J'aime Montreal

I love Montreal! J'aime Montreal! Some of my photography below with the theme of LOVE:

Happy White House Slave Rebellion Day!

Centuries ago, some of the arguments between the UK and the to be USA came down to the status of slaves. In the late 1700s the UK was moving towards abolition of slavery, and the wealthy US slaveholders saw the writing on the wall.  200 years ago today British forces, having attacked the US in the war of 1812, burned down the white house to be followed by an angry group of black people exacting revenge. Some blacks helped save artwork from the fire, others  took the opportunity to get some personal reparations for slavery- grabbing valuables from their former master's house, and others ran angrily after the fleeing president presumably to force some radical political reform i.e. abolition . One of the slaves of that president's wife, Paul Jennings, later hired out to the next president James Polk, did eventually obtain freedom, and went on organize the largest slave escape attempt in US history.

Happy White House Slave Rebellion Day!

Fear of a Black People

Furgeson has thrown race in America into the spotlight, but trying to understand race through these events is like trying to tell what time it is by watching the second hand on a clock.

Much of the way we understand race in America today, for better or worse, ( and I would say always for worse ) is a result of slavery. In fact, the very fact that I consider myself a black person is a result of this institution. Africans identified themselves by tribes, languages and geography. Europeans who dealt in slavery understood this, and sought to break these identifications for practical reasons. Too many enslaves Africans, all able to speak to each other, and identify with each other could cause a slave revolt at any moment. Africans were often placed into slave groups with different linguistic backgrounds, and yet, they revolted still.

I am going to add a link here to part of an interview with Dr. Gerald Horne, both a historian and lawyer that I admire. It throws recent events into a clarifying light.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12266

American Revolution: Long Exposure Photography from July 4th, Text from the Constitution

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Article One, Bill of Rights, United States Constitution.

Is Depression the New Drapetomania?

Drapetomania was the supposed mental illness which caused slaves to free captivity. The diagnosis was coined by Cartwright, an American physician in the late 1800s who prescribed  "whipping the devil out of them" as a "preventative measure". Other doctors recommended a cure of surgically removing part of slaves feet so they could not flee. Related diagnoses included Dysaesthesia aethiopica, a mental illness that caused slaves to not work hard enough for their masters
I considered these facts about psychiatry as I sat in my ENT's waiting room to see the results of my hearing tests. I could see in the papers that after the tragic death of the gifted performer Robin Williams has come a parade of "experts" to tell us all about the dangers of depression. I grabbed a medical journal instead, and just happened on an article about the huge uptick in ADHD diagnosis and medication.
Perhaps it is the same misunderstanding of the human psyche that creates diagnoses like drapetomania that would diagnose so many Americans as with depression and or ADHD. From a philosophical point of view we must ask certain questions. For example: why is depression so much more common in women? If over a quarter of the female population experiences depression, anxiety, or dysthymia  is it a pathology of women or the pathology of a society that expects them to shut up, put on some lipstick and smile as they work miserable jobs that don’t pay them enough to live?

Traditionally lower status work has fallen onto women. Contrary to mythology there is nothing traditional about the idea of women outside the labor force. Unfortunately what is traditional- painful, miserable, and mind-numbing  work in small agriculture, is much harder. In our industrialized society the number of people society needs in various roles is not fixed. We can dream of a day when many of the worst jobs are automated. In reality we now often push the most miserable and scary jobs off shore where they are less regulated. Yet there is still a need for the human touch in fields that involve care. To some extent Americans have attempted to offshore the un-offshoreable, importing an army of third world women to change bedpans and bathe their elders and children. But in the end these jobs have not been eliminated but simply disappeared to marginalized populations we pretend do not exist.

An alarming number of Americans are now scrambling out of miserable work by claiming disability. These disability claims often include a psychiatric element.

In the past the diagnosis of depression was statistically associated with being a white. Successful suicide was associated with being male. Some theorized that black’s and women’s lives were protected by a stronger sense of community and/or connection. Others theorized that on an individual level a white man’s life simply was more depressing, as no failure could be blamed on an oppressive system working against them. Not much has changed in America in terms of who tends to get the high status jobs, yet both my experience and statistics confirm disabling depression seems to be tilted towards women. While it is true women live longer than men and slightly outnumber men, even correcting for these phenomena there is still a strange slant towards the feminine in disability claims in a culture where men on average spend more time in potentially disabling work.  A misogynist might claim that women are natural whiners. A misandrist might claim that men are too stupid to figure out how to manage disability and simply die instead. A psychiatrist might see a disconnect between the numbers of such disability claims and reality. Many psychiatrists will tell you women are the psychologically stronger sex but they also know that statistically speaking women have more depression. Perhaps psychiatrists are not less immune to myths than anyone else.

As we as a nation slide into global irrelevance, economic decay and oligarchy let’s do ourselves a favor…let’s embrace some of our feelings as legitimate . Perhaps then we can do something about these problems besides popping Prozac.

 

 

 

 

Seeing Hope (A photo I took recently)

Information Deserts

Some of the top news stories as on the CNN.com American website this morning:

Celebs embrace the Ice bucket challenge

Look at me: 20 selfies of the week

Who recorded this actress nude?

Teen runaway hides out in Walmart for Days

Tiger Woods: No Ryder for me

At the top of the website runs a banner with the "editor's choice" story. I clicked the one in the middle entitled "Vogue icons." I opened a story about how given that Lauren Bacall died all of Madonna's vogue icons are not living. Given that the editor's jobs are to edit text or images related to many news stories, I think it says something that they picked out a story about a dead celebrity effecting the artistic nuance of an pop stars hit from the 1990s as salient. Unfortunately this selection does not indicate that it was a slow news day. In fact if you click on the international edition of CNN you get a different website. A website in which actual news features far more prominently vis a vis drivel about celebrities. Sadly, CNN is an American company. We seem to be in some sort of auto-infantilazation process, where our own media does not think we can handle reality.

In the popular imagination Rome fell due to decadence. And I'm sorry to tell you my fellow Americans, in the popular imagination of the world America is falling into the same trap. As a South African friend of mine put it back in 2012, "we are pretty sure you guys are going to go down, each of you alone at home watching porn while eating a bucket of fried chicken, wallowing in your own filth." A year later Eat24 launched it's food delivery service with the strategy of putting itself on online porn sites. Even our poor look ridiculous. In most countries poor people look like they could use something to eat. Here a lack of real food and an overabundance of high calorie-low quality "foods" make the poor notably round.

There has been much discussion of food deserts, but little discussion of the equally important issue of information deserts. If you live in rural America you may rely on Fox news, CNN and a few other sources for information about the world. If you are a farmer, you would be lucky to be able to afford the internet. The average small farmer loses money every single year. That kind of financial state makes it unlikely you will put extra gas in the truck to get over to the underfunded public library. Into the void come the screaming voices of FOX pundits full of emotion, but surprisingly empty of facts and historical analysis.

Perhaps I have too little access to information as well, for I have never even seen this issue addressed.

Realistic Alternatives: Israel/Palestine

Across the street from me in the Bronx a young Palestinian Muslim guy runs a Deli. We often talk politics because I trained as a doctor in Israel, and consider myself somewhat of an Israeli in exile. We don't agree about all that much, but on the other hand, at least we keep it real. Few things make me more irritated than people who have never and will never set foot in the Levant making all kinds of proclamations and generalizations about people they presume to understand. In general Americans do not understand the middle east. Their best and brightest led us into an endless quagmire in Iraq...and indirectly caused ISIS to get a state. ISIS, as far as we can tell, are the people who make Al Qaeda look like a bunch of kindergarten teachers. So, given what the political class here has been able to cook up as solutions to middle east conflicts, I consider the ideas of me and my Palestinian neighbor at least equally valid and likely to succeed.
My neighbor and I both want to go home: me to Haifa, him to Ramallah. We have both concluded that the Bronx and the US in general is a crazy, crazy place. Neither one of us has any delusions about the benevolence of the US. The US is running on it's own imperial fantasies in spite of the obvious: it's over. Something about civilization here has gone wrong, and people have stopped being fully human. They became much too concerned about money, which is ironic considering how few of them have any real amount of it.
Both of us agree that what makes life better over there is the people. Most people who live near you have your back. People watch out for the neighborhood kids. And, on a day to day basis, people have surprisingly few problems with each other.
I always thought I was living in some kind of bizarre co-existence bubble only blow over Haifa. My neighbor lived in Gaza before the pull out- he says in a lot of cases the environment was nearly the same. On a day to day basis people had surprisingly few problems with each other. The interesting contrast is the US of course, where on a day to day basis people of different racial ethnicities have surprisingly few real interactions with each other. I remember sitting in my Muslim neighbor's house on Ramadan. I remember an Arab friend of mine buying toys for some of out neighborhood kids who's Jewish mother had a substance abuse problem. "These kids belong to the neighborhood. Everyone is raising them so the situation isn't that bad..." she said to me, explaining everyone's relaxed attitude about their horrible mother. This incident and thousands of others over the years are ones I doubt I would ever witness between white Americans and black Americans.
A lot of what drives the conflict over Israel's borders does not boil down to an inherent conflict between peoples who can not live together. The conflict boils down to a big fight over who gets to be in charge of what. The vortex that spews out militarism is a distorted Israeli economy: highly unequal, highly military, and highly export oriented. At the bottom of the economic order are a lot people without a lot of hope of making what they consider a decent living in any normal peaceful way. To make things worse now many television channels are around to ever inflate what they consider normal.
My neighbor says the solution to the conflict is violence. He understands I disagree, but thinks I'm going to end up dead. "The way things are going, only the violent end up surviving." he says. I think there are other solutions to the conflict. Already through our conversations we have come up with one idea we can agree on: ignore the governments as much as possible; the governments are mostly a problem. On some level this gets down to the kind of creepy people who run governments in the region. Corruption in middle eastern governments is so totally endemic, we might be better of ignoring governments entirely. So then comes the obvious question: what replaces government, and is that not just some new corrupt government.
What seems to be emerging all over the world to replace corrupt governments out of touch with their peoples is civil society. If you add certain processes, like open discussion, open participation, transparency, voting and direct action to civil society you can get organizations that replace governments with something more democratic. Such processes are obviously challenging when you have different peoples with two different languages, but this is merely a technical issue. Canada has two linguistic groups able to exist democratically and so does the party membership of Hadash ( the Israeli communist party). Twenty first century technology can make the world smaller not just on a global scale, but a local one. It is now nearly free to run meetings with simultaneous translation via special headphone sets. I have worn such headphones myself.
Right now conflict rages, and there will be no people to people meetings that can bypass the governments. When the conflict stops for a while, there might be no productive meetings either. Too many people are committed to their own delusions of supremacy. On the other hand, quite a few people have realized no one has any more children to spare for war...so perhaps it is time to build peace for the people from the ground up.

BWB: Breathing While Black, A Message to All America

The old site of harassment was your car. You were pulled over not on a DUI but a DWB- driving while black. In some sort of sick downgrade to our state over the last year we are now at a point where we should even fear walking. Eric Garner was choked to death while simply standing. A 7 month pregnant woman was put in a chokehold for grilling meat in front of her own house with her husband. And now a child, Michael Brown, was walking to his grandmother when fatally shot by cops. At 18 years old, he was on the cusp of adulthood, a flower that never bloomed.

No one can say what life awaited him. One in three black men in America end up in jail. One in millions ends up as the president. Does a black president mean this will stop? Or is he simply a new face on a power structure that condemns most of us to misery?

The Obama administration is arguably the most white supremacist administration in decades. The obvious assumption underneath every droning campaign is that some lives matter more than others. White American lives matter more than brown lives in countries we cannot pronounce. White American comfort via cheap oil to power their huge cars is more important than the comfort of millions fleeing war and destruction on foot all over the middle east. So much so no one seems to care even as America bombs wedding parties or drones 9 year olds in faraway lands. Yet, slowly but surely black people across America have been catching on to the true meaning of all of this beyond half baked excuses like "collateral damage". Blacks are among the most vocal critics of the US imperial machine. The oppressive system that combines crony capitalism, neo-colonialism, and financial fraud is apparent to blacks whether they are working as it’s foot soldiers in the US army where they serve disproprtionallly, or simply getting crushed underneath it in the ghetto. Most whites are still having a moment like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, before they pull the curtain. When the formerly middle class whites of America pull the curtain, and discover the monstrous ideologies operating behind the US, no one knows what they will do. Some whites may accept some moral shortcomings as the only way they can imagine doing business, but they certainly will not accept a system that now views most of them as expendable. They will not accept a new world order in which small farmers work all day, yet cannot even feed themselves by design. They will not accept an order in which women who study to better themselves above traditionally low paid female jobs must turn to prostitution in order to afford studying by design. They will not accept an order in which nurses are put on less than fulltime shifts so their employers do not have to provide them with healthcare by design. No one of any color, wants to live in a world in which it is unclear if work is productive or counterproductive. How long can we continue on this path before all Americans have had enough? Our current situation is tenable only through force. There is a striking similarity between life in black ghettoes and life under military occupation. The death of children is part of a cruel calculated psychological warfare to force the status quo into our brains as if it were inevitable. If we live in fear and shame, we become a weak subjugated people.

The press has given attention to the recent spate of cop killings of African Americans, but this reality has been going on for decades. And suspiciously where there is now  media noise about cop killings of blacks there is an eerie silence about police relations with Latino, Native American, Arab American and Asian American communities. The media attention cannot be attributed to slow news weeks. The media is part of the corporate machinery. Perhaps these killings are sending us messages. The message to me, as a black person, is that death awaits me if I ever step out of line…so I can forget ever doing anything provocative or revolutionary. I should feel lucky if I am simply allowed to exist. The message to white America is one that reinforces their sense of racial superiority. They need to fear black areas for they are obviously dangerous jungles.

How long until military drones start flying over my neighborhood in the Bronx?

 

 

Life and plastic in the late capitalist apocalypse: Confessions of a Western lifestyle survivor

The late capitalist system pushes fixes to mental ailments even if we don’t even have a vocabulary to speak of them. The only question is whether it works. Whether happiness, contentment and even love can be correctly bottled and sold are really the only questions left…in some ways the factory made versions more closely resemble the real things every day.

Money, we believe, and perhaps not even that much of it, buys the freedom to think freely, to pursue hobbies, to sit in cafes philosophizing for hours and then perhaps years… to self-actualize. But what lies at the other end of this process of self-actualization so glorified in the West? What if we self-actualize into monsters or fools, and finally mental ill people? In some sense it isn’t possible. For the wealthy are hardly ever considered mentally ill, merely eccentric. Apparently, we are all now rich enough to be crazy while everyone else nods along.
Consider dolls. As a child I conceived of dolls as something one should be rid of by the time of adolescence. It is now adults who are the most extreme doll lovers. Men buy life sized doll lovers. Women buy realistic doll babies complete with baby smell perfume. Perhaps the concept of buying love has only been democratized and customized to different market segments. The “customers” willing to spend the most can buy a live wife or baby from the third world, or with a little more money, even the first.  Perhaps in the fantastical future the uber-wealthy will grow other humans on petri dishes while performing eugenic euthanasia on discontent lower class idiots like myself. At this point many have moved the production of life to the wombs of surrogates worlds away in class and geography. Is it more unhuman and depressing to consider the idea of exploiting and trafficking people or the idea of men fucking plastic women while women holds plastic baby dolls to their breasts? Those who love plastic hurt no one, yet in reality they also love no one. They are completely alone yet unable to conceptualize of themselves as such.
The phenomenon of those attached to plastic has become such a common theme that it appears in movies and other literature. Lars and the Real Girl was a 2007 American-Canadian comedy-drama film written by Nancy Oliver and in every year since dolls have become more anatomically correct, more life-like. At the same time real women seem to be transforming into something more plastic than ever. Every year seems to bring more cosmetic surgery and more Botox… It’s now nearly impossible to view something produced for mass media in which the women are not “done” even if it is about a war or humanitarian crisis. Looking a certain way, which was once a professional responsibility for models, seems to have creeped towards being the duty of almost any woman who wants to pick up a paycheck. NOW the national organization of women opposed taxing cosmetic surgery on the logic that women by virtue of being women “need” the “work”; they need to do everything up to and including having knives stuck into their faces to keep looking good so they can feed and shelter themselves.
While technology may keep women looking around 30, reality marches onward with the ticks of biological time. Thus enter the new baby dolls. These are baby dolls that even cry and cough. There are several companies making such dolls. One company, Reborn Babies, was profiled in more than one documentary. One documentary features a couple in which the woman predictably has no children but bought several dolls. The customer dressed her dolls twice a day. She admitted they helped her let out her maternal desires. But no one called a psychiatrist as someone did in the fictional scenario of Lars and the Real World…In reality we have become more delusional than even what happens in the fantastic world of movies.  We have become so delusional that we need to hope for the day life begins to imitate art because art can now nearly perfectly imitate life.
Yet, if there has ever been a time to put down our toys, it is now. Every day even the primped and eerily frozen faced lady newscasters must touch upon what happens in reality. How many refugees? How many people made homeless? How many children will go hungry tonight? The world does not lack people we should be caring about: real people who need love. They need not the abstracted “maternal” love a baby doll could elicit, but the real parent like love that worries about children…children who desperately need help and action. What an absurd insult to our humanity that our ‘system’ hands us plastic dolls, while we forget real children starving.

Myself and Professor Cornel West- August 9th 2014

More reproducing the rich...

I recently had a blog posted to cluborlov.com that caused quite a bit of controversy. I was however surprised few people seemed to catch my completely resentful tone given my place in the social hierarchy. I'll expound on one aspect of the topic the topic below:

Life rationing

I sat on the grass across from a man who looked like the perfect American. Dark blond hair, light eyes, and shorts that were faded just so, as if there was some professional industrial process behind their fade. His maroon shorts were paired with a bright green T shirt. He could have been pulled from a catalog marketing expensive casual clothing. His English was unaccented. There was only one thing that set him apart from the people I assume to be upper middle class white people. The people I sometimes assume are all off at a champagne party when I’m struggling to figure out how to pay my rent… He wore the red square of Strike Debt. We pulled out a book to discuss how it managed to kick up a good deal of resentment in me. Soon we had landed on one of my hot button issues with the dominant culture. Motherhood. The holy sainted motherhood of white American women. The motherhood they feel so entitled to. The motherhood that has them so doped up they start claiming it’s tougher to be a mother than a coal miner or a trauma surgeon as they play with Popsicle sticks at 3 in the afternoon. The motherhood that has them hiring an army of black and brown women to pamper and love their children, while those women’s children are an invisible question not asked. For me it’s as far away as a fairy tale in a land made of magic. Yet it’s so close I hear them condescend me every year. Every year some woman I know not even bright enough to enter university or be gainfully employed tells me how I simply don’t understand anything because I haven’t had children. I point out that I’ve delivered babies and saved children’s lives, sometimes they point out that I don’t have a husband, which some claim is “just as hard as going to medical school, even harder.” I’m still waiting for medical school to buy me jewelry and sleep with me, because so far all I got was a bunch of student loans I sometimes skip meals over, enough stress to hang myself, half a career, endless condescension from my some of my less enlightened peers, and a whole lot of people who think I’m a nurse.

I try to explain why separating out this kind of mythological-for-me motherhood, the kind that exists separately from the need for work for survival, is so offensive. I ask about this guy’s parenthood experiences. He says something I never expected. “I can’t afford kids.” I ask further. “It was my kids or my education at some point.”

I still wonder exactly how old this guy was. Was he my age or did some generational shift happen in the last 5 years? Some seismic shift in the understanding of education which threw children into the cliff it created as the political landscape ripped apart. Was education now understood to be part of the quarterly capitalist machine which was now so efficient even men could no longer afford to have children until some imaginary time at which they might have accrued enough resources to pretend to have their own natural children via technology? I wondered if the kid knew the possible trajectories he was laying out for himself. Maybe he would get sick of his wife for a reason he couldn’t quite name, but probably would be related to her no longer looking like 20 year old fashion models whose images percolate everywhere to induce consumerism. He would find another woman. He could be past 50, and finally “ready” although unable to have non-pharmaceutical sex, or produce many sperm. In all probability the narrative of ‘technology to the rescue’ would obscure a much darker one. One about exploitation of the poor for their gonads. One about simply not caring about other people even as their bodies would now care for him. Not just their hands, but their ovaries and uteruses, their very material of life-giving itself. One in which his newly found “need” to reproduce would be weighted higher than the needs of any young poor person’s. One in which he would live two or three lives, while poorer, usually nonwhite people would live half of one.

I remember the first time I heard about second lives. I was talking to my soon to be divorced from me never was a real husband anyways disaster of a spouse in Israel. As we worked on documentation for the legality of our relationship he explained why he supposedly hated marriage. How all the bourgeois couples living in Tivon were all in crisis. It always went the same way: something happened and then they divorced, and then she got the kids and he moved on to his “second life”.  New woman, new set of kids, and repeat. I wondered how often there is the added banal cliché that he runs away with the nanny or the maid, which is really extremely civilized compared to the Americas where he might rape the nanny or the maid, then deny any relation to some “half breed” children.

In the mainstream American culture what is just emerging, as some kind of science fiction novel idea about the future, is a hypothetical world in which the rich get two lives and the poor get one. In reality this trend has already been surpassed. Statisticians who make life tables, forensic accountants who look at tax structures, and everyone in public health know all about it. Even without a miracle fountain of youth drug, a man living on the Upper East side can expect to live more than twice as long as a man living a few miles away in the South Bronx or in Detroit. Even filtering out the alarming number of men killed by violence or even due to infant mortality rates among the worst in the world, the poor just live much shorter lives. Tragically the only thing they receive more of is years spent suffering through debilitation or even downright disability.

Although they have more time on their hands the rich don’t always catch on to the full picture about these structural differences in life patterns. They keep claiming they are the victims. They had to work so hard. They had to pay so much for reproductive services, taxes, schools…the list is as infinite as their money. What in other societies becomes a uniting force- a force by which all people empathetically understand ourselves as children and parents becomes in ours a dividing and divided one. Some chasm is created, a deep divide into which my new friend wearing the red square has fallen, but can be rescued from by gender, race and class privilege. So who is throwing him the rope and more importantly is it us? Is it the army of caretakers? The black women pushing white babies in expensive strollers in neighborhoods they can’t afford to live in while their own children remain in circumstances unknown or perhaps unborn? The single women physicians who give and give extra hours to their patients as we have no spouses or children? The few or many humans reduced to bodies who allow themselves to be reduced to mere tools for his every need and whim from clean floors to catered food? What role do we play in deciding that if he wants it he deserves three lives, scooped out of our own?