Are We Shocked Yet?

Clever Sister saw this January 5 obit:

Frederica Sagor Maas, Silent-Era Scriptwriter, Dies at 111

Which prompted CS to check the library for Maas' tell-all book, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim—written at age 99!

A Salon author interview after the book's 1999 publication reflects the tone of Maas' account.

It happens that in the late 1980s she had met film historian Kevin Brownlow, who would persuade her to write her memoirs. (Brownlow's obit of Maas here.)

The book is a quick read, done since CS passed the book to me last week. If neither of us had heard of the author or her movie scripts, it's partly because her career was a rocky one, with few writing credits received for all her hard work. Frederica Sagor was 25 when she moved to Hollywood from New York, where she had been a story editor at Universal. She was something of an innocent, believing hard work and good writing would lead to the making of worthwhile films and a successful career. She worked for a time at MGM, where a higher ranking writer put his own name on a finished script Sagor had written from scratch. After pointing out a producer's bad decisions regarding another project, she was labeled a "troublemaker."

Ernest Maas became Sagor's husband and writing partner; together they would face more story theft and general frustration from the studio system. Pursuing topics that were labors of love, the couple sometimes invested years into research and writing. When they tried selling their script about photographer Matthew Brady producers insisted, "Civil War stories are out." Their story, "Miss Pilgrim's Progress," was an historical drama about women entering office work after the typewriter was invented. This time they managed to sell the story and get paid—but were then dismayed to see the script turned into a Betty Grable musical.

Frederica writes of often urging Ernest that they should change careers, but he was committed to staying in movies. After World War II the matter was decided for them. When Ernest was investigated by the FBI after applying for Pentagon film work, the couple, Democrats who had campaigned for Roosevelt, were found to read suspicious matter (they subscribed to The Daily People's World and Soviet Life). Ernest did not receive clearance for a job he needed, and Frederica says the couple were blacklisted.

I've read Hollywood histories before, so accounts of the lack of ethics—and abundance of sex, alcohol and drugs—are no surprise. I do find one thing striking, in the midst of our 2012 political "debate" about Job Creators: much of the Hollywood mogul behavior once generally considered abhorrent has become the norm for employers.

Others receiving credit for one's work; the expectation that staff be available at any hour, at the boss' whim, and will forego weekends and vacations—this is the kind of thing that could come from any of Driftglass' numerous posts on "corporate culture."

As I went to find an example, it happened that Driftglass had just this week written a post that's a staggering resumé of his accomplishments, during years of working 80-100 hour weeks.

A couple of the comments—

Anonymous said...

In other words you, in one fashion or another, are likely perceived as a threat to most who would be in a position to employ you.

David in NYC said...

So, to sum it up, it appears that you cannot hold a job. As opposed to, say, the Mittster, who has had the same job (son of inherited wealth) like forever, man.

But I know what you mean. I've summed up the attitude of the powers-that-be at my current job as, "I don't care that you're right. I want you to apologize for pointing it out."

Another very resonant bit of Maas' memoir is her account of the couple's 1937 stay in New York, in an apartment on Riverside Drive.

Almost directly facing our windows, we could see... a colony of homeless springing up along the banks of the river. Shelters were constructed out of huge cardboard packing boxes lined inside with newspapers. Some were able to get their hands on wooden boards... Some even managed to find slabs of aluminum siding—anything and everything was ingeniously thrown togehter to make a home. There they lived, whole families with children, some with grandparents. It was a veritable commune. Those who were able to find a day's work contributed almost all their wages to the enterprise. They sought donations. With this money they bought food at wholesalers in large quantities as cheaply as they could. There was one common kitchen, three large butane stoves. A good nourishing soup was the mainstay. Sometimes there was meat... Mostly it was soup, potatoes, vegetables, apples... all discards from markets and restaurants...

They were not beggars. These were decent people with families, out of work. They were proud of their community and kept it clean and orderly. Everything was shared equally and fairly—food, chores, work... The ingenuity of the have nots was amazing. Nothing went to waste.

Ernest and I visited the camps often. We made friends with the organizers. Before I knew it, I was involved, helping to raise money... I contracted with restaurants and big markets to give us their discards. I even prevailed upon two local doctors to visit the camp when needed, especially when the children or older campers took sick. At Christmastime every home had a tree, collected from the leftovers that had not been sold by Christmas Eve; decorations were either hand-made or discards. There were Christmas presents for the kids from stores and private families. A group of twenty of us women got together and provided automobile transportation for the children who had to go to school in inclement weather. We did everything we could to help these gallant people, clinging despeartely to dignity, to hope and trust in their country. To them, Franklin D. Roosevelt was the Messiah. Somehow he would restore this promised land again. They believed this. And so did we.

Then it happened. Without warning, city workers burned the shanties right down to the ground. They just came in one bitter cold wintry day and did it.

Ernest and I, bewildered and devastated ourselves, tried to offer words of encouragement, but no one said a word... They were numb. This was the end of the road for them. After these people had drifted away, God knows where, we drew up petitions of protest, appealed to the mayor, to the governor, but to no avail. The powerful had spoken. The owners of the big apartment houses lining the river claimed that their tenants had complained, that the dwellings of these vagabonds were an eyesore, desecrating their view of the beautiful Hudson River, its golden sunsets spreading across the sky. Or, was their conscience unable to face how the other half lives?

Family Values

This year is the 45th anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia decision. The International Center of Photography is exhibiting Grey Villet's photos, taken in 1965 for a Life story on Richard and Mildred Loving and their family.

The Lovings would endure this long fight—

Forty-five years ago, sixteen states still prohibited interracial marriage. Then, in 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court considered the case of Richard Perry Loving, a white man, and his wife, Mildred Loving, a woman of African American and Native American descent, who had been arrested for miscegenation nine years earlier in Virginia. The Lovings were not active in the Civil Rights movement but their tenacious legal battle to justify their marriage changed history when the Supreme Court unanimously declared Virginia's anti-miscegenation law—and all race-based marriage bans—unconstitutional.

It was a fight they never sought but bravely faced. And while she had never wanted to be in the public eye, on the 40th anniversary of the decision (and one year before her death), Mildred Loving released this statement, supporting marriage equality as a logical and necessary consequence of the Loving decision.

The photos at ICP emerged as documentary director Nancy Buirski was making The Loving Story, to be shown February 14 on HBO.

A slide show accompanies this piece by Barbara Villet, the photographer's widow.

Emotional content always mattered most to Grey in his work and pursuit of images "as real as real could get." It's what gives his take on the Loving family its intimacy and strength. Grey was a purist in his approach to every essay he shot. Quiet as a cat, he seemed almost to disappear as he worked. Unlike many other celebrated photographers, he avoided posing his subjects, refused to manipulate the action and simply waited patiently for telling moments to emerge, in the belief that reality would supply more truth than any imposition of his own ego.

I didn't know this photographer's work, but after seeing these images I can only agree with Ms. Villet—

The emotions that bound the Loving family together, all those years ago, live on in Grey Villet's images — as does the sensitive spirit of the great-hearted photographer who created them.

A Mere Generation Later

For the noblesse oblige of one generation to be followed by the grab-it-all mentality of the heirs is a familiar story. Coming from a political family adds another dimension to "What Mitt Romney Learned From His Dad."

Rick Perlstein presents this scenario—

...You are an aspiring office-holder, a young and handsome and ambitious man on the rise, and your father loses an election. Dad is your hero, and then the world's goat; you start rethinking your vision of how the world works.

... Pollster Lou Harris said late in 1966 that George Romney, then governor of Michigan, "stands a better chance of winning the White House than any Republican since Dwight D. Eisenhower." Then, just over a year later, he was humiliated with a suddenness and intensity unprecedented in modern American political history... His son was 19 years old. What makes Mitt – né Willard – Romney, run? Much, I think, can be understood via that specific trauma.

That sudden humiliation was the reaction to Romney's 1967 reversal on the Vietnam War—and his attributing his earlier pro-war stance to the "brainwashing" he got from the military and State Department during his first (1965) visit to the country. Romney's accurate predictions of disaster would be ignored, as the media used the "brainwashing" sound-bite to turn him into a laughingstock.

Romney's public career was marked, says Perlstein, by "shocking authenticity; his courage in sticking to his positions without fear or favor was extraordinary." While head of American Motors he derided Detroit's products as "gas-guzzling dinosaurs." During his presidential campaign—even when his popularity plummeted after the "brainwashing" comments—Romney continued speaking against the war.

His opponent, meanwhile, running what you might call a robotic campaign, just bullshitted about Vietnam, hinting he had a secret plan to end it. The truth was a dull weapon to take into a knife fight with Richard Nixon – who kicked Romney's ass with 79 percent of the vote. When people call his son the "Rombot," think about that: Mitt learned at an impressionable age that in politics, authenticity kills. Heeding the lesson of his father's fall, he became a virtual parody of an inauthentic politician. In 1994 he ran for senate to Ted Kennedy's left on gay rights; as governor, of course, he installed the dreaded individual mandate into Massachusetts' healthcare system. Then he raced to the right to run for president.

He's still inauthentic – but with, I think, an exception. Every time he opens his mouth on the subject of capitalism, he says what he sincerely believes, which happens to fit neatly with present-day Republican ideology: that rich people deserve every penny they have, and if people complain about anything rich people do, it's only because they're envious.

This too, says Perlstein, is rebellion against his father, whose

... vision of how capitalism should work was in every particular the exact opposite of the one pushed by the vulture capitalist he sired. (If George Romney's AMC was around now, Mitt Romney's Bain Capital would probably be busy turning it into a carcass.) A critic once said he was "so dedicated to good works his entrance into politics is like sending a Salvation Army lass into the chorus at a burlesque house." As a CEO he would give back part of his salary and bonus to the company when he thought they were too high. He offered a pioneering profit-sharing plan to his employees. Most strikingly, asked about the idea that "rugged individualism" was the key to America's success, he snapped back, "It's nothing but a political banner to cover up greed." He was the poster child for the antiquated notion that corporations have multiple stakeholders: the workers that breathe them life, the communities in which they are situated, and the nation to whom they owe a patriotic obligation – most definitely and emphatically not just stockholders, as Mitt and his defenders say.

As if that weren't a striking enough then-and-now contrast, BuzzFeed digs up this account of Romney's meeting with Saul Alinsky after the 1967 Detroit riots.

When slum organizer Saul Alinsky, with the West Side Organization’s militant Negroes and clerics, wanted to meet with the white Detroit rulers, Romney indirectly arranged the meeting, and attended. Democratic Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh avoided the rough company.

"I think you ought to listen to Alinsky," Romney told his reluctant white friends. "It seems to me that we are always talking to the same people. Maybe the time has come to hear new voices." Said an Episcopal bishop, "He made Alinsky sound like a Republican."

Charles Pierce picked up the story on his blog ,where commenter John Fienberg asks, "Is there any way to bring George Romney back to life and have him run against Obama instead of these Republican clowns?"

Untrustworthy Trustees

It can be safely assumed that the rich of bygone days were no less greedy than the current crop. Yet one thing is very different now: the rich of yore went about their business before a notion like Creative Destruction was conceivable, much less institutionalized.

New York's "The 100 Most Powerless" reinforces Fran Lebowitz's observations here (after 2:00).

The Voice ranks the powerlessness of NYPL librarians # 13, and links to this in The Nation—

... Since 2008 its workforce has been reduced by 27 percent. In a recent newsletter to library supporters, the institution reported that its acquisitions budget for books, CDs and DVDs had been slashed by 26 percent.

Despite these austerity measures, NYPL executives are pushing ahead with a gargantuan renovation of the Forty-second Street library, the crown jewel of the system. The details of the Central Library Plan (CLP) are closely guarded, but it has already sparked criticism among staff members, who worry that the makeover would not only weaken one of the world’s great libraries but mar the architectural integrity of the landmark building on Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, renamed the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building in 2008, following the Wall Street billionaire’s gift of $100 million. (Every staff member I spoke with demanded anonymity; a number of them talked openly about their fear of retribution from management.)

The NYPL's history starts with money and collections bequeathed by 19th century multi-millionaires. Lenox, Astor, Tilden were no longer around when the Fifth Avenue main library began as a monumental construction project: the creation of an architectural gem, "known for the lions without and the learning within," and containing "75 miles of shelves... to house the immense collections."

This time around, a living plutocrat gets the Fifth Avenue library renamed for himself, and the NYPL board is gleefully ready to pull the joint down. That's in response to the 100 mill tax write-off by one of their own members, who made his billions through this little outfit.

Regarding the library, I want to reach for a canary in a coal mine kind of phrase.

But this is the opposite of an early warning signal. What's happening to the NYPL—as to public and university libraries around the country—is more like managerial catch-up: after 30 years of asset-stripping everywhere else, it's time for managers to come for what's left of public institutions and our cultural inheritance.
And as some people try renewing the culture by taking to the streets: more of the Voice's powerlessness ratings—

34. The librarians of the Occupy Wall Street "People's Library"

One of the most fun aspects of Zuccotti Park this fall was the "People's Library," a wide selection of books that sparked freewheeling discussions. Volunteer librarians (like Bill Scott) guarded it with professional care. Although they protected it from Mayor Bloomberg's first threatened raid on the park (by taking the books away via Zipcar to an "undisclosed location"), the librarians were rendered utterly powerless after the city launched its surprise raid and returned the collection looking like shit.

To The Logical Extreme

Precisely where Stephen Colbert is taking his Super Pac.

And since he is informing the public about Citizen's United so effectively (and visibly), Colbert's motives are questioned.

As if Stephanopoulos would be likely to grill a Republican candidate, whether that person's candidacy is "real" or cash cow.

Colbert is taking on not only the "non-coordination of candidate and PAC" charade, but Corporate Personhood itself.


It's not Colbert, after all, who is putting the "mock" in de-móc-racy.

Anniversaries

Year ten, and still counting: this from Dalia Lithwick, on the of sight/out of mind legal limbo to which we've relegated "enemy combatants."

In Digby's post on the newest "bad apples" video to get out, some suggested context to that January 11 Guantanamo anniversary—

We are a nation of prisons. I just don't think most Americans find it all that remarkable that a particular group of prisoners are caught in some kind of legal limbo. It happens every day to one extent or another...

Just as those marines are so used to killing that they can't see they've lost their humanity, the American public is so used to innocent people in prison that they can't get worked up about a bunch of innocent foreigners caught in a Catch-22.

January 11 also marked a 100th anniversary: the start of the 1912 "Bread and Roses" strike in the Lawrence, Massachusetts textile mills. On January 1 of that year a new state law went into effect, reducing the maxiumum weekly work hours for women and children from 56 to 54. From the centennial site's history—

On January 11, workers discovered their employers had reduced their weekly pay to match the reduction in their hours. That difference in wages amounted to several loaves of bread a week.

Bruce Watson in Bread and Roses quotes a mill overseer who stated "the strike began like a spark of electricity." On January 11, Polish women weavers at Everett Cotton Mills realized that their employer had reduced their pay by 32¢ and stopped their looms and left the mill, shouting "short pay, short pay!" (Watson, Bread and Roses, p. 11). Workers from other mills joined the next day; within a week 25,000 workers were on strike.

Robert Forrant on Majority Report, about the strike and its resonance today, in the context of ongoing Occupy actions.

Among the issues Forrant notes: the dire conditions that led workers to strike, and the role of women, many of them immigrants from diverse cultures who nonetheless recognized their common interest. There was the IWW's organizing workers disdained by the AFL. The National Guard called against strikers drew heavily from the classrooms of Harvard—an institution benefiting from the wealth of mill-owning donors. To complicate class issues further, many of the Harvard men had sisters actively involved in supporting the strikers.

New York City, 1912: parade of Lawrence children sent to foster families during the strike

More history and photos at the Bread and Roses Centennial Exhibit.

One hundred years ago, the Lawrence strikers won—briefly. Employers would later fire union organizers, hire spies, and chip away at the workers' gains.

Decades later, after New Deal legal protections and post-World War II recovery, large numbers of workers would begin approaching middle-class status, for a brief window of time.

The protections are essentially gone, and in a climate of "shut up and be grateful if you have a job," the Occupy/99% movement is the first thing in a long, long time that's reminiscent of those young women with the vision to demand bread, without forgetting the need for "roses."

Today would have been the 83rd birthday Martin Luther King, Jr.

If the holiday named for him comes only once a year it's still a potential reminder of how much of King's pro-economic justice and anti-war record is airbrushed from the usual commemorations.

We may be even farther now than in Dr. King's lifetime from the ideal of turning military spending abroad toward social justice at home. And with the military now our only jobs (and benefits) program, more "apples" can be expected to turn out "bad," in a society dehumanized in ways that Dr. King feared.

Another January 15—with renewed threats to the basic voting rights that people fought and died for—here's Charles Pierce: On Our National Holiday, America's Everlasting War.

Something's Got To Give?

Photo: Mike Segar/Reuters An Occupy Wall Street tape hangs across the door of an abandoned foreclosed upon property where demonstrators protested in the East New York section of Brooklyn in New York City, December 6, 2011.
(via Bag News Notes)

So it's back to work, and I'm back to distracting myself from clock-watching—by audio-listening.

Despite the long hours at the office, there's so much excellent stuff available that I can't keep up. But I try, so I'm still getting to year-end material, like the December 29 Majority Report.

This starts with a two hour review of the show's reporting on Occupy Wall Street: extensive, and beginning with the pre-September 17 planning, because Sam Seder saw the significance from the start.

An interview with Fran Lebowitz starts after the 2:00 mark. Regarding OWS, Lebowitz points to the original site itself being "about real estate: no New Yorker ever heard of Zucotti Park." Only because the developer had made a deal with the city years before, a small green space was open to the public when protest got underway in September.

The interview ranges over a lot of thought-provoking material, particularly about the three-decade or so ascendancy of money over all other values. There are no longer sane points of reference, says Lebowitz: "I hear 'earn' before the word 'billion'; you don't 'earn' a billion, you steal it!"

She notes that when Obama ran for president, she knew he was to her right on economic issues, simply because he's ten years younger. It makes him

from the generation of people who believe there is such a thing as clean money... like "clean coal"... "public-private partnerships"
... Words that starting being used about 20 yrs ago: "vision" ... business has only one goal, to make profit, which is fine, but when you mix things..."

you wind up with horrors like Liebowitz's example of private prisons.

Her comments about spurious consumer choice—and the landmark reached "when people started to not mind being called 'consumers' instead of 'citizens'"—harken back to Thomas Frank's take on "market populism" in One Market Under God. There, Frank chronicles the foisting of the post-80s narrative: CEOs are heroic, unions are run by "bosses," and "consumer choice" is the highest form of human freedom.

So much of our sinking ship condition comes from decades of a management consensus used to destroy institutions in the name of remaking them. On the macro level, is the political/corporate agenda behind, say, destroying the Post Office.

On the local level (or in the workplace), it can be painfully easy to see what is sacrificed to bolster individual resumes. This is at work in the case of libraries being stripped of books in pursuit of the next big thing. And, since overseeing a major capital project looks trememendous on a director's resume, functioning buildings are torn down and replaced by empty media spaces.

Lebowitz notes that the "middle-class" was mainly a myth, because people buy on time. And the people who actually were middle-class didn't care when the lower-class jobs began being shipped overseas, since it didn't affect them. Without working-class identification, Americans have been unorganized and have "identified up," with the moneyed class.

With the "Work" part disappearing from the Work-Buy-Consume-Die American way of life, it seems a constructive cultural shift would be the best we can hope for.

Whether of not they come out of Occupy Wall Street, Lebowitz says we will have to find values to compete with the power of money, because "there's no money left: they stole it all!"

Eclipse of the Sun, George Grosz, 1926

"A Very Lonely Stand"

In news this week: the death of Gordon Hirabayashi, on January 2.

Born in 1918, Hirabayashi was raised by very religious Japanese immigrant parents, who had converted to Christianity by joining a pacifist Protestant sect. If Gordon sometimes chafed at his parents' strictness, it seems that his personality as well as upbringing started him early on a path of community involvement, and of deep concern with thinking through and acting on principles.

Gordon entered the University of Washington in 1937. For two years, he attended half the academic quarters, needing the other half of the year to help his farmer parents with the crops and to earn money for school.

Photo: Sharon Maeda/The Wing Luke Asian Museum

Active in the campus YMCA, he also gravitated toward Quaker meetings and to carefully considering his position on the peacetime draft that had gone into effect. After registering as a Conscientious Objector, Gordon had been ordered to Civilian Public Service camp. But that was just before the attack on Pearl Harbor; afterward, he and other draft-age Japanese-American men would be reclassified as "aliens ineligible for conscription."

Gordon also was a UW senior in 1942, when the first restrictive measure against Japanese-Americans, an 8:00 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew, went into effect. Decades later, he would recall [transcript]—

After the curfew order was announced, we knew there would be further orders to remove all persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. When the exclusion orders specifying the deadline for forced removal from various districts of Seattle were posted on telephone poles, I was confronted with a dilemma: Do I stay out of trouble and succumb to the status of second-class citizen, or do I continue to live like other Americans and thus disobey the law?

When the curfew was imposed I obeyed for about a week. We had about twelve living in the Y dormitory, so it was a small group, and they all became my volunteer time-keepers. 'Hey, Gordy, it's five minutes to eight!' And I'd have to dash back from the library or from the coffee shop. One of those times, I stopped and I thought, Why the hell am I running back? Am I an American? And if I am, why am I running back and nobody else is? I think if the order said all civilians must obey the curfew, if it was just a nonessential restrictive move, I might not have objected. But I felt it was unfair, just to be referred to as a 'non-alien'-they never referred to me as a citizen. This was so pointedly, so obviously a violation of what the Constitution stood for, what citizenship meant. So I stopped and turned around and went back.

From that point Hirabayashi refused to observe the curfew, without repercussion.

And then—

When the exclusion order came, which was very close to that time, I was expecting to go along. I had dropped out of school at the end of the winter quarter, which was the end of March. I knew I wasn't going to be around very long, so I just didn't register for spring quarter and I volunteered for the fledgling, newly formed American Friends Service Committee. From time to time, districts of Seattle were on a deadline to move all the Japanese. So, with a car that was made available, I'd go and help - particularly families whose fathers were interned and there were a bunch of little kids, and I helped them to move. It really horrified me to help these families pack up-their belongings and drive them down to the Puyallup fairground and leave them behind barbed wire.

I fully expected that when the University district deadline came up I would join them. Those who saw me waving them goodbye all expected to see me within a few weeks at the most. About two weeks before my time came up, I said to myself, If I am defying the curfew, how can I accept this thing? This is much worse, the same principle but much worse in terms of uprooting and denial of our rights, and the suffering. So that's when I began to mull it over...

Refusing bail conditions that would mean complying with discriminatory policy, he would spend nine months in jail. Prior to his trial, the government even moved his parents from Tule Lake back to Seattle, jailing them for ten days in the same federal holding tank as Gordon.

Soon after his release, he refused to answer a Selective Service questionnaire sent only to Japanese-Americans. This, and his later refusal to report for a physical, would lead to his serving a year in prison.

Hirabayashi's words are from his interview in Peter Irons' The Courage of Their Convictions: Sixteen Americans Who Fought Their Way to the Supreme Court.

Other details above are from an interesting UW alumni magazine piece on Hirabayashi and some of the other Japanese-American students attending the University at the time of the exclusion order.

From the LA Times obituary—

"What Gordon should be most remembered for is taking a stand on a matter of principle at a time when hardly anyone — not only within the Japanese American community but the nation at large — sided with him or sympathized with him," said Peter H. Irons, a retired UC San Diego political scientist whose research in the 1980s helped lay the legal foundation for the overturning of the convictions. "It wasn't at all like the civil rights movement where thousands of people engaged in demonstrations and civil disobedience. It was a very lonely stand."

A stand so lonely that only two other Japanese-Americans challenged the discriminatory curfew and evacuation orders.

It would take over 40 years for the convictions in all three cases to be overturned.

l-r: Gordon Hirabayashi, Min Yasui, Fred Korematsu.
Photo: Steven Okazaki

For the rest of their lives, the three continued to speak out.

Min Yasui would settle in Denver after the war, where he was a civil rights attorney. On the national scene, Yasui would become a leader of the internment redress movement that got underway in the 1970s.

In response to the post-September 11, 2001 assault on civil liberties, Fred Korematsu filed a 2003 brief on behalf of Muslims held in Guantanamo.

A year before his death in 2005, Korematsu wrote in an op-ed about the right-wing effort to re-write the history of Japanese internment as part of its outcry for racial profiling of Muslims—

Fears and prejudices directed against minority communities are too easy to evoke and exaggerate, often to serve the political agendas of those who promote those fears. I know what it is like to be at the other end of such scapegoating and how difficult it is to clear one's name after unjustified suspicions are endorsed as fact by the government. If someone is a spy or terrorist they should be prosecuted for their actions. But no one should ever be locked away simply because they share the same race, ethnicity, or religion as a spy or terrorist. If that principle was not learned from the internment of Japanese Americans, then these are very dangerous times for our democracy.

Everything Old Is New

Summer 1932 (photo source unknown)

November 2011
Photo: Scoboco/Flickr, via Gothamist.

Old is new—or maybe vice versa—with a heaping helping of technology mixed in.

Prostesters camping out, much like in the old days, but this time the word is spread—and the serious news reported—by tweets, cell phone pictures, and Bat signals.

The phase of occupying city parks may be over, but the movement is not; in the year ahead it will be very interesting to see what happens next.

Following the 99 percent movement—and earlier, Wisconsin's dramatic reaction to its state government takeover—were last year's bright spots in news.

Grassroots action could inject some reality into this election year, despite what the major media choose to cover.

Most reporting of the recent death of Vaclav Havel was predictable, quoting world leaders on loss of one of their own, and of course noting the end of communism in the former Soviet bloc.

Havel was a writer instrumental in launching public challenges to the Czechoslovak communist regime, beginning in 1977 and succeeding in 1989. His example is a reminder of what is possible if people decide to use (in Havel's phrase) "the power of the powerless" and stand up to tyrants.

A remembrance of Havel by Timothy Garton Ash.

For me, 2012 will be a year of trying to keep up with the Wisconsin recall and with how OWS develops—possible sources of good news to look forward to.

And I'll try to do some reading up on our nearly forgotten history.

Senator George Norris, co-sponsor 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Labor Act (photo source unknown)

After all, in a time when most workers are left behind in one way or another—unemployed, or doing the work of three for the pay of one—some of the old, suppressed ideas are still the best.

IWW "silent agitator" sticker
Image: Rebel Voices