Ru Freeman

I’m over at the Huffington Post with a Q&A with author Tayari Jones, whose third novel, Silver Sparrow, just came out.

Here’s a snippet (below). You can read the full interview here.

RF: In 2010 you joined the boycott of Arizona, in protest against SB1070 which penalizes non-Whites. In your letter you wrote, “That people should be legally required to show proof of citizenship is similar to the antebellum mandate that black people produce “free papers” proving themselves not to be slaves.” Recently, after the Trayvon Martin murder, you were on NPR speaking to the fact that young Black girls watch as “our mothers groom our brothers to live in a world that feared them…We, too, were in training, learning to protect the men we loved.” Many writers avoid the activist role despite having one of the best tools - words - at their disposal. What makes you different? What gives you the courage to raise your voice against social injustice?

TJ: I think all artists are activists, whether they know it or not. The ones who think they are avoiding it, are activists for the status quo. I don’t mind expressing my opinions and speaking out against injustice. I would be doing this even if I wasn’t a writer. I grew up in a household that believed in social justice. I have always understood myself as having an obligation to stand on the side of the silenced, the oppressed, and the mistreated. I never made a decision. It was how I was brought up. It’s what I believe. I don’t think it takes courage to stand up. If I fear anything, I fear being silent, because I fear the consequences of that silence.

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On August 3, 2006, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelem (LTTE),slaughtered over 100 Muslim civilians including women and children at Pachchanoor, Sri Lanka. Before then, the LTTE butchered 103 Muslims while they wre praying in the grand mosque of Kattankudiy in the coastal city of Batticaloa. You can see the images of these attacks here. It is not pretty. The Tamils had no cause to fight the Muslims, their grievances - imagined or real - were directed at the Sinhalese majority. The LTTE, however, and its leader, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, were committed to the matter of ethnic cleansing in the North. The attacks on the Muslims were part of that effort which also left entire villages of Sinhalese peasants murdered in cold blood in a war that lasted thirty years.

These are events that merit mentioning given the current effort by the United States to table a resolution alleging that the Sri Lankan government perpetrated war crimes during the last days of the war. For the past week there have been demonstrations at the Hague by pro-LTTE groups alleging that the Sri Lankan government set out to kill the Tamil civilians trapped between the army and the terrorists (The LTTE has been referred to by the FBI as the most ruthless terrorist organization in the world and it was banned, albeit only after 9/11, by the US and the UK). It is an easy thing to imagine: a government out of patience with repeated ceasefires and the interventions of foreign governments committed to speaking on behalf not of Tamils but of the LTTE, sets out to murder all the Tamils in the North (the 54% of the Tamils who live outside the North and East were, presumably, safe, odd as that may sound given the allegations).

Except that it isn’t true. Civilians died, yes, though not in as great a number as they did in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan at the hands of the United States military. But not only was there no massacre of all the civilians trapped in the North, most of them, over 100,000, were rescued between April 20th and April 22nd, 2009, from the LTTE which fired on them and placed a suicide bomber among them as they tried to reach the refugee camps.

Sri Lanka fought this war for thirty years against the interference of powerful foreign groups, and in the midst of a tsunami that devastated the country, leaving 40,000 dead and 1.5 million people displaced, and the struggles of a small country caught in a failing global economy. It fought this war against a terrorist organization while, simultaneously, providing the entire civilian population controlled by the LTTE (as well as LTTE cadres), with water, electricity, infrastructure, education, and all forms of social welfare available to the rest of the island, including food and medicine. This has to be a first for any government in the world.

The war in Sri Lanka ended in May, 2009. Since then, the economy is thriving with unprecedented investment in infrastructure from the South to the North. Sri Lanka instituted the Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Committee (LLRC), and conducted hearings in the immediate aftermath of the war. The Government of Sri Lanka is engaged in implementing the recommendations of the LLRC, despite being blamed for being “slow.” Consider that we were willing to wait for two years of hearings to be completed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (between 1996 and 1998) in South Africa. Consider that we were willing to wait four more years, until 2002, until the last of the reports from that commission were presented to the President.

It is politics. Geo-politics. Always. A country with a president who watched its military murder a terrorist-leader, Osama bin Laden, in cold blood after having violated all rules of sovereignty in Pakistan, then disposed of that body out of public view, hardly has a moral leg to stand on when it comes to decrying the death of a terrorist leader who was killed in a final battle at the end of thirty years of war that held a country hostage. This resolution is not about Sri Lanka, it is a play by the US for power in South Asia, a play that is causing the US to call in every favor they’ve ever been promised, and includes the investment of millions of dollars in buying-off and buying-up.

Which brings me back to those Muslims. The LTTE was a group that, repeatedly, demonstrated a particularly virulent hatred for Sri Lanka’s Muslim population, a minority group that has always remained within the democratic system, a group that has never, not once, in the history of that nation, ever perpetrated crimes against their fellow citizens. Pakistan recognizes this as do other Muslim nations. Can the United States, in the wake of riots after the burning of copies of the Quo’ran and the murder of 16 Afghan civilians by Robert Bales, not to mention its decade long occupation of Iraq and years of invading Afghanistan and the drone strikes on innocents in Pakistan, including 160 children between 2004 and the end of 2011, afford to align itself with yet another anti-Muslim organization? Particularly one that is proscribed by its own state department?

Sri Lanka has many friends. Sri Lanka is also a predominantly Buddhist country, used to thinking about the evolution of events in terms of lifetimes, not a 24 hour news-cycle. Whether they win or lose in Geneva, Sri Lanka will endure. The coordinates are different for an America struggling to hold on to a semblance of relevence on the world scene. In a time when the Muslims are out in force against the United States - Pakistan, Aghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Palestine, are but five - the United States has but one democracy it can count on as an ally: Sri Lanka. India has, under internal pressure, expressed its support for the US, thereby alienating the second largest population of Muslims in the world, its own. Today, the Muslim population of Sri Lanka joined the ranks of their brothers and sisters in the rest of South Asia to protest the actions of the United States.

It is governments that control airspace, ports, resources and investments. Not terrorist groups. And the Sri Lankan government will turn with great ease toward China and toward its allies in the Muslim world. The last thing that the US needs is to provide further proof that it is, by policy, military exercises and deliberate intent, anti-Muslim. It is not time for a resolution against Sri Lanka. It is time for the Obama administration to rethink its strategy.

Note: The photographs above depict, in order, former female members of the LTTE, former child soldiers recruited by the LTTE (original photograph first appeared in the Washington Times), injured Sri Lankan soldiers on parade, Sri Lankan child post-war, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and de Klerk after the end of apartheid and a graffiti version of the American flag)

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Over at the Huffington Post with a recap of AWP 2012. You can read the full post here. Below, an excerpt.

…Best of all, with each succeeding year, you learn how to navigate the conference. You don’t dart from panel to panel like a deranged bat trapped at a raquetball tournament, you set time aside to talk to human beings (not their iterations as editors and publishers and sellers of broadsides), and, when in doubt, err on the side of watching out for your friends. So, fresh from AWP, here are a few lessons learned and cool words from people who know these things:

On Writing Evil (from The Center for Fiction reading)
1. To issue evil to others while denying it in ourselves is to imagine that evil is “solvable.” (Paul Harding)
2. If you delineate notions of good and evil you do the work of the devil, so to speak. (Marilynne Robinson)
3. You do not write about evil so much as you write about the management of evil. (Ha Jin)

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I’m over at the Huffington Post with a review of Eugene Cross’ Fires of Our Choosing. (Dzanc Books, March 2012). There’s a taste of it below. You can read the full review here.

As Eric says in the title story, “Dignity was a faraway country from which I had been exiled years before, a place I could hardly recall.” Indeed, very little of it is permitted the underclass of this nation, a fact that creeps up on the reader as these stories unfold, one after another, bringing news of realities so rarely addressed by contemporary writers. How noteworthy is it, then, that Cross offers no apologies for his characters: their poor choices, their lack of moral fortitude, their betrayals of each other and the poverty of their surroundings and, often, themselves; he leaves these things alone. They are who they are, and if dignity has been denied them by the rest of us, including us story-tellers, it is restored by this collection. That he has undertaken to serve as their raconteur should place Cross on the radar of all the big prizes that gift those blessed with talent, compassion and fearlessness, particularly during this present moment in our history.

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Just yesterday I posted on FB that I had “99 problems” and was trying to whittle them down to 98. I was feeling overwhelmed. I have two out of state meetings/conferences to go to, one of which involves a flight, sub-zero temperatures and 10,000 other people. I have mountains of readings to finish, all of which have to be done with the kind of obsessive attention that goes with my personality. I have papers to grade. I have a book to edit. A father to coerce, one who is digging in his heels and refusing to get on a plane and come here. I have several small battles to fight in the larger war against girls and women. I have the detritus of everyday living to sweep up - those dishes, dirty clothes, showers, exercises, medical check ups, and groceries that fill up the day. I have a ton of minding to do, too.

But then Marie Colvin was killed and my attention was drawn to the last news report she filed for CNN. I read through and clicked on the video that was attached. It is an account of a Syrian baby during his last moments of life. He is wearing the kind of shirt that babies in Sri Lanka have been dressed in for as long as I can remember; a simple piece of cloth that even women who can’t sew - women like me - are able to cut and sew. The baby shirt has two arm holes, and a tie around the neck. The back is open in deference to the heat. Women in Sri Lanka sit and sew small hills of these shirts, usually embroidered on the front with flowers and paisley motifs. The baby in the video looks like any baby, and in the video he gasps for breath, his eyes already shut. Marie Colvin says, in the voiceover, that what was terrible about this scene was the silence in which the baby passes away. It is true. He does not cry, he does not flail, his chest heaves and heaves and heaves and then he is gone.

It made me think. A long-ago friend once told me she took to pediatrics because children, even those with terminal illnesses, never complained as much as adults did. They took their illness in stride, living until they no longer could. Here in my Philadelphia suburb we have the story of Alex, the little girl who in life launched Alex’s Lemonade Stand, the single most effective fundraiser for research into childhood cancer worldwide. I don’t know that this Syrian baby, whose passing was witnessed by his grandmother because she was already at the hospital helping other people, knew anything more than a month or so of peace, then nothing but mayhem around him and terror in the faces of his family, before arriving in this hospital at this time, with that particular spokeswoman to relate his story. But, perhaps, no matter what we all think of the politics between large and small nations, between Syrian, America, Russian and Chinese ambassadors, or of despots, tyrants, diplomats and apologist, nobody will turn away from the sight of this particular death. And, perhaps, this brief life lived in innocence, and the journalist who gave her all, will combine to be the face and the voice that brings peace to Syria.

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Last evening I went to listen to the Lower Merion A-Cappella Winter Invitational. As happens whenever I attend any of the band, orchestra, chorus, theater or any other kind of performance in this district, I was struck by the quality of the show. There is a confidence and a certain joie-de-vivre to the students in this district that I, having worked with young people of their age along the entire North East, know for a fact is not the norm for their less blessed peers. It made me think about other parents, just as hopeful and just as full of pride in their childrens’ endeavors, and about the innumerable ways in which the odds are against them when weighed against students like ours, who are the beneficiaries of resources, time, and considerable wealth. From orthodontia to specialized camps to SAT tutoring, students here start off ahead of most of the population their age in this country. It so happened that, as I sat mulling this over, I received this beautifully stated opinion (below the image), from a dear friend, Dr. Sara Taddeo, one whose intelligence is only matched by her compassion for the less fortunate (or, as is more the case, deliberately excluded), in her hometown. I am posting it here in the hope that it will contribute to the national conversation on our rights as well as our responsibilities toward each other.

My husband and I graduated from college thirty years ago, from the University of Pennsylvania and Barnard College, respectively. We were the first in our families to complete a degree, but this was so common among our classmates that it did not call for comment or explanation. When my sons entered their senior year of high school, it was taken for granted that they would apply to and attend college, but they, like most of their classmates, assumed they would not be able to attend an Ivy League school. My husband and I often wonder, in fact, if we would be accepted by our alma maters if we were applying now. This change in attitudes and experiences between our generations prompts my reflections. I am not a statistician, and this essay is not a double-blind study or a controlled experiment, it is an anecdotal report from the front lines of decreasing mobility: the way college admissions feel for the 99.5% who do not attend one of the Ivy League institutions, and the nearly 90% who don’t attend a private school of any type.

When my oldest began the college admissions process five years ago, he confined his search to regional public schools and his final list comprised only three colleges, all of which freely admitted they were not ”highly selective”. The applications were primarily completed on paper, duly mailed out and required no supplementary forms. Arranging tours and sitting in on classes was fairly easily managed without too much advance notice He was quickly accepted by all of his schools and immediately received clear statements regarding merit and need-based aid. The majority of his peers followed a similar path, with similarly satisfactory results. He has done well at his chosen school and is applying to graduate school, but once again, not to any of the “top” places, not least because of the long shadow of the GREs .

My younger son cast a wider net in his college search, so we expected it to be more time-consuming, but we didn’t realize how true this would be: I estimate I spent 10-20 hours a week over more than six months supporting, not conducting, his college search. In the two short years that had passed since our first-born began college, the process had morphed into a labyrinth of supplementary forms (requiring confidential financial information before an admissions decision was made), differing requirements and due dates and, worst of all, the expectation that business would be conducted on-line. Arranging visits was no longer a matter of calling or simply showing up; even less-selective schools required you to sign up on-line well ahead of time. Auditing classes was rarely possible, even though we found, as most people do, that this is the best way to get to know a college and decide if it is really for you. Once the letters of acceptance/rejection started rolling in, I was surprised to find that statements of cost and offers of financial/merit aid were opaque and often late; one well-known (and extremely expensive) university never produced so much as an estimate of the cost for my son to attend, but expected an immediate reply to their offer of admission without such vital information! My son eventually chose a mid-level private school which suited him and which we are fortunate enough to be able to pay for without the necessity of his taking on a crushing debt-load.

2010-2011 was a long year for the family, but our travails pale in comparison to the difficulties encountered by many of my son’s classmates and their parents, who were utterly unprepared for the process. They were astonished by the arcane and intrusive procedures followed by the universities and lacked the time and money to conduct a thorough search and prepare for testing. While many colleges seem to assume that on-line tools suffice to investigate and rank schools and that they conduct a great deal of outreach, especially to the underprivileged, this has not been the experience of anyone I know (an admittedly limited sample of a few hundred). One of the reasons for this is probably the insidious impediment to upward mobility which schools do not even begin to acknowledge: the digital divide. Poor students, especially those in rural areas, do not have the personal computers that wealthier students take for granted and seldom even have familiarity with word-processing, now expected for essay submission. Very few have regular access to a high-speed internet connection, certainly not at home and since paper catalogues and applications have largely been abolished, these students are several steps behind from the start. Far too many lower income seniors feel they are playing a very high-stakes game which has been rigged to favor the high rollers.

These wealthy families prepare their offspring for the college admissions process from their earliest years; some parents even take a leave of absence from their (secure, well-paying) jobs to shepherd the students through the process. Almost without exception they pay for professional guidance services, tutoring and, in particular, coaching for the SATs. This supposedly objective means of comparing students from different backgrounds has become a stumbling block for many, effectively another barrier to college. Luckily for us and for them, our sons did well on the SATs without coaching, but we know far too many deserving students - high achievers, hard working and financially deserving - who received few offers of admission and still fewer offers of aid because they missed the SAT cut-off. Many did not even attempt to raise their scores or apply to more selective schools because they were too discouraged by the complexity of the process. When these students wind up dropping out or underperforming, it is no longer the minor hurdle it was in past decades, because one semester, even at a state school, is often enough to generate tens of thousands of dollars in student debt, with no prospect of being able to pay it off.

Why is this wrong? Am I asserting that everyone is entitled to a college education in a highly selective setting? No, but I would like to see an even playing field, a meritocracy. The current system clearly favors the wealthy and privileged rather than rewarding the most able. By erecting artificial barriers to achievement, it wastes a tremendous amount of human potential in a way that is antithetical both to our democracy and to the innovation which would lead to economic growth. In the current state of the nation, with high unemployment, even for recent college graduates, the competition for those spots which are most likely to guarantee financial success - through placement in lucrative fields and professional schools - intensifies, leading to increased stress on college selection and excluding those who couldn’t afford to pay the “price of admission”, that is to say, pretty much the 99%.

- Sara Taddeo, Waterville, ME

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Last year, my middle-child, the thinking feeling one, wrote a question to me in a book that we pass back and forth to each other: Is Santa Claus real? She had already experienced a near-miss with the tooth fairy who hadn’t yet come by 4.30am, a fact which she had taken, tearful, to her older sister, saying, “I am afraid the Tooth Fairy is Amma. She went out last night and there is nothing under my pillow.” Mercifully, the usually self-absorbed teenager tucked her sister into bed, watched until she fell asleep and then went looking for a box of art-cards to leave under the pillow with a note that read, I am sorry I am late. Your box was heavy and it took me a while to get here. Understanding, in other words, was just around the corner. And yet, how could I be the one to dispel the mystery? Instead I, like hundreds of mothers and fathers before me, took refuge behind a full-color print out of the letter written by Francis P. Church and appearing in The New York Sun in 1897, ‘Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus.’ Sometimes, I wrote by way of introduction, a writer looks to another writer to say what they want to say. The book stayed with her a long time and I was afraid I had crushed her faith in my honesty.

This past summer, while cycling around the Schyulkill river in the City of Brotherly Love where I live, she brought up the topic again. “Are you the tooth fairy?” she asked. What could I say but, yes. I launched, then, into an explanation as to why these stories exist. The job of a parent, I told her, is to keep the fairy tale alive until the child is old enough to take it on. I related the story of her older sister standing in for me, of how once she was no longer waiting for the famed fluttered one, she was glad to turn her attention to making sure that the fairies kept arriving for her sisters. It’s your turn, I said, to do the same for your younger sister.

Although she had taken to winking and smiling in a knowing way as the youngest of my daughters talked enthusiastically about Santa, just a few days ago I realized that the knowledge of his ‘non-existence’ sat heavy in her heart. “Why,” she asked me - as we went looking for ‘the furry slippers’ that the youngest was hoping against hope Santa would bring for her - “why is it that if we have to end up knowing Santa is not real, why do parents tell their children that he is real? Wouldn’t it be better if we never thought he was real?” Navigating traffic, I, at first, gave a smart-alecky response: “Would you have liked to be the only curmudgeon walking around at the age of two saying ‘Santa is not real!’?”

Then, I gave her the answer that I felt in my heart. We let children believe in things that don’t exist for adults in the hope that they will continue to believe in the things that adults forget do exist: that the world is essentially good, that people are kinder than we know, that peace is possible. If we only believed in the things we see before us, or know for a fact are real, why would we ever dream of magic, transformation, the immense potential for a different outcome?

Growing up in Sri Lanka within a Buddhist family in a predominantly Buddhist country, Christmas was something I celebrated with my Catholic friends, going to midnight mass, eating Bruedher and sipping cheap wine. On our tropical island, there were no Christmas trees or snow. But the Christmases of pines decorated with ornaments and lights, of snow on the ground and carolers and, most of all, the arrival of Santa Claus, all things I had read about in books and imagined, was always on my mind. Each Christmas Eve I would put myself to bed in a fever of excitement. Santa was going to come. This was the year. Santa didn’t come to Sri Lanka, I thought, because not enough people believed he would. Every year my older brothers, particularly the one closest to me in age, would say goodnight from the door to my room, lifting up the curtain to say “You waiting for Santa? You think he’s going to come this year?” with laughter in their voices. Looking back I wonder if they envied me my complete and heartfelt faith in the arrival of Santa, the ability to forgive the fact that he never showed up, nor ever would.

Now, in my American home I embrace Christmas with the fervor of the zealot. The tree! The presents! The cookies and carrots! Even, when my husband indulged me one year, “footprints” made of flour leading from chimney to tree for my oldest daughter’s first Christmas and mine.

During all those years when Santa failed to show, I never imagined that Christmas would become the anchoring holiday of my adult life. I still have a youngest who marvels at how well Santa knows our family. That chore chart, she says, is perfect for the three of us. I have coaxed my husband the atheist to say, just this morning, “there are elves who wait for those last minute requests and then they shoot out little rockets so Santa, who is already on his way, gets them.” This, in the face of a small voice announcing at breakfast that she really hoped for a guitar pick, something she had not let ‘Santa’ know in time. Most of all, I have three daughters who are willing to let what they know to be true unwind just a little; enough to let the magic in. I fully expect that, as adults, they will look at all the problems in their world with clear eyes, as I do, and still be able to soften that gaze long enough to know that it doesn’t have to remain that way. I credit Santa for that. Long may children small and large, believe that he will come.

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As promised, the third in the line up of guest blogs from the people who attended my workshop on blogging at the Montgomery Community College Writers’ Festival. This is from Kate Fazekas, a student at Montgomery County Community College, and an aspiring writer of Y/A Lit. She was born in San Francisco, but spent most of her childhood and teenage years in Japan and the Philippines. At present, she lives in Lansdale, PA, “with her wonderfully snarky husband Justin, a cat named Nightcrawler, and two gerbils named Albus and Thomas Kincaid Branagan. Her webcomic, Geminni, can be found here. Her post about GeMiNNi, is below:

In most company, I am a very quiet but friendly person. Some might call me timid. The truth is known to a select few, and they would be very happy to tell you that in reality, I am bat-bleep crazy. Life has trained me to mask my emotions to the best of my ability, but everyone needs an outlet. I found mine in creating a web comic I dubbed Geminni (with 2 n’s).

I honestly had no idea what I wanted my web comic to be about, only that the material would be lightly censored, and that it would be a place where I could be free to curse as much as I wanted. In reality, my swearing ability is awkward and embarrassing. I am still physically incapable of saying the “F-word.” I say “fudge-nuts”, and I call people “hass-holes.” My web comic would abound in sexual humor, anti-racist rants, and promote both racial and sexual tolerance.

I can truthfully say the main characters of Geminni, a single mother and her child, Kaley and Yun Szab, are based on the “angel” and “devil” aspects of my own personality. Kaley is gullibly sweet, while Yun is naturally cranky with a dark sense of humor. As I cranked out updates for Geminni, you start getting glimpses of the dark side of Kaley’s personality. If she was meant to embody the lighter side of my personality, what did that say about me?

Geminni ended up being a web comic with an eclectic mix of themes – real life, comedy, tribute, romance, and theological fantasy. Its charm lies in its wild and zany cast that includes a gay man with a temper and stalker tendencies, a women in her sixties with an outspoken fondness for sex toys, a cute yet bloodthirsty ghost from colonial America, a five-year-old pervert ,the meddling goddess of spring, Persephone , and a pair of perverted friends who view the world as their own personal playground. What can I say? As I have stated earlier, I have been accused of being bat-bleep crazy.

I have known for a while that Geminni will be a long-running series that will take a little over nine years to complete. It will be separated into three comics, Geminni (featuring the character Yun as a child), Geminni Level Up (featuring Yun as a teenager), and Geminni End-Game (featuring Yun as an adult). I am proud to say that Geminni has garnered a modest fan base on the web comic host, Drunk Duck, and has been listed as one of their top ten web web comics for almost two years. I’ve even been interviewed! Woo! I remember being very nervous, and I tend to ramble when I’m nervous. I remember after that interview, proceding to knock my head several times against my desk. My readers loved the interview, but it terrifies me that, like all things submitted online, that interview will always be there, to mock me and remind me of how terrible I was at the public-speaking… thing.

When I first started the comic in 2008, for the longest time the largest amount of viewers I would have in a week was 3. Now, on an average day, Geminni’s page-views are in the thousands, and is a favorite web comic for 1, 785 readers. That’s a pat on the back for me. Yay!

Thanks to all my beloved readers and Geminni Level Up will start on January 1, 2012! Stay tuned!

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A few days ago I posted this status update:

Americans, when they’ve got guns in their hands, are so quick to define how and when they’ll kick some poor sod’s posterior - in the streets of poor neighborhoods, for instance, all dressed in navy blue, or more commonly in some other corner of the world where everything can be neatly edited before being beamed back to TV audiences licking BBQ off their fingers. But ask them to stand up and speak out and suddenly they’re running for cover. Occupy Wall St. you are the only ones able to redeem a country so steeped in cowardice.

Some people did not like that statement. I was, apparently, blind to the fact that most of the occupiers were Americans even though their nationality (and how well that reflects on an otherwise unempathetic nation), was the point of my update. I was also not being successful in getting people to face up to the truth because my words were too critical. Apparently, Americans were no more cowardly than anybody else and, apparently, all human beings resist becoming involved in protesting anything that does not affect them directly. Apparently, Americans are just like everybody else on the planet.

Except, they are not. The American government has waged more wars than all the rest of the nations in the world combined, many of them out of sight of its people. For a somewhat limited (post WWII and not entirely comprehensive even after), list of these efforts at hegemony, check out the one created over at flagrancy. While there you can also browse the shipments (predominantly medical), which the US, this vast and generous nation, would not release to the people of Iraq between 1998 and 2001. The United States ranks #1 in the world for its military strength. Israel, its proxy in the Middle East ranks #10 and Iran, that nation accused of plotting the end of the world, ranks #12. To put that in context, check out the comparison between the US and #2: Russia. Military expenditure in the US stands at $692,000,000,000 in 2011. That is $636,000,000,000 more than Russia’s. Here’s a comparison (as of 2008), between the US and Iran for those of us biting our fingernails wondering if it is really true that it is Iran that is a militarized culture lead by arms-crazy maniacs or if, in fact, it might be a case of “it’s not about you, it’s about me.” Chances are that if America is responsible for 48.4% of the global total on defense spending and Iran is spending 0.5%, we’re the ones with anger-management issues and we’re the ones who are a threat to global peace and we’re the ones whose people need an “Arab Spring” like there’s no tomorrow.

So, who are we? In one of the first pieces of journalism I ever wrote (for The Madison Eagle), I spoke of the tendancy Americans have of ridiculing the singing of their own national anthem. I can’t recall the exact words and, in this study full of clippings and books, I cannot locate the piece; my grouse was with the fact that it seemed like an easy “out” to me. To denigrate the anthem was a perfect illustration of the way liberal Americans like to dissociate from the acts perpetrated by the nation’s leaders as if they imagine that this alone washes them clean of the evils that are being conducted somewhere far out of sight.

One of the people who were annoyed with my original status update sent me a private message advocating for civility and politeness rather than confrontation. Honesty, said the individual, is not measured by decibal level, a reference to a subsequent post I had made after the first one:

The truth cannot be conflated with insult. It is itself. And if one cannot speak the truth, why speak at all? As the French poet, Paul Valery noted, “politeness is organized indifference.”

It’s cute, this advocacy for the “kinder gentler” kind of persuasion. It’s really swell for Americans not to have to be goaded, prodded, stung or screamed at by people, isn’t it? It’s even nicer for such Americans that they feel they have all the time in the world to get there, to that point of empathy, to the point of bestiring themselves on behalf of themselves, forget about the rest of the world. The thing is, 113,708+ human beings may still be alive if only our sensitive American brethren did not need all this time and all this coaxing and pampering before they could bring themselves to speak. Thousands of soldiers who bore citizenship in this country (and many who did not), could also still be alive if only their fellow Americans remembered that they, too, belonged to that “human family” in which we like to claim membership. In a recent post about some of these wars, two, in fact, I wrote about the way Americans remain sanguine about the devastation being wreaked around the world precisely because of their addiction to apathy. In that post I reference an article that I wrote (for The Morning Sentinel), on the occasion of the death of the 2000th soldier, Staff Sgt. George T. Alexander Jr. Here is the conclusion of that piece:

…For those who want to remember that these were human beings, here are a few, very few, details. Sgt. Sean C. Reynolds, 25 years old of East Lansing, Michigan was killed on May 3rd, in Iraq. Uday Singh was 21 years old and not yet become an American citizen when he died in an ambush near Habbaniyah Air Force base on December 1, 2004. I don’t know what number either of them were.

In Brook Park, Ohio, a town that lost 14 marines in a single car bombing this past summer, there’s a man named Ronald Griffin. He lost his son two and a half years ago. This is what he said on the occasion of the announcement from the Pentagon: “I only look at the individuals. I don’t think it’s a significant number at all unless you think about the individuals who make it up. Who was 98? Who was 99? Who is going to be 2,001?”

This morning I woke up, as usual, to National Public Radio. It was a story from Iraq. The story of a man named Manadel al-Jamadi who died in Abu Ghraib, hours after his capture by the Navy SEALs and the CIA. His bruised, bloodied corpse was seen around the world, stuffed in a box of ice and Sgt. Charles Graner giving a thumbs up sign and grinning over it. I went on line to see what else I could find out about this story. There I found a picture of Manadel al-Jamadi’s widow and his son who looks about 8 years old. They have no names. Nor do the children of George T. Alexander Jr.

As I said to the person who sent me that private message, if Americans were only waiting for a “big enough” reason to come out in droves, to turn “rude,” you’d have thought stealing the presidency would have done it. Apparently not. Apparently they were waiting for something even bigger than that. What was that, exactly? Guantanamo and its clones? Were they just waiting for Abu Ghraib? The murder of approximately 115,000 Iraqis in a war of aggression? The massacre of civilians (from a nice safe distance), in Kashmir and Kabul and Libya? Maybe they were simply waiting for Enron? Or were they waiting for the people of the world to sing the hallelujah chorus in praise of all the Americans bound to their deafening, albeit polite, silence?

So, dear American who writes to me like this and all of you who would like me to find that perfect dulcet note with which to address you: I don’t really give a damn if you find my tone offensive. And don’t kid yourself that it is only that which has kept you from being involved; you weren’t going to do anything anyway. You won’t do anything because your “addiction to politeness” which you mistake for “kindness” kept you indoors when your presidency was stolen. This is what is great about America, you were happy to say, we tansition between our governments in harmony no matter that someone has just rammed a giant uncomfortable sharp-edged multi-pronged stick up our collective democratic arse and we aren’t going to be able to sit without pain for the next eight years. Maybe it was trying to get comfortable with that penetration that kept you from screaming bloody murder when your country marched off to invade Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya, when they incarcerated your neighbors in droves in the wake of 9/11 and shout burn the mosque! when they see someone trying to construct a community center. It starts like this and it continues like this. And how does it all end? Who knows? One thing is for sure: the world is not going to wait, politely, to find out.

I’m not sorry to say that I have no empathy, absolutely none for people whose preoccupation with their preferred method of address has resulted in the obliteration of what is called “family” for thousands upon thousands among this “human family” of ours, and who don’t really seem to give a hoot about that little detail in our collective history. Your so-called “admiration of my work” means absolutely nothing to me if you don’t know that the words in my work are written in the blood and in the name of others. I don’t write so I can collect an admiring fan club for myself. I write to jolt you out of your soporific stupor. And if that interfers with the peaceful conduct of your day and your life, let me take a bow on behalf of the people you killed with your silence. It’s the least I can do.

The picture above (of photographs of a family of dead Iraqis), is from The Nation blog by Greg Mitchell. The two other images used in this post (Bush in pictures of the American dead and the bodies of soldiers killed in combat) come from, respectively, Duncan and snarlyboodle.