Many in the military fear that “putting their skin in the game” will be forgotten, and some have taken steps to keep memories of their fallen comrades alive. These may be found in an old form of art, the tattoo, specifically the memorial tattoo.

Mary Beth Heffernan, a photographer and associate professor of sculpture and photography at Occidental College, documented U. S. Marine memorial tattoos on film and incorporated them into a gallery exhibit, “The Soldier’s Skin: An Endless Edition.” The exhibit was shown at the Pasadena City College Art Gallery between October 10 and November 17, 2007, which was organized in conjunction with the citywide Pasadena Festival of Art and Ideas. Marines may be a specialized form of soldier, but most Marines prefer to be thought of as Marines rather than soldiers, as referenced in the exhibit’s title. The endless edition refers to Heffernan displaying her photolithographs arranged in stacks on a floor. To me, it brings tombstones to mind. Heffernan encourages viewers to take home copies from the stack, free of charge and reflect on them.

This image of a tattoo on the back of U. S. Marine, Joshua Hall. was photographed by Heffernan on February 3, 2006. It was reproduced as a 24” x 27” poster in unlimited quantity for the show in 2007. Memorialized on dog tags, along with his grandfather and uncle who died in war, are other fallen Marine brothers in arms.

Other Heffernan images may be found on the following links:  http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-1027-heffernan-pg,0,5619148.photogallery?coll=la-tot-entertainment; and http://www.artscenecal.com/ArticlesFile/Archive/Articles2007/Articles1007/MBHeffernanA.html.

The cover of Heffernan’s exhibit catalog features a young girl holding a 19” x 27” poster showing the tattoo on the front of Owen McNamara’s body, taken on February 6, 2006. During his second tour in Iraq, McNamara was twenty years old. While attending a promotion ceremony, ten of his fellow Marines were killed at a booby-trapped patrol base. The tattoo which covers most of his upper torso has inscribed, “In Memory of Our Fallen Brothers,” positioned above a helmet carrying his unit’s identification, sitting on top of a rifle with its bayonet stuck into the ground dated, “Dec. 1, 2005,” flanked by two dog tags bearing “Never” “Forget.” Empty boots are arranged at the base with five shell casings on either side with the last names of his fallen brothers floating above each of the casings. McNamara was wounded on his first tour in Iraq, and he has a tattoo on his arm to capture this memory.

Even though Heffernan focused on the particular, the images tell us much more about war and the current need of Marines to honor the fallen and preserve their memories in a society that prefers to ignore their sacrifices. For some Marines, Heffernan notes, tattoos are rites of passage and much more. Marines are aware of their mortality and some design tattoos in advance that their friends will have inscribed if they are killed.

Heffernan offers some other thoughts on the Marine memorial tattoos. She sees them as a type of ritual wounding. Pain, healing, and inscription are seen as part of the memorial. It allows for a type of communion with fallen brothers through their own suffering, during the creation of the tattoo. Sometimes the pain goes on for hours. As the body heals and the expression is made, Heffernan notes, the trauma associated with them hardens and closes. Summing up, Heffernan states,

Most of all, the memorial is an attempt to assign stable meaning to an event that is beyond representation: death that is random, violent, disorienting, unfathomably gruesome. The active duty marine who memorializes his brother’s death shimmers in an uneasy present between the threat of his own death and his buddy’s past life. By scripting his mourning onto the surface of his body, the marine permanently flags his own trauma and loss; the soldier’s skin becomes a site of mourning the past and warning the future.

Heffernan has been interested in skin as the site that separates the self from the other, and nature from culture. She spent three months in 2006 researching the project in tattoo parlors located in Twentynine Palms, a small town in southeastern California, near a Marine base. Some of the Marines she witnessed have served multiple tours in combat.

Why do many Marines feel the need to memorialize their fallen comrades on their skin? The answer to this question may be found in the essence of the phrase, “skin in the game,” and in a desire to not have these “skins” forgotten. In a sense, the skin of these Marines allows for the preservation of personal, interpersonal and collective memories. The skins capture life and death, the memories of them, and they tell a political story for those who are inclined not to forget.

Over the last weekend in March, a mural depicting Maine’s labor history was removed from the lobby of that state’s Department of Labor building and put into storage at an undisclosed location by order of first-term Governor Paul LePage (R). Along with banishing the mural, LePage directed the renaming of several conference rooms, currently honoring prominent labor figures, to give them a more “neutral” connotation. The governor’s decision was based on complaints he reportedly received, including one asserting the mural constitutes propaganda akin to that of “communist North Korea, where they use these murals to brainwash the masses.”

In a written statement on her website, Judy Taylor, the artist who created the work, notes: “The purpose of the mural is historical, the artistic intent to honor.” This doesn’t necessarily preclude it from being propaganda, but it does beg the question as to what it all means.

The 36-foot long “History of Maine Labor” mural comprises 11 vignettes, starting with scenes from the nineteenth century when workers learned their trades as indentured apprentices, child labor was common, and young women were sent from home to toil in local textile mills. Other panels depict milestones such as the first state Labor Day in 1884 and the inauguration of the private ballot in 1891. While the figures are generally represented as character types, there is one noteworthy portrait, Maine native Frances Perkins, the first woman US Cabinet-level appointee and Labor Secretary under FDR. The mural cycle concludes on a somewhat uncertain note with the failed strike against International Paper begun in June 1987 in Jay, Maine, and a group of workers looking tentatively into the future as the last two panels. The mural was created over the period 2007-8 under the auspices of the Maine Arts Commission, which held an open competition to select an artist to complete the work. Taylor won the competition and consulted with historian Charles Scontras as to which signal events to represent.

The mural was unveiled three years ago to generally positive reviews. In anticipation of the public display, State of Maine Labor Department Deputy Commissioner Judy Gilbert was quoted as saying, “this is going to be a very important piece of art in the long haul, and it is going to be an accurate depiction of organized labor’s role in the history of Maine.” Nationally, The New York Times and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, among others, have criticized LePage’s move, and locally a poll conducted by The Bangor Daily News shows more than 80 percent of respondents against the mural’s removal.

Governor LePage claims the action was based on the desire not to appear “one-sided” in the state’s dealings with both employers and workers, and yet it’s hard to believe that objectivity is the primary factor for someone who has repeatedly avowed an “Open for Business” stance on the part of his administration. Indeed, LePage has joined a number of other recently elected Republican governors in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Florida, and elsewhere who have acted swiftly and concertedly in instituting policies and legislation that roll back the very gains the “History of Maine Labor” celebrates.

The style of the mural, done in oil, is markedly different from the rest of Taylor’s work, which employs a highly naturalistic approach to noncontroversial subjects such as portraits, figure studies, still lifes, and landscapes. Her only other public commission, for Mesa State College, is a series of paintings of Maine coastlines that could have just as easily appeared on the cover of an LL Bean catalog.

The “History of Maine Labor” uses grisaille backgrounds, evoking vintage photographic archives, behind flat graphic color foregrounds to project iconic status for the images depicted. The vignettes have been selected to portray a narrative trajectory of a rise from servitude to a seeming emancipation that in the end may prove all-too fleeting. As the storyline reflects the interests of a particular group, in this case, workers, one might well argue for the mural as functionally propagandistic. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad or unworthy of public display. Anti-smoking advertising, as Harold Laswell noted more than 80 years ago, is also propaganda from a functionalist perspective, though these days we put a gloss on it by calling it “social marketing.” St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome and Raphael’s fresco “The School of Athens” in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican City are basically propaganda, too, though we call those things “fine art.”

To be sure, given the pressures on the public sphere in recent times with increased media concentration, the “History of Maine Labor” offers a much-needed counterpoint to the valorization of capital that continuously bombards us, starting with the Monday morning weekend box-office receipt reports, to the semi-daily monitoring of mercurial financial exchanges, to the 24/7 flow of pop-up ads and product placements, to the media rhapsodies on the lifestyles of the rich and famous, to the whole spectacle of what Leslie Sklair of the London School of Economics calls the culture-ideology of consumerism as well as what is now known as the military-entertainment complex, and so on, all of it propaganda.

The future of “History of Maine Labor” is undecided at this point. But in the debate over the representation of class power in these United States, it’s done its work wherever it ends up.

What would a world look like if an Empire – an unnamed, teetering superpower – could fly to war without cost and no loss of life to its soldiers or the civilians of its target? We may soon find out. Finally we discover the true meaning of a “war game.”

Our waltz through the North African skies provides the test. After a week of bombing of Libyan military targets, apparently not a single American or NATO soldier has been killed. And, despite the pathetic attempts of the Tripoli regime to demonstrate otherwise, there seems not to have been many (or any) civilian casualties. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to war we go.

Add to this happy scenario the pressure to fund the battles not by taxing the burghers of Calais or the burgers of LA, but the suggestion that our military strikes be funded through the frozen assets of the Libyan regime. While President Obama denies that the money will be touched, honey pots are hard to resist. So just so long as we forget the families of Libyan soldiers, it’s all good. We feel noble about saving lives without costing ours. Bombers have the wings of a dove.

It is true that there is no endgame in sight, and it may be, as has been reported, that Al Qaeda militants are working with the rebels and, who knows, the oil ports may close, but everything is now a training mission. And, perhaps, as we roll the dice, the outcome will be sevens, not craps. Endgames are for Dr. Kissinger, not for Dr. Pangloss.

The charm of brutal dictators (think Mubarak, think Duvalier, think Saddam, think Charles Taylor) is that they have ravaged the wealth of their nation, secreting it away where we can get it. Their greed can fund our moral display.

Perhaps the mission in Libya, despite a wartime death toll that would make the citizens of Sendai weep with envy, may yet be judged unsatisfactory. Libya tomorrow might be anarchic, and, yes, the oil spigot might be turned off, but perhaps a new Libya state will be an Easter present for the West.

But I worry as much about success as about failure. Should the Libya adventure be judged a success, and let us be happy in our military imaginaries, what is next? What will be the lesson of Libya. President Obama has just instructed Laurent Gbagbo, the disputed leader of the Ivory Coast, that he must step down. And then there are the Congo and Korea, Belarus and Burma. Some think that Castro’s regime will need only to be jostled to topple.

We can establish our role as the world’s policeman on its dime. There is something appealing about this desire to spread Western values globally. A world absent Qaddafi is a world in which human rights have advanced, if only by a tiny step.

Still I can’t help but be concerned about this plan for the global future. Dangers lurk in Pax Obama. I reject the extreme claim that suggests that there are no standards for human rights. Nor do I believe that every nation deserves the leaders they have. And we should embrace a foreign policy that includes morality as one factor in determining our global commitments. However, I worry about the day that the most powerful actors in the international political system become persuaded that human rights abuses in other lands become the sine qua non for foreign intervention, separate from national defensive interests. This is a world in which weak armies are piñatas for those who are strong, a world in which a community of nations can go wilding. In such a world the justification for the nation state as an entity where the people can determine their own autonomous future is threatened.

When wars are without charge the world becomes a place in which sovereignty is provisional, preserved at the pleasure of global powers. To be sure modern history reveals that sovereignty was always provisional, but there was always a price to intervention. Without that, why should there be limits? Why not Darfur? Why not Guinea?

What are the unintended consequences of such a system? The states that are protected from Pax Obama are those that can exert a cost on attacking nations. But how can weak militaries do so? In the new world order, governments that can develop weapons of mass destruction that can be used against their mighty opponents will have a shield. North Korea is protected by their nuclear program. But not every state has the infrastructure to build atomic tonnage. Biological and chemical weapons are cheaper and more transportable. Suitcase anti-diplomacy. What is startling is that the Libyans have not – yet – fought back against those who are raining bombs. They are playing rope-a-dope. But what is to stop a chemical weapon in a subway or a biological weapon at a sports event? The great powers may think that they set the rules for warfare, rules that benefit them; their targets may have other ideas.

Are we prepared for these new rules of war? If not, the West may discover that the lessons of Libya are not those that have appeared in current military texts. Global hubris, while understandable, often has a heavy price.

The Democrats are right to be concerned over the consequences of anger. Look at Jared Loughner. Is it possible to direct anger against individuals, organizations, and groups without having that anger develop into hatred, contempt, and disgust – affective commitments that would aim to exclude the objects of anger from a role in politics or even (sometimes) from being recognized as human? Anger is a normal part of democracy, exclusion is not. The difference may lie in short- versus long-run feelings. Blame for particular outcomes need not become demands for permanent exclusion, anger need not build into hatred.

If permanent demonization is morally undesirable, can we avoid it without giving up powerful mobilizing tools? Short-run blame and anger can be used to demand structural reforms. But can the demonization let up then, when popular mobilization seems less needed? Or do we need it in order to remain watchful and suspicious, since we know that all laws can be gradually undermined by vigilant opponents?

The difference between the short-run and the long, or between specific actions and general villains, is like that between guilt and shame. People feel guilty over specific things they have done. They feel shame when they see their entire beings as unworthy. Shame can become an ongoing status of being morally unworthy. Can we focus our indignation on actions rather than on actors, by trying to attach guilt to actions instead of shame to actors? This will be easier if we are upset by a particular event than if we are reacting to an ongoing stream of activities. The financial meltdown of 2007-2008 was that kind of event, and – promisingly from an ethical viewpoint – had a number of potential villains rather than a single central villain.

Villains are powerful and malevolent. We try to portray opponents as villains to emphasize the threat they pose. (Weak opponents are clowns, objects for ridicule not fear.) Villains are more frightening, pose more of a threat, and demand more attention when they are evil through and through.  It may not be possible to craft effective political narratives without any villains. Perhaps the best we can do is to create villains out of generic categories rather than naming individuals. But even that loses some of its rhetorical punch.

Victims are weak and good, in need of intervention, in need of heroes to save them. There can be victims without villains, with only a little stretching: we speak of victims of natural forces and disasters. This kind of victim needs comfort and aid. But if victims are going to inspire new policies, or to mobilize widespread political action through a sense of urgency, they usually need villains who are threatening them. Villain-less victims require charity, not politics.

Americans see rich people, according to psychologist Susan Fiske, as powerful but not as good. They are easily crafted into villains, in true populist fashion, especially when they take the form of bankers, stock brokers, and others who do not really “work” for their money, who do not really “earn” it. But since we don’t expect bankers to be good, we are not necessarily outraged when they live up to our expectations. That is where threat comes in: they need to be doing something that directly threatens. The financial meltdown menaced everyone, in this country and around the globe (broad scope also contributes to the threat).

It is rare for Democrats to specify villains in their rhetoric. One reason is the long-running corporate campaign, reinforced by ideological economists, to portray the economy as a natural system with its own laws. Efforts to interfere with those laws backfire in unpredictable ways. You can’t blame nature the way you can humans, so markets may lead to suffering but there is little we can do to alleviate it. This vision has been central to the neoliberal project of recent years. But it has cracks, and occasionally we see individuals and corporations doing bad things to manipulate those supposedly natural markets, things that can have devastating results. These moments are the only chance the Left has of undermining the great Market Vision.

The more obvious reason that Democrats tend not to demonize the financial industries is their dependence on contributions from those same people. In this case, it may be the Democrats’ allies who need to do the demonization necessary to push legislation through Congress, especially the unions. But the unions have done this, more or less, for a long time without reaching a broader public in the way that politicians can.

There was talk, after the Giffords shooting, of ratcheting down the rhetorical tone of American politics. This might help the Democrats if it is mostly the Republicans who calm down. But the Republicans know better. Something similar happened in Israel in 1995. Binyamin Netanyahu constantly and grotesquely berated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as a traitor for his peace talks, until a rightwinger assassinated Rabin. The act shocked and sobered up Israeli citizens. But Netanyahu’s Likud party won a big victory only six months later. Rabin was collateral damage in Netanyahu’s electoral campaign.

**

Politicians face what I call the Naughty or Nice Dilemma: strategic players can go for short-run gains, but often at some cost to their reputations. This is worth it when the gains are important and hard to reverse later. In electoral politics, naughtiness tends to alienate voters in the center but to energize your extremist supporters. In protest movements, it tends to bring down repression by the authorities. Democrats and Republicans tend to take different approaches to this dilemma, but we cannot say which strategy is more effective in general.

Rules for being nice:

Don’t single out individuals, as occurred with Palin’s notorious cross-hair targets.

Instead use abstract categories such as bankers, international financiers, speculators, rich corporations, tax dodgers. Vague threats can be exaggerated easily to seem more urgent.

Focus on actions, not actors.

Rules for being naughty:

Find loaded terms for villains, to build them up as strong and menacing: parasites, vampires, leeches, and so on.

Question their motives: this makes them seem more threatening AND more immoral (because they are duplicitous). But if they are malevolent rather than simply misguided, more permanent constraints may be needed.

Name names: individuals give concreteness and plausibility to general positions and characterizations of groups. One villain is assumed to represent many more, lurking out there.

Name calling: go back and forth between individuals and abstract categories, as each illuminates the other.

**

For moral reasons, we may still wish to avoid this kind of demonization. But let’s not pretend that being nice is always the most effective strategy as well as the most upright one.

As we reflect upon the dramatic political developments in North Africa and the Middle East, and as we anticipate a tough political battle in the United States about the budget and the role of government, James M. Jasper, a sociologist of social movements, emotions, and strategy, reminds us in this post and in another tomorrow that politics and public debate are  not only reasoned. They also have an emotional side that must be critically understood. – Jeff

Emotions matter in politics. This is evident at home and abroad. In the last two years, we have seen American citizens shouting at their own Congressional representatives in town hall meetings, a hateful Jared Loughner attempt to assassinate his own representative, and a million Egyptians assemble in Tahrir Square and topple a repressive regime.This leads to a pressing question: What emotions matter and help mobilize political action?

A sense of threat and urgency, anger and indignation (which is morally tinged anger), sometimes a desire for revenge, and, on the positive side, hope that the dangers can be resisted – one of the most effective ways to pull these together is to find someone to blame. If there is no one to blame, collective mobilization lacks a focus. It is more likely to be the kind of cooperative endeavor we see after natural disasters: shock, but no politics. And the more concrete and vivid the perpetrators, as the case of Hosni Mubarak showed, the more focused and intense the outrage.

In such mobilization we see the “power of the negative”: negative emotions grab our attention more than positive ones. The events in Egypt and Libya suggest that the power of the negative is increased when hatred, rage, anger, and indignation are focused against one person. Most revolutionary coalitions are held together only by this outrage over the old ruler or regime. It is hard to question the mobilizing power of such feelings, whether the mobilization is for voting in elections or efforts at revolution.

But are there other ways to mobilize large numbers of people? In the US, Democrats’ electoral campaigns, and especially Obama’s, are full of reasoned arguments, based on empirical evidence, with a regard for fiscal responsibility and logical coherence. They mostly avoid nasty frontal attacks on opponents, such as the gun lobby, bankers, or other potential targets. As Dr. Phil might ask, “How’s that working for you?”

The strong Democratic showing in 2008 might reinforce our civilized sense that rational discourse, buttressed by the opinions of experts and especially economists, can prevail even in a nation where a solid third of the electorate believes in the literal truth of the Christian Bible. But did the Democrats win because of their reasoned arguments? Or because the elections occurred during one of the nation’s worst financial collapses ever? (Even eight years of the worst president in US history might not have been enough without the economic crisis.) Let’s not fool ourselves. In normal times an articulate “egghead” like Obama could not win.

2010 was a more typical election in the United States.

Since Plato and Aristotle, commentators have feared strong emotions in public debate. They have twisted their logic to defend rhetoric and democracy even while recognizing the power of emotions. They distinguish between good and bad rhetoric, thinking and feeling, or real and sham democracy. There is no way around it: democratic procedures can lead to results that no one likes – and certainly not the intellectuals who write about such things.

In the United States, Democratic politicians are rarely as cutthroat as their Republican opponents, who simply do not believe in democratic procedures as much as they believe in the substance of outcomes. For instance, Republicans continually attack the legitimacy of the judicial branch – until they need it to steal elections as in 2000. But one result of the Democrats’ decency is that they lose elections even when the majority agrees with their positions. Another downside of decency is that the Democrats lost an opportunity to use the financial meltdown of 2007-2009 to make the kind of structural reforms we desperately need. And the reason is their unwillingness to pin the blame on anyone too directly. If the Democrats could not make financiers and hedge fund managers into robust villains after the meltdown, they are simply not political beasts. They will never have a better chance to fix our financial system.

The emotional dynamics differ somewhat for voting and for protest movements. The organizational structure for the former is already there, so that a small emotional push can move people to vote: it is easy to do. Participating in a longer-term movement requires the creation of networks and organizations and communications and other infrastructure in addition to the arousal of emotions. In voting, the power of the negative helps explain the “pendulum of threat” that moves back and forth: one side wins, the other side feels threatened and mobilizes more energetically in the next election, and so on.

Tuesday August 10, 1948 was, as it happened, a turning point in American culture, a small moment but one of major significance. On this day, Candid Camera was first broadcast on American television. For over sixty years Candid Camera and its offspring have held a place in popular culture. The show, long hosted by Allen Funt, amused viewers by constructing situations in which unsuspecting citizens would be encouraged to act in ways that ultimately brought them some measure of public humiliation, documented by hidden cameras. These naïve marks were instructed to be good sports. “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera” became a touchstone phrase.

Perhaps the show was all in good fun; perhaps it contributed to a climate of distrust whereby citizens thought twice about helping strangers. Still as long as the show remained in its niche on television it attracted little public concern and less disapproval. Candid Camera was, one might suggest, beneath contempt. What happened for sure is that in time the use of hidden cameras has mutated. CCTV (closed circuit television) cameras; the tracking of citizens by governments and corporations, is so endemic to the modern polis, it has  become unremarkable. Surveillance is not merely an obscure commentary by Jeremy Bentham or Michel Foucault, but a reality of which we instruct our children. These cameras are treated as fundamental to security. And perhaps they are.

Technology has its way with us. As cameras have become more portable and as video has become more viral, the hidden camera has become an essential tool of the political provocateur. At one point both law enforcers and investigative journalists (think Mike Wallace) relied on hidden cameras to catch the bad guys engaging in despicable acts. The scenes made for effective prosecutions and mighty television.

But today the offspring of the old show have run amok, shaking American politics. Hidden cameras are everywhere. And they are used in a fashion that is quite different from the civic-mindedness of the journalists of 60 Minutes. Today, secret puppet masters are not inclined to trap their targets in illegality, but rather to provoke discrediting humiliation, merging S&M with MTV. And, sad to say, it works.

As with many innovations, these tricks are bipartisan, even if the cunning Funts are not. Unlike Candid Camera, these tricksters are directly dangerous to our commitment to democratic openness. They aim to annoy and discredit without prior evidence that provocation is warranted. They place people on their guard and off their game. As the penumbra of the Watergate scandal reminds us – along with the pranks of Dick Tuck on the liberal side of the ledger – dirty tricks are not a novelty of the new millennium. But what was once an occasional localized annoyance has been replaced with the contagion of phony meetings and politically motivated prank calls. Puerile hoaxers approach politicians or agency employees sweet-talking them in common cause to say something that they had no intention of saying. Often the embarrassment results from a desire to go along, not recognizing that agreeing with a bonehead can be grounds for termination.

The poster child for Candid Camera politics is the conservative gadfly, James O’Keefe, who as a student at Rutgers University once attempted to have Lucky Charms banned from the cafeteria because of their offensiveness to Irish Americans. That was cute, I admit. But it was much less cute when he secretly filmed workers at Planned Parenthood giving abortion advice to underage women, and ACORN employees helping pimps. Most recently, by pretending to represent an Arab-American charity, his crew encouraged an NPR senior Vice President for Fundraising to reveal left-wing bias; a viral record that brought both NPR’s VP and its CEO to their knees. We have neocons, paleocons, and now a Videocon. O’Keefe’s targets were hardly criminals, but his films had toxic effects.

The left has a little catching up to do, but Ian Murphy, of the website the Buffalo Beast, attempted to even the score by pretending to be conservative billionaire David Koch. In a phony phone call with Wisconsin governor Scott Walker the two chatted in a most amiable fashion, while Walker revealed his hard right preferences.

The problem is not that O’Keefe and Murphy did not get the “goods.” The problem is that they did. Through their duplicity, they revealed private and discrediting moments. But the real danger is how the profusion of what we might label YouTublicity will shape openness in our culture. As hidden camera deceit multiplies, we will be more cautious in our social relations, more willing to erect barriers preventing contact with strangers, and more likely to demand credentials. I think we already have enough gatekeepers separating citizens and public servants. Do we need more? Candid Camera politics can amuse or rile us, but should this proliferation continue, it is certain that in the end the joke will be on us.

When I first read Elzbieta Matynia’s response to the massive earthquake in Japan, I respected the sincerity of her judgment, but thought that it was a bit much. It seemed to me that actually the news reports I was reading suggested a much more positive story than the one she seemed to be reading. The earthquake was the most severe in recorded Japanese history, much more powerful than the devastating ones in Haiti and Chile. Yet the death toll seemed to be quite modest, a little more than one hundred people. This suggested to me the wonders of modern technology. As the father of an architect, I was proud of what humans can do when they put their minds to it.

Then the reports began to come in about the tsunami, reminding me, reminding us, the limits of human power in the face of a massive natural force. My decision to introduce Elzbieta’s reflections with the suggestion that perhaps thousands have been killed, even though at the time the estimate was still between one and two hundred, were sadly justified. Now in the video reports we tremble in fear at the power the devastation reveals. This clearly puts us in our place.

But it is the third dimension of the disaster, human and not natural, that is the most humbling. While the wonders of technology are revealed in minimizing the effects of the earthquake, the dangers of our technology are revealed in the still escalating nuclear disaster. It reminds us that we are capable of destroying our world, demonstrating the deadly potential of atoms for peace, along with atoms for war.

Indian Point Energy Center © Daniel Case | Wikimedia Commons

I feel compassion, perhaps pity, for the victims in Japan, something that we will return to tomorrow in a post on distant suffering. But given the powers of modern media and given that I write these reflections a few miles downstream from the Indian Point (Nuclear) Energy Center, the suffering doesn’t seem that distant.

As I suggested earlier, this requires political action, preceded by deliberation. Wise folk tell us that given global warming, we must use nuclear energy, such as Energy Secretary Steven Chu, but others warn that this is a power that ultimately can’t be tamed, more like a tsunami than an earthquake. Now is the time for informed deliberate debate.

Half a century ago, Tom Lehrer, our iconic musical satirist, paid ironic tribute to National Brotherhood Week. In introducing his cracked paean to tolerance, Lehrer asserted that ‘I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that.’ His grievance is all too common. We have resided for some time in an age that frets about hate speech, but when does distaste become hatred? And is sharp and personal talk bad for the polity? The shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords temporarily invigorated the debate over civility, but such moments have a way of not lasting. That was so January. Biting discourse draws attention and motivates both supporters and opponents.

In the immediate aftermath of the Tucson killings, some on the left focused their attention on those in the Tea Party who expressed vivid – and yes, offensive – animus for President Obama. There surely are those whose colorful language hides an absence of mindfulness. But, as conservatives knew well, their time for grievance would come soon. After all, we have a United States senator who titled his literary effort, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot. And there was the backbench Democrat from Memphis who compared Republican tactics to Nazi propaganda. Hitler would have George Soros’ wealth if he could receive a tiny royalty for each use of his name or image.

Even more dramatic is the boisterous crowd of teachers on the mall in Madison, Wisconsin. Protesters are fighting for collective bargaining rights, and in the process compare their newly elected governor, Scott Walker, to Hosni Mubarak and worse. Others will judge the justice of the Badgers’ cause, but who has taught these demonstrators about the villains of history? By the way, as an Illinois resident, I welcome the fleeing Democratic state senators and urge them to pay our newly increased income tax, part of which will go to teachers’ pay.

The question is how concerned should we be with Governor Walker’s and President Obama’s detractors? What is hate speech? Is it just lusty talk? Is it something to reject and to fear? Or, is it the cornerstone of our rough-and-tumble republic, a democracy that our founders would recognize? When discussed by scholars, such as Jeffrey Goldfarb in Civility and Subversion, civility in the public sphere is often linked to the responsibilities of mainstream intellectuals (Walter Lippmann or John Dewey), but it can equally be extended to C. Wright Mills, Thomas Sowell, or Frances Fox Piven. These thinkers and writers have responsibilities to both lasting discourse as well as to immediate change. But issues of civility and incivility apply also to those who stand outside ivied gates – the Keith Olbermanns, Glenn Becks, Frank Riches, and Bill Kristols of this world.

In fact, there is very little evidence that impassioned rhetoric leads to violence. Admittedly not none, as the assassination of Lincoln, the beating of Senator Seward, or the murder of Yitzhak Rabin reminds us. But objections often seem more aesthetic than criminological. The transposition of scorn and dislike into hatred by those who object to hot talk is misleading, even when we are talking about what has been termed ‘group libel.’ A person who finds African-Americans witless, Jews mercenary, or bankers heartless denigrates the group, but perhaps the heated emotion of hatred does not apply. Maybe they don’t hate, but just scorn, which is different from hate.

As Tom Lehrer breezily suggested, objections to hate speech, when it comes to characterizing a group, can themselves be labeled hate speech. When examining objections to individuals the problem grows thornier still. Someone can object deeply to the president, any president, accusing him of leading the nation into an inescapable quagmire, a world of fascist or communist sympathies. Surely these claims reveal real dislike. As Emily Eisenberg and I once pointed out in comparing reactions to Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton (Tricky Dick and Slick Willie, in their sexualized identities), some leaders raise ire, often less for what they have done, than for who they are.

But it is hard to pin down hatred. A syllogism suggests that I judge critically, you dislike, and they hate. Still, even if one can find such hatred, perhaps we should see the commitment to discourse as opposed to violent action, as within the boundaries of civil society. The allegiance to debate reflects the principles of the Founders, it doesn’t deny them. Being engaged in left or right disruption – talk or action – can be handled by a confident society. Yes, legislators, justices, and government officials must find grounds for reaching agreement, but they can do this – and over centuries have done this – within a welter of voices. The more some say that things have changed, the more that we can say that they have remained the same.

So I am not dismayed about the absence of a congenial debate – even while I wish that those with whom I disagree would sit down and shut up. Throughout our history, tough talk has been common as Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Bush pere and fils can attest. Fiery talk doesn’t lead to fire, it leads to commitment and, sometimes, to social change. As sociologist William Gamson has pointed out, militant social movements tend to be more effective than mousy ones. Get up on the soapbox and shout, as long as there are those who are more pragmatic to do the hard lifting of compromise. Hosni Mubarak is just like . . . fill in the blank.

Yesterday Anna Paretskaya presented a report on the political standoff in Madison Wisconsin.  This stimulated comments by Michael Corey and Iris, the first generally critical of Paretskaya’s presentation and analysis, the second supportive.  This evening, Chad Alan Goldberg, Vice President, United Faculty & Academic Staff (UFAS), AFT 223 and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered his analysis in a reply to that discussion, which I think requires deliberate consideration as a post of its own.  -Jeff

1. Dr. Corey suggests that Anna Paretskaya’s account of events here in Wisconsin is insufficiently objective and lacks a “suspension of belief.” To be sure, knowledge of the social world is always socially situated. Those of us with backgrounds in the labor movement–those of us who are public employees, like Anna and myself, whose collective bargaining rights are now threatened in Wisconsin–are indeed likely to see things differently than someone, like Dr. Corey, with a background in corporate management. However, the tradition of critical theory suggests the possibility of another kind of relationship between the observer and the events she observes. As Max Horkheimer put it, “If … the theoretician and his specific object are seen as forming a dynamic unity with the oppressed class, so that his presentation of societal contradictions is not merely an expression of the concrete historical situation but also a force within it to stimulate change, then his real function emerges…. His profession is the struggle of which his own thinking is a part.”

2. Much of Dr. Corey’s comment lays out the differing claims of the social and political actors in Wisconsin in a “he said, she said” manner without making any real attempt to investigate the substance of those claims. As social scientists, we are interested in facts. And the facts are on the side of the tens of thousands of protesters gathering day after day at the Wisconsin state capitol.

a. Corporate-funded right-wing propagandists insist that public employees are a new privileged class which taxpayers can’t afford. However, as the Wisconsin State Journal reported, a new study by the Economic Policy Institute shows that public employees make less than private workers, when one controls for education and examines total compensation.

b. The fiscal crisis which Governor Walker and Wisconsin Republicans are using as a pretext to eliminate collective bargaining rights and destroy public-sector unions is largely manufactured. The Capitol Times (a Wisconsin newspaper) recently reported: “To the extent that there is an imbalance — Walker claims there is a $137 million deficit — it is not because of a drop in revenues or increases in the cost of state employee contracts, benefits or pensions. It is because Walker and his allies pushed through $140 million in new spending for special-interest groups in January.”

c. Walker’s push for more tax breaks for corporations is further evidence that he’s not interested in balancing the budget. At a time when Wisconsin has a budget shortfall of $137 million, Governor Walker signed a law lavishing $117 million in tax breaks on corporations. As the Wisconsin State Journal reported, these corporate tax breaks will “only deepen the state’s fiscal woes.” Apparently, Wisconsin can afford big tax giveaways to corporations which add to the state’s budget deficit, but not social spending for education, health care, etc. Or, to put it differently, Wisconsin’s current Republican leadership wants to pay for corporate tax breaks with draconian cuts to education (tuition at my university would need to rise by 26% over two years to compensate), health care, and so. This is income redistribution in the wrong direction.

d. On Friday, Feb. 18, Wisconsin’s state and local public employees offered to accept all economic concessions called for in Governor Walker’s budget bill – including Governor Walker’s pension and health care concessions that he says are needed to solve the state budget challenge. With economic issues off the table, it is clear that the only rationale for Republicans continuing to push the governor’s budget bill is to cripple public-sector unions and eliminate public employees’ collective bargaining rights.

In sum, this conflict is not primarily about money, as Dr. Corey and much of the media suggest. It is about the right of teachers, nurses, and other public employees to have a voice in the workplace.

3. Dr. Corey says that “a fundamental question by many supporters of private sector unions is whether or not public sector unions are a good idea.” I was struck by the resounding answer given to this question by the large numbers of private-sector trade unionists who came to the Wisconsin state capitol this week to show their solidarity with public-sector employees. I saw them and met them first-hand. They understand that the anti-labor and pro-corporate right wing, having decimated unions in the private sector (where only 6.9% of workers belong to unions), is now going after public-sector unions (where 36% of workers belong to unions). The right-wing agenda is clearly to destroy what remains of the labor movement in this country.

4. Regarding democracy:

a. Dr. Corey has a narrow and anemic conception of democracy. He is concerned about public employees calling in sick to demonstrate (a “sick out”) and Wisconsin Senate Democrats leaving the state to force Republicans to negotiate. A far more robust conception of democracy can be found in the chapters in Cohen and Arato’s Civil Society and Political Theory on social movements and civil disobedience.

b. The principle threat to democracy in Wisconsin does not come from union members or Democrats. It comes from the governor’s radical and extremist assault on the civil rights of public workers–rights which some public workers have exercised for half a century–to collectively bargain. I quote from a statement signed by hundreds of University of Wisconsin faculty, including myself:

“As scholars, teachers and citizens, we recognize that the right to form unions and bargain collectively has been essential to the establishment and enrichment of democracy in Wisconsin, in the United States and around the world. The International Labor Organization, which the United States joined in 1934, states that ‘the right of workers and employers to form and join organizations of their own choosing is an integral part of a free and open society’ and includes collective bargaining rights among the four ‘fundamental principles and rights at work.’ The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the United States endorsed in 1948, states that all workers have the ‘right to form and to join trade unions for the protection’ of their interests. Since 1935, it has been federal policy in the United States to ‘encourage collective bargaining’ as a tool for avoiding labor conflict and improving wages and working conditions in private industry. The state of Wisconsin led the way in extending those principles to the public sector, adopting a 1959 law stating that public employees, elected officials and the public itself all have an interest in ‘industrial peace, regular and adequate income for the employee, and uninterrupted production of goods and services.’ Toward that end, the law affirmed that ‘an employee has the right, if the employee desires, to associate with others in organizing and bargaining collectively through representatives of the employee’s own choosing, without intimidation or coercion from any source.’ We are concerned, therefore, about the Governor’s proposal to deprive public employees of the right to bargain collectively in Wisconsin.”

c. The assault on public-sector unions in Wisconsin and other states is an attack on democracy for another reason too. As Rachel Maddow reported:

“In 2010, post Citizens United, 7 of the 10 top spending groups [groups that spent the most money on elections] were all right wing…. The only non-conservative groups that cracked the top ten were the public employees union, the SEIU, and the teachers union. That’s it. Unions are the only competition Republicans have in electoral politics…. Without unions, essentially all of the big money in politics would be right-wing money.”

Perhaps a veteran at one of the mass rallies in the Wisconsin state capitol this week put it best: he said he had not fought for democratic rights overseas to have Governor Scott Walker take away his rights at home.

Friends and colleagues, at a time of crisis in Wisconsin and other states, maybe we all need to ask ourselves a fundamental question: Which side are you on?

Anna Paretskaya is a PhD candidate in sociology at the New School for Social Research and lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her primary academic focus is on the study of political and economic liberalizations and the relationship between democracy and capitalism.  She has a front row seat observing the developing events in Madison. This is the first of a series of reports.  Jeff

What started as a stunt by a group of University of Wisconsin-Madison students to deliver a few hundred “Valentine’s Day” cards from students, staff, and faculty to Governor Scott Walker asking him not to slash the university budget has now become national news: close to 100,000 Wisconsinites have come to the State Capitol in Madison over the past four days to protest the so-called “budget repair” bill, effectively occupying the building since Tuesday, diverting traffic from the streets around the Capitol, and hindering Madison’s recent, but beloved tradition, the Winter Festival, that was to take place in downtown’s isthmus area this weekend despite unusually warm temperatures.

On Tuesday, when state legislature’s finance committee was to take up the discussion of the governor’s bill, thousands of people from all over the state descended on the Capitol to lobby against it. At the 17-hour-long committee hearing—a “citizen filibuster,” as one speaker dubbed it—hundreds of Wisconsin residents spoke, nearly all against the bill, and scores expressed dismay at the governor’s attempt to take away the right of 175,000 Wisconsin’s public sector employees to collectively bargain. It wasn’t only union activists, Madison’s aging hippies, and liberal university professors, who waited for up to seven hours to make their two-minute statement before the committee. Amid nurses and teamsters and teacher aides were several self-described Reaganites, fiscal conservatives, and Republicans (or newly ex-Republicans) who were just as distraught by the governor’s heavy-handedness. The UW-Madison’s teaching assistants’ union (TAA), which has been representing graduate employees for the past 40 years, expressed the prevailing sentiment best: “This bill is an affront to democracy on two important levels. First, it proposes to completely eliminate the fundamental human right of fair representation and voice in determining workplace conditions. Second, the process for the passage of this bill has been shamefully undemocratic.” The governor of the state that prides itself on transparency and integrity of the political process, referred to here as “The Wisconsin Idea,” wanted the legislature to pass the bill within a week of its introduction, not giving the pubic much time to weigh in, nor for the elected representatives a chance to debate amendments.

Most of the rally chants and handmade posters that now adorn the hallways of the Capitol are about democracy, solidarity, government accountability, and unions, not so much about pay cuts or benefit reductions (although no doubt all working families in Wisconsin are concerned about those too). In the 1930s, Wisconsin was a birthplace of one of the largest public-employee unions in the country, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and the first state to pass a comprehensive collective bargaining law some twenty-five years later. Today, protesters of the bill undoubtedly sense that they are again on the front lines of the battle for the fate of the labor movement. But it seems that for many of them it is just as much about democracy and exercising their rights more generally: there are constant references to the recent democratic uprising in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. A recent army veteran said at one of the rallies that he had not fought for the democratic rights overseas to have them taken away from him at home. Daily rallies outside of the Capitol begin with the singing of “The Star Spangled Banner.” The crowd inside the building recited the “Pledge of Allegiance” along with the lawmakers at the opening of Wednesday’s legislative session that was broadcast on closed-circuit TV.

The bill is still up for a vote: the governor hasn’t backed away from  any of its draconian stipulations, and Republican legislators have vowed not to amend it in any significant way. Supporters of the bill are expected in Madison on Saturday. It is unclear how many will arrive and how many of them will actually be from Wisconsin. According to a recent poll, two thirds of Wisconsinites believe the bill goes too far and strongly oppose it (including the provision to remove collective bargaining rights). Even though the legislative committee stopped taking testimony early Wednesday morning, people keep signing up to speak before an on-going listening session by the state assembly’s Democrats.

At the very least, the governor’s stance has clearly galvanized the labor and progressive movements. A running joke among local labor activists has been: “Who hired Scott Walker as a lead organizer?” Although they also wish this wasn’t gallows humor.