Remembering James Baldwin

by Kai Wright

Author and essayist James Baldwin died 20 years ago on Dec. 1.

Baldwin's biographer and close friend, David Leeming, called his essays "prophetic," as they articulated an eerily clear-eyed view of America's peril at the hands of what, in Baldwin's day, was politely called the "race problem."

Perhaps Leeming has it right and Baldwin was a soothsayer. But a more plausible explanation is that Baldwin's work remains contemporary because America's racial caste system changed so little over the generations that his writing spans.

Baldwin considered race America's poison pill. And he deftly portrayed Americans of all colors struggling to concoct their own individual antidotes—solutions that are temporary at best and always crazy-making because, at root, the problem is structural not individual.

Today, we still have not reached Baldwin's understanding of race and racism. It remains a collective problem that we insist upon dealing with on an individual basis. As a result, even our greatest triumphs—the end of legal segregation, broadened opportunity for the slim black middle class—are undermined by broader forces.

Chimps Will Inherit the Earth?

by Pagan Kennedy

Last summer, around the time that Leona Helmsley's dog inherited 13 million dollars, an Austrian chimp named Hiasl got stiffed. Hiasl stood to come into a few thousand Euros, but a court ruled that he could not own property, being a chimp and all. (Technically, the Helmsley dog does not own her millions either; Trouble Helmsley inherited her money through a human proxy.)

Surely, Hiasl's advocates could have found the same sort of legal workaround to provide him the stipend he needed for his upkeep in a shelter. But the activists wanted to make a point: why shouldn't a chimp have some limited rights of person under the law? This summer, a judge outside of Vienna weighed the question of whether a chimp might be human enough to own property. If he won, Hiasl himself would receive the money, although his legal, human guardian would make all financial decisions.

And here's the thing about chimps with money: while a dog like Trouble can't grasp the idea of currency at all, a chimp might actually be capable of shopping. The great apes can use language; and some researchers believe they can string together sentences. Furthermore, they understand the fundamentals of market exchange. Econ 101: I give you the dollar bill; you give me the banana.

Read This! Instilling a Love of Reading in Kids

by Chris Mercogliano

A national study just released by the National Endowment for the Arts warns that the sustainability of American culture is at risk because our society is turning more and more toward electronic media for information and entertainment and we are reading less and less as a result. Big surprise, right? However, as NEA Chairman Dana Gioia comments in the preface to "To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence," we all should be shocked by the magnitude of the decline of reading for pleasure in this country, especially among young people.

Among the study’s more dire findings:

• Only 30% of 13-year-olds read for pleasure on a regular basis.
• The number of 17-year-olds who never read for pleasure increased from 9% in 1984 to 19% in 2004.
• The average American between ages 15 and 24 spends only 7 minutes a day reading and half never read books for pleasure.

There are numerous causes for alarm, says the NEA. To begin with, a strong correlation exists between reading for pleasure and overall reading proficiency. Reading test scores for 9-year-olds—who show no declines in voluntary reading—are at an all-time high, while scores for 17-year-olds began a steady downward trend in 1992. Today, little more than a third of high school seniors read proficiently and even among college graduates reading proficiency is declining at a 20-23% rate.

Give a Gift To Our Economy: Shop Locally Owned This Holiday Season

The Broadside took a couple of days off for turkey, stuffing, and family fun. We're back today with a reminder of why we shouldn't spend our holiday shopping dollars without thinking about the impact of our choices.

by Stacy Mitchell

Whether to patronize a chain or a locally owned business is not top of mind for many holiday shoppers, but it should be.  It's a choice that has profound implications for our economy.

If you shop at an independent toy store, such as Be Beep in Annapolis, Maryland, you will likely see products made by Beka, a small toy manufacturer in St. Paul, Minnesota.

A family-owned business, Beka has opted not to sell to chains like Target and Wal-Mart. Doing so, explains co-owner Jamie Kreisman, would require moving production to low-wage factories overseas, which would eliminate what he and his brothers most love about the business: their relationships with their employees and working hands-on with their products.

Beka is healthy, but its future depends entirely on the survival of independent toy stores. Over the last decade, Wal-Mart and Target have aggressively overtaken this sector and now capture 45 percent of U.S. toy sales.

Jewish Book Month recommended reading: Adrienne Rich

by Stephen Burt

You can find Adrienne Rich in anthologies of Jewish American poetry, but most of her many admirers do not think of her first (if at all) as a Jewish poet: they think of her as a feminist poet, as a political poet, as a GLBT activist, as a talented artificer in traditional metrical forms (during the 1950s) as a maker of  harshly original free verse (during the 1960s), as a woman who challenged herself to overcome "the fact of being separate" (as she put it in the early 1970s) in order to speak to and about other people's needs. Though Rich's father was Jewish (as was her late husband), she did not identify herself with any religion for most of her writing life: in high school, she recalled, "I am quite sure I was seen as Jewish (with a reassuringly gentile mother) in that double vision that bigotry allows." Her ambitious, assimilationist father, however, "did not give me the choice to be a Jew."

Rich's 1982 essay "Split at the Root," from which those sentences come, describes her long-delayed decision to call herself Jewish in print. If you read Rich's poem "Jerusalem" (1966) you will see her view religious heritage as an excuse for violence and a trap: "What I dream of the city," she writes, "is how hard it is to leave." An even earlier poem, "At the Jewish New Year," insisted on Rosh Hashanah that "this day is merely one/ Of thirty in September," and that "whatever we strain to forget/ Our memory must be long": "we" here means not Jews but assimilated Jews, Jews who want to distance themselves (but cannot distance themselves enough) from their shared religious past.

Rich's later poems, by contrast, show her reclaiming Judaism as something to which she says she might want to belong. These poems often address the Baltimore family in which she grew up. "Grandmothers" (1980), for example, pays belated tribute to Hattie Rice Rich, the poet's father's mother, whose "sweetness of soul was a mystery to me," but in Rich's youth "a convenience for everyone": "you rose with the birds and children, boiled your own egg," "took the street-car downtown shopping/ endlessly for your son's whims, the whims of genius," and "All through World War Two the forbidden word/ Jewish was barely uttered in your son's house."

Single at the Holidays: Not Alone, but a Different Kind of Togetherness

by Kay Trimberger

Singles during the Thanksgiving and Christmas/Hanukkah seasons—quintessential family holidays in the U.S.—are stereotyped as lonely, isolated and pathetic. While popular entertainment is now as likely to depict family conflict as well as joy during the holidays, we have noticeably fewer images for singles.

Contrary to stereotypes, my study of long-term, middle-aged single women, found little holiday loneliness and angst. Many of these baby boom single women have large families. They range from Wynona, a divorced single mother in her fifties with four grown children and seven grandchildren to ever-single Emily, in her late thirties with no children of her own, but with meaningful ties to her five siblings and their children.

For other single women with fewer family members—or family who live far away—holiday tension focuses on building new traditions with friends in a culture where friendship is more fluid and less valued than family relationships. I discovered that a network of supportive friends is one of the most important factors that lead to satisfaction with single life. But, at the holidays, family obligations still trump any commitment to friends. Rather than being isolated, single women often face conflicts that are both similar to and different from those in family-based holidays. My own experience is a good example.

Closing the Food Gap: Live Chat With Mark Winne online today

Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty, will be participating in a live chat about the shortcomings of our food bank system today at 1PM ET on the Washington Post website.

The discussion is related to his opinion piece from yesterday's WaPo about the problems of food banks and our lack of attention to the underlying causes of poverty. He draws on his experiences in the Hartford food bank system to illustrate the waste inherent in the system and to suggest that we redirect some of our energies to trying to end poverty instead:

My experience of 25 years in food banking has led me to conclude that co-dependency within the system is multifaceted and frankly troubling. As a system that depends on donated goods, it must curry favor with the nation's food industry, which often regards food banks as a waste-management tool. As an operation that must sort through billions of pounds of damaged and partially salvageable food, it requires an army of volunteers who themselves are dependent on the carefully nurtured belief that they are "doing good" by "feeding the hungry." And as a charity that lives from one multimillion-dollar capital campaign to the next (most recently, the Hartford food bank raised $4.5 million), it must maintain a ready supply of well-heeled philanthropists and captains of industry to raise the dollars and public awareness necessary to make the next warehouse expansion possible.

Four Years of Marriage Equality

by Karen Kahn

As we approach the fourth anniversary of Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the Supreme Judicial Court decision that granted marriage equality to same-sex couples in Massachusetts, I find myself reflecting on the profound impact of this decision in my life. Before November 18, 2003, I had not considered marriage as anything more than an outdated, sexist institution. With the energy of the spurned outsider, I rejected marriage and all its trappings. I had no expectation that, in my life time, same-sex couples would be allowed to participate in this exclusively heterosexual ritual.

So it is with utter surprise that I find that the last two and a half years of my life have been "all marriage, all the time": first writing Courting Equality: A Documentary History of America’s First Legal Same-Sex Marriages—and then, over the last six months, talking about marriage equality to audiences from Portland, Maine, to Blue Ridge, Georgia. What’s clear to me, from all these conversations, is that the marriage equality movement is changing the landscape for same-sex couples and their families across America.

Repealing the Estate Tax? Buffett says "Dead Wrong!"

In Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes, William H. Gates (dad of Bill Gates) and Chuck Collins argue that large fortunes should be taxed, both because of the societal benefit of wealth redistribution, and because it's appropriate payback to the society that provided the mechanisms for wealth.

Wealthy philanthropist Warren Buffett has been in the news the last couple of days arguing for the estate tax on just those grounds.

Buffett, the second-richest man in America after Bill Gates, according to Forbes magazine, said recent tax law changes have tended to benefit people like him.

"Dynastic wealth, the enemy of a meritocracy, is on the rise. Equality of opportunity has been on the decline," Buffett said. "A progressive and meaningful estate tax is needed to curb the movement of a democracy toward plutocracy." (Reuters)

Dirk McQuigley at DailyKos picked up on the story, highlighting the tendency of Estate Tax-repeal supporters to refer to the tax as a "Death Tax," and praising what is, in his opinion, a more accurate term: "The Paris Hilton Tax."

Paying taxes IS an obligation of citizens. IMO it is an integral patriotic duty as money paid to the treasury helps pay for our military, homeland security, coast guard, etc. Wing nuts who feel the income tax is unconstitutional ignore that our constitution was ammended to include an income tax.(Link)

Honoring the Warrior, Not the War

by Aidan Delgado

I still think of Veterans Day as Armistice Day, its original name, commemorating the end of World War I. The nations that founded the holiday did so to celebrate the end of what they believed was the "war to end all wars" and thus to symbolize the end of war itself. In America, Veterans Day is now associated with honoring US war dead and remembering the sacrifices of veterans in all our conflicts. This is good and very much in keeping with the original spirit of the holiday; for remembering the terrible cost of war is the best way for us to appreciate the peace we now enjoy. For me, Veterans Day embodies two moods at once: somber reflection on the sacrifices of soldiers and gratitude for the blessing of peace.

Yet these days, Veterans Day often makes me sad. It seems that this holiday in particular almost can't help becoming politicized, particularly in the midst of a controversial war. This is a holiday about celebrating the end of war; I don't want to see it become something like a "Support the Troops" bumper-sticker. I want people to look at all the tremendous sacrifices made by veterans and draw the right lesson from them: that war is terrible and we must do everything we can to prevent it. In honoring the warrior, we should take care not to honor war in itself. Remember that beneath the memorials to individual soldiers, the laurels for their courage, there is a subtle message to the younger generation: you should grow up and become soldiers too. I don't think that's the message that should be sent on Veteran's Day. This should be a holiday about remembering the price of peace, for no soldier joins to perpetuate war. All veterans served and fought in the expectation of eventually regaining the peace, and enjoying a measure of it themselves. If we want to truly thank veterans, then we should not only honor them as individuals but honor the thing they fought and died for: the return to a peaceful society. We should remember that Veterans Day was once Armistice Day.

Aidan Delgado served with the U.S. Army Reserve in Iraq and is now an active member of Iraq Veterans Against the War and the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. He is the author of The Sutras of Abu Ghraib: Notes From a Conscientious Objector in Iraq. Listen to an interview with Aidan Delgado on WAMC.

Female Vets Fight Another Battle at Home: Restoring their Spirits

by Helen Benedict

Over this past year, I have talked to forty or so women soldiers for my forthcoming book, The Lonely Soldier: Women at War in Iraq, and it has become clear to me that they have a set of needs quite different from those of men. All soldiers must deal with the roadside bombs, mortar and grenade attacks, and gunfire that are a part of daily life in this war, where the front line is everywhere and not even bases are safe; and all soldiers must cope with seeing the dead and wounded close up and with, perhaps, having killed. But women have additional burdens: they are sexually harassed by their male comrades day in and day out; one in three is sexually attacked or raped; and they are pressured every minute to conform to a military culture that is intractably male. "The Army consistently tries to make women into men," as Sergeant Sarah Scully of the Military Police wrote to me. "Any sign that you are a woman means you are automatically ridiculed or treated as inferior."

Casualties on the Home Front: The Epidemic of Vet Suicides

by Penny Coleman

On November 6, the Joshua Omvig Suicide Prevention Bill became law. The bill was named for a 22-year-old Iowa reservist who took his own life eleven months after coming home from Iraq. Though Josh is one of hundreds of combat veteran suicides since the wars began in 2001, it is his name that has become symbolic of this campaign. Thanks in no small measure to the advocacy of his parents, Randy and Ellen Omvig, the Department of Veterans Affairs will soon be required to develop and implement a comprehensive suicide prevention program at each of its medical facilities, including mandatory staff training in suicide awareness and prevention, a designated suicide prevention counselor in each facility, and a 24-hour suicide hotline.

With the exception of the unspeakable images of Abu Ghraib, which were e-mailed home by soldiers themselves, for six years Americans have been effectively insulated from the human cost of our wars. This insulation is not an accident: it is policy. Images from the Vietnam years, like the naked child trying to outrun her own burning skin, or the anguished women and children waiting their turn to be executed at My Lai, were catalysts that helped turn public opinion against that war. This time, the government wanted to ensure that would not happen. On the eve of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Pentagon issued a directive to the media forbidding any coverage of returning American coffins. No coffins, no funerals, no wounds, no tears. No empathy.

Randy and Ellen Omvig’s success in drawing long overdue attention to the issue of veteran suicide in an environment that has dismissed or derailed other worthy causes, can be explained, I believe, by their insistence on going public with the most intimate details of their tragedy. They complicated and humanized a debate that has been stalled for decades in a morass of misinformation, disinformation and other evasion tactics.

Vets need help back home

Repeated and long deployments, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and traumatic brain injuries are contributing to high rates of homelessness among veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. The numbers are disturbingly high for a war that’s still being waged:

Some advocates say the early presence of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan at shelters does not bode well for the future. It took roughly a decade for the lives of Vietnam veterans to unravel to the point that they started showing up among the homeless. Advocates worry that intense and repeated deployments leave newer veterans particularly vulnerable.

"We're going to be having a tsunami of them eventually because the mental health toll from this war is enormous," said Daniel Tooth, director of veterans affairs for Lancaster County, Pa.

With such a high number of homeless veterans, "advocates say more financial resources still are needed." Also adding to the financial costs of American fighting overseas: health care. The mental and physical health care needs of returning vets is likely to strain our health care system, according to Physicians for Social Responsibility, who estimate the long-term costs of caring for returning vets as over $650 billion.

The liberal group, which shared the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, estimated that the long-term financial burden to care for a new generation of veterans will far outstrip the amount of money spent on combat operations in Iraq. (From The Boston Globe)

My Angel in the Desert: One Soldier's Story of War

by Marcus Eriksen

Veterans Day seems pointless, just a bunch of old vets telling war stories.  There is no Hallmark set of instructions to hint to a gift you might submit to your favorite war hero.  It’s partly a recycled holiday due to another, Armistice Day, rendered obsolete by time.  But to this veteran it has a point. Veteran’s Day is years of pride and pain softened to a plea.

On Feb. 24, 1991, a truck filled with a dozen marines making a steady beeline for Kuwait City stopped the convoy when I yelled, “Hey look a body!”  The paralyzed figure of an Iraqi soldier lay 50 feet from the incinerated jeep he was blown from.  His knees were bent, eyes and mouth open, and his intestines poured out from under his shirt.  Both he and I were covered with specks of oil from the fires nearby, and soaked by the rains that made me miserable, yet washed his face clean.  Before he died he must have waved his arms, like the way kids make snow angels. He made wings in the sand.  My angel in the desert.

Katherine Newman on the Missing Class

Katherine Newman appeared on Bill Moyers Journal last week (you can watch the show here) to talk about the subjects raised in her new book (with Victor Tan Chen), The Missing Class. The book (reviewed recently in the Boston Globe) focuses on the struggles nearly 50 million American families cope with as they try to survive just above the poverty line.

The Moyers Journal website is fantastic. Rather than providing just a cursory description of each show, the site has an extensive summary, video, transcript, links to related content both on their website and around the web, and a blog with a vibrant comments section. It’s an excellent example of how the web can continue the conversations started in traditional media (something we care a bit about around here as well!).

We’re gearing up for a full week of Veteran’s Day Coverage beginning tomorrow. With posts from Marcus Eriksen on his experiences in the Gulf War, Helen Benedict on women in the military, Penny Coleman on preventing vet suicides, and more, we hope to use this week to foster discussion of the difficult issues facing veterans. We hope you’ll tune in and spread the word.

Jewish Book Month recommended reading: Lion's Honey by David Grossman

by Danya Ruttenberg

I was asked to write a few words in honor of Jewish Book Month, which takes the Jewish world by storm every November.  It's a wonderful celebration of the written word and a reaffirmation that the People of the Book know how to push limits, challenge, surprise, teach, and delight us anew each year.

It's daunting to have to pick one title to celebrate when there are so many important classics—whether Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Sabbath or Maimonedes' Guide For the Perplexed—that all merit much time and attention.  And yet, if I had to think of one recent book that's really moved me, I'd have to mention David Grossman's Lion's Honey: The Myth of Samson.

Grossman is one of Israel's most highly regarded living authors, known both for his fiction and essays.  Here, he strikes out into unfamiliar territory—an analysis of the Samson story from the Biblical Book of Judges—but with quite a payoff. His reading of the strange, four-chapter epic is incisive and quite brilliant, digging deep into the text for literary and psychological insights. He weaves together seemingly incongruous strands and the story's strangest, smallest details, somehow constructing a startlingly cohesive whole. In the end, Grossman paints the story of a Samson who is alienated from his parents and incapable of intimacy, desperate to connect and yet determined to seek out women who shatter his trust and repeatedly betray him.

Breaking the Rules of Silence Around Adoption

by Meredith Hall

When I wrote my memoir, Without a Map, I understood that I was breaking unspoken but powerful rules of silence.  Pregnant at sixteen in 1966, I was one of the thousands (or are there tens of thousands of us?  Hundreds of thousands?  I have heard millions.  Even the number seems to be a secret) of girls who "surrendered" their babies into adoption in the 1950's, ‘60’s and ‘70's.  I was sent away, and hidden away.  After my baby disappeared, I was allowed to creep back into the world on very stiff terms: I was never to speak about this grievous loss.  I followed those terms until I was fifty-five years old, when I made the decision to write a book.  Had anyone asked me through the years to convey my experience, to tell my stories, I would have struggled to name the unique and unceasing kind of grief that comes when a baby dies to you but moves somewhere in the world, not yours but yours in every cell.  The kind of grief that comes when you are outcast from your small and safe world, shamed and very alone. When you are, apparently, the only person who has ever lost a child in this way.  I never heard anyone tell a story anything like mine.

I wrote Without a Map believing that a tiny handful of people would ever read it, and so I wrote a very intimate book. I found words that speak about a frightened girl, a mother's love, how love can fail in the face of shame. I wrote about profound sorrow, and perfect isolation.  I wrote about the miracle of reunion with a lost child after twenty-one years.  And I wrote about the ways in which the grief does not subside, the defining events carved into me forever.  I felt as I wrote that I was whispering my secret stories finally, that a kindly old woman leaned in quietly and calmly and heard me, my first listener.

Slamming the door on defendants

David Dow, the author of Executed on a Technicality: Lethal Injustice on America's Death Row, is a professor at the University of Houston Law Center. He is also the founder and director of the Texas Innocence Network (TIN), which helps inmates,  including many convicted of capital crimes in a state where the death penalty is enforced far more often than in any other state, appeal their convictions.

TIN and other groups like it have helped to overturn numerous death penalty convictions, but earlier this week, one of Dow's clients, Michael Richard, was executed when a judge refused to accept a last-minute appeal. Dow weighs in on this case, and about the Kentucky lethal injection challenge before the Supreme Court, which has prompted a virtual moratorium on lethal injection, in the Washington Post. While the judge in question, Sharon Keller, has rightly come under fire, Dow asserts that there is plenty of blame to go around.

Migrations and Movement: Our Unsettled World

by David Gessner

I think it's funny how often people use place as a metaphor for their state of being.  "I'm not quite there yet." "I'm getting there." "I'm feeling unsettled." Everyone wants to get there and be there but even the most superficial survey of the animal world will tell you that there's no there there. Everyone is moving, everyone is busy going somewhere else; it's a world in movement, a decidedly unsettled world.   

Migration and movement have long been themes of my writing, but never more so than since I moved to the South four years ago. This was an odd decision in some ways, given that Cape Cod had been the main subject of both my writing and life.  Rather than buy a house, my wife and I decided to rent an apartment very close to the beach, the caveat being that it was a "winter rental" and we would be expelled each summer. That was okay with us in one way, since we would be heading back north to rent in Maine or on Cape Cod for the summer, and we have stuck with this arrangement ever since, putting our whole lives in storage in May and taking them back out in late August.