23 Tons of Transcendent Candy

I’ve been down with a total ick of a flu since hooping proud at Pride last Sunday. Among other exciting activities, like huddling under a towel over a bowl of steam (this always makes me think fondly of Pete Postlethwaite in In the Name of the Father), I watched Sophie Scholl, which I’ve been wanting to see for a while. It’s based on the true story of Sophie and her brother, who were university students in Munich during the Third Reich; together they and a handful of others, mostly students, formed the resistance group The White Rose, which distributed anti-Nazi leaflets across the country in an effort to cause a national student uprising against The Fuhrer. During the interrogations, Sophie says something very close to “everyone will hate us for what we have allowed to happen; everyone will ask why we did nothing to try and stop it.”

Yup. It is a complex thing, having a German (or half-German, in my case) identity. Even the most fair and open-minded folks I know often belie – or outright state- their belief that there is an inherent tendency towards ethnic supremacy and harshness, among other ugly traits, in Germans. Despite the fact(s) that I was born in the U.S., and that my mother was only just born at the end of the war (1944), and that her father refused to join the Nazi party and was held back from klobbering the local SS-dude only when the latter threatened his wife (my grandmother), who was heavy with her third child (my mother), and that my mother’s uncle, the intellectual of the family, was a supporter of the White Rose himself and was therefore drowned by SS-officers in front of his own wife… despite ALL this, I have still felt guilty by association throughout my life. Guilty by turns, and by turns pissed off by that energy that people send me when I say I am half-German.

I recommend Sophie Scholl. Also Downfall, which portrays Hitler’s last days and how nearly everyone in his closest ranks lost respect and turned on him.

The Reich’s atrocities are/were unforgiveable–and it’s important to remember how grey and complex every fraggin situation is. The findings of the Milgram Experiments of 1960s, often mentioned in the wake of the Abu Ghraib torture images, showed how pathetically obedient the average person is: “Even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

A couple days ago I intended to write here about the Berlin Airlift, aka Operation Vittles, which began on June 26, 1948, and involved US, British, and French planes dropping tons of food, medicine, and other supplies into Western-occupied Berlin, which was blockaded by the Soviet Union for just about a year. (Soviet strategy was to weaken Germany to render it incapable of another war, while the US, with France and Britain, felt Germany should be rebuilt as a solid economic center of Europe postwar.)

After seeing the desperation of the German children in the blockaded area, one swell pilot named Gail Halvorsen came up with the whimsical idea of tying candy bars and bubblegum to his handkerchiefs and dropping these tiny parachutes from his plane for the kids. The press spread the word and soon American children were donating candy to the effort— then corporate contributions kicked in, including 11,000 yards of linen cut to handkerchief size and 1200 rolls of Lifesavers from the Life Saver Corp. According to the Chicopee Herald, newspaper of Halvorsen’s hometown in Massachusetts, “each of the 22 schools in Chicopee set time aside for sewing the handkerchiefs into miniature parachutes. Each student was required to donate one day per week making candychutes.”

When I lived in Berlin, I lived around the corner from the Tempelhof airfield, which was the drop-site for US-occupied Berlin. There’s an ungainly monument there that commemorates the Airlift, the first segment of a concrete bridge arching from the ground towards the sky and abruptly truncated there, reaching up. When my dad passed away (he’d lived his last years in my mother’s country of birth), I knew immediately that the cemetery just down the street from Tempelhof was the place for him, facing this symbol of how we USAmericans transcended judgment and bitterness, and extended assistance to those in need.

Affinity, not Identity

The announcement by scientists of 28 new planets beyond our solar system (or “exoplanets”), including one with water in the Wonder Twin form of ice, finds me ambivalent: I’m alternately wildly hopeful, then sad about our struggling little planet and its ecosystem.

My friend Van has been stumping on the issue of Inclusion within the vibrant new verdant economy: so poor brown kids aren’t left behind when everyone else benefits from the green jobs wave. I wonder about the implications of class, race, gender and ability in an astronomical relocation of the future. Would moving to a fresh new planet be reserved for only the wealthy, mostly white, and able-bodied among us, solely the Judeo-Christians, or just the (pick your dominant identity)?

This line of thinking synched up nicely with my currently reigning infatuation, the new Battlestar Galactica. Back in March, my savvy friend John recommended I check the show out for its implied commentary on the current state of affairs. My Greencine queue started serving it up last month.

I’ve become pretty enthralled, even after stumbling over the fact that their version of the future is soooo straight—the yummy tension between the original TV show’s Starbuck and Apollo characters hermetically sidestepped by rendering neo-Starbuck a female. In a future where only 49,000-some humans exist, some could argue that re-populating the species necessitates the predominance of heterosexuality, but please!—science already creates babies without intercourse, and everywhichway romance and sex will undoubtedly flourish regardless of procreation’s imperative.

What I’m digging most about Battlestar Galactica is the complexity in the depiction of the Other: in this case, the Cylons, machines that we humans created and controlled until they rebelled against us and destroyed most of humanity. Pejoratively known as Toasters.

Once their clunky metal and wire forms are replaced by (attractive) human replicas that joke, weep, laugh, bleed, etc., Cylons don’t seem so different from us. It becomes easier and easier to imagine co-existing and even fraternizing with these machines that…who… learned terrorization, warfare and domination from us. We are partially responsible, as with patterns passed down from parents to their children.

Battlestar Galactica inspired me to track down the Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway, which I remembered reading in college. In it she breaks down socially-constructed dualisms like man-woman, mind-body, animal-human, or primitive-civilized, by using the organism (natural) vs. machine (artificial) binary as a metaphor.

Easily digestible examples of the fallacy of the organism-machine division include people with artificial hearts or prosthetic limbs, or contact lens wearers, or folks with hearing aids: are they less than human because some part of their body has been replaced or augmented by technology? Are they human?

Philosophers like Haraway may have proven the fallibility of essentialism, which takes the view that all entities within a certain category share a set of fixed universal characteristics and causes– for example, that all women are nurturing. But essentialist categories persist in our society because of their handiness in politics, economics, and other ick’s.

As my friend Lisa points out in her brilliant article If Women Ruled the World, Nothing Would Be Different, these categories “shore up a consumer capitalist system by providing opportunities for both marketing and exploitation.” Today, they enable us to equate muslims with terrorists. Haraway writes that essentialist dualisms have been “systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals—in short, domination of all constituted as Others, whose task is to mirror the self.”

But here’s the rousing, hopeful part: Donna Haraway posits a cyborgian social change vision. Which appears to coincide with the course of the Battlestar Galactica (though I haven’t yet seen Season 3):
“There has been a growing recognition of another response through coalition—affinity, not identity…. A cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point.”

We belong to so many tribes, each of us, after all.

Contrails

I flew at the safe altitude of tribe.net for a month before gaining the courage to launch the rocket here. The following emissions were generated in those flights of fancy, with the net drawn taut under me by my fellow freaks and hoopers at tribe.

NO CHOCOLATES WERE INVOLVED
(originally posted 31.05.07)

May 31 is the day on which the legendary ride of British noblewoman Lady Godgyfu is commemorated. You might know her better as Godiva, the Latin version of her anglosaxon name, which means “gift of God.”

Godgyfu lived in the early part of the 11th century. She was an active philanthropist, and did much endowing of monasteries like the Benedictine’s in Coventry. We should bear in mind it’s not as if she had a lot of other choices of organizations to support: the non-profit sector of 11th century England was not quite our behemoth of today. Plus, as one source puts it, in that era, the Benedictine Monasteries contributed so significantly to education, culture and goverment that the years from 550 to 1150 could be called the Benedictine centuries–in Europe, I hasten to add. So she wielded her privilege for some good.

Her fabled (and probably mythical) ride also stemmed from her bleating heart. Over and over again she had begged her husband Leofric to stop taxing the poor people of the town of Coventry, but he stubbornly refused. Finally, worn down, he offered a deal that he surely thought she’d never take: if she would ride naked through the streets of town, he would grant her request. She called his bluff, and rode buff. He kept his word and abolished the taxes.

I’d like to propose a similar deal to the lawmakers in our nation’s capital: I’ll mount a steed and ride around Capitol Hill in the nude, in return for the passage of a couple pieces of legislation. Just off the top of my head, here’s what I’d expect in return for my first ride:

*Δ*immediate US ratification of stricter emissions standards than in the Kyoto Protocol
*Δ* a nice fat progressive income tax whereby wealthier folks pay a higher percentage than those with less income. Oh, and a laying to bed of any thought of repealing estate taxes—for the mental health of the children of the very rich if for no other reason.
*Δ*a zero waste goal, how about by 2020. Zero Waste goes beyond recycling to eliminate subsidies for raw material extraction and waste disposal, and holds producers responsible for the entire life cycles of their products and packaging.
*Δ*the establishment of the Department of Peace, focused on nonmilitary peaceful conflict resolutions and violence prevention at home and abroad

My second ride will be offered for universal health care, marriage’s removal from the realm of government (thus, equality of opportunity for the full spectrum of couplings) and other equally sensible things.

So, who’s with me? The hottest ladies out there, I mean you, since I think we’ll attract the most attention and possess the most cleavage…I mean leverage.

And can someone contribute horses to this effort, and get them to DC? Please contact me immediately.