Arlene Goldbard

The same qualities Hillary Clinton is displaying now—commitment, tenacity, fortitude in the face of opposition and ridicule—need to be cultivated by anyone willing to stand up for an unpopular position. The thing is, it matters greatly whether that position derives from a wounded certainty of one’s own merit and therefore entitlement, as I’m afraid is true of Clinton, or from insights and observations that hold the potential to heal social wounds.

Just a few days ago, a teacher I value greatly asked me if I share these qualities with respect to my own sense of what needs saying now. He is skeptical about the general state of potential consciousness these days. He asked me whether I am prepared to face isolation, animosity, humiliation and ridicule. I told him I already had a lot of experience along those lines. But mine is nothing to compare to Clinton’s present situation, which calls to mind Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129: “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame/Is lust in action” (though lust for power was not his subject).

We start our lives developing those muscles we exercise most often. I have a friend whose ill-suited parents trained him to endure any amount of pain, physical and emotional. In adult life, endurance can be a valuable skill, getting us through the tribulations the world puts in our path. But if it has no limit, if it isn’t balanced with a healthy willingness to abandon a losing strategy, the very same endurance becomes a cause of new suffering rather than a way to cope with unavoidable discomfort. The person oriented to enduring pain will use that strength to withstand an untenable situation long past the point it would have been better to give up and change direction. The trick is to preserve the endurance muscle, but add in a new skill: the capacity to discern when one is reenacting old traumas rather than choosing freely whether to endure or not.

One thing I learned early on was that many people—especially my family—did not appreciate my talent for seeing through cover stories and rationalizations to what was actually going on. I was admonished countless times not to ask questions, not to say what I was thinking, that I was too young or otherwise unqualified to speak out. I was trained to mistrust my perceptions until I began to doubt them, or at least to cloak them, thereby avoiding the isolating punishments that followed from stating them. You might find it amusing to consider that a person as outspoken as myself is still engaged in cloaking, but it’s true. The new skill I am trying to learn is contacting my deepest thoughts, perceptions and feelings, allowing them to emerge unmasked, without caring about consequences.

The muscle analogy is a good one, because it is so precise. The capacity built up in strong mens’ arms is absolutely neutral: they can use their biceps to snatch purses on the street or ladle soup for the homeless. Each of us has a moral compass calibrated by inheritance, judgment and experience, but how do we know it is pointing true north? In the end, the only way is through fearless self-discovery, the type of soul inventory that shows us all the bright and all the broken places, the work that has been accomplished and the work that remains to be done.

When I see the mask Hillary Clinton wears in public these days, the slippery and desperate way her accent and opinions slide toward local cadences wherever the campaign trail takes her, I see someone who has been focusing so intently and so long on the externals that she has lost the capacity for introspection. I want her to leave the race because I am so excited about an Obama presidency, to be sure. But also because it hurts to see her this way: she has so clearly lost touch with her own inner compass, and she is not on a path to regain it.

I’m not the only person who feels that Clinton is harming herself now. Even the editorial writers of the New York Times, who endorsed her, took her to task today for the viciousness of her tactics, saying she must make a major change “if she hopes to have any shot at winning the nomination or preserving her integrity and her influence if she loses.” I know how to spot someone whose compass is broken. She’s not going to fix it this way. No one could.

A couple of weeks ago, Adam Liptak of the New York Times reported from the front lines of the U.S. prison-industrial complex:

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled

… Read the rest of this post»

Never in my lifelong observation of politics have I seen an election to match this one for extravagant theatricality: Laughter! Tears! Elation! Nausea! This campaign is like a periodic table of human capability, from venal self-interest to hermetic self-delusion, from moral blindness to moral grandeur. To find another story that encompasses as much of the human comedy and tragedy as this one, you have to go back to Aristophanes’ celestial satires, to the spectacles of grand opera, to the dysfunctional families starring in Genesis.

Hillary Clinton, having herself been victimized by smear campaigns, has in the past acted to advance racial equity in this country. But she is now so blinded by ambition that she has become a self-parody, an Iago with no compunctions about inflaming the electorate with whispers, willingly abandoning all principle and honor to pursue advantage. Jeremiah Wright, who has been reading from the book of injustice his whole life long, has become a Pagliaccio, mistaking his part in the play for real life. Failing to see that he is being used to discredit Obama—or perhaps simply prizing his own sudden access to the spotlight more than he values Obama’s chance at the presidency—he has helped what he has cherished to be harmed. And Barack Obama has become Joseph, whose remarkable ability to interpret dreams was perceived to be such a threat to family power relations that his own brothers sold him out. … Read the rest of this post»

I have been trying to clear my mind of obstacles so I can think without the impediments created by attachment to things as they appear to be. If that sounds a little abstract, imagine a farmer prying stumps or boulders out of a field before plowing and sowing; or a painter smoothing and priming a used canvas before laying down new color.

You can try to paint over bumps or plow around them, but everything you create will be imprinted, will be shaped, by what you hope to avoid. I find it a great struggle to try and dismantle conventional ways of thinking with roots as deep in my mind as an ancient tree stump’s in a long-fallow field. But I have a strong hope and faith it will be worth the effort. … Read the rest of this post»

Want to watch a movie? How about watching with friends in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro at the same time? Starting at 11 a.m. Pacific Time on Saturday, 10 May, 2008, Pangea Day will be celebrated with a four-hour program of short films and music. It will be screened in theaters and homes around the globe, on widescreens and cellphones, but I’ll be watching from the Pangea Day Web site. The whole program will undoubtedly be available at the Web site for viewing at later times by those who missed the live feed.

It all started with a wish. … Read the rest of this post»

Passover—Pesach—starts Saturday night. This holiday, halfway into the Hebrew calendar year, invites us to consider the story of the exodus from slavery—from Mitzrayim (which means Egypt and also straits or narrow, constricting places)—as if it had happened to us, as if it were happening right now.

Every year, holiday preparations ask us to seek out and purge all that is inflated or clogging in our lives. As we retrace the journey of the liberated slaves, we hope to be blessed with the leaping, bounding energy of this holiday, which sometimes allows us to spring past obstacles, skipping the arduous task of levering them out of the way, inch by inch. Indeed, with its central story of a spasmodic, halting yet driven expulsion from constriction into freedom, Pesach seems to recapitulate the birth process, promising a fresh start. … Read the rest of this post»

I wrote this on the plane home after a week on the road, so grateful I wasn’t booked on American Airlines that my good cheer was barely dented by a late departure and the fact that the passenger in front of me reclined her seat so far, I couldn’t quite see the screen of my computer.

In the meeting I attended—surrounded by smart, knowledgeable, caring people of goodwill—I heard the word “class” more in the space of 8 hours than in the previous 8 months. Having read a good deal of preparatory material about the problems of one of this country’s most economically depressed sub-regions, my colleagues and I pondered one of American culture’s great mysteries. The data on growing income inequality is in. Everyone who is tracking the distribution of wealth in our society points to the same multi-decade trend (with apologies to Billie Holiday): them that’s got shall get and them that’s not shall lose. Whether the story is framed as “the disappearing middle class,” or the multiplication of millionaires, whether the angle is the virtual impossibility of living decently on minimum wage or the ballooning square footage of the McMansions springing up like mushrooms, we’ve all seen the stories. … Read the rest of this post»

Everyone I talk to is exhausted by the prospect of seven more months of presidential campaigning, American-style. But many people are also resigned: this is the system, it always has been, what can you do about it?

The culture of politics says a great deal about a country. (You can read more on this subject in my essay in New Village Commons’ “Festival of Democracy” issue.) If a Martian were to land in the midst of any recent U.S. presidential campaign, what could he/she/it deduce from our system? That we believe wise leaders emerge from a strange type of ritual combat: the death of a thousand cuts combined with a race to collect the biggest pot of gold. … Read the rest of this post»

I have a dear friend who understands the world of finance as well as I know my way around my own kitchen. For a long time, she’s been sending me alarming bulletins from people who keep a close eye on banks, Wall Street and federal financial regulators.

The economy has developed such an elaborate and arcane array of financial instruments—futures, variance swaps, derivatives, basket options—that what I read about it often sounds to me more like a multiplayer fantasy than a down-to-earth matter of dollars and cents. Sometimes even ordinary financial news and analysis seems to be written in a foreign language: I stare at the charts and graphs, shrug, and move on to something I can comprehend. But this much I have been able to grasp: the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, the meltdown of Bear Sterns and all the recent events of that ilk were by no means unexpected. Watchful and prudent types have been sending out distress signals for a long time now, but until recently, few have been listening. … Read the rest of this post»

Thousand Kites, the project started by artists to awaken our national conscience to the realities of our prison-industrial complex—the planet’s biggest and most costly, bar none—has launched a great new Web site where you can learn about and make use of theater, video, audio and other tools to involve your community. You can share stories, find out who else is active on the issues, download great tools to stage a reading or screen a video right in your own living room or help to organize your whole state.

I’ve been writing about this issue for a while. (On my home page, under “Blog Categories” on the right, click on “Incarceration Nation” to read more.) I’m by no means the only one: lately, more and more people have begun to sit up and take notice of this huge social challenge, from a Ted Koppel special to countless novels, memoirs and nonfiction books. What does it mean to have become a country that locks its problems up and throws away the key? … Read the rest of this post»