BOOKS / Alan Wieder : Paul Buhle's 'Radical Jesus: A Graphic History of Faith'

Paul Buhle's 'Radical Jesus':
Comic artists explore the history
and social message of Jesus Christ

By Alan Wieder / The Rag Blog / December 19, 2013

Paul Buhle, the noted historian, author, graphic novel publisher, and editor of Radical Jesus, is Thorne Dreyer's guest on the 200th edition of Rag Radio, Friday, December 20, from 2-3 p.m. (CST). Rag Radio airs and streams live on cooperatively-run KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas, and is rebroadcast and streamed on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA, Sunday at 10 a.m. (EST) and on KPFT's HD-3 Channel in Houston, Wednesday at 3 p.m. (CST). The podcast of this show can be found at the Internet Archive.

[Radical Jesus: A Graphic History of Faith. Paul Buhle, Editor; Sabrina Jones, Gary Dumm, Nick Thorkelson, Artists (2013: Herald Press); Paperback; 128 pp; $24.99.]

Paul Buhle is one of the most prolific and insightful critics from the American left. While his topics at first glance appear incredibly eclectic, closer reading uncovers a sharp focus that thoughtfully challenges class disparity, racism, and imperialism in the United States and throughout the world.

The breadth of his work, even if you consider only his collaborative graphic titles, is mind-boggling as the topics include Che, Yiddishkeit, SDS, the Wobblies, Emma Goldman, FDR, the Beats, and Isadora Duncan. And now, in collaboration with artists Sabrina Jones, Gary Dumm, and Nick Thorkelson, comes Radical Jesus: A Graphic History of Faith.

Like Buhle’s prior books, Radical Jesus investigates the inequalities that exist in the world, historically and presently, but this time through a theological lens. After an introduction, the sections of the book are “Radical Gospel,” “Radical History,” and “Radical Resistance.”

As a focus for reading the book we can assume that liberation theology began with Jesus and carries on at the present time. Each section is illustrated by a different artist but is pulled together by both content and style. As Buhle explains in the Introduction: “The book has been designed with a purposeful color progression from black and white in the first section, to a color choice reminiscent of the illuminated texts of the Middle Ages, to the full color of modern times.”

Combining substance and style, the drawings and text constantly switch between social issues of the past and the present. Interviewed by a reporter for the Brown University newspaper, Buhle said that he wrote the book for the young people involved in the Occupy Movement.

Oh, let’s say I was speaking to those young people. I’m not a person who goes to church. But I was speaking to those young people and to others who were looking for some alternative, there’s one page in the comic that says no to either passivity or violence. For some other way to respond to the crises, and you know, Americans by and large, still, have this religious thing, this mystique. It’s good to think of a way to speak to them in this fashion.

There are numerous poignant frames in Radical Jesus; below are some samples. With stark black and white graphics page 23 in the “Radical Gospel” section, by Sabrina Jones, begins with a priest looking at a dead man lying in the street, “unclean -- better keep away!” Another priest does the same but then comes the Good Samaritan who helps the man who isn’t dead -- who is the Christian.

Stories of Jesus and class disparity continue in this section with a distressing sequence on preaching and religious leaders on page 35, “They preach – But they don’t practice.” Reminiscent of of Bishop Tutu’s story of Europeans coming to Africa: “We had the land and they had the bible. Then they said, ‘Let us pray.’ And we dutifully shut our eyes, and when we said amen at the end and opened our eyes, why, they had the land and we had the bible.”

But of course Bishop Tutu said much more. Corresponding to Radical Jesus:

This God did not just talk... He showed himself to be a doing God. Perhaps we might add another point about God -- he takes sides. He is not a neutral God. He took the side of the slaves, the oppressed, the victims. He is still the same even today; he sides with the poor, the hungry, the oppressed, and the victims of injustice.

Gary Dumm did the “Radical History” section of the book with Laura Dumm and others. This section tells the story of dissent beginning in the 14th Century and concluding with the abolitionists. John Wycliffe, the Anabaptists, Quakers, and the Grimke sisters are introduced with many other people who challenged church hierarchy in the name of social justice. On page 63, Buhle collaborates with Dumm on a story called “Escape from Galley Slavery.”

Some martyrs were burned at the stake, others were drowned, decapitated, had their tongues ripped out, or their mouths filled with gunpowder. To go to a violent death with cold determination or even good cheer was to prove to all present that the believer placed ultimate trust in God’s judgment.

However, these executions were ultimately cynical and class disparately vicious.

French and Belgian royal courts sometimes offered ‘banquets’ for the intended victim the day before the execution. In the city hall, the accused would be compelled to take the seat of honor between the mayor and a local religious leader while being mocked and offered expensive food and wine.

Many a martyr refused to eat or drink!

Drawing by Sabrina Jones
from Radical Jesus.

The last pages of “Radical History” speak to the Quakers in Pennsylvania losing the fight for Indian rights. Two frames appear on page 85 with the first showing Quaker representatives in the Pennsylvania Assembly resigning and walking out of the chambers in protest of oppressive actions to attack Indians.

The second frame, titled “What was Lost,” depicts people in a living room watching a baseball game between the Philadelphia Quakers and New York Iroquois -- shades of Howard Zinn history.

The 39 pages of the book’s last section, “Radical Resistance,” is thick as the art of Nick Thorkelson and the text speak to the many more modern quests for social justice through questions/statements of a grand diversity of people on-the-ground testifying at a faith-based meeting.

The courage of abolitionist Sojourner Truth is portrayed in a story called “Steal Away: Abolitionism and Black Freedom.” We meet those who fought for civil rights in the United States like Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttleworth, Bob Moses, and many people whose names we don’t know.

The New Jim Crow is portrayed on page 104 with Reverend Jeremiah Wright connecting the incarceration of blacks in the United States with the plight of Jesus. On Reverend Wright: “A prophetic voice much maligned in the mainstream media but cherished by the thousands of black churches allied against mass incarceration.”

“Radical Resistance” also tell us of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin’s Catholic Worker movement as a lead into the anti-war actions of the Berrigan brothers -- liberation theology and the work and political assassination in El Salvador of Archbishop Oscsar Romero. All of these accounts of activism conclude with stories of people that we have never heard of who fight for social justice in both their communities and throughout the world -- and there lies the "mission" of Paul Buhle and his collaborators in Radical Jesus.

Buhle writes:

The radicalism of Jesus has nothing to do with men hoarding guns against the imagined threat of black helicopters, or bearded fanatics burning down schools for women. Instead, Jesus goes to the roots of assorted hatreds -- not only our destructive exploitation of humanity but also our plundering of creation. All of life is endangered and we cannot afford these hatreds running rampant much longer.

Radical Jesus provides the stories of models, teachers, for the young people for whom Buhle says the book was written. The book’s portraits, graphics, and text are thoughtful and powerful, and are important not only for young activists, but also for all of us who thoughtfully work for social justice.

[Alan Wieder is an oral historian who lives in Portland, Oregon. His latest book, Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid was published in the United States by Monthly Review Press and in South Africa by Jacana Media. Read more articles by Alan Wieder on The Rag Blog.]

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Tom Hayden : Becoming Two Countries in 2014

Becoming two countries. Image from Shutterstock / sojourners.

The war for America:
Becoming two countries in 2014

Joined by a right-wing Roberts Supreme Court and funded by the likes of the Koch brothers, the Right is consolidating its power on a scale not seen since the Jim Crow era of the Dixiecrats.

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / October 3, 2013

The logic of voter turnout data all but guarantees right-wing Republican congressional victories in 2014 and a sealing of the divide of America into two countries for the foreseeable future.

White House operatives privately acknowledge that GOP gerrymandering plus low turnout make 2014 a war to keep the Senate Democratic and show gains while losing the House. There are eight battleground Senate seats where Mitt Romney won the popular vote in 2012 and incumbent Democrats are either retiring or vulnerable to defeat.

Even if Hillary Clinton manages to win in 2016, the battle for the House will favor the GOP since the current gerrymandered seats will remain intact until 2020, or even 2022. Assuming continued Democratic control of the White House and Senate in 2014, the opportunity to take back the Roberts Supreme Court may not occur until the next presidential term, as Justices Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia are both 77.

President Barack Obama was not wrong when he promised a single "red, white and blue America" in 2008. That is what a majority of registered voters want, but he underestimated the white sea of hate that would be generated from him among Republicans. His electoral advisors concentrated their brilliance on the national electoral map more than the states where Republicans took over in 2010.

Joined by a right-wing Roberts Supreme Court and funded by the likes of the Koch brothers, the Right is consolidating its power on a scale not seen since the Jim Crow era of the Dixiecrats. Progressives, concentrated in Democratic-majority strongholds, will have to think strategically about how to save constituencies which have being left behind enemy lines for most of their lives.

Thanks to Howard Dean's Democracy for America, campaign resources are being invested in Virginia's legislative election this year, with Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Michigan to follow. These potential wins could minimize losses in the long term attempt to salvage the 2010s from a major Republican counterattack on the Thirties, Sixties, and the Obama era. Unfortunately, the failure already has been cemented by the reapportionment process.

The national Democratic strategy, such as it is, is to paint the Republicans as completely irresponsible, even insane, in an effort to encourage defections among moderate white voters and stimulate turnout among worried Democratic voters. While this strategy may be working among moderate voters, it also strengthens the Tea Party in the primaries of Republican districts and states.

The cold facts are these: in presidential election years, voter turnout ranges between 50 and 60 percent, while in mid-term elections it's in the high thirties. In 2010, turnout was 41.6 percent, meaning a disproportionate racial and economic minority took power in the House of Representatives and also gained control of the governors’ post and both legislative houses in 12 additional states. (See Elizabeth Drew's, "The Stranglehold on Our Politics," for a concise summary.)

The behavior of young voters, ages 18 to 29, is a stunning illustration of the pattern. According to the Center of Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, in 2008 youth turnout was 51 percent, which then plummeted to 22.8 percent in 2010, before trending back to 45 percent in 2012.

In 2010, while the Democrats won the popular congressional vote by slightly over 50 percent, GOP candidates were able to win 54 percent of the House seats while losing by 1.4 million votes overall. In Pennsylvania, for example, Democrats won the popular vote by 83,000 but the GOP wrested a 13-5 advantage in House races. In Michigan, Democrats led by 240,000 votes but the GOP took nine of 14 House seats.

Roe v. Wade "may be doomed," writes Drew. The Voting Rights Act already is badly gutted. New state laws are being promulgated in the swing states of Florida, Virginia, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio to make registration and voting as difficult as possible. It appears that any federal action on immigrant rights will include a delay in the path to voting for longer than a decade, preventing several million Latinos from voting, while a military "surge" is being implemented at the southern border.

Federal marriage equality benefits for LGBT couples may be jeopardized in states where gay marriage is banned. North Carolina, an Obama state in 2008, turned Republican by 2010, and is swiftly implementing new restrictions on abortion and voting rights despite massive protests. Arizona continues to be ground zero for vigilantes in the war against undocumented immigrants, and has succeeded in erasing Chicano Studies from state curriculums.

Since 2010 alone, 178 new anti-abortion measures have been adopted or are in the works. Michigan's gerrymandered legislature has successfully passed a right-to-work law. Twenty-seven states are resisting the expansion of Medicaid, and the majority are refusing to set up the insurance exchanges authorized by Obamacare. Those states are becoming "abortion-free zones," right-to-work states, and bastions of a resurrected "sovereignty" for whites and business interests on the defensive.

Public schools will struggle for resources in one America, while re-segregation and home schooling are completed in the other. As for the overriding crisis of climate change, the crisis of "two Americas" means that progress will occur through federal regulation combined with state action. The rest of the country will remain a Coal Zone filled with droughts, wildfires, and official climate denials.

There happens to be some "good news" in this polarization, since the libertarian Right tends to oppose foreign military interventions and Big Brother spying, while supporting the right to be stoned. A de facto coalition of the libertarian Right with the liberal Left has made progress possible on these important fronts.

The Right’s hatred towards Wall Street equals that of the Left. But the chasm on social justice is widening. Young people attracted to Rand Paul, and Ron before him, are ignoring the fact that libertarians would roll us back to the entire system of lunch counter segregation that was the focal point of the civil rights movement. The white "right to refuse service" prevails in their thinking over civil rights and due process protections.

There is no getting around the deep streaks of male chauvinism, Christian Triumphalism, plain racism, and market fundamentalism that mark so much right-wing rumination. Those divides are being institutionalized. Using the tools at their disposal, the right-wing Republicans are not trying to "take over" the United States as much as carve out a virtual country of their own based on states' rights and resistance to the national governing majority. They want to be able to live in an America where Barack Obama is a bad memory of an illegitimate president.

Can anything be done about this? In the short term, it is imperative that Democrats join Howard Dean in trying to retain their Senate majority and make gains against the gerrymandered legislatures. They should support Attorney General Holder in the courtroom battles against voter suppression. They should help make Obamacare succeed in as many states as possible. They should refuse to employ the deceptive terms "red" and “blue."

2016 will be a historic turning point as an American multi-cultural democracy steadily evolves on the basis of a massive demographic shift. Progressives cannot retreat into enclaves as long as millions of Americans are abused in zones under pro-corporate Republican rule.

Regulations established by the Obama administration must be implemented with the full force of the law in every state, not simply half the states. Progressive models can and should be erected in those states which become, in Justice Brandeis’ expression, "laboratories of reform," with climate change regulations being the clearest example.

Battles will rage over voting rights, women's rights, climate and environmental regulations, and immigration between now and 2016. The 2016 election will become a historic referendum on the future of America affecting the entire lifetimes of the younger generation coming of voting age.

Research by Emma Taylor, Research Assistant at the Peace and Justice Resource Center. This article was also posted to Tom Hayden.com .

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource center and editor of The Peace Exchange Bulletin. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Robert Jensen : Truce at the UT Factory

East Mall fountain, University of Texas at Austin. Photo by Frank Jaquier / Flickr.

With truce at the UT factory,
time to face tough choices

More than ever we need a university that refuses to serve power and instead focuses its resources on the compelling questions of social justice and ecological sustainability.

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / September 5, 2013

AUSTIN -- A truce seems to have been negotiated in the long-running skirmish between the University of Texas and its conservative critics. The Board of Regents’ new chairman has toned down the rhetoric and signaled he wants to reduce tensions that have built over the past two years, which suggests that UT president Bill Powers may keep his job, at least for now.

The start of a new school year, along with this lull in the public squabbling (though Lord only knows what is going on behind the scenes), is a good time to step back and evaluate both sides of the debate.

On one side are Gov. Rick Perry and the regents he has appointed. Their basic complaint is that UT isn’t efficient enough in pursuing what they seem to believe is the primary purpose of the modern university: Churning out technologically competent and politically compliant graduates who will take their slots in the corporate capitalist hierarchy without complaining or questioning.

From that perspective, too many resources are being wasted on irrelevant research by a self-indulgent faculty, and the campus needs a president who can crack some professorial skulls.

On the other side are UT officials and supporters in the state Legislature who defend the quality of the instruction and research at the university, invoking the tradition of academic freedom and an intellectually diverse university, and/or Longhorn loyalty.

As a longtime UT faculty member (with tenure, and hence wide latitude to say what I really think), I don’t hesitate to condemn the anti-intellectual attacks coming from right-wing forces that want to undermine genuine critical thinking. But I also recognize that some of the conservative critique is on target -- there is a lot of irrelevant research being done by a lot of self-indulgent professors, though conservatives misunderstand the problem that creates.


Not enough oxygen for critical thinking

Because of both forces -- attacks pushing the university to the right, and faculty complacency -- there’s not enough genuine critical thinking going on at UT, at a time in the world when multiple cascading crises -- economic and ecological -- demand a critical thinking that is tougher than ever.

Stated bluntly: In 21 years of teaching at UT, I have seen how the reactionary politics of the conservatives and self-serving reactions of the faculty have not served students or society very well. The solution isn’t to force the university to become more factory-like or to defend the existing system of evaluating professors. Instead, we should ask: What is real critical thinking, and on what should it be focused?

Let’s start with the roots of the public squabble: Right-wing forces run the United States, and most of the world, but are never satisfied. Corporate profits are healthy and democracy is ailing; the increasing concentration of wealth undermines the radicalizing potential of democratic processes.

But that level of domination is never enough for the masters, and the right-wing has long wanted to shut down spaces where even token resistance is still possible, especially in journalism and education.

Challenges to corporate values are possible in the university, but that doesn’t mean they are widespread. Take one look at the UT catalog -- pay special attention to the economics and business courses -- and you will see the university isn’t exactly on the front lines of the revolution. The University of Texas is a corporately-run institution largely supportive of corporate values.

Where do faculty members fit in all this? The vast majority coexist with that corporate structure and value system, either because they agree with it or because they have decided not to fight. For the past three decades -- after the threat to an “orderly” society that broke out on college campuses in the 1960s was largely contained -- most faculty have been willing to keep their heads down and let individual career interests be their guide.

In science and technology fields, the result has been increased capitulation of research agendas to corporate demands. University research increasingly is valued when it can be turned into profit, the sooner the better, regardless of the effects on society or ecosystems. Basic science that has no immediate profit-potential is allowed, in part because it provides a necessary foundation for more applied work.

In the humanities and social sciences, the result has been a trend not only toward research that serves the master, but toward research that just doesn’t much matter. The most glaring example is the faddishness of so-called “postmodern” approaches to society, in which marginally coherent “theorizing” that is detached from the real world is not only accepted but celebrated.

When I ask students how they react to this allegedly sophisticated material, they usually roll their eyes. To them, it’s just one more part of college that must be endured to get a degree, like standing in line to get forms signed.

In the social sciences, researchers can easily advance careers not by asking important questions about how systems of power work, but by constructing complex models and methodologies that are, again, so allegedly sophisticated that they have to be important. Students also find most of this kind of work annoying, especially when faculty members have a hard time explaining why the articles being assigned are worth plodding through.


Finding our focus

I’m painting with a broad brush, of course. The University of Texas has many outstanding faculty members who care -- both about students and about the state of the world. I have colleagues I respect and from whom I learn. But the mediocrity and mendacity that I am describing is routine, and the system not only allows but rewards it.

If an individual professor breaks out of the system and spends too much time writing in plain language about subjects that potentially threaten the powerful, the career path gets rocky. As a result, most faculty members take the path of least resistance, accepting the conventional politics of the university and their academic disciplines.

I’ve been lucky in my own career, entering academic life more than two decades ago when it was easier to chart an alternative path; being white and male with the accompanying privileges; and getting some lucky breaks from sympathetic colleagues. As a result, I’ve been able to spend my career writing and teaching from a sharply critical perspective, and keep my job.

My focus has been on the human and ecological crises that existing systems of power -- both corporate and governmental -- have created and the problems those systems cannot honestly face, let alone solve.

That’s what I mean by critical thinking: Focusing first on power, and how concentrations of power undermine decent human communities. That focus is more important than ever, as the human species faces new and unique threats to a sustainable future. Climate change, soil erosion, fresh water shortages, chemical contamination, species extinction -- pick a topic in ecology, and the news is bad and getting worse, and our economic system is compounding the problems.

More than ever we need a university that refuses to serve power and instead focuses its resources on the compelling questions of social justice and ecological sustainability. Instead, the University of Texas has been caught up in a struggle with right-wing forces that want to eliminate what little space for critical thinking still exists. Given the siege mentality that this attack produces, critical self-reflection by faculty members is more difficult than ever.

I believe in the power of people to collectively face these problems and turn away from the death cult of contemporary consumer capitalism shaped by corporate values, and I believe that education is an important part of that struggle. I do not believe the University of Texas, as it exists today, is likely to contribute much to that struggle unless it not only fights the right-wing forces but recognizes that it is failing students and society.

To my faculty colleagues who scoff at this analysis, I would say: You are smart people, probably smarter than I, but being smart isn’t everything. Instead of investing time in your building status in academic cliques -- where you spend a lot of energy reminding each other how smart you are -- wade out into the world and let your work be guided by a simple question: How are we humans going to save ourselves and save the planet from ruin? We live in an unsustainable system that was created by systems that concentrate wealth and power. Do we care?

America is burning, and professors have a choice to fiddle or fight.

This article was also published at the Austin Post.

[Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. His latest books are Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialogue and We Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and Speaking Out. His writing is published extensively in mainstream and alternative media. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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John Ross : The Long Night of San Juan Copala

Justicia en San Juan Copola. Photo from Su Propina es mi Sueldo.
Mexico's Gaza:
The long night of San Juan Copala

Much as the Israeli government had warned the organizers of the Freedom Flotilla not to set sail for Gaza, the Governor of Oaxaca advised the activists to turn back or face the consequences. Like their international counterparts on the aid ships, they refused.

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / June 18, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- The volunteers set out in high spirits on their mission to deliver tons of humanitarian aid to a besieged community that had been denied basic necessities for many months. But within sight of their destination, the convoy came under heavy fire from paramilitary gunmen and in the pandemonium that ensued, a much-respected human rights activist and an international observer were killed and a dozen wounded, including several reporters who had accompanied the caravan.

Sound familiar?

But this mission was not headed towards Gaza and the assassins were not Israelis. Rather, the volunteers' goal was to reach the autonomous municipality of San Juan Copala in the remote Triqui Indian zone in the northeastern corner of Oaxaca. 700 Triqui families, about 5,000 villagers, have been denied food deliveries, electricity, and medical and educational services for the past nine months. Phone lines have been cut by the paramilitaries who command the road to Copala.

Much as the Israeli government had warned the organizers of the Freedom Flotilla not to set sail for Gaza, the Governor of Oaxaca advised the activists to turn back or face the consequences. Like their international counterparts on the aid ships, they refused.

When the activists turned off the main highway at La Sabana, a hamlet within miles of their destination this past April 27th, gunmen under the orders of a local cacique (rural boss) Rufino Juarez, the "director" of a paramilitary group dubbed the UBISORT ("United For Social Welfare In the Triqui Region"), and affiliated with outgoing governor Ulises Ruiz, turned their weapons on the caravan.

Indigenous activist Bety Cariño was killed by paramilitary gunmen on April 27, 2010. Photo from ZBlogs.
Many of the volunteers abandoned their vehicles and fled for their lives, taking refuge behind nearby rocks. But Bety Carino, an indigenous activist and defender of native corn and one of the convoy's organizers, fell under a hail of bullets. Finnish solidarity worker Jyri Jaakkola immediately threw himself across Bety's bleeding body, cradling her head in his hands but he too was cut down by the paramilitary fire.

The 33 year-old Jaakkola was the second international activist to be slain under the murderous regime of Governor Ruiz. On October 27, 2006, independent journalist and social justice advocate Brad Will was fatally shot by Ruiz's police at a barricade just outside the state capitol. At least 25 Mexicans were killed by Oaxaca security agents during the seven month-long 2006 uprising that was ignited by a police attack on striking teachers.

Inspired by the teachings of Ricardo Flores Magon, the Oaxaca-born anarchist and an ideologue of the 1910 Mexican revolution, Jyri Jaakkola traveled to Mexico in 2009 as a representative of a Finnish solidarity group to document human rights abuses in that conflictive southern state.

An anarchist himself, Jyri was much influenced by the writings of Murray Bookchin, the late Vermont-based social ecologist, and radical Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose counsel he took to heart when he sought to protect Bety Carino: "solidarity means to put oneself in the place of those that we act in solidarity with."

International activists have journeyed to Mexico to align themselves with social change movements literally for centuries. The Spaniard Javier Mina fought against the Crown for Mexico's Independence in 1821. The "San Patricios," Irish-American volunteers, took up arms against the U.S. invasion of 1846 and were hung for their troubles. U.S. writers John Reed and John Kenneth Turner were significant voices in the landmark Mexican revolution.

The governments that inherited the mantle of the revolution were often thin-skinned and didn't appreciate criticism by non-Mexicans. Article 33 of the 1917 Mexican Constitution gave presidents fiat to deport any "extranjero" (literally "stranger") whose stay in country they considered to be "inconvenient." The Italian-born U.S. photographer Tina Modotti was tossed out of Mexico in 1930 because of her affiliation with the Mexican Communist Party.

In a xenophobic rage during the most incandescent moments of the 1994 Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, President Ernesto Zedillo ordered over 400 non-Mexican human rights observers deported, most of them North Americans, Italians, and Spaniards but at least a few Norwegians too. An entire class of students from Evergreen College in Washington State were 33'd after accompanying the beleaguered farmers of San Salvador Atenco in the May 1, 2003, International Labor Day march.

Much as internationalists Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall were slain by the Israeli Army in Gaza, Jyri Jaakkola and Brad Will left their lives in the blood-drenched soil of Oaxaca. Like the Israeli government, Ulises Ruiz washes his hands of all responsibility. "Who knows what these blue-eyed visitors wanted? Did they come as tourists or to make trouble for us?" he asked reporters after Jaakkola was murdered by his proxy gunsills.

Independent journalist Brad Will was shot in Oaxaca in 2006. Photo from North Coast Journal.
State prosecutor Luz Candalaria Chinas is equally suspicious of the outsiders' intentions, echoing the Israeli government when she described the international volunteers as "troublemakers masquerading as humanitarian aid volunteers."

San Juan Copala, the April 27th caravan's destination, has been wracked by spasms of homicidal violence for decades. The skein of killings stretches back to 1976 when popular community leader Luis Flores was assassinated by unknowns. In March 1984, Amnesty International sent a team into the Triqui region to probe 37 murders of indigenous activists. Most of the victims were affiliated with the Unified Movement of Triqui Struggle or MULT, founded in 1981 to defend 13,000 hectares of woodlands from the depredations of mestizo caciques from nearby Putla de Guerrero.

The next year, the AI team published a report "Human Rights Abuses In Rural Mexico: Oaxaca and Chiapas," the London-based organization's first investigation into pandemic violence in southern Mexico. The report documented "credible allegations" of extra-judicial killings, torture, police abuse, forced confessions, and the failure of authorities to investigate citizens' complaints.

The AI document was instantly rejected by the Mexican government, then controlled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI. Under-Secretary of State Victor Flores Olea (now a columnist for the left daily La Jornada) questioned Amnesty International's "objectivity." Twenty five years later, the governments of President Felipe Calderon and the much-maligned Oaxaca governor Ulises Ruiz have perpetuated this tradition by rejecting every subsequent Amnesty International alert to human rights abuses in the state on similar grounds.

Armed with the Amnesty report, I visited San Juan Copala in the spring of 1987. Tensions were running high. Soldiers from the 28th Military Region, which had been linked to the slaughter of the MULT members, patrolled the dusty streets. I met with the Council of Elders and compared the lists of the dead -- 13 more had been added since the Amnesty International report was formulated.

Later, I climbed a hillside overlooking the town and snapped photos. Abruptly, five soldiers burst out of the bushes and pointed their automatic weapons at my head. Then they confiscated my camera (I protested that I was only photographing some nearby chickens) and escorted me up to the highway with a warning never to return to San Juan Copala.

Today, nearly a quarter century after the initial Amnesty International report, the death toll in the Triqui region has mounted to over 400.

Ever-present tensions in the majority indigenous state of Oaxaca are exacerbated by upcoming July 4th elections to choose Ulises's successor. According to a consensus of polls, the outgoing governor's hand-picked "gallo" (rooster), Eviel Perez of the long-ruling PRI party, is running neck and neck with Gabino Cue, representing an unlikely coalition that includes both the left-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the right-wing PAN, Felipe Calderon's party. The PAN is widely believed to have stolen the 2006 presidential elections from Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the PRD's candidate. Although the PRI ceded national power to the PAN in 2000, it has continued to rule Oaxaca with an iron hand.

Electoral tensions reverberate in San Juan Copala. During the stolen 2006 vote taking, some MULT leaders lined up behind the local Party of Popular Unity (PUP), a puppet of the PRI designed to siphon off votes in indigenous regions from Lopez Obrador and his slate. Soon after, the MULT split and on January 1, 2007, the MULT-Independiente or MULT-I peacefully took power in Copala, declaring the Triqui village an autonomous municipality modeled on Zapatista "autonomias" in Chiapas.

Under provisions of the never-ratified San Andres Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture negotiated between the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and the Mexican government in 1996, majority Indian municipalities would be granted limited autonomy over land, habitat, exploitation of natural resources, the environment, education, health, and agrarian policies. Authorities would be designated by traditional Indian uses and customs and not by political parties. Self-declared autonomous communities in Chiapas, Guerrero, and Mexico state (San Salvador Atenco) have chronically been under the "mal gobierno's" ("bad government's") gun.

Since the MULT-MULTI split and the uptick in the aggressions of Ulises's UBISORT, escalating violence has torn San Juan Copala asunder. Marcos Albino, the human rights representative for the autonomous municipality, counts 25 fresh deaths in the last six months alone.

On May 26th, Timoteo Alejandro Ramirez and his wife Tleriberta, historic founders of the MULT who left the organization in 2006 to form the MULT-I, were murdered at their home in Yosoyuxi near the county seat of Copala. The motives for the double killing remain murky. Ramirez had been accused by political enemies of the disappearances of two Triqui sisters, 14 and 21, whose families are associated with the MULT.

Other victims include two community broadcasters, Felicitas Martinez and Teresa Bautista, slain in April 2009 on the road to Copala. Felicitas and Teresa, protégés of Bety Carino, had a popular call-in show on the local low-watt MULT-I station "The Voice That Breaks the Silence."

Despite years of killing in Copala and a slew of Amnesty International human rights alerts, the federal government and the state of Oaxaca have declined to intervene to halt the violence. "It is between them. It is their silly uses and customs that is responsible for the killings. Only the Triquis themselves can fix this up," Oaxaca prosecutor Chinas argues.

Slain activist Jyri Jaakkola. Photo from kepa.
The shocking violence in the Triqui zone and the murders of Bety Carino and Jyri Jaakkola has had national and international resonance. In early June, the European parliament called upon Mexican president Felipe Calderon to open a through investigation into the deaths of the activists. A new caravan was mounted led by a PRD congressional delegation. Governor Ruiz immediately condemned the renewed effort to deliver humanitarian aid to San Juan Copala as outside interference in the upcoming gubernatorial elections.

On June 8th, 250 activists, many aligned with the Zapatistas' Other Campaign but led by 15 PRD federal deputies, left Mexico City in a seven bus convoy for the 500 kilometer trip to San Juan Copala, hauling 30 tons of food, clothing, and medical supplies. Both the Mexican military and the Oaxaca governor refused to provide protection -- although AG Chinas promised the state would send agents to check the documents of international observers and warned the Caravanistas of the dangers they faced.

Once again, the activists refused to turn back and as in April, the convoy only got as far as La Sabana. The road to Copala was blocked by large boulders. A string of Triqui women under Rufino Juarez's command and backed up by ski-masked paramilitaries with long guns refused to allow the buses to pass. Shots were heard further down the valley. State police who were keeping tabs on the buses bailed out right away. The bus carrying the PRD deputies turned around and headed back to Mexico City, followed reluctantly by the Other Campaign activists.

As in the struggle to break the blockade of Gaza, the solidarity workers are not throwing in the towel -- a third all-women caravan is being planned.

The Israeli Navy's May 31st massacre of nine Turkish pacifists carrying humanitarian supplies to Gaza has triggered a worldwide wave of indignation and Mexico City is no exception. When, during the first week in June, a score of Mexicans gathered outside the Israeli embassy in the affluent western suburbs of this monster megalopolis, half the protesters were Triqui women dressed in their traditional bright red embroidered huipiles that make them look sort of like plump strawberries. Behind the barricaded doors of their embassy, Israeli diplomats must have been baffled.

"What the Israeli government did to the activists bringing aid to Gaza is exactly what Ulisis and his paramilitaries did to us," explained Marcos Espino, "we came here today to offer our solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Gaza. A lot of our people have been killed too."

[John Ross's El Monstruo - Dread & Redemption In Mexico City ("pulsating and gritty" - New York Post) is hunting for a Spanish language publisher. Those in the know can write him at johnross@igc.org.]

• See Dick J. Reavis' review of John Ross' El Monstruo on The Rag Blog.

The Rag Blog

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Jim Rigby : Towards a Radical Christianity

Jesus drives the money changers from the Temple. Image from ETC / University of South Florida.
A Radical Christianity?

I would say any Christian who leaves the fate of the poor to market forces has renounced Christ in every meaningful sense.

By Jim Rigby / The Rag Blog / May 15, 2010

Dr. Jim Rigby, an activist for peace and justice and for gay rights and women's reproductive rights, is pastor of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas. He was interviewed by Alex Doherty of the New Left Project about a radical interpretation of Christianity.

Your journey seems to have been one of increasing politicization but without moving away from religion -- can you describe that journey for us?

To me, religion is a fancy word for how we build our frame of meaning, and politics is just a fancy word for how we treat each other. As a child I learned an apolitical version of Christianity and was duly offended if a preacher ever brought up social issues in a sermon. Religion, I was taught, was a personal relationship with Jesus. So I could sing “Jesus loves the little children," but did not feel any need to confront the possibility that my nation might be dropping napalm on them.

Nor did I consider myself political in college or seminary. Of course, I was political, I just didn’t know it because the religious worldview I had been taught was so in line with the dominant culture that my own politics were invisible to me. In my mind, I was just a white Christian male who happened to worship a white male version of Christ.

I wasn’t selling out consciously, but it was in my interest not to notice the power systems that left me in a place of privilege. By viewing religion as politically neutral, I could disguise the unfair advantages that came from being a white Christian heterosexual male, My complicity with various oppressions was unconscious, but I knew enough not to explore other ways of thinking, so, on some level, I knew what I was doing.

When I began to work with survivors of rape I could feel the role my male privilege played in their trauma. Later, that insight grew to include what my heterosexual privilege meant to gay and lesbian persons. Finally, I came to understand that justice has to include the whole human family. I realize that most leftists have a well deserved contempt for religion, but I personally came to hear the gospel as a call to justice for all people, which is how many oppressed people have heard it from the beginning.

In your sermons, you take biblical stories to have metaphorical but not literal truth. What is a metaphorical approach to reading the bible?

If the Bible were literally true we would not need it. We do not need symbols for things on the surface of our experience, but the more deeply we wish to speak of life, the more we need poetry and ritual. Reason does very well at apprehending special affairs like matter, it is not so good at apprehending time. Symbols describe aspects of life that are invisible at any one moment but play out over time.

As I studied the stories of the Bible I realized that they were often Jewish versions of much older stories. They weren’t about actual people. They were poems about life as a human experiences it. The figures in the stories weren’t historical but allegorical representations of experiential lessons.

Science and history are attempts to describe our experiences from the outside in. Art is the attempt to express those same experiences from the inside out. Religion is that intuitive act that balances those two vital concerns. As the word implies, religion is reconnecting the pieces of our experience into a meaningful whole. We never have enough information, so that effort requires faith. We never can get complete control of events, so it requires hope. We are never completely what we strive to be, so it requires forgiveness and love.

You view the gospels as having a radical message -- how is it then that the Church has so often sided with forces of oppression?

The church was radical for several centuries but was co-opted by the Roman Empire about the time of Constantine. The reason for this hostile takeover is pretty obvious. It is the same reason corporations buy protest songs and turn them into commercials.

Religion deserves much of the blame it receives for historical monstrosities such as the crusades and inquisitions, but more often, religion falls captive to political bullies who use it for very secular purposes. The war in the Middle East isn’t really about religion at all. It is a fight over land hiding behind the cloak of religion. I doubt very seriously that the primary motive for the Crusades was rescuing the holy lands from Islam. I suspect the booty captured by “pious” European kings was much more to the point.

The role of religion in violence may be closer to the role alcohol plays in domestic abuse as a “dis-inhibitor." If you blame abuse on the alcohol, you may be missing the real dynamics of bullying. I think Voltaire was right to say those who believe absurdities are much more likely to commit atrocities, but the real question for me, is can there be a religion that honors reason, science, and universal human rights? If we use “religion” as a synonym for supernaturalism, the answer, obviously, is no. But I think it is a conversation worth having.

What does the word “God” mean to you?

There are many religious forms that do not personify experience using a concept of God at all. Non-theist religion has a rich heritage when it isn’t being burned by theists. So a personal God is not necessary, but it can be a helpful symbol for doing elementary metaphysics -- which is addressing questions like “what’s it all about?” We cannot really answer the question, but our minds will construct some such frame.

Einstein would often use the word “God” as a shorthand metaphysical device, probably to save time and give a charm to his imagery. He did not believe in a personal God, but he found the symbol useful for talking about everything at once. Our minds need a frame to begin the task of understanding our experience. The universe is a boundless verb, but our minds need the closure of nouns. Hegel said religion is putting philosophy in pictures. That’s an over simplification, of course, but it states a truth I think.

“God” is a human symbol that allows us to speak of everything that is too big, too deep, and too strange for our ordinary understanding. In Hebrew, the divine name of God is YHWH which is a verb form of the word “being.” The other names for God are like facets on that one diamond. The point is not to believe in a being, but to illumine various aspects of being itself.

Your Church took the unusual step of accepting a confirmed atheist -- the writer and activist Robert Jensen -- as a member of your congregation. Why did you accept him as a part of your Church? How was his acceptance viewed within and outside St. Andrews?

Robert Jensen was an example of someone who had rejected religion for all the right reasons. When I heard his speeches I felt prophetic principles beneath his disdain for religion. He hated religion for the same reason that the prophets hated the religion of their day.

When Dr. Jensen joined our church, people inside our church were delighted, but many outside the church were quite upset. It was a bit strange. I received hate mail from theists and he received hate mail from atheists. We were ordered to take him off the roles by the next higher level of the church but we refused. Bob has been a tremendous addition to our church and has allowed people to feel much freer in rejecting supernaturalism and challenging the dominant religion of our nation which is, of course, capitalism.

What is your opinion of the so-called "New Atheists" -- in particular Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins?

I have great affinity for atheists like Robert Ingersoll, but some of the people writing bestselling books are like the televangelists of atheism. They completely misunderstand what intelligent religious people are saying. If you assume that the worst of religion represents the rest, then laughing at us is easy. It is easy to refute Pat Robertson, but I’ve yet to hear a convincing argument that the world was poorer because Martin Luther King and Gandhi were religious. Who can’t refute flat earth religion? I’m sure they are good people, but reading their books feels like getting lynched by people who don’t know how to tie a knot.

When I read an atheist like Bertrand Russell I get a very different feeling. His indignation against religion came straight out of his concern for humankind so he knew where to put the scalpel. I also love Monty Python’s attacks on bad religion. The New Atheists feel more like high school bullies making fun of the slow and weak. I agree with most of what they say, but their cruelty toward their frightened and superstitious brothers and sisters is counterproductive. When confronted with ignorance a fool ridicules and a sage teaches.

What is wrong with capitalism from a Christian standpoint?

Theoretically, a Christian could support many types of government, but the core insights of the religion are basically socialist and even, I think, anarchist. Jesus began his ministry by saying “I’ve come to preach good news to the poor, and to announce the acceptable year of God.”

That statement would have been understood as announcing the year of Jubilee, which meant a release of prisoners and a redistribution of the wealth. To pretend Jesus wasn’t political doesn’t make any sense. The Romans wouldn’t have killed him for being a religious leader. Crucifixion was primarily reserved for insurrectionists. The fact that the Romans put “King of the Jews” on his cross was not a religious taunt. It was a threat to any movement of liberation among the people.

Of course, the ancient world didn’t have the word “capitalism” in the modern sense, but they had a word for making money off of interest owed you by your neighbor. It was called “usury” and it was considered a sin. It is a mistake to reduce any religion down to a political position. And it is also wrong to force any religious sectarian viewpoint into the public sphere. But, I would say any Christian who leaves the fate of the poor to market forces has renounced Christ in every meaningful sense.

Much of the religious life consists of ritual. What is the point of religious rituals? What is meant to be achieved by them?

I used to hate rituals. I felt manipulated by them. What I have come to realize is, when they are done voluntarily, rituals can be a way our body comes to understand the symbols in our heads. When birds want to mate they don’t say it with words, they dance. It is written in their bodies. When bees want to tell of far away honey they, too, dance. Our bodies respond to certain movements in a powerful way that rational language cannot touch.

People often think of religious rituals as acts of socialization, but their more important function is to integrate individuals and communities to the circle of life and to help us move through life passages like puberty, marriage, and death. One of the things that makes Americans so easy to frighten is that we do not have rituals that help our bodies understand that death is a part of life and is not to be avoided. Instead of asking people to live without rituals, I believe we should teach the kind of rituals that would help people to recognize the earth as our home, and every human as a part of our family.

Can you recommend some writers on Christianity and religion in general whom you particularly admire.

I was a musician for a while and discovered that those who can talk about music usually can’t make it. Sadly, the same is true for religion. Most theology induces my gagging reflex because religion isn’t supposed to be a special topic of its own. To hear someone talk about religion is like watching someone chew with their mouth open. I would much rather see them absorb the teachings and then demonstrate them in acts of courage and compassion.

Adult religion shouldn’t in the foreground of our lives. It is more the wonder behind our science, the passion behind our art, and the compassion behind our ethics. I love the writings of MLK, Gandhi, and Tolstoy. But I also love an atheist like Carl Sagan who turns science into a hymn. Richard Dawkins has some nice celebrations of nature. Anyone who tunes their instrument to the chord of nature, and becomes a friend of humankind is singing the one hymn written in every human heart.

[This interview was first published May 10, 2010, by the New Left Project.]

Thanks to Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog

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Robert Jensen : The Collapse of Journalism/The Journalism of Collapse

Image from Knight Science Journalism Tracker.
New Storytelling and a New Story:
The Collapse of Journalism/The Journalism of Collapse

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / March 26, 2010

[A version of this essay was delivered as the Lawrence Dana Pinkham Memorial Lecture, Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, India, March 18, 2010.]

There is considerable attention paid in the United States to the collapse of journalism -- both in terms of the demise of the business model for corporate commercial news media, and the evermore superficial, shallow, and senseless content that is inadequate for citizens concerned with self-governance.

This collapse is part of larger crises in the political and economic spheres, crises rooted in the incompatibility of democracy and capitalism. New journalistic vehicles for storytelling are desperately needed.

There has been far less discussion of the need for a journalism of collapse -- the challenge to tell the story of a world facing multiple crises in the realms of social justice and sustainability. This collapse of the basic political and economic systems of the modern world, with dramatic consequences on the human and ecological fronts, demands not only new storytelling vehicles but a new story.

In this essay I want to review the failure of existing systems and suggest ideas for how to think about something radically different, through the lens of journalists’ work. The phrase “how to think about” should not be interpreted to mean “provide a well-developed plan for”; I don’t have magical answers to these difficult questions, and neither does anyone else.

The first task is to face the fact that every problem we encounter does not necessarily have a solution that we can identify, or even imagine, in the moment; that identifying how existing systems have failed does not guarantee we have the capacity to devise new systems that will succeed.

This is a realistic attitude, not a defeatist one. The lack of a guarantee of success does not mean the inevitability of failure, and it does not absolve us of our responsibility to struggle to understand what is happening and to act as moral agents in a difficult world. In fact, I think such realism is required for serious attempts at fashioning a response to the crises.

The eventual solutions, if there are to be solutions, may come in frameworks so different from our current understanding that we can’t yet see even their outlines, let alone the details. This is a time when we should be focused on “questions that go beyond the available answers,” to borrow a phrase from sustainable agriculture researcher Wes Jackson.

The old story

Before taking up that challenge, I want to identify the story that dominates our era, what we might call the story of perpetual progress and endless expansion. This is the larger cultural narrative in which specific stories that appear in journalistic outlets are set. Charting the whole history of this story is beyond the scope of this essay, so I will confine myself to the post-WWII era in which I have lived, when this progress/expansion story has dominated not only in the United States and other developed countries but most of the world.

This story goes like this: In the modern world, human beings have dramatically expanded our understanding of how the natural world works, allowing us not only to control and exploit the resources of the non-human world but also to find ways to distribute those resources in a more just and democratic fashion. The progress/expansion story assumes we have knowledge -- or the capacity to acquire knowledge -- that is adequate to run the world competently, and that the application of that knowledge will produce a constantly expanding bounty that, in theory, can provide for all.

The two great systems of the post-WWII era that were in direct conflict -- the capitalist West led by the United States and the communist East led by the Soviet Union -- shared an allegiance to this story, that humans had the ability to understand and control, to shape the future, to become God-like in some sense.

Even in places that carved out some independence in the Cold War, such as India, the same philosophy dominated, evidenced most clearly in big dam projects and the Green Revolution’s model of water-intensive, chemical farming.

The failure of the communist challenge was said to be “the end of history,” a point where the only work remaining was the application of our technical knowledge to lingering problems within a system of global capitalism and liberal democracy. Even with the widening of inequality and the clear threats to the ecosystem from human intervention, the progress/expansion story continues to dominate, bolstered by a widely held technological fundamentalism (more on that later).

The bumper-sticker version of this philosophy: More and bigger is better, forever and ever.

There’s one slight problem: If we continue to believe this story, and to base individual decisions and collective policies on it, we will dramatically accelerate the drawdown of the ecological capital of the planet, hastening the point at which the ecosystem will no longer be able to sustain human life as we know it at this level. In the process, we can expect not only more inequality, but in times of intense competition for resources, a dramatic increase in social conflict.

This critique cannot be dismissed as hysteric apocalypticism; it is a reasonable judgment, given all the evidence. The progress/expansion story has left us with enduring levels of human inequality that violate our moral principles and threaten to undermine any social stability, and an endangered ecosystem that threatens our very survival. Whatever systems and institutions we devise to replace those at the root of these problems, the underlying progress/expansion narrative has to change.

The collapse of journalism

In the United States, it is clear that at least in the short term, there will be fewer professional journalists working in fewer outlets with fewer resources for reporting. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism sums it up in its 2010 State of the News Media report: “[W]e estimate that the newspaper industry has lost $1.6 billion in annual reporting and editing capacity since 2000, or roughly 30 percent. That leaves an estimated $4.4 billion remaining. Even if the economy improves we predict more cuts in 2010.” Newspapers are hurting the worst, but there is no good news from any news media.

That loss of capacity comes from plunging ad revenues: In 2009, ad revenue fell 26 percent for U.S. newspapers, including online, bringing the total loss over the past three years to 43 percent. Local television ad revenue fell 22 percent, triple the decline the year before. Other media also saw a decline in ad revenue: radio, 22 percent; magazine, 17 percent; network TV, 8 percent (for network news alone, probably more).

Online ad revenue overall fell 5 percent, and revenue to news sites most likely also fared much worse. Cable news was the only commercial news sector keeping its head above water, barely, according to the report.

Revenue is down, and so are audiences. The PEJ study reports audience growth only in digital and cable news, with declines in local TV and network news. Print newspaper circulation fell 10.6 percent in 2009, and since 2000, daily circulation has fallen 25.6 percent.

This decline is also reflected in employment. According to a report by UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc., there was a 22 percent increase in the journalism jobs lost from September 2008 through August 2009, compared with a general job loss rate of 8 percent. The news industry shed 35,885 jobs in a one-year period straddling 2008 and 2009.

Despite experiments with new ways to organize and support journalists -- including grant-funded news operations such as Pro Publica, university/newsroom partnerships, citizen journalism collaborations with professional newsrooms, and various web projects -- it is clear that, at least in the short term, there simply will be less journalism created by professional journalists.

It also seems clear that of the journalism remaining, a growing percentage is of less value to the project of enhancing democracy. I don’t want to pretend there was a golden age when professional journalism provided the critical and independent inquiry that citizens need to function as citizens.

For reasons articulated by critics such as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, contemporary professional journalism is hamstrung by institutional and ideological constraints that have been built into professional practices. As a result, corporate news owners rarely have to discipline mainstream journalists, who are socialized to accept the ideological prison in which they work and police other inmates.

But even with that rather large caveat, the slide of much of contemporary journalism into banality is frightening. Of public affairs journalism, we might paraphrase an old joke about hard-to-please restaurant patrons: “The food is awful here,” one says, and the friend replies, “Yes, and they’ve reduced the portions.”

The markers of this slide in quality are clear enough: An obsession with entertainment and sports, especially large-scale spectacles; routine exploitation of sexuality and violence in ways corrosive to human dignity; an endless fascination with celebrity, with the standards of what constitutes celebrity continually dropping; and a growing imposition of those spectacle and celebrity values on public affairs.

This is not a screed against entertainment, pleasure, fun, or the people’s desire to gain pleasure from fun entertainment. It is not an attempt to glorify the rational and devalue the emotional. It is not a self-indulgent lament that the kind of journalism I prefer is losing out. It’s an accurate description of our increasing numbed-out and intellectually vapid culture.

How much of this collapse of journalism is driven by the explosion of news outlets in a 24-hour news cycle, as an ever-larger media beast demands to be fed? How much is a product of bottom-line-focused news managers’ longstanding obsession with producing the extraordinary profits demanded by top-floor-dwelling executives? How much is panic caused by these dramatic drops in audience and revenue by so-called legacy media, leading to desperation in programming?

Whatever the relative weight of these causes, the effect is clear: In the mainstream outlets through which most people in the United States get their news, there is less journalism relevant to citizens’ role in a democracy and more journalism-like material that dulls our collective capacity for independent critical thinking. If journalists had only to struggle to return to some previous state in which they did a better job, that would be hard enough. But journalists can’t be satisfied with striving toward standards from the past. A new journalism is needed.

The journalism of collapse

The immediate crises that journalism and journalists face -- some rooted in the pathology of professionalism and its illusory claims to neutrality, and some rooted in the predatory nature of capitalism and its illusory commitment to democracy -- are serious, but in some sense trivial compared to the long-term crises in a profoundly unjust and fundamentally unsustainable world. We have to deal with the collapse of journalism, but we also must begin to fashion a journalism of collapse.

To reiterate my basic premise: Whatever the specific story being told in modern journalism, those stories typically are set in that larger narrative of perpetual progress and endless expansion. What kind of story is needed for a world that desperately needs to rethink its idea of progress in a world that is no longer expanding?

Here’s the story: On March 17, 2051, the world will pump its last easily accessible barrel of usable oil. By that time, cancer directly attributable to human-created toxicity will kill 125 million people per year, while major disruptions in the hydrological cycle will so dramatically reduce the amount of fresh water that 18.9 percent of the human population will die each year as a direct result.

On June 14, 2047, exactly half of the area of the world’s oceans will be dead zones, incapable of supporting significant marine life. Three and a half years later, topsoil losses will have reached the point where even with petrochemical based fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, yields will drop by 50 percent on the most fertile soil and fall to zero on soil that has effectively gone sterile due to contamination and compaction.

But there won’t be any petrochemicals anyway, because there won’t be any oil. And there won’t be enough water. And so there won’t be enough food. And getting reliable broadband internet service will be difficult.

OK, that was all meant to be funny. That, of course, is not the story. The story we need to tell won’t be focused on predictions about specific aspects of collapse. I have no doubt that if the human community continues on its present trajectory, such statistics will be all too real. I have no doubt that if the human community does not change that trajectory in substantial ways fairly soon, the future will be grim.

But rather than scurrying to make specific predictions, journalism should struggle to help people understand the processes that make that preceding paragraph plausible, and hence not funny at all. There’s little humor in the recognition that continued commitment to an ideology of perpetual progress and endless expansion -- operationally defined as ever greater human consumption of the ecological capital of the planet -- is a dead end. More and bigger not only is not better, it is not possible.

The response I often get to this view is the assertion that we need not worry about the physical limits of the planet because human ingenuity will invent increasingly clever ways of exploiting those resources.

This technological fundamentalism -- the belief that the use of evermore sophisticated high-energy, advanced technology is always a good thing and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be remedied by more technology -- is more prevalent, and more dangerous, than religious fundamentalism. History teaches that we should be more cautious and pay attention to the unintended effects of such technology with an eye on the long term.

The fundamentalists believe the future is always bright, apparently because they wish it to be so. But the desire to live in an endless expanding world of bounty -- a desire found both in those who currently have access to that bounty and those who don’t but crave it -- is not a guarantee of it. We certainly know this at the individual level, that “you can’t always get what you want,” as the song goes, and what holds for us as individuals is also true for us as a species.

Those of us who question such declarations are often said to be “anti-technology,” which is a meaningless insult designed to derail serious discussion. All human beings use technology of some kind, whether stone tools or computers. An anti-fundamentalist position is not that all technology is bad, but that the introduction of new technology should be evaluated carefully on the basis of its effects -- predictable and unpredictable -- on human communities and the non-human world, with an understanding of the limits of our knowledge to control the larger world.

So the first step in crafting a new narrative for journalists is to reject technological fundamentalism and deal with a harsh reality: In the future we will have to make due with far less energy, which means less high-technology and a need for more creative ways of coping. Journalists have to tell stories about what that kind of creativity looks like. They have to reject the gee-whizzery of much of the contemporary science and technology reporting and emphasize the activities of those with a deeper ecological worldview.

There also is a corresponding need to tell stories about redefining our concept of the good life. Again, the basics are in pop songs: “all you need is love,” and “money can’t buy you love.” We all agree, yet that narrative of progress/expansion is rooted in the belief that acquisition and consumption are consistent with a good life, or perhaps even required for it.

Central to that redefinition is accepting that collectively we have to learn to live with less. In a world with grotesque inequalities in the distribution of wealth, some of our sisters and brothers are already living with less -- less than what is required for a decent life, which reflects the unjust nature of our social systems.

For those of us in the more affluent sectors, the question is not only whether we will work for a more just distribution within the human family, but how we respond when the world imposes stricter limits on us all.

Living with less is crucial not only to ecological survival but to long-term human fulfillment. People in the United States live with an abundance of most everything -- except meaning. The people who defend the existing system most aggressively are typically either in the deepest denial, refusing to acknowledge their culture’s spiritual emptiness, or else have been the privileged beneficiaries of the system. This is not to suggest that poverty produces virtue, but to recognize that affluence tends to erode it.

A world that steps back from high-energy, high-technology answers to all questions will no doubt be a harder world in some ways. But the way people cope without such technological “solutions” can help create and solidify human bonds. Indeed, the high-energy/high-technology world often contributes to impoverished relationships as well as the destruction of longstanding cultural practices and the information those practices transmit.

Stepping back from this fundamentalism is not simply a sacrifice but an exchange of a certain kind of comfort and easy amusement for a different set of rewards. We need not romanticize community life or ignore the inequalities that structure our communities to recognize that human flourishing takes place in community and progressive social change doesn’t happen when people are isolated.

Telling this story is important in a world in which people have come to believe the good life is synonymous with consumption and the ability to acquire increasingly sophisticated technology. The specific stories told in the journalism of collapse will reject technological fundamentalism and aid people in the struggle to redefine the good life.

Journalists need not merely speculate about these things; across the United States people are actively engaged in such projects. Though not yet a majority, these people are planning transition towns, developing permaculture systems, creating community gardens, reclaiming domestic arts that have atrophied, organizing worker-owned cooperative businesses. They are experimenting with alternatives to the dominant culture, and in doing so they are, implicitly or explicitly, rejecting technological fundamentalism and redefining the good life.

This journalism of collapse I am proposing would include stories about the problems we face, the harsh reality of a contracting world of less energy. But it also would include stories about people’s experiments with new definitions of progress and the good life. Such an approach to journalism would not only highlight the threats but also shine a light on the way people are coping with the threats.

Journalism in the prophetic voice

I would call this kind of storytelling “journalism in the prophetic voice,” borrowing a theological term for secular purposes. I prefer to speak about the prophetic voice rather than prophets because everyone is capable of speaking in the voice; the prophetic is not the exclusive property of particular people labeled as prophets.

I also avoid the term prophecy, which is often used to describe a claim to be able to see the future. The complexity of these crises makes any claim to predict the details of what lies ahead absurd. All we can say is that, absent a radical change in our relationship to each other and the non-human world, we’re in for a rough ride in the coming decades. Though the consequences of that ride are likely to be more overwhelming than anything humans have faced, certainly people at other crucial historical moments have faced crises without clear paths or knowledge of the outcome. A twenty-five-year-old Karl Marx wrote about this in a letter to a friend in1843:

The internal difficulties seem to be almost greater than the external obstacles. ... Not only has a state of general anarchy set in among the reformers, but everyone will have to admit to himself that he has no exact idea what the future ought to be. On the other hand, it is precisely the advantage of the new trend that we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one.

We should understand the prophetic as the calling out of injustice, the willingness not only to confront the abuses of the powerful but to acknowledge our own complicity. To speak prophetically requires us first to see honestly -- both how our world is structured by illegitimate authority that causes suffering beyond the telling, and how we who live in the privileged parts of the world are implicated in that suffering. In that same letter, Marx went on to discuss the need for this kind of “ruthless criticism”:

But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.

To speak prophetically is to refuse to shrink from what we discover about the injustice of the world. It is to name the wars of empire as unjust; to name an economic system that leaves half the world in abject poverty as unjust; to name the dominance of men, of heterosexuals, of white people as unjust. And it is to name the human destruction of Creation as our most profound failure. At the same time, to speak prophetically is to refuse to shrink from our own place in these systems. We must confront the powers that be, and ourselves.

Another prominent historical figure put it this way in 1909: “One of the objects of a newspaper is to understand the popular feeling and to give expression to it; another is to arouse among the people certain desirable sentiments; and the third is fearlessly to expose popular defects.” That was Mohandas Gandhi, on the first page of Hind Swaraj.

Those tasks -- attempting to understand and give expression to what ordinary people feel, and then advocating progressive goals, while at the same time exposing problems in the culture -- are not likely to make one’s life easy. Journalists willing to take this position will find themselves in a tense place, between a ruling elite that is not interested in seriously changing the distribution of power and a general public that typically does not want to confront these difficult realities of collapse.

To speak from a prophetic position is to guarantee that one will find little rest and small comfort. Such is the fate of a commitment to truth-telling in difficult times, and times have never been more difficult.

But others have faced similar challenges. Looking to the tradition in the Hebrew Bible, the prophets condemned corrupt leaders and also called out all those privileged people in society who had turned from the demands of justice, which the faith makes central to human life. In his analysis of these prophets, the scholar and activist Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel concluded:

Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible. If we admit that the individual is in some measure conditioned or affected by the spirit of society, an individual’s crime discloses society’s corruption. In a community not indifferent to suffering, uncompromisingly impatient with cruelty and falsehood, continually concerned for God and every man, crime would be infrequent rather than common.

That phrase, few are guilty but all are responsible, captures the challenge of the journalism of collapse. We can easily identify those powerful figures guilty of specific crimes. Who is guilty in perpetrating the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq? That’s easy -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice. Who is guilty in the bailout of Wall Street and the big banks: That’s easy, too -- Bush and Obama, Paulsen and Geithner, Bernanke and the boys. One task of journalists is to pursue the guilty, perhaps with a bit more fervor than contemporary U.S. news media; our journalists are too polite in handling war criminals and servants of the wealthy.

But when we look at the fragile state of the world, in some sense our future depends on recognizing that we all are responsible, depending on our status in society and resources available to us. Those of us in affluent sectors of society have the most to answer for, and the task of journalists is to raise questions uncomfortable for us all. This will rarely make journalists popular, but that also is not new. In each of the four Gospels, Jesus reminds us: “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.” (Mark 6:4)

Since journalism has never really been an honorable profession, perhaps that makes us the perfect candidates for raising our voices prophetically.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009); Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); and The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing. Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online here.]

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BOOKS / Progressive Giants : Celebrating Paul Robeson and Anne Braden

Two books about two progressive giants:
Celebrating Paul Robeson and Anne Braden

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / March 25, 2010

The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative. -- Paul Robeson, 1937.

…there are no heroes in this story…no villains…only people, the product of their environment, urged on by forces of history they often do not understand. -- Anne Braden, 1958

The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: Quest for Freedom, 1939-1976, by Paul Robeson Jr. (Wiley, January 26, 2010); Hardcover, 432 pp., $35.00.

Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South, by Catherine Fosl (The University Press of Kentucky,August 25, 2006); Paperback, 464 pp., $26.95.

Biographies can tell us about ourselves, where we came from, and where we might go. I recently read two narratives of the lives of extraordinary people and their times. I think their lives and politics are relevant to us today.

The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: Quest for Freedom, 1939-1976, by Paul Robeson Jr., chronicles the years of struggle in the life of the theatrical performer, singer, linguist, and fighter for human freedom. Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South, by Catherine Fosl, tells the story of a militant Southern woman who rejected the political culture of her day to fight for the liberation of African Americans, always insisting that Southern whites had to play a significant role in that struggle.

Paul Robeson, born in 1898, in Princeton, New Jersey, only the third African American to attend Rutgers University, graduated with academic honors and all-American football status. He received a law degree from Columbia University but gravitated to the theater, the concert hall, film, and linguistics. As his world renown grew, Robeson became politically engaged. In 1937 he declared at a fund raiser for the brigadistas fighting the Spanish fascists that “the artist must take sides.”

Over the remaining 40 years of his life he fought alongside others at home and around the world against colonialism, racism, class exploitation, and imperialism. While he symbolized to the world the struggle for a humane socialist future for all, he became the number one target of racism and anti-communism at home.

Anne Braden, although younger than Robeson, led a parallel life of political activism. She was born in 1924 in Louisville, Kentucky, to a traditional Southern family. Schooled in the values of Southern womanhood, she increasingly saw the white supremacist south as an evil that not only repressed African Americans but served as an impediment to the achievement of human liberation for people everywhere.

She pursued a career as political organizer and journalist, publishing the invaluable periodical, The Southern Patriot. She, with her husband Carl Braden, spent years organizing against racial segregation. Her struggle repeatedly encountered racists who opportunistically used anti-communism to protect their white privilege.

The differences in the backgrounds of these two progressive giants are obvious, but the biographies referred to above illuminate fascinating parallels. First, both Robeson and Braden were raised in political cultures that were hostile to social justice. Each was raised in a supportive though sometimes stern family. The world beyond their immediate families was driven by racism. Robeson experienced it as an object. Braden experienced racism as a person being socialized to accept and endorse it.

Second, through a multiplicity of associations and experiences both came to realize that racism was not only an impediment to their own development as full human beings but was also an impediment to the development of all humanity. Consequently, at relatively young ages, Robeson and Braden came to the view that they must devote their lives to the struggle against racism.

Third, both Robeson and Braden realized in their struggles that capitalism as an economic system stood in the way of human liberation. They understood that the capitalist mode of production was built on the backs of workers. Racism, they understood, was used by capitalists to divide workers who together could organize to create a more humane society.

Fourth, Robeson and Braden accepted as a basic premise of their political work the proposition that human solidarity was a necessary if not sufficient condition for the creation of a humane society. Robeson wrote in his autobiography, Here I Stand, that underlying the world’s diverse folk music traditions there was a common musical form, a pentagonal chord structure. To Robeson this shared chord structure mirrored the fundamental oneness of humankind.

Anne Braden, saw human beings as shaped by their environments. Her own upbringing in a segregated society shaped her consciousness, but circumstances made her realize that people can liberate themselves by organizing resistance to that society. Racism has its roots in economic and political structures, and people are “urged on by forces of history they often do not understand.” But they can come to recognize and oppose those institutions that oppress others and by extension, themselves.

Fifth, both Robeson and Braden committed their lives to organizing against capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and racism. For them this meant crossing racial lines, participating in union struggles, linking struggles for civil rights with struggles for civil liberties, and unabashedly working with the Left to bring about social change.

Finally, Paul Robeson and Anne Braden became two of the most despised political activists in Cold War America.

Robeson returned to the United States from a long sojourn in Great Britain during much of the 1930s to an America ready to embrace his music and theatrical performances. His classic radio broadcast, “Ballad for Americans,” was heard by millions of Americans.

But after World War II, Robeson turned his attention more toward fighting racism (lynchings, segregated institutions such as baseball, and white supremacy in the South), opposing colonialism, supporting the expansion of the right of workers to join unions, and promoting peace. In the context of the emerging Cold War the former celebration of his life and work turned to anger against him.

In the 1950s, the State Department pulled his passport so he could not travel overseas. He lost his audiences and livelihood as hundreds of his previously scheduled concerts were canceled. Even African American churches were reluctant to host a Robeson concert for fear of government reprisal.

Anne and Carl Braden purchased a home in Louisville in the 1950s and sold it to an African American family. The property was in an all-white neighborhood. This generated a massive campaign to keep the family from occupying their house. The campaign was leveled at the Bradens for their work against segregation as much as against the African American family.

After an extended public trial characterized by charges of Communist subversion Carl Braden was sentenced to prison for “sedition” based on an arcane Kentucky law. Subsequent to the trial and incarceration, virulent anti-communism dogged most organizing campaigns embraced by the Bradens.

The Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), which the Bradens led, was always viewed with suspicion. Anti-communism even crept into the politics of the civil rights movement as it blossomed in the late 1950s. Despite the virulence of it, which usually was linked with racism, Anne Braden became an inspirational force among the young SNCC organizers in the South in the early 1960s, along with Ella Baker. Anne Braden took particular responsibility for building white activism around civil rights.

In the end, anti-communist campaigns, such as those against Robeson and Braden, were used as tools by racist forces to demean, delegitimize, and split the working class and youth and to defeat progressive forces. Anti-communism and the defense of white supremacy became inseparable.

How do we assess the roles of Paul Robeson and Anne Braden in historical perspective? They participated as leaders, as intellectual and moral inspirations at a time when the working class was on the move in the 1930s and 1940s, and civil rights activism spread in the 1950s. As workers mobilized to demand the right to form unions, Robeson was there. Braden committed her life to the struggle against racism and she saw Black/white unity as basic to victory.

Both participated in struggles with allies from the organized Left, particularly with members of the Communist Party USA.

Finally, and most critically, Robeson and Braden participated in and advanced a politics of the Popular Front. Popular Front politics began with a commitment to class struggle. It was based on the presumption that racism was the central barrier to social change. And Popular Front politics prioritized commitments to broad-based networking among people and groups who engaged in a whole array of peace and justice issues.

Are there lessons from these lives for us today? I believe so. Robeson and Braden taught us that the pursuit of social change was a lifetime activity. And they demonstrated to us that our political work must engage the broadest range of issues and the greatest numbers of people in our struggles for a humane future. These two biographies tell insightful and inspiring stories that everyone interested in social change should read.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

Find:

• The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: Quest for Freedom, 1939-1976, by Paul Robeson Jr., on Amazon.com
• Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South by Catherine Fosl, on Amazon.com

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