A watercolor from Brett Bell, a Bay Area artist:
Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.
Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1985)
By Sherman Alexie, reposted from Orion Magazine
———–
1. The river is empty. 2. Empty of salmon, I mean. 3. But if you were talking to my grandmother, she would say the water doesn’t matter if the salmon are gone. 4. She never said that. I just did. But I’m giving her those words as a gesture of love. 5. She’s been gone for thirty-one years. 6. The water doesn’t matter if my grandmother is gone. 7. She swam wearing all of her clothes, even her shoes. 8. I don’t know if that was a tribal thing to do, or if she was just eccentric. 9. Has anybody ever said that dam building is an act of war against Indians? 10. And, yet, we need the electricity, too. 11. My mother said the reservation needs a new electrical grid because of all the brown- and blackouts. 12. “Why so many power outages?” I ask her. 13. “All the computers,” she says. 14. Today, in Seattle, I watched a cute couple at the next table whispering to their cell phones instead of to each other. But, chivalrous, he walked to the self-service coffee bar to get her a cup. Lovely, I thought. She was busy on her phone while he was ten feet away. When he sat back down, she said, “Oh, I was texting you to get me sugar and cream.”
We live in the heroic age of Assange, Manning and Snowden. Yet, what these men have uncovered for the world to see is so immense and overwhelming that, in order to just cope with our daily lives, we’ve put the issue on the back burner of the collective unconscious. This is one of the lamentations of political cartoonist Ted Rall, whose graphic biography of Snowden was released last month. Like virtually every sample of this genre, Snowden is an easy read. Unlike many, however, it is heavy, exposing the principalities and powers of an Orwellian collusion of government and corporation that watches our every move. It also implicates us: to resist the compulsion to sweep it all under The Carpet.
For radicals & progressives alike, militarism (abroad) and authoritarianism (at home) has been the most aggravating failure of the Obama presidency. It has, quite simply, been an escalation of what Bush started post-9/11. Rall both enlightens and entertains the reader, seeking to understand what it was in Snowden’s character or experience that led him to risk it all to break the law and to question why his actions were condemned so ubiquitously among the political elite. We recommend Snowden, as a nice companion to the work of Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras’ Oscar winning documentary CitizenFour.
And, coming up next for Rall, just in time for the primaries in January 2016…
From artist Koren Shadmi.
By Ric Hudgens, after the morning session at Identity, Theology, and Place: Reinhabiting the Mississippi Watershed inspired by Ched Myers, Elaine Enns, Tevyn East, and Jay Beck (photo by Sarah Amalia Holst, sunrise pipe ceremony)
Artifice will not save us.
Neither a technological
escape hatch to Mars
nor a booby hatch with
Jesus in the clouds.
A world of our own creation
collapses all around us
crushing the stranger who
seeks no other home. The
World under our world holds
forth but longs for our tears.
We must find our feet again.
The grief with no name
suffocates the real.
Hear no truth. Speak no
truth. See no truth.
We must find our feet again;
not paved roads nor
graveled paths, but
dirt, soil, humus, the mud
from which we came.
Take off your shoes.
We stand, if we will stand
at all, on holy ground.
Hundreds of Canadian artists warned in an open letter this week that the country’s recently passed anti-terrorism law has a “chill” effect and “directly attacks the creative arts and free expression.”
Dear Party Leaders,
We are Canadian artists. We have been blessed to be part of a country that does not send poets to gulags, that does not behead people for saying things a government considers critical of it, and that does not murder dissidents and journalists wholesale.
Continue reading “Canadian Artists Express Themselves”
By Tim Vivian, Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies,
California State University Bakersfield
In Honor of William Stringfellow (1928-1985), Prophet to a Land of Unlikeness, Near the Thirtieth Anniversary of His Death. With thanks to Bill Wylie-Kellerman.
In the midst of babel, speak the truth. . . .
And more than that, in the Word of God,
expose death and all death’s works and
wiles, rebuke lies, cast out demons,
exorcise, cleanse the possessed, raise
those who are dead in mind or conscience.
William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973), 42-43
Imagine someone (you can), in 1856,
inviting you to a slave auction, not as
an observer, certainly not as slaver, Continue reading “Imagine”
By Charlie King
Original Song © John Lennon, new concept inspired by Will Fudemann
Imagine you have healthcare
It’s easy if you try
Freedom to choose your doctor
Cov’rage money can’t buy
Imagine first class treatment
When you’re unemployed
Continue reading “Imagine (You Have Healthcare)”
This is a mural on the side of a restaurant formerly known as the Calvert Cafe in D.C. It features U.S. presidents from Eisenhower to Obama with Mama Ayesha, who founded the restaurant that is now named for her: Mama Ayesha’s, just near the Duke Ellington Bridge in Adams Morgan. It was originally labored over by Karlisima Rodas.
The recent transformation involves someone having apparently paintballed all the presidents, shooting them in the privates with red paint…It’s a bit messy, but the intent is fairly clear: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton I, Bush II and Obama. Scrawled on the side is “The War Thugs.”
Meanwhile, the debate has become personal–about Snowden himself more than the issues to which he hoped to draw attention. It isn’t surprising that some Americans are suspicious of Snowdens’s motives. His story seems almost too good to be true: a young man of modest means, propelled by his brilliance to a position that gave him unusual access to the nation’s most closely guarded secrets…
Radical Discipleship 