World Wide Work: Books, Films, Music You May Have Missed
The way holidays like Labor Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are celebrated in the U.S. became an issue in the recent Democratic primary for governor of Wisconsin.
Both the Republican and Democratic establishment made much of old tweets on that subject by candidate Francesca Hong, who lost by fewer than 4,000 votes out of more than 750,000 cast.
The New York Times accused Hong of making holidays “political.”
As this review points out, the new book, “Make Holidays Your Own,” makes clear that holidays have always been political.
Each holiday comes with a story that reinforces a certain way of looking at our society, and that passes on certain values to the next generation. Some of those stories are out of date, incomplete, or inaccurate. They leave out many people in our communities. They distort or paper over uncomfortable aspects of our common history. And for many holidays, much of the original meaning or focus has been lost.
That’s why Make Holidays Your Own suggests ways to celebrate that are more meaningful, inclusive, historically accurate, and fun.
BOOKS
Avalon, Rise by Madeline ffitch (FSG). This novelist (who really does spell her last name that way) has an uncommon way with words and writes about unusual characters. In this book, she introduces us to food activists, anarchists, white nationalists, small-town librarians, social workers, and more.
Whistler by Ann Patchett (Harper). A woman in her fifties has had three fathers or stepfathers. One of them, who was divorced because he was gay, comes back into her life unexpectedly, forming a bond filled with kindness.
Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt (Atlantic Monthly). A rambling novel tells the story of the friendship between two men. They start out working for the world’s largest consulting firm as it advises other companies on how to lay off employees. Then they start their own business that hopes to make a big dent in the world’s climate crisis.
Of Loss and Lavender by Sinan Antoon (Other Press). A novel by an Iraqi writer focuses on the lives of two refugees in the U.S. – one a retired doctor with Alzheimer’s and the other a deserter from the Iraqi army.
Tehran Diaries by Raha Nik-Andish (OR Books). Using a pseudonym for their own safety, an Iranian writer paints a picture of the people of Iran caught between three corrupt and violent regimes – the governments of the U.S., Israel, and Iran itself.
The Golden Fortress by Bill Lascher (Chicago Review). This fascinating history about the use of police against immigrants focuses on the 1930s when cops were deployed at checkpoints where other states bordered California. Their mission was to try to stop dust bowl refugees from the Midwest and South from entering the state. Anti-immigrant sentiment was whipped up by public officials and the news media by claiming that these refugees were mostly criminals rather than working people looking for a way to support their families. In some cases, the power structure in rural counties opposed the anti-immigrant campaign because ranchers and other wealthy interests depended on migrant labor.
Courage or Complicity by Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon (PM). Military veterans are often used as political props even as corporate profiteers push for privatization of the VA, increased spending for military contracts, and war and genocide abroad. This highly informative book shines a light on how veterans are treated and what many of them are doing to fight for justice for themselves and all working people.
Search Work edited by Rachel Meade Smith (OR Books). As corporate greed has reshaped the economy, looking for work has become a job in itself for more unemployed people, often with profound impacts on mental health and personal relationships. Many are unable to find jobs in the fields or at the levels for which they are trained. This anthology brings this phenomenon into the open, using personal testimonies, examples of job ads, and more.
Keep Going by Ellen David Friedman ((PM). A lifelong organizer provides insightful, readable advice, with stories that illustrate the points she makes. While the book is primarily about workplace organizing, much of it would be helpful to organizers on other issues as well.
Movements That Win by Aric McBay (Seven Stories). An experienced organizer shares stories about grassroots movements on issues like fossil fuel pipelines, Walmart’s impact on workers and communities, nuclear waste, and many more. A recurring theme is the importance of balancing the need to celebrate victories with the need to learn from each campaign and organize for the long haul.
The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State by Emmaia Gelman (University of California). The ADL has long portrayed itself as the Jewish civil rights organization and the leader in the fight against antisemitism. This scholarly history documents the ADL’s role in helping the establishment to suppress Left movements that challenge capitalism, colonialism, military and police power, and genocide.
Three Roads by Joe Uehlein (PM). In this plain-talk memoir, Uehlein describes his evolution from labor leader to climate activist. He grew up in a union family in Ohio and got industrial and construction jobs, including helping to build the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Later, he became a union organizer in the South and then a strategist taking on some of the world’s richest corporate magnates. As he became more aware of the climate crisis, he founded the Labor Network for Sustainability that tries to bring unions and environmentalists together.
Alaska Literary Field Guide edited by Marybeth Holleman, Nancy Lord, and Shaelene Grace Moler (Skipstone). You don’t have to be Alaskan to appreciate this homage to more than 90 species of animals, birds, trees, plants, and other beings as well as natural phenomena like the aurora borealis. The book skillfully combines scientific natural histories, artwork, and poetry.
FILMS
Madam President. A four-part PBS series from Iceland shows the lived experience that led Vigdís Finnbogadóttir in 1980 to successfully become the first woman democratically elected president of any country.
Lilith Fair. In 1997, singer Sarah McLachlan organized a series of concerts featuring women performers – a radical idea at the time that was met with great skepticism by those who ran the music industry. The tour, featuring such stars as the Indigo Girls, Tracy Chapman, Bonnie Raiit, Sheryl Crow, Missy Elliott, Fiona Apple, and many more, was a rousing success and raised more than $10 million for community nonprofits.
Charliebird. In this exceptionally well crafted and sad feature film, a woman in her early 30s works as a music therapist for children who may have terminal illnesses. When she is assigned to help a 17-year-old girl, each of them helps the other one grow.
Tailless. A Chilean wildlife photographer follows a Patagonian mountain lion born without a tail. The 24-minute documentary shows the human threats these animals face and how they can be protected through ranchers’ use of guard dogs.
Watchtower. A Turkish woman who has been left without good options by traumatic events not of her own making encounters a man who is working at a remote fire tower in an attempt to leave behind a tragedy of his own.
Peacock. In this German film, a man works for a business called MyCompanion that sends him out to pretend to be whatever the client wants, from a loyal son to a cultured boyfriend to the father a child never had. But eventually he begins to lose track of his own identity.
MUSIC
Devil Hills by Mary Hott. A 7th generation West Virginian sings about coal communities and the struggles they’ve been through.
Southern Man by RJ Chesney. Surprising poetry comes from a singer from the Deep South who says: “You don’t get to tell me how to protest, you don’t get to tell me when to kneel or when to stand. You don’t get to tell me who to love, and you don’t get to tell me how to be a southern man.”
Celebrate July 4 as "Interdependence Day"
Through the Lens of Justice and Light
This feature story by Cynthia Steele in Cirque, the literary and arts journal, gives context to the book "Monumental Beauty: Wonders Worth Protecting in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument."
Why Names in Nature Matter to Us All
This column and photo were published in more than 30 newspapers, including the Miami Herald, Kansas City Star, Charlotte Observer, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Sacramento Bee, and many more.
By Matt Witt
While hiking in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Siskiyou County near California’s northern border, I came across several colorful birds that were zipping around at high speed to gobble up flying insects.
I stopped for a while to enjoy these pink and green creatures and see if I could photograph them as they darted out of oak trees to surprise their prey.
But when I returned home to identify these birds, I got an unwelcome surprise of my own.
I learned that they are called “Lewis’s woodpeckers,” paying homage to Meriwether Lewis, a slave owner who was best known for co-leading the Lewis and Clark expedition in the 1800s.
The expedition he led played a key role in opening for expropriation the lands of this continent’s Indigenous people, or “savages,” as Lewis referred to them.
The U.S. president “has become your only father,” he told the tribal leaders who the expedition encountered.
Wondering why a bird species would be named after such a person, I learned that Lewis claimed to have “discovered” these birds even though they were known to Indigenous people for tens of thousands of years and were here on earth long before that.
I wasn’t thrilled by this name. And, apparently, I wasn’t alone in my dismay.
In November, the American Ornithological Society announced that it will be changing the names of Lewis’s woodpeckers and all other birds currently named after people.
That includes 152 species in the U.S. and Canada.
The change comes in response to a coalition called Bird Names for Birds that includes the American Birding Association and many local birding groups.
“It is a questionable premise that species should be named after specific humans at all, as if bird species were possessions or trophies,” said the AOS committee that recommended the new policy.
The AOS said it will involve the public to generate creative new names that reflect a bird species’ looks, calls or habits.
The committee noted that a large number of bird names that honor individual people were coined in the 1800s to pay tribute to “soldier scientists” traveling with the U.S. Army during the appropriation of Indigenous and Mexican lands.
By contrast, Indigenous communities already living in the West named birds, animals, peaks, rivers or other natural features in order to communicate something about their characteristics — not after individual tribal leaders or members.
Perhaps other agencies and organizations responsible for official names of natural features will now adopt that approach and follow the AOS’ lead.
The colorful woodpeckers I saw that day not only can snatch flying insects out of the air, but in the fall they also break acorns into pieces that they store in holes or cracks in trees for retrieval in winter when food is scarce.
I look forward to seeing them again on a future hike when they will have a new name — perhaps one that reflects their extraordinary survival skills.
Unusual Coalition Unites for Clean Energy
(This column syndicated by Writers on the Range was published in 28 newspapers in the West in April, 2022.)
By Matt Witt
Communities in the West can stand up to giant outside corporations if they want to win a renewable energy future, but it isn’t easy. They can do it only if they manage to agree about what they have in common.
That’s the lesson of a historic victory won by a rural Oregon coalition of ranchers and farmers, climate activists, Indigenous tribal leaders, and anglers and coastal residents.
The victory occurred in December, when a Canadian energy company called Pembina announced that it would halt plans to build a 230-mile pipeline crossing more than 400 waterways across rural southwestern Oregon. The pipeline was to carry fracked gas from the Rockies to a huge, proposed Coos Bay terminal on the West Coast, then on to Asia.
When the export project was first proposed years ago, the odds of stopping it appeared slim. Supporters included the state’s governor and its two U.S. senators – all Democrats – plus most of the Republican political establishment.
But community organizers didn’t give up.
“We were already seeing the disastrous effects of climate change throughout the West,” recalls Allie Rosenbluth, campaigns director of Rogue Climate, a grassroots group in southern Oregon. “The last thing we needed was another giant fossil-fuel project and another major fire hazard just to profit an outside corporation.”
As a group committed to organizing across political lines, Rogue Climate did systematic outreach to hundreds of landowners whose property would be affected, while also working with local environmental groups like Rogue Riverkeeper.
Many landowners were conservative ranchers and farmers, and they were angry about threats from the company: If they didn’t let the pipeline cross their land in return for a one-time payment, they were told the power of eminent domain would be invoked to impose it on them anyway. Congress granted this power to gas pipelines in 1947.
Over a seven-year period, the unlikely coalition that grew in strength turned out thousands of residents to public hearings and spurred more than 50,000 people to submit written comments to regulatory agencies. A delegation representing all parts of the coalition even held a sit-in in the governor’s office.
Seven rural landowners from across the political spectrum also published a column in the state’s largest newspaper, the Oregonian. It was blunt: “We are sick and tired of the pie-in-the-sky speculation by these for-profit corporations. We can’t build, we can’t plan, and we can’t sell if we choose because of the threat of eminent domain.”
Don Gentry, chair of the Klamath Tribes, said that the pipeline would “unearth long-buried ancestors and pulverize sites of cultural importance,” also “strip “shade from streams and pollute them with sediment, harming fish central to the Klamath’s traditions and way of life.”
Bill McCaffree, a lifelong Republican and longtime president of the local electrical workers union in Coos Bay, publicly disagreed with construction union leaders who wanted the short-term work for their members. He also said that most workers would come from outside the area.
“Everyone who works in the building and construction trades wants to build things that benefit communities and don’t cause harm,” McCaffree said. “Since I was a kid, there have been jobs here in Coos County from fishing, clamming and oyster farming. What would happen to those jobs when the bay is disturbed by construction and operation of this export terminal?”
A better strategy for creating good, stable jobs, McCaffree said, would be investing in energy efficiency and renewable energy development. That is “creating jobs at a rate 12 times faster than the rest of the U.S. economy,” he said.
In the wake of this broad and organized resistance, state agencies finally announced that the project failed to qualify for necessary permits. That led Pembina to tell federal regulators it was dropping the project.
The coalition didn’t stop with its victory. Members of the coalition convinced the Oregon legislature last year to pass bills to transition Oregon to 100 percent clean energy by 2040, provide $50 million for community-based resilience and renewable energy projects outside of Portland, reduce energy rates, and appropriate $10 million for energy-efficient home repairs for low-income households. The Legislature also banned any new fracked gas power plants in Oregon.
“Most of us who live in small towns and rural areas all want the same things,” said Rogue Climate’s Executive Director Hannah Sohl. “Good jobs, a healthy climate, communities that work for everyone. Even when big corporations have other plans, we can accomplish a lot when we talk to each other and organize.”