Don’t worry, the cynicism will return

Programming note:

Light posting over the holidays.  Also, abnormally wistful, sanguine stuff.  After the New Year, expect a return to godfuckingdammit what is the government DOING? Don’t worry, it’ll be back.

Who we were who we are

Anna Goldberg died a month ago in her West Side co-op, a one-bedroom corner starring a raggedy pull-out couch and a balcony I threw Lego blocks from as a child.  It was a two minute walk from The Ballroom, where Filipe Lombardi brought tapas to America before his premature death, where my mother fell for her second failed husband.  Somewhere an ex-girlfriend has a photo of me on the balcony in the snow wearing a blue fur coat we found in a closet.  Holding a glass of red wine I resemble something between a Cossack cavalry officer and a mid-market 10th Avenue tranny.

Anna was my grandmother’s older sister.  Last month she sat down in a chair and didn’t get up, at which point her Jamaican home health aide telephoned the appropriate people having been through this routine before.  She was buried two days later by a progressive Rabbi who my grandmother pulled aside and told to go light on the God and focus on her sister.  I missed the funeral.

Except for her silence, there was nothing remarkable of the woman.  She would sit peacefully on Thanksgiving while grandpa demanded legalization of ecstasy, someone defended anarchism for anarchism’s sake, and my paranoid stepfather shouted at my mother’s side of the family for no tangible reason.  Her longtime boyfriend, a character who decided in his retirement to take the New York Bar Exam and passed it on the seventh try, would sometimes intervene to help her get a word in.  It was usually informative, and then she’d quietly return to observing the Leningrad Zoo.

She went, misleadingly, by “grandma Annie.”  Never married and had no kids of her own.  When I was three she fed me Ricola cough drops religiously, so much so that I once asked my confused mother for “Grandma Annie candies” in a grocery store.  After a long career as a school secretary, Anna Goldberg spent her retirement on folk dance, those Elderhostel trips, and a late-in-life habit of watercolors mostly of boats.

Precisely her silence made her absence deafening.  My sister, who had spent a summer at the Fashion Institute on Annie’s couch, barely choked through her speech.  Anna Goldberg was stashed under a nondescript placard in the Jewish corner of the cemetery, awaiting a tombstone.  For the reception my grandfather bought courvoisier.  Later I asked whether he was shooting a rap video.  I think, in a nonspecific way, he got the reference.

She would have made a good spy.  The FBI concurred.  Ninety-five heavily redacted pages, one for each of Luther’s theses perhaps, on Anna, aka “Ann”, aka “Annie” Goldberg.  The file revealed little we didn’t know already, nor anything more Communistic than her other red relatives.  She was a hard-liner, having opposed the reformist tendencies of Earl Browder whose grandson poetically went on to make a fortune looting the Russian markets.  Even in this she lacked the drama of my grandfather’s side of the family; one great-uncle was dramatically expelled from the party, while the other was dishonorably discharged from the army for political reasons.  (Ultimately, this was corrected after a decades-long court battle.)

On Christmas Day, figuring on light traffic, her nieces and nephews descended on the apartment to dole out the goodies.  Paintings, some old clothes, third-world tchotchkes for kids under ten or so, stacks of records (folk songs, the Russians, Puccini), dusty furniture, Henry Wallace buttons, and a moldy assortment of her favorite author Mark Twain. They dumped an entire bathroom worth of months of old drug bottles and tissue boxes.  I was disappointed to hear that no one could find the penguin toys I associate with the place.  Oh, and the record player I had requested was busted.

Christmas night, my mother called me.  They found Celia Kaplan in a drawer.  Specifically, my cousin found her, but my mother was standing by to explain.

Celia lived three years.  In a forgotten desk, inexplicably under my grandfather’s high school diploma, my cousin the fledgling New York actress dug up Celia Kaplan’s Social Security Card and a record of a bank account opened with $50 in her name in 1953 and closed in 1956.  Lincoln Savings Bank outlived her.

They knew she existed.  My grandparents knew.  My mother and her brothers knew.  My generation heard, but no one discussed details.  What was done was done.  There were envelopes and birthday cards with her name on them but little else.  The Bureau had missed it in their file.  But then, they couldn’t hardly keep Annie’s hair color straight.

Celia Kaplan was Anna Goldberg.  She was three years of her life, spent under a false identification working with the CP-USA underground as a factory worker.

Little Anna Goldberg, a woman you’d have missed if you blinked, was a telephone operator at the Daily Worker when the party approached her.  At the time, they were placing activists into industrial jobs in an effort to recruit members from particular sectors of the economy.  My grandmother was insulted, telling me over lunch recently that they picked on her sister because they thought she was pliable.

Either way, Annie took it.  From 1953 through 1956, Anna Celia Goldberg became Celia Kaplan.  With her new Social Security number, bank account, and front address in Brooklyn, she worked in a factory organizing “colored” women at the height of McCarthyism.  In 1956, the bank account closes and her efforts appear to end.  In the apartment are numerous letters still to be read.  Anna Celia Goldberg-Kaplan kept everything from both lives.

That was my Christmas gift.  It took me a year to get her Federal File, from which, redactions and all, my grandmother confidently named the informants who had turned her sister’s information over to the Bureau.  (One gentleman, who at the time had also encouraged my grandmother to leave my grandfather for someone more educated, died a while back.)

At the funeral, no one mentioned Celia.  Not a matter of shame, nor regret.  Simply, it was something that had happened and was now done happening.  Background noise in the generation’s red blur, no more worthy of eulogy than the late-life Yiddish choir performances or folk dance trips to post-Soviet Poland.  My cousin, who never knew the late Ms. Kaplan, was stunned.  My mother was more surprised to discover that her aunt had a middle name, having barely noticed the “C.” on the name plate at the burial.

Merry Christmas.  We found Annie’s secret identity.  I suppose this confirms she was a traitor, but no more than any of the rest of the elders who used to take me up to the dinosaur exhibit on 79th Street.  The great-uncle who was expelled from the party is a draftsman, stairs mostly, who used to keep bags of Hershey’s Kisses on his shelves until he became drastically diabetic.  I watched him work when I was a kid and this is probably why I’m artificially left-handed.  Another one used to play Battleship with my sister, no word on who was the Baltic Fleet and who was the Chinese.

Mark Twain.  An anti-imperialist before anti-imperialism sold records.  Something of a Jacobin.  Anna Celia Kaplan-Goldberg’s favorite author.  Something appreciably American to it.  I’ve got a friend who loves Twain.  If the books are in usable condition I’ll give him an early birthday present.

Still bunches of moldy letters to review.  My cousin took the political buttons on the promise that I get some.  I suppose this is what Jewish nonbelievers give each other to celebrate the birth of someone else’s Lord and Saviour.  I could still use laptop speakers.  Happy holidays grandpa and grandma, mom, Filipe, Chairman Browder.  Merry Christmas, grandma Celia.

Inspiring holiday stuff

Gainesville State School is located 75 miles north of Dallas, next to a town of 15,000.  It was originally a girls’ school, but became co-ed in1974 and eventually all-male in 1988.  The school offers courses in agriculture, horticulture, welding, and business in addition to the standard high school curriculum.

Gainesville State is also a maximum-security youth prison facility.  Incoming students are an average of three years below grade level in reading and four years behind in math, and less than 30% will return to High School upon re-entry into society.

The school has a football team.  Lacking adequate practice time, space, and equipment, the Gainesville State Tornadoes are understandably lousy.  Up against prep school teams with involved parents, endless resources, and home field advantage, Gainesville scored a total of two touchdowns en route to a miserable 0-8 start.

Kris Hogan is head football coach at Grapevine Faith, a Christian school located just outside Dallas.  The Grapevine Lions are high priests in the Texas Football Temple (services Friday evening like Jews).  The Lions made the state title game in 2007, and returned this season with a strong 7-2 record.

Coach Hogan decided to do a good turn for the boys from Gainesville.  With the overmatched prison team on the schedule for the season finale, Hogan emailed team parents and fans requesting that half the group cheer for the visitors.  “Here’s the message I want you to send,” he wrote: “You are just as valuable as any other person on planet Earth.”  Faced with understandably confused parents and players, he stuck to his concept:  “Imagine if you didn’t have a home life. Imagine if everybody had pretty much given up on you. Now imagine what it would mean for hundreds of people to suddenly believe in you.”

Hogan’s commitment converted the unbelievers.  Some 200 hometown fans, approximately half the crowd, sat in the visitors’ bleachers cheering for Gainesville State.  Additionally, for probably the first time in football history, the road team was met with a spirit line, banner to run through, and dedicated cheerleading squad.

Other schools have done things for Gainesville, including providing the students with meals and small gifts.  However, no one had ever given them a cheering section.  It meant a lot more than some trinkets or a snack.  As a Tornadoes lineman explained:  “We can tell people are a little afraid of us when we come to the games.  You can see it in their eyes. They’re lookin’ at us like we’re criminals. But these people, they were yellin’ for us! By our names!”

This wasn’t The Longest Yard. Gainesville was severely overmatched, and Faith went up 33-0 to start the game.  Eventually, however, Gainesville managed two touchdowns on the day on which three of their players had been cut from the team; released from prison.

The score didn’t matter.  In another football first, the head coach of the losing team was doused with Gatorade:

I know people who teach in the prison system, including both maximum-security adult prisons and facilities like Gainesville for youth offenders.  Sadly, adult offenders including those serving lifetime sentences often have better access to educational programs than seventeen-year old first-time offenders who should still have their whole lives ahead of them.  In New York State, this is partly the understandable legacy of Attica and partly due to the fact that D.O.C.S. is its own agency whereas underage offenders are folded into the Office of Children and Family Services.  (I’d be curious if anyone has had any experience with other states; feel free to post in the comments.  New York is actually regarded as one of the best prison systems in the country for adults, in terms of rehabilitation, security for both prisoners and staff, and a relative lack of gang activity.)

The boys on the Gainesville squad are not unrepentant thugs, not inherently violent kids, not the simple stereotypes too often assigned to convicts.  Only those who have served at least half of their sentence, passed all of their classes, and maintained spotless behavioral records are allowed on the team.  Gainesville State head coach Mark Williams explained the importance of seeing his players in human, humane terms:

“A lot of these kids don’t have hope because they’ve taken a wrong path, somebody’s told them that they’re going to be negative,” he said. “They’re not negative. They were very positive tonight. They were just like the other kids.”

After four quarters of football, the winning players greeted their parents and friends while the losing team returned to their bus under watch by a dozen armed guards.  Before the game, and ten minutes from the final whistle, the Gainesville State Tornadoes were faceless statistics in America’s best growth industry.  For 60 minutes, as Gainesville superintendent Gwan Hawthorne put it, the boys “[felt] like any other high school football team.”

A winless season never ended so well.

(For more on this story, see Rick Reilly’s detailed account and the Waco Tribune’s local coverage.)

tropical fruit in war-torn areas brings more jersey-knit than expected

There are many things I love about Barcelona: the Sagrada Familia, their tastier-than-American McDs, the Catalan nationalist, the shopping. My god, the shopping. My little yankee heart did back flips at the sight of a topshop next door to my hotel and damn near exploded when I counted not one, not two, but four Zaras within spitting distance.

It seems another of my darling Spanish retailers Mango is setting up shop in the Kurdish city of Arbil, making them the first international retail brand to set up shop in post-invasion Iraq. It won’t be their usual assortment of liquid leggings and lively print mini dresses inspired by Penelope Cruz, however. They’re working with Zuhair Murad to create spiffy cover-ups so that none of their customers are harassed over immodesty.

Thomas Friedman <3 the 90s!

Readers of the Times could be mistaken for thinking it’s 1992.  What with Ross Perot back in action and a Bush leaving Washington, you can practically bust out the House of Pain.  Sir Thomas Friedman, bearer of the Mustache of Understanding and inspiration for the eponymous Friedman Unit (FU), takes this nonsense to its logical conclusion:

Op-Ed Columnist

China to the Rescue? Not!

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: December 20, 2008

The prominant pundit on all things has unearthed the 1992 Word of the Year.  (The ADS lists are actually fascinating:  “snail mail” did succeed, “ethnic cleansing” earned its stripes immediately, and “Munchhausen’s syndrome by proxy” made Law and Order.)  He’s taking us back to a more innocent time, a time before 9/11 and unspeakable Nirvana covers, a time when men were men and sheep were nervous.  I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone use the Gingrich-era Wayne’s World negation.

Friedman could have gone with “China: PWNED,” or some variant on “fail,” both of which are at least marginally more current.  But he didn’t.  Why?  Because Friedman is dope, that’s why.  Because Friedman is da bomb, all that and a bag of chips.  From now on, that’s Thomas “Waterfalls” Friedman to you.

(Drop some retro slang in the comments, win an Ace of Base cassette.)

Get money get jailed

The now-ubiquitous shoe-hero alleges a severe prison beating as the case reverberates through the Iraqi Parliament.  Meanwhile, the American media jerks itself off laughing about those ungrateful A-Rabs.  Either way, someone’s gettin’ paid.  The previously anonymous “Model 271,” a standard-issue black leather Oxford, is flying off the shelves of its Turkish maker.  Orders have skyrocketed in the past week, with the company taking full advantage of the situation:

“Five thousand posters advertising the shoes, on their way to the Middle East and Turkey, proclaim “Goodbye Bush, Welcome Democracy” in Turkish, English and Arabic.”

Serdan Turk, general manger of Baydan Shoes, praised the outgoing president:

“Mr. Bush served some good purpose to the economy before he left.”

Now, if someone would just hit Cheney with an American-made car.

Santa’s red suit

For the very special Maoist in your life:

“Maoart paintings integrate with virtuosity real people’s faces into faithfully reproduced propaganda posters. Based on a photograph provided by you and a poster of your choice, an artist renders you as a socialist hero.”

Seriously, check it out.  For 200 bucks, you pick a model poster and send in a headshot from a similar angle as your intended character.  Within three weeks, the artists will paint you a faithful revision of the original starring you as the proletarian hero.  The website notes that the paintings are done by “freelance professional Chinese artists selected for their portrait skills and their ability to reproduce the propaganda poster styles,” adding that they “do not commission “painting factories” and their salaried artists.”  Here are some samples of regular ol’ white folk rendered as Chinese Communist icons:

It’s all inclusive: Chinese-language slogans, industrial or agrarian background, etc.  But if it’s out of your proletarian price range, consider a simple movie or DVD.  Especially one reviewed by the Maoist International Movement (MIM).  They’re very sweet on Harry Potter…

“Harry Potter: The Prisoner of Azkaban” is almost the best we can expect from bourgeois liberalism’s films for children. It’s pointedly anti-fascist–giving the boot to eugenics in the opening scene, where Aunt Marge talks about the parents of Harry Potter in a disparaging way as reflecting on Harry…

…and give a limited endorsement to Star Wars:

“There was not much to complain about politically in the first installments of “Star Wars,” which was both anti-fascist and anti-imperialist. The role of Black characters and the “Red Guard” in the key battles did not go unnoticed at MIM. In this movie, we learn that democracy is the preferred government of the “good guys” of the Republic.  Although the characters’ endorsement of democracy is rather shallow like the current understanding of democracy in the united $tates, the movie itself offers slightly more analysis of democracy.”

(Yes, that’s “united $tates.” stet.)

Maoists, however, utterly hated Spider Man 2:

“There is a lot of confusing shit going on in this movie. By the NYSDCJS and NYPD’s own figures(1), grand larceny, grand larceny auto, and murder, will be about 20% of reported crimes in New York City in 2004, and the majority of these reports will not be due to the actions of the illegal bourgeois Mafia, who metaphorically figure prominently in the adventures of such comic action heroes as Spider-Man and Batman. MIM has said that “Spider-Man: The Motion Picture” (2002) has some redeeming value on the basis of its depiction of asexuality, but it cannot ignore the fact that “Spider-Man’s” Amerikan flag-waving fans are cheering for something that in the real world would be called “capitalist police repression.”

This is an important point. Communists do not support pig repression, much less the pig-wanna- be, labor-aristocrat vigilantes who think themselves heroes when they are gunning down the Third World proletariat at the Mexico-united $tates border, or the self-styled “community” pigs who “police” Asian, Black and Latino youth street organizations. If the bourgeoisie want to sic their thugs on each other, MIM would not get in the middle of this fight, but it does not support pig repression in the abstract when Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) has his knee-jerk reaction every time he hears a police siren. If Spider-Man had any (spider-) “sense” at all, he would fight the police repression under which gold miners work in Azania and China to produce the gold coins stored in the vault of the bank that is robbed in the movie.”

Want more?  MIM has literally hundreds of these.  So this holiday season, “Smelt a lot of good steel and accelerate socialist construction.“

*Preemptive note to rightist trolls:  None of the above represents an endorsement of Maoism.

In defense of Susan Rice

A good friend of mine, who knows her stuff upsidedown and backwards, criticized the tone of the incoming U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice on issues of poverty and humanitarian relief.  Her argument, including a link to Rice’s article, can be found here.  It’s worth reading, but I strongly disagree with it.  I was going to post my counter-argument as a comment on her blog, but it was a bit long and I had no other content for today, so I’ve put it here instead.  So go check out her argument, and here’s my response:

Meet Joseph Cao

For the National Republican Congressional Committee, Anh “Joseph” Cao was a diamond in a shitpile.  The 41-year old Vietnamese lawyer, (pronounced “Gow”), knocked off scandal-plagued Democratic incumbent William “Dollar Bill” Jefferson in a bright blue, majority black district.  Cao’s three point victory made him the first Vietnamese-American in Congress, and the NRCC immediately trumpeted his success as a harbinger of better days.

So who is he?  Cao was born in Saigon, son of an ARVN officer.  His father was captured by the Communists, and spent seven years in prison as his mother fled with her children to the United States.  After being released, his father rejoined the family in America.  Joseph moved to Louisiana in 1997 for law school, and lives there with his wife and two daughters.  Thus, your template:  A refugee from a Communist country, member of a politically conservative ethnic group, also happens to be a convert to Catholicism.  On the surface, Cao has all the trappings of a far-right Republican.

Thing is, he’s not.  Cao has a fascinating background.  Following his Jesuit training and MA in Philosophy at Fordham (Go Rams!), Cao moved to Virginia where he worked with Boat People S.O.S. (BPSOS).  BPSOS is a community-based organization dedicated to helping Vietnamese refugees in America.  After earning his J.D., Cao took a position as BPSOS’ in-house counsel.  After Hurricane Katrina destroyed his home and office, Cao returned to New Orleans where he joined the board of the Mary Queen of Vietnam (MQVN) Church’s Community Development Corporation.  MQVN has earned a strong reputation for community development work in the aftermath of the hurricane.  Its leader characterized the situation:

“Before the storm, I guess you could call us libertarians,” Father Vien said. “Our attitude toward government was: ‘you don’t bother us, we won’t bother you.’ But Katrina changed all that. We had a responsibility to speak out.”

With MQVN, Cao fought to have utilities turned back on as quickly as possible in storm-damaged neighborhoods.  He also worked against a landfill project that would have dumped a quarter of Katrina debris in New Orleans East.  Eric Tang’s excellant Huffington Post profile notes praise for MQVN’s work from African-American leaders including local progressives.  Senator Obama visited the church in February.  Overall, Cao’s religious perspective informs a social gospel:

“When I was in Mexico helping the poor, I had a struggle with the issue of poverty and of evil in the world,” Mr. Cao said. “I told my spiritual director about my struggles, and basically he told me that God sends good people to help with human suffering – people like Gandhi and (the Rev.) Martin Luther King (Jr.). I thought the best way I could effect social change was to go to law school and into politics.”

Until 2007, Cao was registered independant.  He frequently cites Aristotle’s definition of virtue: “To walk in the middle line.” Cao says he “is not a hardcore conservative,” and there’s absolutely zero Republican branding on his website.  In an interview with the New York Times, the incoming Representative explained his overall view of things:  “Life is absurd but one cannot succumb to the absurdity of it.”  How often do Republicans channel Camus?

What about social issues?  Whither God and gays?  Cao spoke with U.S. News:

How important were traditional family values issues, like abortion and marriage, in your race?
Very little. I was focusing on the need to rebuild the Second Congressional District so the issues of abortion and marriage were not the focus of my campaign at all.

That’s refreshing, as was this follow-up:

Are those values issue high priorities for your first term in Congress?
My main priority in the first couple of years is to focus on rebuilding the Second Congressional District in Louisiana. Three and half years after Katrina, there are areas that remain devastated. The healthcare system is in need of reform. The educational system is in need of reform. We need to develop economically, need to look at the levies and at coastal restoration. Those are the issues right now that concern the majority of my constituents, so that’s what I’ll be focusing on.

As a devout Catholic, Cao will likely be a reliable pro-life vote.  That said, he strikes me as someone who would vote against gay marriage but might just oppose a Constitutional ban.

Most importantly, the tone of his campaign has been heavily focused on the needs of his constituents.  This might be a matter of necessity in the 29th-bluest district in the country, but his record does show a powerful commitment to community development.  Cao has expressed interest in joining the Congressional Black Caucus, arguing that he represents a majority-black district.  It won’t happen, (outstanding progressive Steve Cohen of Memphis already tried it and failed), but Cao’s record suggests this is a real, good-faith effort to strengthen the voice of his voters.

The incoming Representative is noticeably new to the political game.  He admitted to CNN that his victory was aided by low voter turnout due to Hurricane Gustav.  (Note to new members:  You are happy with turnout, you think it represents a strong mandate for change, etc. etc.)  Republicans have crowed about Cao with tacky headlines (“the future is Cao!“,) but he is unlikely to be re-elected if the Democrats offer a strong challenge.  Besides which, he’s hardly a useful model for future races.  All Cao’s victory proves politically is that Republicans can win blue districts if the Democrat has been caught with $90,000 cash in his freezer, is under indictment on election day, and if a hurricane drops turnout to approximately 1/3 of the 2004 vote total.  If that’s Boehner’s plan, well, good luck to you, sir.

Something lighter

What if the song actually described the video?