Javier Sicilia Speaks Poetry to Power

Mexican poet and founder of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity Javier Sicilia was in New York City on Friday, 7 September, where he made a short speech that's referencing of several other popular poets before getting to the inventors of peaceful revolution – King and Gandhi – or any mention of the movements that they inspired proves once again just how much the world needs our poets.

The speech is titled Let's give peace a chance, words that have been cached in cliché in a culture that refuses to take peace seriously, but which deserve much more than a knowing nod of nostalgic agreement. They are words that, when de-compartmentalized from that place in our brains where we store warm, fuzzy memories of grandma's cinnamon rolls and cozy family gatherings around the Christmas tree and our innocent first kisses the words to our favorite feel-good songs, hold the power of an idea unleashed from the confines of the ideal, a dove released from its bondage as a symbol of unattainable, perfect peace, freed to bring the reality of peace down to earth as a participant of an ecosystem where every creature innovates and creates its own niche.

In the individualist culture of the United States, the reality that many times, relationships are symbiotic in nature is washed over by the adrenalin rush of competition for resources. In the same way, the vision of an apocalyptic Mad Max future grabs the imagination, denying the chance for peace from being heard above the gripping din.

What this Mexican poet is seeking to do is what all poetry can do, if only we would let it. With the enduring strength of careful language, poetry serves as a connective force, connecting and reconnecting people, places, and ideas through past, present, and future, vanquishing the myth of separation with which those who hold so much power in our societies veil the truth of our ability to refuse to accept their version of the way things must be.

It was the words of Jim Morrison with which Javier Sicilia introduced the deeply Mexican notion that the dead can, by invitation, be with us in a meaningful way. After quoting that martyr of the culture wars, he began his speech in New York: 

For all the dead that this absurd war against drugs has left, but have come with us from far away; for the dead that this terrorist imbecility of the 11th of September left behind, and whom at the side of these victims of violence have been summoned here by the verses of Morrison to “anoint the earth”, “to announce the sadness” that overcomes us and to pray with John Lennon to “give peace a chance”, I ask for a minute of silence.

Every year, at the beginning of November, Mexicans summon their dead – to home altars and cemeteries – with such enticements as golden cempoalxochitl (Mexican marigolds), candles, pulque or tequila, sugar skulls, pan de muertos (sweet bread of the dead), and bowls of comforting atole.

Javiar Sicilia brought this stubborn Mexican refusal to deny the sadness of memory on a caravan of care that passed along the U.S.-Mexican border from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, then headed up through the heart of Texas, over to New Orleans, on through Jackson, Miss., Montgomery, Ala., Atlanta and Fort Benning, Ga., and then up to Chicago and over to New York City, to end up in Washington, D.C.

The Caravan for Peace with Dignity and Justice has sought to expose the roots of drug violence in Mexico, raise awareness about the devastating effects of the War on Drugs particularly upon communities of color in the United States, and to inspire civil society to demand changes in the priorities of the most powerful democracy on earth.

To expose, raise awareness, and inspire – this is what poets and other thought-provokers do, and it is through words that the legacy of an individual's actions, which can only take place at one moment in time and in one location at a time, can be shared through space and time. The Caravan certainly made its enduring marks on the lives of many people who had the good fortune of being in each place and time that the pilgrims of peace stopped to expose, raise awareness, and inspire.

Now is when poetry can serve as a mnemonic device for our consciences to remember to move forward and take action rather than allowing ourselves to revert to our more comfortable, compartmentalized, disconnected, and forgetful cultural habits.

Ojalá podamos merecer que nos llamen locos, como han sido llamadas locas las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, por cometer la locura de negarnos a olvidar en los tiempos de la amnesia obligatoria.

If only we could merit being called crazy, as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have been called crazy, for committing the insanity of neglecting to forget in times of obligatory amnesia.

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, in his poem, los caminos del viento, The Ways of the Wind, reminds us that to forget our past is to allow others reshape our reality. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo are the women who have been gathering in front of the Presidential Palace in Buenos Aires every Thursday for decades, ever since their children were abducted and "disappeared" by their government during Argentina's disgraceful Dirty War.

Eduardo Galeano's ode to the courage of hope ends with the words, 

no tienen fronteras los mapas del alma ni del tiempo,

neither maps of the soul nor of time have frontiers.

With these words, he connects souls across space and time, just as Javier Sicilia's caravan journey maps connections between souls across space and time. Along the U.S.-Mexican border, the fates of the citizens of two nations are inextricably tied together. And their fates are strung together with those of Indigenous Americans in New Mexico and African Americans in the agricultural South and the soldiers from throughout Latin America who have come to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Fort Benning, Ga., to learn how to wage war against the illegality of drugs and uphold the illusion of security in their countries and more African Americans and Mexican Americans and so many more people from less developed countries who have come without official sanction to the industrial North to try to forge a better life.

In New York City, Javier Sicilia spoke, as he did in each place where he spoke, in the language of the place. To introduce his Caravan to people in the United States, he began his essay for the Huffington Post by quoting Bob Dylan. In Atlanta, he summoned collective memories of Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Maya Angelou. In Chicago, he invoked the image of Al Capone as a reminder of prohibition's failures. For New Yorkers, John Lennon's words struck the chord that blends together all of the irrational ironies of violence that the Movement for Peace is all about.

And just as Javier Sicilia speak through the voices of others, so did John Lennon voice idea of imagining peace expressed by Swedish writer Stig Dagerman, who understood that life is little more than how we choose to face our fears. His poem, En dag om året, Just Once a Year, begins: 

En dag om året borde alla låtsas,    

att döden vilar i ett vitt schatull.

Inga stora illusioner krossas

och inge skjuts för fyra dollar skull.

Why don't we make believe just once a year

that Death has drowned beneath the deep blue sea!

No one's life is undermined by fear,

and no one shoots his neighbor for a fee.

The Mirror of History

The story about medical experimentation in Guatemala is a harrowing reminder of our past, yet our reaction to this story is itself a snapshot of where our society is today, and I see a welcome image of hope for Progressives, in this time when disillusionment and disappointment seem to be almost overwhelming.

Amy Goodman's October 5 interview with Susan Reverby, the medical historian who recently brought to light the unpublished documentation of the project, puts the incident in perspective. As an authority on the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, she is very familiar with the social attitudes of those decades when the lives of some were simply and plainly not considered to be as worthy of respect as the lives of others. In the case of Tuskegee, poor black sharecroppers in Georgia who were found to already have syphilis were studied, without being told that it was syphilis that they suffered from, they were lied to about the nature of their medical treatment, and they were never treated for their disease, even after penicillin was found to be an effective cure.

The study in Guatemala is even more egregious due to the fact that individuals who were institutionalized in a prison and in an insane asylum, as well as some army soldiers, were actually infected with syphilis, surely without their knowledge, although what they were told was a detail that had been left out of these newly discovered physician's notes. And even in the atmosphere that allowed for the Tuskegee experiment to go on for forty years, from 1932 to 1972, Susan Reverby points to a comment in a letter referring to a statement by the surgeon general himself, showing that he knew that it would not be ethically acceptable in the United States, as the most shocking aspect of her discovery.

On one hand, it is difficult to acknowledge the wrongs of our nation's past. Many would prefer not to think about them. When Glenn Beck spoke of “restoring honor” to the United States during his rally in Washington, for example, his statement rang of the personal experience of a man who seeks to put his own past behind him. He said,

“Let's be honest. If you look at history, America has been both terribly good and terribly bad. It has been both, but to concentrate on the bad instead of learning from the bad and repairing the bad and then looking to the good that is still out in front of us within our reach— We have a choice today. We can either let those scars crush us or redeem us.”

When Glenn Beck looks into the mirror of history, while acknowledging the bad, he cannot bear to dwell for long on those painful aspects. Assuming that what has worked for him in his own life will work for the nation, he turns toward the language of religious redemption, seeing those shameful instances as a part of a necessary spiritual path, as all-too-human lapses, their lessons being those of faith rather than of seeking deeper self-awareness. And whenever Progressives are characterized as the “blame America first” crowd, this abject refusal to look in the mirror and take responsibility for our collective actions, particularly in the “America” that stretches all the way to Tierra del Fuego, the colossal societal disconnect is strengthened.

On the other hand is the hope that surrounds this story. I perceive this moment to be a brief flash of the hope that Barack Obama campaigned upon, the hope that progress brings. That we find this story to be so horrifying, that the president's immediate apology to the nation of Guatemala is seen nearly universally as the appropriate response, shows that the rate of progress is, like the growth of a child, slow and nearly imperceptible to those who are witness to it day in and day out, yet society is moving forward.

Furthermore, by facing up to the attitudes that decided that it was acceptable to do in Guatemala what was not acceptable to do in the United States, the story links us to other past actions that our nation has taken in the Americas that merit attention, if we want to find realistic answers to problems such as illegal immigration or improve our relations within the rest of America. Rather than fearing that our scars will crush us, or refusing to accept blame beyond doing so in seeking redemption, we must study our image in that mirror in order to link our past actions to issues that continue to affect us today.

Walt Long's novel, The Travelers, achieves this goal. It is a story about the smuggling of illegal immigrants through a community in southern New Mexico that not only humanizes all of the factions involved, but also makes the link between the social realities that so many of the travelers are escaping in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, and the part that the United States has played in helping to create those situations. This novel evenhandedly depicts the complexities of a vexing issue, offering not answers, but respect for the fact that it is as complex as the human character is.

Similarly, the past year's unveiling of classified State Department documents from the Nixon era merit close examination, as they go a long way in explaining how the brutal dictatorships that gripped the Southern Cone region of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay were the results of a concentrated effort by the United States to weaken social movements that were becoming legitimized through democratic processes, thus threatening the veracity of the neo-liberal narrative.

“History does not refer merely […] to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it, the past, with us. And we’re ‘unconsciously controlled’ in so many ways, that history, the past, is present now in all we do.” - James Baldwin

Someone Who Cares

This is excerpted from No Stranger to Strange Lands: A Journey Through Strange Coincidences, Connective Thoughts, and Far Flung Places

In light of the recent Wikileaks of the Afghan War Logs, I am posting this segment from my book (which will be available VERY SOON) regarding the mess in Afghanistan.

Talk about someone who cares: Bill Moyers had an inspiring interview on his show, Bill Moyers Journal, last night, with Sarah Chayes. She used to be an intrepid journalist for National Public Radio, but was moved to action after the United States attacked Afghanistan to supposedly topple the Taliban, which, of course, we had originally empowered during the good old Cold War days to fight a proxy war against the Soviet Union's occupation of that country. She had been reporting from there, and decided to do something to try to actually help the beleaguered people of Afghanistan in some little way. So she opened a small natural soap factory, putting people to work on a sustainable product that gives them an alternative to poppy farming that is so prevalent there. Her company is called Arghand, and the all-natural hand-crafted soaps are available in the United States and Canada. The woman is a goddess of strength, love, intelligence, and determination, and Bill Moyers asked her great questions about what is really going on over there. The poppy business, she reports, is not being conducted by any criminal enterprise, nor by the evil Taliban, as our government likes to claim, but by regular businessmen, who are the only entities in the country to dole out any kind of credit to farmers, and so that is what they farm. Their business dealings are only slightly more complicated than any other business there by having to pay more bribes than usual. The term 'criminal' has no real meaning there, because everyone in the entire society is forced to be 'criminal' because of the lack of any kind of oversight or system of accountability. Everyone is forced to pay bribes up and down the line to get anything done, and to skim resources like development aid money just to survive, because a lethal combination of inflation and unemployment is crushing families there. She says that the Afghans don't want handouts, they want jobs and a government that functions. She draws a metaphorical picture of a town in the Wild West, where the sheriff needs to catch some bad guys, so he hires a posse, which is probably made up of some criminals willing to go and catch those bad guys for money, but when the feat is accomplished, the sheriff does not then put the posse in charge of the town. In Afghanistan, however, that is exactly what United States did. They placed real criminals in charge of the government, except for Karzai, who was the only one elected by the people, but who is powerless against the hugely corrupted system he oversees. Now, the U.S. claims that the Afghan people had their democratic vote, and it is up to them to hold their government accountable, which, of course, is impossible because they are being shaken down by their own government, not helped by it in any way. She is the only foreigner that people there see doing what should be done, which is to help rebuild the economy through business investments that offer jobs that will help them get back on their feet.

On Pakistan, she says, “It's been very clear to me, watching since 2002, that Pakistan has been buying us off, by a well-timed delivery of an Al Qaeda operative, which has then caused us to look the other way about the Taliban.”

On why the southern part of the country is so important, she says, “It's kind of like the marrow of the country's bones. Afghanistan was founded in Kandahar. Later the capital was moved to Kabul. It was really the capitol, the Taliban's capitol. It's also the part of the country that the Pakistani government has been able to control most successfully by-proxy. So, this is why 99 percent of the people in Kandahar believe that we are allied with the Taliban. Everybody thinks that America is allied with the Taliban.”

On the nature of the Afghan government, “We keep hearing in the West, about the democratically-elected Afghan government. And, oh, no, we can't get in there and interfere with any of these people, because they're the government of a sovereign country. Well, you could have fooled the Afghans. The Afghans – the only person who's really elected, who has any power, is president Karzai. But every other government official that Afghans interact with on a daily basis, they didn't elect. And they don't have any recourse. They've got no way of lodging a complaint against this person. Or nobody who can put any leverage on them... We're only fooling ourselves when we talk about this democratically-elected Afghan government.”

And on why Afghanistan is so important to the future of the entire world, "There are a lot of people, I think, both in the West and in the Muslim world, who believe in clash of civilization, who want to see the world as a place dominated by two irrevocably hostile blocs. I don't want to live in that kind of world. I think that we live in an interconnected world full of rich, flawed, varied civilizations that are inextricably intertwined. And, so what I'm doing in Afghanistan is working for that intertwined world."

In that sense, George Bush and Osama bin Laden are on the same team. Also, I would note that Afghanistan is in a state of true and absolute free-market capitalism, the kind that Milton Friedman had wet dreams about. That is the true result of that type of system – an unfettered, unregulated, free-for-all, where everyone has to fend for themselves, and only the strong and powerful survive. Lovely, isn't it? Maybe Grover Norquist would like to move there and see what it is really like to have a government small enough to drown in a bathtub.

see: No Stranger to Strange Lands Chapter Outline

other book excerpts: Studs Turkel, King Marketing and His Queen, Pursuit of Happiness, and Three essays from No Stranger to Strange Lands in which the topic ineluctably turns into an Ayn Rant

Studs Terkel excerpt from No Stranger

excerpt from No Stranger to Strange Lands: A Journey Through Strange Coincidences, Connective Thoughts, and Far Flung Places

Studs Terkel
...I seem to be existing in separate realities. One reality is my daily life and the regular people I encounter, who don't seem to be concerned at all about the downfall of this nation due to the stealing of the elections – twice – and the lying us into an unnecessary war and the depletion of the federal coffers so that the only thing government can spend money on is the “war on terror” - goodbye education system, goodbye affordable health care, goodbye social security, goodbye infrastructure, goodbye government regulators of industry... Then there is the reality that I seek out on the internet, the “left-wing” blogs and information sources, and LINK TV. It is truly a bubble unto its own. One that is full of the most creative, intelligent, talented, aware, caring people, one that could and should be a more widespread non-bubble phenomenon, if only its message could get past the corporate right-wing propaganda machine that passes for “news” in this country.

Today, Amy Goodman was in Chicago to interview Studs Terkel for two hours – an amazing man and another national treasure – why had I not heard of him before? Why isn't he more commonly known outside of Chicago? His radio show played for an hour, five days a week, from 1952 to 1997. He interviewed really interesting people like British philosopher Bertrand Russell, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, author James Baldwin, Pete Seeger, who played with Woody Guthrie in the group, The Almanac Singers, and many, many more famous and not so famous people. He was very active in supporting the workers rights movement, the civil rights movement, and was blacklisted as a Communist during the McCarthy era. He, like Howard Zinn, was most interested in the telling of history by regular folks and through diverse viewpoints, in order to counter the prevailing narratives that the powerful would like us to believe. In this interview, he starts out by stating that the “greatest generation” came out of the 60's, not WWII. He talks about the perversion of our language and our thoughts concerning key words like “Commie” and “Liberal” and “Terrorist.” He, like me, wants to know why the so-called “center” is actually so far to the right, thus painting so many as being on the far left fringes that should really be considered mainstream. Much of this is because we do not understand our own history and background. Studs digs right into Alan Greenspan, lamenting that he is a big Ayn Rand fan and throwing in that she believed that the rich deserve to be on top and the poor deserve to be “down there.” He calls the free market ideologues “members of the new religion we have,” and points out the irony that the children and grandchildren of the people that were saved by the actions of the New Deal government during the Great Depression are now ignorantly calling out “too much government.” His rapid-fire 95 year old mind then moves right into how the response to the attacks of 9/11 have been an insult to our common sense of decency and to our intelligence... and that just begins the interview. Later, he comes around to finish out his overall thinking on all of this:

“How could it be at the end of World War II, we were the most honored powerful nation in the world? 'Honored' is the key word. Today we’re the most despised and feared. How come? Because the American public itself has no memory of past. You know, Gore Vidal used a phrase, 'the United States of Amnesia.' I say the United States of Alzheimer's. We forgot what happened yesterday. We know all about Paris Hilton. We know about that. But what do we know about -- why are we there in Iraq? And they say, when you attack our policy, you’re attacking the boys. On the contrary, we’re defending those boys. We want them back home with their families, doing their work and not a war that we know is built upon an obscene lie. We know that now. And so, it’s this lack of history that’s been denied us, just as the case of this guy who was told the government saved them during the Great Depression.”

I was particularly struck by the quote that Studs Terkel pulls out of his jacket pocket during the interview when the subject of James Baldwin comes up. Here is Terkel quoting Baldwin:

“History does not refer merely […] to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it, the past, with us. And we’re 'unconsciously controlled' in so many ways, that history, the past, is present now in all we do.”

That is obviously a very important idea to Studs Terkel, and it is exactly what I am driving at about history not only being so important to inform our actions, but that it actually exists in a substantial way in the present as well as in the past. The denial and rewriting of history has been purposefully perpetrated on this nation in order to distract us from caring about anything but what our next purchases will be. At the same time that we are amnesiacs, we are “unconsciously controlled” by a past that we do not know. No wonder we are so confused and easily distracted. Perhaps it is not me who is schizophrenic, but the rest of society, the ones who do not realize that they are so easily manipulated by the corporate interests that run this country, who do not know the historical facts upon which the present stands, who do not recognize the hypocrisy of so much that comes out of the mouths of our illustrious leaders. Isn't it strange that it is Progressives who want to remember the past accurately, in order to be able to understand ourselves better, while Conservatives want to conserve not the past, but the status quo, and are perfectly happy rewriting the past to follow the narrative they want to disseminate in order to hold on to their status and power? They tend to gloss over the bad and the ugly and glorify the “good” parts of history's story. They get mad when someone brings up the painful particulars. They attempt to bury those not so happy memories. This is not healthy for individuals nor for societies. As James Baldwin points out, the past does not go away. It stays with us, and we need to have the strength of character to work through the hard parts as well as the happy, to own up to them and heal them, not just ignore them and let them unconsciously control us until they burst out in some uncontrollable rage. History and Memories – they are both, if not themselves irrational, very closely connected with the irrational universe of the Emotions.

Orwell Spins a Hole to China, or How Dorothy Didn't Get It

an essay written September 1, 2008

Conservatives believe that Liberals are enemies of “America.” This is what politics are about in this country. Not issues, or policies, or credentials, or personalities, or freedom, not the economy or national security or government spending or foreign policy, or even religion, but the great Cultural Divide that causes conservatives to distrust liberals, to misunderstand and believe, in their paranoia and refusal to engage in self-reflection, that we are out to destroy them and this nation. All of the real issues get swept behind the curtain behind which the little men hide, the Manipulators. Some of us want to expose what is going on behind that curtain. The majority of people, however, prefer to watch the pageant that is being projected and to pay no attention to the little men at the controls, in the same way that they like their technology, but are not curious about how it works. Curiosity killed the cat. So, as does everything else in life, our politics all boil down to one of our greatest cultural treasures: The Wizard of Oz.

For me, the annual showings of this movie on TV when I was a kid was by far the most dramatic yearly event that permeates my childhood memories. Even more than the moon landings, with the astronauts' amazing returns to Planet Earth by parachute into the sea, and which I thought for a while were some kind of annual patriotic celebration, some sort of high-tech display of our national superiority, something akin to the Fourth of July; more than Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, played every Thanksgiving, which was far too creepy and vengeful for my tastes; more than Santa Clause flying gifts in from the North Pole, perhaps because I was just too confused about how he entered our house through our skinny chimney pipe, never satisfied with the answers that sounded as contrived as those I was hearing about how the dinosaurs could have walked the earth for over a hundred million years, yet the Bible was still somehow right about God having created the Earth in six days; more than anything else, I remember those vivid, scary, visually magnificent scenes, one compelling moment after another, complete with sing-along songs and quotable quotes and the unforgettable cast of characters, each one unequivocally representing either Good or Evil, with the single exception of the mysterious and powerful Wizard of Oz.

I have a childhood memory – I must have been about ten years old at the time – of laying in bed after seeing the movie one night, running the story line through my head, thus searing the magical imagery indelibly into my mind. The scene that stands out most to me now is the one in which Dorothy has been captured by the Wicked Witch of the West, and her hapless friends, peeking timidly down upon the heavily guarded fortress, decide that they must rescue her. The Tin Man feels strongly in his heart that they must do something, Scarecrow thinks up a plan, and Cowardly Lion bravely leads the the charge. It seems to me that as I was falling asleep, I looped through from the beginning several times up until this important scene, but never got past it. Perhaps my mind was busy processing the realization that that was where the three companions had proved to actually have the qualities that they thought they were lacking. I woke up the next morning with the impression that I had dreamed all night about it, inserting myself into the story line and acting especially heroically when it came to that deciding moment of facing the castle guards with their haunting chant and those big furry hats.

Several decades later, during the nineteen nineties, I remember taking note of how that iconic movie had saturated our cultural consciousness. Lines like “We're not in Kansas anymore” and “lions and tigers and bears, oh my!,” as well as any reference to flying monkeys or munchkins were immediately identifiable and prevalent in pop culture. I had begun to take an interest in how our culture was influenced by ideas that originated in the stories and images of previous popular culture, how our language was saturated with common phrases that could be traced back to movies and television, although most of us were completely unconscious of their roots. It fascinated me to think about how our entire national identity and understandings of ourselves were tied to these entities, to movies and programs that at once mirrored the attitudes and biases of the times from which they originated and also added new ideas and ways of looking at the world and ourselves, defining us as well as guiding us through the maze of our path from past to present to future.

One day, I was shocked to come upon a person who had never seen The Wizard of Oz. This information astounded me – what red blooded citizen of this great nation could have avoided seeing this movie at some point in their life? It was akin to never having heard the Pledge of Allegiance. The incident got me to thinking about how deeply embedded the movie really is in our national consciousness. What did this mean, exactly, and why did I find it so shocking? How might this lack of cultural indoctrination have caused this man to be free of the messages inherent in the movie? What were those messages? "Good conquers Evil." "David prevails over Goliath." "Follow the Path, and you will be led to the shining Emerald City." "God-like figures are really just projected images." "Strength – Intelligence, Compassion, Courage – comes from within each of us, not from without." And, of course, "There's No Place Like Home." Hmmm, this man was a traveler, a counter culture character, an incredibly intelligent person who never followed convention and had a vivid imagination. I thought about those messages, and about our cultural biases, and about this man and why it was that I was finding myself falling in love with him. I, too, wanted to be a traveler, and to throw away the chains of convention. It wasn't that he was trying consciously to repeal all of the cultural mores that the movie had set forth for us all, because he was immune from them, inoculated. He was simply independent of all of that. I, on the other hand, had been steeped in it. I was going through a process of examination of what it was, exactly, that I valued about my own culture, and what I thought might not be so valuable.

I went through the lessons of The Wizard of Oz again, and evaluated what I held to be the most important among them. Sorting through the list, I placed "Strength coming from within" at the top, with "God-like figures are really just projected images" coming in second place. These are the themes that resonated with me, but obviously, not with everyone in my culture. Why? What were others most influenced by, that I guess I wasn't? It seems almost ridiculous to think that, despite all that beautiful imagery and singing and dancing and brave encounters with evil witches and their obnoxious flying monkeys, despite that beautiful song at the beginning, a classic expression of the human spirit to dare to dream of a better world, Somewhere Over The Rainbow, despite all of that, the strongest message, which is reinforced by the use of Technicolor to highlight the difference between the dream and the real worlds, is to reject all that and get used to the dreary black and white world, because dreams are only dreams, while Auntie Em and the rest of the gang are at home, loving you, which is more important than dreaming, and because you belong at home in Kansas, on the farm, and leaving your loved ones behind and searching out a better world just wouldn't be nice. You can dream the dream, but don't go there, because your family will miss you and worry about you, and you wouldn't want to upset them, now would you.

I did exactly that, and my family was pretty upset with me for a time. Never mind that our nation was built by individuals and families who dared to leave their loved ones behind and set out into unchartered territory, risking their lives, not secure in their futures, but going anyway. Maybe it is just us women who are supposed to stay at home for the sake of the family, or alternatively, go away with the husbands since, after all, our fathers have traditionally paid their fathers to take us off their hands before we embarrass them by popping out a bastard child. It seems to me that only since the dawn of modern communications have mothers become so insistent on those regular phone calls, and only since the advent of modern transportation was it expected of people to gather from afar to celebrate those family holidays, in a mad flurry of activity in the skies and on the nation's roadways. The conceit is seen to be that one would deny their family their presence at such gatherings, not that we as a nation take for granted the resources used up by all that travel back and forth across the continent, for the sake of the family, and as a symbolic yet often contentious show of unity, as in their attempts to subvert deep divisions and painful memories, everyone pretends that their “family values” are intact.

So, in the movie, Dorothy didn't want to be Over The Rainbow from the moment she arrived there. And while the characters that she meets learn to look within themselves to find those strengths that they didn't know they had, Dorothy never looks inside her own self. She is not lacking anything but her family in Kansas, as she goes through all of her adventures with the single-minded determination to get back home. Her big epiphany at the end is, "The next time I go looking for my heart's desire, I won't look any further than my own backyard; if it's not there, then I never really lost it to begin with." Huh??? What was her “heart's desire” again? It was to go Over The Rainbow, which, according to the song, meant she wanted something different, leaving her troubles behind, to explore somewhere far away, to achieve her dreams. Well, apparently, her dreams were to get a little attention from her family and friends at home. She turns out to be the kid who couldn't wait to go off to summer camp, but then is homesick the whole time she is there. Turns out, this is an entire movie advocating the virtue of homesickness, not about daring to follow your dreams.

No wonder our society is so confused. Talk about mixed messages! This movie just adds to all of the other unexamined messages that mainstream society advocates today. Go ahead – dream the impossible dream, sing about rainbows and bluebirds and escaping the ordinary – but then forget about it. Your family has made so many sacrifices for you, you inconsiderate, insolent, home-wrecking, utopia-envisioning ingrate. And your ancestors paved a certain road for you to follow, brick by back-breaking brick, so you will be dishonoring them if you refuse to stay on the path laid out for you. And even if they did horrible things, like enslave people or kill a bunch of Indians who were in their way, they did it all for you, so that you could have a nice big house in the suburbs to raise their grandchildren in. Follow your dreams, but only if they are approved by the dream police, and only if they follow the script, the scripture. And don't even think of giving or taking away any of the special privileges that belong to the upper class. If you are from the lower classes, well, good luck. You must not be working hard enough if you are unable to break through all the barriers that are in front of you, or you are not smart enough, or not worthy enough, and if you are successful, you must have benefited from unfair affirmative action programs. Try cheating – that usually works, especially cheating the government. It's fun, and fruitful! Honesty is overrated and will get you nowhere. Exaggerate, bluff, use some botox, color your hair, improve your image, because Image is everything. But above all, play along with the rest of us. The real world is black and white, not multicolored, and “America” is the land of the free, the home of the brave, the liberators, the good guys, the morally correct – just don't look behind the curtain at how we really operate the ship of state.

Poor Dorothy. She goes, she sees, she returns, having learned nothing from her experience. She is like Charlie in Flowers for Algernon, whose intelligence is dramatically increased through an experimental surgery, and who experiences a much fuller life as a result, but then tragically reverts to his previous state of mental obtuseness. Or how about Jeffrey Beaumont, in the movie Blue Velvet, who innocently descends into the dark underbelly of society, a reality hidden from the white picket fenced, perfect, and pure world that he lives in, where he rescues a woman named Dorothy from unspeakable horrors, then emerges unscathed, unaffected, clueless, back to happy land and white picket fences and innocence and singing birdies, as indeed, the entire film goes in one ear and out the other. David Lynch made an entire movie based on the concept of “in one ear and out the other,” and nobody got it! The haunting theme of Flowers for Algernon, should also make people think about how we become more fulfilled humans by expanding our minds, keeping ourselves open to change, and experiencing other realities, but that gets obscured by the puritans who object to the guy experiencing the joys of sex once he becomes smart. The sad, sad truth is that our society does not want to expand its collective mind. It does not want to improve itself. It resists change, because it thinks that things are just fine the way they are, or even better, the way they used to be, before the hippies corrupted the youth with their mind-expanding drugs, weird music, anti-authoritarian attitudes, colorful clothes, and birth control.

Dorothy not only saw a Technicolored dreamworld, where she might have learned about strength coming from within, if she had paid any attention, but she also exposed the Wizard for the fraud that he really was. She saw that the Godhead was just a show, a projection on a screen, with colored lights and amplifiers and pyrotechnics for extra added effect. She questioned the authority of the Great and Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and found that the show was being run by a regular, if particularly clever, man. In her dreams, Dorothy was a hippie! Questioning authority figures, looking behind the curtains of power, befriending society's outcasts... but, then again, there are the mixed messages, as she also diligently follows the path and longs for the adventure to end and the normalcy of Kansas to return. I guess that most of Hollywood's biggest commercial successes are so successful precisely because they appeal to a large number of people on very different levels. After all, they are not out to change us, but to make money off of us all. It just seems that despite the popularity of heart-warming themes like "David versus Goliath," or "the Triumph of the Underdog" in movies, when it comes to real life, this culture accepts the Goliaths and the Behemoths to actually be the rightful leaders of society because of some kind of (rather Orwellian) Ayn Randian/religious conviction about Natural Order and Social Darwinism... but that is the subject of another essay, entirely.

Our cultural identities ultimately draw most heavily not on the "David versus Goliath" themes nor on the counterculture messages or the deeper meanings present in many of our movies and television shows, but rather, on the more heroic and simplistic themes – the "Good versus Evil" and the "Us versus Them" dichotomies, love stories (sexy as well as more innocent), any excuse for excitement (fights, chases, violence, near-misses) and pageantry, iconic road pictures, rags to riches stories, an obsession with mobsters, and family reunions. So despite how beloved the movie of The Wizard of Oz is by our society, when it comes to questioning authority or looking behind the curtains of power, that is considered insolent and, increasingly, un-patriotic. A patriot follows marching orders, keeps in line, respects authority, and doesn't ask questions, nor should a patriot question the moral authority that is supposed to be inherent in our nation's soul, or question its motives, or its honor, or suggest that we might be a better nation if we would do these things in the spirit of sincere self-reflection. No, that would be blame-America-first liberalism, which is the enemy of all that is unquestionably superior about this nation. Hollywood and the art of movie making is an “American” institution, and the entertainment industry has become an integral part of the military-industrial-corporate-congressional complex that projects only the images and the narrations that it wants us all to see, so that it may play its part in maintaining the status quo of wealth and power distribution, or rather lack of distribution. The entertainment industry must stick to the script, even as those alternative narratives sneak themselves in at times. For that counter culture, maverick image has been surreptitiously conscripted for the cynical purpose of supporting the overarching narrative by projecting independence and attitude as a cultural value, to sell people on the idea that they are bucking the system when the Orwellian reality is that they are falling right in step with the narrative that they are being sold.

I am speaking, of course, about the presidential campaign of John McCain and his newly-chosen vice presidential running mate, Sarah Palin. George Orwell is spinning in his grave so fast, he is about to reach China. McCain and Palin: the Maverick Outsiders. The specter of these two and their surrogates, standing before the Republican Conventioneers, the Conservative Right doing their usual spinning of facts at unprecedented angular velocities, is just insane. Liberals hate America. Republicans are not partisan. Our candidates will change Washington, get rid of Big Government, step outside the Beltway. Pay no attention to the Cocktail Circuit Liberal media, except for the ones who support us. If we say something, it must be true. When they say anything or criticize or point out contradictions or falsehoods, they are lying. Never mind that we are the ones that have been in charge of the government for the last eight years. Infanticide. 9/11. Nukes. Vote for us.