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(Via Lew Rockwell 2008-05-09: Young Heretics vs. the Flag Religion.)

I spent my first few years of school in a Montessori co-op school with a large contingent of aging New Leftists and burned-out hippie types among the parents. But after that it was all government schools, and, as far as I can remember, every government school I ever attended started business each day with the Pledge of Allegiance. I started having problems with the Pledge around the time I got to junior high school; I didn’t like being expected to chant out one nation, under God, and I figured it violated my religious liberty, so I stopped saying that. In high school I refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance at all, and I usually wouldn’t stand up, either, unless I felt like someone in the room was eyeing me. It’s not that I was trying to make some kind of anarchist protest; I was a fairly boring sort of Democratic Party-identified state Leftist for most of the time I was in high school, and didn’t become an anarchist until after I spent a couple years kicking around more radical forms of Leftism in college. But even then I considered the whole ritual Strength-Through-Unity exercise stifling and creepy, and I didn’t want to participate. So I feel a lot of personal, not just political, solidarity for these three teenagers in western Minnesota:

Three small-town eighth-graders were suspended for not standing at the start of the school day Thursday for the Pledge of Allegiance.

My son wasn’t being defiant against America, said Kim Dahl, mother of one of the students, Brandt, who attends Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton Junior High School in western Minnesota. She said her son offered no reason for sitting.

Brandt told the Fargo Forum that Thursday’s one-day in-school suspension, was kind of dumb because I didn’t do anything wrong. It should be the people’s choice.

Kim Dahl said the punishment didn’t fit the crime. If they wanted to know why he didn’t stand, they should’ve made him write a paper.

—Paul Walsh, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribue (2008-05-09): Principal who punished 3 who sat pledge foresees policy rewording

I understand the desire to try to protect your son from abuse in a case that’s sure to draw the howling attention of the Patriotic Correctness bellowing blowhard bully brigade. But, in all honesty, what would it matter if he were being defiant against America? Everyone’s got the right their convictions and nobody should be forced to participate in theo-nationalist rituals that violate their conscience. I also understand the desire to try to get a lighter punishment for your kid when the school is so clearly throwing its weight around in an attempt to bully and intimidate through a heavy punishment. But, in all honesty, what possible justification could there be for forcing this kid to take on extra academic work or to explain himself any further than he cares to do so freely?

She said that Brandt has not been standing all year, and all of a sudden it became an in-school suspension.

The district today is defending the punishments. The school’s handbook says all students are required to stand but are not obligated to recite the pledge. The same is true for all four schools in the district, a school official said.

These three [students] didn’t, and they got caught, said Mel Olson, the district’s community education director. He said he backs the punishment, being a veteran and a United States of America citizen, absolutely. Olson served in the Marines in Japan during the Vietnam War.

—Paul Walsh, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribue (2008-05-09): Principal who punished 3 who sat pledge foresees policy rewording

Another thin-skinned Veteran Against Individual Freedom, I guess, who has nothing better to do with his time than rant and cry about how nobody gives the military and its obsessive flag protocol the respect they allegedly deserve.

One of the things that makes me happy to see is that there is vigorous debate in the comments section on this story, with many posts from people who condemn the school’s actions (and the very idea of forcing children to recite a pledge of loyalty to the federal government on a daily basis), with reasonable argument and also, at times, with the ridicule and withering sarcasm that this asinine school administration deserves. The only thing there that’s irritating is the number of people who feel compelled to say things like, Oh, I think that everybody ought to jump up and shout Sir, yes Sir! when it comes time to say the Pledge, but I’m not sure that it’s really right to force people…. Whatever your personal views about flag protocol may be, this is an argument that can and should be made without doffing your hat to Patriotic Correctness.

As for the commenters who have posted in defense of the school’s actions, they’ve offered three different sorts of arguments, each one of which is beneath contempt. In order of increasing outrageousness, here are some examples of each.

First, there’s the standard Patriotic Correctness argument, along with several direct invocations of love it or leave it, some bizarre non sequiturs about caring about the Constitution (which is nowhere mentioned in the Pledge of Allegiance, has nothing to say about the Pledge or about flag protocol, and seems to mean absolutely nothing in the mouths of the people citing it except as a synecdoche for the authority of the United States federal government), and the usual long litany of demands for unearned respect in return for unasked-for services. The idea here is that the kids ought to be punished for daring to hold, or at least to express, anything other than glassy-eyed unquestioning loyalty to the federal government of the United States of America:

Out of respect for our country..

Its really not that hard to stand up and show some respect- not merely for the flag, but for the values that the flag represents: liberty, justice, and truth. Yes, this is a free country, but that also means that these families are free to leave if they cannot respect our nation.

—olin157 @ 9 May 2008, 10:07 AM

And:

Snot Nosed Brats

These snot nosed brats should not only stand but they should gladly participate in the pledge. At a minimum they should obey the rules of the school which means get off you rear and stand. You don’t have to harm your little sensibilities by actually pledging allegiance to the only country you have, just stand up for goodness sake. The school was right, ACLU and these punks are legally wrong.

—seanintucson @ 9 May 2008, 12:21 PM

Not to mention:

Idol Worship?

Are you people serious? It has nothing to do with the sort. You are not idolizing anything by standing up during the pledge. Hey, you don’t have to say it, the all powerful Supreme Court has brought that commandment down, if you will. Have we forgotten so soon what the Standard represents? Have you Baby-Boomers forgotten your parents who fought to raise that same flag during WWII? How about the current generation, your grandparents fought for it in WWII or Korea, parents in Vietnam and your friends now in Iraq and Afghanistan. I AM a current soldier, not retired, and HAVE served two tours in Baghdad. I truly believe you have the right to free speech, which is why you can go ahead and not say the pledge, but for the sake of my brethren who have fallen and those in the past who have died, show THEM the respect they deserve. Parents, you need to be teaching that this country isn’t about the government, but the people, and the people who formed it. This country’s freedom has, and is, constantly being paid for with the lives of its fighting men and women. While you may have the luxury of sitting back and saying its a free speech thing, just remember who gave you that same free speech.

—SGT_M on May. 9, 08 at 12:26 PM

I should pause to note that my father was indeed in the Army in Vietnam, and my father’s father was in the Army in Korea. The claim that either my father, or my father’s father, fought for free speech, or this country’s freedom, is absurd. Neither the North Korean government nor the North Vietnamese government, let alone the occupied countries of South Korea and South Vietnam, ever posed any threat to free speech or freedom in the United States of America. They did nothing in the Army to give me free speech because freedom of speech in the U.S. was not at risk in the first place.

The claim that either my father or my grandfather fought to raise a damned flag on the other side of the world is also absurd. The reason that my father and his father were in the Army is because the federal government sent each of them a letter announcing that if he did not join the Army, he would be arrested and thrown in prison. I’ll be damned if I sit around and listen to some sanctimonious volunteer soldier talk about how the United States Army, which conscripted both my father and my grandfather against their will, deserves my respect and gratitude for guarding individual freedom during the wars on Korea and Vietnam

As for the statement Parents, you need to be teaching that this country isn’t about the government, but the people, and the people who formed it, I’m inclined to agree, but I think the upshot is not quite what SGT_M takes the upshot to be. And I certainly don’t know what any of it has to do with standing during the Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge of Allegiance is not about the country, much less about the people; it’s about loyalty to the government, and it says so right at the beginning:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

And to the republic, for which it stands.

Anyway.

For the second argument, there’s the These snot-nosed punks got no respect line. This is, honestly, even worse than the belligerent appeals to American theo-nationalism, because, as disgusting as the latter is, the former involves singling out harmless kids for sneering speculation on their motivations and character. And also because they are is no longer attacking a difference of view and an exercise of liberty because they think something more important (love of the government and its symbols, or whatever) overrides it, but rather attacking difference and liberty just as such, because these teenagers are acting like free human beings instead of doing as they’re told by the wise and powerful authorities. Thus:

Respect!

Even if you do not like the Pledge of Allegiance for what ever reason. You should respect others who care and stand! The lack of respect is the main part of our trouble in this rough times.

—hussman02 @ 9 May 2008 10:05AM

And:

If it’s a school rule and he doesn’t have an answer as to why he didn’t stand - then he clearly is just being obstinate. I can’t believe a parent would support their kid in this situation!!!

—Cartert1 @ 9 May 2008, 9:55 AM

And:

$10 says these are pain-in-the-rear kids with pain-in-the-rear parents that hover around their kids and never make any acknowledgment that their kids could ever do anything wrong. If these kids were formally and legitimately protesting the United States they should not have been punished, but the tenor of the article suggests they are just smart asses and that they did not have any political/personal convictions when they sat out the pledge.

—pipress1487 @ 9 May 2008, 10:23 AM

I don’t think that Brandt Dahl’s statement that I didn’t do anything wrong. It should be the people’s choice. suggests they are just smart asses without any political/personal convictions. But suppose this were true. Then so what? Freedom of speech and expression don’t depend on you having something to say that fits some highly stylized model of formal and legitimate protest. The chief value of freedom of association just is being able to be a lazy smart-ass and live your ordinary life as you see fit, rather than spending your time protesting and fighting an overbearing, invasive government. While the right to speak out against injustices is vitally important, what’s even more important, and in fact what makes the right to speak out against injustices as vitally important as it is, is the right to just be left the hell alone and not be subjected to the officious demands of busybodies and blowhards on your time and energy.

If these kids are just trying to be pains in the ass over a ritual that they find stupid and tiresome, I support them and salute them. I can think of no better reason to refuse to participate.

The third, and worst, of the arguments seems (surprisingly, for me, anyway) to be the most common: the idea that even if the school policy is unjustified, and even if schools oughtn’t force students to stand, and even if the kids have got a legitimate beef with the school board, it does not matter, because they broke The Rules, and you got to punish anybody who steps out of line, even if they had a perfectly good reason to object. Now it’s no longer a matter of attacking them for having the wrong beliefs about public political devotion, and no longer a matter of attacking them for being thoughtless or not following orders that the authorities had good reason to hand down. It’s a matter of attacking them for not subordinating their own considered judgment and obeying orders which are admittedly arbitrary and perhaps even wrong in themselves. (If you have some free time and a high tolerance for pain, feel free to count the number of times that people repeat, verbatim, the phrase rules are rules.)

Thus:

he wasn’t protesting.

he didn’t have a reason why he didn’t stand, he just didn’t want to! what happens when mom and dad have house rules that he doesn’t want to follow? should they force him to follow their rules? life is full of rules that different people think are pointless, it just depends on whose ox is being gored. so now he’s learning that he doesn’t really need reasons for his actions, just whether he wants to do it or not. and we wonder why our youth have become so complacent today!

—K_Zemlicka @ 9 May 2008, 10:37 AM

And (all-caps is from the original):

RULES ARE MEANT TO BE FOLLOWED!

RULES ARE RULES, FOLLOWED THEM OR YOU’LL DEAL WITH CONSEQUENCES. BOTTOM LINE ! THAT CHILD DESERVED IT, I BETCHA HE’LL STAND NEXT TIME.

—securpo on 9 May 2008, 10:43 AM

Of course, there are two kinds of consequences in this world. There are the natural consequences of an action, and then there are the artificial consequences that people attach to an action by their chosen responses. In this case the only natural consequence of not standing for the Pledge is getting to spend a minute longer sitting rather than standing. The consequences that these three teenagers are being forced to deal with are better described as the choice of school administrators to flip out and try to make teenagers suffer in the name of Old Glory. In any case, statist logic aside, the fact that school administrators flip out when you don’t obey this stupid policy can hardly be used as a justification for their flipping out, without making your argument do doughnuts around the parking lot.

And then there’s this:

I find it interesting that the school has a policy that students must stand during the Pledge. But, policy is policy and rules are rules, so I agree that the students should be punished. I do think it’s an anti-patriotic policy though and standing for the Pledge would be made more meaningful if kids are allowed to do it through free will.

—ttepley @ 9 May 2008, 10:28 AM

In other words, God forbid that anyone should sit down when there are rules to be followed. Students should be punished for refusing to co-operate with a policy which you yourself believe to be foolish and wrong, because rules and authority need no rational justification, and indeed can defy any rational justification, and they ought to be obeyed nevertheless.

And then there’s this:

My son wasn’t being defiant against America

My son wasn’t being defiant against America, said Kim Dahl, mother of one of the students, Brandt, who attends Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton Junior High School in western Minnesota. Yet The school’s handbook says all students are required to stand but are not obligated to recite the pledge. So her son wasn’t being defiant against America, but defiant to the school policy itself. Ignorance is not a justifiable defense.

—pizann0 9 May 2008, 12:12 PM

I can’t stand flag creeps. I think that kind of belligerent theo-nationalism is absurd, contemptible, and dangerous. But what’s even worse than those who believe that every individual conscience should be turned towards a servile worship of the State, are those who believe that whatever your individual conscience is turned towards, you damn well ought to ignore it and follow the rules, because being defiant to authority is itself a mortal sin, whatever that authority may be and however pointless or wrong may be the rules that they are trying to impose. Where the complaint is not that they ought to be worshipping the one true God, but rather that they had damn well better bow down, no matter what may be before them at the altar.

Incidentally, the state ACLU says that punishing these students is against the rules, as set out in the U.S. Constitution and in rulings by the Supreme Court. I don’t care, and neither should anybody else.

See also:

• GT 2008-03-09: The purpose of government schools is to train your children to love the government.
• GT 2007-12-03: Veterans Against Individual Freedom
• GT 2006-06-14: Festive occasions
• GT 2005-03-09: The Most Depressing Photograph in the World

[See note re: problem w/ text size*.]

In lieu of the still-unfinished essay referenced yesterday, I give you this**.

My mother with Barack Obama, December 16, 2004, Honolulu, HI.

Someday I’ll find, and post, the one with my maternal grandmother and her hero, Oliver North. (Because I’m nothing if not fair and balanced.)

Plus the ones of my paternal grandpa (who raised me on C-SPAN, God bless him) with Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Ford.

For more goofiness, see this old post with pics of the late, great Senator Paul Wellstone, who went to high school with my dad; Wellstone’s mom and my grandmother also worked together in the cafeteria; the families also got together, on occasion, outside of school functions. (Did I mention the young Mr. Wellstone - for whom, years later - I did in fact vote, when I lived in Minnesota - looks quite fetching in a skirt?)

For better and for worse, the political thing has always been in the blood.

Not to worry though, the chances of my running for office are pretty much nil. Not only did I experiment with some blow while I was a teenager in Hawaiʻi, I also have an arrest record.

Ironically, the Olympia, Washington cop thought I had cocaine on me at the time; I didn’t. Rather, I had unlabeled capsules of another white powder in an unlabeled plastic baggie. Somehow he didn’t believe that the capsules contained boric acid: a homeopathic remedy for yeast infections. So they kept me locked up until they’d tested every last one of them. Following which he sheepishly emerged from the lab, asking whether I had any more capsules back at my dorm, so I could take care of my, ahem, “little problem.”

Needless to say, I was itching to get out of there.

__
* Tech note: WordPress is doing something weird with text size, which renders the individual post with too large text, and the post as it appears on main page of blog with size of title’s text too small. No idea why, trying to figure that out now. Will delete this note after troubleshooting.

** Intended also as a follow-up to a conversation that started here. Because this is the fun response, and I’ve given plenty of energy in recent times to political discourse that is, necessarily, painfully serious.

(Story via Freedom Democrats 2008-01-25.)

The primary reason that you should oppose government immigration laws is that the system of international apartheid is based on morally despicable premises, and necessarily involves massive State violence against peaceful people. Immigration laws involve the State in discrimination against, and violation of the basic human rights of, peaceful immigrants. But that’s not all that they do. And if you understand the stupidity and the evil of immigration laws, but don’t yet feel that you personally have a reason to stick your own neck out to actively oppose them, maybe this will help change your mind.

FLORENCE, Ariz. — Thomas Warziniack was born in Minnesota and grew up in Georgia, but immigration authorities pronounced him an illegal immigrant from Russia.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held Warziniack for weeks in an Arizona detention facility with the aim of deporting him to a country he’s never seen. His jailers shrugged off Warziniack’s claims that he was an American citizen, even though they could have retrieved his Minnesota birth certificate in minutes and even though a Colorado court had concluded that he was a U.S. citizen a year before it shipped him to Arizona.

…

In Warziniack’s case, ICE officials appear to have been oblivious to signs that they’d made a serious mistake.

After he was arrested in Colorado on a minor drug charge, Warziniack told probation officials there wild stories about being shot seven times, stabbed twice and bombed four times as a Russian army colonel in Afghanistan, according to court records. He also insisted that he swam ashore to America from a Soviet submarine.

Court officials were skeptical. Not only did his story seem preposterous, but the longtime heroin addict also had a Southern accent and didn’t speak Russian.

Colorado court officials quickly determined his true identity in a national crime database: He was a Minnesota-born man who grew up in Georgia. Before Warziniack was sentenced to prison on the drug charge, his probation officer surmised in a report that he could be mentally ill.

Although it took only minutes for McClatchy to confirm with Minnesota officials that a birth certificate under Warziniack’s name and birth date was on file, Colorado prison officials notified federal authorities that Warziniack was a foreign-born prisoner.

McClatchy also was able to track down Warziniack’s three half-sisters. Even though they hadn’t seen him in almost 20 years, his sisters were willing to vouch for him.

One of them, Missy Dolle, called the detention center repeatedly, until officials there stopped returning her calls. Her brother’s attorney told her that a detainee in Warziniack’s situation often has to wait weeks for results, even if he or she gets a copy of a U.S. birth certificate.

Warziniack, meanwhile, waited impatiently for an opportunity to prove his case. After he contacted the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, a group that provides legal advice to immigrants, a local attorney recently agreed to represent him for free.

Dolle and her husband, Keith, a retired sheriff’s deputy in Mecklenburg County, N.C., flew to Arizona from their Charlotte home to attend her brother’s hearing before an immigration judge.

Before she left, she e-mailed Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C. After someone from his office contacted ICE, immigration officials promised to release Warziniack if they got a birth certificate.

After scrambling to get a power of attorney to obtain their brother’s birth certificate, the sisters succeeded in getting a copy the day before the hearing.

On Thursday, however, government lawyers told an immigration judge during a deportation hearing that they needed a week to verify the authenticity of Warziniack’s birth record. The judge delayed his ruling.

I still can’t believe this is happening in America, Dolle said.

Warziniack began to weep when he saw his sister. They still don’t believe me, he said.

Later that day, however, ICE officials changed their minds and said that he could be released this week.

—Marisa Taylor, McClatchy Washington Bureau (2008-01-24): Immigration officials detaining, deporting American citizens

In the real world, outside of statist power trip la-la land, if you grabbed somebody off the street and locked him up in a hellhole jail cell against his will all through a complete mistake, and you kept him there and stole weeks of his life away from him, all the while failing to notice your fuck-up because of your arrogance and negligence, you would pay for what you did. You’d pay for it on a civil level in the form of restitution to your victim, and you’d pay for it on a criminal level with charges of kidnapping. Morally, the immigration cops who did this should be in jail. But, wait—once you strap on a badge and a gun, suddenly some sanctimonious buck-passing and excuse-making, with an Oops, our bad tacked on along the way, is close enough for government work:

On Thursday, Warziniack finally became a free man. Immigration officials released him after his family, who learned about his predicament from McClatchy, produced a birth certificate and after a U.S. senator demanded his release.

The immigration agents told me they never make mistakes, Warziniack said in an earlier phone interview from jail. All I know is that somebody dropped the ball.

…

Officials with ICE, the federal agency that oversees deportations, maintain that such cases are isolated because agents are required to obtain sufficient evidence that someone is an illegal immigrant before making an arrest. However, they don’t track the number of U.S. citizens who are detained or deported.

We don’t want to detain or deport U.S. citizens, said Ernestine Fobbs, an ICE spokeswoman. It’s just not something we do.

… ICE’s Fobbs said agents move as quickly as possible to check stories of people who claim they’re American citizens. But she said that many of the cases involve complex legal arguments, such as whether U.S. citizenship is derived from parents, which an immigration judge has to sort out.

We have to be careful we don’t release the wrong person, she said.

—Marisa Taylor, McClatchy Washington Bureau (2008-01-24): Immigration officials detaining, deporting American citizens

Of course, if you really give a damn about avoiding mistakes, you might actually take some steps towards investigating, presuming innocence, and following some kind of basic due process before you throw living people down a legal memory hole. But that would require actually granting suspected illegal immigrants the as good or better legal privileges and immunities as are offered to suspects in a normal court proceeding, rather than presumptively throwing them into a detention center and then running them through a parallel, unaccountable administrative process for today’s federal Fugitive Alien Law. And what La Migra gives a damn about is proving to bellowing Know-Nothing busybodies that they are doing something to crack down on illegal immigration—the lives, liberties, and livelihoods of bystanders be damned.

An unpublished study by the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York nonprofit organization, in 2006 identified 125 people in immigration detention centers across the nation who immigration lawyers believed had valid U.S. citizenship claims.

Vera initially focused on six facilities where most of the cases surfaced. The organization later broadened its analysis to 12 sites and plans to track the outcome of all cases involving citizens.

Nina Siulc, the lead researcher, said she thinks that many more American citizens probably are being erroneously detained or deported every year because her assessment looked at only a small number of those in custody. Each year, about 280,000 people are held on immigration violations at 15 federal detention centers and more than 400 state and local contract facilities nationwide.

Unlike suspects charged in criminal courts, detainees accused of immigration violations don’t have a right to an attorney, and three-quarters of them represent themselves. Less affluent or resourceful U.S. citizens who are detained must try to maneuver on their own through a complicated system.

It becomes your word against the government’s, even when you know and insist that you’re a U.S. citizen, Siulc said. Your word doesn’t always count, and the government doesn’t always investigate fully.

…

While immigration advocates agree that the agents generally release detainees before deportation in clear-cut cases, they said that ICE sometimes ignores valid assertions of citizenship in the rush to ship out more illegal immigrants.

Proving citizenship is especially difficult for the poor, mentally ill, disabled or anyone who has trouble getting a copy of his or her birth certificate while behind bars.

Pedro Guzman, a mentally disabled U.S. citizen who was born in Los Angeles, was serving a 120-day sentence for trespassing last year when he was shipped off to Mexico. Guzman was found three months later trying to return home. Although federal government attorneys have acknowledged that Guzman was a citizen, ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice said Thursday that her agency still questions the validity of his birth certificate.

Last March, ICE agents in San Francisco detained Kebin Reyes, a 6-year-old boy who was born in the U.S., for 10 hours after his father was picked up in a sweep. His father says he wasn’t permitted to call relatives who could care for his son, although ICE denies turning down the request.

The number of U.S. citizens who are swept up in the immigration system is a small fraction of the number of illegal immigrants who are deported, but in the last several years immigration lawyers report seeing more detainees who turn out to be U.S. citizens.

The attorneys said the chances of mistakes are growing as immigration agents step up sweeps in the country and state and local prisons with less experience in immigration matters screen more criminals on behalf of ICE.

…

[ICE officials] said they were able to confirm [Warziniack’s] birth certificate, but they didn’t acknowledge any problem with the handling of the case.

The officials blamed conflicting information for the mix-up.

The burden of proof is on the individual to show they’re legally entitled to be in the United States, said ICE spokeswoman Kice.

I want to stress that the point here is not that this kind of treatment is wrong because the people being treated this way aren’t really illegal immigrants. I’m not saying that we need procedural protections for suspects because it’s better for a hundred guilty people to go free than for one innocent person to be punished. That’s not my point because morally, illegal immigrants aren’t guilty of a damned thing. U.S. citizens aren’t entitled to special treatment just because they are Estadounidenses; they’re entitled to be treated better than this because they are people. If there is no excuse for making U.S. citizens disappearing into legal limbo in a system of prisons and administrative law where they have no real civil liberties and no recourse to due process protections, and no excuse for trashing their lives and livelihoods by locking them up and exiling them from their homes, on the unspeakably arrogant presumption that it’s the citizen who has to prove to the government’s satisfaction that she has a right to live peacefully in her own home, then there’s no excause because there’s no excuse for treating anyone that way, no matter what their nationality and whether or not they have a permission slip to exist from the federal government. The thing itself is the abuse.

But the point that I do want to make is that if you’re a U.S. citizen, and you’re not convinced of the central importance of immigration law—if you believe that you can reliably secure your own freedom without paying attention to the way that governments treat undocumented immigrants—then you need to think a lot harder about what a system of immigration control necessarily entails. International apartheid requires mechanisms for detecting, and then either interdicting or rounding up, unauthorized immigrants. But to discover and then interfere with their presence in the country, it necessarily entails a system of paramilitary border control, and it also necessarily entails immigration dossiers, passbooks, and government surveillance. But these systems have to be inflicted both on citizens and on immigrants for them to make any sense at all; by definition, the government can’t discover immigrants who bypass the official documentation system by getting documentation of their undocumented status, so instead the border control State has to force everyone else to carry papers, to submit to La Migra’s surveillance, and to take on the burden of giving affirmative proof of our status whenever some prick with a clipboard demands it. There’s no way to block off opportunities for undocumented immigrants to move or to get jobs except by limiting everyone’s freedom of motion or employment to government-controlled chokepoints where papers can be demanded and inspected. And there’s no way to make undocumented immigrants disappear into legal limbo without also, at the same time, creating an ominous threat to any citizen who might come under La Migra’s suspicion or might have trouble producing her own papers on demand. There is no way for international apartheid to be enforced on immigrants without massive invasions on the privacy and liberties of non-immigrants, because the basic concept — the concept of a government with the power and prerogative to systematically screen who is and who is not allowed to exist within its territory — requires everybody, whether their presence is authorized or unauthorized by the government, to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.

What immigration law does to illegal immigrants is despicable. There is no excuse and it should be abolished immediately. But if you, reader, recognize this, but still don’t see how it personally concerns you, then you should look harder at the effects that immigration law necessarily inflicts on the rest of us in everyday life. Immigrant and citizen, documented and undocumented, the fact is that we are all in this together, and if we let the State spy and stomp on any of us, the system for implementing the policy is necessarily going to spy and stomp on all of us in the end.

(Via The Agitator 2007-11-04.)

Every spring and every fall for the past two decades, Laura Soelberg has had a yard sale. She is 72 years old and she makes a little bit of money for herself selling her old things in the yard of her late mother’s house. Her friends and neighbors look forward to the event and familiar faces greet her every year. She does no advertising, collects no taxes, and has no employees. And now she faces up to 90 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.

Laura Soelberg’s fall garage sale began much as it had for 19 years: Friends parked in the church lot next to her mother’s Minnetonka house, greeted her with hugs and gifts, and began browsing.

But within half an hour, the authorities arrived to shut her down.

A police officer and two city workers ordered a halt to the Oct. 24 event, telling everyone to get out, shoppers said.

It was almost like they were breaking up an underage party, said Laurel Elhart, a Minnetonka resident who had attended the sales for at least a dozen years.

Now Soelberg, 72, could face criminal charges — and if convicted, up to 90 days in jail, a $1,000 fine and a year of probation.

The city considers Soelberg’s yard sales a zoning violation, in part because, while the Deephaven resident owns the house, she does not live in it.

Soelberg looks upon her twice-a-year sales as a tradition she started with her mother in the 1980s and merely continued at her mother’s home after her mother’s death in the late ’90s.

I don’t understand. This is such a minor, little thing, she said. Everyone likes a garage sale.

Before each sale, which generally runs four days, Soelberg sends out reminder postcards to those who request them and gives the neighbors a heads up. Andy Martin, who lives next door, wrote a letter to the city in support of Soelberg, saying that his family is probably the most impacted of anyone by her sale. But her events, in contrast to others he’s seen in the city, are infrequent.

Before you sanction her, you would need to sanction many others, Martin wrote.

Yvonne Brown, who has known Soelberg for 20 years, arrived two hours after the authorities did on Oct. 24 and found the few people still there had stunned looks on their faces. It was like the Gestapo had just come and left, she said.

I couldn’t believe it. There are garage sales all over all the neighborhoods. Why this one?

But the city has raised another question: Are Soelberg’s events really garage sales?

In general, the city draws a legal distinction between a garage sale and a commercial venture, city planner Julie Wischnack said: The difference is whether someone is utilizing the sale for an income-generating venture. Is it truly trying to get rid of items around the house? Or is it a commercial operation?

… Her friends/customers, as she calls them, have voiced support for her in letters and a petition. Elhart said most of the shoppers are acquaintances — middle-aged and elderly women who have met at the sales over the years. And most were shocked by the police invasion. It’s odd that it’s been going on for so long and now, all of a sudden, it’s an issue, Elhart said.

—Jenna Ross, Minneapolis Star Tribune (2007-11-02): When is a yard sale not a yard sale?

So there you have it. City cops busted up an peaceful neighborhood yard sale and now they are threatening a 72 year old woman with jail and a $1,000 fine because she might be making a little extra to support herself through yard sales, without first going through the red tape and expense for a city business license. Also because there’s a zoning code, and the peace and quiet of the neighborhood needs to be protected whether her neighbors care or not. If the city government weren’t there to butt in and hassle Laura Soelberg, her happy neighbors, and her willing customers, who would? Without those zoning and business license regulations, just what would save quiet Minnesota neighborhoods from the rapacity of unfettered flea markets?

Bureaucratic rationality, n.: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy without permission.

Note to my readers: If, after reading this, you would like to support me in getting to the upcoming Prostitution, Sex Work, and the Commercial Sex Industry conference, please avail yourself of the “donate” button. More information on why I am seeking your support can be found here. Thanks.

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Recently at Amber Rhea’s blog, I felt compelled to comment on what seemed to me a bizarre mischaracterization of anti-prostitution feminists. Citing a heartbreaking and enraging news item, Pakistan ‘prostitutes’ beheaded, she had provided this notation:

Militants did this to (and I quote) “end obscenity.” Mmm-hmm. Now see the problem with that kind of shit? Oh but I thought Patriarchy totally loved sex workers. Riiiiiight.

My response, in part:

I’m confounded that you would take the interpretation that anti-prostitution feminists have some notion that “Patriarchy totally loves sex workers.” All the anti-prostitution feminists I know are pretty blisteringly aware that women in the sex trade are utterly despised by patriarchy - that indeed, much of the sex trade is centered around/caters to that specifically patriarchal hatred...

Yes, there are indeed some who call themselves feminists and/or radical feminists who harbor notions that what women who identify as sex workers are doing is some intentional act of collusion with patriarchy, with said collusion somehow being engineered to specifically harm other women (e.g., those not impacted by and/or participating in the sex trade). When I hear that, I call bullshit really loudly. That’s utterly antithetical to feminism, and it’s offensive. (More about the “whorebaiting” problem among some self-described radical feminists some other time.)

Well, I guess today is ‘that other time.’

Recently, at Jill Brenneman’s blog, I read an interesting comment by Gregor, who describes himself as a “male second wave pro -radical feminist.” Here, he is quoting Renegade Evolution (who in turn, had been, from what I gather, extolling the virtues of gonzo porn):

“The human animal is not all happiness and shine, there is dark and savage there…thats what I see in it.” Yeah and you see it again and again and again, and you make sure others see it again and again and again too..

I replied thusly:

This is an unfortunate example of what I call “whorebaiting.” It’s wrong, and it’s anti-feminist. I understand and am utterly sympathetic to your antipathy toward the sex industry on the whole, but this is not helpful. There are more effective (and ethical) ways to get your points across, comrade.

He commented back:

I think my statement is *not* antifeminist. I don’t know where you get that from. I will forward it to 2 senior feminist women for verification. I am certain, but as a male pro-feminist I will do this to make sure.

(AHEM.)

Insert pregnant pause here, as I consider which “senior feminist women” to whom my criticisms may have been forwarded. Maybe Melissa Farley, who’s been pretty cool toward me ever since I told her about the grossly unethical circumstances in which Evelina Giobbe’s “research” on pimps was actually conducted*, questioning the ethics of her relying on that data**?

(NOW BACK TO JILL BRENNEMAN’S BLOG)

Enter now into this discourse Gretchen:

Why is Gregor’s statement “whorebaiting”? Ren is making a decision to film, watch and be paid to do dark and savage sexual acts that an audience consumes and debately*** the films may reinforce misogyny. Gregor has a right to point that out to her and frankly should.

I’m unclear though from your post if you are sympathetic to the porn industry or not?

To which, with much exasperation, I replied back:

You obviously don’t know me, and neither does Gregor, whom I called ‘comrade’ without any sense of irony.

If I have to explain to you why his comment was ‘whorebaiting,’ then, damn. It’s quite possible there would be no getting through to you. The cognitive dissonance between recognizing the harm that the sex industry, largely controlled by men, perpetuates against women and then choosing, more often than not (it seems to me, from what I’ve read here thus far), women in the sex industry as targets for your ridicule is pretty confounding.

Of course, no woman’s experience in the sex trade is going to be ‘equivalent’ to anyone else’s. I’ve written a great deal about the various stratifications among women in the sex trade, which are inexorably intertwined with systems of oppression. In terms of the women I’ve known in the industry, Ren is hardly representative. A comment from ’sojourner’ on this old thread at Feministing speaks my mind here: “Yes, there are women out there who choose sex work… But I also think that trafficked women, women beaten by their pimps or raped by their customers, heroin addicts, and women lying dead in ditches don’t get to write about their experiences on blogs.”

Nonetheless, as a survivor (and I should not fucking have to declare that), I can’t abide by the phenomenon of people who haven’t been in the sex trade (can I safely assume that? if not, tell me) directing their patriarchy-hating vitriol (of which I also have a great deal, btw) at those of us who have been there.

And calling out Ren’s comment as anti-feminist would be sort of like calling out the sky as blue. I expect better from the anti-prostitution and anti-pornography activists with whom I am tactically, personally, and politically allied.

So, are we clear on the concept of “whorebaiting” now?

If my allies in the anti-prostitution and anti-pornography movement would like to stop being slandered by the ’sex pozzes’ (or whatever we’re calling them these days), it would be damn helpful if they’d stop giving them such good ammunition****.

__

* At the time, Giobbe had a sixteen year old foster daughter, known to me a few years later as “Lee,” who had come into contact with her as a client of WHISPER (for Women Hurt In Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt, the erstwhile Minnesota nonprofit), when she was struggling to get away from her convicted murderer pimp. Giobbe essentially used Lee for PR purposes, showing off her charge at meetings of radical feminists who naturally cooed over what an awesome rescuer she was, while at home Giobbe was abusing her physically, sexually, and emotionally. (The fact that she sent Lee on her drug runs is barely the tip of that iceberg.) When she was doing her research for the “WHISPER Oral History Project,” she interviewed a number of pimps, and insisted on conducting at least some of those interviews in the home, while specifically introducing the pimps to Lee (against her stated wishes) and bragging about how she’d “gotten” her. This was part of a pattern Giobbe had of regularly threatening Lee that she could be turned back out on the streets at any time, which, of course, she ultimately did, on the night before Lee had final exams at the high school she’d finally been able to enroll in (about which Giobbe had said, “Education is a privilege - not a right“), which naturally resulted in her ending up back in prostitution. Giobbe, of course, would later lie to her colleagues about this, claiming that Lee had run away - “what else can you expect from these girls”?

** Note that I have no argument with the validity of Giobbe’s data. I just wish to God it could have been collected in a way that was not to the exhaustively demonstrated harm of one particularly endangered prostituted teenager. Every single member of WHISPER’s (long since defunct) board knows what Giobbe did, because I personally drafted the 33-page complaint on behalf of Lee and myself and distributed copies to each of them. Andrea Dworkin got a copy, too.

***This is obviously a misspelling (there were others in both her and Gregor’s comments, which I’ve corrected in this text), but I’m unclear on what she actually meant to convey, so I’m leaving it as is.

****I will not be particularly surprised if I am accused of being the one supplying such “ammunition.” It’s our movement’s dirty laundry, people: the kind that has caused many anti-prostitution survivors to essentially ‘defect’ from the cause, and you know you don’t want that - where else will you get your crunchy anecdotes for your grant applications and books? So, time to deal with it.

Reading today about the I-35W bridge collapse, I am reeling with memories. It’s been years since I left, but I specifically associated that particular area, near the border between St. Paul and Minneapolis, with freedom.

At the time, I was hunkered down with Lee at Job Corps in St. Paul, where the idea was to stay there until her ex-pimp who wanted her (and by extension, me) dead, lost interest in stalking us (or at least, became convinced that she wasn’t going to rat out said pimp’s criminal networks over specific murders in Chicago and Wisconsin about which she had knowledge). The place had the feel of a prison, with various of its practices modeled on corrections systems and/or the military… I can recall the signs up that barked, “Every day is inspection day!” and language like “KP” (for kitchen patrol).

But we welcomed it because it meant we were locked in almost all the time, and anybody who stepped on the grounds would be immediately descended upon by security. If anybody suspected us of using that place as a de facto battered women’s shelter (since of course none of the actual “feminist” battered women’s shelters would take us, as our situation wasn’t the standard hetero DV situation, and plus, we were lesbians) - or of us being dykes - their suspicions were eased significantly when I turned up pregnant, as a result of what had happened to me (involuntarily) at the notorious 410 homeless shelter in downtown Minneapolis right before we got into Job Corps. Sometimes we laughed about the subversiveness of it all - being two scrappy, radical young lesbian feminists using The Man to get away from The (even more overtly oppressive and murderous) Man. And meanwhile, miraculously growing a new life. (I could have had an abortion, but I didn’t want one. More on that here.) But mostly we festered in our respective post-traumatic states.

But there was one small bit of relief for me, when I managed to get a little side job as a housekeeper for a woman, Kathie Simon-Frank, who happened to be the director of academic advising for the department of Sociology for the University of Minnesota. I’d take the bus from Job Corps in St. Paul to Minneapolis and would set to work cleaning her toilets and whatever, then afterwards we’d end up talking about poetry and social justice and whatnot. An awkward situation, to be sure, but Kathie was a genuinely kind woman, and the fact that I got to - not had to - leave Job Corps once a week all by myself (in the process, getting away from Lee who was taking out all her terror on me*), in order to clean this nice woman’s house and have sane conversations that didn’t involve any of the underground insanity I was embroiled in, was a gift**. To the best of my recollection, the bus route I took didn’t specifically cross that bridge, but where Kathie lived was fairly close to it (within 2 miles), and today has found me scrambling for her contact information to make sure she and her family are okay. (I’ll update this post later with anything I learn… meanwhile I was very grateful to learn that a dear friend of mine, whom I actually knew from back in San Diego and who later moved to the Twin Cities, was not directly affected.)

I’ve been thinking today about these lyrics from an Indigo Girls song, Ghost:

And the Mississippi’s mighty
But it starts in Minnesota
At a place that you could walk across
With five steps down
And I guess thats how you started
Like a pinprick to my heart
But at this point you rush right through me
And I start to drown

And I am struck by how, for me, so much literally begins in Minnesota; the place where that bridge fell is like a nerve center for me, and now the whole nation as we look on in horror for the victims, hope for the survivors; I am haunted both because of my individual experience and because of this broader, collectively traumatic experience.

Those able to help please donate to the Twin Cities chapter of the American Red Cross.

*For more, see my poem “How the Fugitives - Two Women Writers - Tried to Love Each Other and Survive,” in Violence Against Women: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 6, No. 11 (November 2000).

**In a bizarre twist, Kathie later ended up being an adviser to Kelly Holsopple in her controversial report, Stripclubs According to Strippers: Exposing Workplace Sexual Violence. (Which, of course, later appeared in an anthology along with some of my own work, a fact I rather regret, but that’s another story.) Kelly, of course, was the plaintiff in the sexual harassment lawsuit against Evelina Giobbe (scroll down to ‘public domain’ subheading on this page) - a suit to which Lee and I contributed supporting documentation, since of course Lee was Giobbe’s former foster child, and she had lots of memories to share like being sent by her “wonderful anti-prostitution activist foster mother” on drug runs and the like, all the while Evelina crowed at how rad it was to be collecting money from the state for all her trouble - it was a better gig, she maintained in so many words, than actual, overt pimping.

After Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty made it clear that he would veto any bill giving domestic partnership benefits to several state employees, the Minnesota legislator dropped the matter last week. Members of the House and Senate eliminated language in a major spending bill that would have given such benefits to domestic partners, including gay partners. (Continue reading at MoJo Blog)

Revealing more freakishly personal shit in comments at others’ blogs than I am (initially) inclined to here.

This time, it’s at Hillbilly, Please, in a comment to a post about the seemingly innocuous topic of “choking hazards.” Good Lord, I even started it with that self-mockingly tedious “once upon a time” bit:

Once upon a time my ex and I (who was not, duh, my ex at the time) were looking for a place to rent along with my very young daughter, and we interviewed a prospective roommate who said we could have two rooms in the house she was already renting, and it would be no problem whatsoever that we’d need to childproof the downstairs. So we moved in. Suddenly the woman developed complete amnesia about the childproofing thing, and found it necessary to tell us how much money she had spent on one corner that had a Mapplethorpe print and an expensive glass vase, that it was all part of the “effect” and was thereby non-negotiable. So we spent a lot of time chasing my poor kid throughout four months of what ought to have been her carefree toddler-hood, trying to keep her from inflicting major property damage. This was depressing, as was the fact that our roommate was a classist, racist bitch.

(Hold on, you knew I’d say something actually relevant to your post, right? Really, I’m almost there!)

Part of what we had to try to keep from young Mariarosa’s mouth and airways included this woman’s various knickknacks on (what else?) very low-lying shelves. She’d bragged to us, in particular, about a Native American arrowhead which she’d gotten from some expensive hiking trip or another. My first thought at the time was, so you, a white woman, found it necessary to remove this artifact from the land. Grrrreat. (Which is not to say that I would always and invariably have a problem with someone owning such items, but because of the numerous other ways in which this particular woman was such a classist and racist bitch, the ‘arrowhead’ bit was quite the icing on the unsavory cake.)

Soon enough, we had to move out of there. And the woman’s beloved arrowhead came up missing. I could only think of two things:

1. Geez, I hope my kid didn’t swallow it, and
2. I wonder if she threw it in the trash? [’Throwing stuff in the trash’] had been a favorite activity of hers at one point. Yes, we were quite poor and had limited entertainment options.

In the end, nothing came out my daughter’s end… so no damage was done there. I’ve often wondered what became of the arrowhead, though. Was it in a landfill, to turn up later in some mysterious situation? Had angry gods come to swipe it in the night? (Of course I liked this second option best.)

This long-assed comment is my lame effort at catching up, and returning the gift of your most welcome goodwill. May no toddlers be caused to choke on your awesome collection of cute little things. May you not be caused to part with said little things as a result. And I know (duh!) you’d never act like that mean nasty woman with whom we were forced to ride out the extremely cold Minnesota winter of 1995.

History, it seems, still gives me plenty to choke on. What was it Robert Frost said, Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat? The material of my life - including its specific poetries - is forever having me by the throat.

… But I repeat myself.

Last month The Nation had an excellent and infuriating article on the paramilitary assaults and round-ups staged by La Migra at a chain of meat-packing plants across the country.

Working on the meatpacking floor can be a grueling, monotonous, dangerous routine, making thousands of the same cuts or swipes every day, and annual injury and illness rates might run 25 percent or more, but a union job with a wage of $12-$13 an hour, enough to support a family, seems worth the pain and risk.

At least until December 12, the holiday celebrating the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe. What materialized in front of the Swift gates that morning was more like a vision of hell. Shortly after 7 am a half-dozen buses rolled up with a small fleet of government vans, which unloaded dozens of heavily armed federal agents backed by riot-clad local police. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents sealed off all entrances and exits and formed a perimeter around the factory. Then others barged inside and started rounding up the whole workforce.

Some of the frightened workers jumped into cattle pens; others hid behind machinery or in closets. Those who tried to run were wrestled to the ground. Sworn statements by some workers allege that the ICE agents used chemical sprays to subdue those who didn’t understand the orders barked at them in English. The plant’s entire workforce was herded into the cafeteria and separated into two groups: those who claimed to be US citizens or legal residents and those who didn’t.

While the Greeley plant was being locked down, more than 1,000 ICE agents simultaneously raided five other Swift factories in Texas, Iowa, Nebraska, Utah and Minnesota. By the end of the day, nearly 1,300 immigrant workers had been taken into custody—about 265 of them from Greeley. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff boasted that the combined raids amounted to the largest workplace enforcement action in history. ICE Assistant Secretary Julie Myers would later claim that Operation Wagon Train, as the raids were dubbed, dealt a major blow in the war against illegal immigration.

…

What nobody, including ICE, can answer is why, if the real targets were those people with stolen Social Security numbers, federal officials didn’t go quietly into the Swift factories and, armed with warrants, simply arrest the suspects. Why the brash paramilitary operation? …

… The aggressiveness of the arrests and what followed have startled many. I was amazed by the force used, by the heavy armament, says Democratic State Representative James Riesberg. Amazed that so many didn’t have the bond hearings they were owed, that so many were held without their location disclosed.

When news of the raids broke, Rodriquez entered the plant but ICE officials prohibited him from getting personal information from the workers to pass on to their families. ICE treated the workers like animals, he says. Didn’t let people eat or drink anything. Didn’t let them go to the bathroom. Wouldn’t let workers use phones to make arrangements for kids in school or at home. He adds, This was something you think you might see on TV, but never did I imagine I would actually live through it.

The Greeley Latino community, about 35 percent of the population, was not totally unprepared for the disaster. Political events of the previous year had spurred community organization and generated vibrant new leadership. As word of the raid flashed on local Spanish-language radio, hundreds of worried family members and protesters converged on the factory gates. Local police mobilized to keep the crowd at bay as their loved ones were handcuffed and loaded by ICE into waiting buses. The militarized sweep hit the community like a hurricane, says 33-year-old Sylvia Martinez, one of Greeley’s most prominent new Latino activists. It’s frightening to see the power that the federal government has to blow through here and leave a shambles, she says as we eat lunch at one of the town’s many Mexican restaurants. This has been our Katrina, a man-made Katrina. There’s no information, no accountability.

-Marc Cooper, The Nation (2007-02-15): Lockdown in Greeley

And what, you might ask, can we find in the Letters section of the most recent issue (dated April 2, 2007), in response to the obvious injustice of this large-scale assault peaceful and productive workers, followed by shipping them off to holding pens en masse and holding them incommunicado without due process, solely on the basis of their nationality? A protest of the government’s practice of international apartheid, and the assault on immigrant workers by which that practice is enforced? Solidarity with the courageous stands against power taken by the union local and the families of the disappeared?

In a couple of letters, sure. In the numerical majority of letters, no. What we have instead is a gang of comfortable Progressives whose only thought is to escalate efforts to jail immigrant workers and/or those who offer them work. Here’s a sample:

The game until now has been an elaborate choreography among the employers who need the immigrant workers, the immigrants who want these jobs, the communities who need them, the cattlemen who depend on them and the government whose basic motto has been: Don’t ask, don’t tell, says an immigrant advocate. The employers don’t need the immigrant workers. The corporations profit from paying coolie wages [sic!] to the illegals. The communities certainly don’t need them. Many communities are hard-pressed to deal with the exploding immigrant population. The cattlemen depend on the immigrants the same way the corporations do. The cheap labor is a source to be exploited. Product prices would increase if corporations were forced to pay fair wages to US citizens to perform unsavory or labor-intensive jobs. I, for one, would gladly pay more for products made in this country, by citizen labor.

Philip Ratcliffe

Philip Ratcliffe is, of course, perfectly free right now to find sellers who will certify nativist hiring standards and to pay them more for their products. But he has no business trying to force that policy on the rest of the consumers in the country—let alone to force it on immigrant workers who have done nothing worse than do work for willing employers and customers. It’s also interesting to note the explicit effort to pry the nativist rhetoric of coolie wages out of Sam Gompers’ cold, dead hands and dust it off for re-use by early 21st century Progressives. (Also the revival of the rhetorical tactic of labeling entire ethnic groups of workers as coolie labor, even when the workers you’re proposing to exile from the country are in fact unionized and being paid a living wage). But anyway, in case the racism wasn’t explicit enough for you, though, there is always this one:

Re: Lockdown in Greeley, How Immigration Raids Terrorized a Colorado Town by Marc Cooper [Feb. 26]. Why is The Nation so intent on jamming Latino illegal aliens down the throats of their readers and ignoring the other side of the story? I don’t know anyone who is not in favor of sending these people back home and cracking down on corporate America for hiring them. They are costing taxpayers a fortune while enriching corporate America, and they are changing the fabric of American culture. America is importing poverty, something we have plenty of already, since the Republicans and corporations have been running the country. Immigration needs to be controlled, and we need a balance of people coming in from different countries. There are too many Hispanics and Latinos in the country, and they shouldn’t be rewarded for breaking the law.

Jeanne Picard

Well, then.

Immigrant workers are indeed among the most downtrodden and exploited workers in the country. But that’s not because there is anything wrong with moving from one place to another in order to find work. That’s something that working folks have done throughout all known history, and for very good reasons. It’s precisely because the know-nothing blowhard brigade has criminalized their existence and put them constantly at risk of being jailed or shot. Among the worst of the lot, because they are the most insidious, are those who propose walling off labor at national borders in the name of labor solidarity, and attempted to tie nativist policy in with pseudo-populist economics. But of course international apartheid does nothing to benefit workers as a whole; at the most, it only benefits the most privileged working folks—the American-born workers and those who had the resources or the good luck to secure a visa—at the expense of all those other working folks — dehumanized into an anonymous mass of poverty by the nativist rhetoric — stuck on the wrong side of the wall. Those who consider native-born American workers more important or more deserving of an opportunity to work without being shot or jailed, just for having been born here, would do well to shut the hell up about the working class and just admit that they are not Leftists but rather belligerent nationalists. The rest of us would do well to dissociate ourselves, as completely as possible, from the crypto-racism and occasionally overt racism of this unwelcome Progressive-era legacy.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-05-01: May Day 2006: A Day of Resistance
• GT 2006-04-22: Over My Shoulder #20: Damon W. Root (2006), review of David W. Southern’s The Progressive Era and Race
• Stanford M. Lyman, New Politics, New Series 7.3 (Winter 2000): The Chinese Question and American Labor Historians

I hereby interrupt my own half-assed hiatus to clarify something. Belledammit Belledame has deviously generously tagged me for the Thinking Blogger Awards, and while my response in turn is nowhere close to being ready, her characterization of me in her post gave me pause:

Victoria is a thoughtful, empathic*, and eloquent radical feminist, with much to say both personal and political. We challenge each other, I do believe; and yet there’s enough common ground to make a connection, which pleases me, as she’s good people.

Now I’m going to have to add to my paradoxical working list of things Belledame has in common with Twisty Faster. (Thing #1: She routinely sends me running to the dictionary, as I have bitched previously. Thing #2: she’s frightfully prolific; there’s no damn way for me to keep up with the volume of her posts and commentaries.)

But my third item for this queer** little list is that I wind up spilling shit in comments on her blog that are mini-blog posts in their own right. As with a recent post of Twisty’s, which prompted my recent declaration of Oh no, I’ve said (perhaps) too much.

Which brings me to my point (yes, I have one!). Namely, that I dunno if I really qualify for the “radical feminist” moniker at this point.

Yet to offer, whether at Belledame’s blog or right here, an apparent public refutation of my “radical feminism” per se is problematic in all sorts of ways. For one thing, it might be (incorrectly) assumed that I think radical feminism is a bad or somehow undesireable thing. Nay, this is hardly the case.

Fact is, radfems kick ass, and I loves ‘em.

Rather, I no longer label myself as a radical feminist because, given an objectively unknowable ratio of “freely chosen to compelled-by-life-circumstances” decisions I have made in my life, both in the psychic aftermath of leaving Minnesota, and in the verifiably post-emergency years following, when I might have made a very different set of choices, with a different partner in a different part of the world, I believe I’ve lost the right to call myself that. (Like I lost the right to call myself a lesbian when I married Jeff. Yeah I know, there are self-declared lesbians who have freely chosen sex with and/or marriages to men, but I just don’t get that, and I’m not going to insult the lesbian separatist I used to be with any such bizarre assertions, no matter how authentically woman-identified I will always be.)

Nor do I mean to imply, with the above assertions, that radical feminists have themselves (as individuals or en masse) somehow kicked me out of any radical feminism “club.” Sure, I’ve taken some of the expected snark about being a “hasbian” and whatnot, but those are really uncontestable charges, and as such, it doesn’t personally hurt me.

Bah. What I mean, in any event, is just what I said over at her place, so I’ll go ahead and do the ol’ copy-n-paste (full text here):

…For the record, I don’t necessarily describe myself as a radical feminist, as much as I identify with radical feminism and with radfems much more often than not.

Yes, I have recently described myself as “radical” (in the sense of getting to the roots of things… ironically, you’re the one who offered that characterization in your comment here), and I’m certainly a feminist and I’ve posted a great deal of meandering autobiography about my lifelong adventures in radical feminism as such. (For that matter, I’ve written about my adventures in lesbian separatism, too, yet the bona fide Big Hairy Man I live with rather disproves the premise that I can still be credibly called that.)

Maybe what I mean is something like this: if radical feminism were a country, then I would be one if its most curiously nostalgic exiles ever.

(More on this and related themes in my damned near complete manuscript which, nonetheless, I keep managing to not send out: How the Exile Came to Love the Foreign Land.)

And now, the postscript:

Certainly, I’m not the only soul on earth grappling with the matter of one’s identification (or, as the case may be, former identification) with radical feminism, in ways that aren’t hatefully distorting and dismissive of radical feminism and/or of radfems personally… certainly, there’s no shortage of that available on the internets, which I’m not going to link to here.

Most notably, AradhanaD does an awesome, deeply thoughtful job of discussing her own struggles with this moniker in this brilliant comment at Witchy Woo’s . Her struggles, of course, are distinct from mine, but I find much in her comments to relate to; had I been aware of that discussion at the time it was in active percolation mode, I would have tossed in a comment or two, but as a latecomer I’ll just have to post this linkage instead, and hope it means something.

*Dunno if she meant to say I was empathetic, or if, indeed, she meant to infer that I have awesomely spooky psychic powers. Damn, I’d hate to have to choose between the two.

** In various senses of the word.

Tags: blogosphere, hybridity, Identity, Minnesota, privilege, radical feminism