartfelt eulogies were written by men and also by how many young women vowed not only to carry the work forward but also to be what Wangari Maathai’s story tells us that any of us can be: Somebody who sees what she is in a position to do and then does it. That’s lucky, because we’re going to need about a million Wangari Maathais to restore the equilibrium of our dangerously unbalanced economies, psychologies, and ecosystems.

To learn more about Wangari Maathai, read her book The Greenbelt Movement or her memoir, Unbowed. The Greenbelt Movement continues and has launched the international “I am the Hummingbird” campaign for people to plant tree’s in Wangari Maathai’s memory.

Derrick Bell

Distinguished scholar and righteous brother (in the truest sense of that term) Derrick Bell authored accessible books on race and rights and broke numerous color bars in his own profession but was most well-known for giving up the power he had worked so hard to get if women were not given equal opportunities. In 1985, he resigned his position as dean of the University of Oregon School of Law in protest of the school’s refusal to hire an Asian-American woman. In 1990, by then Harvard’s most prized professor of law, Bell took an unpaid leave of absence, stating that he would not return to the classroom until the law school hired an African American woman for a tenured position. It took Harvard Law until 1998 to do that, by which time Bell was long-gone–Yup, he actually gave up that job, taking his prestige, scholarship, and teaching abilities elsewhere.

Derrick Bell walking the walk... right out of Harvard

Equality for women will mean that men have to give up some of their unearned privilege. Perhaps for that reason, very few men bother to even talk the talk of women’s rights. Far fewer walk the walk, particularly if it takes them out of their way. Derrick Bell walked. And walked. (He also spoke up for chickens at least once, identifying himself in a letter to KFC as “a person who is concerned about all injustices.”)

Bell’s books are engaging and accessible. As a founder of “Critical Race Theory,” Bell was among the first to bring vivid story-telling into the realm of legal scholarship. If, like most Americans, you’re fuzzy on the details of how the Constitution (and etc.) came to be, you need to read Derrick Bell. I can’t recommend And We Are Not Saved strongly enough. And let’s try to emulate not only Derrick Bell’s willingness to divest himself of unjust privilege but also his dedication to sharing facts and ideas in ways that everybody can understand.

Marti Kheel

From the moment I met Feminist for Animal Rights co-founder Marti Kheel, and throughout our friendship, I was struck by her sincerity in all things. When I say that Marti was sincere, I mean to tender the highest accolade I can give, because I do believe that our chief task in these troubled times is to be true. Marti was exactly what she purported to be without pretense or self-aggrandizement. Marti was a real-deal feminist. She didn’t just write words about women in the abstract. In ways that nobody other than those involved will ever know, she stood strong in solidarity with specific women, offering compassion and support as antidotes to violence. Similarly, Marti was a real-deal animal advocate, consistently putting her professed ethics into practice.

Marti Kheel in2010, lecturing on the intersections between animal liberation and feminism--click the picture to watch the video

We can best remember Marti by being sincere, by which I mean putting our professed values into action. Visit the tribute we published on the VINE Sanctuary blog for ideas about how to remember Marti with action. For a more comprehensive summary of Marti’s work than I can offer, let let me refer you to this tribute co-authored by a number of her more long-standing friends and comrades.

It’s 11:57. 2011 is over. The tides are rising. And we are definitely not yet saved. Solidarity, generosity, and the ability to see connections are the legacies of three activists who died in 2011. What will you do to carry their work forward in 2012?

December 31st, 2011 | Tags: Activism, ethics, Intersections | Category: Activism, Books, Intersections, People I Love | Comments (3)

I was about to blog something sarcastic about the fantasy “War on Christmas” decried by Fox News and the rest of the right when the real news stopped me in my tracks. In Nigeria, Islamic militants bombed three churches, killing dozens and causing “mass carnage” on Christmas Day.

The pictures are arresting: twisted metal, cars on fire, smoldering sheets of roofing.

Witnesses speak of shock and horror: “I came out to the front of the church to see what was happening. I counted 19 bodies myself, many of them mutilated,” said one church-goer.

Listen up, Rick Perry: That’s what real war looks like.

Oh and, by the way, that pesky separation of church and state that so vexes you? That’s what keeps us safe from such sectarian violence. As long as the government stays neutral, neither favoring nor persecuting any particular faith, nobody has to fight about which faith will have the upper hand.

So, let’s quit using words like “war” quite so loosely, because doing so disrespects those who have truly been persecuted.

While we’re at it, let’s get militarism out of our words altogether. Let’s not taint our struggles for peace and freedom with words like “battle,” “front-lines,” and “fight.”

And, for those who really do fear for the future of Christmas, I suggest you start by saving the frankincense trees, the survival of which has been menaced not only by climate change and over-tapping but also by—you guessed it—war.

December 25th, 2011 | Tags: christmas, war | Category: Language, Religion, Violence | Comments (1)

Here we go again.

Last week it was rats and empathy. This week it’s pigeons and math.

Each issue of Science seems to bring news of some fresh cruelty that cleverly demonstrates the cognitive or emotional capacities of non-human animals.

What’s a steadfast animal advocate to do? Cheer the findings? Condemn the methods? Question the researchers’ sanity?

Each newly-found fact—Birds are smart! Rats have feelings!—theoretically represents one more piece of evidence for animal rights.

Or not. Here in the real world, the news that chickens feel empathy did not result in a rush to shun McNuggets.

Because, I say with a sigh, none of this is truly new. People have been living with or near chickens for thousands—literally thousands—of years. We’ve had plenty of opportunities to observe the care they extend to each other and, not infrequently, members of other species. Similarly, inquilines like pigeons and rats have been living among us for as long as we’ve been living in established settlements. We’ve had ample opportunity to observe their prodigious problem-solving capabilities. Many people have published such observations over the centuries.

And yet. And so: As with so many other vexations, our problem is not insufficient data but rather refusal to connect the dots, to do the math, to draw the reasonable conclusions and act accordingly.

This is not to say, by the way, that I believe “rights” (whatever they might be) ought to be dependent on cognitive capacities. I’m simply noting that people who do use alleged human singularity as their justification for claims of legitimate supremacy have not so far been swayed by data demonstrating that non-human animals have language, use tools, are conscious, do math, can be altruistic, and etc. This may be because, whatever they may say, the real justification for their exploitative relationship to animals is simple: Might makes right.

My mind drifts back to last semester, when my students in the community college course I teach on varieties of violence were responding with outrage, as they always do, to the news that there is slavery in their chocolate. Together we brainstormed ways to spread the word and encourage others to join us in boycotting slave-produced consumer goods. Then one young man spoke up from the back of the room.

“You’re all being unrealistic,” he said, “because, if it’s me and I see candy bars on special at three for a dollar, I’m not going to be thinking about those kids in Africa.”

He was right. Some subset of people will quit buying cheap chocolate when they learn that child slavery is the reason it’s so inexpensive. Some subset of people will quit eating eggs when they learn about battery cages. Some subset of people will “go green” once they get the facts about climate change. And one in a thousand (if that many) scientists will quit experimenting on animals once their own findings teach them that their subjects have feelings.

But most won’t.

And so, those of us who hope to spark social change—whether our specific focus is on vivisection, climate change, modern-day slavery, or any of the other evils that menace us—need to spend less time amassing facts and more time addressing the disconnect between what people know and what they do.

One of my own resolutions for 2012 is to focus my own attention on how we might do that. Stay tuned for developments.

December 24th, 2011 | Tags: Birds, Climate, cognition, math, psychology, vivisection | Category: Animals, Birds, Cognition, Psychology, Vivisection | Comments (2)

Michelle Obama is a terrorist. That’s the only conclusion possible after a close reading of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which deems as “terrorism” any coordinated action, including speech acts, that in any way injures any “animal enterprise.”

The New Yorker got in trouble for publishing this cartoon portraying the First Lady as a terrorist, but what if it's true?

Let’s break it down: As has been widely reported, Michelle Obama is currently the figurehead of a coordinated effort to encourage Americans to change their diets. A recent quote from People magazine typifies the message she and her co-conspirators have been broadcasting by all means available to them:

“The overall message of Let’s Move is balance,” she says. “Do we have a vegetable on the plate? Have we incorporated fruit? What’s the portion size? Portion sizes have gotten out of control.”

The title of the article, “Michelle Obama wants you to eat your vegetables” sums up the terroristic aim of this campaign.

Michelle Obama laughs with co-conspirators at a farmer's market

What if Americans do heed their First Lady and begin to make room on their plates for more fruits and vegetables? What will be pushed aside to make room for those insidious asparagus and radical radishes? What if Americans moderate their portion sizes, cutting down their consumption of triple cheeseburgers and super-sized milkshakes?

If even a subset of Americans do this, the fortunes of the purveyors of fruits and vegetables will rise but demand for the products of the meat and dairy industries may decline. And if that happens, Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign becomes a criminal enterprise. A terrorist criminal enterprise.

Perhaps that has already happened. If even one family is now buying less meat due to Michelle Obama’s message, then she has already fallen afoul of AETA.

Luckily for Michelle, the Center for Constitutional Rights has challenged AETA in a  federal lawsuit filed last week. The plaintiffs in the case, Blum v. Holder, assert that AETA represents an unconstitutional infringement on free speech and has, in fact, led them to censor themselves for fear of prosecution.

Michelle Obama directing youthful recruits in the White House kitchen garden... What if she succeeds in training them to grow rhubarb rather than gobble McNuggets?

Michelle Obama hasn’t been censoring herself. She keeps on promoting home vegetable gardens and regular consumption of leafy greens. Barack must be worried.

Which raises the question: What will Eric Holder do? There’s nothing forcing him to defend AETA. Indeed, the White House made news when Obama, citing the unconstitutionality of DoMA, direct the Department of Justice to quit defending it.

He could do the same for AETA. For Michelle’s sake, let’s hope he does.

December 22nd, 2011 | Tags: Obama, terrorism | Category: Activism, Law, Politics, Terrorism | Comments (1)

A new study published in Science demonstrated startling deficiencies in empathy and reasoning among even the most highly educated and otherwise proficient people. The researchers conducting this widely publicized study placed mammals in positions of frightening frustration and then dispassionately sat back and watched to see whether other mammals would come to the rescue—thereby demonstrating their own radical lack of empathy.

When the subjects of their research (who had not consented to participate and were not free to exit the study, however extremely emotionally distressful it became) did indeed set aside self-interest to aid others, the researchers pronounced themselves astonished. Their surprise suggests a significant failure in cognitive processing, given the wealth of preexisting ethological data based on naturalistic observation, not to mention their own plentiful prior opportunities to observe empathy and altruism among non-human mammals.

Whether this failure to compute is due to neurological deficits or to emotional interference remains to be determined. These researchers were highly educated adults affiliated with the departments of psychology, psychiatry, and neurobiology at a major university; this argues against the likelihood of intellectual disability. It appears more likely that the emotion of not wanting to believe that their research subjects also have emotions inhibited their perceptual and cognitive abilities significantly. However, this is not possible to assess without further research into such habitual and highly motivated cognitive lapses.

Similarly, it is not now possible to determine whether these researchers exhibit low levels of activity in the mirror neurons thought to be responsible for empathy or to what degree that deficiency may be shared by others of their species. Although fMRI scans might help to determine the neurological substrate of the radical lack of empathy they demonstrated, we still would not know whether the deficit itself was due to physiological disability—an actual inability to experience empathy—or motivated (albeit unconscious) suppression of that ability.

Further research into these questions is urgently needed, as the cognitive deficits manifested by these scientists figure in many of Homo Sapiens most pressing problems, including the infamous self-centeredness of the “one percent” (lack of empathy) and the ongoing “controversy” over climate change (refusal or inability to draw conclusions from available facts).

December 20th, 2011 | Tags: brain, cognition, empathy, psychology, research, vivisection | Category: Cognition, Psychology, Vivisection | Comments (5)