Sculpting Empire

Paris, June 2009—In New York City, in front of the American Museum of Natural History, stands a sculpture of a man on horseback, accompanied by two men on foot. The man on the horse is U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, naturalist, friend of the museum, and, of course, the soldier who won Puerto Rico, Guantánamo, and the Philippines for the United States. He appears to be dressed in the Rough Rider uniform of those victories.

The other two men are nameless, meant to represent not individuals at all, but continents. A generic African and a generic Native American, they’re leading TR’s horse, and they’re dressed in almost nothing at all. In my youth, during the years that the movement for racial equality was becoming militant, I wondered how that statue, so near Harlem, was allowed to stand, unmolested, not even graffiti’d. No one else even complained about it, at least not publicly

I met its ideological twin in Paris the other day.

More precisely, I met its ideological sextuplets. They’re also in front of a museum, in this case the Musée d’Orsay, and all six of them depict continents: Six larger-than-life female figures representing, from left to right, Europe (yes, Europe comes first), Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and “Oceania.” Like Roosevelt, the statue of “Europe” is somewhat military, despite being female; she seems to be modeled on Athena and is dressed head-to-toe in flowing robes and a suggestion of armor, with a helmet on her head. And, like Roosevelt’s companions, the other five are all half naked.

This is so curious it bears repetition: Seven generic “natives,” created on separate continents and in different centuries, are nevertheless all bare-breasted and accompanying fully clothed white people. What were those sculptors thinking? Surely they never let themselves think what the figures imply …

This is what we know about the sculptures: The Musée d’Orsay sculptures were made for the Trocadero Palace and the Universal Exposition of 1878. Six sculptors were commissioned to create them: Alexandre Schoenewerk, to sculpt the figure representing “Europe”; Alexandre Falguière to create “Asia”; Eugène Delaplanche, “Africa”; Ernest-Eugène Hiolle, “North America”; Aimé Millet, South America; and Mathurin Moreau, “Oceania.” Each did his job; the six works graced the Trocadero during the Exposition and then were discarded and found after the Orsay railroad station was converted into a museum in 1986. The Roosevelt statue was sculpted by James Earle Fraser and placed on the museum plaza and dedicated in 1940.

Those are the bare facts, so to speak. Their meaning would be clear to a child and indeed has presumably been clear to the generations of children who have been taken on school trips to those museums. There is, however, one difference worth noting between the two groups; they are very close ideological relatives, but not quite identical.

The French group was created when Europe truly ran the world, its mastery supported by the ideas shouted by those statues. The group in New York was sculpted just at the moment when the mantle of empire was passing to the United States, which might do well to take to heart the lesson Europe had to learn, the sequel—what empires do after they rise.

They fall.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak 2009

photo by Brian Pasternak © 2009

A Very Political Landscape

For a century and a half, almost anybody in Paris who had been anybody in life was laid to rest at Père Lachaise after death—along with many who had been nobody of note. Once, a hundred odd who had been less than nobody, who were of the canaille (“rabble,” “riffraff,” "mob,” sometimes “scum”), were slaughtered there.

Atop a hill in the 20th arrondissement of eastern Paris, Cimetiére Père Lachaise is named for a 17-th century priest who lived there before the cemetery was built. At 48 hectares (118.5 acres), it is the city’s largest cemetery. It holds the remains of more than 300,000 people, including the beloved French singer Edith Piaf (1915-1963), U.S. rocker-poet Jim Morrison (1943-1971), composer Georges Bizet (1838-1875); medieval lovers Héloïse (1101-1164) and Abelard (1079-1142); actor-spouses Simone Signoret (1921-1985) and Yves Montand (1921-1991); and writers Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Colette (1873-1954), and Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). Under one monument, in the southeast corner of the cemetery, lie “a few of the ashes of the seven thousand French martyrs murdered by the Nazis at the camp of Neuengamme.”

Few tracts of real estate in the world are as politically charged as that corner. Within a few yards of the Neuengamme stone are monuments to the victims of half a dozen other concentration camps, to the French volunteers of the International Brigades that fought for the Spanish Republic, and to the Central Committee of the French Communist party.

They’re not there by accident. Those memorials are directly across a narrow roadway from the Mur des Fédérés, the Wall of the Communards. Against that wall, on May 28, 1871, the French Army shot 147 defenders of the Paris Commune, the world’s first—albeit tragically short-lived—socialist-anarchist revolution.

The Commune was born out of dire circumstances. After the loss of the Franco-Prussian War, in the spring of 1871, the poor and hungry workers of Paris—including both socialists and anarchists—declared the city an independent political entity and held elections for a governing council, or commune. The existing government fled to Versailles; the Commune, flying the red flag of revolution rather than the French tricoleur, took office on March 28. It elected as its leader the jailed socialist revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) and rapidly instituted a series of laws and regulations meant to create political and economic equality, mandates that included a strong feminist component as well.

Blanqui never took office. The French government in Versailles sent the army out against the Commune. After weeks of skirmishes, the army re-occupied Paris. The last 147 defenders of the Commune were shot by a firing squad in Père Lachaise on May 28 at the end of what is still called la Semaine Sanglante, the Bloody Week, which saw the summary executions by the French troops of tens of thousands of suspected communards.

One survivor, the poet Eugène Pottier (1816-1887), later wrote a poem that, set to music by composer Pierre De Geyter (1848-1932), became the anthem of socialists and anarchists around the world as “The Internationale.” It was sung for me once at the Mur des Fédérés, which remains a beacon for the hope for economic equality; French fighters for freedom and justice, including Blanqui and Pottier, have been buried or commemorated near it ever since.

The events of 1871 are also commemorated beyond the walls of Père Lachaise. A Parisian café is named for the Commune’s favorite song, “The Cherries of Springtime,” and a few miles south of the Mur des Fédérés, a boulevard in the Left Bank’s 13th arrondissement bears the name August Blanqui.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak 2009

Courtesy

12TH ARRONDISSEMENT, PARIS—I’m at a dinner party in Paris; I am, in fact, the reason for the dinner party, the guest of honor, the visiting American. Five of us sit around a table, eating, drinking wine, and chatting, amiably and aimlessly, about the world situation, music, theatre, travel, and whatever else arises. My hosts are a French sociologist—whose research brings her from time to time to the United States, which is how I met her—and her student-son. The other two guests are a scholar in the slightly rarefied field of Southeast Asian tourism, and her husband, the director of international relations for a town just outside Paris. (His specialty is also Southeast Asia.)

Among them, the four speak several languages: French, of course, Spanish, Portuguese, German, I think, Indonesian, and smatterings of other Asian languages. And English. Everyone here speaks English, mostly as a third or fourth or fifth language rather than as a second, and mostly less than perfectly. But tonight, they’re all speaking English—

Because the American in the room is competent in only one language: her own. I speak enough French for shopping, but not enough to be comfortable conversing in it.

If any of my companions are equally self-conscious about their less-than-perfect English, it doesn’t show. All evening, as a courtesy to me, they speak my language. Sometimes they fall into French for a moment, but after a couple of sentences, the conversation stops, one of them checks to see if I understood, and they go back to English.

During one such moment, I wonder if I’ve ever seen this happen in reverse. Have I ever been in a room in the United States in which everyone present was speaking a language not their own—that they didn’t even use in their work—to accommodate a non-English-speaking visitor?

My companions stop and explain the last two sentences to me, and I lose the thought. Half an hour later, during another French moment, I come back to it, this time with the answer: Never. I’ve never been at a U.S. party at which everyone spoke a visitor’s language instead of English.

Are the French, then—by custom or nature—more courteous than the people of the United States? Possibly. Could there be another explanation for this particular act of kindness, one that doesn’t involve ethnic or cultural stereotypes?

Well, Europe and the United States are almost exactly the same size—Europe’s area is 3.9 million square miles, the United States’ 3.79 million. But Europe’s population is more than double the U.S. population—700 million to some 300 million. And while the United States has one national language, Europe has dozens. As one corollary among many, Europeans are far more likely to learn multiple languages, to speak some better than others, and to be used to a world in which people speak multiple languages—some better than others.

I find the thought—that these four Parisians are less uncomfortable speaking imperfect English than I am speaking imperfect French—more comforting than credible. They may simply be more willing to get past their discomfort in order to make me comfortable—that is, they may, after all, simply be more deeply courteous than I am.

Either way, the evening is lovely and memorable. I leave wishing to acquire at least a bit of my hosts’ language habit, to speak French more while in France—and perhaps someday, in the company of another visitor to a country not her own, to return the courtesy shown to me tonight.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak 2009

A Change in the Landscape,Magnitude As Yet Unknown

It is finally possible, in this nation so profoundly and for so long divided by race, for a Black man to become president.

"War, Peace, Justice, and the Elections"
A War Resisters League Statement

Election Night, 2008—A commentator on CNN this evening mentioned that it had been 43 years since the historic voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. A little later I spoke with someone who was on that march, who said that if you had asked her then whether the United States could elect a Black man to the presidency, she'd have said, "Not in my lifetime!"

The march, in the spring of 1965, was the culmination of a hard-fought campaign to make the franchise a reality for African-Americans in the South. Almost a century after the ratification of the 15th amendment to the Constitution, which declared that the right to vote could not “be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” poll taxes and lynch mobs still stood between most Southern Black citizens and the vote. Thousands—Southerners and Northerners—had worked to change that; some, like Southerner James Chaney and Northerners Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, and Viola Liuzzo, had died to change it. Later that year, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act.

Let me be clear: I expect almost nothing from Barack Obama that we wouldn't have gotten from Hillary Clinton--indeed, almost nothing we didn't get from Bill Clinton. Obama, like all the presidents before him including George W. Bush, represents the war machine--although it is possible he represents a somewhat more prudent element of that machine than did Bush; he represents capitalism, although it is almost certain that his domestic policies will be less devastating than Bush's; he uncritically supports Israel.

Yet for me, and, I suspect, for many of us who lived through and participated in the civil rights efforts of the '60s, the fact that this has happened in our lifetime after all is, in itself, deeply moving. My African-American nephew DeShawn (above), now seventeen months old, unlike his own mother, will never have known a world in which it could not have happened.

This past weekend, I was on a family road trip. My white brother was driving, I was sitting next to him in the front seat, and a bunch of Black teenagers were sitting in the back of the car carrying on like--well, like teenagers. My brother played Mavis Staples' "We'll Never Turn Back" cd, and I was singing along with "We Shall Not Be Moved," when a voice asked from the back, "Aunt Judith, you like that music?" It was clear she meant, "You like that tired old music?" I admitted to liking it, old as it is. I said, "Once, it moved a movement."

So this is all: What has happened is not revolutionary. It represents no change in the structures of power that allot so much to so few, and so little to so many. It will feed no hungry children; it will house no homeless. It won't change, by the smallest increment, the proportion of the poor, the hungry, the homeless, in this country and in the world, who are people of color.

But a generation ago, we had to march--some of us had to die—so that Black people might vote. Something has changed. We have something to build on—and our work cut out for us if we are to build on it.

© Judith Mahoney Pasternak 2008

A Shameless Plug

(For a while there I was seeing more places than I could write about. Trying to catch up now.)

Do you know what happened in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in May of 1886? Or from what Arizona town 1,100 striking (or allegedly striking) copper-mine workers were “deported” in 1917? Or where the first prolonged sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter was? Or the address of the Maryland draft board that was “raided” by the “Catonsville Nine” in 1968?

Those radical history stories and 52 more from all over (all over the United States, anyway) have just been published in a collection of political landscapes, The Path of Most Resistance: A U.S. Radical History Tour, the War Resisters League 2009 Peace Calendar.

I edited it. And wrote a number of the stories. It was inspiring to work on, and it’s inspiring to read.

Don’t take my word for it. Historians Howard Zinn and Robin D. G. Kelley say so too.

I’m gonna lay down my stylus and palm pilot and study anti-war and more … Thank you War Resisters League for this remarkable calendar, our daily reminder that peace, real freedom, the preservation of humanity and the environment, justice, and more of the fruits of our labor were won by collective struggle alone. We are inheritors of a tradition of resistance, the source of light in dark times, and if we forget, each page of this calendar will remind us of our real daily agenda.
—Robin D. G. Kelley
Author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

The 2009 Peace Calendar is wonderful, truly inspiring. These are unknown moments in history, and the best moments, because they show resistance to war, courage, and comradeship. It is not only a calendar, but a piece of literature.
—Howard Zinn
Author of A People's History of the United States

I didn’t create the calendar alone, of course. There were the radical historians whose work we built on—historians like Zinn, Kelley, and Charles E. Cobb Jr., who wrote the foreword for the calendar. There was the hard-working committee that included WRL staffer Liz Roberts and editors Wendy Schwartz and Ellen Davidson; they collaboratively conceptualized it, critiqued early drafts, proofread it, and helped find graphics for it. There were journalist Erin Thompson, writer/editor Ethan Young, and activists Mike McGuire and R. Stokes, who contributed calendar entries. And there were small labor museums and radical history sites all over the country, including the wonderful Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit, whose staffs gave unstintingly of time and research to help us collect the exciting graphics that illustrate the entries.

Together, we compiled this specific record of exactly where dozens of acts of resistance—and a few acts that evoked resistance—happened. Collecting and writing down these accounts was a little like going to those places and seeing those things happen.

So is reading them—you’ll see.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak

Lost Wages: Coming to Las Vegas

The Las Vegas Strip—formally known as Las Vegas Boulevard South—is unbelievably hot under the midday sun: 105 degrees, declares one sign. It’s also unbelievably cheesy, even to this Miami- and Los Angeles-loving eye.

“It’s so ugly!” I blurt as the bus wends its way from McCarran International Airport to downtown Las Vegas via the Strip, giving me my first sight of the fabled thoroughfare. I’m shocked—shocked!—at its shoddiness.

Here’s Paris, for instance—the hotel—signified by a 50-foot plastic hot-air balloon and a half-size reproduction of the Eiffel Tower. The real Eiffel Tower, standing 1,063 feet tall on its lonely eminence between the Champs de Mars and the Seine, overwhelms the visitor with its grandeur; this one, at 540 feet about the same height as the towers of the hotel itself, and its neighbors, looks shriveled and pathetic. Once in Paris the city, I bought a ball-point pen as a souvenir for one of my children. A tiny tower floated in the barrel, and when you clicked the pen, it played a digital version of “The Marseillaise.”

This is tackier.

Many people, judging by my above-admitted affection for Miami Beach and Los Angeles, have concluded I have a bottomless toleration for tackiness. I’ve loved the bright lights of Times Square all my life, although I preferred the old mix of vice-and-neon Great White Way to today’s Disneyfied 42nd Street. (I’m not knocking Disney, either, in its place. Taken to Disney World last year for the first and so far only time, I thought it was swell and loved the animatronics.)

The Strip is tackier. It seems to exceed even my acceptance of the tasteless.

Yet within 24 hours, my eye acclimates. I stop judging Las Vegas and start being there. No longer an inaccurate and inexpressibly vulgar rendition of my home town’s skyline, New York, New York becomes just the New York-themed hotel on the Strip. My body is less accommodating, however, and the heat actually makes me a little sick on the second day. But then I learn how to cope with it: Lots of (uncaffienated) fluids, wear a hat, and make up your mind early whether you’re spending the day on the Strip or Downtown.

The first two rules are standard for hot climates worldwide, but the last is just for the carless in Vegas. My traveling companion and I, you see, don’t drive. We’re depending on Las Vegas’ mass transit, such as it is, and, born and bred New Yorkers that we are, we’re in Sin City for a day and a half before we truly get how inadequate that is. We finally understand after we walk a mile under the broiling sun to the nearest bus stop and then wait, under that same sun, for forty minutes for a bus.

So let’s see: It’s really hot. It’s really tacky. I forgot to say, we go to see Elton John, and he’s awful. I’m never coming back, right?

Wrong. I’ll be back. In the end, I liked it. I like parties, and Las Vegas is one, at least for the people who are betting with their heads, not over them.

There’s the rub, of course. Your real hosts in Las Vegas, the folks who are paying for the party, are the ones who are betting way over their heads. They’re the ones who sit for hours at the slot machines, winning two or three or a thousand dollars once every so often, and putting in two or three hundred or five thousand. They’re the ones who generate the profits that put everything but the kitchen sink on the Strip: Paris’ Eiffel Tower, New York New York’s Statue of Liberty, the grand Bellagio fountains and the Venetian’s Grand Canal—everything but the kitchen sink and decent public transportation.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak

Crossing Streets in Cairo

The sun was setting when we rolled into Cairo. Talaat Harb Street teemed with people, entire families on foot, scooting between and among tiny cars in every state of disrepair. Lights glimmered through the dusky air—or was that the Cairo smog, a unique mix of dust from the desert only a few miles away and the exhaust of a million tired automobiles?

Men in djellabas glanced into our cab and leaned down and murmured, “Welcome to Egypt.” I was in love before we got to our hotel.

Fellow-journalist Ellen Davidson and I had decided to see Egypt before joining the Middle East Children’s Alliance delegation to Palestine(see “Lifta, Which Was His Home”). The Hotel Luna in downtown Cairo, where we had reserved a double room with bath for 110 Egyptian pounds (US$19) per night including breakfast, offered a free airport pickup service.

Countering our usual impulse to begin our visit on public transportation were the late hour and our intimidation at the idea of finding our way, jet-lagged and exhausted, through a subway system labeled in Arabic. So we had accepted the Luna’s offer and had been met at the airport. Air France had fed us several times on the long flight from New York to Cairo, and we were more tired than hungry. We settled into our room and went to sleep and got up the next morning ready to see Cairo.

That was when we learned about crossing the streets. Talaat Harb, which was now our home, turned out to be a Cairo rarity: an avenue of pedestrian-jammed, slow-moving traffic. One block away on either side of it, we found ourselves in very different territory: street after street of cars and buses, honking incessantly and whooshing by nonstop—nonstop even in the face of traffic lights, which appeared to be issuing advice rather than orders, nonstop even in the face of the occasional traffic police officer, who generally took care to keep well out of their path. We saw people crossing the street between onrushing cars and buses, but the prospect of trying it ourselves was terrifying. For half an hour or so, we wandered up and down Talaat Harb and the two parallel streets.

It was about 95°F in the sun, and there wasn’t much shade. At least half the women and children on the street had ice cream cones. Some women were covered and veiled from head to toe; a few wore bareheaded and in short skirts; most were modestly dressed, with or without head scarves. They didn’t speak to us, but many men, in djellabas or western clothes, said as they passed by, “Welcome to Egypt.” That was one of the only two English phrases we heard. The other became clear through the din of car horns and street sounds: Taxi drivers, slowing down as they drove by, honking at us, and calling out, “Cheap taxi to pyramids and Egyptian Museum!”

I was still in love, but it began to look as if I wouldn’t get to see much of my new beloved. At last, however, bored with Talaat Harb, we marched to the square at its end, Midan Al-Tahrir. Then we stood there, hopelessly waiting for a break in the traffic—

Until one of the djellaba-clad men grabbed my arm in one hand, Ellen’s in the other, and, dodging the cars and buses, pulled us across the street and deposited us on the other side. As he walked away, he said “Welcome to Egypt.”

We had learned to cross the street in Cairo.

©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak
Photo by Ellen Davidson