Late Bloomers: Why do we equate genius with precocity?

I think a number of us have been fretting about getting old and irrelevant, since our masterworks have yet to be accepted into the canon of great American classics.. I sent this Wired article out in an email to a number of friends, but thought I'd post this New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell, author of "The Tipping Point."

Ben Fountain was an associate in the real-estate practice at the Dallas offices of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, just a few years out of law school, when he decided he wanted to write fiction. The only thing Fountain had ever published was a law-review article. His literary training consisted of a handful of creative-writing classes in college. He had tried to write when he came home at night from work, but usually he was too tired to do much. He decided to quit his job.

“I was tremendously apprehensive,” Fountain recalls. “I felt like I’d stepped off a cliff and I didn’t know if the parachute was going to open. Nobody wants to waste their life, and I was doing well at the practice of law. I could have had a good career. And my parents were very proud of me—my dad was so proud of me. . . . It was crazy.”

He began his new life on a February morning—a Monday. He sat down at his kitchen table at 7:30 A.M. He made a plan. Every day, he would write until lunchtime. Then he would lie down on the floor for twenty minutes to rest his mind. Then he would return to work for a few more hours. He was a lawyer. He had discipline. “I figured out very early on that if I didn’t get my writing done I felt terrible. So I always got my writing done. I treated it like a job. I did not procrastinate.” His first story was about a stockbroker who uses inside information and crosses a moral line. It was sixty pages long and took him three months to write. When he finished that story, he went back to work and wrote another—and then another.

In his first year, Fountain sold two stories. He gained confidence. He wrote a novel. He decided it wasn’t very good, and he ended up putting it in a drawer. Then came what he describes as his dark period, when he adjusted his expectations and started again. He got a short story published in Harper’s. A New York literary agent saw it and signed him up. He put together a collection of short stories titled “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara,” and Ecco, a HarperCollins imprint, published it. The reviews were sensational. The Times Book Review called it “heartbreaking.” It won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award. It was named a No. 1 Book Sense Pick. It made major regional best-seller lists, was named one of the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews, and drew comparisons to Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Stone, and John le Carré.

Ben Fountain’s rise sounds like a familiar story: the young man from the provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm. But Ben Fountain’s success was far from sudden. He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His breakthrough with “Brief Encounters” came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The “young” writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight.

Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth. Orson Welles made his masterpiece, “Citizen Kane,” at twenty-five. Herman Melville wrote a book a year through his late twenties, culminating, at age thirty-two, with “Moby-Dick.” Mozart wrote his breakthrough Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-Flat-Major at the age of twenty-one. In some creative forms, like lyric poetry, the importance of precocity has hardened into an iron law. How old was T. S. Eliot when he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (“I grow old . . . I grow old”)? Twenty-three. “Poets peak young,” the creativity researcher James Kaufman maintains. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the author of “Flow,” agrees: “The most creative lyric verse is believed to be that written by the young.” According to the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, a leading authority on creativity, “Lyric poetry is a domain where talent is discovered early, burns brightly, and then peters out at an early age.”

A few years ago, an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson decided to find out whether this assumption about creativity was true. He looked through forty-seven major poetry anthologies published since 1980 and counted the poems that appear most frequently. Some people, of course, would quarrel with the notion that literary merit can be quantified. But Galenson simply wanted to poll a broad cross-section of literary scholars about which poems they felt were the most important in the American canon. The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.” Those eleven were composed at the ages of twenty-three, forty-one, forty-eight, forty, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty, twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-two, and fifty-nine, respectively. There is no evidence, Galenson concluded, for the notion that lyric poetry is a young person’s game. Some poets do their best work at the beginning of their careers. Others do their best work decades later. Forty-two per cent of Frost’s anthologized poems were written after the age of fifty. For Williams, it’s forty-four per cent. For Stevens, it’s forty-nine per cent.

The same was true of film, Galenson points out in his study “Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.” Yes, there was Orson Welles, peaking as a director at twenty-five. But then there was Alfred Hitchcock, who made “Dial M for Murder,” “Rear Window,” “To Catch a Thief,” “The Trouble with Harry,” “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho”—one of the greatest runs by a director in history—between his fifty-fourth and sixty-first birthdays. Mark Twain published “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at forty-nine. Daniel Defoe wrote “Robinson Crusoe” at fifty-eight.

The examples that Galenson could not get out of his head, however, were Picasso and Cézanne. He was an art lover, and he knew their stories well. Picasso was the incandescent prodigy. His career as a serious artist began with a masterpiece, “Evocation: The Burial of Casagemas,” produced at age twenty. In short order, he painted many of the greatest works of his career—including “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” at the age of twenty-six. Picasso fit our usual ideas about genius perfectly.

Cézanne didn’t. If you go to the Cézanne room at the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris—the finest collection of Cézannes in the world—the array of masterpieces you’ll find along the back wall were all painted at the end of his career. Galenson did a simple economic analysis, tabulating the prices paid at auction for paintings by Picasso and Cézanne with the ages at which they created those works. A painting done by Picasso in his mid-twenties was worth, he found, an average of four times as much as a painting done in his sixties. For Cézanne, the opposite was true. The paintings he created in his mid-sixties were valued fifteen times as highly as the paintings he created as a young man. The freshness, exuberance, and energy of youth did little for Cézanne. He was a late bloomer—and for some reason in our accounting of genius and creativity we have forgotten to make sense of the Cézannes of the world.

The first day that Ben Fountain sat down to write at his kitchen table went well. He knew how the story about the stockbroker was supposed to start. But the second day, he says, he “completely freaked out.” He didn’t know how to describe things. He felt as if he were back in first grade. He didn’t have a fully formed vision, waiting to be emptied onto the page. “I had to create a mental image of a building, a room, a façade, haircut, clothes—just really basic things,” he says. “I realized I didn’t have the facility to put those into words. I started going out and buying visual dictionaries, architectural dictionaries, and going to school on those.”

He began to collect articles about things he was interested in, and before long he realized that he had developed a fascination with Haiti. “The Haiti file just kept getting bigger and bigger,” Fountain says. “And I thought, O.K., here’s my novel. For a month or two I said I really don’t need to go there, I can imagine everything. But after a couple of months I thought, Yeah, you’ve got to go there, and so I went, in April or May of ’91.”

He spoke little French, let alone Haitian Creole. He had never been abroad. Nor did he know anyone in Haiti. “I got to the hotel, walked up the stairs, and there was this guy standing at the top of the stairs,” Fountain recalls. “He said, ‘My name is Pierre. You need a guide.’ I said, ‘You’re sure as hell right, I do.’ He was a very genuine person, and he realized pretty quickly I didn’t want to go see the girls, I didn’t want drugs, I didn’t want any of that other stuff,” Fountain went on. “And then it was, boom, ‘I can take you there. I can take you to this person.’ ”

Fountain was riveted by Haiti. “It’s like a laboratory, almost,” he says. “Everything that’s gone on in the last five hundred years—colonialism, race, power, politics, ecological disasters—it’s all there in very concentrated form. And also I just felt, viscerally, pretty comfortable there.” He made more trips to Haiti, sometimes for a week, sometimes for two weeks. He made friends. He invited them to visit him in Dallas. (“You haven’t lived until you’ve had Haitians stay in your house,” Fountain says.) “I mean, I was involved. I couldn’t just walk away. There’s this very nonrational, nonlinear part of the whole process. I had a pretty specific time era that I was writing about, and certain things that I needed to know. But there were other things I didn’t really need to know. I met a fellow who was with Save the Children, and he was on the Central Plateau, which takes about twelve hours to get to on a bus, and I had no reason to go there. But I went up there. Suffered on that bus, and ate dust. It was a hard trip, but it was a glorious trip. It had nothing to do with the book, but it wasn’t wasted knowledge.”

In “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara,” four of the stories are about Haiti, and they are the strongest in the collection. They feel like Haiti; they feel as if they’ve been written from the inside looking out, not the outside looking in. “After the novel was done, I don’t know, I just felt like there was more for me, and I could keep going, keep going deeper there,” Fountain recalls. “Always there’s something—always something—here for me. How many times have I been? At least thirty times.”

Prodigies like Picasso, Galenson argues, rarely engage in that kind of open-ended exploration. They tend to be “conceptual,” Galenson says, in the sense that they start with a clear idea of where they want to go, and then they execute it. “I can hardly understand the importance given to the word ‘research,’ ” Picasso once said in an interview with the artist Marius de Zayas. “In my opinion, to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing.” He continued, “The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting. . . . I have never made trials or experiments.”

But late bloomers, Galenson says, tend to work the other way around. Their approach is experimental. “Their goals are imprecise, so their procedure is tentative and incremental,” Galenson writes in “Old Masters and Young Geniuses,” and he goes on:


The imprecision of their goals means that these artists rarely feel they have succeeded, and their careers are consequently often dominated by the pursuit of a single objective. These artists repeat themselves, painting the same subject many times, and gradually changing its treatment in an experimental process of trial and error. Each work leads to the next, and none is generally privileged over others, so experimental painters rarely make specific preparatory sketches or plans for a painting. They consider the production of a painting as a process of searching, in which they aim to discover the image in the course of making it; they typically believe that learning is a more important goal than making finished paintings. Experimental artists build their skills gradually over the course of their careers, improving their work slowly over long periods. These artists are perfectionists and are typically plagued by frustration at their inability to achieve their goal.

Where Picasso wanted to find, not search, Cézanne said the opposite: “I seek in painting.”

An experimental innovator would go back to Haiti thirty times. That’s how that kind of mind figures out what it wants to do. When Cézanne was painting a portrait of the critic Gustave Geffroy, he made him endure eighty sittings, over three months, before announcing the project a failure. (The result is one of that string of masterpieces in the Musée d’Orsay.) When Cézanne painted his dealer, Ambrose Vollard, he made Vollard arrive at eight in the morning and sit on a rickety platform until eleven-thirty, without a break, on a hundred and fifty occasions—before abandoning the portrait. He would paint a scene, then repaint it, then paint it again. He was notorious for slashing his canvases to pieces in fits of frustration.

Mark Twain was the same way. Galenson quotes the literary critic Franklin Rogers on Twain’s trial-and-error method: “His routine procedure seems to have been to start a novel with some structural plan which ordinarily soon proved defective, whereupon he would cast about for a new plot which would overcome the difficulty, rewrite what he had already written, and then push on until some new defect forced him to repeat the process once again.” Twain fiddled and despaired and revised and gave up on “Huckleberry Finn” so many times that the book took him nearly a decade to complete. The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.

One of the best stories in “Brief Encounters” is called “Near-Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera.” It’s about an ornithologist taken hostage by the FARC guerrillas of Colombia. Like so much of Fountain’s work, it reads with an easy grace. But there was nothing easy or graceful about its creation. “I struggled with that story,” Fountain says. “I always try to do too much. I mean, I probably wrote five hundred pages of it in various incarnations.” Fountain is at work right now on a novel. It was supposed to come out this year. It’s late.

Galenson’s idea that creativity can be divided into these types—conceptual and experimental—has a number of important implications. For example, we sometimes think of late bloomers as late starters. They don’t realize they’re good at something until they’re fifty, so of course they achieve late in life. But that’s not quite right. Cézanne was painting almost as early as Picasso was. We also sometimes think of them as artists who are discovered late; the world is just slow to appreciate their gifts. In both cases, the assumption is that the prodigy and the late bloomer are fundamentally the same, and that late blooming is simply genius under conditions of market failure. What Galenson’s argument suggests is something else—that late bloomers bloom late because they simply aren’t much good until late in their careers.

“All these qualities of his inner vision were continually hampered and obstructed by Cézanne’s incapacity to give sufficient verisimilitude to the personae of his drama,” the great English art critic Roger Fry wrote of the early Cézanne. “With all his rare endowments, he happened to lack the comparatively common gift of illustration, the gift that any draughtsman for the illustrated papers learns in a school of commercial art; whereas, to realize such visions as Cézanne’s required this gift in high degree.” In other words, the young Cézanne couldn’t draw. Of “The Banquet,” which Cézanne painted at thirty-one, Fry writes, “It is no use to deny that Cézanne has made a very poor job of it.” Fry goes on, “More happily endowed and more integral personalities have been able to express themselves harmoniously from the very first. But such rich, complex, and conflicting natures as Cézanne’s require a long period of fermentation.” Cézanne was trying something so elusive that he couldn’t master it until he’d spent decades practicing.

This is the vexing lesson of Fountain’s long attempt to get noticed by the literary world. On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith. (Let’s just be thankful that Cézanne didn’t have a guidance counsellor in high school who looked at his primitive sketches and told him to try accounting.) Whenever we find a late bloomer, we can’t but wonder how many others like him or her we have thwarted because we prematurely judged their talents. But we also have to acccept that there’s nothing we can do about it. How can we ever know which of the failures will end up blooming?

Not long after meeting Ben Fountain, I went to see the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, the author of the 2002 best-seller “Everything Is Illuminated.” Fountain is a graying man, slight and modest, who looks, in the words of a friend of his, like a “golf pro from Augusta, Georgia.” Foer is in his early thirties and looks barely old enough to drink. Fountain has a softness to him, as if years of struggle have worn away whatever sharp edges he once had. Foer gives the impression that if you touched him while he was in full conversational flight you would get an electric shock.

“I came to writing really by the back door,” Foer said. “My wife is a writer, and she grew up keeping journals—you know, parents said, ‘Lights out, time for bed,’ and she had a little flashlight under the covers, reading books. I don’t think I read a book until much later than other people. I just wasn’t interested in it.”

Foer went to Princeton and took a creative-writing class in his freshman year with Joyce Carol Oates. It was, he explains, “sort of on a whim, maybe out of a sense that I should have a diverse course load.” He’d never written a story before. “I didn’t really think anything of it, to be honest, but halfway through the semester I arrived to class early one day, and she said, ‘Oh, I’m glad I have this chance to talk to you. I’m a fan of your writing.’ And it was a real revelation for me.”

Oates told him that he had the most important of writerly qualities, which was energy. He had been writing fifteen pages a week for that class, an entire story for each seminar. “Why does a dam with a crack in it leak so much?” he said, with a laugh. “There was just something in me, there was like a pressure.”

As a sophomore, he took another creative-writing class. During the following summer, he went to Europe. He wanted to find the village in Ukraine where his grandfather had come from. After the trip, he went to Prague. There he read Kafka, as any literary undergraduate would, and sat down at his computer.

“I was just writing,” he said. “I didn’t know that I was writing until it was happening. I didn’t go with the intention of writing a book. I wrote three hundred pages in ten weeks. I really wrote. I’d never done it like that.”

It was a novel about a boy named Jonathan Safran Foer who visits the village in Ukraine where his grandfather had come from. Those three hundred pages were the first draft of “Everything Is Illuminated”—the exquisite and extraordinary novel that established Foer as one of the most distinctive literary voices of his generation. He was nineteen years old.

Foer began to talk about the other way of writing books, where you painstakingly honed your craft, over years and years. “I couldn’t do that,” he said. He seemed puzzled by it. It was clear that he had no understanding of how being an experimental innovator would work. “I mean, imagine if the craft you’re trying to learn is to be an original. How could you learn the craft of being an original?”

He began to describe his visit to Ukraine. “I went to the shtetl where my family came from. It’s called Trachimbrod, the name I use in the book. It’s a real place. But you know what’s funny? It’s the single piece of research that made its way into the book.” He wrote the first sentence, and he was proud of it, and then he went back and forth in his mind about where to go next. “I spent the first week just having this debate with myself about what to do with this first sentence. And once I made the decision, I felt liberated to just create—and it was very explosive after that.”

If you read “Everything Is Illuminated,” you end up with the same feeling you get when you read “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara”—the sense of transport you experience when a work of literature draws you into its own world. Both are works of art. It’s just that, as artists, Fountain and Foer could not be less alike. Fountain went to Haiti thirty times. Foer went to Trachimbrod just once. “I mean, it was nothing,” Foer said. “I had absolutely no experience there at all. It was just a springboard for my book. It was like an empty swimming pool that had to be filled up.” Total time spent getting inspiration for his novel: three days.

Ben Fountain did not make the decision to quit the law and become a writer all by himself. He is married and has a family. He met his wife, Sharon, when they were both in law school at Duke. When he was doing real-estate work at Akin, Gump, she was on the partner track in the tax practice at Thompson & Knight. The two actually worked in the same building in downtown Dallas. They got married in 1985, and had a son in April of 1987. Sharie, as Fountain calls her, took four months of maternity leave before returning to work. She made partner by the end of that year.

“We had our son in a day care downtown,” she recalls. “We would drive in together, one of us would take him to day care, the other one would go to work. One of us would pick him up, and then, somewhere around eight o’clock at night, we would have him bathed, in bed, and then we hadn’t even eaten yet, and we’d be looking at each other, going, ‘This is just the beginning.’ ” She made a face. “That went on for maybe a month or two, and Ben’s like, ‘I don’t know how people do this.’ We both agreed that continuing at that pace was probably going to make us all miserable. Ben said to me, ‘Do you want to stay home?’ Well, I was pretty happy in my job, and he wasn’t, so as far as I was concerned it didn’t make any sense for me to stay home. And I didn’t have anything besides practicing law that I really wanted to do, and he did. So I said, ‘Look, can we do this in a way that we can still have some day care and so you can write?’ And so we did that.”

Ben could start writing at seven-thirty in the morning because Sharie took their son to day care. He stopped working in the afternoon because that was when he had to pick him up, and then he did the shopping and the household chores. In 1989, they had a second child, a daughter. Fountain was a full-fledged North Dallas stay-at-home dad.

“When Ben first did this, we talked about the fact that it might not work, and we talked about, generally, ‘When will we know that it really isn’t working?’ and I’d say, ‘Well, give it ten years,’ ” Sharie recalled. To her, ten years didn’t seem unreasonable. “It takes a while to decide whether you like something or not,” she says. And when ten years became twelve and then fourteen and then sixteen, and the kids were off in high school, she stood by him, because, even during that long stretch when Ben had nothing published at all, she was confident that he was getting better. She was fine with the trips to Haiti, too. “I can’t imagine writing a novel about a place you haven’t at least tried to visit,” she says. She even went with him once, and on the way into town from the airport there were people burning tires in the middle of the road.

“I was making pretty decent money, and we didn’t need two incomes,” Sharie went on. She has a calm, unflappable quality about her. “I mean, it would have been nice, but we could live on one.”

Sharie was Ben’s wife. But she was also—to borrow a term from long ago—his patron. That word has a condescending edge to it today, because we think it far more appropriate for artists (and everyone else for that matter) to be supported by the marketplace. But the marketplace works only for people like Jonathan Safran Foer, whose art emerges, fully realized, at the beginning of their career, or Picasso, whose talent was so blindingly obvious that an art dealer offered him a hundred-and-fifty-franc-a-month stipend the minute he got to Paris, at age twenty. If you are the type of creative mind that starts without a plan, and has to experiment and learn by doing, you need someone to see you through the long and difficult time it takes for your art to reach its true level.

This is what is so instructive about any biography of Cézanne. Accounts of his life start out being about Cézanne, and then quickly turn into the story of Cézanne’s circle. First and foremost is always his best friend from childhood, the writer Émile Zola, who convinces the awkward misfit from the provinces to come to Paris, and who serves as his guardian and protector and coach through the long, lean years.

Here is Zola, already in Paris, in a letter to the young Cézanne back in Provence. Note the tone, more paternal than fraternal:


You ask me an odd question. Of course one can work here, as anywhere else, if one has the will. Paris offers, further, an advantage you can’t find elsewhere: the museums in which you can study the old masters from 11 to 4. This is how you must divide your time. From 6 to 11 you go to a studio to paint from a live model; you have lunch, then from 12 to 4 you copy, in the Louvre or the Luxembourg, whatever masterpiece you like. That will make up nine hours of work. I think that ought to be enough.

Zola goes on, detailing exactly how Cézanne could manage financially on a monthly stipend of a hundred and twenty-five francs:


I’ll reckon out for you what you should spend. A room at 20 francs a month; lunch at 18 sous and dinner at 22, which makes two francs a day, or 60 francs a month. . . . Then you have the studio to pay for: the Atelier Suisse, one of the least expensive, charges, I think, 10 francs. Add 10 francs for canvas, brushes, colors; that makes 100. So you’ll have 25 francs left for laundry, light, the thousand little needs that turn up.

Camille Pissarro was the next critical figure in Cézanne’s life. It was Pissarro who took Cézanne under his wing and taught him how to be a painter. For years, there would be periods in which they went off into the country and worked side by side.

Then there was Ambrose Vollard, the sponsor of Cézanne’s first one-man show, at the age of fifty-six. At the urging of Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, and Monet, Vollard hunted down Cézanne in Aix. He spotted a still-life in a tree, where it had been flung by Cézanne in disgust. He poked around the town, putting the word out that he was in the market for Cézanne’s canvases. In “Lost Earth: A Life of Cézanne,” the biographer Philip Callow writes about what happened next:


Before long someone appeared at his hotel with an object wrapped in a cloth. He sold the picture for 150 francs, which inspired him to trot back to his house with the dealer to inspect several more magnificent Cézannes. Vollard paid a thousand francs for the job lot, then on the way out was nearly hit on the head by a canvas that had been overlooked, dropped out the window by the man’s wife. All the pictures had been gathering dust, half buried in a pile of junk in the attic.

All this came before Vollard agreed to sit a hundred and fifty times, from eight in the morning to eleven-thirty, without a break, for a picture that Cézanne disgustedly abandoned. Once, Vollard recounted in his memoir, he fell asleep, and toppled off the makeshift platform. Cézanne berated him, incensed: “Does an apple move?” This is called friendship.

Finally, there was Cézanne’s father, the banker Louis-Auguste. From the time Cézanne first left Aix, at the age of twenty-two, Louis-Auguste paid his bills, even when Cézanne gave every indication of being nothing more than a failed dilettante. But for Zola, Cézanne would have remained an unhappy banker’s son in Provence; but for Pissarro, he would never have learned how to paint; but for Vollard (at the urging of Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, and Monet), his canvases would have rotted away in some attic; and, but for his father, Cézanne’s long apprenticeship would have been a financial impossibility. That is an extraordinary list of patrons. The first three—Zola, Pissarro, and Vollard—would have been famous even if Cézanne never existed, and the fourth was an unusually gifted entrepreneur who left Cézanne four hundred thousand francs when he died. Cézanne didn’t just have help. He had a dream team in his corner.

This is the final lesson of the late bloomer: his or her success is highly contingent on the efforts of others. In biographies of Cézanne, Louis-Auguste invariably comes across as a kind of grumpy philistine, who didn’t appreciate his son’s genius. But Louis-Auguste didn’t have to support Cézanne all those years. He would have been within his rights to make his son get a real job, just as Sharie might well have said no to her husband’s repeated trips to the chaos of Haiti. She could have argued that she had some right to the life style of her profession and status—that she deserved to drive a BMW, which is what power couples in North Dallas drive, instead of a Honda Accord, which is what she settled for.

But she believed in her husband’s art, or perhaps, more simply, she believed in her husband, the same way Zola and Pissarro and Vollard and—in his own, querulous way—Louis-Auguste must have believed in Cézanne. Late bloomers’ stories are invariably love stories, and this may be why we have such difficulty with them. We’d like to think that mundane matters like loyalty, steadfastness, and the willingness to keep writing checks to support what looks like failure have nothing to do with something as rarefied as genius. But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.

“Sharie never once brought up money, not once—never,” Fountain said. She was sitting next to him, and he looked at her in a way that made it plain that he understood how much of the credit for “Brief Encounters” belonged to his wife. His eyes welled up with tears. “I never felt any pressure from her,” he said. “Not even covert, not even implied.” ♦

Today I'm listening to..

Getting back into the work groove after a week off in Chicago, and I'm really so glad to be back in front of the big windows at Online Cafe, looking out at skies half blue and half gray and menacing.

Making a few big changes lately and in the coming months, so with any luck I'll start posting here more regularly. These are some of what I'm working to today:

volcano!: I was intrigued by the Pitchfork review that said:

It may be easy to create an indie rock song that eschews structure for instrumental shock-and-awe, or reveals too much information in the lyrics, or pokes fun at messianic rock stars. Doing all of the above is rare, however-- as is making each stray verse or hiccup as arresting as the one before it-- but volcano! manage this on their second record, Paperwork, even better than they did on their debut, Beautiful Seizure.

I listened to the songs they have on their Myspace page, and I thought I was going to go insane. Either these folks have more ADHD than me by a power of magnitude, or I just need to give it another listen. That was the case with the Rosebuds' new release.

The Rosebuds, "Life Like": I first listened to this yesterday, and wasn't incredibly impressed. But a day removed, the second listen is impressing me with many of the songs, particularly the 3rd, 4th and 5th tracks, "Border Guards," "Bow to the Middle," and "Nice Fox." One of the really great things I think the Pitchfork review (that's right, all my new music is either discovered there, or in emails from Shani or Jerkemy) was the comment on the rapid release of new Rosebuds material - it allows them to move forward and create new stuff, but you can still see clear links between their older stuff and the newer. I think that's my favorite part of the album, looking for those links, as I think about making music a more central part of my life, and how (or if at all) that would progress.

Rebuilding the Antiwar Movement

I gave my first public meeting talk (and last for awhile) a few days before I left for Chicago. For those from far away, here it is, minus the Powerpoint with pictures and videos (it didn't work that night, anyway).

Rebuilding the Antiwar Movement

So the US ruling class has really found itself in quite a pickle lately, huh? They've responded to the collapsing economy by giving $700 billion dollars to the same people that caused this whole thing in the first place. While doing that, they've spent more on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than any war in history. With millions of working people seething about both of these, it seems like the time is ripening to begin rebuilding social movements in this country. And at the same time, the need for the strong antiwar movement is arguably greater than at any other time in the history of the world. So I'm really glad we're all here tonight, because responsibility like that, what's going on in the world, and how to react, need discussion: they are far from obvious.

But that's just what we're told, being inundated with black or white, yes or no questions from people all over the media like Bill O'Reilly. The world is a complicated place, and rebuilding the antiwar movement is going to take people who understand what's really going on in the world, what's at stake for the US in its various imperial adventures, and what history tells about strategies that can challenge the greatest power the world has ever known.

And no one knows the power the United States can wield better than the Iraqi people, one million of whom have died throughout the course of the US invasion and occupation. To escape from this devastation, 5 million Iraqis have fled from their homes in the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world. A full half of these people have left the country altogether, where the treatment they receive in their new homes mirrors that of the undocumented immigrants in this country - unable to legally work, living in perpetual fear of being sent home. One such woman, the wife of a formerly prosperous construction engineer, said "In Iraq we are not safe but we can eat... in Egypt we are safe but can't eat."

This is a choice no one should be forced to make, but millions do. These people have abandoned their homes, their neighbors, their lives. Women are forced into sex work simply to find ways to earn money. And while violence plays an enormous role in Iraqi life, equally devastating is the lack of access to regular electricity, clean water, and decent medical care. Untold numbers have lost the ability to earn a livelihood, between Paul Bremer's firing of anyone associated with the Baathist regime, the prying open of Iraqi markets to US corporations, and the literal devastation of cities enduring "shock and awe" tactics.

For all these reasons and countless others, a full 50% of the Iraqi people believed - at the time of the US invasion - that the US was there not for their freedom but over control of oil. That number has increased regularly since, as Iraqis have learned the hard way that a military force does not exist to build schools, distribute food or freedom. It is a blunt instrument of force.

And yet, while public sentiment has turned against the war in overwhelming numbers, the belief remains among many that it is possible to achieve good in the world through the use of our military. Actually, the level of anger surrounding the war is in some ways surprising, considering how awful the mainstream media is. We're talking about an industry that literally puts in bins marked "unfit for air" "disturbing footage, like civilians having their homes raided by the military. It's also widely known now the NY Times sat on the truth about weapons of mass destruction, and the government's wiretapping of civilians, for a full year at the Bush administration's request. And to continue with the inanity, there was a Times article just this past Sunday entitled "Back in Iraq, jarred by the calm," in which I read, "the “surge” of American troops is over. The Iraqis are moving to take their country back, yet they wonder what might happen when the Americans’ restraining presence is gone..." By contrast, this text visualization represents the past two weeks' worth of news from the McClatchy service. The bigger the word, the more commonly it occurred.

The mainstream media has routinely parroted every justification put forward by Bush and Co. - regardless of the logic involved or how many times before we had heard something similar - from weapons of mass destruction to fighting islamic terrorists to the US being there to inspire democracy or keep the Iraqi people safe, to more weapons of mass destruction in Iran and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the destruction of Iraq has gone largely ignored. Some attention was paid to the 4,000+ US soldiers dead, or the tens of thousands returning with devastating physical or emotional damage, but there has never been a serious discussion of the consequences on ordinary Iraqis. Had that been the case, the majority of Americans would have laughed at the next idea from the Bush brain trust.

For years, the US has been portraying the Iraqi resistance to US occupation as the work of indiscriminate killers, Islamic terrorists. But by the Pentagon's own figures, 80% of all attacks were on occupying forces," attacks which the vast majority or Iraqis supported either actively or passively. The obvious solution would then be to remove the occupying forces. But as the Bush administration's twisted logic went, the way to solve this was in fact a surge of 20,000 more troops into the country.

So tours of duty were extended, stop-lossing was increased, and since, we have been inundated with celebrations of the surge's supposed success. Is it any wonder, with this unanimous assault on the truth, that half of all Americans began to believe what they had been told over and again? But I think it says a lot about the distrust people have for our government and media that even after all this, almost as many did not believe it. And it says even more that pollsters could only hunt down 4% of Iraqis that would agree with it.

And the Iraqis are right - the surge hasn't really quelled violence. How could it? In fact, in January 2006, there were 537 civilian and Security Force casualties. In June of this year, there were 554. Because the violence is lower than it was at its absolute highest peak does not at all mean that more troops equals more stability or less violence. More likely, what has lead to a decrease in violence since 2004 are three factors:

1. Displacement of Iraqis and ethnic cleansing has been so widespread - all but 25 of 200 mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad are now ethnically homogeneous - that Iraq has simply reached the point of diminishing returns.

2. The Sunnis were called “the terrorists,” “Baathist dead-enders” and al-Qaeda a year ago - but now we call them Awakening Councils and Iraqi volunteers - they've entered temporary alliances with the United States to fight the Shia militias which Washington previously armed.

3. Moktada al-Sadr, the Shia leader of the Mahdi Army, has for most of the last year declared a ceasefire. He could call off that ceasefire at any moment, just like the Sunni militias now on the U.S. payroll.

All this talk of the successful surge has given cover to politicians in both the US and Iraq, whose populations have overwhelmingly rejected the occupation. Their talk of withdrawal should be seen only as the political maneuvering it is, when they'll have the US military to surge back into Iraq should the situation get beyond US control. Which, of course, is something the US ruling class doesn't intend to happen, despite the growing complaints from various Congressmen and women that Iraqis need to "take responsibility for their country." This is, for a variety of reasons, exceedingly difficult for the occupied Iraqi population.

And it will only become more difficult if the US gets its way, as its definition of a sovereign Iraq seems to include the Status of Forces agreement, designed to be implemented before December 30, when the UN mandate for the occupation expires. Under the agreement, Washington will remain in control of Iraqi air space, be exempt from Iraqi law, able to detain Iraqis and launch military strikes at its own initiative, remain in possession of long-term military bases and the World's largest embassy in Baghdad. Other agreements will leave Western companies largely in control of Iraqi oil.

The reality of Iraq is far from obvious to millions of Americans, even those that do not support the occupation. In order to combat and interpret the constantly-repeated lies and distortions, it's critical to have reliable sources of informational and analysis, and as the focus in the war on terror shifts back to Afghanistan, the antiwar movement is going to need to take up the issue of that war's perception as "the good war."

Remember, Iraq was meant to be the sequel to Afghanistan: efficient, precise, almost sanitary. There is absolutely no reason to believe that if we were fed lies repeatedly about Iraq, that it's not happening about everything else... including Afghanistan. So I'd like to step back for a few moments and talk about the "war on terror," and what's really going on there.

Does everyone know who this is? It's Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa, who spent the better part of three decades in a prison cell for his fight against apartheid. Mr. Mandela recently celebrated his 90th birthday, and even the US State Department got in on the action. For Mr. Mandela's birthday they took him off the US terrorist watch list, where he had been since the early 1970's. This is one of the faces that for three decades the US told us would be haunting our dreams and hating our freedom.

Other stories, including that we're in Afghanistan to liberate Women, are equally implausible. I mean, let's just look at the region, whose oil and natural gas the US is in competition with Russia and China to dominate. It's not a coincidence that we have had military conflicts in or with Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, Georgia, and by extension, Russia. Every place there is oil or natural gas or a pipeline, you will find either a government friendly to the United States, or a place labeled a haven for terrorists.

In reality, the US had long sought a partnership with the Taliban. As one U.S. diplomat put it in 1997, "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be an oil consortium, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that." There was hardly the concern with what the Taliban represented, and certainly not towards women. After all, unless the US intends to being invading every country on the planet, including itself, "oppression of women" is an arbitrary decision at best to be in Afghanistan. From the time that it took office, the Bush administration had been negotiating with the Taliban to enlist it as a regime friendly to U.S. interests and to help fend off Russian and Chinese influence. At one point in negotiations, U.S. representatives tired of the slow pace and threatened Taliban officials, saying "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs." If the 9/11 attacks hadn't happened, the US government would have had to invent a reason, but instead they were handed the perfect rationale for imperial aggression.

Should people think the prosecution of the US's occupation of Afghanistan is any different than in Iraq, there is a newly unfolding story. After air strikes in western Afghanistan killed 90 civilians, including 60 children, the US quickly refuted the account, saying in fact 25 militants had been killed with 5 civilian casualties. Due to the overwhelming evidence - including cell phone videos of the carnage - the UN was forced to investigate. Despite the overwhelming evidence that almost 100 people had been killed more or less indiscriminately, the US continues to maintain that numbers had been inflated by villagers tied to terrorists. This line is typical from the US.

At the Winter Soldier hearings in Baltimore, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans told story after story that flew in the face of official US accounts. That civilian welfare, or justice, was a prime concern, was tearfully exposed as a lie by Sgt. James Gilligan, who spoke about his time in Afghanistan, about an incident when his unit coming under fire. [PLAY to "numerous casualties" 3:40], [PLAY to "let us know" 4:40]

Much of the situation in Afghanistan differs from Iraq only in the details. The reasons for the US being there - and for our demands that it leave, are the same. The puppet Prime Minister of Iraq, under enormous pressure from Iraqi public opinion, recently commented, "he who wants to exit in a quicker way has the better assessment of the situation in Iraq." The antiwar movement needs to take this up as a truism of any occupation - including the other occupation in the middle east, Palestine. We have to be fully confident that they have been putting forward the best assessment since day one, in our demand for an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all occupying forces.

Overshadowing much of the debate about the wars abroad is the election race here at home, where things have really heated up as the candidates compete to convince us they are real agent of change over the disasterous past eight years of George Bush. The Republican candidate, John McCain, has for his part ventured to chastise Russia for its recent conflict with Georgia, saying "in the 21st Century, nations do not invade other nations.."

Is he kidding? This guy has stones the size of that thing sticking out of his cheek if he thinks we're going to somehow forget about Iraq and Afghanistan, especially when he's publicly said he would be fine if the US stayed in Iraq for 100 years? And how about Sarah Palin, the Christian Right extremist who was supposed to in some way appeal to Hillary-supporting women It's not difficult to see how that support never materialized. She opposes a woman's right to abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, which puts her beyond even McCain. But the most frightening thing is her belief that the occupation of Iraq is a mission from God. <PLAY to end>

The McCain campaign's leading economic spokeswoman, Carly Fiorina (the former CEO of HP), even said this past week she didn't think Sarah Palin had the experience to run a major American business. She later said she didn't think McCain did either. After the remark raised a few eyebrows, she expanded that statement to include Obama and Biden. Now, she's supposed to attack her opponents. But when one of your chief economic people says their own candidates couldn't do at least as good a job as the people who've been running Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Fannie May and Freddie Mac, AIG, Washington Mutual... That's saying an awful lot. And let's not forget, one of the selling points of George W. Bush in 2000 was his ability to run the country like he was a corporate head. So George W. Bush: CEO material. John McCain and Sarah Palin : not quite. Which makes it troubling that McCain suspended his campaign yesterday... to tend to the economy.

This should be a landslide win for the democrats. Barack Obama has been exciting unprecedented numbers of people, including massive amounts of young people and people of color. 80,000 saw him speak in Denver, along with tens of millions around the world. There is tremendous excitement to elect the first Black President in a country founded on slavery. He's a good looking guy and a brilliant speaker. It's been eight years of possibly the worst president in history, and he's running against two absolute clowns, who represent nothing but a continuation of those policies. Bush's approval ratings are in the toilet, as is his handling of the economy and of Iraq.

Obama should have no problem ripping them to shreds, particularly their insane ideas about the war. But until very recently, they were basically in a dead heat. The media is selling us on the old blue state/red state differences, but this is just another way to divide working people against each other. Especially considering the mid-term election in 2006, where Democrats won major gains - and look to win even more this year - in "red states," the divide is not nearly as deep as we're told it is. National Election Survey results show that across every demographic - race, religion, etc, social issues (including abortion) are less strongly related to party identification and presidential votes than economic issues, and that is even more true for the bottom third of the income distribution than for the more affluent. Instead, there is a perfectly sensible reason for the closeness of the race, and it has more to do with the policies Obama began to put forward after locking up the Democratic nomination.

On Bill O'Reilly last week, he repeated that the surge lie again, AND committed to demanding Iraqis pay the US for destroying their schools, hospitals and cities. I also think he invited Bill O'Reilly on some sort of trip to the middle east. I could find plenty more clips like this, where Obama's inspiring rhetoric is belied by his actual policy proposals.

Obama calls his position on Iraq a withdrawal, and he claims he'll have all troops involved in "combat operations" out of Iraq by the middle of 2010, barring any need to make "tactical adjustments." Even if the "withdrawal" goes as advertised, soldiers involved in combat operations make up about half of all soldiers, and that doesn't of course include military contractors such as Blackwater, whose presence Obama is actually considering increasing. And Obama's "withdrawal" would actually be a redeployment of at least 10,000 troops to Afghanistan, to try to reassert their dominance there, and countless others to Qatar, Kuwait, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Djibouti or on aircraft carriers stationed in the Gulf - safely within striking distance of Iraq.

On the war, and on a host of other issues, Obama has had to walk a fine line between the millions he inspired to come out and support him, and the US ruling class, whose interests he is attempting to represent. It's critically important for the antiwar movement to understand - and make the argument - that Obama is probably not playing conservative to appeal to middle america, only to sweep into office with radical reforms. A look a his foreign policy team tells us this with certainty. It includes Madeline Albright, who as the Secretary of State to Bil Clinton once asked Colin Powell, "what's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Youch. That does not sound like a radical departure from what Obama calls "the foreign policy mistakes of the last 8 years."

Should he win, the important thing is not which Obama will take office, the champion of working people or the friend of the ruling class. What is critically important is what we do on the ground. Hell, Obama has been telling us this himself throughout the election race, that change doesn't come from Washington, it comes to Washington. Or when asked who Martin Luther King Jr. would endorse for President, said he would endorse no one, understanding that change comes from the bottom up, when people hold leaders accountable and demand change. It's too bad my mother can't see me standing here, telling you what the democrat said is absolutely correct.

History has shown us that who is sitting in the White House is not nearly as important as who is sitting in, who is organizing and who is protesting. To prove this, let's compare the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Richard Nixon, the anti-Semitic racist who was chased from office by his own scandals, increased funding for food stamps, rose social security payments by 20%, presided over the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Hazard Act, laid the basis for racial quotas that would become affirmative action, pushed for Title IX, and saw abortion legalized, and pushed aggressively for national health insurance that would cover 100 percent of the nation's poor children. And let’s not forget Vietnam ended while he was in office.

Bill Clinton came into office promising change, including a ban on discrimination against gays in the military, and passage of universal healthcare. Early on those became "don't ask, don't tell" and the disaster of a healthcare plan that Hillary devised. Clinton dismantled the welfare system, financed a prison-building boom, proposed cutting a quarter of a million jobs and pushed through free trade agreements like NAFTA, and passed the Defense of Marriage Act, which went out of its way to institutionalize the second-cass status of gays and lesbians, declaring among other things that "the Federal Government may not treat same-sex relationships as marriages for any purpose, even if concluded or recognized by one of the states." Through murderous sanctions and repeated bombings of Iraq, at least half a million children were killed, and the groundwork was laid for a Bush invasion in 2003. Here's what his Secretary of State Madeline Albright had to say about the dead Iraqi Children - that the price of 500,000 dead Iraqi children (more dead than in Hiroshima) was a price worth paying. This, of course, is the same Albright now serving on Obama's foreign policy team.

So I think the question becomes, what is the difference between these two periods, that working people saw such gains under Nixon, and such losses under Clinton? The difference is what was going on in the streets - the Nixon presidency saw the height of the mass activism of the 60's and 70's, while the Clinton presidency represented the second of three ongoing decades where there was relatively little struggle.

This distinction is something mass movements have been misunderstanding - that power gives up nothing without a struggle, and there has to be some kind of threat of losing much more, before anything will be relinquished. Of course there are Democrats with a desire to see positive change. But we're not talking about what a few individuals want - it's what will actually bring the results that millions are demanding with increasing volume.

This misunderstanding is one of the key reasons that an antiwar movement that staged the largest protests in the history of the world the month before the invasion of Iraq, with 10 million protesting around the world (and 50,000 in Seattle alone), saw those numbers dwindle to a couple thousand for the 5th anniversary protests this year. Sure, there's been massive demoralization at how little Bush and Congress have cared about our opinions - or democracy for that matter. But a major factor was the willingness of major antiwar organizations with tens of thousands of members, like MoveOn, UFPJ, and Code Pink to silence themselves on Abu Ghraib and Falluja in favor of electing John Kerry - a pro-war candidate, in 2004.

Every election cycle, there is a race to the center where the two candidates try to scoop up more and more undecided voters. But that center point has moved steadily to the right over the past three decades, and things get worse for working people every time - working class families earn less, in real dollars, than they did in the late 70's, while working harder. If Democrats believe they can take the antiwar majority, women, people of color and gays and lesbians for granted, because their only choice is to vote Democrat, we're going to keep getting candidates that echo "anybody but Bush." In other words, if they can take us for granted, they will.

The answer then, is not to jockey for their favor by holding fund raisers and laying off difficult questions or not protesting during election season. This is not to say that people voting for Democrats are not welcome in the movement. No matter how you spend that two minutes behind the curtain, everyone should be welcome that is interested in begining the slow, at times painful, process of rebuilding the culture of mass movements in this country. The 60's and 70's, as well as the 1930's and 1890's before that, show how powerful the working class can be when they are confident and organized. We can and should look to the movements that ended Vietnam as a guide to rebuilding our own antiwar movement.

But the $700 billion question is: how do we even begin attempting to match the low levels of organized antiwar activity with the enormous levels of antiwar sentiment? To this point, the Iraqi resistance has been doing nearly all of the heavy lifting for us in holding off the US Empire. With both contenders for president committed to continuing an occupation of Iraq until they are able to declare a victory for the US, it's going to continue to take a savage toll on Iraqis and Afghans until we can put together the kinds of enormous struggles it's going to take to result in US withdrawal.

And the news gets worse: with its access to oil and its proximity to other nations with even greater access to oil, Iraq represents a significantly greater prize to US imperial interests than did Vietnam. Because of this, it will likely take a considerably larger, more militant struggle to achieve our goals. And yet still worse, we haven't had a 15 year civil rights struggle, which had made dissent viable in this country after McCarthyism had paralyzed the US left for a decade.

So that's quite a task ahead of us. But it's not all bad news, there are a number of encouraging things we can look to. For instance, things may seem to be moving slow, but mass sentiment has turned against the war in Iraq much more quickly than it did in Vietnam. And incredible things have been happening right here in Seattle, like when the longshoremen - the people who load the military gear bound for Iraq - called a one-day work stoppage on May Day in protest of the war. That same day, hundreds of students from colleges and high schools throughout Seattle walked out of class, and met the marching Longshore workers at the pier. And later that day many of those protesters joined with the immigrants rights community , to connect the two struggles, against the war of racism abroad and the one taking place here. These kinds of lessons were much slower - if ever - to be learned during the 60's and 70's, and it's critically important that we're so ahead of the curve today.

That same month, a Winter Soldier hearing was held in Seattle, where Iraq and Afghanistan veterans testified before 800 people downtown at town hall, then marched en masse past crowds of tourists through the middle of downtown. And just recently a lease was signed on a GI Coffeehouse outside Ft. Lewis, which will allow the antiwar movement to connect directly with active-duty soldiers about their role in ending the war. These are huge successes, that in many ways put Seattle at the forefront of the antiwar movement.

The challenge facing us in rebuilding the antiwar movement is putting all these different components together into a sustained and growing movement. So I'd like to talk about two different ideas about why there isn't more antiwar activity, and what strategies and tactics flow from there.

One of the common ideas amongst the antiwar movement is that Americans are asleep, numbed by their comfort, possessions and apathy. And that's understandable, when there is really very little coverage of the food lines forming at soup kitchens in city after city, the rising cost of living, and how hard people have to work just to get by. And we know from poll after poll, and the results of the 2006 elections, that there is already mass discontent with the war, even with all disinformation out there.

It's been said that when the media began showing the truth about Vietnam, the images and stories brought home the reality of the war daily, and changed what the war in Vietnam was to Americans. For a certain segment of the population - middle and upper-middle class liberals - that was true, when the media decided it was profitable to start telling the truth, masses of people became convinced the war in Vietnam was both immoral and unwinnable.

But long before the media turned against the war, working-class families and neighborhoods were seeing soldiers return (or not return), and were hearing first-hand what had become obvious truth in Vietnam: that the only people over there worth respecting were the enemy, fighting to protect their families and homes. It is for this reason - that the working class always feels economic, racial, and other oppressions far more acutely than the wealthier segments of the population - that mass anger existed far before it was finally covered by the media. It's not an issue of telling people they have it shitty and there's an unjust war going on. They already know. What they don't know is what they can do about it.

One of the most common things to come up in discussions I have is how atomized, how isolated we are in the United States. People come home from work, exhausted and angry with the world, and they're looking for solutions. Well, that's clearly not to be found when they turn on the television or pick up a newspaper. We're told the most change we can hope to affect is to register some voters and get out the vote for the least worst candidate every two years. And that's incredibly demoralizing - which I don't think is a coincidence.

So is independent mass action a realistic possibility, given our situation and means? Well, yes. Despite the poor state of the antiwar movement in many places in the country, an independent, organized movement with a mass character is not at all an impossibility. It is not the current reality, but that does not mean we should woefully decry the movement, or give up on building it altogether. The tactics we need to make this a reality would necessitate finding a way to cut through the isolation and under confidence so many of us feel. I think this automatically excludes the media from any realistic plan, as it has proved time and again it is neither a friend of the left or the truth. So what tactics are we talking about?

I think mass demonstrations and protests are a very powerful tool. First, it physically brings people together, in the hundreds and thousands, and they can see they're not alone. It emboldens new people to join and invigorates current activists to keep working. It also allows us to guage where the antiwar movement is at, at least locally. Along with mass protest, native resistance to occupation and GI resistance were critical components in ending the Vietnam war.

It goes without saying that a foreign, unwanted occupying force is going to cause resistance. If someone rolled down your street with a tank, broke into your house in the middle of the night and terrified your children and even killed some of your family or neighbors, you would resist, and with every right. Instead of falling into the ruling class trap of dividing ourselves, and hurling names at them like terrorist, we should fully support their right to resist. The inability of the greatest military power the world has ever known to erase this resistance gives hope to people across the world, that we can fight back too.

5 Years into the Vietnam war, in 1968, the Vietnamese resistance launched the Tet offensive, and it changed everything, everywhere. For months President Johnson had been telling the American people there was a light at the end of the tunnel in Vietnam, the US would soon be victorious. As the Vietnamese New Year approached, the American embassy assumed all would be quiet. But on January 28, 70,000 soldiers of the National Liberation Front sneak-attacked 34 provincial capitals, 64 district capitals, and numerous military installations. People everywhere saw the war was far from over - and that 70,000 geurrilas were able to move into place, without a single person giving them up. It showed without a doubt how uniform the support for the resistance was amongst the Vietnamese. The war was unwinnable.

That year saw protests outside the DNC in Chicago turn into a bloodbath at Mayor Daley's orders, while hundreds of delegates inside donned black armbands in protest. It saw over ten million strike in France, eventually bringing down the DeGaul government. At the summer Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists to the sky in revolt and resistance. Thanks to Tet, people had hope that you could fight back against incredible odds, and they had confidence.

One group whose confidence was sorely lacking - at least in the areas it was supposed to be confident and trained - were the GIs in vietnam. There was a clear class divide between officers and enlisted men, 80% of who were from blue-collar families. They quickly learned the enemy were the only ones over there who knew what they were fighting for. Black soldiers, who made up disproportionate amounts of casualties, were being told the brown men in the jungles were there enemy. Meanwhile back at home, dogs and firehouses were unleashed on black students attempting to desegregate in Birmingham in 1963. In 1968 they saw the murder of Martin Luther King, who only a year before had begun to turn on capitalism itself, and called the US as the greatest purveyor in violence in the world. Black soldiers saw the Black Panthers at home, protecting their communities against police brutality, and understood their enemy was not in Vietnam, but at home.

Other soldiers weren't any happier about being in Vietnam. They knew full well they were there to kill peasants, and that greater bodycounts resulted in promotions for their officers. In fact, there were often times were units were ordered to take a completely worthless piece of land - incurring injury or death in the process - simply to put their oficer in line for more decoration or a promotion. There are always desertions in the military, but in Vietnam the desertion rate spiked by three times over that of the Korean War. And those that didn't, or couldn't desert, rebelled in the only ways they could. It's a dangerous thing to train someone how to kill, give them weapons, and then send them to die for a lie.

By 1971, Colonel Heinl was forced to write in the Armed Forces Journal that: "Our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near-mutinous." Bounties started cropping up on the heads of the most ruthless officers, the killings called fraggings. These did not happen to officers for revenge, but to exercise some control over battle situations that were spiraling out of control. For this reason, officers were usually warned prior to fraggings. First, a smoke grenade would appear near their beds. Those who did not respond would find a tear-gas grenade or a grenade pin on their bed as a gentle reminder. Finally, the lethal grenade was tossed into the bed of sleeping officer. Officers understood the warnings and usually complied, becoming captive to the demands of their men. Altogether, there were between 800 and 1,000 successful fraggings in Vietnam.

The soldiers began to take over the military. While earlier on they would perform "search and avoid" missions, which were just going down the road a bit, camping out and making fake radio reports, they began to actively defy orders. The National Liberation Front had publicly stated they would not shoot at anyone who did not shoot at them. GIs would wear red armbands to signal they did not want to fight, and thus soldiers on the ground began to make their own peace.

Despite much shorter tours of duty than today, which made it more difficult to organize their resistance, they did just that. Much of this was thanks to the role of the socialist workers party, who had a policy of not dodging the draft. Instead, they organized within the military by engaging soldiers in discussion and helping to start underground GI newspapers, of which there may have been as many as 300 different publications. The role of the newspapers in disseminating information cannot be understated.

What also cannot be understated is the effect of domestic protest on soldiers' willingness to resist orders and the war. In March 1965 teachers at the University of Michigan decided to have a teach-in on the war. 3,000 people showed up and debated until 8 the next morning. Later at Berkely some 30,000 participated in a 36-hour teach-in. In April 1965, Students for a Democratic Society astonished everyone by orgnanizing a protest in D.C. that drew 25,000. On a weekend in October 25,000 more demonstrated in New York, then 30,000 a month later, and 50,000 in March of 1969. These numbers would go up and down as the movement pushed forward and was set back, particularly for the 1969 election season. But they scared the hell out of Presidents Nixon and Johnson. When his advisers were pushing him to drop the atomic bomb on Vietnam, Johnson was quoted as saying, "how long will it take 500,000 angry Americans to climb the White House wall out there and lynch their President if he does something like that?"

The anger on display in repeated protest didn't just scare Johnson, or Nixon into bringing the troops home, it sent a clear message to half a million US soldiers all the way on the other side of the world. It let them know they while the media portrayed the antiwar movement as anti-soldier, the GIs were not alone in their anger, their bitterness and their pain. It gave them the courage to act in defiance of the most repressive employer imaginable. That should give us the courage that we, too, could defy our employers to fight for what is right. And it should inspire us to rededicate ourselves to the task of rebuilding the antiwar movement, because in Vietnam, the US ruling class lost the war to the Vietnamese and to the American working class, and in struggle with veterans and active-duty soldiers, and the occupied peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan, we can do it again.

Now imagine oil and gas had never existed, or they've dried up and disappeared. Whatever the next resource to become precious, be it wind, land or water, there would be competition between corporations, and the nations that back them up, for control over it. And from that competition one nation would look to dominate another's resources. When economically strong arming weaker nations doesn't do the trick, the military is inevitably called in and wars begin. This is called imperialism, and it's something the antiwar movement needs to put front and center of its message.

While the gains of the 60's and 70's not only included ending a war, but saw incredible steps forward for people of color, women, gays and lesbians, those gains have slowly been peeled back. And now we are working to reinvigorate an antiwar movement to stop not one but two wars, and possibly more in the near future. To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., if we want to stop more than just these wars, but all war, if we want to not just flip coins to beggars, but dismantle the system that produces beggars, then we need to end capitalism, which is proving every day just how unstable and unforgiving it really is to the vast majority of people. What is desperately needed now are more people who can make these connections for people.

There is a reason that in his 1971 report on the collapse of the military, Col. Heinl made a direct connection between the conditions he was dealing with and the collapse of the Tzarist armies in 1916-17 (one of the events preceding the socialist Russian revolution). There is a reason that when Attorney-General John Mitchell looked out his window in 1969 and saw 500,000 people demonstrating - and the police wading in to beat them, wearing gas masks and riot gear - that he felt like he was witnessing the Russian Revolution. There is a reason McCarthy demonized communists in the 1950's, driving radicals out of unions and workplaces across the country, and received the support of the US ruling class and government to do so.

It's because, unlike what we can learn in school and from the mainstream media, the ruling class is well aware of the history of class struggle, and who has typically been at the heart of struggle for social justice time and again. It has been socialists, who not only dedicate their lives to fighting for a better world, but arm themselves to be the memory of the class, to understand what has worked before in history. Rather than just pulling ideas out of the ether, we work from material reality, and decide what is possible in a given period, how to push struggle forward.

There are bad ideas coming at us from all angles. Any assertion that there are cut and dry, easy answers is flat out wrong. And the idea that we should all wait for - or be - a knight in shining armor to rescue the dumb masses is not the answer either. No one can liberate you but yourself. On the other hand, no one can make it happen on a wider scale by themselves - and we need to constantly be talking to others and making hard arguments with people about what its going to take to end these wars, and why they should be involved in fighting against capitalism, the system that has the productive capacity to feed, cloth and tend to the needs of every human being on the planet, yet produces beggars and wars instead.

While we make the planes, houses, cars, and everything else in this world, they are the ones that reap the enormous wealth we create every day, and they are the ones that send us to die when they want more. While we serve them dinners and stock their groceries, they destroy the economy in competition to soak up every last bit of profit. For all the ways they try to divide us, we still work in cooperation every day to keep society running. It's going to take that same cooperation to use our power to shut society down that will ultimately allow us to achieve a world where everyone is taken care of and such ugliness like racism, sexism and homophobia, and wars, are a thing of the past. That's a world that's possible to achieve, and it's one worth fighting for.

Old Speech I gave

Really busy getting ready for Socialism, but I thought I'd throw this up. It was a speech I gave when we brought Jello Biafra out to Seattle last year, and Lisa asked me to forward it to her for the comparison between the presidencies of Nixon and Clinton.

Good evening. My name is Jason and I am a member of the International Socialist Organization, and we’re so glad you all came out to this event we’ve put on tonight. It’s amazing that without television coverage, without full-page ads in the Stranger or even a single mention of in most of the listings sections, hundreds of people found their way onto campus – not to see a punk rock legend rehash old tunes, but to sit and hear him talk - about politics - for a few hours. I think most of the people in this room came out tonight because they’re pretty pissed off about what’s going on in this country and around the world.

I see indications that we’re not alone every day: more than two-thirds of this country wants to know when our troops are coming home from the illegal occupation of Iraq, and they want that to be now. 70% of the troops themselves said they wanted to come home – by the end of 2006. The vast majority of the people say that healthcare IS the responsibility of our government, and that they would even pay up to $500 MORE in taxes every year if that would guarantee healthcare access to all. And these are the working people of this country, already buried in debt. 59% of people say they favor a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants in this country, and close to a million marched just three weeks ago in cities across the US for a path to citizenship that does not include tens of thousands in fines PER PERSON, and a waiting period that might take some 13 years. But despite clear proof that the vast majority of this country – even in the so called “red states” – have moved way to the left on all these issues and more, our government has failed to act on a single one.

George Bush’s approval ratings are in the toilet, in the low 30’s – this is the neighborhood Nixon was in just before resigning. But approval ratings of our new congress – the one elected last November on a clear mandate to get us the hell out of Iraq – isn’t far behind. It’s not surprising, with such a huge disconnect between what the people in this country want and what they’re getting.

So what are we supposed to do about this? We’re told by our history books, in the movies, by the news and everywhere else to wait for a hero. George Washington, John F Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Hilary Clinton, Barak Obama… just keep waiting, be patient. And whatever you do, MAKE SURE YOU VOTE DEMOCRAT. Your needs may not be met now or ever, but they certainly won’t if you don’t get into a voting booth every two years. This is what they expect us to believe, year in and year out, that the only way we can hope for change in our lives is by passively participating in the electoral process. Don’t like the Republican Channel? Switch to the only other channel on the set, Democrat. It may have different commercials, but somehow the same crappy programs keep coming on you switched away from the other channel to avoid. And no matter how often you keep flipping, it doesn’t ever seem to change. Is this really all we can do while being robbed and left to fight each other for crumbs, to grit our teeth and bear it, and be thankful it’s not any worse?

The architect of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin, had a name for people who just accepted these hypocrisies; those clinging to claims of “open-mindedness” while doing little and watching conditions get worse every year. He called these people liberals. And this is what he had to say about those people: “When a liberal is abused, he says, ‘Thank God they didn’t beat me.’ When he is beaten, he thanks God they didn’t kill him. When he is killed, he will thank God that his immortal soul has been delivered from its mortal clay.”

What we see every day in the mainstream media enforces that attitude. Things could always be worse, be happy with the little you have, things could always be worse. It’s how we’ve always been divided: be happy with what you have, look how you’re so much better off than those black slaves. Look at those Irish, Chinese, Latino workers, they are so much worse off than you – you should be thankful of what you have. You may not have healthcare or decent schools or decent public transportation, but you could always be gay – and not even be able to marry. We are divided in whatever ways possible, to prevent any kind of mass struggle from taking place. A sexist man can take what comfort he wants from a woman making 70 cents on his dollar, but when he’s only making 7 or 8 dollars an hour, things aren’t looking to bright for him either.

Jello will tear into the hypocrisy and bullshit of our ruling class and its mouthpiece the media, so I don’t have too much more to say about that. I would like to take up a different issue. If we are so pissed off about what’s going on in this country, but our ruling class continues to ignore us, and our media continues to tell us things are either ok or could be much worse, what can we do? Well, I’m in a revolutionary organization, so we would suggest a revolution that throws these leeches out on their asses, but that’s getting a little ahead of things.

The possibility of revolution tonight, tomorrow or any time soon is remote. But to ignore the role of struggle in winning rights for working people would be to ignore history. Our schoolbooks do that well, insisting that history is merely a series of heroes, riding in on their horses or tanks, and saving a grateful populace from themselves. But let’s consider some moments from the history of this country.

The abolition movement, the Woman’s suffrage movement, the movement for the 8-hour day and union rights, the civil rights movement, the Woman’s and Gay liberation movements, are just some of the many struggles this country has seen. Each time the rich in this country have wanted something, they’ve had a direct line to a legislator who could make it happen. When working people wanted something, anything, they have has to organize, slowly and painfully, and fight for it – together. Sometimes, like with Vietnam, it took more than half a decade to get a movement off the ground. This, incidentally, is why I see tremendous hope in our own anti-war movements: not only did we stage the biggest protests in the history of the world before the invasion of Iraq, but our movement is growing much more quickly than it did then.

This is another reason why it is so beautiful to me that so many of you are here tonight. A single march or protest is not likely to achieve any demand immediately. But in addition to showing our ruling class how many of us are pissed off and demanding change, it shows US how many of us there are. It’s so easy to feel isolated and alone when we get leader after leader that ignores us, and a mainstream media that refuses to talk about our issues. And being around so many like-minded people is inspiring – I know it is for me. It’s what drives me to go to more protests, to set up more events like this, to fight harder for what I believe in.

The abolitionist and one-time slave, Frederick Douglass, once said "If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the awful roar of its mighty waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand!"

There could be no better proof of the power of struggle than in the comparison between Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Richard Nixon, that loathsome anti-Semitic racist and coward, chased from office by his own scandals, presided over the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Hazard Act, laid the basis for racial quotas that would become affirmative action, pushed for Title IX, pushed aggressively for national health insurance that would cover 100 percent of the nation's poor children. And let’s not forget he ended Vietnam. Bill Clinton, who told us her could feel our pain, kept gays in the military in the closet when he enacted Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, passed the Defense of Marriage Act, did nothing with the national health care he had been elected to create, threw millions of single mothers off welfare, helped to dismantle a woman’s right to control over her body, and threw millions of poor single mothers off welfare. The brutal sanctions and continued bombing he greenlighted in Iraq lead to the deaths of a million Iraqi children.

This Republicrat role reversal seems startling; but both of these men had the same interests, that of the ruling class – to have the vast majority of us work our asses off to create as much wealth for them and their friends as possible. Left to their own devices they would throw themselves entirely into this task, of making every policy decision based on what would best consolidate power and money for the super-rich in this country. But every now and then something pesky gets in the way of these plans: a massively pissed off, massive majority of working class people. Nixon was not a better guy than Clinton, he was afraid he was going to be strung up. There was massive unrest, and he responded to it. Every major gain for working people has come under the exact same conditions.

Is this really the kind of world want to live in, where we can only get the most basic demands met by putting our leaders in fear for their lives? Does everything really have to be such a struggle? Well, yes and no. Under capitalism, in which the vast majority of people are paid just enough to stay alive and reproduce, so that they might continue to create wealth for a very few on top, we live in a system that mandates these types of hostilities. We are all in constant competition with one another for everything. But we in the International Socialist Organization, the largest revolutionary organization in the country, look to a world where the needs of the vast majority, and not the profits of a select few, are the goals. The technology exists to feed, house and provide for everyone on this planet, yet billions live in squalor and many others in various stages of wage slavery.

While the working people of the world are frequently turned against each other through racism, sexism, homophobia, nationalism or xenophobia, we all share much more in common with each other than with the ruling class that exploits us every day. It will only be by joining together in struggle – like the January 27 march we helped to build, which brought 3,000 people down Union Street in the Central District and shut down a recruiting station for the day – that exploitation and oppression can be a thing of the past.

The International Socialist Organization looks to the lessons of the Russian Revolution. Pushed as far as they could be, the working class in that country revolted and took control in a bloodless revolution. They immediately instituted day care centers to relieve the double burden of women, gave women the right to vote and dissolve her marriage, made abortion fully legal and free, and legalized homosexuality – in the year 1917. This was three years before women even had the right to vote in this country, and waay before homosexuality was legalized in here in 1972. Leon Trotsky, another leader of the Russian Revolution described it: “The revolution gave land to the peasants, the revolution gave power to the workers and the peasants; these were great achievements, but no achievement is more important than the awakening of the human personality in every oppressed and humiliated individual.” Despite the incredible advancements this revolution made, it was defeated several years later when the world’s imperial countries, the US included, financed an army to overthrow this, the only true socialist society in history.

Lenin died and Trotsky was exiled before Stalin could take over the then-destroyed Russia and pervert socialism into state capitalism, something Mao did in China and Castro in Cuba. These dictators used socialism for their propaganda like George Bush uses freedom towards his own political ends. While the advancements made by the socialist revolution were erased, no one can extinguish struggle. There will always be new movements springing up, and struggle will continue as long as there is something to struggle for. The questions is whether or not we wish to spend the few years we have left on this planet before capitalism destroys it fighting tooth and nail for every basic need.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said “true compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." This was in a speech you don’t hear often, when he came out against the war in Vietnam. This was when he lost his connections in the white house, and was killed a year later. Despite that tragedy, the civil rights movement continued. When Malcom X was shot, the movement continued. Without downplaying these heroes or their contributions, struggles have continued because history is not changed by single people doing great deeds, it comes from masses of people joining together to make change. If you are at all interested in joining the struggle to not just end this war, but to end all wars, to not flip a coin to a beggar but to remove the system that creates beggars, than I suggest you join the International Socialist Organization and help us organize working people in self-emancipation. There are contact sheets going around, and you can put your name down either to be contacted about future events or put a star next to your name if you’re interested in joining.

Why did police attack Julio Hernandez?

My report in Socialist Worker on an incident of police brutality at Seattle Central Community College--and the protests against it.

June 9, 2008

SEATTLE CENTRAL Community College (SCCC) student Julio Hernandez was beaten by two Seattle police and three campus security guards during class changes on May 28, in front of a crowd of at least 100 people.

The school administration has invoked Virginia Tech in defending its decision to involve the police, who claim to have exerted just enough force to subdue a violent student attempting escape.

But from the very beginning, the administration and police have been forced to contend with a student response, the reports of many witnesses disputing the official story, and their own contradictory accounts.

Jorge Torres watched the event unfold. "I was right in front of the steps, and noticed two cops, and one or two security guards approach [Julio] and circle him," Torres said. "One of the cops reached to frisk him, and he jumped back in surprise. [Julio] didn't do anything, and they kept talking. A few minutes later, one of the cops grabbed him by the throat and pushed him to the ground. He continued to choke him, and [Julio] struggled under him."

A crowd quickly gathered, and the initially stunned students began to shout at the police. Cries of "Let him go!" were ignored by the police, as they threw their fists, elbows and knees into the student.

"The other cop jumped on top, and the three wrestled and wound up rolling down the stairs," said Torres. "One of the cops actually leaned the kid over, and the other one kneed him in the head. After that, they pushed him to the ground, and a third security guard rushed up. At this point, they had Julio's hands behind his back."

In the melee, a gun came loose, clattering to the ground and sending several bullets skittering. One cop turned his attention from Julio, whose face was pressed into the ground, to grab the gun. He elbowed and shoved a student to get at a bullet, and returned to reload the gun in front of Julio's face.

Several in the crowd began to shout in terror, others in disgust, "Why do the police have a gun out in school?" The policeman holding the gun claimed it belonged to Hernandez and then helped drag the student outside. They were met by 20 or 30 more police, and a dozen police cars with lights blazing.

Julio was taken away, while others, confused, angry and scared, milled outside the building and waited for some word as to what was going on.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

SCHOOL ACTIVISTS immediately began organizing a response. One student began collecting statements from those who had seen the incident unfold. Another spoke with the media, and others discussed their response.

Within a few hours, a speakout was organized for the following day's Unity Fair, an end-of-year event held by the college. Five or six media outlets covered the speakout. "The students and the progressive community on campus must demand that the cops be held accountable for their violence and endangerment of the student body, " Darrin Hoop told the crowd.

Between the time of the arrest and the eventual release of a statement from the school administration, several versions were circulated about what Julio's crime had supposedly been.

The rumor quickly spread around campus that he had been carrying a gun, but many had noticed that the fallen gun was re-holstered by an officer--several students had actually caught this on their camera phones. While the police were eventually forced to issue a retraction, many had already been confused by the lie and assumed the police had apprehended a genuinely dangerous person.

Students were told at various times that Hernandez had sexually harassed a woman, threatened a professor and either directly threatened two students or was overheard making threats. It was revealed that the threats were made the previous Friday, reported on Tuesday after the holiday weekend, and dealt with the next day, when the student was scheduled to be in school.

The school administration has refused to discuss the details of the alleged threats. Nor did it give much explanation for why a "serious threat of mass violence" did not result in police being dispatched to the student's home to deal with the issue previously, why no students received an e-mail warning, or why the school wasn't closed for the day.

Julio Hernandez's case is not an isolated one. It's not even the only recent incident of police brutality in Seattle. According to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer report, there have been at least 161 force cases at the Seattle Police Department in the past 18 months. No officers have been disciplined, despite the city losing cases in which it paid out $47,500 in response to a 2003 march against police brutality and $1 million to WTO protesters.

Less than a month ago, a judge threw out the city's case of resisting arrest against an antiwar protester, after seeing video footage of the brutality he endured. The same sort of video evidence exists for Hernandez, for whom a trial cannot come too soon.

A week after his arrest, Julio sits in jail on $75,000 bail. Incredibly, he will be tried for three charges of assault, disarming a law enforcement officer, and malicious harassment, a charge reserved for those who burn crosses or paint swastikas.

The swift, organized and uncompromising stand made by other students has put Hernandez in a position to win justice. Their support has sent the message that police brutality will be challenged and exposed.

Donate to Julio Hernandez's Defense Fund via PayPal.

Double Burden

Welcome back, all! Let's get right back into it, with an article sent in by (non)reader Xy:

Men Create More Housework for Women

Having a husband creates an extra seven hours of housework each week for women, according to a new study. For men, tying the knot saves an hour of weekly chores.

"It's a well-known pattern," said lead researcher Frank Stafford, an economist at University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. "Men tend to work more outside the home, while women take on more of the household labor."

He points out individual differences among households exist. But in general, marriage means more housework for women and less for men. "And the situation gets worse for women when they have children," Stafford said.

Overall, times are a' changing in the American home. In 1976, women busied themselves with 26 weekly hours of sweeping-and-dusting work, compared with 17 hours in 2005. Men are pitching in more, more than doubling their housework hours from six in 1976 to 13 in 2005.

Stafford analyzed time-diaries and questionnaires from a nationally representative sample of men and women over a 10-year period between 1996 and 2005. The federally-funded study showed that, compared with the single life, marriage meant more housework for both men and women.

"Marriage is no longer a man's path to less housework," Stafford said.

Single women in their 20s and 30s did the least housework, about 12 weekly hours, while married women in their 60s and 70s did the most - about 21 hours a week.

Men showed a somewhat different pattern, with older men picking up the broom more often than younger men. Single guys worked the hardest around the house, trumping all age groups of married men.

Having kids boosts house chores even further. With more than three kids, for instance, wives took on more of the extra work, clocking about 28 hours a week compared with husbands' 10 hours.

Mmhmm

It's 11:11 on September 11 as I write this. Make a wish!!!

I think this video disproves the idea that Bush and Co. charged in Iraq expecting to be greeted as liberators and sweep to victory. They expected a resistance, and have send thousands of US soldiers to to kill and be killed.

This video was taken in 1994.

Are US citizens outraged by the occupation?

Q. I just don't understand how people can hear all these reports of facts on the real conditions in Iraq, and yet the public outrage against this administration remains relatively minimal.

A. That a really good question, Jerkemy.

For those who don't know J, he is off-base at Lakenheath, Eng-land, and gets a cable package designed for military families (is this correct J?). So while the media coverage his family receives might be a bit more propagandistic than the mainstream media here, it's not by far. This is why I get that question quite a bit, even from people who are here.

Just as the mainstream media helped in Bush's charge to war (look into NY Times/Judith Miller, how the paper had every knowledge WMD etc was bullshit yet reported it as fact), they are covering for congress now. It's all part of the same system - to quote Karen de Young, editor and reporter from the Washington Post, "we are inevitably the mouth piece for whatever administration is in power... If the president stands up and says something, we report what the president said," as opposed to researching any claims for verity.

So it's not easy to see any significant opposition to this war - because the US ruling class doesn't want out of this war. So the first way I will answer that question is that people aren't hearing these types of reports. Anything remotely related to the real experience of Iraqi people or US soldiers under the occupation is kept far away from your living room. Instead of people being dragged from their homes, searched, terrorized, of checkpoints and large swathes of the country without electricity or running water, we see: Anderson Cooper, in a LL Bean vest, driving in the back of a truck.

I recently saw Soldiers of Conscience at the Seattle International Film Festival. In it is a powerful scene of a family being dragged out of their house at gunpoint, of the little girls unable to control their tears and the boys standing in impotent silence. It's a truly horrifying picture as you realize the daily humiliation of life under occupation. In the Q & A afterwards, the directors mentioned much of the movie came from footage they found in archives and purchased the rights for. That particular scene came from CNN's "NOT FIT FOR AIR" archive. There are many more like it. The directors mentioned they only had the money to license the archives for festival showings, and hadn't yet raised the money to release theatrically or on DVD.

If CNN isn't showing people what is really going on, and it is far too expensive even for filmmakers with financial backing to afford, then how the hell are people going to see what's going on there?

Well, I have two answers to that:

1. They can get their news from UNembedded reporter Dahr Jahmail. Let's reflect for a moment on CNN, MSNBC, FOX et al's "embedded reporting." That's basically saying "officially authorized by the US military."
2. People are STILL pissed off - massively so - without seeing much of what is really going on.

Let's look at some numbers for a minute:

• 80% of the US is against this occupation
• 67% think the country is headed in the wrong direction
• Bush's approval ratings are at Nixon-resignation-levels of 27%
• The only thing lower than that are the approval ratings for the Democratically-controlled congress, at 24% (this is what happens when you take a nice big poop all over your electoral mandate)
  

So with a sustained media campaign for the war, with every leader we have lying to us about what is going on in Iraq and where it's headed, the US people are still pissed off. If they knew half of what was really going on, there would be riots until this war ended.

But that's the way things work - there is always a section of people who get it first, and then that number grows. 9/11 was a major derailing of the left, a left that had been picking up huge steam with a massively successful UPS strike in 1997, the Battle of Seattle (WTO protests) in 1999, and much more. And now we're getting back on track, and protests are both growing in size and in frequency. Iraq Veterans Against the War has more than doubled in size, and even had a chapter of active-duty soldiers on-base at Fort Drum in NY!!!

The Vietnam war wasn't ended overnight. It was the confluence of a great many elements:

• A civil rights movement that had been picking up steam for 15 years, since the 1950's
• Black soldiers coming home on leave and seeing the rights they didn't have at home, and beginning to question what they were fighting for
• A women's rights movement and a gay rights movement
• Massive soldier revolt, refusing to fight (and even fraggings of officers!!) - you cannot fight a war if the human beings do the grunt work refuse missions
  
• An anti-war movement that embraced veterans, and gave confidence to others to resist

So it's going to take some time before we end this war. There is much, much more at stake in Iraq than there was in Vietnam. Now we are talking about the third-largest oil reserves in the world, and control of a Middle East the US desperately needs. In order to continue their world-wide dominance, the US needs to be able to defeat Iraq, a country devastated by a decade's worth of sanctions and bombings (at least a million died). How embarrassing must it be for these people that the biggest army in the history of the world could not waltz in and pluck this low-hanging fruit from the tree?

There are many signs of hope that we're headed in the right direction. We have a growing anti-war movement, amongst soldiers as well. A great many are against this war, and fight only to get home, and to make sure their buddies and comrades do so as well. There are also other movements that are growing, that I think we should look carefully at.

Immigrants rights are this generations civil rights struggle - I think the comparison is apt. The military is heavily - heavily - recruiting Latino youths. They are promising citizenship to undocumented workers - in fact, the very first US soldier to die was an Ecuadorian immigrant. He was granted posthumous citizenship. These soldiers, between being sent out for the third, fourth or fifth deployment, are coming home and seeing the ICE raids, the deportations, the xenophobia and racism against immigrants, and are going to ask what the hell they're fighting for. Mohamed Ali beautifully summed up the black refusal to fight in Vietnam: "No Veit Cong ever called me nigger."

To update: "No Iraqi ever called me illegal."

There is also a growing outrage over the state of health care in this country, thanks to Michael Moore's new movie SiCKO. The International Socialist Organization, along with CAIR Project (Community Abortion and Information Resource) and PNHP (Physicians for a National Health Program) held a public meeting on Single-Payer Health Care and the fight to get it. 200 people packed into the room, and 100 of those people put their names down to meet the next week to organize in Seattle a fight for single-payer health care.

The connection here, and with the degrading CTA service (at higher cost) in Chicago, and with the classes in New Fairfield, CT that force their children to bring their own tissues, etc at the beginning of every year, is the occupation. Two trillion dollars have been spent on this war so far - enough to improve the lives of so many people. But instead it has been used to end so many lives (almost a million so far in this occupation), to displace almost four million in Iraq to neighboring countries, and to permanently disrupt the environment with all the depleted uranium from our weapons of war.

And what is all this for? This is for the profit of US corporations - the same thing we see, over and over again. The very few at the top don't care how they keep expanding their already-obscene wealth, and they don't care what our lives look like during that process. So while there is already quite a bit of outrage - in a general sense - at this occupation, the job of the left will be to keep making those connections, so that more and more people will join in this movement. It's not going to be easy to end this war, but it is possible. Let's just hope this time, we can use it to further strengthen to working class to continue the fight onwards - to end a system that produces war, instead of struggling to defeat each war individually.

Dahlia Wasfi

Coffee with Herb