fantasy: – Radio Free

Francis: the Fantasy of Church Renewal in a Time of Monsters

Brian Kelly — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 05:50:28 +0000

After a long period of declining health which saw an increasingly debilitated Francis struggling to hold onto life, it was the demonic visitation of US Vice President JD Vance, it seems, that finally did the pontiff in. His death marks the end of a 12-year project aimed at rescuing a crisis-ridden Catholic church from irrelevance and possibly terminal decline. Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina, a mid-ranking Jesuit at the height of that country’s ‘dirty war’, Francis was an obscure figure to many outside Latin America when he assumed the papacy in March 2013.

The church that Francis inherited was then locked in a profound crisis and was being rapidly deserted by lifelong Catholics, even in traditional strongholds. His predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI were staunch conservatives in both their theological and political leanings. In his efforts to stamp out the ‘heresy’ of liberation theology—a ‘preferential option for the poor’ that propelled a powerful Catholic left across Latin America in the 1970s and 80s—the strident anti-communist John Paul had aligned Rome with US President Ronald Reagan’s bloody counter-insurgency and did not flinch even when US-armed militias raped and massacred grassroots Catholic clergy. Indeed, some of his bishops are said to have provided lists of potential targets to the right-wing death squads.

Serving an apprenticeship as John Paul’s doctrinal henchman, Benedict assumed the papacy after leading a purge of left-wing clergy: his own reign was marked by hysteria around creeping secularism and women’s demand for equality in the church. Benedict pushed an early version of the ‘culture wars’, encouraging an obsessive focus among conservative clergy on sexuality, abortion rights and the traditional family. This was part of a calculated effort to exorcise the social justice focus of the liberationists.

Their successful prosecution of a war on the Catholic left endeared both of Francis’s predecessors to church conservatives, but outside these narrow circles they are most popularly associated with a series of profound scandals that, by 2013, threatened the church’s very existence. The best-known of these exploded after a series of revelations about the massive scale of clerical sexual abuse, compounded by proof that—for all their pious moralizing around sexuality—both popes had played central roles in covering up these crimes and shielding perpetrators from justice. The Boston Globe concluded that John Paul had been ‘guilty of one of the biggest institutional cover-ups of criminal activity in history.’

On its own the disclosures around massive, endemic sexual abuse rocked the church internationally, but they were compounded by shocking financial scandals. The release of the Panama Papers in 2016 revealed that Rome kept tens of millions in offshore tax havens. The twilight days of Benedict’s papacy saw further, sensational revelations of the deep financial corruption at the heart of the Vatican. To take just one example from the Vatileaks disclosures, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, living in a ‘princely dwelling’ in Rome with a nun serving as housekeeper, was found to have ‘redirected tens of millions of euros from a foundation meant to support the Bambino Gesu paediatric hospital in Rome and used the funds to renovate his apartment instead’. Bertone travelled around Rome by helicopter, running up a tab of nearly €24,000 in 2012. The church’s global ‘Peter’s Pence’ charity—meant to be used ‘for the relief of those most in need’—was revealed to be a financial ‘black hole’, with nearly 70% of its collection handed over to maintain the ‘Vatican bureaucracy’. There were dozens of similar exposures.

The Politics of Church ‘Renewal’

All of this passed under Francis’s predecessors without a murmur of complaint, and it meant that he inherited an institution in freefall. There were other pressing challenges: at a time when membership was declining in the US and elsewhere in increasingly secular former Catholic countries in the West (like Ireland and Spain), across Latin America—where Catholicism had long exercised a monopoly—and in Africa, Rome faced increasing competition from evangelical Protestants, Pentecostals and other sects. Benedict’s rout of liberation theology and the hierarchy’s reassertion of command only created new problems: in Brazil and elsewhere believers deserted the stale ritual of elite-led Catholicism en masse.

Catholics who clung to their faith despite the revelations looked to the new pope—an outsider, the first from Latin America—to clean house and reset the church’s crumbling foundations. Progressives within its ranks saw an opportunity not only to return to the spirit of Vatican II—to ‘open the window and let in some fresh air’—but, crucially, to take up root-and-branch reform of the church’s approach to sexuality, and correct the longstanding subordination of women in Catholic religious and lay practice.

Rhetorically at least, Francis committed himself to a vaguely-defined project of ‘renewal’: the church needed to ‘come out of herself and go to the peripheries’, to become a ‘field hospital for the faithful’. He abandoned the opulence of his predecessors for a [relatively] modest daily routine, and pledged to root out corruption and address the legacy of endemic sexual abuse.

In the end the results never matched even the most modest expectations of those who looked to Francis for reform. Francis took steady aim at the most flagrant corruption (though without touching the church’s vast accumulated wealth) and was not slow to oust church bureaucrats who stood in his way, but he was far more hesitant in facing up to the church’s history of abuse, or to its position on sexuality more generally. Survivors of sexual abuse were bitterly disappointed at his unwillingness to move decisively: Boston survivor Anne Barrett Doyle characterised Francis’s inability to deliver on his promises as a ‘tremendous disappointment’ that would ‘forever tarnish his legacy’.

Quickly it became clear that there would be no fundamental change in women’s place in the church; there were gestures indicating a more ‘compassionate approach’ to lesbians and gay men in the Church but, as one commentator has put it, ‘in doctrinal terms Francis remained firmly within the letter of existing canon law’. This massive gap between rhetoric and substance is conspicuous across Francis’s record around gender and sexuality.

While an increasingly belligerent Catholic right seethed with outrage over the occasional gestures coming out of Francis’s papacy—his willingness to regard lesbians and gay men as human beings worthy of compassion—what is most striking is the degree to which Francis held the line on Church teaching on sexuality throughout a period of profound crisis. Not only did he reject ordination for women and refuse to move on endorsing same-sex marriage: as late as 2023 Francis upheld the Church ban on contraception; his opposition to abortion led him to share the stage with far right politicians like Italian PM Giorgia Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, even to the point of endorsing their hysteria around declining European birth rates. Mary McAleese was clearly on the mark in insisting that, beyond rhetorical posturing, the Church under Francis remained ‘one of the last great bastions of misogyny’.

Francis: an Anti-Capitalist?

At one level, his fundamental conservativism around sexuality seems out of step with Francis’s willingness to speak out plainly on other issues that placed him in the crosshairs of the Catholic right. Their intense hostility—and in recent years his willingness to stand up to a growing far right—have led some commentators to make Francis out to be more than he was.

Francis has been mistakenly credited—in Jacobin, the social democratic US magazine, and elsewhere—with having ‘brought to the Vatican a concern for social justice rooted in the radical liberation theology of his home region’. The reality is that so long as liberation theology thrived in Argentina and elsewhere, Bergoglio regarded himself as an opponent: Francis’s ‘most sympathetic biographers concede that he “kept his mouth shut” throughout the period the [Argentinian dictatorship] was carrying out its worst atrocities, but there are indications that his actions bordered on complicity’.

Bergoglio played an important role in articulating a new ‘middle ground’ between church traditionalists and the liberationists—a kind of theological ‘third way’. As I argued in an earlier piece on Rebel, it was only after the defeat of liberation theology that opponents within the Church ‘began to endorse some of the language of the movement’ while ‘emptying [them] of their class-based political vision’. The precondition for Bergoglio adopting the role of a critic of ‘unbridled capitalism’ was the success of Rome’s counter-offensive against liberation theology.

Long before he ascended to Rome, Francis had advocated a theology of class reconciliation, of ‘persuad[ing] the rich to surrender power rather than help the poor to take control of their own destiny.’ The source for this was not liberation theology, but the well-known social teachings of Vatican II. Even John Paul had insisted that ‘the development of a more harmonious society is going to require both forgiveness from the poor, for past exploitation, and sacrifice from the rich.’ Francis’s articulation of this well-worn perspective stood out more conspicuously in a neoliberal world, where public discourse was everywhere saturated by the worship of market forces. One sceptic rightly pointed out that in his calls for solidarity between rich and poor and the amelioration of capitalism’s ‘excesses’ Bergoglio had ‘moved from the right to the middle not the left.’

The outlook he brought to Rome was almost explicitly a Catholic articulation of ‘third way’ politics, which enjoyed a brief shelf life in the 1980s and 90s as the Clinton-led Democratic Party in the US and the traditional parties of social democracy in Europe (Blair’s Labour) and elsewhere shifted to the right to accommodate neoliberalism. Francis’s problem was that by the time he assumed the papacy this strategy had proven bankrupt: across the globe, the 2008 crash brought harsh austerity and accelerated growing inequality: the despair growing out of this made for a volatile and highly polarised political atmosphere. That Francis’s advocacy of a ‘humane capitalism’ mark him out as a radical iconoclast on the global stage only shows how far politics have lurched to the right in the post-crash period.

A Rising Catholic Far Right

This political polarisation in the outside world reflected and gave form to internal tensions within the church hierarchy. Some of these were longstanding and mostly theological: at the top there had always been a humourless rump of traditionalists who resisted Vatican II, and who’d looked to Benedict to restore rank and order: they objected to Francis’s restrictions against the Latin mass; they were apoplectic when he met with Buddhist and Muslim counterparts; they scoffed at his washing the feet of migrants, and refused to implement his move toward blessing same-sex couples.

These tensions were most profoundly registered in confrontations between Francis and the American church, today closely aligned with Trump and the far-right. Embracing a ‘pathological worldview’ forged out of disparate, often peculiar ideological strands—a Catholic version of the ‘prosperity gospel’ that Protestant televangelists have popularised to justify getting rich as ‘the Lord’s work’, for example—they wield control over a vast ‘Catholic media ecosystem’ that attacked Francis relentlessly. The Trumpian Cardinal Raymond Burke tried his best to annul Francis’s papacy, and on the fringe conspiracy theories flourished suggesting that Frances was not the ‘real’ pope, that he was a ‘servant of Satan’—even that Benedict was alive and poised to return.

The festering disaffection with Francis’s leadership at the top of the US church both reflected and encouraged a shift to the right among (overwhelmingly white) lay Catholics who, in an earlier period, were more likely to have voted Democrat. The swing is reflected in the Trump administration, which is ‘stocked with conservative Catholics’ who make up more than a third of [his] cabinet, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Catholic convert JD Vance, whose ‘hillbilly theology’—an attempt to deploy Catholic teaching to justify mass deportations—became the target of sharp and direct rebuke from Francis.

Immigration, Genocide: A Refusal to Back Down

The same global crisis that drove mounting inequality unleashed waves of mass migration among those fleeing war and poverty: to his credit Francis went out of his way to place the church on their side. His first trip outside of Rome was to the island of Lampedusa, where he condemned those who’d transformed the Mediterranean into a ‘giant cemetery’ and called for a ‘reawakening of consciousness’ in a world that has ‘forgotten how to cry’. Three years later he spent Holy Thursday at an asylum centre outside of Rome, washing the feet of refugees, ‘our brothers and sisters in search of a better life, far away from the poverty, hunger, exploitation and the unjust distribution of the planet’s resources which are meant to be shared equitably by all.’

These were powerful symbolic gestures at a time when politicians across Europe and the US were busy ramping up anti-immigrant hysteria. They brought Francis into sharp collision with an emergent far right attempting to galvanise new forces around a reactionary agenda, and to his credit he refused to back down. But his principled approach on immigration stands out mainly because of the abject cowardice of every other major political figure over recent years. As Michael Coman observed in The Guardian, ‘As western governments have increasingly battened down the hatches and adopted draconian short-term responses to the new reality, the pope at times appeared a lonely and isolated ally of millions of vulnerable people on the move.’

More recently, his willingness to speak out against the barbarism being unleashed on Palestine—his call for an investigation into whether Israeli actions amount to genocide, his persistent demand for a ceasefire—made Francis the target of vile attacks from Zionists and their allies among the leading imperialist powers.

But among Palestinians living under the bombs in Gaza and besieged in the West Bank, this solidarity—in a context where the whole western establishment has abetted their annihilation—is deeply felt. ‘I think no Palestinian will ever forget when [in 2014 Francis] stopped his car, stepped down and prayed at the separation wall separating Jerusalem from Bethlehem,’ pastor Reverend Munther Isaac told Democracy Now. Christians in Gaza recalled that Francis ‘used to call us daily during the war, on the black days under the bombing—on the days when people were killed and injured[.] We’re like orphans now.’

After Francis: Which Way for the Catholic Church?

As Pablo Castano has observed, it’s likely that we will eventually ‘look back on the last decade as an anomaly in the modern history of the Catholic Church’. Institutionally, as a relic of a feudal order based on hierarchy and elite rule, on the imposition of a cramped, conservative vision of human sexuality and the subordination of women, the church is far more amenable to a social order that upholds class inequality and regards democracy as a threat.

Indeed for all its history, the church has been a pillar of class domination, performing an important ideological function in reconciling the poor and oppressed to the status quo.

Francis’ papacy represented an attempt to revive the liberal spirit of Vatican II and remake a church fit for the modern world, to clear the stench of corruption and widespread abuse. But the limitations that he himself accepted in defending the church meant that ‘renewal’ could never move beyond rhetoric or gesture.

More importantly, Francis embarked on reform in a context where the ‘humane capitalism’ that he’d long advocated was everywhere off the agenda, and where the austerity-merchants of the neoliberal era had not only overseen massive inequality and a sharp withdrawal of democratic rights, but came to reconcile themselves to pitiless genocide. In this, they prepared the ground for a challenge to their own power from the monsters of an emerging far right. As ever, the future of the Catholic church is bound up with developments in the world at large. With Francis out of the way, his enemies in and outside the church aim to capture the Vatican to aid in imposing the far right’s authoritarian vision globally. We need to resist their project at every turn.

This originally appeared in Rebel.

The post Francis: the Fantasy of Church Renewal in a Time of Monsters appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Brian Kelly.

Trump’s Star Wars Revival: The Golden Dome Antimissile Fantasy

Binoy Kampmark — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 03:41:47 +0000

Bad ideas do not necessarily die; they retire to museums of failure and folly, awaiting to be revived by the next proponent who should know better. The Iron Dome shield vision of US President Donald Trump, intended to intercept and destroy incoming missiles and other malicious aerial objects, seems much like a previous dotty one advanced by President Ronald Reagan, known rather blandly as the Strategic Defense Initiative.

In its current iteration, it is inspired by the Israeli “Iron Dome” multilayered defensive shield, a matter that raised an immediate problem, given the trademark ownership of the name by the Israeli firm Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. Given the current administration’s obsession with all things golden, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has dubbed this revived endeavour “Golden Dome for America”. The renaming was noted in a February 24 amendment to request for information from industry. Much sniggering is surely in order at, not only the name itself, but the stumbling.

Reagan, even as he began suffering amnesiac decline, believed that the United States could be protected by a shield against any attack by Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. The technology intended for that endeavour, much of it requiring a space component, was thin on research and non-existent in development. The envisaged use of laser weapons from space and terrestrial components drew much derision: the President had evidently been too engrossed by the Star Wars films of George Lucas.

The source for this latest initiative (“deploying and maintaining a next-generation missile defense shield”) is an executive order signed on January 27 titled “The Iron Dome for America”. (That was before the metallurgical change of name.) The order asserts from the outset that “The threat of attack by ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles and other advanced aerial attacks remains the most catastrophic threat facing the United States.” It acknowledges Reagan’s SDI but strikes a note of disappointment at its cancellation “before its goal could be realized.” Progress on such a system since the US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 had been confined to “limited homeland defense” efforts that “remained only to stay ahead of rogue-nation threats and accidental or unauthorized missile launches.”

The Secretary of Defense is also directed, within 60 days, to submit to Trump “a reference architecture, capabilities-based requirements, and an implementation plan for the next-generation missile defense shield.” Such a shield would defend the US from “ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles and the other next-generation attacks from peer, near-peer and rogue adversaries.” Among some of the plans are the accelerated deployment of a hypersonic and ballistic tracking space sensor layer; development and deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors and the development and deployment of capabilities that will neutralise missile assaults “prior to launch and in the boost phase”.

The original SDI was heavy on the intended development and use of energy weapons, lasers being foremost among them. But even after four decades, US technological prowess remains unable to deploy such weapons of sufficient power and accuracy to eliminate drones or missiles. The Israelis claim to have overcome this problem with their Iron Beam high energy laser weapon system, which should see deployment later this year. For that reason, Lockheed Martin has partnered with Israeli firm Rafael to bring that technology into the US arsenal.

To date, Steven J. Morani, currently discharging duties as undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, has given little away about the herculean labours that have been set. “Consistent with protecting the homeland and per President Trump’s [executive order],” he told the McAleese Defense Programs Conference in Washington earlier this month, “we’re working with the industrial base and [through] supply chain challenges associated with standing up the Golden Dome.” He admitted that this was “like the monster systems engineering problem” made even more difficult by being “the monster integration problem”.

The list of demerits to Golden Dome are many, and Morani alludes to them. For one, the Israeli Iron Dome operates across much smaller territory, not a continent. The sheer scale of any defence shield to protect such a vast swathe of land would be, not merely from a practical point but a budgetary one, absurd. A space-based interceptor system, a point that echoes Reagan’s Star Wars fantasy, would require thousands of units to successfully intercept one hefty ballistic missile. Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute has offered a calculation: a system of 1,900 satellites would cost somewhere between US$11 and US$27 billion to develop, build and launch.

A study for Defence and Peace Economics published this year goes further. The authors argue that, even if the US had appropriate ballistic missile defence technology and a sufficient number of interceptors to be distributed in a two-layer defence with an efficiency return of 90%, 8 times more would have to be spent than the attacker for a bill between US$60 and US$500 billion. If it was assumed that individual interceptor effectiveness was a mere 50%, and the system could not discriminate against decoys, the cost would be 70 times more, with a staggering bill of US$430 billion to US$5.3 trillion.

The most telling flaw in Golden Dome is one long identified, certainly by the more sober members of the establishment, in the annals of defence. “The fundamental problem with any plan for a national missile defense system against nuclear attack,” writes Xiaodon Liang in an Arms Control Association issues brief, “is that cost-exchange ratios favor the offense and US adversaries can always choose to build up or diversify their strategic forces to overwhelm a potential shield.” As Liang goes on to remark, the missile shield fantasy defies a cardinal rule of strategic competition: “the enemy always gets a vote.”

Monster system; monstrous integration issues. Confusion with the name and trademark problems. Strategically misguided, even foolish. Golden Dome, it would seem, is already being steadied for a swallow dive.

The post Trump’s Star Wars Revival: The Golden Dome Antimissile Fantasy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Elon Musk and the right-wing fantasy of Rhodesia

Democracy Now! — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 17:05:15 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Imperialist Fantasy: Historian Greg Grandin on Trump Threat to Retake Panama Canal, Invade Mexico

Democracy Now! — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 15:35:05 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Imperialist Fantasy: Historian Greg Grandin on Trump Threat to Retake Panama Canal, Invade Mexico

Democracy Now! — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 13:36:03 +0000

Donald Trump has set his sights on the Americas, threatening to retake the Panama Canal if Panama doesn’t lower fees for U.S. ships. The United States controlled the waterway until 1977, when President Jimmy Carter signed a landmark treaty to give Panama control of the canal. Trump has also recently floated the idea of annexing Canada, and even a possible “soft invasion” of Mexico. Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale historian Greg Grandin explains the practical impossibilities of such plans but analyzes the political impacts of Trump’s statements. “There’s no way the United States is going to fill out greater America. This is red meat for the Trump base,” says Grandin. “It’s classic Trump.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

How a fantasy oil train may help the Supreme Court gut a major environmental law

Stephanie Mencimer, Mother Jones — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 14:00:00 +0000

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The state of Utah has come up with its share of boondoggles over the years, but one of the more enduring is the Uinta Basin Railway. The proposed 88-mile rail line would link the oil fields of the remote Uinta Basin region of eastern Utah to national rail lines so that up to 350,000 barrels of waxy crude oil could be transported to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The railway would allow oil companies to quadruple production in the basin and would be the biggest rail infrastructure project the U.S. has seen since the 1970s.

But in all likelihood, the Uinta Basin Railway will never get built. The Uinta Basin is hemmed in by the soaring peaks of the Wasatch Mountains to the west and the Uinta Mountains to the north. Running an oil train through the mountains would be both dangerous and exorbitantly expensive, especially as the world is trying to scale back the use of fossil fuels. That’s why the railway’s indefatigable promoters, including the state’s congressional delegation, will probably fail to get the train on the tracks. However, they have succeeded in one thing: providing an activist Supreme Court the opportunity to take a whack at the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, one of the nation’s oldest environmental laws.

Enacted in 1970, NEPA requires federal agencies to consider the environmental and public health effects of such things as highway construction, oil drilling, and pipeline construction on public land. Big polluting industries, particularly oil and gas companies, hate NEPA for giving the public a vehicle to obstruct dirty development projects. They’ve been trying to undermine it for years, including during the last Trump administration.

Last week, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, former Solicitor General Paul Clement channeled those corporate complaints when he told the justices that NEPA “is designed to inform government decision-making, not paralyze it.” The statute, he argued, had become a “roadblock,” obstructing the railway and other worthy infrastructure projects through excessive environmental analysis. “NEPA is adding a juicy litigation target for project opponents,” Clement told the court.

But NEPA has almost nothing to do with why the Uinta Basin Railway won’t get built. “The court is doing the dirty work for all of these industries that are interested in changing our environmental laws,” Sam Sankar, a senior vice president at Earthjustice, said in a press briefing on the case, noting that Congress already had streamlined the NEPA process last year. Earthjustice is representing environmental groups that are parties in the case. “The fact that the court took this case means that it’s just issuing policy decisions from the bench, not deciding cases.”

The idea of building a railway from the Uinta Basin to refineries in Salt Lake City or elsewhere has been kicking around for more than 25 years. As I explained in 2022, the basin is home to Utah’s largest, though still modest, oil and gas fields:

Locked inside the basin’s sandstone layers are anywhere between 50 and 321 billion barrels of conventional oil, plus an estimated 14 to 15 billion barrels of tar sands, the largest such reserves in the U.S. The basin also lies atop a massive geological marvel known as the Green River Formation that stretches into Colorado and Wyoming and contains an estimated 3 trillion barrels of oil shale. In 2012, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported to Congress that if even half of the formation’s unconventional oil was recoverable, it would “be equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.”

Wildcat speculators, big oil companies, and state officials alike have been salivating over the Uinta Basin’s rich oil deposits for years, yet they’ve never been able to fully exploit them. The oil in the basin is a waxy crude that must be heated to 115 degrees to remain liquid, a problem that ruled out an earlier attempt to build a pipeline. The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, a quasi-governmental organization consisting of the major oil-, gas-, and coal-producing counties in Utah, has received $28 million in public funding to plan and promote the railway as a way around this obstacle. The coalition is one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court case.

“We don’t have a freeway into the Uinta Basin,” Mike McKee, the coalition’s former executive director, told me back in 2022. “It’s just that we have high mountains around us, so it’s been challenging.”

Of course, there is no major highway from the basin for the same reason that the railway has never been built: The current two-lane road from Salt Lake City crests a peak that’s almost 10,000 feet above sea level, which is too high for a train to go over. So the current railway plan calls for tunneling through the mountain. But going through it may be just as treacherous as going over it. Inside the unstable mountain rock are pockets of explosive methane and other gases, not all of which have been mapped.

None of this deterred the Seven County coalition from notifying the federal Surface Transportation Board, or STB, in 2019 that it intended to apply for a permit for the railway. The following year, the board started the environmental review process, including taking comments from the public.

In December 2021, the STB found that the railway’s transportation merits outweighed its significant environmental effects. It approved the railway, despite noting that the hazards from tunneling “could potentially cause injury or death,” both in the railway’s construction and operation. It recommended that the coalition conduct some geoengineering studies, which it had not done.

Among the many issues the board failed to consider when it approved the project was the impact of the additional 18 miles of oil train cars that the railway would add to the Union Pacific line going through Colorado, including Eagle County, home to the ski town of Vail. Along with creating significant risks of wildfires, the additional trains would run within feet of the Colorado River, where the possibility of regular oil spills could threaten the drinking water for 40 million people. The deficiencies in the STB’s environmental impact statement prompted environmentalists to ask the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to review the STB decision, as did Eagle County.

Writer and illustrator Anna Fusco on the fantasy and reality of being an artist

Carolyn Bernucca — Mon, 06 May 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Broccolini Ridge, color pencil on tea-stained paper 6 1/4 inches x 8 11/16 inches, 2023.

When did you first feel like an artist?

I’ve been very expressive my whole life. There’s always been a proclivity towards the arts, always in the art room at school, always being guided in that direction by my teachers, my mentors, and myself. What I do today is the natural trajectory of showing up to something at least four days a week since I was a child. It’s a part of my soul. So in that sense, of course I’m an artist. But at the same time, there’s an inevitable imposter syndrome. Sometimes I’ll receive feedback that’s just the warmest thing you could dream of, and it feels like somebody else is getting that compliment.

It feels like I hit the lottery, like I’m in a very limited window of time where I’m able to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. That might be a protective mechanism. There’s a disassociation, a tendency to deflect or diminish my work, like, “I’m not really an artist, this is just my holding place until I have to get a real job.” And maybe that’s because—and I’ve heard other artists talk about this, too—sometimes I just feel like a vessel. Whatever’s coming through me is something else, like a spirit, so I almost don’t take credit for it.

Lights out on a northern trail, color pencil on tea-stained paper 12 1/16 inches x 10 3/16 inches, 2023.

How did you create a path for yourself as an artist?

I was in and out of school, but I decided to finish my degree at 26; by that point, I already had a portfolio and an ability to articulate myself, and I got a huge financial aid package. I was in the [art] teaching program, until one day, the head of the printmaking department was like, “Do you really want that? You don’t have to do that. You should just be an artist.” That 40-minute conversation altered the course of my life. I switched into printmaking and devoted myself to that for the next two years. I don’t think school is necessary for everyone, but it was so helpful, and an extreme privilege, for me to be in an environment where being an artist is not only seen as possible—it’s the expectation.

Ghost Town Jenny, color pencil on tea-stained paper 6 1/4 inches x 7 7/8 inches, 2023.

I owe a lot of what happened next to timing, to lockdown, and to privilege. I was only out of school for a few months when COVID hit. I didn’t get sick, I didn’t have to take care of anyone, I didn’t lose my housing, so I was able to hide out, get unemployment, and make art all the time. There was a New York-based Food Service Workers Coalition raising funds for undocumented workers who couldn’t get unemployment benefits, so I sold one drawing on Instagram as a print, and donated all net proceeds to the coalition. Then I did it again, and again, and then people started asking if I had an online store.

It took me a few months to hear the call and recognize, “This is what’s happening. This is your life. You can do this.” Since then, it’s just been a ball rolling downhill and uphill and downhill again. The store is how I support my writing and drawing practices now, rather than working a service job. That work has attracted a few galleries, allowing me to have a couple solo exhibitions of less commercial work.

You have to dream things out before they become real, Jenny!, color pencil on tea-stained paper 15 1/8 inches x 15 1/8 inches, 2023.

What is something you wish someone told you when you began making art?

I think if someone asked me, “Okay, what do I need to know?” I would just say, you’ll need more time than you think for everything. It takes time to really feel into what you’re doing and creating and get into a flow. I noticed an expectation, within myself, that things would happen quickly. But art is one thing that just cannot be rushed. It might take years of sucking. If you are doing anything with a sense of urgency, it’s not going to land.

And I don’t know if I wish someone had told me this, because I think I maybe wouldn’t have moved forward, but there is an extreme amount of administrative work required to pay myself through my own art. It is never-ending, and it is expensive. I don’t want to do it all myself, so I have an accountant, a bookkeeper, and a financial advisor, and I could not do what I do without them.

Did you ever imagine what it would be like to be a professional artist?

I never imagined it because it was not something that I had any blueprint for, even amongst mentors or professors, and especially not in my family. My conditioning is, “You can’t just be an artist, it’s not possible. You won’t be able to buy groceries, you’ll always be hungry.” So for a while I was pursuing maybe being an art teacher or an art therapist, but it felt very forced. And now here I am, I’m an artist, and that’s just complete magic every day.

Someday, color pencil, watercolor on paper, 7 3/8 inches x 10 1/8 inches, 2023.

I don’t think I could ever have conceived of this reality, because being an artist has totally transformed over the last decade; I use a free app on my phone to communicate and share my work with thousands of people. It’s insane. My modern fantasy [of being an artist] would be like, I have an adobe house in Santa Fe, just like Georgia O’Keeffe, where I paint, and I have an art show a few times a year, and that’s the extent to which I participate in social forces. I don’t think that’s impossible, but that disconnection does not come naturally to me, and I don’t know how to get there.

Where do you do your work? What things do you need in order to do it?

I do my work in a studio space that I’ve just finished building out with my partner, that may also become a place where I sell my work. But I take baby steps with everything. Before the studio, I always just worked in my bedroom, which was extremely chaotic and fruitful. These last two months [in the studio] have been completely transformative, because for the first time in almost a decade, my room isn’t all about art, books, merch, paper, glue, tape; it’s just about sleeping, doing yoga, hanging out, and reading. It’s really cool, but…Time will tell if it is a good thing for my practice or not.

The things I need…I move at a snail’s pace, on purpose—that’s something I need. I definitely need quiet, and I need to know that I have full days where I don’t have any obligation to people. I will lose whole days to scattered interruption throughout the week, which sounds like a total prima donna thing to say. But I just know that if I have to stop working and put my banking hat on at 3:00 P.M., I won’t bother to start a drawing. So I’m learning that I need more, more than just a few hours. I also always need exercise. Coffee. That’s it.

Devastate me, baby, ink on found paper, 8.5 inches x 11 inches, 2022

What distracts you from your work? How do you minimize that distraction?

Something that is helpful for me is not giving myself the benefit of the doubt—treating myself like I’m a baby, or an extreme diva. I don’t want to be too demanding of myself, but at the same time, I could probably stand to be a little bit more extreme about it, because this is an extremely distracting world. I have to put devices on other sides of the room, or in my car, or just turn them off altogether. I find social media really distracting, so if I know that a big show or a big push is coming up, taking breaks where I log off indefinitely is key.

I wish I had some great wisdom here, but I’m struggling just like everyone else. Distraction feels like the Goliath, the highest hurdle for me. I can pay my bills, I can make a studio, but can I reclaim my attention long enough to feel sane, and feel like I did what I wanted to do in a day? Not always. To make that happen, sometimes I have to really go all out and be the demanding person of my dreams. Distraction is really strong, so we need stronger things to fight it than we would think. I can’t just be like, “Oh, I just won’t look at my phone.” Maybe you need a box with a lock on it. Whatever it takes to convince you that these distractions are really powerful drugs, give that to yourself. Get crazy with it, because you’ll probably still get distracted.

Mad Dog loves Jenny, color pencil, crayon, oil stick on tea-stained paper 15 3/16 inches x 10 1/2 inches, 2023.

What are some things you do for or tell yourself when you feel like you’re in a creative rut?

I don’t really believe in creative ruts. If I’m in a phase where I’m not making anything, then that’s where I’m at. It has no meaning. I can’t always be outputting. If I’ve just finished a project, I probably just spent months giving everything that I had, and now there’s nothing left. That’s okay. We don’t have to be artists all the time to be artists. My dream is that I spend three months a year reading books, looking at art, walking around the world, and having conversations, and the idea of making a drawing is totally off limits.

When you’re an artist, all the material is in the dance of life, in taking the time to go camping with your friend or watch tons of movies. It’s in getting back to your play self and being excited to pick up a crayon. Where did you get this idea that you should be constantly producing? Are you alive? Are you getting out of bed? Well, good. You did it. You’re doing it. Other people are producing right now, you’ll have your turn at it again. It’s not about a block, or this thing you’ll never get back. Like I said earlier, I truly think that artists are just vessels. If it ain’t striking you, go meditate, or sit on a bench and look at a tree for 15 minutes. Get still. Sometimes I ask — the spirits, the underworld — “What do you want me to know today?” And sometimes it’s like, “Nothing. Take the kettle off the stove. Get a trampoline. Do something fun.”

Suntide, color pencil on paper 24 1/2 inches x 31 1/4 inches, 2023.

What is your relationship to community? How does that show up in your work?

I don’t think modern society is structured in a way where most of us are thinking about community naturally. The expectations that we have for ourselves, our relationships, and the way things operate are counterintuitive to community, to caring, to unconditional compassion, to forgiveness, to patience, to things that really heal people and connect them to one another. Right now, I live in an intentional community with nine other people. My day-to-day is structurally pretty radical compared to the way most of my peers live, and compared to how I’ve lived before.

As much as I could cerebrally or conceptually say, “I love community,” living in this community and unlearning rugged individualism is uncomfortable for me, and that definitely informs my work. One example of that discomfort is doubt and insecurity about the path I’ve chosen, because it’s so different from my mom’s or my aunt’s. That in turn sparks reflection on the conditioning I’ve had both from my upbringing and from society. Then in my writing, I’m able to synthesize these real-time experiences of unlearning, and use that as a vehicle for imagining a new world for myself. Also, one of my land mates is a newspaper editor, and his review and feedback have become part of my process.

Neighbors, color pencil on tea-stained paper, 12 1/4 inches x 12 1/4 inches, 2023.

What are the non-material rewards of your creative practice, and how do these rewards show up in your life?

I never imagined any of this for myself. It really hits me when people tell me that they’ve been thinking the same thing I just wrote about, but they didn’t know how to say it, or couldn’t take the time to articulate it that way. That feels surreal, and it keeps me returning to the work over and over. If just one person is like, “Oh my gosh, I really needed this today,” that’s all that matters to me. There’s value to everything that we have to share. Storytelling is so important, and I hope that my work can help people realize that what seems unrealistic for them maybe isn’t, and that their voice is important, too.

Anna Fusco Recommends:

It’ll End in Tears by This Mortal Coil

Exercising on a rebounder trampoline

Guided meditations with Insight Meditation Center

The book Make Miracles in Forty Days by Melodie Beattie

Louise Hay talks about How to Love Yourself

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Carolyn Bernucca.

Fantasy, Illusion and Reality in Two Wars

L. Michael Hager — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 07:00:27 +0000

Photo by César Hernández

Wars seem to breed fantasy: hero worship, victory parades, exuberant patriotism, or “a war to end all wars.” Such fantasies are usually based on inflated expectations, grand illusions, or outright lies.

Even some of history’s great generals have fallen prey to fantasy. An illusion of imminent victory caused them to miscalculate and lose battles. For example, Napoleon thought he could conquer Moscow before the snows arrived. He was wrong and his wintertime invasion of Russia in 1812 led to a catastrophic French defeat.

Or recall the illusion of Japanese General Isoroku Yamamoto at the Battle of Midway in June 1942. He thought he could eliminate American carriers in a decisive battle, but U.S. forces deciphered his intentions and launched a devastating counterattack. Yamamoto lost both the battle and his life.

Closer to home, U.S. General George Custer mistakenly believed he could overwhelm a larger combined tribal force at the Battle of Little Big Horn in June 1876. By dividing his troops into three separate battalions for an untimely attack he suffered an ignominious defeat.

Like those defeated generals before them, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have both pursued illusory paths–with U.S. President Joe Biden tagging along behind them.

The U.S. and NATO helped Ukraine rightfully and successfully defend Russia’s attack on Kiev in February and March 2022. However, the existential war for national survival transformed into a contest over long-disputed land in the southern and eastern regions. A failed Ukraine counterattack last summer morphed into a continuing stalemate, with heavy losses on both sides.

Rather than agree to a ceasefire or invoke diplomacy to settle territorial claims, Zelensky has held fast to his top two strategic goals: expulsion of all Russian troops and recovery of Crimea. Such prospects are an illusion. How can Ukraine expect to achieve such a vision of success when it faces an enemy four times its size and confronts its own manpower shortfall.

Until declining weapons support from the West causes him to rethink his goals, Zelensky will likely remain in the grip of illusion. His valent troops will continue to die on the battlefield and in the trenches.

Following the brutal and inexcusable massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas militants on October 7, Netanyahu announced as his primary goal the total elimination of Hamas in Gaza. Unlike Zelensky in Ukraine, Bibi must have known that his stated goal was illusory. How could such a deeply entrenched organization as Hamas, with its thousands of active militants either comingled with innocent civilians above ground or concealed underground in miles of deep tunnels, be “eliminated?”

The Israeli leader must have realized that his purported vision was in fact an illusion; that the intended but unannounced purpose of his invasion of Gaza was the complete elimination of Palestinians there.

Evidence of such intention may be found in the relentless IDF bombing, shelling, and sniping in all parts of the Strip; the repeated use of unguided bombs and bunker busters in crowded spaces; the frequent bombardment of hospitals, schools, libraries, mosques, churches, refugee camps and humanitarian facilities; the targeting of journalists, medical personnel, and intellectuals; a siege that has almost entirely eliminated civilian access to clean water, food and other necessities of life; and forced evacuations that have relocated most of the 2.2 million Palestinians to confined areas near the Rafah border with Egypt.

Even the Egyptian army could hardly restrain a border breach by more than a million desperate Gazans seeking food and safety. The most likely outcome would seem to be the forced relocation of the expelled Palestinians to a desert camp in the Sinai. Then the crafty Netanyahu can claim credit for reenacting the 1948 Nakba.

For his part, U.S. President Joe Biden has fully bought into both illusions, without any apparent recognition of the realities in either Ukraine or Gaza. In Ukraine, he continues to advocate for more weapons to help Ukraine pursue its illusion of victory over Russia. In the Gaza war, Biden seems to accept at face value Israel’s publicly stated illusion of eliminating Hamas. Accordingly, he continues his cheek-by-jowl support of Netanyahu. He continues to supply offensive arms that kill women and children; and he continues to defend Israel in the United Nations.

America’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine costs Zelensky the lives of his soldiers. America’s enabling of Netanyahu not only costs civilian lives in Gaza, but also risks regional conflict. More importantly for the longer term, it undermines the international rule of law established with U.S. leadership after the Second World War and it establishes a dangerous precedent for lawless behavior.

When the illusions of the three leaders are exposed, reality will overtake fantasy.

The post Fantasy, Illusion and Reality in Two Wars appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by L. Michael Hager.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous on Targeting of Journalists, Israel’s "Colonial Fantasy" to Depopulate Gaza

Democracy Now! — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 16:39:01 +0000

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous on the Targeting of Journalists & Israel’s “Colonial Fantasy” to Depopulate Gaza

Democracy Now! — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 13:30:46 +0000

As the United Nations calls again for a ceasefire in Gaza, Palestinian health officials are warning thousands of women, children and sick people could soon die as Israel continues its bombardment of Gaza. Gaza is also facing a second day of a communications blackout. “Gaza City itself is a hollow shell” where “the streets have been turned into graveyards” and “the smell of death is everywhere,” says independent journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous. “It increasingly seems that Israel is trying to push Palestinians into Egypt, which is a long-standing colonial fantasy,” he says of Israel’s campaign of Palestinian displacement in Gaza. Kouddous also calls out the journalism community’s silence in the face of what is the deadliest conflict for journalists in decades, noting the “bias being laid bare.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Veering from the Slipstream: Vonnegut

Paul Haeder — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 04:36:49 +0000

I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a colour photograph of God Almighty — and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable.

What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, Bennington College Address (1970)

Something compelling and sad about that life. Kurt. Born and raised in Indianapolis, (1922-2007). Iconic. More than Slaughterhouse Five.

I remember the reading, at UT-El Paso, my first year in the English graduate program — why that, and I was working for newspapers, had a language gig, one-on-one, in Juarez with a Mexican engineer working for Packard Electric. I was deep into writing stories and a novel. Lots of cross border ruckus stuff. Drugs and some other cross-the-tortilla-curtain smuggling. That was October 19, 1983. Two feet from fame.

It may have just been a coincidence it was a Homecoming event, but he was there, speaking to graduate students in a classroom. Then after the reading, a party. The obligatory after-reading-party.

Wine, whisky, tequila. Kurt was looking for Pall Malls, and I had two packs ready — cheap cigs from Juarez. I brought a bottle of mescal, with the worm, and we talked — me, Vonnegut and two other folk. But he and I talked face to face. I had no fear, no compunction to put anyone on pedestals, and we talked about Dresden and some of my life.

I grabbed Dixie cups, threw some lime wedges into each one and poured me, Kurt and the two other people shots of the agave drink.

These guys and gals are many times inquisitive about the people who parachute into their lives — young people, like myself. Twenty-six and with a donkey cart full of stories already. I had family who survived that bombing in Dresden — in fact, my Canadian mom, divorced from my German father, had the sugar, salt, flour and grease ceramic flower containers that were buried for safekeeping in Dresden. They survived that bombing.

Vonnegut never survived that role he played as a captured US soldier picking up the carcasses of the dead in Dresden. He was deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was imprisoned in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse, schlachthof fünf (5). He survived the allied bombing.

We’re talking several days of heavy bombers from US Air Force and RAF, up to 1,350 aircraft in total, with their payloads ready for factory, neighborhood, family and town — 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices. Like all UK-American bombing, a firestorm ensued, which destroyed more than 1,600 acres of the city and more than 25,000 were killed with so many more wounded, and yet more psychologically scarred.

Kurt was one of those who never recovered. His book, Slaughterhouse Five, took years to write, coming out in 1969. It is an anti-war book. I saw him again 20 years later, in Spokane, at a reading and then, the proverbial party afterwards. Pall Malls he still chain smoked. This crowd was a bigger crowd, and I remember having that chance to go over to him and rejiggering his memory. The party in one of the faculty’s houses in New Mexico. Two horses and the fields of giant green chilies growing. And the bottle of worm-blessed mezcal.

I know this seems narcissistic, but the guy remembered me, recalled that night, and the drinking of the agave fermented elixir. He asked about that mezcal again. I repeated that I had just come back from Mexico a few years earlier, and spent time in Oaxaca where there are thousands of acres of agave plants (200 varieties) grown for tequila and mezcal. I told him about how the curanderos and even the narcotraficantes use the liquor in their ceremonies and baptismals, as in vetting their sicarios in the drug runners mafia. Hired killers.

Some of what we talked about went back to El Paso, and then he kept asking me about my life in Mexico, and the booze. He wondered why this time I hadn’t brought a bottle of the mezcal with the gusano (worm) sunk at the bottom. I told him that tequilas were becoming trendy and boutique brewed. I said that mezcal was becoming popular too, thanks to the marketing of it in Mexico on the international stage.

He told me he recalled being really inebriated, and that he had some crazy dreams. “No hangover in the morning. I so wanted to call you to let you know you were right. The dreams and the lack of headache.” He laughed hard, smoke pouring out of his mouth around bedraggled teeth.

His memory was jarred, and he laughed at something he remembered out there in El Paso. He liked the wild west aspect of the town, and the good Mexican food, and he liked the mix of people. Almost all the students who listened to him were of Mexican descent. The department — English Department — wasn’t 87 percent Latino (like the town), but we did have a few in our ranks. The school itself drew people from around Mexico, Latin America and Africa. Engineering. Nursing. Mining. Not many documented or undocumented immigrants were rooting for their children to go get a useless degree in English literature or creative writing. For the most part. In Spokane he was railing against Bush and Cheney. The neocons. He was only a few years from his untimely death.

He and I talked intensely (as intensely as Kurt could be because he always had that raspy laugh, like a two-stroke lawnmower engine choking down, barely hanging onto a spark). He laughed a lot. But when it came to Bush and war, he was serious. He talked a lot about Bush. He asked about El Paso. He asked about my own threadbare travels and even more threadbare writing (paid publishing) career (sic).

I told him the Mexican saying — “Para todo mal, mezcal, y para todo bien, también; y si no hay remedio litro y medio” — For all bad, mezcal, and for all good, as well; and if there is no remedy, liter and a half.

He asked how the hell I got from Mexico and El Paso to Spokane, to Gonzaga. I tried to squeeze in as much as I could before our talk was overcome by hangers on, the groupies. I told him that even now, after 20 years, I was still teaching as an adjunct, and that I was still organizing part-timers in a union. I also told him I was fiddling around another degree, a masters in urban and regional planning. He knew who Jane Jacobs was. The two of them lived in New York, and Kurt was also a fan of her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. He too was against the Robert Moses’ project to kill the Village, with the Lower Manhattan Expressway.

This all is percolating inside after watching the Weide documentary, Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time. The life of this man, and the life of his family, is laid out, but Robert Weide had an unusual relationship with Vonnegut — more than two decades of friendship. Lots of letters back and forth. The project about this man’s life. Weide was a fan of Vonnegut in high school. He became a filmmaker, and he wanted to capture Kurt’s life in film. This too took Weide a lifetime to produce. It’s a compelling piece, one that is about Kurt, about his failings and his features, about what his kids have to say about Kurt the dad. The ups and downs and ups and downs of his literary life. He was obsessed, and he was almost always a writer.

In so many ways, the movie is about a man out of his own time. He was too old for the Love and Peace Generation, but they adopted him with his iconic books held deep in their souls. Many Vonnegut fans were fans, having never really read his work. I’ve read six of his books, not all of the ones he wrote. I was happy about his books, but I wasn’t obsessed.

Watching this flick, I have a deeper regard for the man, for the country he believed in (one I never believed in) and his world which was big and large on one level, but in many ways, very finite and small. He was a New York and East Coast guy, and he was an icon, a guy who actors and painters and celebrities went to. In his presence, he was a simple guy. I never thought of him as literary. I have been in the company of many literary folk, poets, novelists, journalists.

This is why I adore the time I had with Kurt — limited, two feet from his fame, and now part of the fabric of my own tattered quilt. My life. Failures, mostly, in the literary sense. And this is still stuck in my craw, but I am more resigned with that fact. Timing, disposition, vision, limitations, focus, and a dream. His background is so different from my own. His parts to his whole so different than mine. I’d say nothing we have in common. Nothing, really, but writing, or the knowledge that that is a private and profound thing — to write, to make up and to be a journalist too.

In the documentary, there is a real loneliness that reverberates in this guy’s life. Watch it if you can. About a time long gone. In the context of now, too, with Nazi’s in Ukraine, with the American ghostlands, all the same actors he railed against with the Bush Family and the wars. But, a man like Vonnegut, while immense on many levels, still believed in a lot of goodness in people. Even those in politics. He held a belief that someone was good, something was good about Clinton, and this was before Obama. I can only guess what he would have thought about that charlatan, that war criminal.

They all are. And, now, seeing the propaganda machines in the USA, around the Western world, in the UK and EU, and down under, in Australia, it must be said that the same criminals who bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they are the same ones fomenting war and hatred with the psychological operations. With the corporate-legacy-mainstream-commercial media part and parcel of their slick Goebbels-Edward Bernays lying game.

Amazing to see the script flipped, and the USA supporting Nazis, and the complete revamping and rewriting of history. Putin as Hitler: What a fucking sad time making that comparison. Sick, Russia lost 27 million defeating the Germans. Putin remembers, and he never knew one brother who died in World War Two. Relatives killed and wounded. What a creepy country, USA, and it is also my mother’s birthplace, Canada, that is creepy. My grandparents from UK, Scotland, that part of the world = creepy. And, well, those Germans, what are those countrymen saying about Putin? Hitler and Putin? It makes no sense. My family was forced onto the Russian front as German conscripts. My grandfather was a pilot in World War I.

Talk about a sick bile in my throat.

Fascism- A History

Slaughterhouse Five, and the Nazis, and the Allies. One in the same.

Imagine the time I could have spent with Kurt if I had had the chance to pull him aside, take him to Chihuahua, spend a week with him in Mexico. Imagine the education I would have gotten, and the one Vonnegut would have gotten.

Sometimes that slipstream comes from a place of mythology, a dream, some biscuit of exceptionalism. All the soured lies of history. But Vonnegut knew that. He wrote about that. Kids in high school were assigned those books. Breakfast of Champions. Cat’s Cradle. Mother Night.

Bly —

Bly’s Call to Duty

By Paul K. Haeder

Each of his poems puts a chink in the armor of the war makers. Robert Bly’s Friday night appearance at SFCC will be part touchstone for peace and part riling-up of the audience to bear witness and take action.

Bly, a preeminent American poet whose 80-year-old voice and intellect have helped to sculpt an important vision of literary art and cultural reclamation, will speak as part of Spokane Falls Community College’s “Lit Live!”

While Bly is a sought-after voice of reason and lyrical charm, his poetic pulse has been stimulated by a life alone, working far from the rarified atmosphere of college or university settings. His roots are in Mansfield, Minn., and in the furrows of hard-working immigrants where his reverence for land and people germinated.

Translator of such great poets as South America’s Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo and Antonio Machado, India’s Ghalib, Spain’s Lorca and Jim & eacute;nez, and Norway’s Rolf Jacobsen and Olav H. Hauge, Bly’s output of articles, essays and criticism is matched by his more than 40 books of poetry.

Enwrapped in solitude, Bly spins ruminations shaped by other cultures, other poets — as in “Meeting the Man Who Warns Me”:

I dream that I cannot see half of my life. “I look back, it is like the blind spot in a car./ So much just beyond the reach of our eyes, what tramples the grasses while the horses are asleep, the hoof marks all around the cave mouth…/ what slips in under the door at night, and lies exhausted on the floor in the morning.

Also slated for the Music Auditorium stage on Friday night are four male drummers, pounding animal skins as a tribute to “the wild man” in Bly’s Iron John. His 1991 book examines the dichotomy between Savage Man, who is both wounded and inflicts wounds on earth and humankind, and Wild Man, the shaman-healer, Zen priest or woodsman. In Iron John, we have a book about men and the lost energy of visions, fairy tales and the male drumbeat of power and depth. It’s a book of healing and reaffirmation of soul.

Bly also helped redirect the creative surge of Modernism’s influence on poetry by unraveling his words and lines into what Victoria Frenkel Harris has called “incorporative consciousness.” Bly believes that the poet or creative thinker must go “much deeper than the ego … at the same time [becoming] aware of many other beings.” In a sense, he believes that “leaping out” of the intellectual world and into what we intuitively hold as our own realities best explores the paradoxes of two worlds: the world of our psychic pain, and the world in which we must adjust to observing the rules.

Bly came to prominence during the Vietnam War era — a time that tore at the psychic integration of American culture. He recalls how controversial his work was then: “Most of the English teachers in the universities hated our doing ‘political poems,’ as they were called. That still happens,” he recently said about those heady days of the ’60s. “When I’m at a reception at a university these days, an English professor may come up to me and ask: ‘How do you feel now about those poems you wrote during the war?’ They want me to disown the poems. I say, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t write more of them.’”

Bly, along with David Ray, created the group American Writers Against the Vietnam War. The first important protest volume was A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War (1966), edited by Bly and Ray.

In one of his poetry collections, The Light Around the Body, Bly cast a beacon of hazy light upon the symbiotic relationship of poverty and racism and the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

But now, in 2006, with the stink of Abu Ghraib and Fallujah still enveloping Mr. Bush’s war, Bly speaks with singular impetus in his recent work, The Insanity of Empire: A Book of Poems Against the Iraq War. “The invasion of Iraq is the biggest mistake any American administration has ever made,” he says. “The most dangerous and greatest confrontation is between twentieth-century capitalist fundamentalism and eleventh-century Muslim fundamentalism,” he writes.

For aficionados of the poetic form, The Insanity of Empire embodies both Bly’s disdain for immoral governments and Bly as an the artful practitioner of the ghazal, an Arab poetic form:

I don’t want to frighten you, but not a stitch can be taken/ On your quilt unless you study. The geese will tell you/ A lot of crying goes on before the dawn comes.

SFCC’s literary publication, Wire Harp, and the endowment for Lit Live! will not be the only beneficiaries of Bly’s incantations on Friday night (50 percent of the gate goes to the endowment). Conscious Living — a local business that creates events including the annual Celebrating Body, Mind and Spirit Expo and A Psychic Affair — is partnering with SFCC.

As a reminder of Bly’s continuing relevance, consider that he’s an anti-war activist of long standing. In the Dec. 9, 2002 issue of The Nation, Bly was one of the first to beat the earth drum against the impending war, in his poem, “Call and Answer”:

Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days/ And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed & r & The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?/ I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense/ Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out! See who will answer!”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Fact and Fantasy, Demigods and Myths

Bob Topper — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 05:32:24 +0000

The ability to imagine is uniquely human. Imagination enabled the invention of our modern world with its bewilderingly complex transportation and communication systems. But building that world required more than imagination. It required imagination tempered by reason. We imagine and we rationalize. We can explain how the planets revolve around the sun and how birds More

The post Fact and Fantasy, Demigods and Myths appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Bob Topper.

Fantasy like Moana? ‘No, I just wanted to tell my story,’ says Tongan pilot

Sri Krishnamurthi — Tue, 09 May 2023 22:02:52 +0000

REVIEW: By Sri Krishnamurthi

From Island girl to an airline pilot seems like the Disney fantasy Moana yet nothing could further from the truth when it comes to Silva McLeod who turned fantasy into reality with heartbreak along the way.

Born in the small Tongan village of Vava’u in the days when we watched and marvelled as jets few overhead, Mcleod never dreamed one day that she would be there in the sky flying jet planes to all manner of destinations.

In her recently released memoir,  Island Girl to Airline Pilot: A Story of Love, Sacrifice and Taking Flight, she tells her story.

The book details when and where she meets her Australian husband Ken who went to Tonga to work in building a hospital. She was working as a waitress in a bar when she first met him.

However, unlike other Palagi (white men) visiting the islands and making promises they never intended to keep, Ken — according to her autobiography that initially reads like a Mills & Boon novel — was a perfect gentleman as he slowly courted her.

“At first, it wasn’t the done thing to do… Unfortunately, the picture we have that white men come in — it’s not a very nice picture, but that’s how it was — they impregnate the Tongan girl and then nick off, and mum and dad, nan and pa will have to clean up the mess,” she writes.

“So, this is quite rare, a young handsome Pālagi came to our island, and we found a common attraction to each other. My family feared the worst … so it wasn’t very well received in the beginning.

Language ‘huge barrier’
“Language was a huge barrier at the beginning, because my family couldn’t speak a word of English and Ken couldn’t speak a word of Tongan.

“So how could Ken make a conversation that might help my family accept the situation? But it didn’t take long.”

Ken eventually whisked her away to Melbourne in 1980, and while her dreams were put on the backburner while the couple raised a family.

She did ultimately realise her dream to become Tonga and possibly the Pacific female airline pilot, beginning as a flying instructor, then flying for Royal Tonga Airlines, Australian Flying Doctor Service and eventually Virgin International Airlines.

And, at the time of doing this interview, she was waiting to hear about her health results to find out whether she could keep flying.

Becoming a pilot “was never really a dream, because I could never envision reaching it or getting there,” Mcleod  says.

“It was more like a fantasy because it was never going to happen.

Both ways to the beach
“Growing up in Vava’u, in a tiny little island of Pangaimotu, 200 people live there: you walk one way you reach the beach; you turn around 180 degrees you reach the beach.

“So, to dream of eventually becoming an airline pilot one day, or even just flying an aeroplane was unreachable — so I kept it as a fantasy.

“I can just visualise myself as a child running outside every time I hear a sound of an aircraft and I was there [looking] at the sky until the aircraft disappeared.

“The curiosity in me … was getting a little bit too much, running away with the thought of ‘oh wow, how clever is that, imagine the people that are flying that machine… wouldn’t it be amazing to operate such a machine, because it defies gravity?

“The fantasy was right from a young age, but it wasn’t a dream because I didn’t think that I’d get there.”

Mcleod’s world while growing up was limited, she says: “like wanting to reach for a piece of coconut but finding your arms are bound”.

At the time growing up in the 1970s in Vava’u, television and  newspapers weren’t easily accessible, so glimpses of the lives and places outside of the immediate community were limited, she says.

‘I can’t get out’
“It felt like, ‘I can’t get out’. It’s the same right across the Pacific Islands, it’s not just Tonga.

“We have such a rich culture and living in it … it’s just part of you and something I will treasure and value for the rest of my life.

“But then on the other hand, it’s restrictive because there’s nothing else to do.

“You go to school and then after that there was no university, there was no job. What could  you  do on an island? You couldn’t see a future.

“We are bound by culture, we bind by family, we bind by religion. It’s like you are free but you are bound to something.

“That’s just the way it is, and that’s just the island life, and you just grow up understanding it and it’s part of you.”

Now, with internet connectivity many Pasifika children view a more open world, she says.

Done her family duty
Settling in Melbourne and raising two daughters who are happily married with their own kids, she has done her family duty.

Then in a conversation with Ken, Mcleod spoke of her dream of becoming a pilot. However, instead of laughing, her husband told her that she could do it.

“Yes you have to be good at mathematics to be pilot and it takes hard work so no fantasy is ever easy,” she said.

Not long after, Ken became sick with cancer, and underwent chemotherapy. Mcleod focused on his recovery until her husband asked her about what it would take to get her started. He bought her a birthday present of vouchers for an introductory flight, and the rest is history.

Six years later, she earned her air transport pilot’s licence and became  the first Tongan woman to qualify as a pilot, and later a flight instructor.

The work brought Mcleod satisfaction, though she frequently faced both racism and sexism along the way, such as callers would say they wanted to speak to “Mr McLeod”.

Sexism, racism and misogynism, she has experienced it all, but as she said, “my book isn’t about that, I just wanted to tell my story through my eyes”.

An eye on Boeing 777s
As a pilot, Mcleod was “quite happy just flying 737s all around” but  followed with interest as Boeing 777s were developed and introduced, with automated fly-by-wire technology.

“I was based in New Zealand for nearly 12 months — loved my time there. That was on the 737s, so I did all of the domestic routes in New Zealand as well as all the South Pacific islands.

“At first I was based in Christchurch, then when moved Auckland a group of us pilots pooled our allowance and took an apartment at Auckland’s viaduct and we just loved it there, Ken came along and joined us,” she said.

Mcleod then  began working for the Virgin stable  and was trained to pilot 777s there — another thing ticked off her bucket list.

When she joined Royal Tongan Airlines and became  the first pilot  to speak fluent Tongan to the largely Tongan passengers over the intercom, it gave her such pride.

Defining her life
Mcleod underlines her story that flying aeroplanes does not define her life. Her journey, family, cultural identity and partnership with Ken determined her life.

Alas Ken died recently from cancer as the covid-19 pandemic swept through the world, and McLeod says that  until the end they remained both close and committed to breaking down barriers of skin colour and culture.

“I was a wife first, a mother, a grandmother, a carer, and I just call myself a worker … whatever field you have it’s no different. I just wanted to tell my story,” she says.

“And if my story inspires young Pacific women to be who they want to be, then so be it, but that was not my ambition. I just wanted to tell my story,” she says heading out the door to a nearby golf course.

 Island Girl to Airline Pilot: A Story of Love, Sacrifice and Taking Flight, by Silva Mcleod. Melbourne: Exisle Publishing. ISBN: 9781922539618

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Sri Krishnamurthi.

100+ Groups Urge Congress to Abandon ‘Carbon Utilization Fantasy’

Jessica Corbett — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 19:04:47 +0000

More than 100 organizations on Monday urged the congressional sponsors of a new proposal that would boost the tax credit for certain carbon capture projects to shift their focus to solutions that will actually address the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency.

The groups—including 350.org, Beyond Plastics, Center for Biological Diversity, Food & Water Watch, Indigenous Environmental Network, Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition (MEJC) Action!, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Science and Environmental Health Network (SEHN), and Waterspirit—oppose the Captured Carbon Utilization Parity Act (S. 542/H.R. 1262).

Introduced last week by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Reps. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) and Terri Sewell (D-Ala.), the legislation would increase the 45Q tax credit for carbon capture and utilization (CCU) "to match the incentives for carbon capture and storage (CCS) for both direct air capture (DAC) and the power and industrial sectors."

The groups sent a letter to the four sponsors arguing that:

This bill does not advance climate solutions, but is rather a giveaway to fossil fuel companies and other corporate polluters under the guise of climate action. Promoting the utilization of captured CO2 in petrochemicals, plastics, and fuels, as your legislation would encourage, will perpetuate environmental justice harms and subsidize the oil and gas industry to do it. Rather than perpetuating these climate scams, we encourage you to support the elimination of subsidies for the fossil fuel industry instead of enriching them through carbon capture schemes.

In addition to stressing that such projects consume a lot of water while producing emissions and chemical waste—further endangering frontline communities that are disproportuantely home to people of color and low-income individuals—the organizations pointed out that "carbon capture has a long history of overpromising and under-delivering."

"The overwhelming majority of captured carbon to date has been used to increase oil production via enhanced oil recovery (EOR)," the letter highlights. "The myth of a massive carbon management paradigm that uses and re-uses carbon dioxide on any large scale serves only to greenwash the reality of how carbon dioxide is used: for oil production."

"As laid bare in an investigation from the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, the 45Q tax credit is rife with abuse as credits are improperly claimed," the letter further notes. "Moreover, documents uncovered by the House Oversight Committee's investigation into major oil companies and climate disinformation revealed that the biggest proponents of CCS also understand the technology to be costly, ineffective, and requiring continued and increasing government subsidization."

"The myth of a massive carbon management paradigm that uses and re-uses carbon dioxide on any large scale serves only to greenwash the reality of how carbon dioxide is used: for oil production."

Citing a report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the organizations also explained that "in contrast to things like solar power and batteries, carbon capture is not the kind of technology that gets significantly cheaper over time, and increasing public subsidies to spark a carbon management industry will not result in a self-sustaining system."

According to dozens of groups representing communities across the country, "The carbon utilization fantasy should be abandoned, with focus restored on the solutions we know will help combat the climate crisis, like renewable energy and storage, electrification, energy efficiency, real zero-waste materials systems, agroecology, and more."

SEHN executive director Carolyn Raffensperger told Common Dreams that her group is supporting the letter "because carbon capture use and sequestration (CCUS) is the fossil fuel industry's diabolical plan to line its investors' pockets with public money" and "the antithesis of a climate solution in that it delays real, tried and true solutions."

"Further, the entire 45Q tax credit program turns sound environmental policy on its head: Instead of requiring the polluter to pay for its damage, 45Q tax credits pay the polluter to pollute," Raffensperger added. Pointing to proposed CO2 pipelines in Iowa, she said:

Keenly aware of the climate crisis, we investigated the claims that industry was making that we could address climate by putting a big machine on top of various polluting facilities and transporting the CO2 across the countryside and burying it deep underground. What we discovered was that the entire enterprise would require more energy than the original facility required. It will disrupt farm land and pose grave risks in case of a pipeline rupture. Even worse, we found that this vast complex system of carbon capture, transportation, and either use or disposal is horribly under-regulated by [the Environmental Protection Agency], the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the [Internal Revenue Service], and others. The frosting on this toxic cake is that the public pays the fossil fuel industry with public money and the public gets no climate benefit. If anything, CCUS makes climate change worse.

"Heed the lessons of the recent train derailment and pipeline disasters. That is, fix the regulatory mess before pouring money into 45Q tax credits," she urged U.S. lawmakers. "The tax credits are like shoveling coal into the boiler of a runaway train."

MEJC Action! backed the letter "because of the dangers CCUS presents to environmental justice communities in Michigan," Juan Jhong-Chung, the group's climate justice director, told Common Dreams. "Our communities are already overburdened by polluted air and water because of fossil fuel power plants and other toxic industrial infrastructure. We do not want government subsidies going to technologies that will perpetuate harms and impact the health of our families."

"Most projects where CCUS can be deployed are Black, Brown, and poor communities," the campaigner added. "We don't need more respiratory issues, we deserve clean pollution-free renewable energy."

As Rachel Dawn Davis, public policy and justice organizer at Waterspirit, said Monday in an email to Common Dreams, independent science has already shown that investments in carbon capture "would be a waste of money and time," and "we are experiencing the sixth mass extinction; we have no time to continue wasting."

"If we are to provide a livable future for current and future generations of young people and all creation, we must invest solely in renewable energy, not furthering fossil fuel fallacies," she emphasized. "Subsidies going to the most heinous polluters are only continuing through this legislation; congressional representatives must know better by now."

This post has been updated with comment from MEJC Action!.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Artist and fantasy architect and builder Lauren Halsey on being of service in your creative work

Mark “Frosty” McNeill — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 08:00:00 +0000

What does being of service mean to you and why is it important?

There must be some sort of tangible output, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, artistic output to the community outside the art audience. Being of service just means sort of shape-shifting with what the needs of folks in the neighborhood have right now. It means being present, being available. It means recycling and redistributing resources, both poetic and tangible, informational, intellectual back into the neighborhood that I deeply love. Utilizing this neighborhood love and pride I have for art-making, of course, but also for other conceits, and just seeing it out in the world.

I’ve been trying to do it since 2010 when I entered art school as an undergrad, but 10 years later, now that I have a gallery, and they commercialize my work for me, it helps to build social programs and provide financial support to other organizations also doing the work. I’m able to engage on the street-level in the way that I’ve always wanted to. I’m finally doing it, which is really cool and meaningful. It’s always just been a core part of the desire of even wanting to make art.

Lauren Halsey, Slo But We Sho (Dedicated to the Black Owned Beauty Supply Association) II, 2020, synthetic hair on wood, 72 x 101 1/2 x 8 inches, Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

Is this model of balancing a high level art practice and high level social practice something you hope to pass on to young people and others around you?

I’m not trying to convince anybody of anything, I’m just doing what I’m called to do. For example, my father was an accountant for private firms, for the city of Santa Monica, and at one time the guitarist, I think, it was Slash from Guns N’ Roses. He did his professional job well on the West Side and always brought resources back to South Central as part of his personal ethos. I can think of 90 million people in my life who have had different paths, different relationships to me, but were also part of that pantheon of folks that I knew I wanted to be like—always of service, always organizing.

I move the way I move and if it’s inspiring, that’s amazing. But people are going to live the way that they need to live, and that can mean anything and that’s totally appropriate. I don’t hold anybody towards an expectation. If anything, I’m only heavy-handed with my little cousins and I’m very hands-on and insistent about including them in a lot of the programs that the [Summaeverythang] Community Center does because it’s good to build that into their identities very early on. They’re my cousins so it’s different but as far as people I don’t know, I put it out and take what you want to take from it.

Can you talk a bit about geography and space and the kind of stimulating energy that you find in your community?

Like I said, it’s very biased. My biography and everything that I’ve inherited energetically—some stuff kinetically and then the literal stuff: the language, the archive, the histories, the South Central artifacts, the stories, the pictures… loving all of those things and wanting to be a custodian of all those things in the most intentional way. Then also growing up with friends who also have that same sort of relationship to the neighborhood who are now in my studio. We’re coming up as adults, feeling this sense of love and honor and pride about being where we’re from. A lot of that is coming from our parents, cousins, and our grandmothers, but also just the really cool things that we’re into, like the aesthetic moments that are very, very specific to this street or this corridor. I feel we’re constantly discovering, which is great. I love it. It has its problems, it’s not Disneyland. This place is fucked up too, but I’m from here.

Lauren Halsey, Loda Land, 2020, inkjet print on paper, 67 x 45 1/2 inches, Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

Can you talk about the importance of fortifying against the danger of development and outside ownership in a community that has such deep roots and a multi-generational creative continuum?

When you own something you control it, to an extent. Generationally, you can think about how this space might operate in a larger community context or in your family. You get to function in a space without the mess of bureaucracy. We can, to an extent, determine our needs, palate, tastes, etc. We can protect it. We can care for our archives. You don’t have to depend on institutions to collect them. We can build our own. We can create our own spaces for gardening, for our own harvest. We can distribute that into a community.. There’s all these moments for choice. I’m interested in one day engaging the community land trust model for these reasons.

There’s tangible reality, like the physicality of a neighborhood, but I’m also curious about the power of myth-making. How can fantasy have a tangible influence in the real world?

I’m not sure as far as how they land on folks and how they sit in people’s hearts and minds, but for me, I make large-scale sculptures or installations that have this architectural vision through a very fantastical frame and lens because I want to compel folks and myself. I make them for myself and share them with other people, but I want to compel dreaming, new aspirations, proposals for the future and actually do it. But then also, growing up in a neighborhood where architecture and the visceral feeling, body feeling, of architecture here and its materials—it’s cladding and can be very disempowering. I don’t mean the homes. I mean a certain county building or a certain high school. Not all of them, but there are these moments or these markers where it’s just like, someone made these decisions in response to a very racist, and most likely classist lens about South Central.

I’m interested in, one, making gorgeous black space for Black people, but also spaces that just aren’t about beautiful form, but embody what I hope to be future spaces that are actually functional in a neighborhood as habitats. Not just representations of architectures as maquettes in an art gallery or museum but the everyday experience of living with it and in it. Right now I still think I’m in model-making form, even though it’s human space, but eventually I think the spaces should exist on the block. I’m not saying it will ever be this, but just an extreme example, if it was a liquor store or mini market without all of the baggage of cladding and signage, “No loitering, no gang-banging, no guns, no washing your car on the premises.” I’m like, “Fuck, I’m just trying to buy a bag of chips.” You go in and there’s all of this surveillance and all of this armor to protect the person behind the register. So, to make these like fantastical, smart, light, poetic spaces where we can actually function. I think that would sit well on the hearts and minds of folks in a way that we’re not able to function in regular spaces now, because the stuff is so harsh.

Lauren Halsey, land of the sunshine wherever we go, 2020, mixed media on foil-insulated foam and wood, 97 x 52 x 49 inches, Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

Yeah, people bloom and blossom when they don’t have that psychic barrage. You’re very sensitive to the ability to create ideal worlds through your art and visions. How does it feel being in a space that you’ve created?

I’m trying to chase the high I’d get in grad school, building a space in solitude over time in the studio. There wasn’t a Fire Marshall, there wasn’t the press, I was able to accumulate over a nice chunk of time. I mean, of course there were deadlines, but they were sort of abstract. Building something was still very much in my control. I was able to go into tangents. I was able to literally live in the sculptural installations I was building at the time. Whereas now, I enjoy it, I wouldn’t do anything else, but there’s a lot of pressure that shows up when you professionalize passion for a commercial context. There’s a lot of labor, a lot of staggering deadlines, money, time, effort, and just all this thick stuff that goes into building and making something. When I see it, I probably have 10 seconds of deep joy and then my mind then starts thinking, “Well, what’s the next one?” I think I’ll continue to sort of operate in that thought process until I get to the real scale of architecture which I’ve been trying to reach since 2006.

With success comes responsibility, more of the administrative hustle to enable the mechanism to function and less of the dreaming which is the reason you got into it. What would you ideally like to see for yourself down the line?

I care very, very much about the people that work with me and I care very much about their comfort. That’s just a huge thing for me. I want my studio to feel like a family. I think it does. I want to pivot in the future to having my own space within a studio, not sharing an open floor with everyone, which is what it is now. I want to be able to have my private moment to feel free and be at play with the work. Right now, it’s very hard to go to that space—a head space, heart space, creative space, where I can make a mess, fail, land, and still experiment while other folks are in the room, 20 feet away mostly because my studio has run out of space. I want to be able to just build a deeply personal installation in the studio as a habitat I live in, not to be exhibited. Something like that might take three years, but I just need to do it.

That kind of re-imagination of space through your lens seems very powerful. I think about Noah Purifoy and the kind of reclamation of discarded materials that in his case, had a lot of heavy weight. The materials you use are infused with a vibe, almost a coded language, like a portal into your community neighborhood. For you, the reclamation of discarded materials, what’s the power in that?

I wish I used discarded materials more. I would save a lot of money. I’m obsessed with what people make with their hands so I’m constantly buying from makers in the neighborhood at all levels of production—incense, oils, mix CDs, movies, painting, textiles. I intentionally collect and archive all of these things and I use them in my work when it makes sense but primarily for our community archives. But the ultimate goal of the exercise for me is that one day I will have a space that’s able to hold our archives, literally. And the archive is made on the street level first, archives that might not make it into the institutional space and if they did, I don’t know that I would want that. I want folks from this place and others like it, to be able to go into the incense collection and understand new references and deep histories behind a title or scent, for example. I’m also collecting the process and production of the things, how they’re made, how they make decisions, not just the result or the object. And folks get to download all of that too, so that in the future, when people think of incense and, “Oh, I mean, you burn it. You change the energy in the room,” or these very esoteric ways that we think about it now. I can say, “Yeah, and there’s this dude Leon, who’s a hardcore poet and he writes poems with the goal of then producing a scent for it. Then he tries to summon some sort of title for it, from the scents that he creates and that’s how he gets the title. It’s not just the stick.” And then I have the interview with him, talking about it. I collect all types of stuff. Some of it shows up in my work, but like 99% of it doesn’t. I do that with the goal of one day having South Central research archives for the world to see. So I think in 10 years that will exist, maybe even sooner. It’ll just be how people access it, I have to figure that out.

Lauren Halsey, My Hope, 2020, acrylic, enamel, and CDs on foam and wood, 116 x 101 x 36 inches, Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

Amazing, I love this idea of the archive. Within your social practice and your arts practice, do you think about nourishment and what the nourishing effect will be for the person who engages with it?

Not so much, that’s too much work. It’s already hard enough to build it. But, when I decided I would have a Community Center that was part of the thesis. But I pretty much wear all of the hats and I get caught up in logistics and a lot of that stuff gets put on the back burner, and a lot of my thinking and brain space around it is just like, “How do I make the produce land here?” But I think after Corona, I think I will be able to have a sort of intimacy with the community and the project and it’s trajectory beyond just, “Here’s a box, and I might not ever see you again.” I can actually really embrace the word nourishment and I can embrace those relationships on another scale. And actually being of service in a very long-term sense because we don’t have to be physically distant. Right now I can’t even go there because I’m just trying to keep everybody safe and we’re just trying to get the boxes out. But in my dream world, when we pass this moment, there will be a totally different engagement. Not just giving out the boxes, but following through with, at the minimum, recipes and cooking classes, and trips to the farm, and holding the grocery stores accountable for the horrible produce supply chain that we get in South Central, Compton, and Watts. There will be multiple actions, not just one. I think only time will tell because I’m also just figuring it out as I go.

600 bountiful boxes of produce per week, from farm to Watts. Nourishment ups the quality of life. How would you articulate the thesis of the Summaeverythang Community Center?

I don’t know yet but I call it Summaeverythang because it can be in and of everything, and can exist across multiple or plural contexts, no matter what it is. It can be a space for job creation or it can be a music studio. It can be a class for Capoeira. Whatever is for the advancement and transcendence of folks in the neighborhood in that moment is what it should be. It could literally be anything that feeds and nourishes an intellectual space, a heart space, emotional space, psychic space. It could be anything. It could be sign painting classes.

At the highest level.

At the very highest level. It was important that we didn’t do a food program that was about replicating what’s already in the grocery stores, which I have a huge problem with. It’s about not being afraid of the cost and not giving folks the crumbs. So doing what I have to do as an artist in my studio as far as production, to fund it, and then doing all the things that I had to do to become a nonprofit, very rapidly. Then doing all the things to now activate that to its fullest potential by hiring a grant writer, staying in conversation with them, constantly applying to things, and now trying to do my due-diligence to figure out alternative streams of revenue because grants aren’t enough if I want it to operate at a very high level. So it’s all about taking a step at a time, and just trying to get there. But one day, when it opens to the public, it’ll be all of these actions happening simultaneously, whatever they are. In my dream world I’ll be able to hire Debbie Allen’s Dance Academy and do three months of free classes, four times a week for dancers in the neighborhood. She’s the highest level that it gets. So that’s what I mean.

Summaeverythang Community Center, Los Angeles, June 2020, Courtesy of SLH-Studio, Los Angeles, and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

The highest actions can co-exist with humility. You put a note out there at the beginning of the food program, “My lane isn’t food advocacy, so if mission-aligned folk out there want to collaborate or lend some advice, hit me up.” I think the ability to come at it with professionalism but also humility, to make it a collaborative effort, is really important.

Yeah, for sure. Which is why I work with who I work with, why I work where I work, why I hang out where I hang out. Because as the practice becomes more successful, the artwork, studio, my relationship with the gallery grows, I’m not interested in separating the success from the neighborhood or the subject or the story that I drew, or the incense designer that I buy from. You know what I mean? As long as there’s Black and Brown South Central, I’ll always be here. I’m not saying that people that leave and don’t come back are problematic, but I’ve never had that interest.

Your work speaks very powerfully. I think about the hand painted signs that you often use in your art. If you were to make a sign to amplify your message and vision as a human what would it be?

It would be simple, “Lauren ‘n’ thangs.” It’s part of a vernacular, whether I’m in South Central or I’m in Atlanta and I say, “’N’ thangs” people know exactly what I mean and what that portal could mean and not mean. It also just suggests, you don’t know what you’re going to get. I would say that.

Lauren Halsey Recommends:

CocoEgypt (Incense)

Ramsess (Artist)

Sevshaw (Album by Six Sev)

“The World Is A Hustle” (Song by Ms. Lauryn Hill)

Planet Splurge (Place)

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Mark “Frosty” McNeill.

Scott Ritter: Ukraine cannot win this war. It’s a ‘fantasy.’

The Real News Network — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 17:56:56 +0000

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.

Fibs and Fantasy: Scott Morrison Joins the Global Lecture Circuit

Binoy Kampmark — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 05:51:47 +0000

Time for some dark amusement. Rising water levels are being recorded in Victoria and New South Wales. Homes and businesses have been inundated before swelling rivers. And Australia’s former Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, is being advertised in his latest private engagement as a global visionary of vast influence. The snake oil merchants on this occasion More

The post Fibs and Fantasy: Scott Morrison Joins the Global Lecture Circuit appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.