Who do ya think you’re foolin’?

When President Obama announced recently the end of the combat mission for US soldiers in Iraq and presented it as a triumph for both the US and Iraq, I thought back to when I began painting the portraits. It was January 2002, 15 months before the invasion, when the decibel level of fear and propaganda, righteous war-mongering, was already deafening. Weapons of mass destruction! al-Qaeda in Iraq! Saddam Hussein’s complicity with 9/11! Iraqi nuclear weapons! Mushroom clouds! Lies ricocheting around America’s hollow, Halliburton supported media skull with a tooth-rattling roar. Lies unchallenged by our “free” press because the press was obsessed with tactics for defeating an enemy whose strength had to be inflated like a balloon to make it seem like the world’s biggest war machine had to pop something. All those ex-generals, all heavily invested in corporations that profit from war, trotting from station to station like trained dogs to promote the coming violence. Hard to tell what scent they were on --- blood or profit? Voices challenging the lies were banned from the major media. Anyone who tried to talk about oil, empire, and control of the Mid-East as reasons for war was ignored, marginalized, called a traitor.

I began painting truth tellers as a personal act of resistance and defiance and a means of maintaining some measure of self-esteem. How hypocritical and duplicitous was our country! How sad to have one’s perception of one’s worth bound up with national identity. But this war was being promoted to protect me and you, thousands of people were going to be murdered (most of them civilians) to protect me and you, young patriotic American men and women would die and be grievously wounded to protect me and you. What a profound betrayal of the notion of democracy and the rule of law was being carried out in your name and mine. And if you can imagine a country’s wealth as a great forest of possibility, ours was being clear-cut for a war revelers’, blood soaked bonfire …. not for housing, healthcare, education, alternative energy, and alleviating poverty. A net of fear was thrown over this country and the majority of people were swept up like a panicked school of minnows. Gleefully. Free fish were criticized for failing to conform to the culture of fear.

The proposition that the US is now leaving Iraq is preposterous. As preposterous as the absurd reasons given for the war. But the first is the necessary condition of the second. The war was not to protect America and not to free Iraqis from an evil dictator. Our government, that is, our taxes, have built there the largest embassy in the world and many “enduring” bases to protect the real reasons for the war. The shameful and ludicrous demand that it’s time for Iraqis to finally take responsibility for their own security is obscene. Iraqis didn’t ask for this war, didn’t beg for America to destroy all their infrastructure, power stations, water treatment plants, kill 1 million plus civilians, create more than 4 million refugees, poison the country with Depleted Uranium, foster ethnic and religious animosity, further malnourish their children, leave the entire country in a state of traumatic stress and give control of their oil to foreign countries.

It seems Iraqis can’t police themselves and don’t understand how to be grateful! Or, how to be thankful for indefinite colonization.

It’s like the teenage drug addict who storms into his little brother’s room, rips it to shreds looking for a little loose change, and then says, “Now I’m going to sit right here and wait till you clean up this mess you just caused by hiding your money.”

Andrew Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University and a former colonel in the US Army who has been very critical of both the Iraq (his son was killed in Iraq) and Afghan wars, recently said:

"The question demands to be asked: Who is more deserving of contempt? The commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause, however misguided, in which he sincerely believes? Or the commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause in which he manifestly does not believe and yet refuses to forsake?"

The first commander he refers to is Bush, the second Obama. I have a problem with the characterization of George Bush as a true believer, a president who was convinced he was morally right to engage in pre-emptive war. If Bush’s zeal for war --- part born again “Christian” crusader, part neo-con ideologue, part oil imperialist, part Dick Cheney puppet --- makes him a misguided, true believer, then what are we to make of his understanding of his position as leader of a democratic republic? What are we to make of his oath to defend the Constitution?
He was a president ( appointed, not elected, by the way) guilty of lying to creat war, guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, guilty of ordering torture and a host of subversions of the Constitution. I have the greatest respect for Mr. Bacevich, but Bush was not a true-believer. He was a true disbeliever in our democracy and law. And he was on purpose. Contempt is too good for a president who lies to create war. Give me prosecution. Our contempt is righteous, but puny and ineffectual. Bush’s contempt for democracy, life, and law was enormous and changed the history of the world, sinking us further into brutality, ethnic and religious hatred, inequality, corporatization, and avoidance of humanity’s great crises.

And because President Obama has refused to acknowledge those intentional crimes and not disavow the true reasons for the Iraq invasion, not just the wars but the crimes become his, too.

I have not written for my own journal in a while. I have gone on painting portraits, but putting in words my outrage at the continuing wars, the lying and hypocrisy about them, the BP oil disaster, the failure of our government & most others to even try to curb the serious climate crisis has left me speechless. Is it my mother's voice telling me that if I can't say something nice, don't say anything at all? No. It's the sense that many people are stating the problems well, but they are not being listened to. I needed to think carefully about what to say next, what is worth saying while continuing to paint.
In the meantime the on-line branch of YES! Magazine asked me to write an essay for them about why I paint the portraits. YES! uses them in its curriculum. They were only able to print 1000 words. I thought it might be worth while to share the original essay.

YES! Article/ Americans Who Tell the Truth portraits

“The most alarming sign of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.” --- Wendell Berry

I did not want to paint these portraits. Over 25 years I had built up a career as a surrealist painter – enough of a career to pay my bills, work full time, and, it seemed to me, fulfill my obligation to society as an artist. It was an obligation I defined in terms of exploration into the mysteries and ambiguities of the human predicament. I had never painted a portrait.

Then September 11, 2001… then a war launched not against the perpetrators of the crime but against the country of Afghanistan where they ( Saudis and Egyptians) had some training bases… then the blatant and purposely false reasons promoted by our government for the pre-emptive war on Iraq. My sense of obligation as an artist changed.
I could not live with myself unless I used what I do best to expose the lies, to try to tell an honest history, to provide role models --- not of the myths of U.S. exceptionalism, but of citizens who struggled for justice --- and to provide hope by offering stories of courage. I wanted to reclaim my own freedom in the way Utah Phillips once put it: “The degree to which you resist injustice is the degree to which you are free.”

However, I had no idea yet of the portrait series. Mired in anger, grief, cynicism and shame, it seemed that those were the feelings I needed to express in art. But where do those feelings most often lead except to more of the same? How to use those feelings to do something positive? I ended up being guided by shame --- a very isolating and debilitating emotion. I thought --- why do I spend so much time agonizing over my shame for this country? Why don’t I surround myself with people who make me feel proud, people who have insisted that this country live up to its own professed ideals about inalienable rights, equality and justice? Why don’t I invoke their spirits by painting their portraits? The portraits became my way of using negative emotions in the service of positive, anger in the service of love.

We are the stories we tell ourselves. I was fed up with the stories of U.S. entitlement --- the greatest democracy on earth, the most blessed by God, the most powerful, its people the most virtuous. Why all this arrogance? Why no humility? Why do we think these things are true? Do we do our children any favor by teaching them to become actors in this pageant of superiority? Implicit in the myths of our exceptionalism is still the story of Manifest Destiny, that our virtue entitles and justifies our actions no matter how despicable in terms of cost to other people and environments. It’s a myth that says because it’s our might, it is right. It says my country right or wrong because my country is never wrong. Manifest Destiny justifies and makes a positive ethic of collateral damage.

At the same moment that I got the idea to paint the portraits, I knew that the words of the subjects had to on their portraits. The statements being made about various forms of justice had to be literally spelled out. These aren’t just people in paintings looking at you. They are people imploring you to listen and act. I scratched the words into the surface of the paintings rather than painted them on as a metaphor about commitment.

I wonder why we need to tell ourselves stories that set us apart from the rest of mankind, stories of power and domination. It seems to me that our nobility as a people has been discovered --- and continues to be --- through the courageous insistence of our own people that our country fulfill its own promise. Not in how we subdue others, but in how we subdue our own worst tendencies to racism, sexism, classism, and environmental degradation. Our revolution did not end in 1787. Because, at the signing of the Constitution, we did not free the slaves, give political rights to freed African-Americans, Native-Americans, women, the disabled, or poor whites, our revolution was just beginning. I decided to paint portraits of some of the people who had fought to extend rights to everyone. It was a story not about America being its own reward, but about a reward continually needing to be earned.

I do not want to paint celebrities. Nor do my subjects desire to be perceived as such. Celebrities are people the culture idolizes for their disproportionate wealth, power and fame --- people made huge so that the rest of us can feel small and unworthy. My intent was the opposite, to portray real, ordinary people whose persistence and courage changed their own lives and provided role models of all of us. “Without courage,” William Sloane Coffin said, “there are no other virtues.” Any person, adult or child, acting with courage for justice, becomes a teacher, becomes a light in the darkness, encourages all of us to become our own lights. Just as fear is infectious, so is courage. Think of Sojourner Truth, the illiterate ex-slave, who became one of the greatest leaders for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. Today we remember and admire her, not her rich white owner. Which one do we think of when we want to understand the meaning of America? It’s not about celebrity, social status, money or privilege. It’s about courage. Ordinary courage. Colonel Ann Wright’s resignation from the diplomatic corps in protest of the illegal invasion of Iraq was not to make herself a celebrity. She resigned to better defend the Constitution that she had sworn to protect. She had not sworn to protect illegal policies of elected leaders who betrayed the Constitution. Her resignation took a lot of courage. Think of Rachel Carson, dying with cancer, refusing to be intimidated by the chemical companies who were using all of their power to humiliate and discredit her when she exposed how their chemicals were poisoning the natural world. What a debt we owe her courage!

Painting the portraits of people such as these has given me the opportunity to tell their stories to children and adults. Their stories both authenticate the experience of people in unjust situations now and show them the way forward. And in teaching how to struggle against injustice, we also must teach about why there is so much injustice.
Slavery continued after the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, after the recognition of inalienable rights and the necessity of democracy being built on equality. Why is that? We discover that enlightened, otherwise idealistic people, will sometimes fail to live up to their own ideals when their source of profit and power is lodged in the old evils. As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” He also said, “Find out what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong that will be imposed on them.” For me, those two quotes explain all we need to know about the interests of power and the necessity of citizenship.

When I began painting, I had a goal of 50 portraits. I never expected to reach it. I also expected that no one would care what I did, whether I reached that goal or not. I envisioned a stack of portraits in my attic that made me feel better. Now there are 150 portraits. They travel to schools, colleges, libraries, museums, and community centers all over the country. Painting time is now a luxury because of my schedule talking, teaching, and giving workshops. I teach about history, ethics, and citizenship. I would not classify my decision to give up my former artistic career to paint these portraits as an act of courage, but I would call it an act of defiance, of resistance, of refusal to accept a lie as a patriotic reason for war, of refusal to accept that a country that allows a presidential election to be stolen is the greatest democracy on earth. The portraits are an affirmation that only persistent courage and citizenship maintain our ideals. If we want to define the destiny of this country, but more properly, the human enterprise, as a movement toward enlightenment and justice, we have to accept the responsibility of making that happen.

I felt a great sense of freedom when I began to paint the portraits --- the same sense of freedom that is available to anyone who chooses to act for a good cause. That freedom was magnified by another decision --- made before I had painted even the first portrait --- that I would give away the entire collection. I knew I would be painting people who had in effect donated their time on earth --- often risking, and giving, their lives --- so that this country might be more equal, just and honest. My effort had to be a metaphor for those lives. Knowing that I would not sell the portraits freed me to say whatever I thought to be true. Before I began painting the portraits I felt blessed to be part of an exciting artistic community. The portraits have allowed me to be part of a community of people struggling to fulfill the promise of our ideals. Anyone can choose to be part of this community and be welcomed into it.

We are often told that time may alleviate grief. That’s true. But time will not rectify injustice. People have to do that. A government will not often correct injustice unless forced to by its people. When the people do not act to protect their rights and futures, time allows privilege and power to entrench and rigidify the status quo.

Marion Wright Edelman, head of the Children’s Defense Fund, said, “What’s wrong with our children? Adults telling children be honest while lying and cheating. Adults telling children not to be violent while marketing and glorifying violence. I believe adult hypocrisy is the biggest problem children face in America.” I have repeated that quote to students of all ages all over this country and have yet to find a student who disagreed with it. What most students have not thought about is why it is true --- that our society, when forced to choose between care for its children and exploiting them for profit, often chooses profit but can’t admit it. That situation will not change until the people demand that it change and until teachers have the courage to teach the truth about our history, that democracy is made possible not by capitalism but by citizenship.

Painting the portraits has been an enormous education for me. I did not know my own history, nor did I understand the forces that drive it --- backwards & forwards --- until I began this process. As its pain and injustice are oppressive, so, too, its joy and courage in the struggle for justice are inspiring. Cynicism about hypocrisy and corruption seems a rational response to our situation today until one studies the life of John Lewis, Alice Paul, Diane Wilson, Bill McKibben, Dahr Jamail, Lily Yeh or so many others. It’s daunting to oppose the forces that prefer war, daunting to oppose the forces that prefer economic hierarchy, daunting to oppose corporate media and the control that corporations have on the political process, but it’s also exhilarating. And it’s right.

Suffer the Little Children to Wear Our Words

The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. --- Terry Tempest Williams

I spent the first week of March in Davenport, Iowa in residence at St. Ambrose University. Davenport, one of the Quad cities ( along with Moline, Rock Island, and Bettendorf), boasts a first class art museum, the Figge, featuring great paintings by Max Beckmann, Jackson Pollock, Richard Diebenkorn, and Grant Wood. I went to the Figge twice, but not to see the big name artists.

Just inside the entrance was hanging a tapestry triptych by John Nava, a contemporary artist from Santa Barbara. (http://www.johnnava.com/JNS%202006/Neo-Icons/trip.html) Together the three tapestries are ten feet high and 20 feet wide. Each one portrays the same blond, blue eyed, pigtailed young girl in an identical pose. Her expression is haunting --- sober, challenging, mature, impassive, profound. Her stare, as deep and forceful as an indictment, is hard to hold. Long after you look away, you know that she hasn’t. Beside some minor color variations from one tapestry to another, the only difference is the words on the salmon colored tee-shirt she wears. The name of the work is W Haiku. The “W” refers to President George Bush. The “Haiku” is a Japanese style poem that John Nava has constructed from Bush’s words. The girl’s tee-shirt on the left says, “I say bring’em on.” The middle says, “One heckuva job, Brownie.” The right, “Mission Accomplished.” Together they follow the 5 syllable, 7 syllable, 5 syllable haiku format.

For those of you young enough to not remember the context of the words, let me explain:
By July 2003, after the first months of the US attack on Iraq had seemed easy, the Iraqi resistance picked up. Bush, with what seemed arrogant and insensitive bravado ( He wasn’t going to be in danger of Improvised Explosive Devices!), said, “Bring’em on!”
Following that statement the war became much more brutal and there were thousands of American casualties. In August 2005, a couple of days after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, and our government did next to nothing to rescue and feed thousands of trapped residents ( mostly poor African-Americans), Bush complimented Mike Brown, the director of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for a job well done. Bush’s nickname for Mike was “Brownie.” And on May 1, 2003, less than six weeks after the attack on Iraq, Bush declared “Mission Accomplished.” Now, seven years later, the war and the occupation continue.

What moved me deeply about Mr. Nava’s tapestries was how he had employed this young girl to indict adults for allowing these events to have become our history. More importantly, her history. The ironic point that he is making is that history is not simply a tee-shirt that can be pulled off at the end of the day & thrown in a corner. It is not a tee-shirt that she can choose to wear to advertiser her favorite singer or funniest slogan. It’s a tee-shirt she cannot take off. And her life is forever changed for that reason.

She wears the burden of a history that had been propagandized, manipulated by lies not mistakes, and was the result of cynical policies and people who cared not a whit for its victims, including her. She is the victim of a history that was not inevitable. A vigilant press and responsible citizens could have written it differently. I suspect that Bush and Cheney, Rove and Rumsfeld, and all the rest of them, had cynical contempt for the American people they pretended to revere. Why shouldn’t they? Shouldn’t a people who allow themselves to be so easily led by fear and lies be held in contempt? And mustn’t they have held democracy in similar contempt? Why respect a system so easily manipulated? Wasn’t this the system whose legislative and judicial branches sanctified the stolen election of 2000?

The girl in the tee-shirts has in effect been branded. Not her body. Her destiny. Her tee-shirt has shaped her, not the other way around. Her life choices, the money available for her schools, the ability of her government to combat climate change and provide health care, explore alternative energies, and subsidize whole host of social programs, all changed because her government chose an unnecessary war for empire and resources, chose to go trillions of dollars into debt and become a country permanently at war. For lies. Her ability to be safe in the world is changed. Her self esteem as an American is changed. An essential hypocrisy will always be a bad taste in her mouth. She will forever question the wisdom and courage of adults who allowed this history to be made. A history manufactured from lies becomes fact.

Curiously, though, Bush’s statements have some profound truth in them. It’s easy to scoff at Bush for declaring “Mission Accomplished” when the war had barely begun. But he was right. If the mission was to dupe the people & start preemptive war, he succeeded. Once the soldiers were there, it didn’t matter how long it took or how many Iraqis and Americans died. The US was not going to abandon its 14 permanent bases in Mid-East oilfields & the biggest embassy in the world. The oil cronies, the Pentagon, the war profiteers had the last laugh. The little girl in the tee-shirt pays the price. The mission was accomplished. Democracy was successfully subverted. A new reality was in place. Shiites and Sunnis can go on killing each other forever. It makes no difference.

And Brownie did do a heckuva job. Thousands of poor blacks were removed --- dead & alive – from New Orleans as a result of incompetence, neglect, and corruption. Never to return. Gentrification by shock doctrine. The poor, dehydrated victims of the storm were successfully portrayed as criminals as they broke into stores to obtain bottled water ---enemies of property and the white middle class. Recovery would be a boondoggle for some of the same corporations making fortunes from Iraq. Government would be reduced to a hapless doll that could be drowned in the bathtub as some of the neo-cons had prophesized. Ironically the process would be helped by a flood. The government & the people drown together. But the spigot never stops gushing money for the Pentagon and the wars.

In the Mississippi River, on Arsenal Island, the largest government weapons facility in our hemisphere, right across from the Figge Art Museum where I was looking at this artwork, 25 million dollars is being spent to build another weapons factory at the same time that the local school departments are cutting teachers and staff. Should I say exploding teachers and staff? But, can't the teachers be re-trained to make bombs? The kids, too?

And when Bush said, “Bring’em on,” no matter how stupid, callous, or arrogant it may have sounded, that statement and the intensification of the war that followed, helped to shift the US to a permanently militaristic society --- and unending and unendable War on Terror. In a funny way the War on Terror is the Pentagon’s answer to the perpetual motion machine. Outrage precipitates outrage. Our drones and missiles for their IEDs and suicide bombers. Terror for terror. So, bring’em on again! Remember to ask the question, who profits?

What would redeem this girl? What could break the hold of those words on her, break the cycle of terror? What would prove to her that we adults are not drones ourselves, heartless robots whose primary appetite is for profit and comfort and whatever collateral damage is necessary? Because, finally, being complicit in an immoral system, and acting as though we have no ability to alter it, turns us all into robots. Drones. Invisible god-like appetites high in the air throwing missile lightning bolts to continue our consumption and dominance.

What would redeem her? Accountability. Prosecution of the war criminals. If we can’t do that, we have the same contempt for democracy and our Constitution as Bush, Cheney and Rove. The inability to prosecute the worst of our criminals, to really name their crimes, is our fatal flaw as a people. That inability enables the neglect of all our other moral obligations to our children.

The look on the girl’s face is deadly serious, but not angry, not judgmental. It simply asks, “Why do I have to wear this shirt?”

She doesn’t.

Howard Zinn & The State of the Union

Howard Zinn died on January 27, 2010. He’s the fourth of the people whose portraits I’ve painted to have died. The others are William Sloane Coffin, Molly Ivins, and Utah Phillips.
Zinn died at the age of 87 --- ironically, on the same day Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union address. I say “ironically” because Howard Zinn spent his life diagnosing the state of the union, trying to assess the health of our democracy, what people and forces created that health, what impeded. If anyone should have been standing in front of Congress, the Cabinet, the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs, and the American people to tell us the truth --- instead of a toxic mix of hyperbole, fear, military hypocrisy, and false hope --- it should have been Howard Zinn. How reassuring that would have been! For a brief moment I actually thought that the president could not help but mention the passing of a great man like Zinn, the author of The People’s History of the United States. I mean, what modern historian has done more to tell Americans true stories of how our freedoms have been won, the courage it took, the reasons for the opposition?

And then I laughed at myself. How naïve! Presidents flatter the American people, tell them they are the greatest people on the planet, and tell them their government admires them. Presidents don’t tell the people their nobility was earned by opposing the state --- that the proper relationship is for the government to fear the people as it should fear the press. The greatest Americans have fought to expand equality and justice --- people like Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, John Brown, Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Daniel Ellsberg --- and they had to struggle against the state. They were treated as enemies of the United States. These are the stories Howard Zinn told. And that’s why the president could not offer a fond tribute to the death of the man who said democracy is a bottom up, not a top down affair, who said our crises are not exacerbated by civil disobedience, but by civil obedience. Democracy is not a humming little abstract engine of philosophy and laws set in motion by our founding fathers. Democracy is a continuum of individual, courageous acts necessary for its own defense. Democracy’s engine won’t take us anywhere without tinkering troublemakers to keep it running cleanly.

The last thing the president would want to do is remind people that their finest hours have been in the streets, on the picket lines, sitting in, committing civil disobedience, demanding the truth, resisting injustice. When the people fight for their rights, the government must be accountable to its own ideals. As President Obama spoke, he used his lofty language to praise the ideals but ignore the accountability.

A recent cover of The New Yorker magazine showed Obama casually walking on water but suddenly falling through. Their point was that his failure to win health care reform and provide jobs for unemployed workers has rendered him mortal. But what he continues to do is walk on blood. He enlarges America’s illegal and immoral wars, justifies the numbers of civilians killed as collateral damage, feeds a war budget bigger than the military budgets of all the other countries of the world combined, and starves the necessary programs of education, health, environment, and compassion that foster community. If Obama really wanted the programs and policies he seems to espouse --- health care, education, Wall Street regulation, climate change regulation, bipartisanship --- he would follow the advice of Howard Zinn. He’d encourage the people to get out in the streets & stay there until they get the policies they need for a healthy future.

Howard Zinn rarely showed anger. His voice remained halting, humble, dry, bemused, ironic. Like Molly Ivins, Utah Phillips, and William Sloane Coffin he made one laugh at hypocrisy. He used this method to reassure people, people who witnessed corruption and injustice but heard it called the triumph of the American system, that they were not crazy, that what they saw, no matter what the media said, was indeed an outrage. Zinn was indispensable in the effort to have the true stories told. Our media/political barrage of spin, propaganda, and willful falsehood is constant and determined. Lies maintain power. Everything is permissible as a means when the only end being sought is power. Zinn showed us again & again that the soulless pursuit of power destroys democracy.

Many of the mainstream obituaries referred to Zinn as a radical and a hard leftist. This language is meant to frighten you --- as though any sensible person knows that good, normal people are centrists who take comfort in the reasonableness of the middle ground. Radicals are scary passionate people --- not far removed from terrorists. Hard leftists are ideologues who don’t know how to compromise. Well, actually, Zinn was a realist. He merely points out that it took “radicals” like Rosa Parks, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Cesar Chavez, Muhammad Ali, Woody Guthrie and Helen Keller to challenge the comfortable center so that America could live up to its own radical proposition that all people are create equal.

From the moment we are born, each of us is an empty vessel that gradually fills with time and information just as a reservoir fills with water. And just as a reservoir may fill slowly with clean or polluted water, so, too, the time that gradually builds up in us, second by second, ounce by ounce, may tell true stories or false, be clean or polluted. Polluted time is history that has been purposefully injected with false story, time that leads you away from understanding the truth of your country, the time in which you live, and your obligations as a citizen. If you knew that a president was lying about the necessity for a war, you would know that the patriotic thing to do is try to stop it, not fight in it.

So, imagine your life like a clean glass slowly being filled with dirty water, dirty time, time that clouds and obscures your vision of who you are, what is happening around you, and how you should act. Dirty time is not the result of the mixing of competing, relative truths. Dirty time results from the intentional polluting of story with falsehood in order to maintain power and enhance profit. Howard Zinn’s life was spent as a filter, straining and purifying our time, our history. His legacy is in the struggle for true history. True history is not radical, not leftist. Without that truth we drown in our own poisoned stories, the myths of our exceptionalism, the justifications for bailing out banks too big to fail and accepting wars for resources and empire promoted in the name of democracy. In false story we have no idea of how to behave to increase justice because justice becomes equated with power and profit and ruthlessness. We think that a true American hero might be John D. Rockefeller or J.P. Morgan or Robert McNamara instead of Mother Jones or Eugene Debs or Jane Addams …. or Howard Zinn.

Babar’s Mother in the Harvard Club

“The hunter has killed Babar’s mother! The monkey hides, the birds fly away. Babar cries.” ---- Jean de Brunhoff, The Story of Babar.

I was invited last week to unveil my recent portrait of Frances Perkins (http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/pgs/portraits/Frances_Perkins.php) at a fundraiser for the Frances Perkins Center (www.francesperkinscenter.org ). Frances Perkins was the Secretary of Labor under FDR, the first woman in a presidential cabinet and the person most directly responsible for the programs of the New Deal. The event was held at the Harvard Club in New York City.

I had never been in the Harvard Club and was unprepared for my reaction to it. Harvard’s color, as you may know, is crimson. So, crimson predominates. The floors, the walls. The crimson and the dark wood paneling give the building an atmosphere of plushness, power, prestige, blood passing from red toward blue --- a kind of hushed, dark, comfortable, dignified self-satisfaction. One can nearly hear the avuncular creak of the mortised joints of the crimson leather bound chairs. And, as one would expect, memorabilia adorns every surface. Photographs of fresh-faced football players from 100 years ago, champion crews, squash teams --- the hallways and rooms are lined with them. In the library, the great room (Harvard Hall), meeting rooms, and in the dining rooms are the portraits of exemplary Harvard graduates, dignitaries, presidents, members of the corporation. From Teddy Roosevelt to Lawrence Summers. There are two outstanding portraits by John Singer Sargent painted in the 1890s. The air seems redolent with legacy, lineage, and ego as though one’s mere presence here entitles.

Besides the portraits, drawings and photographs, though, the walls are decorated with the busts of large game animals. Surprising. We are not in the hunting section of L.L. Bean, nor in a memorial for Ernest Hemingway. And one suspects that these moose, elk, ibex, warthogs, reindeer, and wapiti that jut off the walls in lifelike, heroic poses, their glass eyes frequently dusted to keep the glint, are not Harvard graduates. Otherwise, the stuffed head and shoulders of the old Rough Rider himself would be similarly mounted. But there is a relationship in the juxtaposition of the famous portraits & the animals. What might it be?

In a word, dominance. Superiority. These mounted heads are the remnants of animals whose grace, strength, speed, intuition, intelligence, and sometime ferocity were no match for a Harvard man with a gun. They remind us who is still pecking at the top of the order. They also suggest that the greatest ambition of a moose with an enormous rack would be a place on these walls. How else would it attain a permanent place in the Harvard Club except by submitting to the violent will of the superior species? This, then, is a great animal’s best use --- to exalt the prowess of the hunter from Cambridge. In a curious way, by juxtaposing portraits with trophies, each portrait subject, in addition to his elite credentials, becomes a great white hunter. Each claims with equal confidence that these great animals have no right to their own lives. Their destinies are props for human ego. Each portrait claims that an animal’s beauty is better appreciated dead than alive, better owned than free.

A mounted trophy represents about a quarter of the original animal. Its head and neck protrude vigorously from the wall as though the remaining bulk is suspended somewhere out of sight and still engaged in flight or maybe a last ditch charge. Abdomen, heart, muscles, lungs, thighs, sexual organs, tail, hooves, blood --- all on the other side, so to speak. We see and are asked to admire the amputated part. And one wonders, why not scalps? Why not, nailed to these walls, the scalps of all the subjugated species and races that have given their lives for the magnification of the wealth embodied here?

In one sense, both the portraits and the trophies elude death. Painted or stuffed, they are immortalized --- the humans for their individual achievements, the animals for the representative, but defeated, strength of their species. The one canonizes ego and fame, the other generalizes a primal attribute. The portrait asks forever to be admired for his accomplishments, the animal forever admits his subjugation. The human heightens his sense of vitality and strength by draining the animal’s. In this context, this blood rite, crimson becomes symbolic, symbolic of a civilized barbarity, a well-mannered ruthlessness. The animals are victims of Manifest Destiny, of a superior species and its self proclaimed ethical right to their land and lives.

I know that the trophies are an anachronism. Few contemporary people --- except, maybe, members of a hunting lodge --- would stuff and mount an animal. Many members of the Harvard Club must feel the objectionable nature of this display --- at least be embarrassed by it. So why are the trophies still here? Does tradition trump ethics? In fact, Mary Saunders, the curator of the Harvard Club collection, told me that if it was up to her, the animal parts would all be gone. The board of the Harvard Club has often considered that in order to attract new young members they should take down the trophies. Repeatedly that suggestion has been nixed. Maybe the club doesn’t want to recruit the kind of members who would object to the animal heads.

The most astounding of the mounts is in the great room, Harvard Hall. The Harvard Club website (www.hcny.com) says this: “Many architectural observers consider Harvard Hall to be the finest clubroom in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world. With its three-story-high ceiling and rich, dark paneling, it is truly a special place.” That’s true. But not the half of it. It’s a huge rectangular box --- 40 feet high, 100 long, 38 feet wide. Just below its massive dark beams hang early 18th Century Flemish tapestries, depicting the life of Alexander the Great, as fine as in any museum. And at ground level, all the way around, are the greatest of the portraits. Near the ceiling on the south end is the bust of an adult elephant, ears and trunk extended, as though in the act of trumpeting. One imagines that even her warning trumpet blast could not fill this space. Surely, no one below wants to hear it. Mary Saunders told me that it was William Sewall who over 100 years ago shot Babar’s mother and donated her and nine other animal heads to the club. But as surely as some members of the Harvard Club feel enhanced, more powerful and confident, by the presence of this dead and still subjugated elephant, they are, in fact, diminished. Perhaps for them she trumpets, no matter what liberal ideas they may profess, a comforting Republicanism, a defense of the status quo. For if this space trumpets any message it is the continuity of power, privilege, and status quo --- that tradition, no matter how morally objectionable, is good.

The appropriate action for the club would be to return the trophies to their countries of origin --- Kenya, Tanzania, Quebec --- and bury them with apology. Or, perhaps, each Harvard Club member should be required to text 500 times on his Blackberry to all his powerful friends Walt Whitman’s dictum: “This is what you shall do: Love the earth, the sun, and the animals.” ( wlt witmun: “ths is wat u gona do: luv the urth, sun, n anmals.”)

The next evening, three blocks away on Broadway, we watched a performance of The Lion King, which celebrates the glories of animal spirit, teaches us that we are all equal and all necessary in the circle of life and death. It awes us with the extravagant beauty and imagination of animal and plant forms. It shows us that the greatest good is the triumph of community, not the triumph of self. It makes clear that the person who would kill another --- human or animal --- to attain power is the enemy of all.

Robert Shetterly