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theculturedmarxist · 5 years ago

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ROBERT SCHEER: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case Max Blumenthal, who I must say is one of the gutsiest journalists we have in the United States, and have had for the last five years or so. He’s, in addition to having considerable courage and [going] out on these third-rail issues — like Israel, being one of the more prominent ones — and challenging some of the major conceits of even liberal politics in the United States about our virtue, our constant virtue, he’s done just great journalism. I really loved his book, “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel,” which came out in 2013, because it was based on just good, solid journalism of interviewing people and trying to figure out what’s going on.

I’d done something a half century earlier, or not quite that long ago, during the Six-Day War in Israel, where I went over when I was the editor of Ramparts. And I know how difficult it is to deal with that issue, because I put Ramparts into bankruptcy over the controversy about it. [Laughter] So maybe that’s a good place to begin. You know, you dared touch this issue of Israel, and it didn’t help that you are Jewish. I guess you are Jewish, right? Do you have a background, did you practice any aspect of Judaism? Literature, culture, religion?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: I’m a Jew who had a bar mitzvah, and I even had a bris.

RS: Oh. [Laughs]

MB: And you know, I’ve continued to pop in in synagogues here and there on High Holy Days. I guess you could say, you know, when the rabbi asked, you know, asked me to join the army of God, I tell him I’m in the Secret Service. But I’m definitely Jewish, you know, and it’s a big part of who I am and why I do what I do.

RS: Well, and I thought your writing on that, and your journalism, was informed by that. Because after all, a very important part of the whole experience of Jewish people as victims, as people forced into refugee status, living in the diaspora, was to develop a sense of universal values, and of decency and obligation to the other. And I think your reporting reflected that. However, my goodness, you got a lot of heat over it. And it’s the heat I want to talk about. I want to talk about the difficulty, in this post-Cold War world, of actually writing about the U.S. imperial presence, or writing critically about what our government does, and some of its allies.

And I think Israel is a really good case in point, because we have one narrative that said in the last election we had foreign interference, mostly coming from Russia. And we talk about Russia as if it’s the old communist Soviet Union, with a top-down, big, organized party — forgetting that [Vladimir] Putin actually defeated the Communist Party, and even though he had been in the KGB, and most Russians had been in some kind of official connection with society or another. Nonetheless, Russia really has gotten very little out of whatever interference it did. Israel, that is very rarely talked about, interfered in the election in a very open, blatant way in the presence of Netanyahu, who denounced Barack Obama’s major foreign policy achievement, the deal with Iran, and has focused U.S. policy mostly against the enemy being Iran, and ignoring Saudi Arabia and everything else.

And the interesting thing is that Israel’s interference in the election, and Netanyahu, has been rewarded over and over — the embassy got shifted, the settlers got more validation, now there’s a big peace plan that gives the hawks in Israel everything they want. So why don’t we begin with that, and your own writing about U.S.-Israel relations. It’s kind of odd that there’s — or maybe not odd, maybe it’s just because it is the third rail — that there’s been so little discussion about Donald Trump’s relation to Israel and his payoff to Netanyahu.

MB: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot to chew on there. I would first start with just an observation, because you mentioned that we’re in a post-Cold War world — well, we’re not in a post-Cold War world anymore, we’re in a new Cold War. And for all the attacks I got over Israel, which were absolutely vicious, personalized, you know, framed through emotional blackmail, attacking my identity as a Jew, calling me a Jewish anti-Semite — the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is this right-wing racket over there in L.A., made me the No. 4 anti-Semite of 2015. You know, I was right behind Ayatollah Khomeini. But you know, the worst attacks, the most vicious attacks I’ve received have actually been from centrists and liberal elements over my criticism of the Russiagate narrative that they foisted on the American public starting in 2016, and also on the dirty war that the U.S. has been waging on Syria, and how we at the site that I edit, the Grayzone, started unpacking a lot of the deceptions and lies that were used to try to stimulate support among middle-class liberals in the west for this proxy war on Syria, for regime change in Syria. This was absolutely forbidden, and that attack actually turned out to be more vicious and is ongoing.

With Israel, you have a situation where you have, not maybe a plurality, but maybe a majority of secular Jewish Americans, progressive Jews, who have completely turned their back on the whole Zionist project. And it has a lot to do with Netanyahu. Netanyahu is someone who came out of the American — out of American life. He went to high school in suburban Philadelphia, he went to MIT, he was at Boston Consulting with Mitt Romney. His father ended his life in upstate New York as Jabotinsky’s press secretary, the press secretary for the revisionist wing of the Zionist movement that inspired the Likud party. So Netanyahu is really kind of an American figure, number one; number two, he’s a Republican figure. He’s like a card-carrying neoconservative Republican.

So a lot of Jews who’ve historically aligned themselves with the Democratic Party, who see being a Democrat as almost synonymous with being Jewish in American life, just absolutely revile Netanyahu. And here he is, basically the longest-serving prime minister in Israel; he’s completely redefined the face of Israel and what it is. And he’s provoked — I wouldn’t say provoked, but he’s accelerated the civil war in American Jewish life over Zionism. And what I did was come in at a time when it wasn’t entirely popular, to not just challenge Israel as a kind of occupying entity, but to actually challenge it at its core, to challenge the entire philosophy of Zionism, and to analyze the Israeli occupation as the byproduct of a system of apartheid which has been in place from the beginning, since 1948, which was a product of a settler colonial movement.

That really upset a lot of people who kind of reflect the same elements that I’m getting, who are attacking me on Syria or Russia. People like Eric Alterman at The Nation. He wrote 11 very personal attack pieces on me when my book “Goliath” came out in 2013. Truthdig, you, Chris Hedges, it was a great source of support. And you, you know, you opened up the debate at Truthdig, you allowed people to come in and criticize the book, but kind of in a principled, constructive way. Whereas Eric Alterman was demanding that The Nation censor me, blacklist me, ban me for life, and was comparing me to a neo-Nazi by the end, and claiming I was secretly in league with David Duke. And that was because he had simply no response to my reporting and my analysis of the kind of, the inner contradictions of Zionism.

And so to me, it was really a sign of the success of the book, that someone like Alterman was sort of dispatched, or took it upon himself to wage this really self-destructive attack. And in the end, he really had nothing to show for himself; he wasn’t arguing on the merits. And that’s just what I find time and again with my reporting is, you know, you get these personal attacks and people try to dissuade you from going and touching these third-rail issues, but ultimately there’s no substance to the attacks. I mean, if they really wanted to nail me and take me down, they would address the facts, and they really haven’t been able to do that.

RS: Right. But Max, if I can, let’s focus on the power of your analysis in that book, which is that it is a settler colonialism. And Netanyahu actually is — we can talk about the old labor Zionists, you know, and what was meant by progressive Zionism and so forth. Even at the time of the Six-Day War when I interviewed people like Moshe Dayan and Ya’alon and these people, they all were against a full occupation of the West Bank. They didn’t act on that, unfortunately. But they were aware of the dangers of a colonial model. But right now you have a figure in Israel in Netanyahu, who is, very clearly embodies a racialized view, a jingoistic view of the other, which is really, you know, very troubling. And he’s embraced by this troubling American figure.

And so what your book really predicted is that the settler colonialism was a rot at the center of the Israeli enterprise — and historically, one could justify that enterprise. I don’t know if you would agree. But even the old Soviet Union, I think, was the second, if not the first country to recognize Israel. There was vast worldwide support for some sort of refuge for the Jewish people after such horrible, you know, genocidal policies visited upon them. But what we’re really talking about now is something very different. And that is whether political leadership, and interference and so forth comes mainly for Democrats, very often; obviously, for republicans and Bible-belters and all that, who seem to like this image of the end of time coming in Israel. But really what’s happening — and it’s not discussed in this election, except to attack Bernie Sanders, who dared make some criticisms of Israel in some of these debates — you have a very weird notion of the Jewish experience, as identified with a very hardline, as you say, sort of South African settler colonialist mentality.

And so I want to ask you the question as someone–and we’ll get to it later — you grew up sort of within the Democratic liberal establishment in Washington. Your parents both worked for the Clinton administration, were close to it. How do you explain this blind eye toward Trump’s relationship to Netanyahu? And ironically, for all the Russia-bashing, Netanyahu and Putin seem to get along splendidly, you know. And that doesn’t bother people as far as criticizing Netanyahu. So why don’t we visit that a little bit, and forget about Eric Alterman for a while.

MB: [Laughs] Well, he’s already forgotten, so we don’t have much work to do there. But there’s a lot, again, a lot to chew on, a lot of questions packed into that. You know, just starting with your mention of Moshe Dayan — who is a seminal figure in the Nakba, the initial ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population in 1948 to establish Israel — he was the southern commander of the Israeli military. And he later kind of became a kind of schizophrenic figure in Israeli politics; he would sometimes offer some kind of left-wing opinions, and then be extremely militaristic. But you know, when it came down to it, Moshe Dayan — like every other member of the Israeli Labor Party — was absolutely opposed to a viable Palestinian state. He even said that we cannot have a Palestinian state because it will connect psychologically, in the minds of the Palestinian public who are citizens of Israel — that 20% of Israel who are indigenous Palestinians — it will connect them to Nablus in the West Bank, and it will provide them with a basis for rebelling against the Israeli state to expand the Palestinian state.

The other labor leaders spoke in terms of the kind of, with the racist language of the demographic time bomb that, you know, we need to give Palestinians a state, otherwise we will be overwhelmed demographically. And so the state that they were proposed was what Yitzhak Rabin, in his final address before the Israeli Knesset, the Israeli parliament, called “less than a state.” He promised Israel that at Oslo, he would deliver the Palestinians less than a state. And if you look at the actual plan that the Palestinians were handed at Oslo — which Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Authority chairman, didn’t even review before signing — the map was not that different from the map that Donald Trump has offered with the “ultimate deal.” And they’d say, oh, you get 97% of what was, you know, offered in U.N. Resolution 242 in 1967. But it really just isn’t the case when you get down to the details. What the strategy has been with the Labor Party, and with successive Israeli administrations — and with Netanyahu until he got Trump in — was to kind of kick the can down the road with the so-called peace process, so that Israel could keep putting more facts on the ground.

So it was actually Ehud Barak of the Labor Party, Yitzhak Rabin’s successor, who moved more settlers into the West Bank, by a landslide, than Netanyahu did. Ehud Barak actually campaigned on his connection to the settlers. And then Netanyahu capitalizes on the strength of the settlement movement to build this kind of Titanic rock of a right-wing coalition that’s kept him in power for so long. And if you look at who the leading figures are in Israeli life — Naftali Bennett, who was from the Jewish Home Party, he comes out of the Likud party and he’s someone who was an assistant to Netanyahu. Avigdor Lieberman, who was for a long time the leader of the Russian Party. Yisrael Beiteinu, this is someone who came out of the Likud Party, who helped Netanyahu rustle up Russian votes. It’s a Likud one-party state — but then you have, culturally, a dynamic where starting with 1967, the public just becomes more infused with religious Messianism.

The West Bank is the site of the real, emotionally potent Jewish historical sites, particularly in a city like Hebron. And the public becomes attached to it and attains its dynamism through this expansionist project, and the public changes. A lot of people from the kind of liberal labor wing became religious Messianists, started wearing kippot, wearing yarmulkes, the kind of cloth yarmulkes that the modern orthodox settlers where.

RS: OK, but —

MB: Today you not only have that, you have a new movement called the temple movement, which aims to actually replace Jewish prayer at the Western Wall with animal sacrifice, as Jews supposedly practiced thousands of years ago, and to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque, and practice Jewish prayer there. This is not just a messianic movement, but an apocalyptic movement that is actually gaining strength in the Likud party. So when you mentioned Donald Trump’s “ultimate deal,” there’s one detail that everyone seems to have missed there, which is prayer for all at the Dome of the Rock, at Al-Aqsa. That means there will be Jewish prayer there, officially, that Palestinians must be forced to accept that and destroy the status quo, which has prevailed since 1967.

RS: I know, but Max, before I lose this whole interview here — because I think that’s all really interesting; people should read your book, “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.” That’s not the focus of this discussion I want to have with you.

MB: OK.

RS: And I want to discuss, in this aspect, the whole idea of Israel as a third-rail issue for American politics.

MB: Yeah.

RS: American politics. And the reason I want to do that is there’s obviously a contradiction in the Jewish experience, because Jews — as much or more so than any other group of people in the world — understand what settler colonialism does. They understand what oppression does, they’ve been under the thumb of oppressors. And so I would argue the major part of the Jewish experience was one of revolt against oppression, and recognition of the danger of unbridled power. And that represents a very important force in liberal politics in the United States: a fear of coercive power, a desire for tolerance, and so forth. And we know that Jews have, in the United States and elsewhere in the world, been a source of concern for the other, and tolerance, and criticism of power.

And the reason I’m bringing that up is it seems to me it’s a real contradiction for the Democratic Party, which you know quite a bit about. And in this Democratic Party, there’s this great loathsome feeling about Donald Trump. And many of these people don’t really like Netanyahu. You know, the polling data shows that Jews are, you know, just about as open to the concern for the Palestinians as any other group. And Bernie Sanders, the one Jewish candidate, is the one who dared to bring up the Palestinians — that they have rights also, that they’re human beings. He’s being attacked for it as, like you, a self-hating Jew. And so I want to get at that contradiction. And, you know, full confession, as a Jewish person I believe it’s an honorable tradition of dissent, and concern for the others, and respect for individual freedom. And I think it’s sullied by the identification of the Jewish experience with a colonialist experience. It is a reality that we have to deal with, but that’s not the whole tradition. And I daresay your own family, whatever your contradiction — and I should mention here your father and mother both were quite active in the Clinton administration, right.

And your father, a well-known journalist, Sidney Blumenthal, and your mother, Jacqueline Blumenthal, was I think a White House fellow or something in the Clinton administration? I forget what her job was, but has been active. And they certainly come out of a more liberal Jewish experience, as do most well-known Jewish writers and journalists in the United States. That’s the contradiction that I don’t see being dealt with here. Because after all, it’s easy to blast Putin and his interference, but as I say, Netanyahu interfered very openly, but in a really unseemly way, in the American election by attacking a sitting American president in an appearance before the Congress, and attacking his major foreign-policy initiative. And there’s hardly a word ever said about it. It doesn’t come up in the democratic debates. You know, and the — as I say, there was this incredible moment where Netanyahu, after coming over here and praising Trump for his peace deal, as did his opponent, then he goes off and meets with Putin. And so suddenly it’s OK, and yet the Democrats who want to blast Putin don’t mention Netanyahu, and they don’t mention his relation to Trump.

MB: Well, yeah, I was trying to illustrate kind of the reality of Israel, which just, it’s gotten so extreme that it repels people who even come out of the kind of Democratic Party mainstream. And the Democratic Party was the original bastion in the U.S. for supporting Israel. So my father actually held a book party for my book, “Goliath,” back in 2013. It’s the kind of thing that, you know, a parent who had been a journalist would do for a son or daughter who’s a journalist. And he was harshly attacked when word got out that he had held that party in a neoconservative publication called the Free Beacon, which is kind of part of Netanyahu’s PR operation in D.C. You know, it was like my father had supported, provided material support for terrorism by having a book party for his son.

But the interesting part about that party was who showed up. I didn’t actually know what it was going to be like, and it was absolutely packed. I mean, they live in a pretty small townhouse in D.C, and there just was nowhere to walk, there was nowhere to move. And I found myself in the corner of their dining room shouting through the house to kind of explain what my book was about and answer questions. And a lot of the people there were people who were in or around Hillary’s State Department, people who worked for kind of Democratic Party-linked organizations — just a lot of mainstream Democrat people. And they were giving me a wink and a nod, shaking my hand, giving me a pat on the back, and saying thank you, thank God you did this. Because they cannot stand the Israel lobby, they despise Netanyahu, and they’re disgusted with what Israel’s become.

And we had reached a point by 2013 where it was pretty obvious there was not going to be a two-state solution, and that whole project, the liberal Zionist project, wasn’t going to work out. You know, and the fact that they just could give me a wink and a nod shows also how cowardly a lot of people are in Washington. They weren’t even stepping up to the level my father had, where when his emails with Hillary Clinton were exposed, it became clear that he was sending her my work. And he was actually trying to move people within the State Department toward a more, maybe you could say a more humanistic view, but also a more realistic view of Israel, Palestine and the Netanyahu operation in Washington. Working through [Sheldon] Adelson, using this fraud hack of a rabbi, Shmuley Boteach, has kind of their front man. They ran like a full-page ad in the New York Times painting me and my father as Hillary Clinton’s secret Middle East advisers.

And then one day in the middle of the campaign, Elie Wiesel died. You know, someone who is supposed to be this patron saint of Judaism and the kind of secular theology of Auschwitz, who had spent the last years of his life as part of Sheldon Adelson’s political network. Basically, he had lost all his money to Bernie Madoff, and so he was getting paid off by Adelson. He got half a million dollars from this Christian Zionist, apocalyptic, rapture-ready fanatic, Pastor John Hagee. He was going around with Ted Cruz giving talks. And so when he died, I went on Twitter and tweeted a few photos of Elie Wiesel with these extremist characters.

And I said, you know, here are photos of Elie Wiesel palling around with fascists. And the kind of Netanyahu-Adelson network activated to attack me. And ultimately it led — I actually, within a matter of a few days, it led to Hillary Clinton’s campaign officially denouncing me and demanding that I cease and desist. And so, you know, I looked at the debate on Twitter, and a lot of people were actually supporting me. And it was clear Elie Wiesel, this person who was supposed to be a saint, was actually no longer seen as stainless, that the whole debate had been opened up by 2016.

And now when we look at the Democratic Party and we look at the Democratic field, you know, Bernie Sanders — he’s better than most of the other candidates, or the other candidates, on this issue. After we put a lot of pressure on him in the left wing-grassroots — I mean, I personally protested him at a 2016 event for his position on Palestinians, and we shamed him until he took at least a slightly better position, where you acknowledge the humanity of Palestinians. But what we’re hearing, even from Bernie Sanders, doesn’t even reflect where the grassroots of the Democratic Party — particularly all those young people who are coming out and delivering him a landslide victory tonight in Iowa — are. The Democratic Party is not democratic on Israel, but it’s no longer a third-rail issue. You can talk about it, and the only way that you can be stopped is through legislation, like the legislation we see in statehouses to actually outlaw people who support the Palestinian boycott of Israel. So we’re just in an amazing time where all of the contradictions are completely out in the open.

RS: OK, let me just take a quick break so public radio stations like KCRW that make this available can stick in some advertisements for themselves, which is a good cause. And we’ll be right back with Max Blumenthal. Back with Max Blumenthal, who has written — I mean, I only mentioned one of his books. He wrote a very important book on the right wing in America that was a bestseller; he has been honored in many ways, and yet is a source of great controversy. And I must say, I respect your ability to create this controversy, because it’s controversy about issues people don’t want to deal with. You know, they want to deal with them in sort of feel-good slogans, and it doesn’t work, because people get hurt. And including Jewish people, in the case of Israel. If you develop a settler, colonialist society, and that stands for the Jewish position, and you’re oppressing large numbers of people, be they Palestinian or others, that’s hardly an advertisement for what has been really great about the Jewish experience, which I will argue until my death.

It was represented by people like my mother, who were in the Jewish socialist bund, and two of her sisters were killed by the Czar’s police in Russia. And they believed in Universalist values, an idea of being Jewish as standing for the values of the oppressed, and concern for the oppressed. And most of their experience in the shtetls, and out there in the diaspora, had been being oppressed.

And so I don’t want to lose that there. But I wanted to get now to the last part of this, to what I think is the hypocrisy of the liberal wing of American politics, or so-called. And now they call themselves more progressive. And it really kind of centers around Hillary Clinton. And whatever you want to say about Bernie Sanders — you know, Hillary Clinton’s recent attack on Bernie Sanders, that no one likes him and he stands for nothing and he gets nothing done. And I think this is a, you know, a person that I thought, you know, at one point — despite her starting out as a Goldwater girl and being quite conservative — I thought was, you know, somewhat decent.

And I’m going to make this personal now. I was brought to a more favorable view of Bill and Hillary Clinton, in considerable measure, by your father, as a journalist at the Washington Post, and then working in the administration. And I respect your father and mother, you know, and Sidney Blumenthal and Jacqueline Blumenthal, I think are intelligent people. And I once, you know, went through a White House dinner; I think I only got in because your father put me on the list, and Hillary Clinton said I was her favorite columnist in America — no, the whole world — and it was very flattering. But I look back on it now — Hillary Clinton has really represented a kind of loathsome, interventionist, aggressive, America-first politics that in some ways is even more offensive than Trump. When Trump said he’s going to make America great again, Hillary Clinton said, America’s always been great. What?

MB: Yeah.

RS: What? Slavery, segregation, killing the Native Americans — always been great? You grew up with these people, right? You were in that world. What — so yes, they can come up to you at a book party and say, yes, it’s about time somebody said that. But what are they really about? That they — you know, you mentioned Syria. You know, their great achievement, they created a mess of that society. And she’s the one who went to, said about Libya, oh, we came, we saw, and he’s dead. You know, sodomized to death. So take me into the heart of the so-called liberal experience.

MB: Well, first of all, since you invoke Sidney Blumenthal so frequently, he has a — I think his fourth book in a five-part series on Abraham Lincoln out. And you know, these books address Lincoln almost as if he were a contemporary politician. It’s a completely new contribution to the history of Lincoln, and if you invite him on, be sure —

RS: I’m familiar with it, and I’ll endorse it —

MB: If you invite him on, you can ask him, I would love to hear that debate —

RS: I certainly would, and I have — as I said, I have a lot of respect for your father and mother. I’m asking a different question. Why do good people look the other way? Or how does it work? Just, you know, to the degree you can, take me inside that Washington culture. And where there’s a certain arrogance in it, that they are always, even when they do the wrong things, they’re just always accidents. They’re always mistakes. You know, it never comes out of their ideology, their aggression. So I want to know more about that.

MB: I mean, I saw all these — so many different sides of Washington. And so — and I was always supported by my parents, no matter what view I took. So I don’t feel like I have to live in my father’s shadow or something like that. They remain really supportive of me. I have a new book out — it’s not really new, it came out last April. It’s called “The Management of Savagery,” and it deals substantially with my view of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, but particularly the Hillary State Department, the Obama foreign policy team, and the destruction they wrought in Libya and Syria. So, you know, I put everything I knew about Washington and foreign policy into that book. And so I really would recommend that as well.

But, you know, how does it work with the Clintons? They were — they set up a machine that was really a juggernaut with all this corporate money they brought in through the DLC, the Democratic Leadership Committee. It was a very different structure than we’d seen with previous Democratic candidates who built — who relied heavily on unions and, you know, the civil rights coalition. And that machine never went away. It kept growing like this — kind of like this amoeba that began to engulf the party and politics itself. So that when Bill Clinton was out of power, the machine was passed to Hillary Clinton, and the machine followed her into the Senate. And the machine grew into the Clinton Global Initiative, which was this giant influence-peddling scam that just cashed in on disasters in Haiti, brought in tons of money, tens of millions of dollars from Gulf monarchies, and big oil and the arms industry — everything that funds all the repulsive think tanks on K Street through the Clinton Foundation.

And everyone who was trying to get close to the Clinton Foundation, whether they were in Clinton’s inner circle or not, was just trying to gather influence. That’s why you saw at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, behind her, Ghislaine Maxwell, who was basically Jeffrey Epstein’s personal child sex trafficker, just trying to cultivate influence with people who have this gigantic political machine.

So that’s why so many people, I think, have stayed loyal to this odious project, and have looked the other way as entire countries were destroyed under the direct watch of Hillary Clinton. Libya today — where Hillary Clinton took personal credit for destroying this country, which was at the time before its destruction, I think the wealthiest African nation with the highest quality of life — is now in, still in civil war. We’ve seen footage of open-air slave auctions taking place, and large parts of the country for years were occupied by affiliates of Al Qaeda or ISIS, including Muammar Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte. It was immediately transformed into a haven for the Islamic State.

This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton. There would have been no Benghazi scandal if she hadn’t gone into Libya to come, see, and kill, as she bragged that she did. And in Syria, she attempted the same thing; fortunately failed, thanks to assistance from Iran and Russia. But this was, it consisted of a billion dollars, multibillion-dollar operation to arm and equip some of the most dangerous, psychotic fanatics on the face of the planet in Al Qaeda and 31 flavors of Salafi jihadi. Hillary Clinton said we can’t be negotiating with the Syrian government; the hard men with guns will solve this problem. She said that in an interview, and that’s her legacy.

Beyond that, you know, I in Washington grew up in a very complex situation. I don’t know what view people have of me, but I grew up in what was – D.C. when D.C. was known as C.C., or Chocolate City. It was a mostly black city, run by a local black power structure with a strong black middle class, and I grew up in a black neighborhood. And I kind of saw apartheid firsthand, where I saw how a small white minority actually controlled the city from behind the scenes. And then, you know, and I saw that reality, and then I went to school across town in the one white ward to a private school, and I got to know some of the children of the kind of mostly Democratic Party elite. And so I saw both sides of the city. And it was through that other side, and also my parents’ connection to the Clintons, that I — I mean, I barely interacted with the Clintons. I’ve had very minimal interaction with them ever.

But I did get to meet Chelsea Clinton once. And you know, for all my reservations about the Clintons or what they were, I thought you know, she was kind of an admirable figure at that time. She was a — she was a kid, she was an adolescent who was being mocked on “Saturday Night Live” because she was going through an awkward phase. She went to school down the street at Sidwell Friends, and I met her at a White House Christmas party; she was really friendly and personable. And you know, since then, I’ve watched her grow into adulthood and become a complete kind of replication of the monstrous political apparatus that her family has set up, without really charting her own path. She just basically inherited the reign of the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative. She does paid talks for Israel. Her husband Marc Mezvinsky, he gambled on Greece’s debt along with Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. You know, the squid fish. I mean, there’s just — I mean, as a young person, seeing someone of my generation grow up and follow that path, do nothing to carve out her own space — it just absolutely disgusts me.

And now Hillary Clinton is still there! She won’t go away! She’s not only helped fuel this Russiagate hysteria that’s plunged us into a new Cold War, but she’s trying to destroy the hopes and dreams of millions of young people who are saddled with endless debt by destroying Bernie Sanders. And it’s because she sees her own legacy being smashed to pieces, not by any right-wing, vast conspiracy, but by the electorate, the new electorate of the Democratic Party. And I absolutely welcome that. I think, you know, tonight in Iowa, a landslide Bernie victory, one of the takeaways is this will be the end of Clintonism. It’s time to move on and hand things over to a new generation. They had their chance, and they not only failed, they caused disasters across the world.

RS: So this is — we’re going to wind this up, but I think we’ve hit a really important subject. And I want to take a little bit more time on it. And I thought you expressed it quite powerfully. But the error, if you’ll permit me, is to center it on the personality, or the family. And I don’t think Clintonism is going to go away. Because what it represents — and I know you —

MB: It could be become Bloombergism, you know?

RS: Well, that’s where I’m going. I think what Clintonism represents is this triangulation, this new Democrat. And I interviewed him when he was governor, just when he was campaigning. And I did a lot of writing on the Financial Services Modernization Act and on welfare reform, and all of these ingredients of this policy. And what it really represents — no wonder they’re rewarded by the super wealthy. But the Democratic Party lost its organizational base with the destruction of the labor movement and weakening of other sources of progressive class-based politics, concern about working people and ordinary people.

And what Clinton did is he came along, and he had a sort of variation of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, how he got the Republicans to be so important in the South. And it was this new politics, this redefinition. And it’s not going away, because it’s the cover for Wall Street. It’s the cover for exploitation. And the main thing that happened from when you were young — or born, actually; you’re 42 years — it’s 42 years of, since Clinton really, and you can blame Reagan, you can blame the first President Bush, you can blame other people, and certainly blame the whole bloody Republican Party. I’m not going to give them a pass.

But the fact is, what the Clinton revolution did was it made class warfare for the rich fashionable, in a way that no one else was able to do it, no other movement. And it said these thieves on Wall Street, these people who are going to rip you off 20 different ways to Sunday — they’re good people, and they support good causes. And you mentioned Lloyd Blankfein, you know; “government” Goldman Sachs, you know. Robert Rubin came from Goldman Sachs; he was Clinton’s treasury secretary. And the whole thing of unleashing Wall Street and getting, destroying the New Deal — that was a serious program to basically betray the average American and betray their interest. And that’s why we’ve had this growing income inequality since that time. That’s the Clinton legacy in this world, really, is the billionaire coup, the billionaire culture.

MB: Yep, the oligarchy was put on fast-forward by the new politics of the Clintons. What they promised wasn’t, you know, a break from Reaganism, although there was certainly a cultural difference. They promised continuity, and that’s what we saw through the Obama administration. Obama presided over the biggest decline in black home ownership in the United States since, I think, prior to World War II. You mentioned Glass-Steagall; this set the stage for the financial crisis; NAFTA, destroyed the unions, shipped American jobs first to Mexico and then to China, and destabilized northern Mexico along with the drug war that Clinton put on overdrive, creating the immigration crisis that helped fuel the rise of Donald Trump.

Welfare reform — all of these policies were just, were odious to me and so many people at the time, but there was just this desire to just beat the Republicans and out-triangulate them. Now that we’ve seen the effects on them and so many people have felt the effects, you have an entire generation that sees no future, that realizes they’re living in an oligarchy, realizes that the alternative to Bernie Sanders is a literal oligarch, this miniature Scrooge McDuck in Mike Bloomberg, and they’re just not having it.

I don’t know if Hillary Clinton understands this history; I don’t think she sees it in context. She just blames Russian boogeyman and fake news for everything. But the rest of us who’ve lived through it really do, and it’s the continuity that is so dangerous, especially on foreign policy. I mean, the Libya proxy war and the Syria proxy war, the stage was set in Yugoslavia with NATO’s war that destroyed a socialist country and unleashed hell on a large part of its population. And we still don’t debate that war. The stage for the Iraq invasion was set in 1998 with Bill Clinton passing the Iraqi Liberation Act, which sent $90 million into the pocket of the con-man Ahmed Chalabi and made regime change the official policy of the United States.

It’s tragic that Bernie Sanders voted for that. But we have to see the cause and the effect to understand why so many people are in open revolt against that legacy. And you’re right, it goes well beyond the Clintons. It’s a program that markets right-wing economics and a right-wing foreign policy in a sort of progressive bottle. Now what they’re trying to do with the label on that progressive bottle, the way they’re trying to preserve it — we see it a lot through the [Elizabeth] Warren campaign — is through a kind of neoliberal identity politics that divorces class from race and gender, and attempts to basically distract people with needless arguments about Bernie Sanders saying a woman couldn’t have gotten elected in a private conversation that only Elizabeth Warren was party to.

So I’m really encouraged, I guess, by the results that we’re seeing. We’re talking tonight on the eve of the Iowa caucus. I’m encouraged by those results, just because I see them as a repudiation of the politics that have just dominated my life as a 42-year-old, and just been so absolutely cynical and destructive at their core. But I would just remind anyone who is supporting Bernie Sanders and listening to this — he’s not just running for president. He’s running for the next target of a deep state coup, and the deep state exists, and will respond with more force and viciousness than it did to Donald Trump, who actually has much more in common with them than Bernie Sanders.

RS: I didn’t quite get the grammar of that last paragraph, not any fault of yours. You said he’s not just running — can you —

MB: He’s running for the next target of a deep state coup, the forces of Wall Street. You know, the —

RS: Oh, you mean he will be the target.

MB: He will be the target.

RS: Yeah, you know, it’s — you just said something really — OK, I know we have to wrap this up, but it’s actually just getting interesting for me. [Laughs]

MB: Sorry about that.

RS: No, no, no, come on, come on. [Laughter] What I mean is, I do these things because I learn, and I think, and you know, my selfish interests. And really the question right now, I did a wonderful interview with Chomsky on this podcast, and he took me to school for not appreciating the importance of the lesser evil. And I’ve lost sleep over it since. You know, well — and we always fall for that, you know. On the other hand, some of the things you’ve been talking about, you know — and this is going to get me in big trouble — but you know, Trump is so blatant. He’s so out there in favor of greed and corruption.

He’s so obnoxious. And actually, in terms of his policy impact — not his rhetoric, but his policy impact — is he really that much worse? Well, for instance, you mentioned NAFTA. The rewrite of NAFTA, even before, you know, some progressives got involved in it, it was a substantially better trade agreement than the first NAFTA. You know, he hasn’t gotten us into Syria-type, Iraq-type wars.

He actually — so I’m not — you know, yes, I consider him a neofascist; rhetoric can be very dangerous. He’s obviously spread very evil, poisonous ideas about immigrants and what have you, you know, I can go down the list. But the people that you’ve been talking about, that–you know, and I voted for all of them, and I’ve supported them — are they really the lesser evil? You know, or are they a more effective form of evil?

MB: I mean, to understand Trump, we just have to see him as the apotheosis of an oligarchy. In its most unsheathed, unvarnished form, he’s just lifted the mask off the corruption, the legal corruption that’s prevailed, and been completely unabashed about it. Donald Trump was targeted with this kind of Russiagate campaign, which was partly run by Clintonite dead-enders who wanted to blame Russia for her loss, and to attack Donald Trump with this kind of McCarthyite rhetoric. But it was also being influenced by the intelligence services — figures like John Brennan and James Comey, and neoconservative hardliners who could easily jump back into the Democratic Party. And they were just seeking a new Cold War, to justify the budgets of the intelligence services, and the defense budget and so on.

But at his core, Donald Trump, what he’s actually done, especially domestically, I think outside of the immigration stuff, is he’s been kind of a traditional Republican. And he won a lot of consent from Republicans in Congress when he passed a trillion-dollar tax cut. He’s given corporate America everything he wanted after kind of campaigning with this populist, Bannonite tone. So in a lot of ways, Donald Trump does share more in common with the Democratic Party elite — with a lot of the figures who’ve been nominated to serve on the DNC platform committee, who are just from the Beltway blob and the Beltway bandits — than they do with Bernie Sanders.

And I think that if Bernie Sanders gets the nomination, there will be an effort to McGovern him. To just kind of turn him — turn this whole process into McGovern ’72, hope that Bernie Sanders gets destroyed by Donald Trump, and then wag their fingers at the left for the next 20 years until they get another Bill Clinton. I think that they don’t know how to stop him at this point, but they’re willing to let him be the nominee and go down to Donald Trump, because Bernie Sanders threatens their interests, and the movement behind him particularly, more than Donald Trump does.

RS: You know, they will stop Bernie Sanders, and they will do it by the argument of lesser evilism. And you see the line developing —

MB: But who is the lesser evil, Bob? I mean, Joe Biden is like this doddering wreck. There is no other candidate who seems even remotely viable against Trump.

RS: No, no, no — I understand that. I’m telling you what — well, it seems to me there’s — you know, you want to talk about fake news, the, misreporting of Bernie Sanders — in fact, the misreporting of what democratic socialism is. I mean, he’s now branded in the mainstream media as some hopeless fanatic because he dared to defend democratic socialism. Democratic socialism has been the norm for the most successful economies in the world, even to a degree when we’ve been successful. That was the legacy of Roosevelt, after all, is to try to save capitalism from itself. That’s why you had some enlightened government programs, you know, right down the list, and that’s what saved Germany after the war, and that’s what France and England and so forth, that’s why they have health care systems.

But the mainstream media has actually taken a very moderate figure, Bernie Sanders, and demonized him as some kind of hopeless ideologue, right? And as you point out, Bernie Sanders is hardly a radical thinker on issues — particularly, as you mentioned, about the Mideast and so forth. What he is, is somebody who actually is honoring the best side of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: you can’t let these greed merchants control everything, you have to worry about some compensation for ordinary people. That’s what Bernie Sanders is all about. And it should be an argument that has great appeal to people of power, otherwise they’re going to come after you with the pitchforks. Instead the mainstream media, in its hysteria, you know, has taken this word “democratic socialist” and used it to vilify him.

But the point that I want — and we will end on this, but I’d like to get your reaction — that came up in my discussion with Chomsky, who I have great admiration for. But it is this lesser evilism. And I think while, yes, people in their vote can think about that, they can vote that way — I’ve done it much of my life; I’ve voted for all sorts of evil people because they were lesser. But as a journalist — and I want to end about your journalism — as a journalist, I think we have to get that idea out of our head. And it means being able to be objective about a Donald Trump when he comes up with his NAFTA rewrite, and say hey, there are some good things in it, including the fact that you have to pay $16 an hour to people in Mexico who are working on cars that are going to be sold in the United States, OK. And what the liberal community has been able to do in the mainstream media, MSNBC, is Trumpwash everything.

Which brings us back to your critique. They’ve been able to say — they’ve made warmongering liberal and fashionable. They’ve taken the — they’ve made the CIA now a wonderful institution, the FBI a wonderful institution, [John] Bolton a wonderful hero. And I want to take my hat off to your journalism, because you have — and I do recommend that people go to your website, the Grayzone. Because you have had the courage to say, wait a minute, what’s called a lesser evil can’t be given a pass. Because in fact, maybe in some ways, or in many ways, it’s a more effective evil. We know what Trump is; he stands exposed every hour of every day.

But you know, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton — and I’m not trying to pick on them, but you know, they represented this embrace of the Wall Street center — they were much more effective in redistributing income to the rich. You know, you can talk about Trump’s tax break, but the real redistribution came with letting Wall Street do its collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps that caused the destruction of 70% of black wealth in America, 60% of brown wealth in America, according to the Federal Reserve. So really, in this election, people have to think — you know, yes, I’ll hold my nose and I’ll vote for the lesser evil. But what’s that going to get us? Does it get us a more effective evil, a better-packaged evil? Last word from you?

MB: Well, I mean, one of the things that we do at the Grayzone.com, our mission is to oppose this policy of regime change that the U.S. imposes across the world against any state that seeks some independence from the U.S. sphere of influence that wants to craft its own economic policies in a socialist way, like Venezuela, Nicaragua. We, you know, we exposed a lot of the deceptions that were trying to stimulate public support for regime change in Syria, that would have been absolutely disastrous. And in all of these situations, we don’t stand alone, but we stand among a really, really small group of alternative outlets who don’t play the lesser-evil game on regime change.

Where we say, well, this leader or that leader are horrible, and they are evil dictators, but we should also be kind of suspicious of the, you know, of the war that the U.S. might wage. Or we should be critical of these brutal economic sanctions that have killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans through excess deaths. We say — we actually look at the alternative to the current government and show that there actually isn’t the lesser evil, that the alternative is far worse. In Syria it was Al Qaeda and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood; in Venezuela it’s Juan Guaidó’s right-wing, white collar mafia, which is a front for Exxon Mobil. Same thing in Nicaragua.

And you know, as much as I respect and I’ve learned from Noam Chomsky, he plays that lesser-evil game on regime change. He’s trashed all of the, all of these governments. He celebrated the collapse of the Soviet Union, and we saw what happened to Russia after that. So it’s important to look at lesser evilism through a historical context, and then we can apply it to the United States as well. Look at who’s been sold to us as the lesser evil that we had to support. Well, we’ve been talking about them, Bob, for the last half hour, and they’ve subjected Americans to the same evil the Republican Party has, for the most part. Maybe they’ve limited it to some degree. But now there’s actually an option for something that I’d say is moderate in the United States.

You’re right — Bernie Sanders does nothing, and proposes nothing, outside the framework of the New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. I don’t even think he’s a democratic socialist. I don’t know what that term really means. He’s a social democrat. And he is someone who at least offers a change from the consensus where the government actually starts to intervene to prevent people from dying excess deaths across the country, from the opioid crisis, from poverty, from homelessness. Eighty percent of new homes that have been built in the U.S. in the past two years are luxury housing. And you know who else is supporting Bernie Sanders besides all these debt-saddled youth? Active duty U.S. military veterans who are sick of permanent war. $160,000 in campaign contributions have been given to Bernie by active duty vets. That’s something like eight times more than have gone to Joe Biden, who is involved at the forefront of almost every American war since Gulf War I.

And we’re really capitalizing on that at the Grayzone. We understand the American public and the western public are sick of being lied into war, and they’re sick of being pushed into lesser evilism, whether it’s abroad in countries that are targeted by the U.S., or at home. And so we’re just there providing balance and exposing whatever the lie is of the day.

RS: Let me, as an older person, end with a little editorial about what — and I agree with the thrust of what you’ve been saying — but why I think this word “democratic socialism” is important, not just social democrat. Because it acknowledges the vast harm that has been done by the left in human history. It’s not just the right, it’s not just the corporate elite, and it’s not just the oligarchs. That people got hold of a message of concern for the ordinary person. It happened in religion too, after all, you know; structures were developed, people who claimed they were following the message of Christ, and they ended up building edifices to the exploitation of ordinary people.

I think what Bernie Sanders represents — and I’ll ask your response, but what I think he represents, the reason he’s so authentic — he actually believes in the grassroots. He actually believes that an ordinary person in Vermont can make intelligent decisions about the human condition, and about justice and freedom. And I think the reason Bernie Sanders can survive the rhetorical assaults on his leftism or his socialism, is that what people of power in the capitalist world have managed to do is identify this cause of social justice, a notion of democratic socialism with totalitarianism, with elitism. And Bernie Sanders — and this is a good night to celebrate Bernie Sanders, if it’s true; I hadn’t caught up with the news, but if he’s really doing that well in Iowa. Because I thought he would get 1% of the vote four years ago when he started; I never thought this would happen.

I think what makes Bernie Sanders authentic is his respect for the ordinary person. He is the opposite of that leftist elitist–and you have them as well as rightist elitists — who thinks they have to distort history to protect the average person from reality. And Bernie Sanders is — he speaks truth about what’s going on. And at a time when people on the right and the left have nothing but contempt for most of the politicians, and journalistic leaders and everything else, for having betrayed them. So I think Bernie Sanders is a ray of hope. I wish he would be around a lot longer, but then again, I wish I’d be around a lot longer. But it’s nice to run into Max Blumenthal, who’s half my age and has all of that spirit that I’d like to see in journalism. So thanks, Max, for doing this.

MB: Thank you, Bob. It’s a real honor.

RS: And by the way, I ignored that last book of yours. Could you give the title again and how people get it?

MB: It’s called “The Management of Savagery.” And let me pull it off the shelf so I can actually read the subheader. You can edit this. It’s called “The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump.” And it’s really kind of my look at the, sort of how the politics of my lifetime and my generation has been shaped by foreign policy disasters that an unelected foreign-policy establishment has subjected us to.

RS: Full disclosure, I actually have not read it, and I will get it as soon as I can.

MB: I’ll send you a copy —

RS: No, no, no, you got — it’s hard enough to make a living as a writer. I don’t think you should give these things away for nothing. I’ll get myself a copy. And I want to thank you again. I’ve been talking to Max Blumenthal, check out his work, check out the Grayzone. These podcasts are done basically for KCRW, the public radio station in Santa Monica, where Christopher Ho is the engineer who gets it up on the air.

At Truthdig, Natasha Hakimi Zapata writes the brilliant intros and overview of these things and posts them up there. Here at USC, Sebastian Grubaugh, the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, really gets the whole thing going and hooks up everyone, thanks to him. And finally, there’d be no “Scheer Intelligence” without the main Scheer, Joshua Scheer, who’s the show’s producer. And we’ll see you next week with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence.”

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t-huddz · 4 years ago

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Co w Duszy Gra o czym jest cały film?

I have not watched a lot of movies this year, mostly because of the pandemic.So I have not had the time to go out to movie theaters, of course,and most of the time I've just been watching series with my sister.But thankfully, because of the Disney overlords, we are able to watchSoul for free.

Unlike what they did with Mulan, so we don't have to pay an extra like $39.So Soul is a movie I have been waiting for a while.Unlike most people, I know a lot of people grew up with Disney films, like the animated and musical films.For me, it was a little bit different.I grew up watching Pixar and DreamWorks most.So I always look forward to Pixar projects compared to Disneyprojects, to be honest, and so I was really excited for this one because I loveInside Out.I love Up.I love Pete Docter as a writer and director, and I think he's very underrated,and I think a lot of people should mention him when mentioning, you know, really greatdirectors within... within the current modernera or something.Soul is a really great film.I think it's already given. Since it's Pixar, you know, it has great animation.

It has a great voice acting.It has, you know, great concept.It's an all around really, really great film, and I prefer this in comparison to, likeInside Out.I think because Inside Out is just like -- it's just -- I wouldn't want to say a chore.It's a really good film. But watching that movie is such an emotionalturmoil for me because it's such a rollercoaster of feelings.I always have to brace myself to cry, and it's ugly.But Soul is a movie that I could see myself rewatching just because I think it's muchfunnier than Inside Out.I really like the message as well, and I think it's a message that, you know you constantly need toremind yourself as well.And with that said, I feel like this movie would probably appeal more to adultsbecause given the themes and, you know, just the mainstruggle of the lead itself is --It's a struggle that a lot of people would experience, and arelikely to experience if you've lived some life.It's something that we all feel at the end of the day, and I don't think children would be able tounderstand the nuances or whateveris just going on with his mind because they have not lived this life where they have thiscrisis of..

You know, "What's my purpose?""What if I'm not doing the things that I want to?""What if I'm not achieving my dream?"And so this is something that will probably resonate more for people you know,like me, who's older and probably within the creative industry too, I don'tknow. But this is one of the things that I really liked about this film.It's a film that is probably more mature than its intendedaudience, but at the same time, I can't really see this movie being, you know, made into a liveaction film.I think it's perfect as an animated film as it is. And the comedyitself. It's absolutely my style of comedy, and I don't think the comedy issomething that children would get that much.You would appreciate it more if you're older.I would say. Another thing that I really liked about this film is...you know, I think the message is really good.It's a message that is,interestingly, is quite 'antethical'. Am I using that word right?That is quite 'antitical', 'anti tickle','Antithetical' to theregular Disney films are, you know, just Hollywood blockbusters in general.I'm not going to spoil what the message is because

I think the journey intorealizing what the meaning of the movie is this part of the journey and the fun of actually watching the film.So I'm not going to say what it is, but I think probably you understand what it was.But I think it's a message that's quite relevant for our time is right now.But yeah, like another thing I would like to point out. I mean, there's an implicationof having like [Pixar's] first colored lead spending most of his time outside his ownbody.But to be honest, I do feel like this film is still quite culturallyrich with the African American culture without feeling likeit's a gimmick.Even though it's a large part of the story.It's not something that's portrayed, like, 'this is a message exclusivelyfor people within that group.'Representation is usually, it's just there if you're trying todiscuss issues that are relevant or just important to that group.So, for example, like for black people, the movie that they could onlybe leads in are films about slavery, aboutthe cultural or racial divide in America.

OrAsian leads,It's always about, you know, the diaspora off being Asian American of notbeing able to speak this language and only being able to speak English.And, you know, having this cultural differences. These are strugglesthat people do struggle with.But we also have other, you know, universal feelings.And I appreciate that this movie recognized that you know this universal messageof the moral ofthe movie can be delivered to everyone, but they just chose to do it with,a black male lead.And I think it's quite significant to have that while still having his identity andhis culture is still intact.And I think that's the kind of representation that would really be great if we could see that.And I think this movie is a step towards the right direction.But yeah, there's really nothing to be said about this movie, because this movie ispractically perfect.And I really enjoyed it.And that's the thing about Pixar movies.They're always so good.There's nothing to complain about. If you're nitpicking, you're just being, you know, petty.I don't know.This is probably, like one of my top films of this year [2020].Just because I didn't want a lot to be honest.This is really great.I really love the message of the movie.This is a movie that I could always see myself revisiting if I need somerefresher of, you know, to remember the meaning and the message andeverything.So thank you so much for watching. If you like this post wath whole video here:

Co w Duszy Gra online PL

#soul #soul movie #co w duszy gra

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auutintiug · 4 years ago

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“In her own words, Hoda Katebi is “a Chicago-based angry daughter of Muslim-Iranian immigrants,” author of the book Tehran Streetstyle, community organizer, and the voice behind the radical, political online fashion publication JooJoo Azad. Here, she speaks with Palestinian-American human rights attorney, artist, educator, and writer Noura Erakat, who has time and again stunned and stupefied the media in bold, brazen, sensibly unapologetic interviews. Katebi and Erakat’s conversation is akin to two streams flowing parallel to one another, embarking upon the surfaces and diving into the depths of politics, art, activism, identity, and gender norms, ultimately joining forces in the same body of water, not in competition but in support of one another—level and determined, headstrong, open to the elements.

—

Hoda Katebi: Do you think that all art is political?

Noura Erakat: I mean, I’m trained as an attorney. I’m hesitant to make such an absolute statement. Politics is basically the negotiation over scarce resources, and it’s the work that’s being done to actually negotiate that distribution. Art is expression, some sort of expression, any kind of expression, right? It’s a visionary aide. It’s a manifestation. That could be political in two ways: What is it that the artist chose to represent as opposed to anything else, and then how does creation implicate a discussion around the distribution of scarce resources?

I don’t identify as an artist because it’s political. I identify as an artist because I think that it’s a way of being. An artist is someone who can transcend an immediate material reality to be able to define yourself on your own terms, and to want to see the world on terms that may not yet exist. So those are the things that I think define an artist, which is not being bound by what is, but instead being in the constant act of creating what could be. A lot of the time it does come from people who hold privilege who say that they don’t want their art to be political or simultaneously call out Palestinians or black folks and say, “Oh, why do you always create political art?” It’s almost like my entire life. It’s triggering to you.

HK: What role does art play for you, and especially as a Palestinian, why is it important?

NE: So, I just want to be clear: I identify as an artist because I think that that’s the best way, because a lot of people see me, and they’re, “Oh, Noura’s a lawyer. Oh, Noura’s a teacher. Oh, Noura …” You know what I mean?

HK: Yeah.

NE: And I feel like rather than be defined by the actual profession, I want to be defined by the way I relate to the world in it. Me being an artist is not me defining my career or my productivity. It’s my relationship to time. I’m also identifying as queer, right? it’s not who you’re attracted to; it’s how you’re manifesting yourself in the world outside of binaries. I want to live.

I’ve written two plays, and I’ve fallen out of that—it’s a practice, like anything, and I haven’t been keeping it up. But last fall, the Kennedy Center invited the DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival, which I am a co-founder of, to curate a program for the Millennium Stage. I got to direct the program, which meant musical direction, light direction, you know, all the stage work, plus it’s a play that I wrote, and I directed the professional actress who performed it. It was actually such a miracle, because we only got to do one stage rehearsal an hour before the program started.

The DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival began because in 2011, I had been co-leading something called the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, and we had created a local chapter in D.C., and all of the work that we were doing as part of that network was, I thought, very reactionary. No to negotiations. No to these terms of the peace process. No to the split. I knew, I knew that that was not going to last because that’s not something that sustains. It creates a lot of toxicity.

On a trip to Toronto, I was speaking in Toronto and my good friend introduced me to her project, the Toronto Palestine Film Festival, and I thought to myself, oh my God. That’s it. We have to create something that will outlast the politics of rejection. We have to create something that lives on its own terms. So when I got back, I and two other women co-founded this project, and now we’re in our eighth year. It is not a Palestine film festival; it is a showman arts festival. Our whole purpose is to showcase the artists, whoever they are. You could be talking about your favorite color or your favorite candy or the way your mom screwed you over and still left it in your head. The whole point is to showcase the artist and all of the different media that they use, visual, performing, cross stitching, cooking, music, dance, the whole thing.

This is where we’re dreaming of the future. This is where we’re creating. Who are Palestinians? Who are young Palestinians don’t know anything about it? From what they feel, from what their family passed onto them—how are they expressing that? And that is the future of Palestine. We’re trying to cultivate the space where they can dream. What the diaspora looks like and what the community looks like beyond just, what are the political terms upon which this will be resolved? Instead it becomes a social question, more like, what do people look like? What does trauma feel like? What is joy? What is internal conflict? What languages do we speak in this space? It also becomes one of the best tools for mainstreaming the question of Palestine. We’re bringing out audiences that probably feel like the whole thing is toxic.

HK: Yeah, it’s like a language that transcends border and culture. You create really accessible work. So, how are you able to transcend that really difficult box that lawyers are taught to be sitting in?

NE: I went into law school because I wanted to fight, and I thought, if only we had these tools we could just reason through this, then we can get out of the binds that politics had created for us, and we’ll just reason through it through some arbiter. We just listen to each side, and we can figure it out, and in fact, that was a really jarring lesson, and one of naivety, and it’s become the source of inspiration for my forthcoming book, Justice for Some: Law in the Question of Palestine, which will be out in March 2019. First of all, I barely survived the damned thing, because it is the single most white, heteronormative, classist, stifling space—

HK: Say it.

NE: —you can ever imagine. It is basically where you go to protect and revere the status quo. My issue with law school is that you take that for granted. Nobody admits that that’s what it is, and you start to act like everything that you’re studying is objective when everything is so not objective.

HK: Everything that you produce, whether it’s academic in the legal industry, you’re coming from your particular perspective of the world. Oppressed or oppressor.

NE: True, but there’s a different kind. Let me give you an example. When you’re studying property law in the United States, all property law is built upon a logic of dispossessing native nations, indigenous nations in the United States. And here you are studying concepts like liens, trusts or estates, possession, but you never ever talk about, well, what is the root of this whole model? The root of it is the dispossession of indigenous nations. Or when we talk about criminal law: We want to talk about the death penalty as a jurisprudential matter, which means we’re just going to look at the case law, but we’re not going to talk about, how is it that the law itself and the way that the death penalty becomes instrumentalized is specifically to punish black people?

I had a really hard time in law school. I ended up getting a big award at the end, which was like a vindication, but I almost didn’t even go to my graduation because I was just like, this was miserable. Afterwards, I didn’t even take a traditional law job. I went to Berkeley Law, and after law school, I got a fellowship for something like 30, 35k. That’s insane for a recent law graduate, and then there was no such thing as working as a Palestinian-rights lawyer, so I had to create my own job. It was a coup to even get the fellowship.

I’m now in a place where I have some stability, but from the time I graduated until now, I came onto the tenure track in the academy basically hustling. Nobody wants to … It’s just a difficult story. I mean, you have to be crazy to be doing this work. If I wasn’t crazy, I wouldn’t have lasted this long.

HK: What has got you through?

NE: I kept pushing. I kept being a lawyer. I went back to school, and I kept writing like a lawyer. I kept appearing on television like a lawyer until more recently. I think until last December, when I started to appear on TV and in public spaces, a little less as an attorney and more like as a human being and a Palestinian, that, I think, was a major turning point for me and for people receiving me, because when I’m talking as a lawyer, you know, I’m basically trying to be removed from it, just making the argument and letting it stand, but when I step into my skin as a Palestinian, as a human being, it’s me.

I’m still going to use logic as my primary communication tool, and everybody has a different way they like to communicate in public. Some people like to tell stories. Some people like to move you, just really deeply move you and rally you to fight and believe. I think logic is really compelling. I do it in the same way when I’m in my classroom. I don’t ever tell you what exactly to believe. I want to give you enough facts and information for you to make your own decision. That’s so much more powerful when you have to engage with me and do the work with me. You have to think about it.

For me, legal practice basically means that I’m an advocate. Because what is human rights advocacy? There’s no courtroom. What does it mean, then, to be a human rights attorney? It means that I am making a case in the world of public opinion. That’s my courtroom.

HK: What got you out of bed every day during this period? Were you also doing art at the same time, or did art come later?

NE: I was producing art while I was in law school as a writer. I dabbled in poetry, but I did the theater work. My first play is based on oral histories that I collected.

I’m in the West Bank in 2000, when the second intifada begins. I’m a student at Hebrew University [of Jerusalem], which was a whole story unto itself, but I’m the only student at Hebrew U that is a Palestinian and living in what’s known as the West Bank. And so basically, school gets shut down, because the intifada has started, and I had come eager to do an oral history project. I thought it was going to be about young girls and women. I started traveling to interview families of the slain, of the killed, and to get the stories of those killed, and so I collect all of these stories and come back. I transcribe them, and then I turn that oral history project into a revolving monologue, which is like a one-act play for about an hour where you get to hear almost all of the stories being told by the characters themselves as they’re describing their loved one who’d been killed.

So, I write that while I’m in law school. I produce that. I direct that. It takes its own life, and it’s performed in different places. I then come to do another monologue, but this time it’s a one-woman show, and I perform that one everywhere. And that was it. That space just killed my creative spirit.

HK: Do you see yourself within the legacy of any artist that you look up to? Whose tradition do you feel that you belong to, if any?

NE: The first person that comes to mind is Arundhati Roy.

HK: Bae!

NE: Right? Here is this woman completely committed to revolutionary justice and transformation but who is expressing herself also as a dreamer, as a novelist, and as an essayist, and so I really like that. It’s these visionary women who are immersed and accountable to a base and to a movement. They don’t see themselves as above or as being revered. They see themselves as being a part of something bigger than them. What you’re seeing in their work is homage to it, paying respect to it, and creating space for it.

HK: Situating yourself in the West as a site of knowledge production in academia, which is heavy orientalist, perpetuates a lot of racism, the same ways that you mention about the law. What are your experiences there, and what made you become an educator?

NE: I think in everything that I’ve done, I’ve always been an educator. Even as an activist or when I’m leading workshops at different universities from before I got into law school. The difference about entering the academy is now you’re producing knowledge in a way that’s refereed and becomes subject to academic and scholarly scrutiny. A lot of circumstances pushed me into that field, and also because I’m increasingly unfulfilled by the legal practice, which I find is so hampered by the question of politics and by political issues. I’m increasingly frustrated with the limitation of the law, but also more curious about it. Why is it working in this way? What is it about the law, what is it about politics? And so these became scholarly inquiries that push me out, like make me more disenchanted with being a lawyer.

Once I’m in the academy, now it’s like a whole different set of challenges. It becomes the most stark when people of color talk about justice issues that are difficult conversations. So, if I was talking about FGM and the Muslim community, I don’t think people would receive me harshly. It might even be kind of okay, because I’m not challenging the establishment. But being of color, producing knowledge that is counter-hegemonic is when you raise a lot of flags, and immediately people begin to question whether you’re an academic or an activist. It’s one thing if somebody was studying these things. It’s another if you’re invested in them and studying them. That’s been a really difficult challenge, how to toe that line.

It’s a lot of unknowns, like you’re saying. For me, I’m leaving the choice to myself. I write about what I find the most interesting, intriguing, because that’s what’s the most authentic, and that’s the work that I do best, when I enjoy what I’m doing. But there is great risk in doing the work in that way. I feel like that’s the risk that’s worth taking. I want to know that I spent all the time I had breathing, able-bodied and able-minded, to produce the work that I thought was critical and necessary, rather than produce the work that I thought was going to help me climb some sort of career ladder.

HK: Because at the end, you always get exposed anyway.

NE: Maybe it’s about getting exposed, but I feel like it’s between you and yourself. What is it that you want at the end of the day? What is going to make you happy? So, yeah, I’m taking a risk, but everything else that I’ve done has been a risk. Right?

HK: Yeah. And with all of these risks, what are the joys of being an educator?

NE: Oh my God, the students. There’s so much tremendous joy. There’s so much tremendous joy in their capacity and their imagination and their passion, and the community that they create with one another. In finding folks who want to create an alternative world based on a place of love and a place of vision and a place of hope and a place of faith. All of that is joyful. I believe that the revolution will be full of joy. I know the revolution to be full of joy. It’s also full of tremendous heartache, but we already know that, right? But when we fight, we don’t just fight because we’re sad and because we’re angry. We fight because we believe we can. We believe we can. We believe we should.

HK: And we have no choice.

NE: We believe we are better. And that’s so joyful.

HK: And that also takes me to the very last question that I’ll ask: What is the world that you’d like to see?

NE: Well, there’s the really nerdy answer, which is to see a world where if we are to have governments, the governments are to be run by people for the sake of people, where profit is not a determinative logic, where the distribution of wealth is not concomitant with some neo-liberal equation of productivity and earnings and market formulations, but rather based on need. That’s a world that I would love to live in.

I would like to live in a world where we’re actually honoring the earth. We are depleting this earth at such a fast rate, at such a disrespectful rate, that we’re not going to have an earth to even divide by the time we figure out how to get along with one another and get over our human conflict. That’s why billionaires are trying to figure out their exit route to Mars and life elsewhere. Environmentalism isn’t this side thing. It’s central to everything that we do, and it’s entwined with indigenous justice as well, people who have already told us how to treat this earth and how to make it sustainable.

HK: That’s beautiful. Well, thank you so much. Is there anything that you wanted to say that we didn’t get to touch on?

NE: One of the things that made me most excited about the invitation by Suited, the first thing I thought of, was that I wanted Rami Kashou to dress me, because I saw him on Project Runway and he didn’t identify as a Palestinian. I knew he was Palestinian, but he was just out there being a designer, and in watching him, I found freedom. I thought, that is what freedom will mean for Palestinians, when they can just be in the world and not have to be defined by our fight. We can just be defined by whoever we want to be. “I’ve been fangirling you for 12 years. You want to dress me?” So we meet, and he dresses me, and if you notice … I don’t know if you’ve seen the photos.

HK: I haven’t.

NE: It’s like artwork. Literally the only other person who’d worn what I wore for this photo shoot was a mannequin at a museum. It is exactly what I envision the future of Palestine to be, which is taking our tradition and our history and our past, but not going back to it or being stuck in it. It’s taking it and creating something absolutely new and visionary. It’s Palestinian futurism, and it was … that is such a central piece of the photo shoot, of this story, of what art is doing, of my own vision of: What does it take for us to create these new futures? And at the heart of it, it means not being afraid to dream.

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tylerbiard · 8 years ago

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Still in Edmonton

So it’s Spring in Edmonton. The weather is warmer, the snow is melting, and everything looks ugly. You know, the melt is dislodging the garbage and gravel that was embedded into the snow, creating a muddy mess, and where it isn’t a muddy mess, everything is simply brown and dry. The grass truly is not greener here until May. Still, there’s something about this season that makes it synonymous with change, and with change comes reflection.

I had to do this assignment in one of my classes this semester on “material culture.” Basically, I needed to figure out a material aspect that represented my culture and then present. I was gonna be cliche and just pick my camera or something along those lines, but I decided to be innovative and pick something that literally both represents me and my background. So I went with the perogy, an Eastern European dumpling.

The reason I chose it was two-fold: it represents my ethnic background on one side and it also represents my home. The Parkland region of the Canadian Prairies, roughly corresponding with the Yellowhead corridor, from Edmonton to Winnipeg, is home to a huge Ukrainian diaspora. When the Canadian West opened up in the late 19th century, Ukrainians were among the earliest settlers to the untamed flatlands, and were pivotal in converting the land into arable farmland. They were chosen due to the similar climate of Eastern Europe and the Canadian Prairies. Most Ukrainian immigrants stayed in rural areas, like the Edna-Star Colony, and did not migrate into the cities until after World War II. As a result of this diaspora, Edmonton has the nickname “Edmonchuk” (-chuk is a common suffix to Ukrainian last names) and as the diaspora integrated and mingled with wider Canadian society, certain aspects of Ukrainian culture were annexed into the wider culture here. This was largely in the form of food, especially perogies, which is a popular dish here, regardless of ethnic background. But even things like pysanka and the presence of Ukrainian Orthodox churches on the landscapes show the influence of Slavic culture in the Parkland. So, in choosing perogies as my “material culture,” I wasn’t speaking merely about my heritage, I was also speaking directly to the place I inhabit and its own culture. Someone born in Edmonton, but of an Belgian or Bengal or Brazilian background could’ve chosen perogies too and it would’ve been accurate.

I actually thought, knowing the strong Ukrainian slant here, that maybe someone else in my class was also going to use perogies as their “material culture” example. But no one else did. The whole perogy thing kind of reaffirmed how embedded in this place I am, to an extent that few people seem to be. Maybe that’s arrogant. I mean, there are other tokens of Parkland culture out there, and Ukrainians weren’t even the only people settling the West in the 1890s and 1900s. Hell, the other half of my family didn’t even arrive in Canada until after World War II! To be fair, with regards to the “material culture” assignment, there were other people in my class that could’ve been just as embedded into the psyche of this place, but their examples were more broad. Like coffee was a common example of “material culture” that a few people used, but that’s more of a wider Western thing, and someone doing the same assignment in Toulouse or Tuscaloosa could’ve said the same thing.

When I look at the people around me, I often find it hard to come across people who are as embedded in Edmonton and Alberta psychologically as I am. I really feel like I am of Edmonton, for better or worse. A lot of people, especially since the mid-2000s boom, are relatively recent to Edmonton. People from across Canada have been coming in droves for the “Alberta Advantage” and cities like Edmonton have ramped up the intake of foreign immigrants. It feels like everyone here is more tied to somewhere else. In a lot of ways, this demographic change-up is great. Objectively, Edmonton is a far more progressive, vibrant, diverse, and all around simply a better place than it was in 2003.

At the same time, though, it’s kind of alienating being surrounded by people who are out to make a quick buck off of oil, and funnel money back east or overseas, without a care for what this place actually is. There’s a transiency to Alberta, which is felt most acutely during boomtimes. It happened in the ‘80s, it happened in the mid-’00s, and again in the early ‘10s. It’s tapered off somewhat over the past few years as oil prices dropped, but there is still a large amount of people here who aren’t really connected to this place the way that multi-generational Edmontonians are. To be totally fair, I know people who’ve come here from near and far and absolutely love Edmonton and are interested in knowing what it’s about, but they seem less common. I’m probably complaining about nothing; like I said Edmonton is objectively better off now and I objectively like the way things are improving.

But feelings are never objective. It’s weird how you can be nostalgic about eras that, when you look back critically, you can be like, “yeah, no, I’ve definitely got it better now.” I feel that way with Edmonton a lot of times. The sleepy, parochial, depressed Bill Smith-era city I grew up in was unequivocally a shitty one, riddled with a small town mentality that made anyone remotely progressive cringe. And yet, I somehow miss it occasionally. For years, I lamented how dead downtown was, and now that the stunning new arena is built, with spillover development well underway, I can’t help but think just how much of a scene downtown is now. It’s, like, too popular now, or something. I’ve been thinking of going to spots that remind me of the Edmonton of yore and photographing them. I sorta already did one photo like that, here.

Yet on the flip side, I am routinely forced to contend with just how far behind Edmonton feels in terms of urban planning compared to every other major Canadian city, even smaller ones like Winnipeg, Quebec City, and Halifax. I’m confronted with signs on Jasper Ave that, as a pedestrian, tell me to cross the street on the other side of the road. Like, what the hell. It’s Jasper Ave, not Saddleback Road. Even when there’s progress, it’s half-assed. New LRT? Great! Forgetting we dodged a bullet with underground LRT downtown and deciding to build above ground a la Calgary? Dumb! Deciding West Jasper Ave needs to stop being a stroad? Fabulous! Forgetting to bother with benches and trash cans and the like? Fail! Committing to more cycling infra but cheaping out with sharrows? Why bother? You’d think being the liberal bubble of the province, Edmonton would be open to more sustainable forms of planning. Realistically, I think a large part of the issue stems from just how far Edmonton fell behind by circa 2006, after being stagnant for a generation, and so there’s still much catch up to do.

Basically, I am nostalgic about the stagnant Edmonton of yesteryear while still complaining about lack of progress. Makes sense, right? I want more people from a myriad of places to come here and expose this place to new ideas but dislike that they will never know the Bill Smith Edmonton I grew up with. I’m basically an old man barking at the clouds and can’t be satisfied.

At least not here. I feel stuck here. I know Edmonton’s really not a bad place and there’s a lot of momentum here, but I’m just so disengaged with the place that the only thing holding me here is the people. Perhaps that’s part of the issue. I didn’t move around much in childhood, which further cements me in this Parkland metropolis. While many of my friends have family scattered around the country, from where their families first settled in Canada (or the US), almost all of my family is here, in Central Alberta. Both sides of the family came straight here from Europe. So I don’t have some distant aunt in Montreal or a cousin in Moncton, which, again, entrenches me in this place. Also, unlike first-gen friends of mine, who have some ties back to the old country, I don’t really have connections across the Atlantic. What ties there were pretty much evaporated with the passing of my grandfather. Thus, I am very much “Canadian” (not to say first-gens can’t also be unequivocally Canadian, but that I have no alternative), but also very Albertan and Edmontonian. At least in some ways. I suppose I’m more of an Albertan-by-birth than an Albertan-by-choice; a lot of the values here don’t align with my own. I was thinking of this recently within the context of my Canada project, and maybe there’s something there about wider Canadian culture and values resonating with me in a way that Alberta doesn’t.

I probably just need to get out of here, even temporarily. Being in university distracts me a bit from the limitations of Edmonton as a place for me, but it only goes so far. It’s hard to leave, though. I’m very embedded in this place and most of my connections are here. It’s hard to give that up. Maybe I’ll move to Toronto or Halifax eventually, or maybe I’ll do that term abroad in Holland. I’m locked into Edmonton for another year, though. I’ve heard on multiple occasions that moving away from Edmonton, after having grown up here, presents an opportunity to really appreciate Edmonton and it makes for a more enjoyable place upon returning. Or I could just be like “bye bitch.” Or maybe I’ll stay put, settle down, and come to terms with being of Edmonton. But it hasn’t happened in the many years I’ve felt this longing to leave, so I’m skeptical.

There’s also this other thing with Edmonton that is kind of special. Because of how stagnant things were here through the ‘90s and into the 2000s, Edmonton did fall behind, as previously mentioned. But from that, there is a lot of potential here to inflict change. It’s in part the whole big fish in a small pond thing, but it also has to do with how much of the city feels like a blank canvas, and through those things, how much easier it is to have a positive impact on Edmonton’s future in a way you can’t in Toronto. Edmonton is far less established as a place, so being here, especially now, not only can you put in the tokens that will churn out progress, you can also watch it happen before your eyes. I’ve witnessed a lot of progressive change happen to Edmonton in my lifetime and it really makes you feel apart of the process and makes you appreciate all that has gone in to make Edmonton better. You wouldn’t get that if you fucked off to Montreal or even Vancouver. Still, the progress, although palpable, does take time. It took 6 or 7 years before the City finally started upgrading the streetscape of the Quarters after the initial Area Structure Plan came out in ‘08 or ‘09. Essentially, I don’t want to be 70 before Edmonton gets to the point where it’s the kind of place I am happy with. Some days, I just wanna go somewhere where that stuff is already in place. Sure, it’s the easy route (in a way), but it makes sense in a way to not waste your life hoping your hometown will finally change to fit your definition of better.

All I know is that I’m still here. For now. Actually those t-shirts are really resonating with me right now and I should probably get one. They sum up my mood with this oil-drunk Parkland metropolis I call home. So how’s that for Springtime reflection?

#yeg #still in edmonton #edmonchuk #writing #alberta #sense of place

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hawaiireview · 8 years ago

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INTERVIEW: Stephanie Han

Navigating Place and Identity in Swimming in Hong Kong

Though your language, your passport, your husband, your education and everything about you says you should feel at ease in this room, you don’t. You take no pleasure in Hong Kong trailblazing. You were not an American trailblazer. You did not invent the nectarine, win an Olympic gold medal, star in a TV show, or lead Japanese American troops into battle. You hate the phrases ‘overcoming odds’, ‘defying stereotypes’ and ‘getting ahead.’ You don’t like the words ‘assimilation’, ‘model minority’ and ‘well-adjusted.’ This is why you left the U.S..

(from "Invisible")

Stephanie Han, whose collection of short stories Swimming in Hong Kong came out early this year, gestures with her hands as she explains that while some writers save rejection letters, hers could fill filing cabinets. The gestures convey the cabinets would be the large ones, probably four-drawer and tall.

She began writing the stories for this collection twenty years ago, yet if it weren’t for the years “1982,” “1985,” and “1977” given in some chapter titles, it would be easy to assume the stories are set in present-day. And this was one of the hurdles to publishing that Han faced. “A lot of the things in the collection now are current – that’s why it’s published now,” she assessed during our talk. “Although these relationships have occurred throughout time.”

Swimming in Hong Kong is centered on female protagonists, most of Korean descent or from Korea, and is set in Hong Kong, Korea, and the United States. The book speaks with a multiplicity of voices: a Korean-American girl spending the summer with relatives in Seoul; a Korean-American college student navigating identity, feminism, and consent in New York; a little girl, who is Chinese, observing how her father is treated by white expatriates in Hong Kong during the World Cup… The stories take the complicated issues of hyphenated identities, diaspora, power, colonialism, visibility versus invisibility, race, class, gender relations, and make them personal. Swimming in Hong Kong was a finalist for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction as well as the Spokane Prize. The stories’ voices speak with immediacy, and the narratives pursue social issues that are layered and complex.

Han was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and has lived in the United States, Hong Kong, and Korea. Her father, who was born in Seoul, was drafted as a U.S. military doctor, and her family moved every year until she was eight or nine, when they settled in Iowa. She spent the summers of her childhood staying in a cottage at the Korean Care Home on Liliha Street in Hawai‘i, where her grandmother was the nursing home director. Most of her adult life has been in California. Han earned her MA from San Francisco State University, MFA from the University of Arizona, and was the first to earn a Ph.D. in English literature from the City University of Hong Kong. She and her husband were part of the dotcom boom and bust – and when it busted, they moved to Hong Kong for better opportunities. After years of living and working in Hong Kong, she and her husband have moved to Hawai‘i; she says that now, she would like to be in the West.

We met in a little coffee shop in Waikiki, around the corner from the apartment where she and her family live. As we sit across from each other drinking coffee and talking, I switch from typing her responses to writing because I think maybe I can write faster. I don’t. Stephanie talks quickly during our conversation, strings thoughts together between brief silences.

Brooke Jones: Why do you want to be in the United States now?

Stephanie Han: I want my son to have an American identity. My husband is British, and expat, and because I’ve moved so much, I’m constantly in the position of being an outsider. And in 2047, mainland China is taking over in Hong Kong. The rule of law will not be in Hong Kong then, and it’s slowly being infringed on now; Hong Kong is not doing well with the Beijing government. So I wanted to leave Hong Kong.

Despite what is happening in the United States, there is a way to remake an American identity. There is potential here, and an energy here. We are still a young nation, if you look at the trajectory of history – it is always four steps forward, three steps back. We are now in a backward stage. But it doesn’t make me think it is hopeless here forever. Americans can be very open people; I’m talking in very broad terms about Americans, but we are a young nation. We are also a nation that claims genocide, slavery, and massive inequality as part of its history. The American project has a lot of problems, and there are also a lot of good things that have come from this national project. It is easy for people to condemn, but I think that the very concept of nation also offers us some interesting possibilities, a way of restructuring and choosing who we want to be. That said, there are 320 million people here, so it is difficult for all of us to be on the same page at any given time. And too, why should we be beyond the basics – which I suppose is really the question. What are the minimal requirements that we expect as citizens? I wanted my son to be a part of it. And I think I can make a greater contribution as a citizen, or negotiate better from my in-between context, here.

BJ: The stories in Swimming in Hong Kong include themes of identity and development of identity, insider vs. outsider, visibility and invisibility, and place and belonging. How did these themes develop?

SH: I wrote the book from 1997 to 2004 or 2005. I did live in Korea for a year as a child. My dad was a naturalized U.S. citizen. My question had a lot to do with place – what does it mean to have a home? Asians don’t have a binding narrative. If you’re Native American you have a narrative with genocide, Hispanic with language… Asians are not like that – they do not share a language, culture, anything. As a result, we come into this Asian-American identity. And it’s very problematic. It’s an artificial construct. I think while I was writing during that time, I was trying to figure out what it meant to be an outsider and insider. I don’t write like that anymore; I’m okay hovering, not in any place. I’ve finally resolved that, more or less, Hawai‘i is both a physical place and memory to me, and the closest I have to a home.

My peripatetic existence was amplified by marrying an expat. I feel, however, it’s important to have a home and place to feel rooted – especially for our child. It would be nice to stay in one place. I’m sick and tired of buying the same thing from IKEA – you’re not going to take a knife block between countries. You can look at moving as exciting or dynamic, or even as an incredible waste of money and time. It all depends on how you prioritize movement and place. I’d be fine being in one place for a while, but I’m never going to say I’m going to be in a place permanently. It’s like a jinx. Now it’s normal for me to be outside the conversation of where I am, on the borders or periphery.

The big theme in the story collection is place. My father was a medical doctor. After he got his U.S. green card, he got drafted. Because they were drafting medical doctors up to age thirty-five, we moved a lot when I was a kid because he was in active duty. I was a military brat. We lived on the base in San Francisco and in Korea. I asked my mom, “Mom, where am I from?” and she answered, “Well, why don’t you list the places you’re from and ask people to pick a place?” That’s why I read. Reading offered me a world. My 70s mom was not big on the touchy-feely sort of discussions of how one tries to belong and was quite casual. It was a different way of parenting. She said, if you like to read – yeah, you can have a friend in a book.

BJ: Did you have any siblings? Sometimes that can help, give you someone to play with, sometimes not…

SH: I have two younger sisters. We were close as a family because we had to move around a lot. Then we lived in Iowa for a period of time, seven years. I was thirteen years old when I went to boarding school; I didn’t want to live in Iowa. The summer when I was twelve, I went to Korea, like the short story [from Swimming in Hong Kong, “My Friend Faith, 1977”]. My grandfather sent a plane ticket, like the story. That really changed my life, going there. After I came back, I decided I wanted to leave Iowa. I didn’t want to be the only Asian. There was one black kid in school, one other Asian kid. Then they moved.

While I was visiting Korea, I spent two weeks in a bizarre camp. You’d wake up every morning to the national anthem. Brain-washing. You had to promise to visit the Motherland, to build up resources. They took us to the border to see North Korea – to see that we were under threat. We had to get lectures on the military capacity of Korea, on the agricultural industry. We had to wear these badges and sit in these steel chairs and watch. Eventually they had to stop the camp – I think it became hard to control because there was a conflict between the Western teenage Koreans and the conservative Korean camp leaders. But this was a very early government attempt to engage overseas Koreans with education to come back and return to the motherland.

Seeing other Asian faces was a revolution for me, that’s what led me to leave Iowa.

BJ: Why did your parents or relatives decide to send you to that camp?

SH: My uncle heard about this great Korean overseas camp, and I went for a couple weeks. I loved it. I had pen pals after that. I met Koreans from Queens, New York , and they’d tell me, yes there are other Koreans here. But obviously the experience was so significant to me because I was culturally and socially isolated.

BJ: Often, fiction is autobiographically inspired…

SH: It can be, but it’s not [autobiographically inspired] for me. I use it as a jumping-off point. When I was in Korea and Hong Kong, I had African-American friends and heard about their negotiation of the place. I’m not one of those people yearning for my homeland. Korea has a lot of problems. It’s very racist. I’m not happy in a society where people are racist against black people or anyone who is non-Korean, for that matter. That thinking deeply bothers me. So I can’t get caught up in the “my homeland’ stuff and feel sentimental about Korea in that way as I am too critical and disturbed by this type of thinking. I’m glad I went back to Korea; it resolved issues. A part of me belongs there, and a big part doesn’t. It’s too intolerant. I can’t negotiate out of it completely because I am Asian, so when I am there, I am subject to a different level of scrutiny and ideology. A lot of people who aren’t Asian are never accepted anyway, so they can negotiate out of it. I can’t. It’s hard. I don’t have legal standing in Hong Kong or Korea, so it’s hard for me to advocate for other people’s civil liberties as I have no voting rights there. That’s part of the reason I came back, too – I want to participate as a citizen. I want to raise my voice. There’s a lot of people who don’t care about that. I can understand that, too. But I’m too invested in the potential of what can be. I want things to get better.

BJ: The first story you wrote in the collection was “The Body Politic, 1982.” Did you begin with the idea that you were writing a collection of short stories? How did the collection develop? What was the process?

SH: It was hell. Each story was rejected one hundred times easily. I was picked up by agents and dropped. No Asian-Americans would publish me. I quit taking it personally - what’s another rejection? Who cares? People save rejection letters; mine would be in the pounds. But I get enough encouragement to keep writing, but I’m probably a masochist. You see narratives like what I was writing now, but not fifteen years ago.

“The Body Politic” developed, shifted, was workshopped many times. It was the last story to be published. I think because it was the nature of that narrative: what is consent; feminism. It’s not that it didn’t exist, but it’s far more mainstream now. The people who didn’t like it and reacted poorly were Asian women. Because people want to read literature with heroes and heroines that are lovable, defy all odds. You want the Amy Tan character. Americans want to read about winners. One woman told me, I want her to stand up and punch him. It makes people feel uncomfortable when a character isn’t lovable or heroic.

I’m more interested in imparting the narratives of women because our stories aren’t told as frequently as male POVs. We’re not represented at the same level in literature. We don’t appear in publishing, government, business, areas across the board – we are still under-represented. I see narratives of women as more urgent.

BJ: How did you find motivation to continue to write and submit in the face of so many rejections?

SH: I taught quite a bit and students have a way of inspiring you and encouraging you to keep going. I also had enough encouragement to keep plodding along. Writing is also how I express myself, so it isn't as if I could simply stop as I needed to communicate and obviously felt that there was someone on the other end who might want to read what I wrote, or share my outlook or perspective.

BJ: All the stories feel very current. If the dates weren’t in some of the titles, I would have thought they were set today.

SH: That’s actually why I put the dates on them. I wanted to show that the questions are questions that have always been there, that some of these ideas we think are new are really not new, but we are now more comfortable discussing them.

In the class I teach at Hawai‘i Pacific University, the students are about eighteen. Some female students said razors don’t get a luxury tax, but tampons, etc., do. I’ve been teaching long enough that I know teenagers in freshman composition wouldn’t raise this question fifteen years ago. We’re talking about it now. It’s great.

After one hundred and fifty tries, it [“The Body Politic, 1982”] finally got published. It got published after the book was released. I am so glad. It was the story that people felt hostile about.

BJ: What were your goals for the collection?

SH: I just wanted it to be published.

I think about experimentation with different kinds of voices. There are quite a few coming-of-age stories. There’s an arc to that – moments of awakening, of urgency.

BJ: There are many voices in the stories, including child POVs.

SH: I didn’t set out deliberately to write from the point of view of a young girl [in the story “Hong Kong Rebound”]. It was for a contest. In 2002, I was in Hong Kong during the world cup. Half the games were in Korea and half were in Japan. It was an exciting time to be in Hong Kong. People would stop in the middle of the street to watch; it was just a time of a lot of energy. The South China Morning Post had a call for a story, and the prompt was “Rebound.”

My father was staying with me. I thought a lot about father-daughter relationships. He was a very devoted father when I was a young child; he’d often take me to the zoo, spend time with me. I was very lucky.

The story Hong Kong Rebound was written in 2002 and this was only five years after the Handover. Mostly there were expats in the Central bars. Locals were looking in at the bars but couldn’t afford beers that cost eight dollars. People in the bars would put up black paper in the windows. I witnessed this several times. I remember an old man peeking in one corner, where there was a little scrap of window that wasn’t covered.

So these were the three things that prompted the story. And I thought, I’m going to write something. The story won the award. Sometimes, giving yourself parameters and boundaries is good, versus if everything is open and without any rules. It had to be under 2500 words.

The swimming pool that Ruth and Froggy swim in [from the story “Swimming in Hong Kong,” also the book title] is covered now. I used to swim there. The roof was open, so you could see the sky. They decided to cover it years later. I got so mad, I wrote into the newspaper and cited facts about heated swimming pools and what have you. I got really irate about it. But they covered the pool, which is really too bad. Hong Kong doesn’t have good urban planning and has a limited understanding of design in terms of allowing people to interact with nature. On the other hand, everyone has health insurance. No place is perfect.

So the Hong Kong stories I wrote – I think they cover different aspects of Hong Kong life.

BJ: Could you tell us more about setting boundaries and parameters in writing? For instance, do you generally find parameters and boundaries helpful when you write? Do you set them for yourself? What does that process look like?

SH: Sometimes I find that having little rules can work in terms of helping you reign in your ideas. If you say to yourself I want to write a 2000-word story, you can then easily eliminate the excess, and try to think of situations that will be well told in 2000 words. Sometimes journals have requirements. Often this is a way to force yourself into flexing your writing muscles. I sometimes set artificial deadlines for myself too – I must finish X by Y date. Really, no one is asking for it by Y, but setting up that date provides you with some sort of endpoint.

BJ: You’ve written about writing into conflict and paradox. What’s your process? Do you experience any surprises while writing?

SH: It works better for me to write into conflict and paradox. We think we are one thing, but we are this other thing. Humanity by its very nature is paradoxical and contrary. I always tell my students to write into the conflict. Start right before the problem explodes, because you can always backtrack a little.

Usually, I have an idea – that there’s a problem and a moment of grace about the problem. And I thicken the story as I go along. As you’re writing, things become more serendipitous.

BJ: Could you share a bit about teaching writing…

SH: I teach at HPU, and I started a workshop series this fall. I used to teach creative writing workshops in Hong Kong. I like this idea of people feeling they can control their narrative. People have a narrative; we all have stories inside of us. The art of autobiography, it’s very much an American phenomenon. Autobiography opens our nation – there’s more texture, we have a more porous surface, hearing these voices. I feel it’s important for people to write their own story.

These people who wax poetic about the writing life – I’m not one of those people. Sometimes I think, I should do something else. But I can’t think what else I would do. Writing is a compulsion. I’m a really terrible advocate for the writing life. It’s not the only way to have a meaningful creative life. I think what is important is understanding the power of your own narrative and your community’s narrative, and having or acquiring the skill to act as a citizen in terms of being able to write to communicate about a particular problem or idea. But I don’t think writing is the only means to a creative life. You must think of how you would like to communicate with the world—some do it through music, others through design, still others through physical gestures. Creativity takes many forms.

#fiction #stephanie han #swimming in hong kong #brooke jones

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