Here’s a cool new thing (to me) for 2014, that I heard on the radio last week.
Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement
Wangari Maathai (1940-2011) was founder of the Green Belt Movement, 2004 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the subject of this terrific documentary I watched last night, Taking Root: the Vision of Wangari Maathai:
Her simple act of planting trees grew into a nationwide movement to safeguard the environment, protect human rights, and defend democracy in Kenya.
Their workshop topic of the ‘Wrong Bus Syndrome’ remains particularly applicable throughout the world.
Proof of a Common Goal
Via Informed Comment, Nelson’s Mandela’s declaration to the court as his trial began in pretoria at the Supreme Court of South Africa, April 20, 1964:
I am the first accused. I hold a bachelor’s degree in arts and practised as an attorney in Johannesburg for a number of years in partnership with Oliver Tambo. I am a convicted prisoner serving five years for leaving the country without a permit and for inciting people to go on strike at the end of May 1961.
At the outset, I want to say that the suggestion that the struggle in South Africa is under the influence of foreigners or communists is wholly incorrect. I have done whatever I did because of my experience in South Africa and my own proudly felt African background, and not because of what any outsider might have said. In my youth in the Transkei I listened to the elders of my tribe telling stories of the old days. Amongst the tales they related to me were those of wars fought by our ancestors in defence of the fatherland. The names of Dingane and Bambata, Hintsa and Makana, Squngthi and Dalasile, Moshoeshoe and Sekhukhuni, were praised as the glory of the entire African nation. I hoped then that life might offer me the opportunity to serve my people and make my own humble contribution to their freedom struggle.
Some of the things so far told to the court are true and some are untrue. I do not, however, deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness, nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of my people by the whites.
I admit immediately that I was one of the persons who helped to form Umkhonto we Sizwe. I deny that Umkhonto was responsible for a number of acts which clearly fell outside the policy of the organisation, and which have been charged in the indictment against us. I, and the others who started the organisation, felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the government. We chose to defy the law.
We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.
Mandela 1918 – 2013
Rest in peace. I’ll never forget going to see him on his U.S. tour after his release. More on that later. Now, grief.
Origins of the Distrust
It can be argued that the seeds of the distrust we have for government, and especially government commissions, were purchased on this day, 50 years ago. There were watered by the Warren Commission as it tried to not explain just what had happened to a popular, sitting U.S. President in broad daylight. And by the time we arrived at Watergate and the Church Commission, those lusty seeds were in full bloom. Pierce:
One argument with which I have no patience is that the distrust of the Warren Commission, a distrust that has remained remarkably consistent for five decades, is based in our disbelief that a great leader could be gunned down by an ordinary schmoe with a cheap rifle. This. we are told, is too much for our delicate sensibilities to handle. This is arrant, infantilizing nonsense. At the time of his death, John Kennedy had a national security establishment that was a writhing ball of snakes. (Not for nothing did he insist that his White House cooperate with the filming of Seven Days In May.) There were the ongoing plots against Castro in which his brother was intimately involved. There is a contemporary memo for something called Operation Northwoods that called for what we would now call “false flag” operations within the United States, including blowing up John Glenn on the launching pad in Florida, that could be blamed on Cuba and used as a pretext to invade. You can see a copy of it in the John F. Kennedy Library. Since then, we have seen Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra. Richard Nixon sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks to help him get elected, and Ronald Reagan’s people may have done the same thing with the release of the hostages in Iran. Don’t tell this generation that we don’t believe the Warren Commission out of some mushy, mythical notion of proportionality. There is no proportionality to the deceptions involved in official murder. We’ve read enough Graham Greene to know that. We watched enough happen on the television. We can see a church by daylight.
An author friend wrote a book about the Kennedy assassination, and just a few of our conversations convinced me that it was a conspiracy without end – one for which it is even difficult to find the beginning. And it still hangs there, as we do, bound by its purposeful mysteries, unable to move forward in many ways because of them. We are a resilient country with a odd penchant for renewable Original Sin.
Young or old
We are often willing to believe anything, especially when we want to believe it. I had friends in France – and still have them, actually – who told me at the time that Armstrong was on drugs and I refused to believe it, was offended by the notion, in fact. It was such a great story. And fun to watch. And we saw the USPS team in four different stages in various years. I held green boy up on my shoulders amid the throngs and snapped great photos on the Champs Elysée. And it was all a lie.
The photos are still great, and their frames durable, but now they’re just about the memories. Maybe they always were.
SNAP!
Because we firmly believe that benefits to poor people are far too generous and the source of a kind moral hazard that just doesn’t never cannot affect rich people, we’re cutting food stamp benefits today into a bunch of confetti and dropping it on now-hungry people from great heights:
Food stamp benefits will be cut to more than 47 million Americans starting Friday as a temporary boost to the federal program comes to an end without a new budget from a deadlocked Congress to replace it.
Under the program, known formally as the Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program, or SNAP, a family of four that gets $668 per month in benefits will find that amount cut by $36.
SNAP, which benefits one in seven Americans, is administered by the Department of Agriculture and is authorized in a five-year omnibus farm bill covering all agricultural programs.
Vulnerable populations will be hardest hit by the cuts. In New York, more than 1 million elderly people or those with disabilities will feel the impact, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank. About 2.3 million children in both California and Texas will be affected.
Nausea-inducing. Worse, actually. There are (rich) people all around this country who are happy and proud about this fact, and who will eat (parts, not even all of – they’ll throw away significant portions) sloppy breakfasts and then piously dress themselves for church on Sunday, where they will go to hear neatly condensed stories about a man who would be disgusted by the contempt for the poor that undergirds support for these cuts. And lo, none of this will occur to them, as they check cheap watches on fat writs and wonder what’s taking the preacher so long. Because they are ready to eat.
Do What You Should
As others on the internets have decried, Mr. Reed’s passing deserves more than an RIP post and a video. Much more. Here goes.
I like the Eno quote that only about 30,000 people bought the first VU record, but all of them started bands. I can trace the lineage of my own projects through at least a few dozen of these early adopters, as we would refer to them now. SNAIL played a version of What Goes On for years as part of our set, even as other songs got replaced by newer, better ones. That one seemed to never go out of rotation – and I sure hope now that we did it some measure of the justice it did us.
(Far) Too young to have have seen the Velvets, I did see Lou Reed perform once, as part of the big, weird Amnesty International shows in 1985. It was one of six shows that took place in the U.S. and included the first Police reunion, U2, Peter Gabriel, the Nevilles and Reed (and others). And we didn’t need binoculars. My buddy’s ex-girlfriend worked at Turtles Records and her manager, who had a crush on her, got us (alas, not the buddy) tickets on the sixth row. I could see Stewart Copeland jumping around backstage right before they went on. That close. So I actually watched Lou Reed play, drops picks and smile, from about 20 feet away. Thanks, Elaine.
And lastly, to keep this short, when green boy was born, I was very fastidious about what recorded music we would play in the house during those first six months or so – and I don’t know where this came from, it was just totally made up, much like the rest of the experience – and Mrs. Green let it fly, as she had many more pressing concerns. But all we listened to at home for six months was the Velvet Underground Loaded, Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue and Hank Williams’ greatest hits volume 1. We eventually loosened up, of course, and I think some heavy pop and Coltrane quickly followed. But judging by his progress so far, I’m sticking by the wisdom of this early episode in quixotic parenting.
Lou Reed, 1942-2013
Blog at half mast. RIP, Mr. Lou.
Around to See It
Whether it’s color, cash, inexperience or the ins and outs of renewable energy development in general, I often find myself tacking away from the original intent of the meaning of the essence of this site. But then some new article comes out to bring it all back around:
Another conclave of the global great and good is looking at what should be done in the much trickier area of climate change. The premise of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate is that nothing will be done unless finance ministers are convinced of the need for action, especially given the damage caused by a deep recession and sluggish recovery.
Instead of preaching to the choir the plan is to show how to achieve key economic objectives – growth, investment, secure public finances, fairer distribution of income – while at the same time protecting the planet.
The author provides us the Kennedy space-race analogy as an illustration of the kind of efforts and leadership needed to curtail the effects of climate change, which is fine and well-meaning enough. But then he drops the second Pop-Tart® by suggesting that we need first to show/guarantee business the long-term benefits of greening the economy. I have one: how about you get to still have an economy?
That’s what the whole question is about: do we have enough greed to stifle the impulse toward self-preservation?
Okay – no one can use Enough Greed as a band name or an album title, because I just thought of it and realized its multitudes. Individual songs are fine as long as WDGM is ID’d in the bridge someplace.