fabrisse | Entries tagged with politics

He was one of the first people I recognized in British politics, along with Harold Wilson. Someone gave my father a copy of "The Bedside Cabinet Book" when we first moved to London in 1967. That book, which was pictures with silly captions, was one of my first introductions to British politics.

Mr. Benn, and he was MISTER, having renounced the title Viscount Stansted in order to serve in the Commons, was probably the most left wing of all the prominent Labour leaders. The ones who came up through the trade union movement understood compromise better -- understood constituents who might be conservative in small ways, social ways -- Benn was the pure Socialist who approached through ideology.

Even when I agreed with him (I'm left of center on the British scale, which makes me a raging commie on the American scale and firmly to the right of Tony Benn), I often found him didactic and off-putting.

And yet, I also felt Labour lost something when they relegated him to the back benches after Michael Foote's firm 1983 defeat. He was never namby-pamby. He kept talking when everyone else, even on his own side, told him to sit down and shut up. I respected him. He made me define my own values.

So, I leave you with his ten best quotes according to readers of the Guardian.

His son has acceded to the title on his death. I find myself oddly disappointed by that.

There's an article at Salon about a woman whose citizenship application has been rejected because she's a conscientious objector and the belief is not based in religion.

I grew up in the military. When I was 17, it looked like the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) would pass and, at that point, there was a good chance everyone between the ages of 18 and 26, not just men, would have to register for selective service. These days registration requires your Social Security Number, full legal name, and birth date. At the time, it was still being done on cards, and you could write in a preference for service or state you were a conscientious objector. Were the draft to be reinstated, those with a preference would, probably, get that preference unless there were special circumstances, and conscientious objectors would be examined about their beliefs.

My father, a full Colonel, sat down with my sister and less than half an hour later, she said that Dad had suggested she state a preference for Air Force or Naval Air. I think she still regrets never learning to fly a plane.

My conversation with my father took much, much longer. One part of the conversation still sticks out in my mind. Dad, obviously somewhat frustrated with me, said, "Don't you believe there's anything worth dying for?" And I stared at him and said, "Yes, I can think of lots of things I would die for. I can't think of anything worth killing for."

It was years before I realized how much I must have hurt him. I never thought of it as a judgment for his choice of career; I knew that he believed a strong standing army was the best defense a nation could have and his morality dictated that he serve as part of his nation's defense. It wasn't until I was in my late forties that I found out his parents had discussed disowning him because, as good Baptists, they were pacifist. (My mother still hasn't forgiven me; Dad never thought there was anything to forgive, bless him.)

After making my pronouncement, Dad sat back and said, "Then you're a conscientious objector. That's honorable." He went on to explain that not everyone would see it as honorable. During a popular war, I could be executed for refusing to bear arms, if conscientious objector status were denied -- though he stressed that had never happened in the US. I could be imprisoned, which has happened. I could be sent to work on the front lines without any means of defending myself. (Message runners during World War I were often pacifists who were conscripted and chose to serve rather than go to prison. Their death rate was appallingly high.)

Sometime in the early oughts, my sister got a phone call from a man who said, "I knew who everyone else with this last name was, but I didn't know you." He turned out to be a distant cousin and a fascinating man. He was enough older than my father that he was drafted in World War II. He applied for conscientious objector status and ended up imprisoned for several months before serving as an orderly in military hospitals. Before his death, he and my Dad spoke at a couple of colleges about the morality of the military and conscientious objection within an American context. While both of them are men of deep faith, neither of them presumed that only people of faith could claim conscientious objector status.

I still feel that war is wrong. All war. It is as ingrained as my objection to the death penalty (Not something to debate with my mother, by the way. Dad just told me to get my facts together so I could make logical rather than emotional arguments.)

And I am an atheist.

In August of this year, we will reach the centenary of the beginning of World War I.

Americans won't have the same level of involvement in the Remembrances because we didn't join in until April of 1917, but it's salutary to remember this war. It was begun in idealism. It shattered the class system. Without World War I, there might still be a British Queen ruling India. Hitler would never have risen to power. Americans might not have indulged in such severe isolationism. Women might still be fighting for the right to vote.

There are stories. The Angel of Mons was fiction that people came to believe happened. The Christmas Truce with its football games between the opposing sides in no-man's land really happened. The world became much smaller in people's minds. Aerial bombings happened. The guns in France could be heard in London. Edith Cavell treated people on both sides from her hospital in Brussels and was shot by the Germans as an enemy for helping French, English, and other soldiers to escape from Belgium.

I want someone to put out a Kindle edition of Nelson's History of the War. I have a complete copy in storage, but I want to read it again. It's British propaganda, written before anyone knew which side would "win" (remember, it ended in an Armistice, not a surrender); it's stories are documented within about six months of their occurrence. It runs over twenty volumes. And it's invaluable as a tool to see the old order's death being explained to the "common folk" who will benefit, but are afraid of losing the certainty of "knowing one's place."

Read Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth for more about the upper middle class and the women who chose to work in the hospitals. Read any of Lyn MacDonald's books about the war. Read the poetry and the autobiographies and All Quiet on the Western Front to remember that the experiences of the soldier were not that different on the other side of no-man's land.

Belgium formed me in many ways. In February of 1979, while I was in history class, we heard an explosion at school. A farmer in a field near us had been harrowing a field and connected with live WWI ordnance. He didn't survive. Every commun had its own memorial, often with the same surname recurring. In Place Sainte-Catherine, there's a memorial to the carrier pigeons who gave their lives serving.

The idealism was real. The hope that this bloody, in both senses of the word, conflict might be the world's last was genuine.

So. Watch Human Nature and Family of Blood from Martha's season of Doctor Who. Watch Lawrence of Arabia and really grasp that this is a very small part of a world turning upside down. Watch Blackadder Goes Forth.

Comprehend.

This post is brought to you by Michael Gove who wants British school children to be taught about World War I in "the right way" while ignoring that the idealists who survived the war, including Rudyard Kipling, were no longer idealists when it ended.

I'm sitting here crying. The individual mandate was upheld. ROBERTS voted for it.

I will never again have to be declared indigent to have my pneumonia treated. I will never again have to fear that I can't pay for the basic prescriptions that will help me when I'm sick.

I don't care about the taxes. I paid more in tax by percentage when I lived in Belgium. But I had appendicitis in Belgium and didn't have to fear they wouldn't treat me.

Health care will be available to the people I see on the street every day. This is good.

Current Mood: thrilled

Dustin Lance Black took the transcripts of the Proposition 8 trial and shaped them into a play. Also included are actual anti-Proposition 8 advertisements from the ballot campaign.

The reading last night was livestreamed. I found out about it accidentally after it had started. There is a link to it on the American's For Equal Rights page. It can be found on YouTube, too. The play starts at about 29 minutes, and there are some preliminaries which provide context beginning around the 17 minute mark. This may only be up for a week, so if you're interested, watch sooner rather than later.

The cast includes Martin Sheen, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Kevin Bacon, Jamie Lee Curtis, Christine Lahti, Matt Bomer, Matthew Morrison, etc.

Massachusetts is mentioned more than once.

The Governor has been working quietly behind the scenes since last year to get the same-sex marriage legislation to cross his desk. He says he'll sign it. That makes Maryland the first state south of the Mason-Dixon line to do so. Although the District has allowed same-sex marriage since March of 2010, so it's not the first jurisdiction south of the Mason-Dixon line to do so. (There is some "suck it, New Jersey" mixed in this, too.)

Across the Potomac, Virginia is continuing to anger me. I had an ancestor in the Jamestown colony. My rants about ultrasounds, birth control (someone in comments of The Washington Post actually said that they were trying to ban any contraception that could be construed as abortion -- IUD, pill, morning after pill, etc. That would leave the diaphragm for a woman to control her reproduction options or trusting that her partner will use a condom every time.), and the most repressive DOMA in the country tend to begin with the phrase, "My ancestors didn't found that Commonwealth to have it make such boneheaded laws..."

Fortunately, some of my relatives were in Maryland, too. *G*

Current Mood: mixed

My flight was cancelled last night due to the United computer glitch, so no Boston for me this weekend.

Two of my stranded compatriots decided to get to New York or New England by the 3:15 Amtrak departure and were dropped at Union Station just before I was let off.

I did the tourist thing, especially with the woman who lives in Albany but spends a great deal of time in Denver. She's a schoolteacher and the questions she asked about "the bad parts of town" were slightly prejudiced -- though to her credit she didn't know it until I explained and she seemed quite compassionate after I gave her a potted history of the city.

But she also did not know, nor did the other person in the van with us, that the District had no representation in Congress. They both asked a few questions, and I made my usual plea for them to ask their representatives to give me a representative (at least).

I also did some sightseeing spiel for them, since she'd never been to DC before and I included the tidbit that the statue of Freedom on top of the Capitol is actually slightly taller than the one of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial which is impossible to tell from the angles. I then mentioned that Jefferson Davis when he was Secretary of the Interior was responsible for the change to the headdress (it was originally supposed to be a French style Liberty cap) because he didn't want the slaves who were building the Capitol to get any ideas.

She said, "I don't like to hear about things like that," and shuddered.

It's part of our history. She's tall (at least compared to me), slim, and blue-eyed. How many people don't know because they don't like to hear about it?

It's amazing to me.

There's an opinion piece in the "On Faith" section of the Washington Post.

The comments there can be very nasty, but occasionally I'll comment, as I did on that article. I stated that I was atheist -- under Fabrisse, not my real name.
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