Politics & Society

Rethinking the Split Between Feminists and the Left

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Susan Faludi’s biographical study of Shulamith Firestone in the current New Yorker is required reading for anyone interested in the history of the last third of the twentieth century. It restores to her proper place one of the most inspired and original political intellectuals of the sixties, and a founder of modern feminism. I can speak personally here of the impact of Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex (1970) on my own life. When I first read the book, upon its publication, I immediately recognized that its portrait of a universal system of male domination rooted in the family was both the most important challenge to the Marxism, which had shaped my worldview, and an equally important corrective to its blind spots. My 1972 book, Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life began as a review of Firestone’s work, and proposed both to answer and to learn from it.

Christianity

Weekly Sermon – Tend My Sheep

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We make war for oil. The only security our wars buy this homeland is the security to keeping pumping oil and gas into our cars, factories, and homes. We are willing to frack the foundations of the earth and pour millions of gallons of toxic chemicals into vaults of the earth in order to get our fix of fossil fuels. For the sake of oil in the Middle East, our leaders will not challenge Israel to treat Palestinians justly. Food supplies and prices are threatened the world over as we turn food into gas for our cars and drive farm soils to ruin in a deluge of petrochemicals. Racism, the bastard of American slavery and many other evil fathers, is finally one more means by which the privileged keep economic benefits for themselves. Hoarding power is the motor inside the chariots of empire—and empire craves oil, coal, and gas to fuel the engines of wealth. Mass incarceration, wage stagnation over the last 40 years, the gutting of clean air and clean water regulations; an unjust, unaffordable health care system, rotting infrastructure, crumbling public education and the destruction of democracy—all these evils are driven by the unregulated desire of power to get more power by whatever means necessary. Climate change is nature’s blunt instrument to respond to systems which are fundamentally irresponsible. Capitalism, if unregulated, is simply sin. And the wages of sin is death.

Culture

What the Right Understands About Poverty and Dependency

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David Azerrad in a recent post at the Heritage Foundation’s site, “What the Left Misunderstands about Poverty and Dependency” offers a long list of right wing assumptions: that housing, food, and medical assistance prevent people from marrying and working, that government assistance “erodes the virtues that allow people to flourish,” and most astonishingly, that “all Americans – conservative and liberal alike – believe in a strong safety net.” I sent him an email with several questions (if he answers, I’ll provide that in an update). Here is the first:
When you mention, “the virtues that allow people to flourish,” which virtues do you mean and what would be “flourishing”? From what I can gather, when conservatives talk about flourishing, they mean working hard (but not in any public or government position, Republican politics excepted), going to college, getting married, starting a business, buying a house, etc.. If you’re really flourishing, you live in a gated “community,” go to a private school, own high-end cars, play golf, travel by air, help out with the Boy Scouts (while your sons are in a troop), and perhaps donate your old clothes to charity.

Healing Israel/Palestine

Obama in the Footsteps of Sadat

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It is one thing to come, deliver and fly off, but without a coherent and resolute, goal-driven, follow-up strategy, the Obama visit could turn out to be be worse than a waste of time. Raising hopes and dashing them once again would be very damaging. If the Obama initiative succeeds in emulating the Sadat initiative by triggering new political currents in Israel, it is imperative that they are cultivated and nourished.

General News

Tax Day Demonstration Against Drones

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Our trial was originally scheduled for today, but it’s been postponed. Still, today, April 15, Tax Day, is a good day for a demonstration against drones. The drone program consumes billions of our tax dollars. Our government cuts programs that promote the common good and serve basic human needs, while it pours billions into hi-tech robotic killing machines that destroy human lives and communities halfway around the world. To find out more about my motivation for taking this action, go to “Why I Crossed the Line at Beale.”

Judaism

Misc thoughts re: Yom Ha’atzmaut

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Remembering the pain of the Palestinian people would not need, in any way, to diminish the pride one might feel when remembering the birth of Israel. In fact, doing so would be a powerful display of one of my favorite aspects of Jewish history and culture: the embracing of contradiction.

Christianity

Hope and Guantanamo

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Those of us who live freely here in the United States may not realize how connected we are to the prisoners in Guantanamo. Their pain and their struggles may seem to have nothing to do with us. But we are connected to them, and to the people killed by U.S. drone strikes and other victims of our country’s foreign policy. I am a citizen. I pay taxes. I vote. I remain silent or I speak out. Our government can only take such actions through the active participation or the silent complicity of the people.

Politics & Society

Letter to a President

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Americans rarely elect presidents whose talents warrant their high office, but when, as in 2008, we do, we paradoxically ensure that they will fall short of the potential with which we fell in love when we voted them in. Whatever their strengths or accomplishments, presidents are judged them harshly and caricatured savagely. That is their role in our political and psychological economy: to represent fantasies of absolute power that we mercilessly, relentlessly puncture. We doom our presidents to fail our greatest hopes than risk empowering tyrants who fulfill our worst fears.

General News

Day of Action to Close Guantanamo

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Today, April 11, is the National Day of Action to support the Guantanamo hunger strikers and to call for Guantanamo to be closed. This effort is sponsored by Witness Against Torture and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. Find an action near you and/or call President Obama urging him to fulfill his promise to close Guantanamo. There are phone numbers below, along with a script for callers to use. Support the hunger strikers and end indefinite imprisonment without trial.