Arlene Goldbard

Could everybody please stop for a minute and take a breath?

A milestone has been reached, one we might best commemorate by a collective inhalation, sending a little oxygen to the national forebrain, which seems to be suffering the symptoms of acute deprivation.

The scapegoating of Shirley Sherrod, the Agriculture Department official who was forced to resign last week, was such a perfect, surreal, and toxic example of everything that is wrong with our politics that I am daring to hope we can actually learn something from it.

In case you’ve been taking a media fast, here’s a quick recap. (Frank Rich has a much more detailed account in Sunday’s New York Times, complete with many of the relevant links.)

Shirley Sherrod, head of the United States Department of Agriculture’s rural development office in Georgia, a civil rights hero, married to a civil rights hero, and the daughter of a civil rights martyr, has lifelong bona fides as a human rights and justice advocate.

Last week, Andrew Breitbart, a reckless, relentless right-wing media propagandist (whose shaky credibility seems no impediment to Fox News), posted an excerpt from a speech Shirley Sherrod gave to an NAACP Freedom Fund banquet, doctored to make it look as if she used her public position to discriminate against white farmers who came to her office seeking help. Since the NAACP has recently been publicly condemning racism in the Tea Party movement, there’s good reason to think Sherrod’s talk to that organization was targeted as a way to retaliate.

Without investigating—without even watching the full tape of Sherrod’s speech—Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack requested her immediate resignation, demanding by phone that she pull off the highway and send it via her Blackberry. The same day, national NAACP President Benjamin Jealous denounced Sherrod for “abuse of power” and “shameful” actions.

Once they bothered to look at the entire speech, first the NAACP and then Tom Vilsack apologized, and reportedly, Sherrod is considering another job at Agriculture. Sherrod said on TV that she deserved a call from the President, and a few hours later, he obliged, expressing regret.

Are you remembering to breathe? While this story and all the other horrors unfolded, children went swimming to cool off, people worked hard, birthday candles were wished-upon, most of the systems that sustain our world kept ticking over, love overflowed.

So what is going on here?

The incident has been condemned for racism, and surely racism has a great deal to do with it. The disintegration of our national discourse on race (which was never all that stable anyway) has been hyper-accelerated by the right’s tactic of defending against charges of racism by leveling the same charge at the attackers, baselessly, shamelessly, over and over again.

If all you have is a hammer, they say, every problem looks like a nail. Glenn Beck’s favorite hammer is Hitler: he pummels every social policy and political statement he dislikes with comparisons to Nazism, to the extent that a Daily Show clip diagnosing him with “Nazi Tourette’s” has garnered over a million hits on the show’s site. Fox’s second-favorite hammer is racism; a year ago, Glenn Beck made headlines calling President Obama a racist, something he and his colleagues have continued to do with accelerating frequency. Once Sherrod was dismissed, Fox quickly picked up the story, and a string of the network’s commentators, including Newt Gingrich, denounced Sherrod for her “racist attitude.”

If Shirley Sherrod had been white, it’s very likely the rush the judgment would have been slowed enough to view the speech in its entirety. And if she had transgressed, it’s much more likely she would have been given a chance to redeem herself: rest in peace, former Ku Klux Klan organizer Robert Byrd, whose coffin lay in state in the Lincoln Catafalque of the Senate Chamber, not a month before Shirley Sherrod was pulled off the highway and summarily fired. That this was done on the watch of an African American President was not sufficient to change the entrenched pattern.

The incident has been seen as an expression of what’s wrong with the media: the extent to which these snippets of heavily, tendentiously edited video are validated and repeated with such force that they become reality in many people’s minds; the way new and old media tend to run them without checking. No disagreement: unless there is some way to introduce awareness and refusal, to disrupt the cartoon version of reality that spreads virally through these videos, the future of our national discourse is likely to resemble one of those whack-a-mole games, where poking your head into public space invites a crushing blow. (Van Jones had a nice op-ed on this.)

The incident is perhaps most telling with respect to public leaders’ response to this climate. It is very important to recognize that Shirley Sherrod was dismissed before the tape was ever broadcast on Fox. In other words, Obama administration leaders (plus the NAACP and almost every else) have so completely ceded power to control the public story to Fox and its ilk that they preemptively punished themselves to avoid being beaten up by Glenn Beck. Have you ever seen one of those depictions of the child who is trained to assist in his own punishment, marching dutifully to the woodshed to fetch a switch? That’s what happened here, and Shirley Sherrod was the one who bore the pain of it.

Remember to keep breathing now. Lots of us give our power away at some time, in some relationship, whether to another individual or an opposing political force. But if you have given it away, then only you can take it back. The choice is yours.

I’m not all that big on psychological explanations for social phenomena, but most of my direct exposure to self-punishing behavior like this has been with highly traumatized individuals who are stuck in a cycle of reactivity. Panic takes hold, breathing stops, the neocortex surrenders to the more primitive parts of the brain, which administer a chemical bath evoking the fight, flight, or freeze response. Typically, the person becomes so organized around his or her defenses that every stimulus feels like an attack. The traumatized person’s responses are trained to hair-trigger readiness. Once the cycle has been set in place by actual experience, without intervention, the traumatized person will compulsively repeat it, cringing in anticipation even of blows that never come.

Some people may be too far down this path to fully recover, but for many, there is an antidote, and it is awareness. You train yourself to notice your own reactions, and over time, with practice, what had been a compulsion becomes a choice. Things still strike a match in your brain, but self-awareness enables you to refrain from touching it to the fuse.

I can’t see any way out but making this a lesson, getting as many people as possible to speak out about the roles of racism, media manipulation, and hyper-defensive politics in this fiasco. Right now, almost everyone involved has apologized to Shirley Sherrod. That suggests a moment of receptivity. Let’s not waste it on arguments over whether this scandal turned on racism (it did), the terrible state of the commercial media (it did), or traumatized politics (it did).

This just in, friends: such events are always caused by a combination of such forces, each contradicting, reinforcing, or somehow distorting the other. And when people temporarily awaken, see what they have done, and apologize, an opening is created to learn. Let’s not waste it.

It’s a blues moment in America. A time for the bittersweet aesthetic of broken things made beautiful. For me, there is only one consolation and one hope, and they are the same thing: the sad news lives alongside the happy. Neither is truer than the other. Life is this and this and this, all at the same time. Even as the body politic is gripped by this terrible reactivity, while defensive reflexes shoot off like dandelions bursting into seed, there is always the chance to fill your lungs and brain with oxygen and make a different choice.

Take another breath. Listen to the divine Bettye LaVette, “Let Me Down Easy,” a masterpiece of yearning. Imagine the awesome power of awareness in action. Yearn for it. It’s yours.

On July 1, education leaders in Burlington, VT removed from her post a school principal who was, by all reasonable accounts hugely admired and wildly successful at loving and educating the pupils in her charge. According to the New York Times, Joyce Irvine of Wheeler Elementary School…

[W]as removed because the Burlington School District wanted to qualify for up to $3 million in federal stimulus money for its dozen schools.

And under the Obama administration rules, for a district to qualify, schools with very low test scores, like Wheeler, must do one of the following: close down; be replaced by a charter (Vermont does not have charters); remove the principal and half the staff; or remove the principal and transform the school.

Do yourself a favor and read the entirety of this excellent Times article by Michael Winerip. Its distinguishing feature is a true diversity of stakeholder voices, and a true willingness to question official pronouncements, both increasingly rare in daily journalism.

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The gulf between practice and preaching is vast enough to swallow almost anything, but I am beginning to think we have something caught in our collective throat. Despite all our claims for the higher virtues of compassion, truth, and altruism, our common culture has persisted in attaching a positive presumption to material success. Those who excel in economic competition, the tacit reasoning goes, must merit it; and therefore they deserve to be heeded. They deserve the benefit of the doubt.

This is in contrast to the cultural assumptions that dog losers in the economic race: they are lazy, they fail to plan ahead and conserve, they deserve punishment for spending beyond their means, their misfortune is self-created. Rather than meriting the benefit of the doubt, they deserve to suffer. Nearly a week ago, Paul Krugman’s “Punishing The Jobless” column on the shameful Congressional failure to extend unemployment benefits quoted Sharron Angle, the Republican senatorial candidate from Nevada:

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As the U.S. pauses from work to celebrate freedom, what national liberation do you desire? At the risk of seeming ridiculous, I’d love the public interest to awaken from its self-imposed trance, putting the people’s business before self-serving politics.

When a pig flies, you say? Look north, up in the sky, what’s that pink blob flapping over Iceland?

Jon Gnarr, the new mayor of Reykjavik, Iceland, is a comedian by trade. In fact, it was widely assumed that he embarked on his election campaign primarily to satirize political conventions, using his skills as a humorist to highlight the absurdity of his city’s actual existing government.

Then he won.

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“The personal is political.” If you were sentient in the sixties and seventies, you heard it almost daily. No doubt, you also said it now and then. It still echoes occasionally around the Zeitgeist, but with a less commanding tone.

It’s been a little over a year since I left a decades-long marriage, and I am ready to explore relationship again, which for me means meeting men. The trouble is, I live the life of a writer and speaker whose main subject is culture. In comparison with the normal pattern of going to an office each day, I spend a remarkable amount of time alone with my computer, mostly loving every minute of it. (I’m lucky, I know, to experience bliss in the act of writing, even when the results fail to induce the same state in readers.) In between, I take to the road for work. I’m glad to have had quite a few speaking and consulting engagements this spring, mostly journeying to that corner of the universe known as “the arts,” where I am surrounded by women (roughly two-thirds of the people who work in that field, by my informal estimate) and gay men, with a sprinkling of married men in the crowd.

Wherever I go, I’ve been driving my friends a little crazy with this topic, and their response has been to urge me to register with an online dating site. Yesterday, I let myself be persuaded, which entailed answering a long list of questions about my background and personal tastes and habits. The idea is that on the basis of some algorithm, I will be matched with compatible men (although the first batch of matches has left me feeling skeptical).

Still, it’s good practice, friends say, recounting all the happy couples they know who met online. So I am practicing, and as I practice, I wonder if anyone is paying attention to the politics of mature romance, a subject ripe for exploration.

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My friend heard it from Wilbert Rideau, a writer she admires. He was commenting on the constraints that shape certain prison writers’ perspectives. “They can only see the world,” he said, “through the lens of their own pain.”

Some of us are imprisoned by iron and stone, some by cages erected in our own minds. When you are so identified with your own story that you can admit no other truth, pain owns your vision. The only antidote is awareness, which can sometimes be activated by glimpsing a wider lens (check out the wise writings I’ve linked at the end of this post).

I’ve put off writing about Israel and the Gaza flotilla, even though they are much in my mind, because I didn’t want to rattle people’s reactivity, unleashing the friend-or-foe perspective so often seen through the lens of pain. But then this statement was posted to a progressive Jewish e-list: “Maybe I live too much now in the 1930’s and am experiencing these times as 1938.”

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Back in 1996, Tikkun published my essay, “Let Them Eat Pie: Philanthropy à la Mode.” Fourteen years later, I still get messages from people thanking me for it.

I’d like to think that’s because my analysis of philanthropic power relations and their discontents wowed readers with its brilliance. But I’m pretty sure the essay’s biggest thrill was that I dared to write it at all. There aren’t many truth-tellers in the world of charitable giving, on account of pervasive fear that biting the hand that feeds could endanger one’s economic well-being.

No doubt. But if you care about accountability, reciprocity, and other social goods, then the harm done by silence will be evident. There are many individuals and some foundations doing much more than the minimum to introduce accountability and some democratic spirit into philanthropy. I know program officers who are up nights agonizing about the huge burden nonprofits now bear as a result of corporate financial crimes, lax public oversight, and their impact on endowments—who arise each morning in dread of that day’s news of lost jobs and lost opportunities.

But that doesn’t change sectoral realities, which reinforce the antidemocratic spirit of these giver-receiver relationships, where potential receivers are expected to expose themselves to unbounded scrutiny and givers are entitled to ask without being required to answer. If truth in giving were mandated for foundation guidelines the way health warnings are required on cigarette packs, many of the more than 1.2 million foundations registered with the IRS as of last year would have to carry this notice (most of the rest are small family foundation that exist to give a few grants to pet projects):

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So many of us want to make things better: the world, our lives, the lives of others. Some are driven by a vision; if not the lion and lamb cuddling up together, at least a greater harmony and wholeness. My generation of thinkers and activists is swathed in that desire. Looking back, I see this scene: I am painting a portrait of myself as earth-mother, with a child-sized globe swaddled in my arms; on the stereo, the Rolling Stones are singing “Angie,” and when they get to that line, “Sometimes I want to wrap my coat around you,” the painting is done.

A few days ago, my friend told me that her daughter and her twenty-something activist cohort see life differently from their parents’ generation. They gaze through open eyes at something terrible coming toward us, and are working with great commitment to limit the damage, to live with conviction and enjoyment despite it.

Perhaps we all want Arcadia. Even under the worst conditions, desire is free. But if history is any guide, I’m beginning to think the path of wisdom steers clear of disappointment when Arcadia doesn’t arrive. In Jewish mysticism, the divine energy poured into the creation of the world was too intense to hold. The vessels were shattered, and ever since, it has been our task to reassemble them. Can it be ambition enough to make something beautiful out of the broken pieces?

In Juan Jose Campanella’s mesmerizing film, The Secret in Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos), a broken typewriter plays a small but pivotal role. It can type only the capital A, making every page an Alpine lAndscApe. In the wild clockwork of the film, that brokenness becomes a tiny lever the protagonist finally pulls, turning a lifetime of fear into the realization of love.

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At times like this spring, when I’ve been on the move and meeting deadlines pretty much non-stop, my policy of blogging only when the spirit sparks me tends to bog down. Life takes on a hamster-wheel quality, and the poor pooped hamster has few insights worth sharing.

My favorite philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, is famous for spinning a lengthy essay out of the ancient poet Archilochus’ animal maxim, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin’s game was distinguishing those whose views are shaped by a single, defining idea from those who draw on many sources for a result both more textured and less reductive.

But the hamster’s teaching doesn’t fit either category. It isn’t about knowing, but about asking one big question: “Am I there yet? Am I there yet? Am I there yet?”

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I’ve been talking about “paradigm shift” a lot lately, much to the annoyance of people who are tired of seeing that rubric misused and overused. But bear with me, because it is apt and irreplaceable sometimes, and one of those times is now.

If you haven’t already read the introduction to Tony Judt’s new book, Ill Fares The Land, do it now. Judt has written with the urgency of a man gravely ill who knows his time is likely to be brief. The result is not a polemic, but a clear-eyed, heartwrenching appeal to awaken from the trance of hypercapitalism and rescue the notion of common good before it is trampled to death in the pursuit of material self-interest. It is simple and clear and to me, undeniably true.

When historian of science Thomas Kuhn proposed the term “paradigm shift” for a change of scientific consensus, he meant something precise: A paradigm shift takes place when an older system of understanding can no longer hold newly emerging knowledge. If you are certain the earth is flat, and evidence accumulates that ships sailing over the farthest horizon return, rather than plunging into nothingness, your old model of planetary reality shatters, making way for a new one.

How can you tell when a new model is emerging? How about when all around you, smart and articulate people are writing things that have the exact tone and character of awakening from slumber? … Read the rest of this post»