Hero Worship
The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Illiad, is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work at all times, the human spirt is shown as modified by its relation to force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.
-Simone Weil
***
Achilles is given a clear choice. He is told that he carries two destinies:
“If I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans,/my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting;/but if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers,/the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be long life/left for me, and my end in death will not come quickly.”
The primacy of honor is memorialized in Achilles’ choice to stay and fight. The conflict between what the hero must do for honor as opposed to even life itself is replicated in other ways in the hero’s situation.
In the role of the hero, one finds the prelude to the tensions and conflicts that structure the polis at later centuries. The political community as a community exists only on the battlefield, where the collective good of the community can be the primary concern of the hero. The community both sustains and provides for the warrior-hero and sends him to possible death…the warrior-hero experienced the conflict between the collective good as an end in itself, and as an instrument of his own glory and honor. The highest good for the warrior-hero is not, as Socrates/Diotoma point out in the Symposium, a quiet conscience, but the enjoyment of public esteem, and through this esteem, immortality.
-from Money, Sex, and Power – Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism, by Nancy C. M. Hartsock
Stan:
We could list a thousand examples in short order of hero worship in popular culture. This phenomenon, hero worship, is glimpsed here through the unique perspectives of these two women, one a Christian pacifist and one a materialist feminist. Their ideas about classical heroism, and by inference on hero worship, have found themselves swimming together.
Worship/idolatry.
They might offer a fruitful point of departure for understanding the masculinist core principle of the most persistent and bloody form of idolatry.
Over on Facebook, S. Brian Willson, a personal ‘hero’ of mine who laid in front a train carrying weapons to El Salvador and lost both legs at the knees, recently posted a picture of an Air Force captain – a woman – who was in an air conditioned tactical operations center, at a computer, directing the flight of an armed aerial drone to a “target” in Pakistan. One of the frequent commentators’ objections to this technical killing by someone who would seem at home in a college classroom was that she wasn’t in the battle directly, and therefore was “a coward.” Get your heads around that; then realize that in the hometown newspapers, she is now consistently included in the boilerplate category, “the men and women of the armed forces who are protecting our freedom,” and we see how many fissures the dominant culture is forced to step over and around to avoid falling into its own cognitive dissonance.
For myself, this is where the “liberal feminism” most often identified as simply “feminism” falls apart like a two-dollar shirt. Following this line of thought a step further, we arrive at the fundamental contradictions (lies) of liberalism itself.
14 December 2009, 9:03 amMichael Anderson:
The hyphenated term you use, hero worship/idolatry, is significant. We are encouraged in our [unquestioning] idolatry of manufactured plastic people and things constantly. I have some personal heroes, if you want to call them that, but they seem more like mentors; that is, folks who are knowledgeable who are passing what they’ve learned on to others. Getting back to the Iliad, it seems that Achilles’ choice of glory is a form of death-worship, which we also have in this burgeoning hypermasculine culture aplenty. He wasn’t much of a mentor, was he?
It seems the fundamental contradiction of liberalism is the taking of that name for itself as cover. I suppose “conservatives”, referring still to those who champion the system, are marginally more honest in describing themselves; but in the process they all end up turning meanings upside down—war is peace, slavery is freedom, good is evil, black is white. Just like Obama’s Nobel speech….the “defense of the indefensible”.
14 December 2009, 9:28 pmm.c.:
One reason I admire Thomas Jefferson is that of all the things he had chiseled out on his tombstone, President of the United States was not one of them.
15 December 2009, 10:55 amm.c.:
For that matter, I was disappointed in Mick Jagger for accepting his Knighthood. Unlike the Beatles, I hoped futilely probably that in solidarity all the bandmembers would get one or none would. Anather example of Capitalist Sellout-Hood.
15 December 2009, 11:06 amStan:
Sojourner Truth said this in a speech in 1852.
That’s liberalism. The weasel is that it uses the concept of “equality” in the abstract to protect structured inequality in the particular. Anatole France said it like this: “The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
Liberal-conserverative as we use these terms in popular discourse refers to differences of nuance within Liberalism, the dominant philosophical stance underwriting capitalist constitutional democracies.
Liberal feminism, for example, wants equality of access to positions of power between men and women, but gets tripped up on all the other axes of power, class and nationality being the most common (with race still hiding in there). Equal access to jobs as door gunners in an imperial armed force, eg. Equal rights to objectify males as males have objectified women. It’s no coincidence that early white feminists complained that “inferior” black men received the franchise before they did, and even supported eugenics (as did pretty much everyone who called themselves “progressives”).
The problem with this critique is that it burrows pretty quickly into the whole modernist project, with its idol of progress, and into the acquisitive individualism that is the heart of Liberalism’s body of thought. An honest nihilist can tear the whole notion up with little effort, which has a good deal to do with what a horror it has produced in reality, what a boundless ocean of misery and cruelty, and with that the attachment to (mental and physical) islands of safety surrounded by dark threats.
Liberalism’s tumble into militarism, even domestically, was inevitable. And it’s to this Island-of-Safety meme that the deracinated idea of the hero had to be grafted and bastardized, now by the worship of technology. Note how the modern story – say all the tv police procedurals that glorify forensics – have recast the hero narrative that is more explicit in traditional war stories, relegating the latter to arenas where Men can regain their hero-protector status (Saving Private Ryan) en extremis.
The office-bound woman guiding the drone to kill Pakistanis is the quiet professional keeping the ‘burbs safe, just as is the militarized cop performing counter-insurgency in the mean streets of imperial abandonment.
15 December 2009, 3:26 pmDeAnander:
Just jumping in briefly to cross-connect themes… Monbiot has been on a roll lately:
This is not merely about numbers, chemicals, money and growth vs responsibility: it’s also about definitions of manhood, gender tropes, the end game of a warrior/expansionist culture (the “beef/wheat” culture as described by Manning) coming up against the finitude of an oblate, not-quite-spherical ball of rock that we all have to live on. Monbiot doesn’t quite go there — for whatever reasons — but it’s hard to ignore the gender reverberations of the denial of limits, the idolatry of transgression of boundaries, the fantasy of unbounded appetite and unbounded predation: all these are the themes of commercial pornography, and of commerce and marketing and the industrialist mythos in general. They are also the themes of the imperial dream: to smash borders, to realise ambition without boundaries, to “conquer the world.”
To live mindfully of others, to observe the decencies, to clean up your room — what could be more “sissy,” more domestic, less “heroic,” less Manly?
As Stan points out in one of our pullquotes, there is an alternative model of manly virtue — the ethos of the peasant or yeoman farmer, or the patient fisherman. Persevering, capable, hard-working, honest, thrifty, humble, taciturn, stoic, responsible: steward of land, provider for an extended family, dutiful, mindful, taking a long view, scheming for prosperity for children and grand-children. The “decent man” of our cultural memory, the masculinity that contends with (and in our time has lost to) the swaggering masculinity of the warrior/bully/thug.
I am not suggesting that this “alternative traditional masculinity” is an unalloyed ideal: it’s still a highly gendered patriarchal meme, often contrasting itself with a “femininity” conceptualised as trivial, weak, unreliable, incapable, improvident, infantilised, dependent. [Though there is an agrarian/maritime counter-meme of the capable, strong, intelligent, stoic, hardworking (etc.) female who's the ideal mate and partner for this archetypical productive male.] Without claiming it as an unalloyed ideal, and without denying all the historical baggage that adheres to it — it still seems like a starting point for a cultural revisioning project, acceptable even to those who can’t wrap their heads around a challenge to gender-binning and patriarchy themselves.
The “growth without limits” crowd presently posturing and crowing and claiming the meme-space of Manhood in the public imagination need to be exposed as the adolescent boys they are. It seems unlikely, in our lifetimes, that men and boys will cease to worry about being Real Men, or cease to look for heroes and role models to define “manhood”. Deconstructing the gender dipole is a multi-generational effort; in the meantime, at the very least we should be able to propose that Real Men live gracefully and courteously — like gentlemen — within the limits of others’ needs, rights, and happiness… and that only boorish, ignorant, and foolish boys think they can carouse and consume without limits on this bounded Earth. Deconstructing the swaggering, mannerless, and selfish Hero of our warrior-cult and replacing him with a Decent Fellow may be a meme struggle worth pursuing. It’s daunting to realise how difficult this project seems — so much less radical than the deeper challenge to hard taxonomies and the gender binary, and yet even the lesser effort seems almost hopeless: the swaggering Hero/Thug is so entrenched in the collective imagination.
15 December 2009, 3:32 pmDeAnander:
One other depressing thought: the “growth without limits” crowd with their contempt of boundaries — including the boundaries of other people’s well-being and right to live — have one obvious solution to the problem of finite resources and insatiable appetites: exterminism. They are constantly on the threshold of openly asserting it, and consistently practising it wherever they can get away with it. Predictably, the warrior/hero’s response to a too-crowded world where there isn’t “room to roam” or space for heroic exploits… will be to kill off enough people to *make* some room. I fear that we may be hearing some echo of this “solution” in the too-bad-but-inevitable tone of many civilised western whitefellas’ predictions of a “major die-off.” The detachment and absence of fear in these predictions makes me suspect that the prognosticators don’t somehow imagine *themselves* as being among those who will die off. Given the patterns of collapse in “high imperial” civilisations, I’m not so sure about this; in major collapses, sometimes the elite at the core suffer a more severe cull than the humble peasantry in the hinterlands. (Another violation of the Heroic Mythos: it’s the Lone Hero who’s supposed to survive the cataclysm, not the boring hicks from the sticks.)
Personally, I’m quite frightened. Civilisations don’t always behave sanely, and ours isn’t showing much sign of it. Our clinging to cornucopian myths and the obsolete warrior cult — even rewriting Christianity into a warrior religion, which takes some chutzpah and some doing — seem to me very bad signs.
15 December 2009, 3:42 pmDeAnander:
And one more cross-connection: noting that under industrialism, even farming and food/fibre production have been “militarised,” turned into glory-seeking contests between Man and Nature. I’m thinking of Will Allen’s book _The War on Bugs_ and of D Jensen’s _Strangely Like War_.. and contrasting the “conquer/exterminate” style of agriculture and silviculture with the (more productive, more sustainable but [therefore?] less Manly) permacultivation techniques of many pre-conquest peoples. I’m reminded of one unforgettable shot from the documentary “Our Daily Bread” in which a “farmer” rides across a field in an enormous machine of some kind — so large that the driver seems almost irrelevant, a tiny creature in the cab; across the front of the cab the model name is written in glaring block capitals: DOMINATOR.
Also should note that ours isn’t the first age in which Christianity has been rewritten as a warrior cult. The Victorians did it (“Muscular Christianity”) — we have the lyric of “Onward Christian Soldiers” to remind us. Constantinian Christianity we have, alas, always with us… The message of the Gospels has always been at odds with the warrior/imperial cult, and every imperial state that has made Christianity its official religion has attempted the same rewrite. Ours is perhaps more lurid than most (the “Killer Christ” of the Left Behind books has to rank among the more colourful and bizarre heresies ever). But I’m straying into theological history which is rather off my home turf, so I’ll stop there and hope that Stan may pick up the Warrior Christ meme…
15 December 2009, 3:55 pmm.c.:
DE,##
Well, you ain’t wrong…..!
15 December 2009, 4:45 pmStan:
Not here and now, but I was writing precisely on this today, on another machine off line. It was part of a long reflection on the whole experience of getting out.
Gall bladder attack put me on the vicodin tonight, but tomorrow I’ll try to make some time to excerpt a theologic outline on how manhood perverted the message against the same. Give us our daily bread is a commitment to restraint and surrender of control. More later.
Ever so glad to see you burning up the keyboard, De.
15 December 2009, 9:54 pmJuannie:
Interestingly it was the cult hero worship novel Atlas Shrugged that paved the way for my personal escape from the culturally imbued patriarchal hero meme. It suggested to me that ego strength was a not only necessary but a mandatory step along the arduous path of personal evolution. But only a little way into the process I recognized that strengths without restraints in a finite environment inevitably led to a conflict with powers that could never be matched inhuman form. Thus a more inclusive ideology began to gestate.
Your cross-connections, DE, offer me more insights into why I’m so drawn toward the permacultivation techniques not only on my small acreage but as a metaphor in my life as well. And I’m quite frightened also although I will hold fast to the idea that the elite at the core are really the most vulnerable in the sense that they have the most to lose and are ill equipped to survive as civ. collapses. I like to think that we permaculturists may be leading the advance into the post civ. world. Humanure offers an important step in our way out of this shitty mess we’re in.
Off topic DE, but your article”Why Is Beauty On Parade” inspired a voluminous writing (for me) but I had no way to share it with you. If you’re so inclined I’d like to, johnhball@aol.com.
16 December 2009, 4:09 amKim Sky:
“decision to leave everything familiar.”
okay. my curiosity is getting the best of me. also, my attachment to action, or what one is actually doing.
What are you doing? Where are you going? The idea of leaving everything familiar sounds so appealing. How is this manifesting itself? For me, any tale along these lines is important.
Thanx, Kim
16 December 2009, 1:05 pmGuy Montag:
“an anti-hero” …
Here’s an excerpt from a letter I wrote to Joe Bageant last January about Pat Tillman’s hero:
In your November 20, 2008 essay, “The Sucker Bait Called Hope,” you wrote that the US media all but ignored the death of Rachel Corrie under an Israel bulldozer and that the few who knew of her death largely deemed it a bizarre and senseless act; “Moral conviction scares the hell out of us. Hope is effortless.”
Rachel Corrie lived her life with integrity. As you wrote in your essay, she had “… Conviction. The real stuff. … Accepting the truth and acting on it. … ‘taking personal responsibility’, but doing it for real. …”
Last year, Rachel’s family edited her journal entries and letters in the book, “Let Me Stand Alone.” From her journal:
“My values. … Responsibility for myself – accountability … Independence /Autonomy. … Honesty. Humor. Integrity. Courage. Loyalty. Critical thinking. Curiosity. … Family.”
I think you might be interested to learn that Rachel Corrie was Pat Tillman’s hero. Pat shared many of Rachel’s values. He was driven by a core of honesty and integrity, led by personal example, and lived his life intensely. His mother, Mary Tillman, wrote in her book, “Boots on the Ground by Dusk,” about Pat’s admiration for Rachel:
“Everywhere I look in this house, I’m staggered by memories. I see Pat in every corner and doorway. … I stay in the house to look at Pat’s books on the shelves and appreciate his special keepsakes displayed in the dining room hutch.”
“As I’m looking at the mementos, I find a small newspaper clipping I’ve seen before. The article is about Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old peace activist from Olympia, Washington, who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer on March 16, 2003, trying to protect the home of a Palestinian doctor and his family.”
“I remember picking up the article from the same spot more than a year ago [in 2003] and asking Pat, “Who’s this?” “That’s my hero,” Pat said. “She was a stud; she had a lot of guts.” I read the article with tears in my eyes then; now, I quietly cry.”
. . .
Finally, I’d like to point out a connection between Rachel Corrie, Pat Tillman, and Jonathan “Yoni” Netanyahu [one of his “younger” brothers is Benjamin Netanyahu, head of the Likud party and former Prime Minister of Israel]. This seems fitting coming on the tail of the invasion of the Gaza Ghetto this past month.
Yoni has been a hero of mine for decades (Yoni was shot and killed while leading the rescue of Israeli hostages at the Entebbe airport in 1976.). After his death, his family published a book of his letters “Self-Portrait of a Hero” (comparable to “Let Me Stand Alone: The Journals of Rachel Corrie”). I bought the book a quarter century ago when I was a “young and dumb” paratrooper. Like Pat Tillman’s “friendly fire” death, the nature of Yoni’s death has been covered up the IDF for the past four decades
Yoni and Pat Tillman were eerily similar characters, both driven by a sense of integrity, honesty and conviction. As was Rachel Corrie. The following passage from “Self Portrait of a Hero” could be said about all three of them:
“Of all the aspects of his character one predominates – integrity. By this we do not mean only honesty toward one’s fellow man, but, above all, honesty toward oneself. An inner wholeness marked Yoni’s entire behavior, inspired his way of life and determined his objectives. That wholeness resulted from a great need for absolute harmony between his thoughts and deeds.”
“For Yoni, unlike many of us, could not hold beliefs without living them to the full. Once convinced of the rightness of an idea, whether in the personal or national sphere, he had to do what he could to actualize it, regardless of the hardships or risks involved. Again and again he asked himself whether he was working toward the realization of his life’s aims.”
It’s ironic (and a bit sad to me) that Rachel was a hero to Pat Tillman, yet is viewed with disdain by Yoni’s family. The play “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” is based on her e-mails, letters, and journals. Another play, “To Pay the Price,” draws on letters and interviews with family and friends of Jonathan “Yoni” Netanyahu, a hero in Israel.
Two years ago, the Netanyahu family forced the Watertown’s Repertory theatre to cancel a planned run of “To Pay the Price” because it was to have been paired with “My Name is Rachel Corrie.” Iddo Netanyahu, Yoni’s youngest brother, said that he feels “that there is an inherent incompatibility in the joining together, in one evening, of a play based on my brother Yoni’s letters with the play ‘My Name Is Rachel Corrie.”
. . .
As far as the “Warrior Christ” meme… Instead of a macho image of a hero, I think more of the Japanese Bushido ideal of the martial artist.
In the traditional martial arts, your opponent is primarily yourself, not others. Strict with himself, gentle with his (or her)juniors. Those who practice long and seriously can “polish themselves” and develop shining spirit. Long ago, I experienced this sort of practice in karate-do (Shotokan Karate of America)and saw the example set by my strong seniors who embodied their ideals.
Unfortunately, traditional martial arts are hard to find in the US. Traditional practice is difficult and hard on the ego. Most “karate” schools in the US are commercialized and superficial. And the popular culture typically portrays martial arts in movies as part of stereotypical macho redemptive violence.
16 December 2009, 3:02 pmMichael Anderson:
Speaking of population control as a way to gain more living space (which is one the two reasons, historically speaking, that humans go to war—the other being resource appropriation), I believe there will be, if there is not already, a concerted effort by the powers-that-be to reduce population by various means…and make it look as accidental as possible. Crop plagues/genetically engineered organisms and bacteria are a couple of ways that have been discussed by people with no axes to grind.
I know that Stan discounts this idea a bit; that is, the idea of a will waiting for a way; and that the environmental situation is bad enough in itself and taking lives in the process, but I am also convinced that the power elites are not quite stupid enough to let themselves be annihilated willy-nilly in a replay of certain (recent) historical episodes.
No, I’m not one of the Illuminati or secret knowledge believers, and there is plenty of dissent, ego & downright stupidity at that level of power & wealth. But as Ms. Clarke said, civilizations don’t always behave sanely.
And, yeah, Stan, I’m with Kim….elaborate on your new unfamiliar terrain (speaking of crossing boundaries)!
16 December 2009, 3:39 pmJeffrey D. Rubard:
You know what, though, Stan, *the point at which they can’t make you ‘fib’ about your service* is *the point of Federal criminality* (“license and registration, SSN number); which is nowhere you want to be, *even* if they let you take another shower you richly enjoyed.
STAN: Maybe I’m being obtuse, but I don’t quite follow this.
16 December 2009, 4:33 pmStan:
Kim & all,
We have sold our house, paid off our debts, and given away everything that wouldn’t fit into a car. We are now visiting relatives around the country; and in early January we will be flying to Costa Rica where we will arrive with two backpacks and two suitcases (having given away the car by then, too). Then we’ll find a small place, probably in the central highlands (moderate climate), to live. I can only do this because I have a small pension from my army service, not enough to survive in the US. Once there, we’ll find where and how we might be of service. We are applying for residency, and it seems it will be easily approved. I am also taking an iTouch (a gift from my former co-workers on the deconstruction crew) with around 1,500 of our favorite songs. We’ll be online with a couple of ASUS Eee’s, eating local, no AC/heat, no car (we’ll look for two serviceable bicycles). Much of the electricity is geothermal (seven active volcanoes there).
The decisive fact that settled CR instead of several others was the fact that CR has no army.
Cheap hostels will be our abode(s) until we get settled.
I’m journaling about the process to get from A to Z on this, but we aren’t at Z yet. We’re practicing black bean and rice recipes. Sherry concocted a great Caribbean black bean soup yesterday.
There is still plenty of privilege involved, but our footprint will drop considerably. And I can really write again. Ojala.
16 December 2009, 5:31 pmjuannie:
Stan, I heard The Lord’s prayer at a minimum every Sunday in the Anglican church where my father preached until I left home at the age of seventeen. I struggled with it through my years of atheism while trying to reject it and through my non-atheistic years since I awoke from that fallacy and tried to imposed my sense and intellect on it. I got some of it right but your exposition was a definite Ahh Ha! for me today. It has been hard intellectual work trying to connect my early religious upbringing with my experience in this realm but you have contributed much to me in this regard in this thread. Of course, Thanks.
On your and Sherry’s upcoming sojourn, I wish you well and offer that, even though it has been at times a difficult journey since I jumped out of the system (honestly, more or less) in the mid 70′s, I wouldn’t trade it one iota for the tempo-task debt ridden materially rewarding life style I left and shunned ever since. Good luck. I hope you are able to always keep us abreast at Feral Scholar as you traverse your chosen path.
16 December 2009, 6:41 pm(Boer) Tom:
To Stan: Just one request – when North Americans and Europeans started dabbling in the South African market, the prices of land went up considerably – land in RSA costs about the same now as in North America, but whites alone typically earn six times less, and it is much worse for non-whites – you don’t do any favours by paying North American rates – please pay local rates – many simply cannot afford to live there anymore, except as a shanty dweller/squatter – the longer it takes for the prices to equalize, the better locals can adapt.
16 December 2009, 7:49 pmStan:
We aren’t buying property; and we plan to pay Tico prices for Tico food and goods, living in a Tico neighborhood, attending a Tico church, and seeking a way to contribute to the community of which we eventually become a part. I’ve seen the price inflation you talk of. It’s a very bad business. Gentrification always is.
16 December 2009, 9:23 pmMichael Anderson:
Well,I’m certainly glad they have no standing army in Costa Rica. I wonder what the social situation is…looks like a lot of Transnational businesses have factories there.
17 December 2009, 6:20 pmKim Sky:
Interesting. I sure learned a lot living in CR. The pacifist attitude is real.
The capital hosts many important conferences due to their no-army status. Great place to be a fly on the wall! The “no army” thing was always a bit confusing to me, I did see a Costa Rican Army stationed in Liberia, sharing housing with the local museum? Something I did not investigate further, as they were rather intimidating.
I suggest checking into the University for Peace (UPAZ). The University is grossly underfunded, but has a beautiful campus, and is dear to many hearts. Great possibilities!!! Robert Muller has a 40 acre farm adjacent to the school. Also the University has suffered many a scandal, more recently with Maurice Strong, who I believe they eventually kicked out of the country.
The nice thing about CR is that it’s a small country and meeting presidents etc. are easily possible. The people are amazing, very intelligent and kind hearts.
RAIN ON YOUR PARADE (apologies for this stuff)
Perhaps you know way more than I do about CR!!! My opinion is that it’s better to go in expecting things to be difficult, rather that rosy-eyed…
The not so nifty thing is the zillions of foreigners living there. Most of the land along the beaches and mountain areas, anywhere noted for beauty, is owned almost exclusively by foreigners. Most foreigners have a special giant safe built inside their homes and do not leave the house for 20 minutes without stashing most of their valuables in the safe.
There is an undercurrent regarding the affluence and power of US-citizens especially. The aftermath of training Nicaraguan freedom fighters there and the on-going drug war. One might hear, “don’t mess with them, the CIA will be after you.”
After one year, I was indeed sad to leave many good friends. If you’re interested in a couple of contacts near UPAZ let me know.
SUPER GOOD LUCK. I’m sure you will make a difference! Lot’s of great activists, etc.
Thanx for sharing!!!
Chao.
17 December 2009, 7:48 pmxenia:
Best wishes. There will be a lot of challenges, a lot of painful moments, but a tremendous burden will also have lifted off your shoulders. Courage!
17 December 2009, 8:54 pmCurt Kastens:
Good Luck Stan,
18 December 2009, 1:32 pmI imagine that the days of Feralscholar are limited. I have enjoyed reading the many thoughts of people who’s ideas are not so much like mine as to be boring but not so different as to have no common points of reference.
Stan, you have my email address. It would be interesting to hear every couple of years how things are working out for you. Before we moved to Germany I had been considering Costa Rica but family considerations made Germany a much more logical choice for us.
I can say that leaving the US has allowed me to maintain what little sanity that I have. Of course that is the official story.
Again Best Wishes
Kim Sky:
Hero Worship – my new hero Aminatou Haidar
Haidar, the 43-year-old mother of two, has returned to Western Sahara!
The Spanish daily El Pais revealed that the Moroccan security forces had already booked a seat on the Lanzarote-bound plane for Haidar before she was detained and accused of committing the treasonous act of inscribing her nationality as Sahrawi rather than Moroccan. She has succeeded in re-igniting the Sahari cause. After a month of hunger strike, the Spanish government passed a special referendum proclaiming that the issue is of the “highest level”, to move toward negotiations with King of Morocco. Also adopting a point in the United Nations referendum on Morocco, supporting the free right of self-determination of the Sahrawis. AND, an accord to step up vigilance over human rights in Sahara.
[translation here is possibly flawed http://www.europapress.es/nacional/noticia-sahara-psoe-minorias-ultiman-texto-comun-contempla-gestiones-maximo-nivel-referendum-20091215184102.html
Quite a feat! Beautiful. Just Beautiful.
COURAGE PRIZE – Year 2009 Award Recipient Aminatou Haidar.
Acceptance speech in New York City on October 20, 2009.
http://www.civilcourageprize.org/haidar-remarks2009.htm
SPANISH PRESS
Went crazy on this one, exposing every last detail of betrayal, Spanish government working in collusion with Morocco. Real terror for Socialist? Zapatero government. The ultimate, was removing her to the hospital.
The Spanish people know oppression well, and have no interest in its perpetuation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_EtqCBbSB0&feature=player_embedded
Where does a hero of this sort fit into this discussion?
18 December 2009, 2:03 pmChasm:
How interesting. I have just done the same thing, selling off or giving away my car and virtually all my possessions (down to two suitcases worth of clothing, a few books, and my computer — necessary for my work). And I’m moving to Buenos Aires. My goal is to stay limited to two trunks, buying nothing. I’m not a cook, but I’ll rent a small place and will eat locally. No car — walking and public transit. It’s not perfect, but it’s a big change. Then again, I’m single with no kids, so it’s probably a lot easier for me.
We’ll see where it leads. Good luck, Stan. I think you’re on the right path (at least I hope so).
21 December 2009, 7:14 pmjohn s:
stan,
26 December 2009, 1:18 pmgood for you. we, too, plan to leave in three years, as soon as my wife’s daughter gets out of high school. we are searching now. why did you not choose venezuela or cuba or ecuador or bolivia? thanks for any input.
Michael Anderson:
http://www.alternet.org/world/144929/why_are_we_so_blind_to_the_true_horrors_of_war/?page=entire
5 January 2010, 7:30 amStephen:
Stan, glad to hear that you and Sherry are well. It has been a challenge to keep up with all of your writings, but thanks….I always learn something. I have been able to get more involved with things going on in DC now that I’m working on a project here in the area. I finally got to meet Cindy. She sends her love & wishes you the best.
18 January 2010, 9:46 pmGo in peace.