F for Fake and On Volunteering

While reading a blog post by The Smirking Chimp's resident curmudgeon BlueTigress (1) and with her help, in one of those aha moments, I saw another way of talking about my favorite theme, illusions; fake.

Mere synonym aside, the reason I'm making a distinction is that I like the vehemency of "fake" versus "illusions," the latter having more of a literate flavor, the high versus the low of "fake" or "phony". It has much more muscle. There's also another dimension to "fake" that I like; agency, planning or plotting, intention, motivation. Implicit in it is the notion that someone planned something and gave or executed it, no matter how stupid or well-thought out, poorly or masterly played. That's not necessarily inherent in "illusions" which implies the receiving end of perception, the one exception being magic tricks.

The great Orson Welles essayed on this very subject whose title I stole for this entry; it's nothing less than one of the most brilliant movies I've ever seen in both form and content.(3)



All of which - BlueTigress, Welles and my liking the theme of illusions - says that I think the term "fake" or even "phony" applies more accurately to American "capitalism" than "illusion," because it places the onus upon the people who wield conglomerated power.

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I admit to an experiment; see if I could write an essay whose footnotes were longer than the main body. I've succeeded.

1. While I couldn't agree more with her take on crazy liberals, particularly white-guilted ones, I disagree with her when she admonishes them by saying,

As for the self-flagellation crowd? Look people, what's done is done and cannot be undone. Rather than go "we're so horrible" go to the reservation and volunteer to teach the kids or volunteer to be the tribe's general helper. Work with the people who are here now, rather than try to raise the consciousness of people who don't care. You're wasting your time and irritating them, which makes them even LESS receptive to your message. If it makes you feel noble to eat your bread and water meal in a room that was purposely made cheerless so you could meditate on the injustice Europeans have done to the world, fine. And when you've emerged from your hermitage, and nothing is different, don't feel bad. You did what you thought best. But did it matter?

It's the part about volunteering. Let me be honest about it; fuck volunteering. It's unctuous, condescending and infantilizes poor people of color. As Jonathan Kozol so aptly noted decades ago, bleeding heart liberal white kids come and go in the ghetto every summer during internships... and yet the reservation/barrio/ghetto stays the reservation/barrio/ghetto and the white kids disappear, only to be replaced by the next crop. In a poignantly funny moment, I recall Kozol remarking how blacks would look at white kids who opted to go barefoot to show that they were down as crazy, for who would choose to go barefoot when they had perfectly good shoes?

By saying, "...rather than try to raise the consciousness of people who don't care," she ignores history and that ole sayin', there's more than one way to skin a cat. After all, in conglomerating around the issues of war, civil rights, women's rights, and Watergate, those issues were dealt with because it was so in your face, all the time, even in the music and movies of the day. It's also much harder to organize disenfranchised folks, let alone impart pragmatism that works in favor of their needs, and I suspect that's the reason even the "pragmatic and down to earth" BlueTigress would rather advocate for volunteering than organizing.

And an important point that seems obvious to me but which I find myself clarifying time and again in these arguments; I'm not questioning the intention(s) of people, I'm interested in effects. I can remember the first time David Hilliard started telling me stories about crazy liberals when I produced a series of programs with he and Luis Rodriguez (and later, Piri Thomas!) and cracking up. But then, one particular gig which was at Jerry Brown's compound, we had a couple of nut cases - one a butt fugly fat Asian lesbo tree hugger who was mouthy to the point of making everyone within earshot do the eye roll; shithead snuck in without paying, too. The other was the typical Berkeley liberally conscious yenta who looked like she orgasmed at the thought of the Dewey Decimal system and replete with her white fro curls, so full of self-righteousness and certainty as to what "progressive" was that anything outside of its bounds -- such as Luis' story of transcendence or the Panther free breakfast program -- made her throw up. She ended up leaving during the program, but not before making us all aware of how we were all so wrong for listening to this (re-write? revisionism?) "stuff." Of course, they were at the extreme end.

Mr. Hilliard's real point, of course, was that the world was overflowing with crazy liberals who mouth off with lofty idealism, "book smarts" and high ideals, but in the end, shoot blanks. And that's why people who are crazy liberals can't stand true progressives - because real progressives are grounded in equal parts idealism and pragmatism; they have a sense of high and low, are resourceful, have strategic plans, and last but not least, they do the work.

Volunteering, on the other hand, is selfish and done for the feeling of "doing some thing good," ostensibly for the Other, but inwardly, psychologically, deceptively, for one's own self, (trust me, the irony's not lost here). It reminds me of people who do nothing about oppressive systems 364 days in a row, and then dole out Thanksgiving turkey on Skid Row. It accomplishes nothing systemically and in fact continues the infantilization of the recipients. Like virtually 99% of American systems, it's a quick fix.

The other "real progressive scenario" is a lot of frustration with the odds against you and a lot of poverty because the disenfranchised aren't motivated toward conglomerating like capital interests who have attainable, concrete goals, clearer paths via systems they are players in and the connections toward attaining them.

In other words, one is temporarily playing at action, the other's real hard work with poverrty level wages or somewhere thereabouts. This way of looking at volunteering also comports with the theme, because fake is deception, and that is exactly what goes on internally within the volunteer; self-deception.

2. In particular, there's the notion of the relationship between film(maker) and spectator, which for lack of a better way of stating it relies on a consistent interrogating of the viewer, with doubt as its tool. This is a deeper relationship - or at least a more complex one - that goes far beyond the "talking to the camera" gimmick (Annie Hall) or the mere pointing of a camera at the viewer (a'la' the opening credit sequence of Le Mepris). No doubt Noel Burch has nailed this.

Of course, reflexivity is nothing new to the cinema - Porter's The Great Train Robbery comes to mind - but the (psychological) level and sophistication with which Welles engages the audience portends things to come... which never were to be.

The tragedy of Welles - Never underestimate the stupidity of the studio system to ostracize greatness and banish him to a promise unfulfilled and but a beautiful glimpse.

Kill the Mockingbird, Already

While we can all, I think for the most part/at least I hope, grasp that racism sucks, people often don't get what I mean when I rail against crazy liberals and their own particular, and peculiar, brand of racism. There, I said it. Again.

Maybe it's because of being raised in LA, where so-called liberalism runs rampant. Huh. Some don't believe me when I tell them that LA's about as segregated a city I know of. In many ways this veneer illustrates American phoniness all too well.

Roger, take it.

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To Kill a Mockingbird

BY ROGER EBERT / November 11, 2001

"To Kill a Mockingbird" is a time capsule, preserving hopes and sentiments from a kinder, gentler, more naive America. It was released in December 1962, the last month of the last year of the complacency of the postwar years. The following November, John F. Kennedy would be assassinated. Nothing would ever be the same again -- not after the deaths of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, not after the war in Vietnam, certainly not after September 11, 2001. The most hopeful development during that period for America was the civil rights movement, which dealt a series of legal and moral blows to racism. But "To Kill a Mockingbird," set in Maycomb, Alabama, in 1932, uses the realities of its time only as a backdrop for the portrait of a brave white liberal.

The movie has remained the favorite of many people. It is currently listed as the 29th best film of all time in a poll by the Internet Movie Database. Such polls are of questionable significance, but certainly the movie and the Harper Lee novel on which it is based have legions of admirers. It is being read by many Chicagoans as part of a city-wide initiative in book discussion. It is a beautifully-written book, but it should be used not as a record of how things are, or were, but of how we once liked to think of them.

The novel, which focuses on the coming of age of three young children, especially the tomboy Scout, gains strength from her point of view: It sees the good and evil of the world through the eyes of a six-year-old child. The movie shifts the emphasis to the character of her father, Atticus Finch, but from this new point of view doesn't see as much as an adult in that time and place should see.

Maycomb is evoked by director Robert Mulligan as a "tired old town" of dirt roads, picket fences, climbing vines, front porches held up by pillars of brick, rocking chairs, and Panama hats. Scout (Mary Badham) and her 10-year-old brother Jem (Philip Alford) live with their widowed father Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) and their black housekeeper Calpurnia (Estelle Evans). They make friends with a new neighbor named "Dill" Harris (John Megna), who wears glasses, speaks with an expanded vocabulary, is small for his age, and is said to be inspired by Harper Lee's childhood friend Truman Capote. Atticus goes off every morning to his law office downtown, and the children play through lazy hot days.

Their imagination is much occupied by the Radley house, right down the street, which seems always dark, shaded and closed. Jem tells Dill that Mr. Radley keeps his son Boo chained to a bed in the house, and describes Boo breathlessly: "Judging from his tracks, he's about six and a half feet tall. He eats raw squirrels and all the cats he can catch. There's a long, jagged scar that runs all the way across his face. His teeth are yellow and rotten. His eyes are popped. And he drools most of the time." Of course the first detail reveals Jem has never seen Boo.

Into this peaceful calm drops a thunderbolt. Atticus is asked by the town judge to defend a black man named Tom Robinson (Brock Peters), who has been accused of raping a poor white girl named Mayella Violet Ewell (Collin Wilcox). White opinion is of course much against the black man, who is presumed guilty, and Mayelle's father Bob (James Anderson) pays an ominous call on Atticus, indirectly threatening his children. The children are also taunted at school, and get in fights; Atticus explains to them why he is defending a Negro, and warns them against using the word "nigger."

The courtroom scenes are the most celebrated in the movie; they make it perfectly clear that Tom Robinson is innocent, that no rape occurred, that Maybelle came on to Robinson, that he tried to flee, that Bob Ewell beat his own daughter, and she lied about it out of shame for feeling attracted to a black man. Atticus' summation to the jury is one of Gregory Peck's great scenes, but of course the all-white jury finds Tom Robinson guilty anyway. The verdict is greeted by an uncanny quiet: No whoops of triumph from Bob Ewell, no cries of protests by the blacks in the courtroom gallery. The whites file out quickly, but the blacks remain and stand silently in honor of Atticus as he walks out a little later. Scout and her brother sat up with the blacks throughout the trial, and now a minister tells her: "Miss Jean Louise, stand up, your father's passin'."

The problem here, for me, is that the conviction of Tom Robinson is not the point of the scene, which looks right past him to focus on the nobility of Atticus Finch. I also wonder at the general lack of emotion in the courtroom, and the movie only grows more puzzling by what happens next. Atticus is told by the sheriff that while Tom Robinson was being taken for safekeeping to nearby Abbottsville, he broke loose and tried to run away. As Atticus repeats the story: "The deputy called out to him to stop. Tom didn't stop. He shot at him to wound him and missed his aim. Killed him. The deputy says Tom just ran like a crazy man."

That Scout could believe it happened just like this is credible. That Atticus Finch, an adult liberal resident of the Deep South in 1932, has no questions about this version is incredible. In 1962 it is possible that some (white) audiences would believe that Tom Robinson was accidentally killed while trying to escape, but in 2001 such stories are met with a weary cynicism.

The construction of the following scene is highly implausible. Atticus drives out to Tom Robinson's house to break the sad news to his widow, Helen. She is played by Kim Hamilton (who is not credited, and indeed has no speaking lines in a film that finds time for dialog by two superfluous white neighbors of the Finches). On the porch are several male friends and relatives. Bob Ewell, the vile father who beat his girl into lying, lurches out of the shadows and says to one of them, "Boy, go in the house and bring out Atticus Finch." One of the men does so, Ewell spits in Atticus's face, Atticus stares him down and drives away. The black people in this scene are not treated as characters, but as props, and kept entirely in long shot. The close-ups are reserved for the white hero and villain.

It may be that in 1932 the situation was such in Alabama that this white man, who the people on that porch had seen lie to convict Tom Robinson, could walk up to them alone after they had just learned he had been killed, call one of them "boy," and not be touched. If black fear of whites was that deep in those days, then the rest of the movie exists in a dream world.

The upbeat payoff involves Ewell's cowardly attack on Scout and Jem, and the sudden appearance of the mysterious Boo Radley (Robert Duvall, in his first screen performance), to save them. Ewell is found dead with a knife under his ribs. Boo materializes inside the Finch house, is identified by Scout as her savior, and they're soon sitting side by side on the front porch swing. The sheriff decides that no good would be served by accusing Boo of the death of Ewell. That would be like "killing a mockingbird," and we know from earlier in the film that you can shoot all the bluejays you want, but not mockingbirds -- because all they do is sing to bring music to the garden. Not exactly a description of the silent Boo Radley, but we get the point.

This is a tricky note to end on, because it brings Boo Radley in literally from the wings as a distraction from the facts: An innocent black man was framed for a crime that never took place, he was convicted by a white jury in the face of overwhelming evidence, and he was shot dead in problematic circumstances. Now we are expected to feel good because the events got Boo out of the house. That Boo Radley killed Bob Ewell may be justice, but it is not parity. The sheriff says, "There's a black man dead for no reason, and now the man responsible for it is dead. Let the dead bury the dead this time." But I doubt that either Tom Robinson or Bob Ewell would want to be buried by the other.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" is, as I said, a time capsule. It expresses the liberal pieties of a more innocent time, the early 1960s, and it goes very easy on the realities of small-town Alabama in the 1930s. One of the most dramatic scenes shows a lynch mob facing Atticus, who is all by himself on the jailhouse steps the night before Tom Robinson's trial. The mob is armed and prepared to break in and hang Robinson, but Scout bursts onto the scene, recognizes a poor farmer who has been befriended by her father, and shames him (and all the other men) into leaving. Her speech is a calculated strategic exercise, masked as the innocent words of a child; one shot of her eyes shows she realizes exactly what she's doing. Could a child turn away a lynch mob at that time, in that place? Isn't it nice to think so.

Bad Sista: An African Fem

Note: I've cleaned up and done some editing of this, one of the best if not the best writing on the way crazy white liberals "help" poor mudpeeps, in this case Africa, but it could just as easily have been Asian, Pacific, Latino, or Native mudpeeps. How she echoes my thoughts and feelings... Some of the links may be dead, but this writing, so intelligent, vibrant and alive, is a testament to the no horseshit attitude I admire and wish were the norm amongst so-called progressives.

Here then, in all her glory (save for the first line about crazy liberals - that's from my original posting), is "Blacklooks," a Bad OG - how I wish her blog were still in play!

-jp, November 7, 2007

Crazy liberals... it's about time someone called them out!

We are not whales!

The response from the liberal blogosphere to any criticism of the Live 8 concert and the ideology of paternalistic simplicity espoused by Geldof et al has been "at least they are doing something" or "its better than nothing" or a comment I read on African Bullets & Honey [note: Just re-checked for dead links; this is a defunct blog as of 11/07] "Pennies on the dollar are better than no pennies at all" or some other naïve variant. Statements such as these contain a loosely concealed self-congratulatory, paternalist and arrogant attitude towards Africa and Africans.

My argument is that No It is not better than nothing and that what they are doing is actually damaging to African countries. Furthermore the Live 8 concert reinforces racist stereotypes and like most liberal projects fails to challenge the status quo or address the real issues. It is as if people so much want to believe that Geldof's agenda for Africa has and will make a difference that they cannot see the wood for the trees. There is a desperateness about their rush to believe the superficial explanations offered to them. I can only conclude that the truth is just too much for people to bear. The bleeding hearts of liberalism cannot face the reality that their liberalism will solve nothing, that it colludes with the maintenance of the status quo and actually will cause more harm than good.

One of the pro-Geldof copouts is that Westerners are deprived of information about African countries and therefore something like Live 8 will give them the missing information. Rubbish. Westerners and other non-Africans do not need to live in Africa or live in any other part of the world to understand what is happening there. The information is available; Americans and Europeans have much more access to information than the rest of the world; if they choose not to read the available information that is because they have no desire or interest in doing so.

My prediction [note: ibid] that the presentation of African countries during Saturday's concerts would be a negative pitiful one was correct. We were presented with Africa as the scar of the world; passive, starving, diseased, dying and helpless. This was a conscious decision by the organisers of the concert to make the crowd sympathetic to their cause and at the same time make them feel good, make them feel as if they had made a contribution to saving Africa. I am reminded of an American TV programme we watched as children in Nigeria: The Lone Ranger. At the end of each programme after the Lone Ranger had fought off the baddies and saved the poor defenseless people his horse would rear up and he would shout "hiooooooo Silver"; and then ride into the wilderness till the following week. And so to we are all asked to give "thanks and praises to the great white chief Geldof on his shining white horse.

Madeleine Bunting writing in today's Guardian quotes Cambridge historian, John Lonsdale's description of Blair's Agenda for Africa as

a construction that infantilises not only Africans, unable to fend for themselves, but us too, like babies demanding the instant gratification of self-importance.

Not only does it infantilise Africans and Europeans, it also facilitates the continued appropriation of all things African and all things in Africa including our problems [note: yet another dead link] and reduces the issues to cheap sound bites and meaningless nauseating rhetoric that go down well in the kindergarden playground of liberal politics. She goes on to say

It is almost as if the west can't accept African agency: we want the simplification of the four Ps (picturesque, pitiful, psychopathic, and above, all passive) because it so neatly caters for our fears, derived from the colonial history of the "dark continent" of Joseph Conrad fame. Is this the price that has to be paid for an instant of western attention?

I would add that the Blair/Geldof agendas aim to reduce western guilt, fulfill the chronic need to "feel good" and reinforce western feelings of superiority towards the other all of which are underpinned by an insidious racism. A prime of this example is the lack of any "visible participation of Africans" in this whole enterprise which Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem describes as "trying to shave someone's head in their absence". http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/28386

As I have said, the Live 8 crusade and the response that "at least they are doing something" will damage African countries in a number of ways. Firstly Live8 and its accompanying ideology has served to undermine the anti-globalisation movement and any real challenge to changing the status quo. John Pilger critiquing the "unrelenting sophistry of Geldof, Bono and Blair" explains how the spin works:

The illusion of an anti-establishment crusade led by pop stars," which is in reality, "a cultivated, controlling image of rebellion - serves to dilute a great political movement of anger.

Secondly the crusade has managed to completely ignore the realities of the recent so called "debt relief" to the 30 countries in the world. Geldof and Bono both hailed the announcement as, a victory for millions.

An historic deal to free more than 30 countries from the crippling shackles of debt to the West was hailed by Bob Geldof yesterday as a "victory for millions"..... The $55billion settlement, which will immediately benefit countries from Ethiopia and Uganda to Rwanda and Mozambique, was the beginning rather than the end, the campaigning rock star said......The Observer.

...a little piece of history...

What we have here today is a little piece of history," the U2 frontman told Britain's Sky News television after the G8 agreed to wipe away $40 billion ($52 billion) of debt owed by 18 of the world's poorest nations, most of them in Africa.

The truth is however very different.

First of all only 18 countries are covered of which 16 are in Africa when in fact there are some 60 plus countries that should be relieved of their debt.

The IMF and World bank will "monitor the indebted countries progress and decide if they are to be relieved of the debt burden". In other words the debt is dependent on the IMF/World Bank and it is in their interest for the debt relief to take place as slowly as possible.

For each 1$ of debt relief, each country will loose 1$ in new aid from the International Development Association/World Bank. So what they give with one hand they take away with the other.

The worst aspect of the debt cancellation are the conditionalities imposed on those selected countries. "the reality is that the finance minister's proposal has the potential to deliver to the wealthy nations more money than they have written off" What is presented as "charity" is in fact more money for the West:

By a) boosting private sector development and b) good governance meaning privatising the public sector such as electricity and power, health and education; allowing foreign investment; removing obstacles to foreign investment (eg be less stringent on pollution requirements than in the west, allow foreign companies to bring in their own staff or staff from outside the local community in which they operate.); cooperation with the "war on terror"; purchase of Western goods (nearly 70% of US aid money is tied to the purchase of US products and in Italy 100% of aid is tied to the purchase of Italian goods).

These are the same IMF/World Bank/G8 policies that have been killing Africa in the past. Arms sales from Britain to Africa amount to more than $1 billion. So on the one hand Blair is advocating cancellation of debt WITH conditionalities that benefit Britain and on the other he is selling $1 billion worth of arms to African countries. How do policies such as these alleviate poverty and where is the justice? Whose victory are we celebrating here?

The new deal for Africa is the same as the old deal - nothing has changed. "The G8's interest in Africa is summed up in a 2003 World Bank report that identifies sub-Saharan Africa as the most profitable place in the world for direct foreign investment" - that is where the truth lies.

For a fuller explanation of the impact of debt relief on the 18 countries see:

Africa: repudiate foreign debt (no link)
Raised Voices www.raisedvoices.net
Vivelecanada www.vivelecanada.ca/article.php/20050624095334717