How to Live ventured into the heart of darkness this week: to Bridgend. I had been called upon to give an account of myself to Colwinston Philosophy Society, which meets monthly at The Sycamore pub in that sleepy village. So I asked Nemonie to speak on my behalf, whilst I acquainted myself with the local talent in Cody’s and The Roof in Bridgend itself. “Oggy Oggy Oggy,” and, as that tap-dancing Swansea-lass C to the Z von J would no doubt chant, “Oi Oi Oi.”

Nemonie tells me that a wide-ranging discussion eventually turned to Mr T. Blair and Sir J. Chilcot, and all concerned agreed that Socrates’ unsurpassed if incomplete and humble account of the nature of knowledge, viz.

Knowledge = Justified True Belief + a Logos or Rationale of said belief

seems to have passed straight through the bowels of contemporary politics. Let the fool say what he likes in his heart, if his belief is to be carried politically in the form of a decision, let us have good reasons.

It was with a heavy heart, then, that we raised our greasy placard outside Queen Elizabeth II Conference Hall this Friday, with fellow protesters whose number is now so very diminished, and is predominated by the Zarathustra-like, almost medievally mad - including myself. Yet Saturday 30th January was witness to the second Progressive London Conference led by Ken Livingstone, and here our hearts lifted in appreciation of Ken’s persistence in the cause of justice and equality. In attendance was a rather curious Daily Mail journalist - an odd addition to an environment in which people were seeking to advance a political thinking to hold open a future for new and exciting ways of living. But, lo, said journalist had been sent to investigate the claim made by the quite malignant Andrew Gilligan that a participating speaker was in fact a supporter of terrorism. As with Gilligan’s various campaigns against Livingstone’s mayoral administration, which have been shown to be unfounded according to several independent, and independently verified inquiries, this slur was publicly refuted with reference to the logos or rationale that serves justified true belief. Mehdi Hasan, senior politics editor at the New Statesman enjoined us to be brave: to have courage in a form of thinking that proceeds according to what serves justice and equality, and thereby seeks always to refute the thinking that serves only the few. Then we will be able to say, with Socrates: “I have no regrets about defending myself as I did; I should far rather present such a defence and die, than live by defending myself in that other fashion.” Will TB be able to say as much?

As CZJ might put it, being Welsh, “willy fuck.”

Such is the fatal circuit of what Michel Foucault calls the Christian hermeneutics of desire opposed to the pagan aesthetics of existence. In a seminar at New York University in 1980, Foucault is reported to have said that the difference between late antiquity and early Christianity might be reduced to the following questions: the patrician pagan asks, “Given that I am who I am, who can I fuck?” The Christian asks, “Given that I can fuck no one, who am I?” Foucault’s insight is profound, but let me state categorically and without a trace of irony that, as a committed atheist, I side with the deep hermeneutics of Christian subjectivity against the superficial pagan aesthetics of existence. The question of the being of being human - who am I? - that begins with Paul and is profoundly deepened by Augustine arises in the sight of God. The problem is how that question survives God’s death. This is Rousseau’s question in his Confessions, it is Nietzsche’s question in Ecce Homo, and it is Heidegger’s question in Being and Time. In my less humble moments, I think of it as my question as well. Whether or not he exists, we are slaves to God.

Copyright © 2009 Simon Critchley

In September 2008, Simon Critchley inaugurated the How to Live project with a secular sermon on the theme of how to live. The above is an exclusive extract from a new project. In 2010 Simon will be touring the UK (with Shahidha and Nemonie) in the new How to Live Ambulance. An appointment register for the Open Heart Surgery will be available soon.

Simon Critchley is chair of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. He is currently at work on two new projects: one on the faith of the faithless, and one on being inauthentic.

On November 11th, in commemoration of the end of World War I and of those who have died in combat, many British and Commonwealth citizens will observe a minute of silence. This remembrance is accompanied by a visual prop of plastic poppies pinned to people’s chests for the weeks prior to the moment of silence at 11am on the 11th day of the 11th month.

As a Canadian, thinking about the war is culturally inseparable from the poppy. In addition to using blunt scissors to cut red construction paper shapes, there is a poem that Canadian students are all obligated to recite:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

My memories remain strong of our red paper flowers hanging from the walls and how with rousing vigor we recited John McCrae’s heavy rhymed lines

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

The poem has a strange mix of pastoral memorializing of the dead and the reinvigorating call to continue the fight. Of course, it is fair to say that whatever the poem was meant to convey, it was lost on all of us in grade school. We learned simply to mouth the words of Vimy Ridge and to know that we, as Canadians, had done something really important to help win the war in Europe. Despite the poem’s own mixture of remembrance and war-making, the poppy endures for us as part of our own mythology as a nation of peacekeepers.

In my newly adopted home of the United Kingdom, poetry also has a closely knit relationship to the remembrance of war, particularly the Great War. In his introduction to an anthology of war poetry, the poet Andrew Motion notes that the work of poets such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Isaac Rosenberg are ‘dripped into the bloodstream’ of the nation each year and ushered in ‘as state furniture’ each November. On a day of remembering the sacrifice of soldiers, the diverse poetry and experiences of these figures are nearly in dissonance with the purported purpose of commemorating the dead. Their work is seen, for the most part, as protest poetry and poetry that embodied the experience of warfare - most particularly the futility, madness and pity of war. Although there was a much more voluminous body of poetry produced by civilians (particularly women) alongside the pro-war poetry from soldiers and non-combatants, these particular poets’ works have an enormous resonance for the British public and have come to be synonymous with the act of memorializing World War I.

These poets have helped establish the understanding of the war as a tragedy and an outrage; the image of lion-like soldiers led by inept donkey Generals. Dan Todman has lamented the way that these writers’ poems are taught as history, particularly through their appearance on school history syllabi. Some historians such as Gary Sheffield have asked that the British people shrug off the mentality of the war as futile and instead embrace the war as a ‘forgotten victory’. These ideas are easily reconcilable, seemingly. We solemnize the contribution of soldiers, meanwhile looking to these individual poets as heroes with conscience. Their voices were strong enough and apparently beautiful enough to oppose the war and leave us with a sense of the tragedy of the war, alongside the possibility of understanding the conflict as necessary - as a war Britain wasn’t destined to win, but won as a result of the great sacrifice offered by its boys. Both opinions can be held at the same time within the mythology of the war. In a bizarre twist, we can now read that the poet Simon Armitage will be visiting Helmand province to find the new war poets. Anthologies of war poetry from American and British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are already printed. The poetry of war and the experience of soldier-poets are easily appropriated into the narrative of continued wars without pronouncing too explicitly the outrage with aggression and war.

This incorporation is made easier by a vast and nearly deafening silence in this country on the subject of Britain’s own colonial legacy. This history ranged from India to Ireland (wherein differing revolts and uprisings were savagely quashed), to the Commonwealth (protests in Australia, Quebec and South Africa) and to the Middle East, which was carved up, to be shared with France, in the wake of the war. What remains in the silence are crimes outside the ear and eye of European modernism, such as the American invasion and 19 year-occupation of Haiti beginning in 1915. When we commemorate our soldiers, we are told to remember their sacrifices, but we so rarely have the honesty to examine where our soldiers also acted as aggressors. To remember how we remain the aggressors.

Institutional and national commemoration helps generate the illusion of a collective memory. There is no such thing. Particular communities remember, and they remember in their different ways and towards their different ends. Moreover, these diverse and multiple acts of remembrance are not simply idle and unattached events. They are themselves intertwined in historical narratives that say as much about the present as they do about the past.

Certainly the greatest atrocities of World War I were perpetrated by the Ottomon Empire against the Armenians. Conservative estimates claim over a million Armenians were killed. Turkey does not acknowledge these figures and opposes them being described as genocide. Despite Britain’s own discussion of these atrocities in the past, and because of the modern geo-political importance of Turkey to British, American and Israeli interests, the leaders of these nations have colluded to refrain from censuring Turkey for their denial of the atrocities in Armenia and from employing the discourse of genocide in relation to Ottomon aggression during World War I. In a strange twist, Israel is reconsidering their position in light of Turkey’s criticism of Israel’s conduct in their assault on Gaza last year.

When we note these twisting attitudes and the selective memorializing of the past, we start to witness the way the memory of the war is simplified into symbols that fail to capture the struggle involved in remembering. Within the evocation of these symbols, contradictions are easily resolved. The poems of protesting soldiers are easily reified into the gross mystification of historical and political narratives that incorporate a conscious moral opposition to war alongside a narrative of the necessity and ultimate justness of British military conduct. This means the war poets provide an odd, though easily incorporated and acceptable counter-narrative to the memorializing of the war. This is not dissimilar to contemporary discussion of the enormous protests against the war in Iraq, in particular, as a sign of successful democracy, which nonetheless fails to deal with a word of what the protesters demand.

The pitied poetry of protest did not begin to address Britain’s wars, its occupation of nations or the vocal and sometimes militarized opposition to that occupation. Far from being moments to reflect on in the past, these wars of colonialism, particularly in the Middle East, continue - be they vestiges from Britain’s heyday or from the handing over of the reins of global dominance to America after World War II.

Much of the modern interest with World War I protest poetry emerged out of increased attention to student and soldier protest against the Vietnam war. Writing 25 years after the publication of his seminal The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Paul Fussell explained that his hope was to persuade his readers that “even Gooks had feelings, that even they hated to die, and like us called for help or God or Mother when their agony became unbearable.” Ironically invoking racist language commonly used to refer to the Vietnamese, Fussell reveals his aspiration that the imaginative empathy he saw at work in some of the poetry of World War I might also aid readers to appreciate the inherent humanity of the Vietnamese (the enemy: in his study, the Germans; in his era, the Gooks).

Historicizing Fussell’s book and indeed taking his word for it, he hoped to parallel the suffering of British soldiers in France to the experience of American soldiers in Vietnam. Comparisons focusing on the suffering of soldiers flatten out how the American presence in Vietnam was not the result of chance or folly, but instead a result of planned response to anti-colonial struggle. However brutal the war seemed to the civilians unceremoniously drafted and the 58,000 American casualties that resulted from the conflict, focus on their suffering obfuscates the ecological and humanitarian tragedy that led to an estimated 3 - 4million Vietnamese deaths. (This kind of oversight is typical of Fussell, although rarely discussed. His sympathy for the misery of soldiers, and lack of consideration of Asian lives led him, elsewhere, into vociferous defence of the American nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

Anglo-American imperialism continues. What we remember and the way that we remember the past has important and immediate consequences on how we understand our present.

Many of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam understood the horrors they participated in and chose plain speech, not poetry, as the means to convey it. Speaking at the 1971 ‘Winter Soldier’ hearings, Scott Camile laid plain some of the realities of warfare in Vietnam:

SCOTT CAMILE: The way that we distinguished between civilians and VC [Viet-Cong], VC had weapons and civilians didn’t, and anybody that was dead was considered a VC. If you killed someone, they said, “How do you know he’s a VC?” The general reply would be, “He’s dead,” and that was sufficient.

The cutting off of heads—on Operation Stone, there was a lieutenant colonel there, and two people had their heads cut off and put on stakes and stuck in the middle of the field. And we were notified that there were press covering the operation and that we couldn’t do that anymore.

I saw one case where a woman was shot by a sniper, one of our snipers. And when we got up to her, she was asking for water. And the lieutenant said to kill her. So he ripped off her clothes, they stabbed her in both breasts, they spread her eagle and shoved an E- tool up her vagina—an entrenching tool—and she was still asking for water. And then they took that out, and they used a tree limb, and then she was shot.

MODERATOR: Did the men in the—in your outfit, did they seem to think that it was alright to do anything to the Vietnamese?

SCOTT CAMILE: It wasn’t like they were humans, like we were—you know, we were conditioned to believe that, you know, this was for the good of the nation, the good of our country, and anything we did was OK. And like, when you shot someone, you didn’t think you were shooting a human. They were a gook or a Commie, and it was OK.

Camile’s sparse wording and the lack of any lyric turn highlights the horribly commonplace violence of the war. It is not the recognition of common humanity (Fussel’s hoped-for result of reading World War I poetry), but instead the institutionalized definitions of the enemy as inhuman and animal that are worth noting here. Reading these accounts, the surrealism of war emerges in ways that the war poetry of World War I does not approximate. The boy’s youth becomes evident from his repetitions of ‘you know’. He struggles to keep the needle on the record. Indeed, in reading this account, I understand with greater precision why the aesthetic transformation of brutality and suffering is almost perverse (at worst) or utterly inadequate (at best).

In 2008, inspired by the Vietnam veterans’ example, American veterans of the current invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan conducted their own ‘Winter Soldier’ hearings. Almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media, the accounts of the systematic violence that results from occupation are instructive and moving insights into the contemporary experiences of soldiers and their diverse expressions of outrage and protest. Jason Hurd was deployed to central Baghdad with Tennessee’s 278th Regimental Combat Team in 2004:

I want to tell you a very personal story, and I want you all to bear with me, because this is always difficult for me to tell. One day, we were on another dismounted patrol through the Kindi Street area. We were walking past an area we called “the garden center,” because it was literally a fenced-off garden. As is policy, we are to keep all cars and individuals away from our formation. And so, a car was approaching us from the front. I was at the rear of the formation, because I was the medic and the medics hang out at the back with the platoon sergeant in case anything happens up front so you can respond. They waved the car off down a side street, so that it would not come near our formation.

As I made it up to that side street, the car had turned around and was coming back towards us, because the street was blocked off by a concrete T barrier at the other end. So I began doing my levels of aggression. I held up my hand, trying to get the car to stop. The car sped up. And I thought to myself, oh, my god, this is it. This is someone who is trying to hurt us. And so, instead of doing what I should have done according to policy and raising my weapon, instead, I did what you should never do, and I took my hands off of my weapon altogether and began jumping up and down, waving my hands back and forth, trying to get this car to stop and see me. The car kept coming. And so, I raised my weapon, and the car kept coming. I pulled my selector switch off of safe, and the car kept coming.

I was applying pressure to my trigger, getting ready to fire on the vehicle, and out of nowhere, a man came off of the side of the road, flagged the car down and got it to pull over. He walked around to the driver’s side door, opened it up, and out popped an eighty-year-old woman. Come to find out, this woman was a highly respected figure in the community, and I don’t have a clue what would have happened had I opened fire on this woman. I would imagine a riot.

Ladies and gentlemen, I hate guns. I spent ten years in the military, and I carried two of them on my side in Iraq, but I think they should be melted down and turned into jewelry. To this day, that is the worst thing that I have ever done in my life. I am a peaceful person, but yet in Iraq I drew down on an eighty-year-old geriatric woman who could not see me, because I was in front of a desert-colored vehicle—or, excuse me, desert-colored building wearing desert-colored camouflage.

In speaking with and actually experiencing the lives of those suffering occupation, Hurd’s impression of their lives and their behavior started to make more sense.

You know, conservative statistics say that the majority of Iraqis support attacks against coalition forces, the majority of Iraqis support us leaving immediately, and the majority of Iraqis see us as the main contributors to the violence in Iraq. This gives us a view at the prevailing sentiment in Iraq. And I’d like to explain it to everyone this way, especially in the South, because it rings with some semblance of truth to people down there. If a foreign occupying force came here to the United States, and regardless of what they told us, whether they told us they were here to free us, to liberate us and to give us democracy, do you not think that every person that owns a shotgun would not come out of the hills and fight for their right to self-determination?

It is commonplace to make fun of the American South, presuming that racism and cultural ignorance are their guiding lights. As a Southerner, Hurd presents another voice. His is a voice of dispossession, economic disenfranchisement and indeed honesty, gentility and decency. Hurd’s comments aren’t exhaustive by any means, but testimony from soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are an important alternative narrative to the current justifications for the ongoing support for these wars. (As a side note, similar brave and momentous accounts are also emerging from Israeli soldiers through the ‘Breaking the Silence’ movement.)

Commenting on the contemporaneous New Yorker articles of John Hershey (later collected in his celebrated book Hiroshima (1946)), the journalist and critic Dwight MacDonald labelled the book an artistic failure and noted that this failure emerged from a moral deficiency: ‘the dead-pan, keyed-down approach is so detached from the persons Hershey is writing about that they become objects of clinical description; the author appears like a specialist lecturing on some disease, with ‘interesting’ cases on the platform.’ MacDonald was perplexed that others found the ‘antiseptic’ prose powerful enough to relate the experience of the Japanese and create empathy with their plight. He concluded that maybe ‘my feeling is simply that naturalism is no longer adequate, either esthetically or morally, to cope with the modern horrors.’ What, if anything, may we demand of poetry, of language lifted to the sound of music, in the light of the current wars?

Lyric protests to the war too easily carry us away from the harrowing reality that these conflicts perpetuate. Think of how some of Bob Dylan’s early music evokes the vaguest atmosphere of Vietnam without in any way engaging with or even informing us about the meaning of that invasion and occupation. Yes, British soldiers are dying. But we must see that Afghans and Iraqis are also dying. Real remembrance means pushing ourselves, to demand ourselves to ask why: why are soldiers and civilians dying and why are we, under the cover of NATO, waging these wars? Honest and rational engagement with memory means taking your finger and following it through the narrative of history to see how the past informs and collides with the present.

Why do our governments continue to engage in imperial wars of aggression?

What prevents them from them even being discussed as such?

Remembering this past changes our feelings of pride to feelings of shame. In the nudity of prose, our own responsibility in relation to these current wars is laid plain before us. These wars were not strategic mistakes; they weren’t examples of American hegemony pulling Britain along for the ride; they aren’t even strictly acts of revenge: they are open acts of aggression. For sixty-five years, Germany has had to carry out the work of looking into the past. When will we enact similar remembrance of own actions?

In reviewing the first volume of poems by the young T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster found Eliot’s poems a refreshing break from marches and parades; he found them innocent of any ‘public-spiritness.’ He lauded Eliot’s songs of private disgust and portraits of people ‘who seemed genuine because they were unattractive or weak.’ Forster praised Eliot’s feeble protests against tea parties as something that didn’t get swept into the spirit of the war, but instead ‘preserved a tiny drop of our self-respect, he carried on the human heritage’. Perhaps here art has the greatest potential: for preserving and expanding what it means for us to be human. Even as Eliot’s Prufrock anxiously stirs his coffee or Virginia Woolf politely contains the war between two small brackets in To the Lighthouse, the world of war is present. Art, in its frivolity and freedom, can be its own form of protest—of no use or utility to anyone. The abstract and unregimented art of some of the era’s greatest poets remains defiant, and to many ears, deviant.

We may scream and scream with Cassandra and no one will listen. We may sing and a few might feel comfort. But we have greater responsibilities. We have time and access to information. We must at least try to remember carefully and urge others to remember with the same care. We have language and a responsibility to connect to people and to find a way of digging our boots into the ground and declaring that we have had enough. We have the responsibility to lurch toward the silence—be it a minute of silence, or a generations’ worth. This prodding in the silence means discovering other voices and other traditions. People not meant to be remembered may come to haunt us, be they ghosts from the past or the ‘unpeople’ of the present (in the words of British diplomatic historian Mark Curtis).

I no longer wish that slim monument of silence on November 11th to be an isolated and appropriated moment of remembrance. Remembrance must always be multiple, cacophonous and ever present. It can be a radical act: an opportunity to envision a much larger set of possibilities in the world.

As for language—‘poetry’—it will always be here and its infinite possibilities may always prove me wrong. Perhaps the poet will emerge, who, influenced by McCrae’s words, creates a new masterpiece. As Eliot’s later ‘Note on War Poetry’ (1942) states ‘War is not life’ and, we may further infer, war is not poetry or poetry war; every experience has the potential of being transformed into verse.

Our emotions
Are only ‘incidents’

In the effort to keep day and night together.
It seems just possible that a poem might happen
To a very young man: but a poem is not poetry—
That is a life.

War is not life: it is a situation,
One which may neither be ignored nor accepted,
A problem to be met with ambush and stratagem,
Enveloped or scattered.

The enduring is not a substitute for the transient,
Neither one for the other. But the abstract conception
Of private experience at its greatest intensity
Becoming universal, which we call ‘poetry’,
May be affirmed in verse.

Equally, poetry cannot offer enough food for us to shutter ourselves up for winter in our towers. In our own lives it might be worthwhile to let drop our tea cups and saucers, spoons and journals - to rip the hinges from their jambs and run into the streets, into life and launch ourselves daily into the silence so that we may begin the work of remembering.

I have to be careful here, because I could be overcome by emotion at any moment. Jamie Fraser and Debs Reeks, a.k.a. Super Mega Action Plus (and they are super), accompanied us on a walk to Hay Bluff earlier this year to celebrate How the Light Gets In. Unfortunately, I had sprained my ankle partying - and partying hard, mind you - to some Renaissance Trance by The Roots Union at this so-called ‘philosophy festival’ the night before I was due to lead our party to the Bluff, which duty then fell to a girl with an annoyingly high-pitched voice.

Fortunately, Jamie and Debs captured the soul of this walk in a light-sensitive box, and have now released it into the wild, in the form of a ‘film’. They did this with such love and care that I wished to share their illustration with my fellow walkers, and they have magically assisted me in this task. Here it is. When watching these images, I feel I was there on Hay Bluff, clipped by the gliders that soared close above these intrepid strangers, who are now friends. I will from now on, I assure you, fellow walkers, wear ankle stirrups when trancing out in the Renaissance style in my endeavour to remain,

Yours, ever,

JWvG

How To Live - Goethe’s Elective Affinities Walking Group @ Hay-on-Wye from Super Mega Action Plus on Vimeo.

A little over a year ago I was holed up in a barn in France, laying the blueprint for what would become the How to Live project. When necessary I would hop over the road to what was a temporary yoga retreat – with wireless internet capability – and (whilst averting my gaze from the guru’s oft-brandished ballsack) shoot off emails to friends who were helping me with the logistics of creating this online forum, and our first event – to be held at Paradise Row - at which Simon Critchley eventually gave us a secular sermon on the theme of how to live. This year has more than fulfilled my heart-burstingly high expectations of the project: we’ve not only been the privileged online hosts to works by a talented array of artists and writers, but we’ve also been lucky enough to participate physically in events such as the How the Light Gets In festival at Hay-on-Wye. And we had 30 haikus for 30-yr olds!

The seeds of inspiration for this online space were sown in 2005, when I came across a BBC news item profiling stars of the ‘blogosphere’ and was directed to dooce.com. If you’re reading this, then you’re more than likely well aware of the amazing community that has developed around various American ‘mommy blogs’. Dooce, a.k.a. Heather B. Armstrong, is the original mommyblogger, and was recently ranked number 26 in Forbes’s list of The Most Influential Women in Media (Oprah being number 1, of course). dooce.com gained notoriety in 2001 when Armstrong was fired from her job for writing disparagingly about her workplace and colleagues. In Armstrong’s own words, her blog has traced a life ‘from a time when I was single and making a lot of money as a web designer in Los Angeles, to when I was dating the man who would become my husband, to when I lost my job and lived life as an unemployed drunk, to when I married my husband and moved to Utah, to when I became pregnant, to when I threw up and became unbearably swollen during the pregnancy, to the birth, to the aftermath, to the postpartum depression that landed me in a mental hospital. I’m better now.’

It would be an understatement, perhaps, to say that dooce.com - with its tales of the trials and tribulations of spawning - has spawned its own cottage industry, when ‘empire’ might better describe Armstrong Media LLC, Blurbodoocery, Inc., and the New York Times bestseller It Sucked and then I Cried published earlier this year by an imprint of Simon & Schuster in the US. The Forbes list was selected according to various criteria, taking into account influence via ‘social media outreach’ - something dooce.com achieves not only through 300,000+ unique visits per day, but also through Armstrong’s 1,226,967 followers on Twitter.

1,226,967. 1,226,967?

That’s a figure as staggering and mind-boggling as the 250,000% by which David Eagleman’s collection of short stories Sum (published by Canongate in the UK) shot up The Bookseller’s ‘movers and shakers’ list after it was endorsed by Stephen Fry, and his paltry 750,000 or so Twitterati.

It’s somewhat unsurprising then, that, since 2005, dooce.com has secured advertising from, amongst others, McDonald’s, Weight Watchers and Disney, which, all told, it is estimated, could bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Indeed, Forbes has reported that the Federal Trade Commission has been drawn to investigate and ‘crack down’ on bloggers who may be suspected of being less than up-front about ‘product placement’ deals (something Dooce categorically denies). The Dooce empire now financially supports the Armstrong family, including (and with the key assistance of) husband Jon - and Chuck the dog.

Before the days of McDonald’s and the Federal Trade Commission, I got addicted to Dooce, not simply because a daily dose was a tonic (who doesn’t need to start their day hearing about the consistency of another person’s stool?), but because the site suggested online possibilities that made my imagination catch fire (if not cannily enough to consider those 1,226,967 followers and the potential advertising revenue they represent). I was already tapping away online, corresponding with other fictional online characters such as The Rabbit who, if you ask me, may be involved with this lot who created this thing and base their agency of ‘adventure and play’ on principles of ‘loveliness and reciprocity’.

The internet can be a lovely place to be, and for some of Dooce’s many followers it offers a space for thinking about and laughing through some of the more difficult aspects of being a parent – particularly for those mothers who have suffered from or are actively struggling with ante- or postnatal depression. Shahidha Bari and I describe How to Live as providing philosophical resources for those interested in asking ‘vital questions’ about everyday life, and there have been many times since last August when we have been made acutely aware of the need to carve a space for the expression of solidarity with those whose lives have been rendered unliveable, and for robust counters to the thinking of this country’s re-emergent conservatism - in the face of which questions of motherhood, love and sex have never seemed so vital, and in need of the vitality of thinking we have been fortunate enough to host.

Armstrong has remarked that if she doesn’t post anything on dooce.com ‘for two days in a row, people write to ask if I’m dead.’ Her life has become a story, and yet her success now seems to place this story at a crossroads no doubt familiar to all celebrities of the ‘reality’ genre. For every Dooce-lover, there appears to be a rabid horde of Dooce-dissers – disgusted with the life that dooce.com enables Armstrong and family to live. As one of dooce.com’s readers has asked: how does something as wonderful as the internet inspire so much hate? Armstrong may be ‘better now’, recently acknowledging that she’s in danger of sounding like a ‘droning mommyblogger’, but, she writes, ‘I also hope that [...], from the perspective of someone who has lived through the blinding demons of sadness and hopelessness, [I] might give someone out there a glimpse of what [motherhood] can be, and maybe they’ll go for it.’ Is this the happy ending dooce.com should stick with? A temporary riposte Armstrong offers to the haters is this ironic venture, fascinating for the sheer insanity of its unwitting contributors. Let’s hope, however, that the internet, as well as being a home for irony and irreverence, continues to inspire and support, to be a place of ‘loveliness and reciprocity’.

Vive l’internet.

Coney’s A Small Town Anywhere will run at BAC from 15th October to 7th November 2009.

 Newsletter  901 :  August 2009 : “Happy Birthday How to Live; Happy Birthday Goethe”

Dear Walkers,

 I think we walkers – though our opinions diverge frequently – can all come together in agreement on one thing: the unabated growth of my already quite hearty sexual appetite. Walkers beware: you are entering my sexual prime! No, but seriously: thank you all so very much for attending my 260th birthday party this 28th August.

It has been quite a year, and I was pleased to celebrate too the first birthday of this so-called “How to Live” project. Well done Nemonie and Shahidha, who have now entered into what I permit myself (with some justification, I think!) to name a Faustian pact with the glorious Jon Elek. I hope that Jon will protect this pair from any repetitions of the fisticuffs witnessed at Hilary Lawson’s joyous “How the Light Gets In” festival at Hay-on-Wye earlier this summer. Although I must admit that I did enjoy the sight of Nemonie standing astride the pews that day, before launching a physical and verbal assault on the Red Tory, Phillip “Red Light District Tory” Blond.

 Before sharing some of my Elective Affinities in felicitation of this anniversary, and the forthcoming tour of Kew in my honour to be led by one of our patrons, Emma Townshend (watch this space, readers!), I would like to share the observations of the visiting Count in that same story (if I may):

“We do so like to think that earthly things will last, and especially marriages, and concerning these we are beguiled by what we see again and again in the theatre into notions which do not accord with the way of the world. In comedy marriage is depicted as the final goal of desires whose fulfilment is postponed and hindered for the duration of several acts, and the instant it is achieved the curtain falls and that moment of satisfaction reverberates in us. In the real world, things are different. The play continues behind the curtain, and if the curtain rises again we do not like to watch or listen any further.”

Or, as a dear friend once responded to the computer-generated question, “So when do you plan on getting married?”:

“Erm, never, given that it’s an ideologically abhorrent hetero-patriarchal institution!”

But, then again: I offer the words of my mason in Elective Affinities, laying his cornerstone, from which a building must derive strength; and I think of Shahidha, beautifully articulating the need to find a new foundation for justice: a foundation without foundation.

Happy Birthday “How to Live” - or whatever your name is!

 “This foundation-stone, whose corner will mark the right-hand corner of this building, whose squareness will signify its regularity, and whose horizontal and vertical setting will ensure the plumb and level trueness of all the outside and inside walls, might now be laid in place without more ado, for it would surely rest on its own weight. But there shall be lime here too, in a mortar, to bind; for just as people who are naturally inclined to one another hold together better still when cemented by the Law, so likewise stones, suited in shape, are joined even better by these powers that bind; and since it is not proper that you should be idle while others are active, you will, I am sure, be willing to take a part in the work. [...]

          We lay down this stone for ever, to secure the longest enjoyment of the house by its present and future owners. However, whilst here, as it were, burying a treasure we are mindful also, in this most fundamental of all matters, of the fleetingness of human things. We entertain the possibility that the lid here so securely sealed might one day be raised again, which could only happen if all that we have not yet even built were then to be destroyed.”

 Trans. by David Constantine

Ever,

J to the W von G

Islington. Farmer’s
Market. Travelling fairtrade
organic cocaine

Glastonbury mud
Drugs booze festival spirit
Blands Kate Moss facebook

Dinner party friends
Authentic Vietnamese
Chopsticks culture wine

Functioning for cash
Is no way to ensure you
Will ever matter

But big ching buy you
Smashing tits and iPod to
play Keane’s greatest hits

Warehouse location
Postmodern ironic kitsch
Cunt with facial hair

Disguising raging
whorefest of brain and body
By wearing Converse

Capitalism
keeps you working for bags
Priced like winter coats

Consumerism
Kills communism. Loves Che
Guevara t-shirts

Soul crushed. Brain melt in
.gif. End of everything.
Bongos weed chillax.

To be in work for
cash hungry ad men in jeans
Make small death likely

(Profiteering for
blue blood new media shits
fulfilling self harm)

German not know if
he is hunk or super geek
Girls wish he was Tom

Suburban orgy
Cosmopolitan swinging
BabeStation phone sex

E equals Mimi
Carey squared Boob ass diva:
All relative m8

Britain’s Got Talent
Saturday Night Takeaway
Haha gud 1 lol

Ninety-nine percent
of the general public
Suffer retardation

Deify beauty
Survival of the thickest
Tsunami model

Statement anarchy
Aim subversion politics
End shitting Banksy

Minimalist white
desks aren’t suited to dropping
Vietcong noodles

But style mag
conscious playlists and slogan
t-shirts are SO cool

Guestlist, fuckface, cock
munching penis holder blag
shit weasel spunktard

You’ve got the looks I’ve
got the brain let’s make lots of
classic synth pop

Genius of our
Time? Object of ridicule?
Morrissey loves blacks

When the machines take
over please kill the stupid
And the inane first

Angry young Muslim
In sprawling metropolis
Gym kit rucksack bomb

French electro geek
Detroit techno boggle face
Shoegaze indie fringe

Robot Cyborg bleep
Y2k android machines
Daft Punk club bangers

If art will save us
From life’s degrading horrors
Keep New Order looped

Nosheen Iqbal is a Contributing Editor on Guardian Culture. These 30 haikus were first published here.

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, its dissolution as a rule follows two steps. Before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy, its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down…

In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuściński located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman simply withdrew; in a couple of hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although there were street fights going on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game is over. Is something similar going on now?

There are many versions of the events in Tehran. Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western “reform movement” along the lines of the “orange” revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, etc. – a secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution. They support the protests as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic secular Iran freed of Muslim fundamentalism. They are counteracted by skeptics who think that Ahmadinejad really won: he is the voice of the majority, while the support of Mousavi comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth. In short: let’s drop the illusions and face the fact that, in Ahmadinejad, Iran has a president it deserves. Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the cleric establishment with merely cosmetic differences from Ahmadinejad: Mousavi also wants to continue the atomic energy program, he is against recognizing Israel, plus he enjoyed the full support of Khomeini as a prime minister in the years of the war with Iraq.

Finally, the saddest of them all are the Leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad: what is really at stake for them is Iranian independence. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s independence, exposed elite corruption and used oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority – this is, so we are told, the true Ahmadinejad beneath the Western-media image of a holocaust-denying fanatic. According to this view, what is effectively going on now in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a West-financed coup against the legitimate president. This view not only ignores facts: the high electoral participation – up from the usual 55% to 85% - can only be explained as a protest vote. It also displays its blindness for a genuine demonstration of popular will, patronizingly assuming that, for the backward Iranians, Ahmadinejad is good enough - they are not yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular Left.

Opposed as they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests along the axis of Islamic hardliners versus pro-Western liberal reformists, which is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants more personal freedom and market economy, or a member of the cleric establishment whose eventual victory would not affect in any serious way the nature of the regime? Such extreme oscillations demonstrate that they all miss the true nature of the protests.

The green color adopted by the Mousavi supporters, the cries of “Allah akbar!” that resonate from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness, clearly indicate that they see their activity as the repetition of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, as the return to its roots, the undoing of the revolution’s later corruption. This return to the roots is not only programmatic; it concerns even more the mode of activity of the crowds: the emphatic unity of the people, their all-encompassing solidarity, creative self-organization, improvising of the ways to articulate protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline, like the ominous march of thousands in complete silence. We are dealing with a genuine popular uprising of the deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution.

There are a couple of crucial consequences to be drawn from this insight. First, Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but a genuine corrupted Islamo-Fascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the majority of ayatollahs. His demagogic distributing of crumbs to the poor should not deceive us: behind him are not only organs of police repression and a very Westernized PR apparatus, but also a strong new rich class, the result of the regime’s corruption (Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is not a working class militia, but a mega-corporation, the strongest center of wealth in the country).

Second, one should draw a clear difference between the two main candidates opposed to Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Karroubi and Mousavi. Karroubi effectively is a reformist, basically proposing the Iranian version of identity politics, promising favors to all particular groups. Mousavi is something entirely different: his name stands for the genuine resuscitation of the popular dream which sustained the Khomeini revolution. Even if this dream was a utopia, one should recognize in it the genuine utopia of the revolution itself. What this means is that the 1979 Khomeini revolution cannot be reduced to a hard line Islamist takeover – it was much more. Now is the time to remember the incredible effervescence of the first year after the revolution, with the breath-taking explosion of political and social creativity, organizational experiments and debates among students and ordinary people. The very fact that this explosion had to be stifled demonstrates that the Khomeini revolution was an authentic political event, a momentary opening that unleashed unheard-of forces of social transformation, a moment in which “everything seemed possible.” What followed was a gradual closing through the take-over of political control by the Islam establishment. To put it in Freudian terms, today’s protest movement is the “return of the repressed” of the Khomeini revolution.

And, last but not least, what this means is that there is a genuine liberating potential in Islam – to find a “good” Islam, one doesn’t have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here, in front of our eyes.

The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.

Iran is currently in the grip of a new and strong political movement. While this movement proves that Ahmadinejad’s populist techniques of deception no longer work inside Iran, it seems they are still effective outside the country. This is mainly due to thirty years of isolation and mutual mistrust between Iran and the West which has turned my country into a mysterious phenomenon for outsiders. In this piece I will try to confront some of the mystifications and misunderstandings produced by the international media in the last week.

In the first scenario the international media, claiming impartiality, insisted that the reformists provide hard objective evidence in support of their claim that the June 12 election has been rigged. But despite their empiricist attitude, the media missed obvious facts due to their lack of familiarity with the socio-historical context. Although the reformists could not possibly offer any figures or documents, because the whole show was single-handedly run by Ahmadinejad’s ministry of interior, anyone familiar with Iran’s recent history could easily see what was wrong with this picture.

It was the government who reversed the conventional and logical procedure by announcing a fictitious total figure first – in four stages – and then fabricating figures for each polling station, something that is still going on. This led to many absurdities: Musavi got less votes in his hometown (Tabriz) than Ahmadinejad; Karroubi’s total vote was less than the number of people active in his campaign; Rezaee’s votes were reduced by a hundred thousand between the third and fourth stages of announcement; blank votes were totally forgotten and only hastily added to the count when reformists pointed this out; and finally the ratio between all candidates’ votes remained almost constant in all these four stages of announcement (63, 33, 2 and 1 percent respectively).

Moreover, as in any other country, the increase in turnout in Iran’s elections has always benefited the opposition and not the incumbent, because it is rational to assume that those who usually don’t vote, i.e. the silent majority, only come out when they want to change the status quo. Yet in this election Ahmadinejad, the representative of the status quo, allegedly received 10 million votes more than what he got in the previous election.

Finally, Ahmadinejad’s nervous reaction after his so-called victory is the best proof for rigging: closing down SMS network and the whole of country’s mobile phone network, arresting more than 100 leading political activists, blocking access to Musavi’s and many other reformists’ websites and unleashing violence in the streets… But if all this is not enough, the bodies of more than 17 people who were shot dead and immediately buried in unknown graves should persuade all those “objective-minded” observers.

In the second scenario, gradually unfolding in the last few days, the international media implicitly shifted its attention to the role of internet and its social networking (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc). This implied that millions of illiterate conservative villagers have voted for Ahmadinejad and the political movement is mostly limited to educated middle classes in North Tehran. While this simplified image is more compatible with media’s comfortable position towards Iran in the last 30 years, it is far from reality. The recent political history of Iran does not confirm this image. For example, Khatami’s victory in 1997, despite his absolute lack of any economic promises and his focus instead on liberal civic demands, was made possible by the polarization of society into people and state. Khatami could win only by embracing people from all different classes and groups, villagers and urban people alike.

There is no doubt that new media and technologies have been playing an important role in the movement, but it seems that the cause and the effect are being reversed in the picture painted by the media. First of all, it is the existence of a strong political determination, combined with people becoming deprived of basic means of communication, which has led the movement to creatively test every other channel and method. Musavi’s paper was shut down on the night of election, his frequent request to talk to people on the state TV has been rejected, his official website is often blocked and his physical contact with his supporters has been kept minimum by keeping him in house arrest (with the exception of his appearance on the over a million march on June 15).

Second, due to the heavy pressure on foreign journalists inside Iran, these technological tools have come to play a significant role in sending the messages and images of the movement to the outside world. However, the creative self-organization of the movement is using a manifold of methods and channels, many of them simple and traditional, depending on their availability: shouting ‘death to dictator’ from rooftops, calling landlines, at the end of one rally chanting the time and place of the next one, and by jeopardizing oneself by physically standing on streets and distributing news to every passing car. The appearance of the movement which is being sold by the media to the western gaze – the cyber-fantasy of the western societies which has already labelled our movement a twitter revolution, seems to have completely missed the reality of those bodies which are shot dead, injured or ready to be endangered by non-virtual bullets.

What is more surprising in the midst of this media frenzy is the blindness of the western left to the political dynamism and energy of our movement. The causes of this blindness oscillate between the misgivings about Islam (or the Islamophobia of hyper-secular left) and the confusion made by Ahmadinjead’s fake anti-imperialist rhetoric (his alliance with Chavez perhaps, who after all was the first to congratulate him). It needs to be emphasized that Ahmadinejad’s economic policies are to the right of the IMF: cutting subsidies in a radical way, more privatization than any other post-79 government (by selling the country to the Revolutionary Guards) and an inflation and unemployment rate which have brought the low-income sections of the society to their knees. It is in this regard that Musavi’s politics needs to be understood in contradistinction from both Ahmadinejad and also the other reformist candidate, i.e. Karroubi.

While Karroubi went for the liberal option of differentiating people into identity groups with different demands (women, students, intellectuals, ethnicities, religious minorities, etc), Musavi emphasized the universal demands of ‘people’ who wanted to be heard and counted as political subjects. This subjectivity, emphasized by Musavi during his campaign and fully incarnated in the rallies of the past few days, is constituted by political intuition, creativity and recollection of the 79 revolution (no wonder that people so quickly reached an unexpected maturity, best manifested in the abstention from violence in their silent demonstrations). Musavi’s ‘people’ is also easily, but strongly, distinguished from Ahmadinejad’s anonymous masses dependent on state charity. Musavi’s people, as the collective appearing in the rallies, is made of religious women covered in chador walking hand in hand with westernized young women who are usually prosecuted for their appearance; veterans of war in wheelchairs next to young boys for whom the Iran-Iraq war is only an anecdote; and working class who have sacrificed their daily salary to participate in the rally next to the middle classes. This story is not limited to Tehran. Shiraz (two confirmed dead), Isfahan (one confirmed dead), Tabriz, Oroomiye are also part of this movement and other cities are joining with a predictable delay (as it was the case in 79 revolution).

History will prove who the real participants of this movement are but once again we are faced with a new, non-classical and unfamiliar radical politics. Will the Western left get it right this time?

This piece was originally published here

* The title is a reference to Michel Foucault’s 1978 writing on Iran’s revolution: “What are the Iranians dreaming about?”

In Memoriam: Dr. George Tiller (1941 - 2009)

He was asked to conclude his talk with a vision of the future that he wished to see and was working towards.

‘I personally see a society that respects the integrity of its citizens to struggle with complex health issues and make decisions that are appropriate for them and their personal lives. I see a society that respects the religious differences of its citizens. I see a society that rejects hate, rejects judgmental condemnation, and rejects prejudice and racism. I see a government that honors the privacy of its citizens without unwarranted surveillance. I see a society where war is not an option.’

His striped shirt did not match his patterned tie.  His Utopia sounded saccharine, slightly naïve and simple.  Nearly cliché.  We have all appealed to these ideals, but what good does it do?  These are just words.  Still.  So much could be hung on that word ‘complex’.  He continued with a series of platitudes and a touch of irony that got a small laugh from his audience.

‘We have given war, pestilence, hate, greed, judgment, ego, self-sufficiency a good try. And it failed. We need a new paradigm that consists of kindness, courtesy, justice, love and respect in all our relationships.’ 

Then a pause.  A moment to collect himself.  A shift in tone.  He left his paper for a moment. Speaking from somewhere unscripted inside of himself, his right hand caught in his left.  There seems now, in retrospect, a slight urgency to his words.  A pleading to keep going, an insistence on perseverance:

‘Work hard. Be a leader. Your way of life depends on it. And just look at the rest of the world. That’s the way the anti-abortion segment of our population wants the USA to be. And how do we do that? We do it the way we have always done things. We feel our way forward. We consider defeat a temporary inconvenience. And we never, ever, ever take no for an answer. Never take no for an answer. Work hard. Be a leader. The rest of your life depends on it, and the life of your sisters and brothers throughout the world depend on it.’

These were the words of Dr. George Tiller from March 2008.  On May 31st, 2009, Tiller became the eighth abortion provider (the fourth doctor) to be murdered in the United States since 1977.  On March 10th, 1993, Dr. David Gunn of Pensacola, Florida, was fatally shot during a protest.  On June 29th, 1994, Dr. John Britton and his clinic escort, James Barrett, were both shot to death outside a Pensacola facility.  On December 30th, 1994, Shannon Lowney and Leanne Nichols, two receptionists, were killed in two clinic attacks in Brookline, Massachusetts.   In 1998, Robert Sanderson, an off-duty police officer, and Dr. Barnett Slepian were killed.  Tiller was sixty-seven years old and was shot outside of the Wichita Reformation Lutheran Church in Kansas where he was an usher. 

Tiller’s was one of 3 clinics in the United States performing late-term abortions after the 21st week of pregnancy.  His clinic was bombed in 1985.  In 1991, during the so-called ‘Summer of Mercy’, anti-abortion protestors tried to block access to his clinic.  Protestors also insisted the District Attorney investigate Tiller on a variety of criminal charges, of which he was acquitted.  Dr. Tiller survived a 1993 shooting sustaining gunshot wounds to both arms.  It was after this last attack that Tiller’s trauma started affecting him.  To compensate, he hired a Brink’s armored car to take him to and from the clinic.  He joked that those days were the only times he ever left the clinic on time.  In 1994, he was assigned federal marshals to protect him.   Anti-abortion activists stalked his wife and harassed his business vendors.  When speaking of these experiences and sharing slides of his bombed clinic he repeated his attitude plainly, but with gusto: ‘Hell, no, we won’t go!’  He believed in the American legal system and the rights the government gave his clinic to use the full implementation of the Roe v. Wade decision to conduct post-viability terminations of pregnancy.

Tiller first worked as a surgeon in the Navy.  With the death of his father in a plane crash, he returned to Wichita with the aim of closing down his father’s medical practice and pursuing his own aspirations of becoming a dermatologist.  Dr. Susan Robinson recounted that after returning he just couldn’t leave: the patients kept him in Wichita.  One day, she recalled, a woman asked him for an abortion and he said ‘Well, I don’t do abortions.’  The patient made it clear: ‘You have to do abortions.  Women need abortions, and you have to do them.  Your dad did them, and you have to do them.’ 

It was from these patients, Tiller would explain, that he became a woman-educated physician. (What he meant by being woman-centered could be summed up in a list of his rules, which themselves owe a debt to midwifery: The woman’s body is smarter than the doctor.  Time, Patience, and the baby will come.  Respect the woman’s rhythm.  And if you forget the second and third rule, remember the first: The woman’s body is smarter than the doctor.) He learned quickly about the abuse and devastation that occurs in families as a result of alcoholism and drug addiction.  

His pivotal moment came when a mother and her nine and half year-old daughter travelled from California to his clinic to terminate the girl’s pregnancy.   The girl was too far along and he explained that he could not help.  Stories leaked to the press that Dr. Tiller was ready to kill babies for a nine-year old.   In trying to explain the situation to his own nine and ten year-old daughters, he came to realize what he had to do.  Thirty seconds into him trying to explain the situation, Tiller’s daughter Jennifer said ‘Daddy, a nine year old girl shouldn’t be pregnant, and simply not by her father or her grandfather or her uncle.’  Tiller, who would joke that he was going to allow his daughters to car-date when they were 35, had to face the reality that at nine and ten, his daughters already knew a great deal about sex and babies and right and wrong.

‘What one of the things that my father taught me was that to be credible in medicine, you must require for your patients the same care that you would require for your family.  I made a decision that if my nine and ten year old daughter at that time were in that situation, I would do the procedure.  I did it for this girl.  It turned out marvelously.  There were no problems, no complications.  And I made that decision at that time that I was going to help as many people as I possibly could.  And age was—if a woman or a girl was able to get pregnant, we should be able to do a termination of pregnancy.’

His clinic walls were lined with thank you letters from patients from all over the world.  There was a letter from the woman from New Zealand who found out thirty weeks into their pregnancy that her baby didn’t have a brain.  There was one from the woman from New York whose baby had a life threatening tumor on the fetus.  Post-viability abortions save women’s lives.  Dr. Tiller saved people’s lives.  But how might we explain such a simple fact to his murderer or to those such as Randal Terry from Operation Rescue, an anti-abortion activist group:

‘Dr. Tiller was a mass murderer.  I grieve for him that he did not have an opportunity to properly prepare his soul to face his Maker.  Unless some miracle happened, he left this life with his hands drenched with the innocent blood of tens of thousands of babies that he murdered.  Surely there will be a dreadful accounting for what he has done.’

Tiller always believed that these people were simply misguided by their religion, that they didn’t understand the lives or biological realities of different women’s lives.  But domestic baby killers spill ink, so to speak, and people who help women don’t.  Bill O’Reilly mentioned Dr. Tiller on twenty-nine episodes of his The O’Reilly Factor on Fox:

‘Let’s be more blunt: Tiller is executing fetuses in his Wichita clinic for $5,000.  And records show he’ll do it for vague medical reasons.  That is, he’ll kill the fetus, viable outside the womb, if the mother wants it dead.  No danger to the mother’s life, no catastrophic damage if the woman delivers… There are Americans who believe that babies that are about to be born are not human beings—how they form that conclusion is interesting—and only a handful of doctors in the USA who will perform late-term abortions for any reason, because doctors know a viable life when they see it.’

I find myself sometimes repeating platitudes like they are koans or prayers to help me keep a grip on what is happening around me.  We seek peace.  We would like housing and medicine and education to receive greater funding than bailing out banks or supporting the military industries.  People should not be terrorized or occupied by foreign powers.  When I am fumbling, I reach my way forward to hold onto such simple truths, like a baby at grip with its pacifier.  But simple wishes are not enough.  These are just words.  Sometimes, however, when the words turn a little differently, they take the shape of thought and help nourish and protect us.  Language in the guise of thought can sometimes hold open enough space to inhabit the worlds our imagination offer us and that we must take the responsibility to help create.  All of a sudden and in an instant such was the space offered to me when I overheard Dr. Tiller’s words, repeated by someone else, wherein he noted that ‘Women are spiritually, morally and intellectually capable of struggling with complex, ethical decisions and arriving at the correct decision for themselves and their family.’ As his voice fades beneath the din of denunciations or simply as he is forgotten under a thin layer of earth, may we speak with him again and imagine better worlds.