Racial understanding in Oregon

The Times has reported on the Restorative Listening Project in Portland, Oregon, which aims to increase understanding between the races on gentrification and other divisive issues. Looks like it's working already:

Last month, Joan Laufer, who is white and who moved into a house in Northeast in 2006, stood up to express gratitude to a black minister for describing how hard it was for blacks to get home improvement loans and for addressing some sensitive stereotypes.

“I’ve learned two things about all you guys already — why the houses aren’t fixed up and why you guys are riding around in all these big flashy cars,” Ms. Laufer, 55, a nurse practitioner, said.

At one point, she also asked blacks what she should call them — blacks or African-Americans.

An older black woman in the front replied, “People.”

Ghost bikes

I usually buy my fish in Chinatown, since there are no fish stores near my home, and the supermarket fish looks dubious. I go to the same place, near the terminals of the Fung Wah and Lucky Star bus companies, and walk over the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn, since the entrance to the bridge is only about a block away. Last week, on the traffic island near the entrance, I saw something new: a ghost bike commemorating a young man who was killed near that spot. I had seen a few ghost bikes in New York before: old bicycles painted white and chained to a street sign, usually with some flowers and a plaque identifying the person who was injured or killed. Ghostbikes.org is one site for more information on this phenomenon, but there are others.

Foreclosures

The building next to my own apartment building went through a couple of owners recently before being gutted and abandoned. Now what used to be a reasonably attractive place is a brick shell with a padlocked front door, yellow tape running around the front, and a X in a box painted on the facade that marks it as condemned. An article in the Post says the number of foreclosures in Brooklyn in the first quarter of 2008 is up by 26.6% from the same period last year. That sounds bad, until you see that the foreclosure rate is even higher in every other borough, reaching 101% in Staten Island. And that sounds bad, until you see that the increase in foreclosures for the country as a whole is 112%.

The Sean Bell Verdict

Three police detectives were acquitted this morning of all charges after firing 50 bullets at an unarmed men and his two friends outside a club in Queens. Sean Bell was killed on his wedding day, and his friends were wounded. The barrage was so reckless that video cameras caught bullets careening through the glass walls of the Jamaica metro station nearby. I expected at least some of the charges to stick in this case. Now that I see they haven’t, I’m not so much angry as deeply discouraged. There’s not much more to say about it: This picture and the quotes below tell the story.

“They got away with murder in there,” said Calvin B. Hunt, a man in the crowd.... William Hargraves, 48, an electrician from Harlem brought his 12-year-old son, Kamau, to the courthouse this morning. He said this verdict parallels the outcome of previous police shootings of black men. “Connect the bullets,” he said. “How many times did they shoot Diallo? Forty-one times. They were acquitted. They got a pension.” His son said: “I think it’s not right, because they shot him 50 times. They knew he was hurt, and they kept shooting him. He didn’t even have a gun.”

Let them eat mud

As food prices around the world are skyrocketing, and hungry people are becoming even hungrier, the TV news asks whether Reverend Wright loves America, and whether, when Senator Obama was scratching his face, he was actually giving Senator Clinton the finger. The other day I saw a photo, very much like this one, of a array of mud pies. Each one was neatly made and smoothly finished, with an artistic swirl. They are being made by starving people in Haiti to stave off hunger pains. When I tried to find the photo again I discovered a post called Mud Pies in Soleil at the blog Dying in Haiti, one of several blogs written by Dr. John Carroll and his wife, who live and work in Haiti several months each year. I’ve been interested in Haiti for well over a decade, and visited the country in 1996, during a peaceful period in the presidency of Rene Preval. The constant media emphasis on Haiti’s problems — and the problems are dire enough — tends to overshadow the beauty and uniqueness of the country’s religion, music, art, and language. I hope the day will come when we read articles about those things. Until then, I can always reread Herbert Gold’s Best Nightmare on Earth.

A Political Education by André Schiffrin

André Schiffrin is the founder of The New Press, the extraordinary nonprofit publishing house that he created in 1990 after being forced out of his position at the head of Pantheon Books. A Political Education is his modestly brief, yet eye-opening memoir (published by the independent Melville House). Though raised in New York City, Schiffrin was born in France, where his father was an eminent publisher and the creator of the Pléiade series of classic literature (the inspiration for the Library of America series in the US). He has returned regularly for many years, and began in recent years to divide his time between New York and Paris. Schiffrin’s French roots, and his early immersion in socialist thought and political activism, give him a valuable perspective on politics and publishing in the US. It’s sobering, though not surprising, to learn that New York City has lost 90% of the bookstores it had in 1945. France has plenty of bookstores, but the swallowing up of independent publishers by conglomerates has advanced even farther there than it has in the US. Something that did surprise me was the extent to which the insanities of the Korean War prefigured those of Vietnam, and how Cold War censorship and self-censorship covered up those insanities. I didn’t know, for instance, that “MacArthur had proposed dropping fifty atomic bombs along the thirty-eighth parallel dividing the two countries, to make sure that a radioactive border would keep Korea forever divided.” Or that “at least eighteen of the twenty-two major cities [of North Korea] were virtually obliterated” and “more napalm was dropped on the hapless Koreans than we were to use during the whole of the Vietnam War.” Self-censorship is still with us, unfortunately, and the need for independent voices. In the first two years of the Iraq War, Schiffrin points out, no major US publisher would release a book that was critical of the war.

Change in Zimbabwe, at last

When I first went to Zimbabwe, in 1990, I had spent the previous several years raising funds for political prisoners in South Africa and Namibia. I was an admirer of Robert Mugabe because of his support for the ANC, and because he had overturned the expectations of people who expected him to be a tinpot dictator. He had improved health and education in the rural areas, welcomed foreign investors, and given farms back to white commercial farmers who had fled the country. I was troubled by the massacres a few years earlier in Matabeleland — in retrospect I should have been a lot more troubled — but I thought Zimbabwe could have ended up with a leader much worse than Mugabe. By the end of my six months in the country, I had changed my mind. It was an election year, and thugs belonging to the ruling party’s “youth league” were intimidating and beating up supporters of the opposition. The opposition candidate for vice president was shot, though he survived. Other people who were inconvenient to the government tended to die in car crashes, sometimes in collisions with armored vehicles. Joshua Nkomo, the widely respected leader of the ZAPU party, had been harmlessly neutralized as a minister without portfolio. I saw him at a ceremony for the tenth anniversary of the country’s independence — a huge sad man in a suit, staring at his lap. Meanwhile the ruling ZANU party was finishing construction on a new and brutal-looking tower in Harare. Eighteen long years later, Zimbabwe’s economy is in ruins and its people starving. When I was there, the largest bill in general circulation was a blue note worth twenty Zimbabwean dollars. As I recall, it was worth about ten dollars. In January this year, the government printed new money:

On Jan. 18, Zimbabwe’s reserve bank put a $10 million bill into general circulation, a maroon-tinged piece of paper with a sketch of water gushing through a dam that might well have symbolized the escaping value of the note itself. Worth enough at the time to buy a chicken, it now will barely buy a few eggs, with a value of about 40 cents.

As I write, Mugabe has admitted that ZANU has lost control of Parliament, but he has not yet stepped down. I hope he does so soon, that there is a peaceful transition of power, and that foreign governments and aid agencies provide the country with help that actually promotes development and not debt and dependency.

A revealing comment by George Will

On one of the Sunday talk shows, he said this with his usual straight face (I’m quoting from memory): “I never let my kids use the word fair. I didn’t want them to grow up to be liberals.”

A revealing comment by Dick Cheney

Wednesday, March 19, 2008: Martha Raddatz, ABC's Good Morning America: Two-thirds of Americans say [the Iraq War is] not worth fighting. Vice President Dick Cheney: So?

Obama Won Texas?

The major news media have been reporting for a week that Hillary Clinton has saved her campaign and built momentum by winning the primaries in Ohio and Texas. But now NPR has reported that she may not have won Texas after all. She won the popular vote but apparently lost the caucus vote, which could leave her with 95 delegates to Obama’s 98. According to NPR, it may not be sorted out until June. Meanwhile, the constant repetition of what is, at best, a half-truth continues to shape the opinions of people who don’t dig deeper — along with half-truths (or worse) like “Hillary has more experience” (because she was First Lady?) and “Obama doesn’t have detailed proposals.”