My life in books

It’s hard to deny that the United States is teetering on the edge of becoming a theocracy, in fact, if not in name. The religious right, a minority among American citizens and voters, holds an undue amount of influence over one of the country’s two main political parties, and its purported values influence the national conversation on social policies to an extent much greater than its numbers would warrant.

Many words have been written about just how this has come about, that a nation founded by religious dissenters who, informed by their experiences as a disadvantaged religious minority, sought to create a political system that embraced the separation of church and state, has become by far the least secular of the developed, democratic nations. A commonly accepted analysis points to the alliance of politicians and evangelicals in the late 1970s, that made abortion a key issue dividing the country into two political camps. However, in his book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, historian of religion Kevin Kruse places the turning point much earlier, during the Eisenhower era. In his Introduction, Kruse notes:

“In his acceptance speech at the 1952 Republican National Convention, he promised that the coming campaign would be a “great crusade for freedom.” As he traveled across America that summer, Eisenhower met often with Reverend Billy Graham, his close friend, to receive spiritual guidance and recommendations for passages of Scripture to use in his speeches. Indeed, the Republican nominee talked so much about spirituality on the stump that legendary New York Times reporter Scotty Reston likened his campaign to ‘William Jennings Bryan’s old invasion of the Bible Belt during the Chautauqua circuit days.’ On election day, Americans answered his call. Eisenhower won 55 percent of the popular vote and a staggering 442-to-89 margin in the Electoral College. Reflecting on the returns, Eisenhower saw nothing less than a mandate for a national religious revival. ‘I think one of the reasons I was elected was to help lead this country spiritually,’ he confided to Graham. ‘We need a spiritual renewal.’ “

Indeed, as one reads Kruse’s account of Eisenhower’s inauguration, it’s hard to argue with this. Eisenhower was the first to encourage his entire cabinet to attend religious services with him before the inaugural ceremonies began. He chose to be sworn in on two separate bibles, each opened to a verse chosen by Billy Graham, about Christian stewardship. He offered a prayer if his own writing following the taking of the oath. The inaugural parade opened with a float that, while ecumenical in nature, proclaimed that “In God We Trust.” And four days later, Eisenhower attended the first ever National Prayer Breakfast. None of this was traditional in the event.

Kruse goes on to say: “All this activity took place in just the first week of February 1953. In the months and years that followed, the new president revolutionized public life in America. In the summer of 1953, Eisenhower, Vice President Richard Nixon, and members of their cabinet held a signing ceremony in the Oval Office declaring that the United States government was based on biblical principles. Meanwhile, countless executive departments, including the Pentagon, instituted prayer services of their own. The rest of the Capitol consecrated itself too. In 1954, Congress followed Eisenhower’s lead, adding the phrase “under God” to the previously secular Pledge of Allegiance. A similar phrase, “In God We Trust,” was added to a postage stamp for the first time in 1954 and then to paper money the next year; in 1956, it became the nation’s first official motto. During the Eisenhower era Americans were told, time and time again, that the nation not only should be a Christian nation but also that it had always been one. They soon came to believe that the United States of America was ‘one nation under God.’ “

It is Kruse’s thesis that this was the consequence of a campaign begun during the 1930s by industrialists concerned over the effects of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘leftist’ New Deal policies on what had been up to that point relatively untrammeled capitalism. Having tried, and failed, to convince the public directly of the benefits of minimally regulated free enterprise, corporate interests took a leaf from Roosevelt’s own book, which promoted his reforms with biblical references and the preaching of a social gospel, and began to develop their own theological argument in favour of free enterprism, Christian libertarianism. One of the leaders of this theological movement, James W. Fifield Jr., went so far as to label the vaguely socialist reforms of Roosevelt as “state paganism” and likened them to Germany and Italy under the fascist totalitarianism of Hitler and Mussolini. This argument was based in a concept of parallelism between free enterprise and Christian salvation - that just as capitalism rewarded the individual efforts of the capitalist, Christ rewarded the individual efforts of the penitent with salvation. Policies that aimed at collective good sought to replace individual striving toward both wealth and grace with dependence, replacing Christ as the giver of all good with the state.

Funded and supported by wealthy industrialists, politicians and public figures such as former president Herbert Hoover and Hollywood celebrities Cecil B. deMille and Ronald Reagan, Fifield and others, among them his long-time friend Norman Vincent Peale, conducted wide-ranging campaigns to bring as many clergymen - mostly Protestant ministers, but also some conservative Catholic priests and rabbis - across the country into the fold, persuading them that the New Deal was just one step away from a rejection of God and an embrace of National Socialism. Their organisation, Spiritual Mobilization, would eventually claim over ten thousand “minister-representatives” prepared to “....exalt the dignity of individual man as a child of God, to exalt Jesus’ concept of man’s sacredness and to rebuild a moral fabric based on such irreducibles as the Ten Commandments.” The equation of Christianity with individual freedom, and the construction of the welfare state as the enemy of both, ensured that policies ranging from taxation to pensions for the elderly were identifies as not just liberal, but immoral, against the natural order as created by God.

Advocates of Christian libertarianism also sought to bring political and economic leaders into their movement. One key tool was the promotion of prayer breakfasts across the country, and particularly in Washington DC, where prominent men of government and industry were invited to meet with their peers, pray, and discuss the ways in which partnering with God - and rejecting government interference - could improve their business prospects. Soon both the
Senate and the House of Representatives hosted regular prayer meetings, largely attended by conservative politicians already opposed to New Deal policies.

By 1949, the gospel of Christian libertarianism had been taken up by a charismatic young preacher, Billy Graham, who fed on the anxieties of an America that was no longer the world’s only nuclear power to promote the message of individuality, reliance on God rather than the state, and free enterprise as the answer to the threat of Godless communism.

“In 1954, Graham offered his thoughts on the relationship between Christianity and capitalism in Nation’s Business, the magazine of the US Chamber of Commerce. “We have the suggestion from Scripture itself that faith and business, properly blended, can be a happy, wholesome, and even profitable mixture,” he observed. “Wise men are finding out that the words of the Nazarene: ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you’ were more than the mere rantings of a popular mystic; they embodied a practical, workable philosophy which actually pays off in happiness and peace of mind. . . . Thousands of businessmen have discovered the satisfaction of having God as a working partner.” “

Graham was instrumental in persuading Eisenhower to run for President, and while he did not openly declare his support, many in the Christian libertarianism movement urged voters to think carefully and choose the candidate God would want as president, and suggested issues to consider that strongly favoured the Republican candidate. The strategy was effective, Eisenhower was successful, winning with a strong majority in the electoral college. The prayer breakfasts continued, emphasising the essential connection between Christian libertarianism and political policy. “In February 1954, Eisenhower, Nixon, and several cabinet members returned to the Mayflower ballroom, along with nearly six hundred figures from government and business. Chief Justice Warren offered the main address of the morning. Speaking at length on the role of religion in American political life, he concluded that “no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Savior have, from the very beginning, been our guiding genius.” Looking forward, the chief justice urged the crowd to adhere to “the spirit of Christian religion” to ensure that the country remained strong both in spirit and substance in the days and years to come. In the end, Warren stated emphatically: ‘We are a Christian nation.’ “

Under Eisenhower, meetings of senior officials in the executive branch - many of them new appointments with ties to the corporate sphere - routinely opened with prayer, either silent or spoken. Employees were urged to attend services regularly, and to facilitate this, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish services were offered in several government buildings, including the Pentagon, on a regular basis.

While Eisenhower did remove many of Roosevelt’s regulations on corporate enterprise, he failed to kill the welfare state, thus losing some of the support of the Christian libertarian movement. He did, however, succeed in “sacralsing” government and linking the American ideal of freedom with the importance of religion. He made Independence Day a National Day of Prayer. The success of this movement to brand the United States as a Christian nation and to establish “faith as the foundation of freedom” was demonstrated when, in 1954, both Republicans and Democrats supported the bill that added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. Around the same time, the motto already found on most coins, “In God We Trust,” was added to the design of paper currency, and a very popular stamp bearing the motto was issued. In 1956, “In God We Trust” replaced “E Pluribus Unum” as the official national motto. In the public eye, the connection between religion and government was well established, though the principle of separation of church and state was still observed in the insistence on nondenominational language. Indeed, some stressed that the God of America was the God not only of Christians of all kinds, but also the God of Jews and Muslims. Only pagans snd atheists, it seemed, were unAmerican.

The reinterpretation of the founding fathers as intending to create a Christian nation, one based in biblical faith, grew common in public discourse, normalising a relationship between church and state that was in fact a relatively new development. A consortium of advertising companies, seeing the importance to their own industry of promoting the aims of the corporate movement to bring religion into politics to support their interests, began producing “public service” copy for newspapers, magazines, radio and television. These campaigns stressed the importance of religious institutions in American life, reminding Americans that “religious faith, cultivated by our churches and synagogues, is one of the foundations of our nation and of our dedication to human rights and individual liberty, as suggested in our national motto, ‘In God We Trust.’”

At the same time, the work of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities and the flood of anti-communist propaganda created a fear of ‘godless communists’ aiming to destroy both secular snd religious freedom by undermining the free and Christian nation they lived in. Using a trope many of today’s progressives would recognise, Americans were warned that a secular, socialist society would take away their freedom to celebrate Christmas. Anti-communist organisations, funded and supported by corporations who feared the impact of labour unions on their bottom line, produced propaganda and media spectacles, often featuring some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, all expounding on the evils of communism - which was often framed as anything much further left than the John Birch society.

And the people, their receptivity to this message enhanced by the fear of communism and the anxieties of the Cold War Era, adopted this concept of extreme, public religiosity as an essential part of the American way of life. Religious-themed books proliferated on best-seller lists - Angel Unaware, The Robe, Life Is Worth Living, A Man Called Peter, This I Believe, and The Greatest Faith Ever Known, The Power of Positive Thinking, The Silver Chalice. Televangelism began, with popular ministers having their own local and national prayer programs. Hollywood turned to Biblical themes for its blockbusters. In the wake of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, four thousand stone monuments bearing those Bible verses were erected on public land across America.

Kruse presents his argument carefully and in great detail, showing the growing presence of religion in the workings of government during Eisenhower’s administration, and detailing the network of connections between Christians liberationists and government officials, from Eisenhower and his vice-president, Richard Nixon, down. He also looks at the conflicts initiated by the encroachment of specific religious practices into daily life - for instance, the controversies over prayer and the distribution of King James Bibles by the Gideon Society in schools.

In a striking example if the success of this campaign for religion in public life, a legal challenge against the introduction of a prescribed prayer in the schools in New York state was rejected on the grounds that public religious observance was a traditional aspect of the American way if life. In support of their decision, one if the judges cited: “the references to the Deity in the Declaration of Independence; the words of our National Anthem: “In God is our trust”; the motto on our coins; the daily prayers in Congress; the universal practice in official oaths of calling upon God to witness the truth; the official thanksgiving proclamations beginning with those of the Continental Congress and the First Congress of the United States and continuing till the present; the provisions for chaplaincies in the armed forces; the directions by Congress in modern times for a National Day of Prayer and for the insertion of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag; [and] innumerable utterances by our presidents and other leaders.”

Kruse goes on to observe: “Most of these were recent innovations not yet reviewed by the courts, but no matter. In a sign of how swiftly and thoroughly the religious revival of the 1950s had taken root, these judges cited changes that had occurred in their own recent memory as proof that the country’s religious roots stretched back to time immemorial.”

When the Supreme Court reversed this ruling and agreed that there should not be mandated prayer in schools, the majority of Americans were angered by the decision, engaging in ‘slippery slope’ arguments that, once again, ended up with the spectre of a ban on Christmas. When the .supreme Court later ruled that mandated devotional readings from the Bible in schools were also unconstitutional, the demand for a constitutional amendment, which had ben broached from time to time in the past, began to gain more support. A petition was submitted to Congress which read: “Whereas the Supreme Court of the United States by its decisions has virtually outlawed the right to pray or read Scripture in public schools and other institutions, we, the undersigned citizens, respectfully petition you to take the initial steps necessary to bring about an amendment to the Constitution which will forever guarantee the protection of our Christian traditions and the right of our people to pray and honor Holy Scripture in their institutions.”

The election of Richard Nixon only served to heighten both the trappings of religion that now surrounded the office of the President, and the partisan nature of this display of piety. Nixon had worked closely with Billy Graham for many years on the Christian libertarian project, and now welcomed him into the White House as an advisor. Both Graham and Norman Vincent Peale spoke during Nixon’s inaugural ceremonies, which included a full church service. Nixon, with Graham’s encouragement, ordered that weekly religious services be held in the White House. Officiating ministers frequently delivered sermons that stressed not only Christian values, but conservative political policies. A decade later, Ronald Reagan upped the piety content further: “Rather than simply reaffirm the old faith of the Eisenhower era, Reagan created new political rites and rituals suited to his own time. The silent prayer at the end of his speech was one innovation; the sign-off of “God bless America” was another. While the phrase had a long history in American culture, it had actually been used only once before in a major address by a president or presidential candidate. ... Earlier presidents and presidential candidates had used other forms of divine invocation, of course, but only sparingly. ...the eight presidents from FDR through Carter called for God’s blessing in less than half of their speeches; indeed, most of them did so in only a quarter. But from Reagan on, presidents have asked for God’s blessing in roughly nine out of every ten speeches they made. Reagan’s campaign represented a turning point, a moment when this “God strategy” became the new norm.”

Any objective observer can confirm that, in recent decades, the rhetoric and ritual of Christian piety has become an integral part of the American political scene, to a degree unknown in any other major modern democracy. While Republicans presents themselves as the party of Christian values, Democrats have also adopted the cloak of public religiosity. The country as a whole has accepted this relatively recent cultural shift as a long-standing tradition, believing without question that the United States us, and always has been, a Christian nation, ‘one nation under God’ destined to lead the world because it, like no other country, is founded in religious truth. It’s a dangerous myth, and taken too far, can lead to the establishment of a repressive theocracy - as the critics of this movement have argued at every step along the way.

In the current American political environment, I doubt there are enough people willing to read this book, or other critiques of the entanglement of religion and governance, to effect any kind of change. And that gives me yet another reason to worry for the future of America, and the world that must live with whatever it does.

Bitch Planet Volume 2: President Bitch (containing issues 6 through 10 of the comic series written by Kelly Sue DeConnick) continues to tell a brilliantly dystopic and uncomfortably violent story. As with the first volume, I can’t quite say I like or enjoy reading it, it’s too raw and too close to reality, in spirit if not in fact. It’s hard to read about women in prison for being insufficiently docile, and not hear the chants of ‘Lock her up’ heard at Trump rallies, or think of women of colour from Joanne Little to Sandra Bland and on and on, imprisoned, abused, raped, killed, in jails and prisons, or thousands of migrant women detained for the ‘crime’ of seeking refuge in the richest country in the world. Feminist dystopias are hard things to read if you happen to be a woman in this time.

But, on with the story. Volume One established the scene and set up a situation where former athlete Kamau agrees to lead a team of women inmates in the Metaton tournament that is a huge part of the authoritarian, patriarchal culture in which a place like Bitch Planet can exist. Volume 2 begins with a flashback telling the story of Bitch Planet inmate Meiko Maki, who was murdered during a Metaton practice session at the conclusion of Volume 1. In the present, multiple plot threads are advancing. Meiko’s father, Makoto Maki, an engineer, has been assigned the task of building a Metaton stadium on the Bitch Planet. He agrees, hoping to see his daughter - not knowing she is dead. Kamau has convinced a guard to get a map of the prison for her, and convinced that her sister is being held in a special cell. We, however, have seen that her sister Morowa, a trans woman, is being held in the general population in a special section with other trans women. Whitney, the official who offered Kamau the leadership of the Metaton tram, has been stripped of her position and imprisoned fir Meiko’s murder - and is now Kamau’s cellmate.

When Makoto is allowed a ‘virtual interview’ with Meiko, he realises something is very wrong, and uses his authority to get access to the prison controls, shut down the power and open all the cell doors. Kamau takes the opportunity to look for her sister, but instead, discovers that the mysterious unnamed prisoner in the special cell is an older black woman named Eleanor Doane, whom Kamau addresses as Madame President. The volume ends as revolution, both in the prison and on Earth begins.

There is a very raw, very real feeling to this narrative. It’s powerful, it is saying things that need to be said. It’s profoundly intersectional, and one of the things about it that is so very right is the way that it shows us that while sexism causes damage and injury to all women, it’s the multiply marginalised, black women, trans women, women who cannot conform to male-created standards of beauty, who suffer most. It acknowledges the reality that women of colour have always been more likely to be seen as transgressive and non-compliant, and be punished for it by the justice system, which has always operated for the benefit of the multiply privileged - those who are white, wealthy, heterosexual, cisgender and predominantly men.

I can hardly bear to read it, but I’m going to keep on doing so anyway. If you are interested, I urge you to read the individual comics, not the trade compilations, because of the excellent articles by feminist, anti-racist and trans activists and scholars. Bitch Planet is more than just a powerful feminist narrative, it’s an experience.

Charlie Angus, politician, author and journalist, is a longtime socialist, social justice activist, and Indigenous ally. His book, Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada’s Lost Promise and One Girl’s Dream, arises out of these multiple threads. Angus takes a hard, journalistic view of the way that Canadian society, government and institutions have failed Indigenous children, giving his account a strong centre by focusing on young Cree activist Shannen Koostachin, a member of the Attawapiskat First Nation, and her fight for equal access to education for the students of her community and for all Indigenous youth across Canada. Angus has a personal connection to this story - Attawapiskat is a part of the riding he represents in Parliament, and he knew and supported Shannen Koostachin in her campaign, but he treads carefully in writing this account, avoiding sentimentality and never injecting himself needlessly into the narrative - rare restraint from a politician.

Shannen’s story is short, inspiring and tragic. At 13, she challenged the federal government to build a new school in her community to replace the mould-filled portables sitting on toxic, contaminated land that had been the only educational facility available to the children in her remote community for years. Her drive, her charismatic presence, called out to other youth across the country to support her. Even after her death in a car accident, the fight she started continued until the government finally was forced to recognise the demands she and her supporters made. But as Angus says, Shannen’s story is emblematic of a problem that affects Indigenous communities across Canada.

“And this is where the story of Shannen Koostachin takes on larger political significance. The story of the inequities faced by students in Attawapiskat provides a window into a world that most Canadians never knew existed. It has opened a political and social conversation about how a country as rich and inclusive as Canada can deliberately marginalize children based on their race or, more accurately, marginalize them based on their treaty rights.

What Shannen’s story shows us is that, though the conditions in Attawapiskat might have been extreme, they were by no means an anomaly. All over Canada, First Nations youth have significantly fewer resources for education, health, and community services than those available to non-Indigenous youth. Certainly, there are many reserves with proper school facilities. But other communities make do with substandard schools or condemned schools or, in some cases, no school at all. It is the arbitrary nature of the delivery of education that speaks to its inequity. What all these communities have in common is systemic underfunding for education by the Department of Indian Affairs compared with communities with students in the provincial school systems.”

Angus begins his acount with the signing of Treaty 9 at Fort Hope in .Northern Ontario on July 19, 1905. He recounts the promises - all lies - made to persuade the Cree to sign, the guarantees that their way of life would not be threatened and the offer of education for their children. And he describes what followed - the concerted attempt to destroy Indigenous culture and assimilate Indigenous children through indoctrination, humiliation, violence and terror at the residential schools. He quotes Duncan Scott Campbell, architect of Treaty 9 and head of the Department of Indian Affairs: ““I want to get rid of the Indian problem. . . . That is my whole point. Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.”

Angus focuses his narrative on one of the Canadian government’s key strategies for elimination the ‘Indian question’ - the horrifying system of residential schools in which children were taken from their families and communities, forbidden to speak their language or practice any aspects of their traditional culture, and frequently subjected to psychological, sexual and physical abuse. As many as one-third of children in the so-called care of the residential school system did not survive their experience. Far too many of those who did, left the schools with no connection to their culture, traumatised in ways that would mark their communities for generations. And in examining the system of deliberate cultural genocide and attendant abuse that was the hallmark of the residential school system, Angus pays particular attention to St. Anne’s Residential School. This school, run by the Catholic Oblate order, was situated in the region that Angus represents, and was thus, for Shannen Koostachin and the Attawapiskat First Nation community, part of their lived experience. I’ve read other accounts mentioning the situation at St. Anne’s, notably the courageous memoir of Chief Edward Metatwabin, Up Ghost River, which is cited by Angus here. The picture that emerges from the testimony of survivors of St. Anne’s s one of an utter disregard for the health and dignity of the children entrusted to the institution’s care, combined with outright racism, abuse, and violations of the children’s rights as human beings, and the parents’ rights to even so much as be informed of what happened to their children. It is a picture of deliberate, racially motivated genocide.

Even with the closure of the residential schools, the deliberate attempt to forcibly assimilate Canada’s Indigenous people by destroying families and cutting children off from their communities and culture continued - and continues into the present day. Indigenous children were, and still are, placed in white foster homes on the flimsiest of pretexts, away from their parents, their homes, among people who knew nothing about their foster and adopted children’s languages or cultures, and had no interest in allowing the children placed in their care to learn about their Indigenous roots.

“The huge number of children taken from their parents under this agenda has been named the “Sixties Scoop.” Theresa Stevens, who works in Indigenous child welfare services in Kenora, Ontario, was recently interviewed by the National Post on the devastating impacts of the Sixties Scoop in her community of Wabaseemoong (Whitedog First Nation) in northwestern Ontario. She said that child welfare workers would arrive in the community with a bus that they filled with local children who had been apprehended. The children were then flown to another isolated community and given away to strangers. “When the planes landed at the dock, families there were told they could come down and pick out a kid,” she stated. So many children were taken from her community that teachers at the local school were laid off because there weren’t enough children left to be taught. Stevens said that the process continued until 1990 and was only stopped at her home reserve when the band members openly defied the child welfare authorities. “They stood at the reserve line on tractors with shotguns saying, ‘You aren’t coming into our community and taking any more of our children,’” she stated.”

In 1976, the Attawapiskat First Nation finally got their own school. But there were problems from the beginning. The construction of the facilities, including residences for teachers, failed to take into account the climate conditions in such a northern region. Within a few years, the freeze and thaw cycle cause shallowly buried fuel pipes to buckle and break, resulting in leaks that seriously contaminated the soil on which the school was built. Health problems developed among students and staff. Some attempts were made to remove contaminated soil, but the leaks continued, adding to the load of toxic diesel fuel in the ground and the health risks to the students. The school, which was under the jurisdiction of Indian Affairs, not the provincial educational system, continued to operate. Finally, in 2000, the band declared the school as a condemned building and demanded that a new school be built. One was promised, but no action followed on that promise. Instead, classes were taught in portables set up near the old school - still close to the source of contamination, cold in winter, lacking in facilities to support the basic educational program, and screaming “slapdash solution to a serious problem.”

Angus carefully details the campaign originated and driven by the students of Attawapiskat, and the shameful responses - obfuscations, denials, diversions and outright lies - of the government of the day and the various Indian Affairs ministers, who held the portfolio during the Harper regime.

He also paints a powerful and painful picture of what Indigenous children, particularly those living in remote and isolated communities, deal with. The poverty, lack of resources, lack of housing, schools, community infrastructure, social programs. He speaks about the epidemics of depression, apathy, suicide, that have swept through indigenous communities. The problems faced by Indigenous youth taken from their homes and placed in foster care or in institutions. The endless wasting of talent, potential, and lives that would never be tolerated if these children were white.

The basic truths that Angus speaks are these: that the federal government, regardless of what party currently forms it, has never paid attention to the real needs of Indigenous communities, has never listened to the people it abandoned, has never wanted to spend the money necessary to ensure the most important supports: safe, clean housing; medical care; essential infrastructure; education comparable to that provided by provincial authorities; social programs with a goal of keeping families together, children in their communities, and indigenous cultures strong; economic development to enable communities to be self-supporting. That white settlers stole their land, tried to erase their very existence and gave them nothing but empty promises. That the colonial project of genocide continues to this day. And that the resistance to this project is alive and growing.

Indigenous Nationhood is a collection of writings by Indigenous writer and activist Pamela Palmater of the Mi’kmaw Nation, which she describes as: “... a collection of my own personal thoughts, opinions, ideas, and critiques about a wide range of issues...” Most of the writings are taken from her blog, and address many issues, political, economic and cultural, of relevance to Indigenous peoples, particularly those living within what is now called Canada, and their struggles for justice in a white settler country. Many of the blogs were written during the tenure of Stephen Harper as Prime Minister and refer to specific issues involving his government, but really, not much has changed under Trudeau, and the basic truths remain, no matter how the details change.

In my comments on the non-fiction books I read, I often try to summarise some of the important points the author makes; this time, I’m just going to let Palmater’s words speak for themselves, and urge you to buy the book, or go read her blog, to learn more. Because her words are important.

“This is an old battle, one that we have been fighting since contact. While many Canadians would like to believe that old colonial ideologies about Indigenous peoples have long since waned, the opposite is true. Just take a peek at some of the vile comments posted on online media stories about Indigenous peoples and you’ll see what I mean. Not only do Indigenous peoples face this battle on multiple fronts and on a daily basis, but they must also face the battle within themselves. Every day we face the battle to prove we are worthy as human beings. Too often this battle is lost, and we lose our young people to suicide, violent deaths, and early deaths from diseases, malnutrition, and lack of housing or clean water caused by extreme poverty.”

“It is time Canada accepted the fact that we will not be assimilated. Whether you call it “aggressively contrary,” “insurgency,” or “criminal” — we will continue to protect our cultures and identities for future generations. If only Canadians could leave their minds open long enough to see the incredible strength of our diverse peoples, the beauty of our rich cultures and traditions, the unique ties we have to our territories, and the incredible pride we have in our identities — then they would see why we refuse to give it up.”

“My own identity has been shaped by the histories, stories, lessons, and practices passed on to me by my large extended family. This has shaped my worldview, values, and aspirations — it is essentially what some might refer to as my cultural identity. My experience of identity on the other hand, has been shaped entirely by others — by schoolmates, teachers, employers, friends, neighbours, historians, judges, politicians, and governments. While my own Indigenous identity is strong and has survived the test of time, it is scarred and bruised by my lived experience of identity and the ongoing attack on my identity through government law and policy designed to assimilate Indigenous peoples into the body politic.”

“From smallpox blankets and scalping bounties to imprisonment and neglect — Canada is killing our people, and Canadians will be next if nothing is done to change the value (or lack thereof) that we collectively put on human life — all human life. This dictatorial, police state is not what newcomers had in mind when they came to Canada. A territory shared with Indigenous Nations based on formal agreements (treaties) and informal agreements (alliances) was founded on three principles: mutual respect, mutual prosperity, and mutual protection. Indigenous peoples, their families, communities, and Nations protected and cared for newcomers. Our people fought in Canada’s world wars to protect our shared territory and people. Now it’s time for Canadians to stand up for Indigenous peoples.”

“There is a children-in-care crisis, with 40% of children in care in Canada (30,000–40,000) being Indigenous children. In Manitoba, approximately 90% of the children in care are Indigenous. The crisis of over-incarceration of Indigenous people shows that 25–30% of the prison population in Canada are Indigenous and numbers are increasing. The water crisis reveals that 116+ First Nations do not have clean water and 75% of their water systems are at medium to high risk. The housing crisis is particularly staggering when you consider that 40% of First Nations homes are in need of major repair and there is an 85,000 home backlog. There is a growing crisis of violence against Indigenous women, with over 1200 murdered and missing Indigenous women and little girls in Canada. The health crisis results in a life expectancy of 8–20 years less for Indigenous people due to extreme poverty. This does not include the cultural crisis, where 94% of Indigenous languages in Canada (47 of 50 languages) are at high risk of extinction. These are all exacerbated for communities which suffer from massive flooding due to hydroelectric operations.”

“We are in the fight of our lives and we need to turn the tide of this war around. We have to stop blaming ourselves and believing the lies that we were told. We are not inferior, we are not genetically predisposed to dysfunction, our men are not better than our women, and we certainly did not ever consent to genocide against our people. All the dysfunction, addictions, ill health, suicides, male domination, and violence are the result of what Canada did to us. We are not each other’s enemies. We have to forgive ourselves for being colonized — none of that is who we really are as Indigenous peoples.”

“Today, however, the bright spirits of our peoples have been dimmed by the dark cloud under which our generations have lived for a very long time. Multiple generations of our peoples have been living under colonial rule and suffering the losses of our lands, identities, traditions, values, and worldviews, as well as our sense of responsibility to ourselves and each other. This has been compounded by the historical and current physical and emotional harms imposed by our colonizers. These actions are well known and include assimilation laws, policies, and state actions like residential schools, day schools, the Indian Act, discriminatory laws, the sixties scoop, overrepresentation of Indigenous children in foster care and our men in prisons, deaths in police custody, starlight tours, racial profiling, and many other current state actions.”

“Just like all the “non-status,” “non-band member” and “off reserve” Indian women who have been excluded at every turn, we now have a new negative descriptor — murdered or missing Indigenous women and girls. Our women can be murdered or go missing in frighteningly high numbers without society caring enough to even wonder why. How much more inequality must Indigenous women endure before society at large will stand up and say enough?”

“The whole world is changing and it is Indigenous peoples who are leading that change to restore balance to the earth, its life-giving resources, and the peoples who share this planet. We have the power to bring our people back home. All those suffering in child and family services, those that are missing, and those trapped in prisons or state custody — we are going to bring them back home. Canadians are standing beside us as we do this because they have come to realize that without farmable land, drinkable water, and breathable air — none of us will survive. This means that Indigenous Nations are Canadians’ last best hope at protecting the lands, waters, plants and animals for all our future generations.”

I do not often read picture books for children. Largely because it’s been a very long time since I had very young children in my life on the sort of basis where I selected and read picture books to them, and a much, much longer time since I was reding picture books for myself. So I don’t know much about picture books these days and what’s done and not done in them. I think the last picture book I remember reading for my own interest was Where the Wild Things Are, because there was a time when everyone was talking about it. My own tastes in picture books were influenced by Madeleine, and Babar, and Peter Rabbit.

But when I heard the story of how A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo came to be written, I had to read it.

Because gay bunnies are delightful, and messages of accepting and valuing difference are important, and there’s a decent civics lesson in there too.

I don’t know what children will think about it, but I was crying at the end, it made me so very happy.

Just in case you don’t know the story, it goes something like this. US Vice President Mike Pence has a bunny named Marlon Bundo. And his daughter has written a book about Marlon Bundo, called Marlon Bundo’s Day in the Life of the Vice President. Now there’s nothing wrong with the book itself, as far as I know. What has annoyed some people is that the Pences are promoting it through, among other places, the notoriously queerphobic Focus on the Family organisation. And as far as I’m concerned, once you politicise your book by linking it to a known hate group, you make it fair game for satire.

But because satirist John Oliver has class, he decided not to troll the book directly. Instead, he arranged for the creation and publication of a legitimate children’s book, written by Jill Twiss and illustrated by E. G. Keller, that’s a message of inclusion and acceptance. In this book, Marlon Bundo, the Vice President’s bunny, is lonely, until he meets a floppy-eared bunny named Wesley, and they enjoy hopping around the garden together so much, they decide to get married and hop together for the rest of their lives. But when they tell their friends about how happy they are together, along comes the Stink Bug, who seems to be in charge, and he tells them all that boy bunnies can not marry boy bunnies. And that being different is wrong. The animals decide to reject this message, and hold a vote to remove the Stink Bug from power. And Marlon Bundo and Wesley get married and hop together forever more.

It’s important to note that there are no cheap shots at Pence here. The Stink Bug is a homophobic autocrat, but in the story, Marlon Bundo talks about his family, his Mom, his Grandma and Grampa, who is Mike Pence. The book says nothing about the Pence family beyond that. Mike Pence is not identified as the Stink Bug (although there may be some ways in which the drawing is a caricature of the VP). The Stink Bug is symbolic of anyone who tries to marginalise and oppress those who are different.

And the illustrations are lovely. There’s a few particularly charming images of Marlon and Wesley doing hoppy bunny things together, and later warming themselves in front of a fireplace, gazing into each other’s eyes. Both text and pictures do a marvelous job of portraying love in a way that is absolutely accurate, and appropriate for children.

And the proceeds from the book are being donated to the Trevor Project, a suicide hotline for young LGBTQ people, and the AIDS charity AIDS United. So you really can’t go wrong with this book. And if you have small kids, they might like it. If they do, let me know.

Ibram X. Kendi, in Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, traces the history of thought about race in America, from the earliest days to the present, "... from their origins in fifteenth-century Europe, through colonial times when the early British settlers carried racist ideas to America, all the way to the twenty-first century and current debates about the events taking place on our streets." The book itself draws its title from a statement about race: "... from a speech that Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis gave on the floor of the US Senate on April 12, 1860. This future president of the Confederacy objected to a bill funding Black education in Washington, DC. 'This Government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes,' but 'by white men for white men,' Davis lectured his colleagues. The bill was based on the false notion of racial equality, he declared. The 'inequality of the white and black races' was 'stamped from the beginning.' "

Kendi structures his observations into five historical periods, characterising each period as, in a way, a conversation with the ideas on race of five American intellectuals: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis. He carefully weaves the development of each individual's thoughts on race into the historical events of their times, comparing and contrasting their views with other intellectuals of their times, showing both the influences on their ideas, and their influence on events and the ideas of others. While his focus is on ideas about racism, he makes a consistent attempt to identify the ways in which gender and queerness intersect with race. This results in various critiques throughout the book of the ways in which racist and heterosexist ideas and practices differently affect Black men and Black women, the ways in which sexism and hetersexism have influenced Black anti-racist thought about women, gender, and Black queerness, and the ways in which feminist movements and thinkers have engaged in racist thought and action.

In exploring the range of ideas about race that have influenced and driven American culture, society and politics, Kendi identifies three general strands of thought - segregationalists, assimilationists, and antiracists:

"But even before Thomas Jefferson and the other founders declared independence, Americans were engaging in a polarizing debate over racial disparities, over why they exist and persist, and over why White Americans as a group were prospering more than Black Americans as a group. Historically, there have been three sides to this heated argument. A group we can call segregationists has blamed Black people themselves for the racial disparities. A group we can call antiracists has pointed to racial discrimination. A group we can call assimilationists has tried to argue for both, saying that Black people and racial discrimination were to blame for racial disparities. During the ongoing debate over police killings, these three sides to the argument have been on full display. Segregationists have been blaming the recklessly criminal behavior of the Black people who were killed by police officers. Michael Brown was a monstrous, threatening thief; therefore Darren Wilson had reason to fear him and to kill him. Antiracists have been blaming the recklessly racist behavior of the police. The life of this dark-skinned eighteen-year-old did not matter to Darren Wilson. Assimilationists have tried to have it both ways. Both Wilson and Brown acted like irresponsible criminals."

Kendi takes aim at the generally accepted belief that ignorance and hatred are the basis for the development of racist ideas, which then are manifested in policies that end in racial discrimination. He argues instead that the self-interest - political, economic, and cultural - of the elite white classes leads to the adoption of policies that discriminate and oppress along racial lines, which supports the development of racist ideologues, which create ignorance of and hatred toward racialised groups.

The precursor to racist ideas, Kendi argues, can be found in Aristotle's justifications for the Greek practice of slavery, which holds that, while al non-Greeks are barbarians, peoples from extreme climates are in particular inferior to Greeks because of the environment they live in. Variations on these ideas - that people from other cultures are inferior, and people from distant places where the physical conditions are different are even more so - were later used to justify slavery in the Roman and Muslim spheres of influence. A second source of racist thought may be identified in the Biblical story story of Noah's son Ham, the progenitor of African peoples and other dark-skinned peoples, who 'looked on his father's nakedness.' As punishment, Ham, his son Canaan, and their descendants were cursed by God. The darker complexions of Africans and other non-Europeans were seen as a mark of the curse and of their inherited inferiority.

Initially, slavery in Christian Europe, like that in Muslim countries, involved both black Africans and
Eastern European Slavic peoples. However, in the 15th century, the pattern began to shift as the sea trade with coastal Africa increased significantly (and the Slavs embarked on fort building to discourage Turkish slave raids), black slaves became the norm and racist justifications for slavery derived from initial idea of the 'curse of Ham' dominated the discourse. With the 'discovery' and later colonisation of the Americas by Europeans, concurrent with the increasing colonisation and exploitation of African nations, the racist narrative of the inferiority and natural role as slaves of dark peoples - both African and indigenous American - became the established thinking on race among Europeans and American colonists.

As slavery became a necessary institution for the provision of cheap labour in the colonies, the previously existing racist idea of African peoples as barbaric and hypersexualised was extended, with stress on the sexual aggressiveness of black women. This served to excuse the rape of female slaves. Kendi notes that the law - which in British tradition had long held that a child takes on the social status of the father - was explicitly reversed, ensuring that children born of such rape were seen as slaves, and hence additions to the available cheap labour pool, like their mothers. At the same time, sexual contact between white women and black men of any status was prohibited.

European law at the beginning of the colonial period held that Christians might be indentured, but could not be enslaved. Thus at first there was little pressure to convert slaves to Christianity, and much resistance. Indeed, many slave-owners and segregationalists in general argued that for various reasons - barbarism, lower intellectual capacity, even the presumed lack of a fully developed soul, Africans could not by their natures become Christians. Christian assimilationists, wanting to save black souls without threatening the economic status quo, began to argue that Africans had been brought by historical necessity into slavery so that their masters might convert them - thus making them more docile slaves. Laws were passed that explicitly stated that converting someone already a slave would not change their legal status in any way; Virginia's 1667 statute declared that "the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage.”

With the approach of the Enlightenment and he beginning of 'scientific' thinking about race, two opposing theories of human origins, monogenesis and polygenesis, emerged. Monogenesis - usually associated with assimilationist thinking on racism - held that all humans had the same origin. On the other hand, polygenesis - a clearly segregationalist narrative - put forward various theories concerning the origins of the different races; the one consistent element of these theories was the idea that Africans did not share an origin with white peoples - indeed, they often argued that Africans and great apes shared an origin.

Repeatedly, "altruistic" attitudes toward African slaves - the idea, for instance, that despite their presumed barbarism, their souls were capable of salvation - were advanced, only to be countered by either segregationalist narratives, or laws that ensured that no degree of altruism might interfere with the economic interests of land/slave holders. Slavery was cast as both legal and permissible under Biblical precedent - thus criminalising any black person who sought their own freedom. "No matter what African people did, they were barbaric beasts or brutalized like beasts. If they did not clamor for freedom, then their obedience showed they were naturally beasts of burden. If they nonviolently resisted enslavement, they were brutalized. If they killed for their freedom, they were barbaric murderers."

As the abolitionist movement grew, both in England and in what would become the United States, new ideas entered the public discourse on race. Abolitionists put forward the argument that while Africans were inferior - thus supporting racist perceptions - it was so because of the conditions of slavery. Pro-slavery voices expanded upon the concept of polygenesis, giving reason upon reason for their conviction that black people were of a different species altogether from white people. Kendi pays particular attention to Thomas Jefferson's writings on both the justification for the American revolution and his support for the continued enslavement of Africans in America. The notion of colonisation - creating a new nation in Africa for free American blacks (as Britain had done in Sierra Leone) added further nuances to ideas about the nature, capabilities and potentials of black people, and the possibility of a state in which free blacks co-existed with whites.

As the middle of the 19th century approached, with the Civil War still some decades away, the multitude of positions on black Americans included wholehearted advocates of slavery, 'gradual abolitionists' who wanted a slow end to slavery, those who wanted to immediately abolish slavery but limit the civil rights of blacks until they were 'ready' to exercise them, those who demanded immediate abolition and full enfranchisement, and those who supported abolition only if free blacks were deported to the new African colony of Liberia.

Kendi demonstrates how new developments in scientific understanding consistently came to be used against the possibility that blacks and whites could be equal. Darwin's Origin of Species may not have addressed human evolution, but even while it provided the means of dismantling the popular theory of polygenesis, it was used to argue that whites were superior to blacks due to natural selection. Sir Francis Galton's work in mathematics led to the understanding of statistics, but his strong pro-nature stance in the nature vs. nurture debate led to the creation of eugenics as a sociopolitical position, and Sir Herbert Spencer's championing of Darwin's theories resulted in the concept of 'social Darwinism' - two ideas that were easily used to counter any attempts to 'improve' the situation of slaves or free blacks in America. When Darwin at last turned to the subject of the evolution of the human species, his thinking on race was sufficiently ambiguous that "Both assimilationists and segregationists hailed Descent of Man. Assimilationists read Darwin as saying Blacks could one day evolve into White civilization; segregationists read him as saying Blacks were bound for extinction."

Kendi does not shy away from critiquing the positions of Black intellectuals or the Black elite - middle-class or wealthy, often Northern, educated professionals and entrepreneurs - on the issue of race. The 1890s were a time when Black public intellectuals began to have a greater voice in the national conversation on race in America. Sadly, many members of the Black elite were assimilationists who had internalised racist thinking about themselves, or about 'lower class' blacks who needed to be 'raised up' from the state to which they had descended during slavery.

The 'voice' chosen by Kendi to frame the conversation on race during the late 19th and early to mid 29th century is W. E. B. Du Bois, whose own understanding of race changed significantly during that time. In the 1890s, when Black intellectuals were gaining prominence, W. E. B. Du Bois was a young man whose anti-racist vision had not yet matured. Du Bois had studied in Germany and, on returning to the US, at Harvard, and, as Kendi explains,

"He had grown more accustomed to meeting “not white folks, but folks.” He mentally climbed in Germany and stood on an equal plane with White people. But his new antiracist mind-set of not looking up at White people did not stop him from looking down at supposedly low-class Black people. It would take Du Bois much longer to see not low-class Black folks, but folks on an equal human plane with him and the rest of the (White) folks.

Du Bois accepted a position in 1894 teaching Greek and Latin at the A.M.E. Church’s flagship college in Ohio, Wilberforce. He was determined 'to begin a life-work, leading to the emancipation of the American Negro.' Somehow, some way, he maintained his faith that American racism could be persuaded and educated away. 'The ultimate evil was stupidity” about race by “the majority of white Americans,' he theorized. 'The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation.' "

The preeminent Black voice of the period was Booker T. Washington, "the calculating thirty-eight-year-old principal of Tuskegee, [who] wanted Black people to publicly focus on the lower pursuits, which was much more acceptable to White Americans. ... In private, Washington supported civil rights and empowerment causes across the South throughout his career. In public, his talking points reflected the New South racism that elites enjoyed hearing.
At the opening of the Cotton States International Exposition on September 18, 1895, Washington delivered the 'Atlanta Compromise.' He asked southern Whites to stop trying to push Blacks out of the house of America, and to allow them to reside comfortably in the basement—to help them to rise up, knowing that when they rose, the whole house would rise. Many of the landowners in the Atlanta audience had spent their lifetimes trying to convince their Black sharecroppers 'to dignify and glorify common labour.' So when Washington beckoned to them with the words, 'It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top,' they were overjoyed. Rest assured, Washington said, 'the wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly.' "

It is interesting to note that anti-racist thought seemed to be most fully developed among Black women who had entered the realm of the public intellectual. Speaking about Booker T. Washington's assumption of the mantle of premier Black intellectual on the the death of Frederick Douglass, Kendi says: "Ida B. Wells would have been a better replacement, but she was a woman, and too antiracist for most Americans."

"Wells knew that immoral constructions about Black women hindered them from fully engaging in the burgeoning women’s club moral movement that cascaded across the 1890s. 'I sometimes hear of a virtuous Negro woman, but the idea is absolutely inconceivable to me,' wrote an anonymous 'southern White woman' in The Independent. Oberlin graduate and teacher Anna Julia Cooper took it upon herself to defend Black womanhood and encourage Black women’s education in A Voice from the South in 1892. Like Wells, Cooper wrote in the antiracist feminist tradition. 'The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country,' Cooper explained. 'She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or unacknowledged factor in both.' And yet, Cooper did espouse some class racism. She praised, for instance, the 'quiet, chaste dignity and decorous solemnity' of the Protestant Episcopal Church, while demeaning the 'semi-civilized religionism' of low-income Black southerners.

Southern white men were 'shielding' themselves 'behind the plausible screen of defending the honor [of their women]' through lynchings in order to “palliate” their record of hate and violence, Ida B. Wells maintained in Southern Horrors, and again during her 1893 anti-lynching tour of England. Her speaking tour was an embarrassment to White Americans. In her work, Wells more or less condemned the strategy of uplift suasion and championed armed Black self-defense to stop lynchings. 'The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs,' she declared, 'the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged, lynched.' "

Throughout much of the first half of the 20th century, the predominant thinking about race remained either segregationalist or assimilationist in nature. Du Bois, disenchanted by his efforts to raise the condition of Blacks through education and 'suasion,' slowly came to realise that racism had to be confronted directly, that nothing Blacks did to become 'more like Whites' was going to change the engrained white supremacist position. Other anti-racist thinkers - Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, James Baldwin - joined him in rejecting assimilationism and the notion that Black people had to 'improve' themselves in order to earn equality with whites.

Post-war America found itself in the position of presenting itself internationally as the beacon of freedom while domestically still in an era of Jim Crow and deep racial inequities. It became a matter of national image to at least give the impression of moving towards racial equality and civil rights for all. Gestures such as school integration were attempted, provoking serious opposition in the South. Civil rights activists began staging demonstrations to draw attention to the need for action. In 1964, the US government went ahead with civil rights legislation, but in many ways the effects were superficial, and did not result in deep, systemic change. Kendi marshalls a powerful critique of civil rights 'gains' during this period: "... as much as the Civil Rights Act served to erect a dam against Jim Crow policies, it also opened the floodgates for new racist ideas to pour in, including the most racist idea to date: it was an idea that ignored the White head start, presumed that discrimination had been eliminated, presumed that equal opportunity had taken over, and figured that since Blacks were still losing the race, the racial disparities and their continued losses must be their fault. Black people must be inferior, and equalizing policies—like eliminating or reducing White seniority, or instituting affirmative action policies—would be unjust and ineffective. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 managed to bring on racial progress and progression of racism at the same time."

In this post-war environment, new voices emerged to take up the national conversation on race: Elijah Mohammed and his protege, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, and the black anti-racists who would become the leaders of the Black Power movement, including Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis. Kendi follows these and other Black voices, and those who sought to diminish or silence them, through to the grassroots antiracist organising of BlackLivesMatter.

As his account of ideas about race moves forward through American history, Kendi examines each new stage in racial/racist thought with reference to the events which both contributed to and were bolstered or opposed by it. His research is detailed and exhaustive, making for a book that is immensely informative but best explored slowly and thoughtfully. Looking at American history through this lens of its ideas about race is a difficult but important experience for the white reader. Events we thought we understood, at least in general, take on different meanings and perspectives; backgrounded events take a new and more prominent place in the national narrative.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough for those who truly seek to understand the roots of racism in America.

Wonderfully left-wing publishing house PM Press has been putting out a series called Outspoken Authors which consists of collections of writings by visionary left-leaning writers, most of them writers of sff. I've read and talked a number of these before, including volumes that contained selected works (and an original interview) with people like Ursula Le Guin, Nalo Hopkinson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Terry Bisson and Eleanor Arnason.

My latest read from this series is a collection of essays, poems and other works from Marge Piercy called My Life, My Body. Woven through all the selections is a strong, politically and socially radical consciousness, conjoined with a commitment to feminist analysis, addressing topics ranging from the effects of gentrification on marginalised communities to the enforcement of a white male canon in literature.

Her focus ranges from social justice to literary criticism. Several of the selections here deal, in part or in whole, with the growing problem of homelessness, particularly among women. Others argue passionately against the trend in criticism that demands the separation of politics and art, and devalues literature written from a political consciousness (which, she notes, is often work created by women and marginalised peoples.

In addition to the essays and poems, the volume includes an interesting interview with Piercy conducted by fellow leftist and science fiction writer Terry Bisson.

If you're a fan of Piercy's work, you'll appreciate the pieces collected here immensely. And after that, I heartily recommend that you have a look at other volumes from the Outspoken Writers series.

Gypsy is one of the latest additions to PM Press's remarkable Outspoken Authors series. As with previous volumes in the series, Gypsy contains several collected works a single author. This collection features selections from the works of eclectic writer Carter Sholtz, including the novella Gypsy, two bitingly funny satirical short stories, an essay on the ease with which the US and its corporations violate national and international law, and an interview conducted with Sholtz by Terry Bisson.

The novella Gypsy takes place in an unsettlingly familiar dystopic future - climate change, corporate greed, resource depletion, war and the collapse of civil society. It's gotten bad enough that an underground network of dissidents have managed, in secret, to cobble together a space ship that will be able - if everything goes right - to transport a small number of people to the Alpha Centauri system in the hopes of finding a livable planet. It's a desperate shot in the dark.... but letting the situation on earth continue without some attempt to create another place for humans to survive seems unthinkable.

This is not a happy story. It is unrealistic to expect that that everything would go right in such an endeavour, and this is, given the opening situation, a very realistic, hard sf story. But it is also a powerful story, and a thought-provoking one.

In addition to the novella, the other pieces in the collection are well worth reading. I particularly enjoyed "Bad Pennies," a wicked satire on the American penchant for meddling in other countries' business and for doing business at whatever cost.

For some time now, I've been watching the full-tilt assault on reproductive rights in the US - and the less aggressive but equally troubling one here in Canada - with growing concern. It was a hard-fought battle, and one I remember well, to win those rights, and to see them being eroded in less than a generation is a sad thing indeed. Fortunately for Canadians, our struggle took us farther, to the full decriminalisation of abortion, which makes it harder to turn the clock back all the way here - though by no means impossible, and we must be vigilant, especially when conservative elements hold political power. But in the US, where abortion remained a matter of law, rather than a private medical decision between doctor and client, it has seemed to be much easier for the anti-choice forces to pass one new requirement or limitation after another, slowly curtailing reproductive freedom under many disguised. But as an outsider, dependent primarily on sporadic exploration of a foreign media, I remained unclear on just how serious the situation was in the US, and on what points the debate is currently focused. So when I heard of Katha Pollett's new book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, I was eager to read it. And almost from the first page, I found my fears confirmed:

Between 2011 and 2013, states enacted 205 new restrictions—more than in the previous ten years: waiting periods, inaccurate scripts that doctors must read to patients (abortion causes breast cancer, mental illness, suicide), bans on state Medicaid payments, restrictions on insurance coverage, and parental notification and consent laws. In Ohio, lawmakers have taken money from TANF, the welfare program that supports poor families, and given it to so-called crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) whose mission is to discourage pregnant women from having abortions. (That’s right: Embryos and fetuses deserve government support, not the actual, living children they may become.) Twenty-seven states have passed laws forcing clinics into expensive and unnecessary renovations and burdening them with medical regulations intended to make them impossible to staff. Largely as a result, between 2011 and 2013 at least 73 clinics closed or stopped performing abortions. When these laws have been challenged in court, judges have set aside some of them, but not all. The result: In 2000, according to the Guttmacher Institute, around one-third of American women of reproductive age lived in states hostile to abortion rights, one-third lived in states that supported abortion rights, and one-third lived in states with a middle position. As of 2011, more than half of women lived in hostile states. Middle-ground states, such as North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin, have moved in an anti-choice direction. Only twenty-three states could be said to have a strong commitment to abortion rights. In 2013, only one state, California, made abortion easier to obtain.

Pollitt's book, however, is not intended as reportage so much as it is a revitalisation of the understanding of full access to abortion as an undeniable element of reproductive healthcare, and hence a social good (note: where Pollitt refers to women as those immediately affected by pregnancy and issues of access to abortion, my remarks on the text are intended to include in this category those genderqueer, non-binary and trans* people who, while not identifying as women, may also experience pregnancy and require such access). Pollitt summarises her main points as follows:

In this book I make many arguments, but let me mention three. First, the concept of personhood, as applied to the zygote, blastocyst, embryo, and, at least until late in pregnancy, fetus, makes no sense: It’s an incoherent, covertly religious idea that falls apart if you look at it closely. Few people actually believe it, as is shown by the exceptions they are willing to make. Second, the absolutist argument that abortion is murder is a mask by which people opposed to the sexual revolution and women’s advancement obscure their real motives and agenda: turning back the clock to an idealized, oversimplified past when sex was confined within marriage, men were the breadwinners and heads of families, Christianity was America’s not-quite-official religion, and society was firmly ordered. Third, since critiquing what came before does not necessarily help us move forward, I want to help reframe the way we think about abortion. There are definitely short-term advantages to stressing the anguish some women feel when facing the need to end a pregnancy, but in the long run presenting that as a general truth will hurt the pro-choice cause: It comes close to demanding that women accept grief, shame, and stigma as the price of ending a pregnancy. I want us to start thinking of abortion as a positive social good and saying this out loud. The anti-abortion movement has been far too successful at painting abortion as bad for women. I want to argue, to the contrary, that it is an essential option for women—not just ones in dramatic, terrible, body-and-soul-destroying situations, but all women—and thus benefits society as a whole.

As Pollitt points out, the standard narrative requires that pro-choice activists buttress their advocacy with comments describing abortion as "the lesser of two evils" or presenting abortion as a harrowing choice for those who decide to terminate a pregnancy. A person seeking an abortion is expected to express ambivalence, sorrow, regret. Abortion is often characterised as the action of frivolous or irresponsible people, young, unmarried and/or engaging in transgressive sex. And so on. Pollitt would have us challenge that narrative.

Abortion is often seen as a bad thing for society, a sign of hedonism, materialism, and hyperindividualism. I argue that, on the contrary, access to legal abortion is a good thing for society and helping a woman obtain one is a good deed. Instead of shaming women for ending a pregnancy, we should acknowledge their realism and self-knowledge. We should accept that it’s good for everyone if women have only the children they want and can raise well.

Pollitt takes a thorough look at the key questions surrounding positions on abortion, and effectively demolishes not only the anti-choice arguments, but also the propensity of many on the pro-choice side to allow their opponents to frame the discourse.

She addresses the issue of the personhood of the embryo/fetus, and the logical, if not always elucidated, consequences of the belief that it is a person from, as some insist, the moment of fertilisation. She examines the ways in which anti-abortion (and anti-contraception) arguments and laws are in essence about policing female sexuality and socially-prescribed gender roles.

At the heart of opposition to legal abortion is an anti-feminist, anti-modern view of relations between the sexes: Women are (or should be) maternal and domestic, men are (or should be) energetic breadwinners, and sex is a powerful, dangerous force that must be narrowly channeled, with parents controlling girls to keep them virgins and women refusing men sex in order to corral them into early marriage with babies soon to follow.

Exploding myths used by abortion opponents to paint abortions as dangerous, and those who have them as either hedonistic and thoughtless or victims of manipulation by parents, Pollitt exposes the hypocrisy of anti-choice advocates who value the fetus but not the person who bears it or the child it will be after birth. She draws aim on the conservative agenda in which opposition to both contraception and abortion goes hand in hand with opposition to everything that might make the lives of actual living parents and children easier, from paid parental leave and flexible working hours to subsidized day care programs to minimum wage legislation and welfare, showing that the real goal of conservatives is to negate the advances made through feminism and other social justice movements and send women back to a limited role where they are dependent on men.

As an American-centric treatise on the current state of abortion rights, Pollitt's book is highly informative - both well-researched and highly accessible. As a call to reclaim abortion as an essential and positive part of reproductive health care, it is inspiring. As a reminder that the work of feminism is not yet finished, that we do not yet live in some glorious post-feminist society, it is invaluable.

Life's been too much of a bitch for me to keep on writing about books much, but I still read, and I may as well at least post lists of what I read this past year. Here's the first list.


Non-fiction


Much of the of the non-fiction I read was a bit of a hodge-podge. Cultural/political studies, feminism, history, biography. All in its way interesting and nothing I regret reading.

Helen Merrick, The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms

Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender

Adam Kotsko, Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television
Arundahti Roy, Talking to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy
Tim Wise, Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority

Lillian Faderman, Naked in the Promised Land

Alison Weir, The Wars of the Roses
Leanda de Lisle, Tudor: The Family Story