The Epistemology of War

by Mona Shaw

Her tight, gray curls would bounce when Miss Hunger, our kindergarten teacher snapped away another chair.

"You're not even trying, Becky," she told a small, timid girl in our class.

"I thought it was nicer to share," Becky whispered.

"This is the cakewalk game," Miss Hunger replied with strained patience, "You win the game if you sit in a chair before someone else takes it."

"But, Miss Hunger," Becky said, perplexed that Miss Hunger didn't see the obvious, "we have plenty of chairs."

Not to be undone by a five-year-old's naiveté, Miss Hunger smiled, "We have plenty today, but one day there may not be enough chairs, and you need to learn how to compete for a chair when that time comes."

Becky was still confused and asked, "But, then, wouldn’t it be better if we were learning how to make more chairs?"

It was a moral contradiction.  Moral contradictions learned in childhood are rarely resolved and normalize a routine of situational ethics that leave us chronically qualifying if not rationalizing these contradictions.  In this context, how does one define “ethics,” let alone war?

We say that sharing is a virtue, but "success" is measured by our ability to hoard or acquire.  Lying is wrong when we're lied to, but becomes prudence if it keeps us in a job or otherwise seems to protect us.  Secrets are labeled with vicious metaphors like “backbiting” when we've been hurt by lies, but lies become “the better part of valor” or discretion when they serve our personal interests. 

While we pretend we believe being “two-faced” is bad; we honor it as a marketable skill under job titles with names like “diplomat, lobbyist, or community relations director.”

Knowledge, when we seek it, is not so much about wanting to know anything, but about wanting to earn a credential, to pass a test for "success," a test written and graded by those we perceive to have power over that "success."  Students rarely enroll in college to learn—you can learn with a library card—but to haul out certificates toward even higher privilege or status.  "Knowledge" becomes a commodity, routinely reduced to parlor games (figuratively and literally, e.g, Trivial Pursuit) in which those who are “certified” to have more of it position themselves as lords over those with less of it.

Inevitably these rationalizations form information itself and create a structure of knowledge comprised of what we believe of what we've been told, and, in turn, we teach or pass on "knowledge" that isn't necessarily, or even usually, what we believe.

Because this is our collective situation, how we know what we know (or epistemology), holds more information about us than what we know, and therefore how we know is more important than what we know.

Accredited history textbooks do not contain facts and events, but are selected interpretations of facts and events written by the victors of war.  Had England won the U.S. Revolutionary War, our scholarly characterizations of the British monarchy, or even monarchy itself, would read very differently.  Had Spain conquered England during the European colonization of North America, elementary school students would engage in pageants about St. Augustine in Florida, rather than about Plymouth Rock or Jamestown.  Had U.S. history not almost exclusively featured the lives and deeds of less than half its population (white, land-owning men), we would read a very different history indeed.

Significant details of battles won and lost, and the actions of the "heroes" involved are routinely obscured or eliminated altogether to the extent they cannot be exhumed by even the most sedulous scholars.  Howard Zinn did the world a great service when he rescued much of our evaded history in his text, A People's History of the United States.  However, Zinn is quick to concede that even in this effort, "There is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation.  Behind every fact presented to the world—by a teacher, a writer, anyone—is a judgment."

Moreover historical "facts," particularly the details of U.S. wars are endlessly revised—revisions that sometimes challenge proscribed thought as in Robert McNamera's Fog of War confessions regarding Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Vietnam, and sometimes reinforce the victor's right to power, as in Dick Cheney's Kings of The Hill: How Nine Powerful Men Changed The Course Of American History.

Given that our knowledge of the details of wars is partial and selective at best (and often intentionally misleading); our understanding of what war is can be no more enlightened or true.

In corporate controlled media "if it bleeds it leads" and in the canon of the empire "war is gore."  War defined as gore and weaponry is a contrivance by the authors of war that intends to limit and obscure the horror of war.  The sanitization of recent wars through corporate and governmental censorship of photo and video journalism of battles and casualties is a clear attempt to prevent public opposition to war that was provoked by disturbing coverage during previous wars.  (If there is no gore; there is no war.)  Not so clear, is the cover-up of other acts of war in which the gore is less apparent and military weaponry is not required. (There is no war because there is no gore.)  The covert (not to mention patriarchal) restriction of acts of war to gore and weaponry certainly supports the perpetuation of war by dulling stimuli for resistance.

Other acts of war are hidden on shredded paper under the desks of corporate executives whose wealth depends on war.  The relationship between war and profit lead some to suggest we are indulging in Military Keynesianism, a national economic policy in which the government apportions outsized spending to the military in an effort to stimulate economic growth.  When, actually, Military Keynesianism resides in the good old days or is a phase we passed through in the mid-1990s, when we became an unmitigated war economy. 

Canadian author on the economics of war, Philippe Le Billon defines "war economy" as "a system of producing, mobilizing and allocating resources to sustain violence."  The reality of the U.S. functioning under a war economy is not only evinced by the supremacy of the military industrial complex predicted by Eisenhower in the 1950s.  The military industrial complex now controls the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the U.S.

The deliberate procession to a war economy was entrenched in the 1980s and 90s by Presidents Reagan (busting unions) and Clinton (NAFTA, GATT and the WTO) when manufacturing jobs were driven out of the country.   Given that the GDP measures output generated through production by labor and property which is physically located within the confines of a country, if we set aside the provision of services used in daily living such as education, health care, and auto repair, we generate only two national products: war and capital.

Weapons and war are now our major (and essentially only) exports.  Consumer goods are almost entirely manufactured outside the U.S.  While investments in these goods profit the investors, they do little to grow the domestic economy (i.e. create jobs).  Jobs are now dependent on venture capital (proven by the fact that floundering banks and financial institutions require chronic bailouts in order for our economy to survive), and venture capital is dependent on war.  War, the production of military training and weapons, the military industrial complex, the privatization of war, the control of international territories of capital investments, et al, are the only viable leverage the U.S. can wield to retain profitability in the global economy.  In a war economy, the economy is not simply stimulated by war; the survival of the economy requires war.

In a war economy, every NASDAQ exchange is an act of war, and every financial CEO is a war general.  The current war economy is so insidiously entrenched and partnered with greed so pathological that the collapse of Wall Street may not merely be inevitable, but required and, yes, even desirable in order for human life to ever cease being sacrificed for human greed.

If we are to end war, as well as confronting military sites, we must pressure and abolish the institutions that profit from war.  The health insurance industry is a good place to start.  There is no equivocation in stating that healthcare denial is an act of war.  This is true on prima facie evidence and not only because of the industry's symbiotic relationship with the military.  (Health Net, a major health insurance corporation, is the seventh highest-paid defense contractor.)  Denial of healthcare treatment by this industry leads to at least 20,000 deaths each year.  (Some studies estimate these annual deaths number as high as 100,000.)  Healthcare apartheid and genocide account for an astronomical portion of the casualties of war.

If we are to accept Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assertion, "Peace is not the absence of conflict, it is the presence of justice," we cannot pretend there is a distinction between a justice issue and a war issue.  We can either capitulate to the lies of the Empire that such distinctions exist, or we can study war no more.  We can study peace through our witness to all war profiteers (i.e. all venture capitalists) that we're on to them.  We can teach others how to build more chairs.

Moral Courage

 By Mona Shaw

“There’s more than ten thousand dollars in receipts in the cigar box, “my uncle said.

It was March, 1972, and my grandfather had died the month before. I was staying with my grandmother while I was home on spring break from the University of Iowa. She sat in a wooden rocking chair that had once been varnished dark walnut, but the only way you’d know that was by the streaks of shiny brown on the few places where life hadn't stripped the chair to a grayed, bare pine. I sat on the green sofa-bed, its worn spots covered by a tan wool blanket and matching hand towels over its arms.  One of her hands waltzed lightly over my grandfather’s pipe stand and tobacco bowl on the end table next to her as she spoke.

“Jake didn't dun folks.”  My uncle had anticipated her response and began his rehearsed counter before she finished speaking.

“I know, but you need the money, and they owe it.  And you could help Mona Lynne go back to that college.”  He knew he could tempt her more by what she could do for me than for herself.

“I can’t think of anything we can’t do without today,” she said.

“Okay,” he said, “You're right.  I won’t dun anybody.  But most of ‘em were at Daddy's  funeral and almost everyone asked me to call ‘em and tell ‘em what they owe.  And, I said I would.  Shouldn't I do that since they asked?”

“Maybe so,” she said after a long pause, “but not today.  Can’t it wait till Mon’Lynne goes back to Iowa City next week?”

“Oh, yeah, don’t know why not.  I’ll come back next week then.”

“Bamp,” as his grandchildren called him, had been a popular auto mechanic.  If he had the part or could afford to buy the part himself, he never turned anyone away who couldn't afford a car repair.  He’d tell them to write what they owed on a slip of paper and put it in a cigar box on a bench in the back of his garage.  He never looked in the box, never knew what anyone owed him, and never knew when he repaired someone’s car if there was already a slip in the cigar box or not.  When someone came to pay him, he’d direct them to the cigar box, and accept whatever cash he was handed and put it into another cigar box he kept for cash.  The person either took the slip back or edited the slip to indicate the amount still owed.  He believed it was wrong, in any way, to remind his customers of their debt.

“It’s painful to not be able to pay your bills,” he’d explain.  “I’m not gonna add to any family’s pain by rubbin' their nose in hard luck.”  The slips weren't for his records.  They were for the convenience of his customers who’d asked him for some way to remind them what they owed.  He never looked at the slips.  Never.  Moreover, he made it very clear that he would consider it mean and wrong for anyone else to look at them either.  He was so clear, that until he died, none of us ever did.  

Many of his customers were African Americans, though no one called them that then.  This was how he met his best friend, a Black man with the same name as his, Jake Nelson.  Gram often said that if they hadn't solved the world’s problems it wasn't because they hadn't put the time into it.  A school teacher complimented Bamp once for being willing to do business with the “coloreds” to which he replied, “Don’t take offense, but I’d just as soon not get a pat on the back for not being an asshole.”  

Another time a woman asked him whether white or colored folks were more apt to ask for credit.  “I couldn't tell ya,” he answered honestly, “I don’t see a reason to git interested in that, do you?”

So, I was surprised that my grandmother had relented so easily.  I assumed that if Uncle Eddie hadn't made the promise he had at the funeral, she might not have.  

I was secretly glad.  I looked around the tiny living room or the “front” room as she called it.  There wasn't a stick of furniture that wasn't older than I, and it was probably second-hand when it was purchased.  Besides the couch and the rocking chair, there were a tattered vinyl recliner, a coffee table pocked with innumerable and concentric white rings, a bookcase filled with 1940s encyclopedias used by mother and uncles while they were in school, and an Emerson television they’d bought in 1952.  The floor was a scuffed, flowered linoleum.  The places worn to the cement beneath it were mostly covered by rag rugs that were made by hand.  There were often more visitors in their home than the furniture could sit.  When this happened, chairs were brought in from the kitchen or the garage.  When these ran out, children would sit on laps, or folks would sit on the rugs on the floor.

There was rarely an evening when the front room wasn't filled to capacity.  Folks dropped by most often unannounced.  Gram would make strong coffee or iced tea and put out a plate of Vista Pak sandwich cookies or those almond ones shaped like windmills.  Bamp would sit in the rocking chair and tell stories while he smoked his pipe.  The evening ended when the story and his pipe tobacco ended at the same time.  He would repack the pipe if he was in the middle of a story.  If the story ended while his pipe still held any tobacco, he would begin a new story.  The ritual took hours, and few held on to the bitter end.  Those who had to get home would often come back the next night and request to hear one story or another early in the evening in order to learn how it ended.

The kitchen was far less elegant.  A tiny red and white table on rusting chrome legs and three red chairs were along the long wall; a four-burner gas stove filled the short wall at the end of the room.  On the other long wall was a sink and a refrigerator they had bought used in 1942.  It had been manufactured sometime in the late 1930s and had the motor on the top.  The refrigerator still ran just fine, a fact that was repeated anytime it was hinted that it might be time to replace it.

Everything in the tiny cottage attached to the large four-bay mechanic’s garage had a matte patina from the abrasion of coal dust.  The scent of burning coal was omnipresent and could be smelled even in the summer.  It is like no other scent, dry and crisp, with a warm, bitter hint.  My nostrils still stretch when I think of it, and my throat dehydrates from the memory of its swab.  

Maybe we didn't need anything today, but there were so many things I thought she had a right to have.  A new refrigerator, a new couch, maybe even a wall-to-wall carpet or a new winter coat.  Or a t-bone dinner at a restaurant or a new set of dishes.  She was living on $300/month Social Security, and she was only 58 and had a pace-maker.  Maybe it was enough now, but who knew what she might need and when?  I was secretly glad she was going to have any amount of that money Eddie could collect.

“Are you chilly, Mon’Lynne?” my grandmother asked a few hours after my uncle’s visit.

“Not really, Gram.” I said.  I was a little chilly, but not nearly enough to want to stoke up the furnace. “I can put on a sweater.  Want me to grab yours?”

“Well, I’m chilly.” She said. “Help me fix a fire.”

We trudged to the garage, and Gram pulled the wrapped wire handle to the door of the furnace, and I slid in a shovel of coal.

“I think that’s enough to take the chill off for tonight,” she said and tore strips of newspapers and tossed them on top. “Oh, we’re gonna need more kindlin' I think.”

I didn't think we did, but I reached for another newspaper just the same.

“Let’s not waste those,” she said. “What else we could we use?”  

She looked dead, straight into my eyes without blinking.  She looked beyond my eyes, in truth, to a place where she held a singular prerogative to communicate inside my core.  And, so I knew what she meant.  I started to ask, “Are you sure, Gram?” but she spoke before I could.

“Just go get ‘em.”

She’d already lit the fire before I returned with the dogged-ear cigar box, the dignified Indian on its lid burnished to near imperceptibility years ago.

“Open it,” she whispered the order.

I did, and she lifted out a handful of slips and let them fall from her open, out-stretched hand onto the blaze.

“Now it’s your turn.”

I looked into the box and felt a sense of awe and holiness as if it were the Ark of the Covenant, a metaphor that over the years has become less and less of an exaggeration.  It held more slips than were physically possible, literally hundreds of them, and their volume ballooned exponentially far, far larger than the size of the box once the lid was lifted.  The slips seemed to glow. They were all sizes and colors, some folded, some flat, some crinkled, some torn.  Neat handwriting, illegible scrawls, some with dates and amounts crossed off, some with lines and sums of columns.  Some with words or messages I didn't have time to read nor understand.

“Don’t look at them,” she said.  “Just turn the box over and let 'em land.”

We didn't speak.  We didn't touch.  We didn't weep.  We didn't laugh.  We just stood there shoulder-to-shoulder and watched them burn.  

As they curled and dissolved, I began to feel warm, but there was something strange about it, and I began to wonder about that.  Then, I realized the warmth was coming from the inside out, toward the fire and not from the fire.  I felt something I’d never felt before or at least not that way or to that extent.  I found myself looking for a word for the feeling.  I still look for that word.  The only word that came to me then is still the one that comes closest today.  I felt victorious. I felt calmly, solidly, victorious and utterly secure.

I understood things in that moment that I would forget again and again, however relentlessly life would remind me.  Each ember, each crackle, sparked a new understanding.  I understood how to have power over lack and status and greed.  I understood I simply needed to not believe in them.  I understood what Bamp meant when he told me before he died how life had given him more than anyone had ever wanted.  He had said that because it was absolutely true.  He died with all the end results of all the things everyone does to get what he had.  I understood why he said you were better off dying from starvation sharing your last crust of bread than dying with a full belly if someone else was hungry.  I understood why he was always kidding me to make sure I didn’t let all that book-learnin’ keep me from having good sense.  I understood what I really wanted to learn, what I really wanted to know.  I understood the difference between investing in what I wanted instead of ways to get what I wanted.  I understood how much we squander when we exchange our time here on Earth for the latter.  I understood that human pain decreases as sharing and decency become routine.

His cigar box was a nesting place of everything we need to end preventable human suffering.  Each slip was a testament to compassion and a willingness to sacrifice to make things better for others.  Each slip proved the senselessness of wealth and status in all that really matters.  Each slip eschewed praise or recognition for good deeds.  Each slip believed that everyone had the courage and the wit to do the right thing.  Each slip believed we could and would do it.  His cigar box was moral courage.  

My grandmother knew this too.  In some ways even more than he did, I think.  She poured me a cold glass of milk and gave me a couple of cookies once we were back inside.

“Those are the best cookies you've ever eaten, ain't they?”

“Yeah,” I said not all that surprised that she knew what I was thinking, “They really are.”

“You’ll sleep good tonight,” she smiled.

And, of course, I did.

Ending preventable human suffering is utterly possible.  It’s rather silly, if not an outright lie, to claim that it’s not.  We only need to decide we’d rather end suffering than acquire material things or feel superior and accomplished via some dim notion of success.  We simply need moral courage.  

Moral courage isn't a demonstration of sainthood by a marginalized avatar before a throng to later become martyred then canonized or bestowed some other secular equivalent.  It is the ordinary person whose name you will never know, who--past food, shelter, and treatment for illness or injury--couldn't care less about what one has; and yet is very concerned with what one can give.  The world is changed easily when a collective of such souls choose, despite the world’s contradictions, each day, no matter what, to give more, care more, speak out more, sacrifice more, and encourage others to do the same.

I've forgotten this lesson and lost my way many times.  I expect I will again.  I’m flawed.  I’ll need the rest of this life to approach understanding and grace.  But,  when I forget now and then or forget altogether,  my foolishness won't shrink its truth.  The truth of it will always remain available for those with a heart that seeks change.

                                                                                                                    

Songs from the Underbelly

In the camp where we all live

The fire flickers fast

The flies swarm in and eat our dreams

And the water never lasts.

On summer nights the old man

told stories,

we never remembered,

and tapered hours

over his pipe puffing

cherry smoke that danced to

Bev's guitar.

Babies rolled from between her legs

on the grass with ours

And the damp dark promised to

tell the secret of how or why,

if not that night,

we'd laugh enough

the next

for sure.

String beans snapped

under hardened hands and watched

nonlooking, drive by-standers,

who earned more

than their keep

and Naught saw us,

Nor laid aside the tracks.

But, like the evening momma wailed

pleated their noses while

they snuffed our noise.

No winter has brought a day as cold

As this dead child in my arms.

A sea of scalding tears would not thaw

That part of my spirit frozen and gone

With his last breath.

The child you thought I shouldn't want

lips fell blue before he ever laughed.

Tiny fingers shuddered in my hand for minutes

while you dismissed

his unbecoming life

            a blessing in disguise.

Years later and from now on

The whisper weight of his stillness bears on

these muscles and

torn flesh still stings from being

stolen from my arms

carved from the cradle in my breast.

When the g-string broke on Bev's guitar

So did she.

A half-written letter

to her husband

in prison

a half-bottle of rot gut,

and half the pills that

shouldn't have been enough

were next to her

next to her babies

next to the new-born

maggots in the urine in the crib.

At the Mayflower honky-tonk

after the wake,

Catfish frying up

the sweet-juices of the Mississippi

pulled our tongues

stung by Jim Beam

over greasy faces napping

in gangling wooden booths,

to the dance floor,

where nickels from nowhere

spilled more Hank.

Gramma peddled mamma,

into a fox trot;

pumping their knees over

their ears they forced

the blues to giggle at their inside joke.

Then Uncle Bunker

yodeled "The Tennessee

Waltz"

again,

to a now

diminished downbeat of belly-aches,

not because

he'd actually been to Tennessee

but by knowing that

the dress he'd bought Bev

to be buried in would've made

her smile,

so could we.

In the camp where we all live

The fire flickers fast

The flies swarm in and eat our dreams

And the water never lasts

Fran, Bev's oldest,

            was

put with proper folk

And they believed them when

they found the cum

of the family dog

running down her leg

zippered with blood

because she was

sex-crazed.

Though Frannie said they'd

snickered and clapped

because she'd yelped

            the whole time

just like the dog.

They locked her away

where her kind belonged

which she said was okay

because after that nobody'd

want her

again.

I wanted her

again.

Growing what I

prayed to God

would be breasts,

Gramma'd been right

to snort,

"If you don't quit

gawkin' at yer titties,

yer gonna git yer ass

in trouble."

Frannie'd already plucked

that bud, and the sap

had dripped into

our every crack and bucked us to

other-places.

The river

had escaped.

Not as young and less naive,

we outwitted Hope.

Running, running

across and away

from the crew-cutted courtyard

of the nut-house,

we made only the promises

we knew we could not keep.

But still, when stilled, we

let our braided

fingers trace them on each other's

palms years later, and still later

when first she, then I

would sing.

No winter has brought a day as cold

As this dead child in my arms.

A sea of scalding tears would not thaw

That part of my spirit frozen and gone

With her last breath.

The child you thought I shouldn't want

lips fell blue before she ever laughed.

Tiny fingers shuddered in my hand for minutes

while you dismissed

her unbecoming life

            a blessing in disguise.

Years later and from now on

The whisper weight of her stillness bears on

these muscles and

torn flesh still stings from being

stolen from my arms

carved from the cradle in my breast.

Since, we'd been swindled

from burying the babies

next to Gramma,

and the Mayflower

had gone belly-up,

we sipped the old man's stories

we couldn't remember in a parking lot

straight from the bottle.

Repacking the pipe came easier

than the smoke from our noses

teaming up with the whiskey

and spraying chortles down our chins,

when

we realized that we finally

owned some land.

Frannie's numbed tongue spoiled

the joke

and slopped up my chin

into a soiled, so-long kiss.

We poured the rest

of that-day's bottle

down a non-looker's gas tank.

Caked on our nerves,

the ballad faded

for now,

for them,

and for sure.

In the camp where we all live

The fire flickers fast

The flies swarm in and eat our dreams

And the water never lasts.

A Beethoven Sonata

There is an existential intersection between Marxist (or at least Engel's and Trotsky's) aspiration and post-colonial entitlement which does not countermand congruent routes of cognizant and sentient dimensions of an ethereal materialism but rather function as the zygote of their intrinsic convergence.

The tragedy is that I know what this means.

And it's even true at three a.m.

after a good bottle of chianti

swilled with pork roast and baked apples

and I'm wedged between Kate's legs

adjusting the rhythm of the me

that I'm putting inside her

and the me I think I'll take away.

Dinner-talk and a wafer of after-dinner acrimony

are crumbled on new black percale, and though

I feel their grit beneath her arms and ass,

I speak only of the silk woven by her cunt's

reaching for my breast and mouth and hand.

And I wish,

I wish,

And I wish,

I wish she would open her eyes

As I peel open her mouth with my thumb

and tug on her tongue with my lips,

her tongue that tells me even less than the vague

surrender in her sigh.

There are books here.

Her books.

Their shadows lasso the walls

around us in street and candle light.

Propping up other things of insufficient leg.

Priceless first editions of a best-seller

now prostheses that slyly re-member

the plastic limbs of the legless man

who sold her this place and

last made love in this room.

But her eyes stay closed because

her there is there

and mine isn't,

and since neither of us

is here,

we've allowed room for the sun

to set upon the shaky dawn.

And I put my ear into the mattress

to hear the sounds of every sun's setting and dawning

because I wish to hear as well as see

their pink and amber fingers drip in

purple over the ceiling shadows

and inhale the vapor and evaporation of

those hands I cannot reach.

And I wish, I wish

And I wish

I wish these clamoring and hungry whispers

could use my voice to speak.

Yet somehow this particular and symphonic impotence

Draws Kate's heel into my back.

It's an adagio movement and bucks its own harmonics.

So, when she lathers my breasts with incessant sterling hair

and tightens her thighs on my waist, I suckle her release

in my throat and swallow.

And swallow.

And swallow her spill of

"I love yous."

Before the next-day's light

bleaches out their visit.

And of all the things she might have done,

Instead

she opens her eyes,

And she smiles.

Neither latter nor present-day intermittent sentiment affords sufficient therapy to eradicate indoctrinated predispositions that prohibit concurrently extended, concordant or bonafide exchange between individuals with realities predicated on disparate notions of self-purpose and identity determined by cultural origins.

The tragedy is that I know what this means.

Another War Story

After weeks of unspeakable negligence, seriously wounded, Army soldier Michael Hervey was finally told he'd be moved to a hospital in Germany. The news was really another stalemate. In order to be actually, physically moved, the Army required that Michael take his gear with him. Retrieving gear while in the hospital is a bureaucratic nightmare. It can take weeks and months for that detail to be satisfied. Michael was prepared to wait through another series of indeterminate delays, but the next day Army soldier, Ryan Kohler showed up at his bed with his gear.

"How did this get here so fast?" Michael asked Kohler, "Did the doctor or someone push it? Did the supply clerk put through a requisition?"

"No," said Kohler, "Your mom called."

Brenda Hervey's ability to get medical attention for her step-son, Michael is a simultaneous lesson in triumph and tragedy. The triumph is her courage and persistence. The tragedy is help did not come from those who should have helped.

It did not come from the military or the military medical machine that constantly referred her to bureaucracy after bureaucracy. It did not come from state or federal legislators—whom Brenda contacted constantly--in Iowa or New York. Staff in Harkin's, Schumer's and Clinton's offices took the information, but never got back to her. The rest ignored her altogether. It did not come from any public proponent of the war, or any conservative faction waving a "Support the Troops" banner. Moreover, it did not come from Hollywood stars ubiquitously on the front-lines of anti-war marches.

Brendy Hervey's help came from the father of a son also stationed in Iraq. Via her own investigation, Hervey stumbled across Military Families Speak Out, a grass-roots group comprised only of real people with real loved ones who are really affected by the war. She found a friend in Tim Kahlor, who contacted his son, Ryan; and it was Ryan who went out of his way to procure and deliver Michael's gear.

How has it come to be that the sum of all the most powerful resources in the most powerful nation in the world could not get Michael Hervey to the hospital, but two men, already sacrificing far more than their share, were the ones who could and did? This is a reality and tragedy so fraught with deceit and betrayal that it is too much for most Americans to more than superficially acknowledge.

There is a sea of pain here that is so wide and deep that angels gulp and doubt whether eternity provides time to cross it. Each bleak and aching wave whispers the obvious question, "When will the pain matter?"

More specifically, the question is, "Whose pain matters?" The flat reality is that most Americans awaken each morning with no reflexive, visceral twinge over the war. Even most anti-war advocates will admit, when honest, they've never been startled from sleep because of it.

I have put this article away a hundred times now because I require myself to consider this, and I find the pain too unbearable. And, then I find it more unbearable to realize that if my imaginings are unbearable, how is it that we expect the world to heal from the realities that hundreds of thousands have faced in this war?

I imagine the frustration and fear woven through all the details slicing at Brenda Hervey's heart and mind this past year. I imagine her ear numb from holding on the phone, I imagine her stifling tears or anger as she writes down one more number or name. I see her walking a floor or rocking back and forth on a chair as she waits for a call back or pushes through a sleepless night. Eating something, drinking something, reading something, ignoring something, doing or not doing something as sunset after sunset bleeds into sunrise after sunrise; each delivering more questions than answers.

I imagine rows of beds as she walks into the hospital in Germany. I imagine white sheets tye-dyed with pink and orange and yellow and brown stains and smells and hybrids smells of medicine and waste of things human and inhuman. I think of the hallways of suffering she must pass through storing all those beloveds, and some not beloved enough, in chairs or on carts, before she can wrap her arms around her own beloved son.

And more painfully, far more painfully, I realize (as I know does she) that she is luckier than many in this sea.

And, because I am far too human, I cannot keep from imagining something else.

A flash of bright yellow comes through a sunny open door in my mother's arms. This is a memory. And, I remember what happens next. My mother places the sunny newborn baby in the yellow blanket on my lap, and, because it is my fifth birthday, she tells me it is my birthday present. The baby is rosy beige, and her eyes and fists are clenched. I slip my finger through a cluster of hers and believe she intends to grip me. I ask about the dried, brown, stem-looking thing on her belly, and as my mother explains it to me, the baby opens her eyes and stares into me.

"Is she really mine?" I ask in utter wonder.

"As long as you take good care of her," our mother answers.

She is fifty now, my baby sister, and she is a chief petty officer on the USS Stennis, which is positioned in the middle of the Persian Gulf. She is a mechanic, and she repairs war planes. She (who is in a position to know) and others (who are not in a position to know) tell me she is "relatively" safe in this war. It is that word, "relatively," that haunts me throughout these days. If she is "relatively" safe then she must also be "relatively" in danger. No matter who else says what else, I cannot not know this; and I can't stand it. I can't take care of her. I can't even know what her days are like there, because she cannot tell me. I only know she has seen the planes she has repaired take off with bombs and come back without them. And, because I know her to be compassionate and kind, I also fear what this is doing, and has done, to her heart and soul as well as what it may do to her body.

Sooner, rather than later, I will witness another dismissive shrug of "That's how war is." The irrefutable horror of the war will be splashed near some war proponent's feet, and this will be the response.

I don't dare deconstruct this response because it may tell me something I don't want to know. It may tell me that there is no story wrenching enough to motivate a sufficient review of our collective compliance with the persistence of this war. Even more frustrating, there may be no story to be told that will nudge even those who are academically opposed to the war to risk anything to stop it.

Other questions and comments and questions and comments like them I've heard made to others hit me harder.

"At least you don't have a child there."

"At least your sister isn't on the ground."

"Are you sure you're not using your sister to justify your politics?"

"Are you sure your activism isn't only about your own family self-interest?"

Like all words that hurt, the pain comes from a grain of truth they may hold. So I, like others, twist myself into a living illustration of the Kubler-Ross theory.

I deny. I deny her danger. I put my personal concerns away and in perspective. I don't have a child there. My sister is safer than some. I organize or help others organize efforts against the war. I don't have to worry about Jacky, she's probably going to be okay. I read, and I write, and I write. I write letters or emails or essays to Congress, to online forums, to the Editor, to other activists, to my friends, to my family, to my sister.

I bargain. If I work hard enough to stop the war, if I care enough about the pain of others affected by the war; Jacky will be okay. I spend every spare dime I have to stop the war. I go to Washington—a number of times. I go to Ft. Benning. I go to Tuskegee, Alabama, and sleep in a pew in a place where Dr. King preached. In January, I force myself to upload a chart of Iowans in the military who have been killed in Iraq on my group's website. It is an agonizing project that is accomplished through a flood of tears, several pots of coffee, and a pack of cigarettes before I'm finished. There are thirty-seven names, and each name I type tears me apart. I scold myself simultaneously for the grief I feel because it might be indulgent but also because I do not feel grief enough. There is no escape from this guilt because I cannot touch the endless grief wrought by each name I enter on the chart.

I deny while I bargain. This is familiar. I've done this before. I was an indefatigable AIDS activist during the 1980s and 90s to keep my life-long soul-mate friend Michael from dying—an endless parade of demonstrations in Iowa and Washington, symposia, lobby days, the Quilt, and funerals. The number of funerals is one I no longer try to count, funerals of other friends who owned less of a chunk of my heart than Michael, and all their mothers, sobbing inside my embrace. Michael still died, but I refuse to weigh this history in this mix.

Another Michael has entered my life, Michael Hervey, and his situation is present and urgent. His serous injuries may not be serious enough for the Army. He may be sent back to duty soon. There must be some way to stop this. His mother, Brenda and I, both Iowa members of Military Families Speak Out, have only met through email. Brenda sends me a journal entry and other information about her struggle. I am knocked backward by the scorch when I read more about the searing series of betrayals that created their senseless ordeal. Brenda bravely relates, only as a point of fact, that her husband and Michael's father, Bill, has died the year before. I sit on my sofa and sob.

I'm soon distracted by the breaking Walter Reed scandal. Bipartisan bull-roaring commences. I don't know why the story is breaking now. I do know the news is not new to anyone in Congress. Maybe they really don't read our letters. Jacky orders Ramen noodles online because the food Halliburton serves is that inedible. I come from a family who'll eat just about anything—you can tell this by looking at us. How bad must the food be? Congress knows this too. I am distracted by passage of the Joshua Omvig bill. Josh was an Iowan. I've known about him for some time, but this is the first time I read about him in the press. It takes an act of Congress to provide for round-the-clock mental health care for veterans, and the reach of the act is still questionable at best. Here at home, in what is often called "the People's Republic of Johnson County," I have yet to see one elected county official at a single Peach March, Rally, vigil or even at the opening of the Peace Center this month. There are now forty names on my chart. Joshua Omvig is not one of them. I stumble across a note I have of Grandma Shaw's memory of my Uncle Harold being killed in World War II. My family has yet to recover from this. My grandfather never comes home from the war. Driven by guilt for ordering his sons to enlist, he exiles himself to Arkansas instead. My father responds by enlisting too, lying about his age. He was 16. My mother's brother, Bernard, dropped dead from an aneurysm in the front seat of his car right after his last tour in Viet Nam. I trip over a snapshot of my best friend from college, Tom. Tom survived Viet Nam, even though his left arm was paralyzed, only to be killed in a car crash one year after six months of treatment at the Iowa City V.A. hospital. Some well-meaning jerk at Tom's funeral whispers to me that Tom's death is "a blessing in disguise" because of the many times we've coaxed him, trembling, out from under a table or bench every time a car backfires or a fire cracker explodes.

I interrupt my interrupting thoughts because it's time to do my weekly stint as a volunteer at the Peace Center. Afterwards, I stop at George's, my tavern hangout these past 35 years. Before I change the subject and talk with others about the Alberto Gonzales scandal instead, I tell a woman I've known for years of Brenda and Michael's story.

She says, "That's rough, but at least it's only her step son."

I am angry. I am very angry. I am sick of everyone who is sick of hearing about it. I am angry at everyone who isn't angry about this too.

I am angriest at myself. Adjoining the sea of pain is a bottomless reservoir of class bigotry, racism, rationalizations, excuses, dismissals, and apathy that feeds this sea. After all these years of dog-paddling in this reservoir, I have yet to find a way to drain it or even siphon off a little of its poison. Instead I watch its bacteria gurgle and grow like the immense vat of toxic waste it is.

"At least" have become the passwords for inaction.

"At least" we live in a country where you can complain.

"At least" Tina Richards can go to Washington and talk to a congressman about her son even if he did insult her for doing so.

"At least," Cindy Sheehan can buy land to stage her dissent.

"At least," your sister can order food online.

"At least" the women in Iraq got to vote.

"At least," it's only her step son.

How much pain is enough before people will do something? How close does the relative have to be? How horrible their stories? I consider telling all of them to "Go to hell," if only as a method to get them in the same room where we are. The foaming waste fills my nose and eyes and ears. It's in my mouth and strains through my teeth and burns my throat and tongue. "At least" I'm not swallowing it.

I'm angry even though I know anger is a particular problem because it's the ultimate indictment that permits the dismissal of suffering. E.g. "I can't listen to them because they have so much anger." And I have my own list of "at leasts."

At least one elected official might attend at least one peace event in my so-called liberal county.

At least one member of at least one board might be someone who doesn't believe they are superior to those they serve.

At least one of these people who dismiss these stories might hear one out before they throw it out.

At least we should be willing to sacrifice as much—our jobs, our wealth, our status, our lives—to end this war as what is being taken from those we send to fight it.

With due respect to Dr. Kubler-Ross, I am nowhere near acceptance. I cannot accept two more years of this outrage or even two more needless deaths because of it. I cannot accept elected leadership that cares more about the next election than the next orphaned child or grieving mother (or father or grandmother or grandfather, or sister). I cannot accept a citizenry that will accept leadership that accepts this. I need to believe we are waking up to our obligation to assume our roles as responsible citizens and as decent human beings. I need to believe our growing numbers of dissent will soon explode in every corner of human experience, that truth and justice will win, and that this travesty will end. Soon.

Michael Hervey's Story by Brenda Hervey is located on the School for Moral Courage website or by clicking http://www.schoolformoralcourage.com/michaelstory.html

Another Payne on the Path to Justice

Class is the tow rope that pulls oppression. Its aching, twisting stretch for respectability churns the undertow that drowns equality and erodes courage.

This high-gauge lash is dragging through Iowa City this weekend (January 27, 2007) in a workshop at the HACAP center on Waterfront Dr. called, "Bridges out of Poverty." The workshop is sponsored by the Iowa City Housing Authority and is based on the work of Ruby Payne and her book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty.

Payne's skill at self-promotion has been a convenient fit for educators eager for a quick fix in dealing with poverty, and her popularity has rapidly surged with little or no honest investigation of her competence. In fairness, it is flashes a beacon of hope to those who sincerely seek educational equality for their students from low-income families. Confidence in Payne's methods, like Payne's thesis, is based on collegial gossip and unsubstantiated and rather rare anecdotes of success.

The fundamental problem with Payne's thesis is that she doesn't know anything about poverty, let alone the culture of poverty, either through direct experience or scholarly research.

Anita Perna Bohn, an assistant professor at Illinois State University, examined Payne's scholarship and discovered that her work didn't meet any of the academic standards of research. I.e. There is no documentation that Payne has ever been a serious scholar of poverty or the impoverished either through academic or self-education. The "findings" in her self-published book are not verifiable, reproducible or valid. Bohn goes on to say that Payne's methods are not only incompetent but "downright dangerous" and states:

"On my first read-through of the [Payne's] "rules" I didn't know whether to laugh at the sheer stupidity of some of them or to rage at the offensive stereotyping of people in poverty and the thinly veiled bigotry reflected in others. I am still hard pressed to understand why ideas like this have made Payne the hottest speaker/trainer on poverty on the public school circuit today. One thing is certain, though: Ruby Payne has flown under the radar far too long. It's time for teachers and administrators to take a critical look at her immensely popular message."

In fact, there's scant evidence that Payne has ever read a book about poverty, other than her own.

Her bibliography consists entirely of authors with a right-wing, conservative, and economically laissez faire perspective on issues of which only a few are even vaguely related to poverty. She has no reference to any of the scholarly titans in the field like, Shirley Bryce Heath, Jonathan Kozol, Annette Lareau, and J.U. Ogbu. The bibliograhpy does include several books by Thomas Sowell, who has written position papers against a minimum wage, affirmative action, the liberal media bias, universal health care, and same sex marriage.

Payne shares these political views and seeks to advance them in her work. She is a public proponent of "No Child Left Behind," and cites Fox News as the authority for her statistics.

It's not only that Payne is a white, affluent, woman with no direct experience of poverty; she regurgitates and reinforces the most vicious stereotypes of those who live in poverty. Payne contends that people in poverty never plan, are slothful and undisciplined, talk funny, and don't care about their children.

Payne's theory is far from new and basically an unimaginative rehashing of the bigotry that blames poverty on those who are poor. She maintains that if "you people" would learn to talk, walk, and dress like "us," you'd be fine. (Apparently she's unaware of the millions of those with Ph.D.s and other advanced academic credentials working the same low-paying jobs as the working poor.)

This bias is outlined in the flyer distributed for the Iowa City workshop. The flyer states:

"You will be able to…

"▪ Explain how economic realities and living in an economic class system affect patterns of living and decision-making [Low income people are on to this.]

"▪ Describe and teach the hiden rules of middle-class [These rules are hardly hidden and are basically the problem.]

"▪ Understand the various language registers [It's okay to look down on you if I think you talk funny.]

"▪ Understand how to use discipline to bring about positive change [Working two to three jobs to survive doesn't require sophisticated discipline?]"

The flaws in these teachings isn't only that they assume that most low-income people don't know these things already, they deny that it is, in fact, middle-class and affluent America that has a whole lot to learn from the low-income people about discipline, planning, and cultural linguistics.

One particularly perverse tactic used by Payne is to make fun of how the underclass tells a story. Payne insists that a story must have a succinct beginning, middle, and an end without tangents or colorful illustration. This exposes Payne's own aversion to knowing anymore than she wants to know and lets the dominant culture that desperately needs some of this information off the hook for their own class bigotry. Fortunately Payne's limitation here hasn't had more social acceptance, yet, or the entire body of our most beautiful and powerful creative literature would be erased.

Payne denies the interlocking connections between class and race and gender. This has led to a teaching manual specifically addressing the inherent racism in Payne's approach. In An African Centered Response to Ruby Payne’s Poverty Theory, by educational consultant, Jawanza Kunjufu, Dr. Kunjufu asserts that "to provide an adequate education to students in poor communities requires teaching students how to eliminate poverty" rather than meaningless middle-class mimicry. The case he makes is solid and has led to several educational consultantships to debunk and/or clean up after Payne's work.

A peer review of Payne's book, "Savage Unrealities" by Paul Gorski (an assistant professor in the graduate school of education at Hamline University and founder of EdChange.org) refers to Payne's standpoint as "horrifying."

"Payne argues that her work is not about race but about class. … why does she paint such racist portraits of the African-American and Latino families in her scenarios? Payne identifies violent tendencies, whether in the form of gang violence or child abuse, in three of the four families of color depicted in the vignettes, but not in any of the three white families. Each of the families of color, but only one of three white families, features at least one unemployed or sporadically employed working-age adult. Whereas two of the three white children have at least one stable caretaker, three of the four children of color — Otis, who is beaten by his mother; Opie, who is left in the care of her "senile" grandmother; and Juan, who is being raised by his gang-leader, drug-dealer uncle — appear to have none."

Ruby Payne's workshop is not driven by informed educational practice but by a desire to foster a conservative economic agenda. Given some (proportionately few) people of color adopt conservative social and economic philosophies, it is safe to assume that the African Americans and Latinos that Payne has recruited for her cause come from those philosophical ranks.

I did watch a recording of this workshop that was presented last year and found the program to be completely consistent with the fears and objections of Payne's critics.

This column is not an indictment. Well meaning people can be misinformed and otherwise misled. It is a plea for more caution and thoroughness before we subject people to things that may do more harm than good. Our helping agencies should not be exploited to advance a narrow political agenda.

Please write or call the Iowa City Authority and the Iowa City Council today and ask them to

▪ review this program and disband this workshop.

▪ investigate and ask for a verifiable track record from the Bridges Out of Poverty Systems Change Team in Polk County along with the credentials of its trainers and leaders.

▪ consider a healing presentation by a reputable educational organization that works with race and poverty.

Contacts:

Mary Copper, Iowa City Housing Authority Self-Sufficiency Programs coordinator
Mary-Copper@iowa-city.org
319-887-6061

City Council of Iowa City

To contact the entire City Council of Iowa City
Council Members
410 E. Washington Street
Iowa City, IA 52240.
council@iowa-city.org

Members must be phoned individually.

To contact city councilors individually

Ross Wilburn, mayor
ross-wilburn@iowa-city.org
(319) 358-6374

Regenia Bailey, mayor pro-tem
regenia-bailey@iowa-city.org
(319) 351-2068

Amy Correia
amy-correia@iowa-city.org
(319) 887-3578

Connie Champion
No individual email address
Res: (319) 337-6608
Bus: (319) 338-2210

Robert Elliot
No individual email address
(319) 351-4056

Mike O'Donnell
No individual email address
Res: (319) 354-8071

Dee Vanderhoef
dee-vanderhoef@iowa-city.org
Res: (319) 351-6872

Related Links

Savage Unrealities by Paul Gorski
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/21_02/sava212.shtml

A Framework for Understanding Ruby Payne by Anita Bohn
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/21_02/fram212.shtml

Ruby Payne's bibliography
http://www.ncacasi.org/enews/articles_feb06/sch_accred_class_issues.pdf