Sherry Chandler

A while ago, I put up a post condemning this art exhibit, The Assassination of Barack Obama/The Assassination of Hillary Clinton, based on this post at Shakespeare’s Sister.

On second thought, I’ve taken the post down. I made the post on insufficient information, on the basis of just one photograph, and I am not in the business of censoring artists. Art is dangerous. If it is safe, it probably isn’t doing its job.

Which is not to say that art can’t be wrong-headed or racist, but without seeing the entire exhibit, not just selected photographs, I am in no position to make that judgment. I’ll never see for myself because the exhibit was not allowed to open.

Also, I haven’t seen any photographs from the Hillary Clinton side of the exhibit.

I am still not comfortable with the use of the children, or for that matter, with nooses, but if I only look at art that I’m comfortable with, I am not likely to learn anything. I remember years ago when the city of Cincinnati tried to shut down the Mapplethorpe exhibit. I thought that was wrong. I think it may have been wrong to shut this one down, too.

The remedy for speech is more speech.

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Addendum: Consider this: is it possible that, just as the widespread insensitivity to sexist discourse in this primary season has revealed the continuing prevalence of sexism in the United States, so the widespread hypersensitivity to racist discourse can be used to conceal the depth of continuing racist practice and the way racism can be gamed to the detriment of the nation at large (e.g. Clarence Thomas)?

And this may be a good place to point out Barack Obama’s new web site Fight the Smears.

That’s the question Ursula K. Le Guin asks in the introduction to her collection Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (Roc, 1987), for which she won a Hugo Award and an International Fantasy Award. (Hear her read “She Unnames Them,” the final fable from that collection here.)

She answers it, in part, like this:

People to whom sophistication is a positive intellectual value shun anything “written for children”; if you want to clear the room of derrideans, mention Beatrix Potter without sneering. … In literature as in “real life,” women, children, and animals are the obscure matter upon which Civilization erects itself, phallologically. That they are Other is … the foundation of language, the Father tongue. If Man vs. Nature is the name of the game, no wonder the team players kick out all those non-men who won’t learn the rules and run around the cricket pitch squeaking and barking and chattering!

…

Why do animals in kids’ books talk? Why do animals in myths talk? …Why does the tortoise say, “I’ll race you,” to the hare, and how does Coyote tell Death, “I’ll do exactly what you tell me!” Animals don’t talk—everybody knows that. Everybody, including quite small children, and the men and women who told and tell talking-animal stories, knows that animals are dumb: have no words of their own. So why do we keep putting words in their mouths?

We who? We the dumb: the others.”

All this by way of announcing that you can find the first three chapters of Morgan S. Williams’s anthropomorphic first novel Oseille at this link, downloadable for free as a rich-text file.

Morgan S. Williams is my son. He’s looking for a publisher.
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Note: In a degrees-of-separation kind of connection, Ursula K. Le Guin has a small chapbook of poems, I Am My Inheritance, in volume 28 of The Other Voices International Project and I have a small selection, October Grass, in volume 19.

Haven’t we won that little altercation yet?

Capitalist nations not only exploit their workers, but ruthlessly invade, plunder, and ravage one another. The profit system is responsible for it all.

— Eugene V. Debbs, quoted in Ernest Freeberg’s Democracy’s Prisoner (Havard, 2008), p. 26

At the beginning of the 20^th Century, the Socialists had a plan for stopping war, which they saw as the ultimate capitalist exploitation of the working class. When war was declared, Socialists would call a general world-wide strike, and without workers or warriors, the war could not go forward.

This grand plan hit a small glitch in the form of World War I. When war was declared, German workers chose national security over solidarity, and they were soon followed by workers in France and England.

Socialists in the United States still had some hope. Woodrow Wilson wanted to be a mediator for peace, and there was a sizable peace contingent in the country. The famous Chicago social worker Jane Addams was associated with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which had 40,000 members. Henry Ford was an active pacifist, though his efforts were met with ridicule. The American Union Against Militarism “proposed public ownership of armaments factories to remove the profit motive from mass destruction” (Freeberg p. 27). It was this latter group that spawned what became The American Civil Liberties Union.

But the war escalated. Wilson’s efforts to bring peace were rebuffed. The Germans sank the Lusitania and made some overtures to Mexico to form an alliance against the U.S. Wilson decided to begin arming the nation, which at that time had very little in the way of a standing army. He called his policy preparedness.

Not everybody was on board with the policy. Socialists still hoped for a universal disarmament overseen by some version of international governing body, a “United States of the World.” In May, 1915, they sent a delegation to meet with Wilson on this subject:

When the Socialist delegation called on Wilson, they were delighted to hear that he was already working on a “similar plan” to end the war and build a new international order founded on a league of nations. The president offered the same assurances to other pacifist groups. When a committee of liberals and socialists from the American Union Against Militarism visited the White House, Wilson disarmed them by taking them into his “intellectual bosom” and sympathizing with their fears. “I am just as opposed to militarism as any man living,” he told them, but he argued that the arms buildup was a tool that would allow America to lead the postwar world in the creation of an international peacekeeping body. The petitioners warned him that the “reactionary” forces of big business would use America’s new military force to pursue the “aggressive grabbing for the trade of the world.” Wilson professed to share their concerns, but insisted that a strong American army would have just the opposite effect, empowering the country to lead a “world federation” for the “international enforcement of peace.” Guns, bombs, and battleships were the unsavory means to a beautiful end, one long cherished by conservative peace advocates, liberal Christians, and Socialists alike.

“We all liked him,” the socialist editor Max Eastman reported, “and we all sincerely believed that he sincerely believes he is anti-miliarist.” (Freeberg, pp. 32-33)