On the afternoon of September 7th, 2014, a mentally disabled Ethiopian-Israeli man left his Ashkelon home and headed for the Gaza Strip. By evening, he'd scaled the fences and disappeared, and his exact whereabouts are still a mystery. That man's name is Avera Mengistu, and although at a glance, his story doesn't seem like anything exceptional, Avera's choice has started a nationwide movement for racial equality in Israel.
I first learned about Avera from my Ethiopian host family. The back wall of their apartment has a flag bearing his name, and there's a sticker of his face pasted to their front door — something many of the doors in the building share. I asked what it meant, and this led to a conversation about politics, race, and the Free Avera Mengistu movement. They explained how it isn't Avera's disappearance itself that's controversial — it's Israel's reaction to it.
According to Maayan, at about 11pm, a group of Ethiopian teens and a few of their white friends met in the park outside our apartment buildings to chat over beers. These are kids I know personally — I work with them at the youth center, and they shouldn't have been drinking, but they're definitely not criminals. Maayan was by the living room window when a police cruiser pulled into the park. She watched the officers exit the car and immediately surround the Ethiopian boys, ordering them to take out their ID's but ignoring the white boys on the benches beside them. She said the officers were harsh, and the Ethiopian boys were interrogated until they were finally given back their ID's and ordered to go inside.
They went without question. If they'd argued, Maayan explains, the Ethiopians probably would have spent the rest of the night at the jail — a lesson some of them have learned the hard way. The white boys were also scolded and told to disperse, but the police didn't card them, nor did they wait around to make sure they went home like they'd done for the Ethiopian boys.
The Ethiopians grapple with stigma and cultural misunderstandings everywhere they go, and right now, the race situation is at a questionable crossroads, but both Wor Kay and Maayan admit there's been improvements — even if the process is slow. They were also quick to tell me how prejudice isn't only a problem between whites and blacks. Ethiopians are racist against other Ethiopians. Arabs are racist against Arabs. Jews are racist against other Jews. They say it's something nobody can escape, no matter where they go, but that everyone can fight it… and we should.
Yehuda Biagda's death is still fresh in the minds of the Ethiopian-Israeli community, and as for Avera, Israel forces still haven't confirmed his whereabouts. The Ethiopians haven't given up hope. In fact, these issues have helped them to find solidarity. They hang flags with Avera's name on it. They place stickers on their front doors to show their support, and they march together through the streets to protest the injustices against them. The state of Israel has made great strides to address the problem, but racism is still rampant, and until everyone can walk the streets free from prejudice, it's our responsibility to keep fighting against it.
Ethan H. Smith is a teacher, writer, and volunteer living in the city of Rishon Leziyyon. He studied Psychology and German at Seattle University and now works as a social change activist in the Ramat Eliyahu community.


More than 150 U.S. and European Union figures will be barred entry into Belarus, says the BelTA state news agency, in response to a January 31 action by the European Union imposing sanctions against 157 Belarusians - including President Alexander Lukashenko.
Belarus announced the retaliatory measures yesterday, soon after EU foreign ministers voted to enlarge their list of sanctioned Belarusians.
The EU sanctions come as a result of controversy surrounding the Dec. 19 presidential elections in Belarus, in which Lukashenko won with nearly 80 percent of the vote. In the run-up to the vote, monitors congratulated the eastern European state for hosting its most democratic elections yet. Then they changed their minds after the incumbent's victory, and now argue that the vote was rigged. European officials further chide Belarus for imprisoning several presidential candidates, whom Belarus argues worked to instigate violence and rioting.
"I do not think that people who took the decision to expand the list really believe that such action can make a difference," said Nikolai Samoseiko, a member of Belarus's legislature. "Those, who think that in this way they can exert pressure on the judicial system, are profoundly mistaken."
"The judiciary," Samoseiko said, "is independent from politics and subject only to law."
Belarusian officials contend that the vote was fair, and that support for Lukashenko was high because people were rejecting "extremists" who opposed him. For example, one candidate, they noted, had publicly said "Lukashenko should be hanged."
Belarusian leaders claim that their country is being targeted by western powers because they have refused to give up their sovereignty to transnational capital and, instead, focus on bettering the living standards of the Belarusian people. Belarus defines itself as "socialist oriented" and "a state for the people." The largest parties in its parliament are the Communist Party and its allied Agrarian Party.
A Dec. 2 interim report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has a mission in Minsk, noted that ten presidential candidates had been registered by "inclusive" means, and that state television had obeyed the legal rules that all candidates be given free time on television.
However, European officials began to condemn Belarus on the day of the election, when a full-scale riot broke out in Minsk. Police forcefully dispersed the crowd, and several dozen people were arrested, including, reportedly, a number of the opposition candidates.
While the European officials consider the crowd to be "pro-democracy," Belarusian authorities said that most of the people there were either foreign agents or paid by them, and were looking to instigate a riot. Indeed, videos that surfaced on the internet show the demonstrators trying to break their way into government buildings.
"Kill Lukashenko with a bullet?" said Youtube user Rustam Minsk, referring to one of the chants by protestors. The user was responding to another from outside the country, who criticized the government for arresting the rioters. "You realize that you are defending terrorism, right? If you were imprisoned in Belarus, you would probably call yourself 'innocent.' Don't you think that it's too hypocritical from your side?"
The Belarusian president argues that the candidates arrested were helping to lead a riot, and that they have nothing in common with the popular revolutions going on in other countries such as Egypt. He argues that the protesters are "not an opposition but a fifth column," pointing out that, in other countries, people who lose elections don't immediately call for sanctions.
Some Belarusian officials point out that, despite there being far less repression in Belarus, the protestors have never picked up a mass following, as they did in the Eastern European "color revolutions" or in the more recent Middle Eastern uprisings.
According to Lukashenko, 87 million euros from the pockets of Western European taxpayers was sent, though most of it was siphoned off in transit, leaving only 8.7 million euros to the Belarusian opposition, which, he said, "consists of about 800 people, 400 of them militants."
In many ways, Belarus is surrounded by hostile forces. Western states, Belarus says, are unhappy that it pursues an independent policy in all spheres, and that it will not open up its economy to gangsters and unrestricted control by foreign capital the way that other post-Soviet republics have.
But Russia, traditionally an ally, has also pressed Belarus recently, upset that the republic has been attempting closer cooperation with the west.
Speaking March 18 about the detainees, Lukashenko said, "We wanted to clarify who they are and where the money came from," adding, "unfortunately, there had been Russian money, too."
Frustrated with the U.S./European interference in Belarus, Lukashenko said, "To talk to the West ... ? One cannot talk to them and shouldn't! They are indecent people: they say some things but think different things."
Nonetheless, he emphasized the trade between Belarus and its neighbors, both eastern and western. "Can I ignore that half the trade involves the European Union and America? I cannot. Today we use U.S. dollars and euros even in bilateral payments with Russia." Almost half of Belarus' trade is with the west, the other half with the east.
The country is trying to diversify, however, and has signed agreements with Vietnam, China and Latin American nations.


text:
A deep, thoughtful read. Can you hear it?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ambivert, extroverted, extroverts, human biology, introverted, introverts, neuroscience, noise, psychology, Quiet, Susan Cain on September 28, 2012| Leave a Comment »
I'd been wanting to read Susan Cain's Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking for months, but there has been a long waiting list at the library. I finally checked it out a little over a week ago, and I've been reading it slowly (for me anyway). It's that kind of read.
It's also one of those books that's potentially life-changing. I had repeated "Ah ha!" moments as I read, mostly from recognizing the things Cain addresses in the people around me (including myself). A friend noted that "everything made so much more sense" after reading Quiet.
Cain has a very clear way of writing about the complicated human biology and psychology that makes people introverted, extroverted, or ambiverted. She explains how and why we communicate differently, work differently, and socialize differently, and how we can navigate these differences in order to get along better. And how each of us can learn to recognize and honor these differences in each other.
She also introduces successful, sometimes famous introverts and provides plenty of reassurance for those trying to get along in an extroverted world. Cain's persuasive arguments are backed by evidence — concrete examples (anecdotal and scientific) of the many ways introvertedness can be a gift. One that, when appreciated and nurtured, can really benefit society. If society would shut-up and sit down and pay attention long enough to notice.
Ok, Cain didn't say that, but I am. Because one thing Cain didn't mention in this lovely, erudite, gentle book is that our culture today is dominated by mindless noise. Sometimes shouting seems like the main mode of communication. And what's being communicated so loudly is often not contributing much value to the world. Those of us in the book world have repeatedly seen thoughtful, interesting books deserving of wide cultural acclaim and conversation under-appreciated while inexplicably popular titles (often unoriginal, poorly written, and/or trivial) dwarf them. I'm sure the same can be said of most everything, from cultural phenomena to political discourse.
Noise seems to dominate, even when we know it's illogical or pointless to listen to it. I am hopeful that more introverts will get the appreciation they deserve as a result of this wonderful book. I'm grateful that Cain offers advice for how people can be themselves and also be confident, living harmonious, happy, balanced, successful lives. But in a world where noise rules even when we try not to hear it, and where ordinary shyness or anxiety is often medicated or counseled, I wonder whether the message of Quiet will prevail.
Let's hope.
A cross-cultural historical cautionary tale, with recipes
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bakery, book club, book discussion, Books on the Nightstand, brotchen, e-book, El Paso, fiction, Hitler, Kindle, library, Nazi, novel, Sarah McCoy, Texas, The Baker's Daughter, Vietnam vet, WWII on September 24, 2012| Leave a Comment »
I heard about The Baker's Daughter, by Sarah McCoy, on Books on the Nightstand. It was the first library book I tried on the iPad's Kindle app. I'm still not impressed with e-books, but I enjoyed this novel.
McCoy explores the trauma of war not only for soldiers but also for civilians. The cautionary tale? There's no redemption in this story for soldiers who follow orders they know are wrong or make a bad situation worse. One main character, Elsie, has a fiancee, Josef, a Nazi officer wracked by psychosomatic migraines and insomnia; another, Reba, is the daughter of an alcoholic Vietnam vet suicide victim. Neither man deals adequately with the part he played in their respective wars. Both women live with their families' war ghosts, both ultimately make their peace.
In fact, one of the nicest things about this book is Elsie's ability to let her sorrows go. I don't want to give too much away but she's a very strong, interesting character who experiences real redemption and forgiveness and makes peace with all that happened. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The Baker's Daughter is set both in WWII Germany and present day Texas. Reba is a reporter in El Paso, with a troubled childhood and a fiancee, Riki, she isn't sure she can commit to. Riki is the child of Mexican immigrants working for the U.S. Border Patrol, torn between his loyalty to America and its rule of law and his moral compass telling him that many of the people he deports are victims, not criminals. And that even those who try to enter illegally might be better served by compassion than scare tactics.
Reba meets Elsie and her grown daughter Jane at their bakery when she's writing a magazine piece on Christmas traditions. Elsie doesn't reveal all of her past in their interviews, but the book alternates between her life story — and that of her sister Hazel, who was a mother in the Lebensborn Program — and Reba's, with brief forays into some of the other characters' stories, especially Josef and Riki.
It was an interesting read, with characters facing many moral dilemmas and family secrets. The teenage Elsie begins to sense through her sister's letters and her first Nazi social event with Josef that what Hitler's Germany stands for is nothing like the ideal her father believes in. When an older SS officer assaults her, a Jewish boy who was made to sing at the party comes to her aid. He shows up outside her house hours later, begging for protection. Despite her extreme fear, she can't turn him away. I loved this part of the story.
I also enjoyed the way the novel explores how people don't know the whole story of an event as it's happening. Riki and his fellow Border Patrol agents have to guess about the people they're chasing. Elsie and her sister believe propaganda at first because it's what they know, but the war begins to impact them in ways they never imagined and shades their understanding of the world. Josef is a young man who feels conflicted about carrying out his orders. When a younger Nazi gets carried away, Josef exacts his own justice, and is haunted by the event for the rest of his life. His story is echoed in that of Reba's father who goes mad because of what he did in Vietnam.
Riki makes a different choice, following his conscience to find a different job. All of these characters act within a community of family and friends; Reba and Elsie's family represent those who love people living with hard choices. A book club could have fun hashing out the repercussions they all experience. There's a particularly poignant scene between Reba and her sister when they discuss their parents.
McCoy presents several of Elsie's secret Schmidt family bakery recipes in the back of the book. I copied down the recipe for "brotchen" which my son thinks are the rolls he ate when he went to Germany a few summers ago to play soccer. He called them "dope rolls," which is teenager for "really good." I hope I can do them justice!
A book that goes places I've been
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged 10 Downing Street, A Dance to the Music of Time, Alan Turing, Andrea Levy, Anthony Powell, Bletchley Park, book reviews, books, Cabinet War Rooms, Churchill, Citizens of London, Enigma, historical fiction, Imperial War Museum, London, Lynne Olson, Mr Churchill's Secretary, mystery, novel, Princess Elizabeth's Spy, reading, Robert Harris, Small Island, spy, Susan Elia MacNeal, The 1940's House, thriller on September 21, 2012| 1 Comment »
I read Susan Elia MacNeal's Mr. Churchill's Secretary in two sittings (it could have been one if I'd started earlier the first evening), anticipating an enjoyable read. The book is set at the beginning of Winston Churchill's first term as Prime Minister. Having visited the Cabinet War Rooms years ago, and the Imperial War Museum and Bletchley Park last May, I was excited to revisit the time period in fiction.
I really admire how the British dealt with the war, a topic that has been covered in many of my favorite books (Andrea Levy's Small Island, The 1940's House book and television show, Lynne Olson's Citizens of London, Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time cycle, Robert Harris's Enigma, just off the top of my head). MacNeal has written a fun, fast-moving spy/mystery/thriller that takes readers into the wartime lives of some young Londoners. It's the first in a planned series (there is even a preview of the 2nd book at the end of this one).
MacNeal's heroine, Maggie Hope, is British, but was raised in America by her aunt, a lesbian college professor who left England to escape her judgmental mother. Maggie's parents were in a car crash when she was an infant. After she's graduated from college and been accepted into M.I.T.'s PhD program in math, Maggie learns her grandmother has died in London and left her a large Victorian home. According to the will, she herself has to go to London or the house can't be sold.
We meet her about a year later. The house hasn't sold, and she's decided to stay and join the war effort. MacNeal quickly establishes that Maggie is smart, has had an unusual upbringing, is sketchy on her own family history, and prone to strong opinions about equality for women and gays. We also learn that one of Mr. Churchill's secretaries has been murdered and Maggie is about to get her job through a friend who works at No. 10 Downing Street.
I read some online reviews critical of MacNeal's plotting; some of the parts fit more (or less) neatly than some readers would like. I'm less inclined to criticize, because although the book may not be perfect, it did what a spy thriller should: kept me on edge, wanting to know what would happen next. I imagine it's hard to write historical fiction well, and to plot a thriller, so I am willing to cut MacNeal some slack.
Maggie is a unique and delightful character. She's outspoken, brilliant, a loyal friend and sensible woman who seems perfectly suited to daring war work. Her friends are interesting characters as well, including a ballerina from working class Liverpool and a gay man who discusses the need to keep a low profile (one reviewer thought it unlikely a gay man could have worked for Churchill in wartime; Alan Turing certainly engaged in top secret war work and was only arrested years later when he mentioned his boyfriend while reporting a theft). I got a kick out of MacNeal's portrayal of Churchill and his interactions with his staff.
The IRA presence in London plays an important part in Mr. Churchill's Secretary. I hadn't read much about IRA/Nazi collaborations. MacNeal draws chilling portraits of an English fascist and two IRA agents, including the atrocities perpetrated on the agents' families by the British military that led them both to the Republican cause. It was interesting to consider how MI5 had to deal with both domestic espionage and terrorism.
In her afterword, MacNeal talks about her research, including corresponding with one of Churchill's woman secretaries, and her visit to the Cabinet War Rooms. I enjoyed the way she wove historical fact into her fictional world, and admired her lively and vivid characters. The book has a clever (I'll concede occasionally far-fetched) plot and was an interesting and fun read. My interest in Maggie Hope is piqued enough that I've placed a hold on the Princess Elizabeth's Spy, the 2nd book, due out later this fall.
A page turner about imaginary friends
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Books on the Nightstand, BOTN, bullying, fiction, imaginary friends, Matthew Dicks, Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend, novel, reading, The Mindful Reader, Watership Down on September 14, 2012| Leave a Comment »
I really enjoy Books On the Nightstand, although I got a little behind on their podcasts over the summer. But at one point I heard about Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend by Matthew Dicks on BOTN and then serendipitously, the book's publicist heard about The Mindful Reader and asked if I'd like a copy to review. Dicks lives in Connecticut (a little beyond the column's geographic limits), and my "to read" shelf is stuffed, but I told her about bookconscious and said I'd heard good things about Memoirs and would love to read it. (Thanks, Aleks!)
So this amazing story made its way to me and last night I did something I haven't done in months: stayed up too late to get to the end. If you can't imagine how a book narrated by a kid's imaginary friend (Budo, friend of a boy named Max) could be so compelling, try it. It's an imaginative story with very well developed and interesting characters — who readers meet through Budo's eyes, mind you.
Max is "on the spectrum" (of autism) although his dad keeps saying he's just "a late bloomer." He's very smart and very creative, so he's imagined Budo as smart and creative as well, and older than many imaginary friends. He also didn't imagine he'd need sleep, so as Budo says, "I have more time to learn." His understanding of Max and the way his mind works, and of all the human relationships he observes, is just incredible. With no need for rest, Budo is also able to hang out at night with Max's parents or at an all night gas station, so he knows a good bit about the adult world.
Which is good, because Mrs. Patterson, a disturbed aide at Max's school, decides she knows better than anyone what Max needs. I don't want to give away the page-turning plot, so I won't say more, except that Budo, who no one but Max and other imaginary friends can see and hear, is on to her very quickly, thanks to Max's imagination and his own curiosity about the world.
When children grow up, they forget about their imaginary friends, who then disappear. Budo loses Graham, his best friend other than Max, when her little girl no longer needs her. Dicks writes beautifully about the "death" of imaginary friends. And he sets up the central problem of the book: if he helps Max defy Mrs. Patterson, Budo will end up hastening his own disappearance.
It's not easy to imagine what I'm describing, but Dicks manages it perfectly. Imaginary friends and their world became completely believable to me (just as rabbit culture did when I read Watership Down). And Mrs. Patterson is quite the villain — the last bit of the book had me completely drawn in and feeling I HAD to know what was going to happen.
Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend ventures into some very adult issues even though the central characters are a nine year old and his imaginary friend. Max's parents are struggling to deal with their son's differences and also with secondary infertility. Budo can tell that at Max's school, some of the teachers are very good and others "play school." There is bullying and crime and illness and injury in this book. It's definitely not simple just because it deals with childhood. Budo's insights into human nature and our tendency to misunderstand each other are very perceptive.
So if you're looking for a book that will keep you glued to the page, maybe touch you with some very poignant observations about the human spirit, and perhaps even bring back some memories of imaginary friends (I know I had one, although I can't recall too much about that, and my kids both did as well), check out this book. But allow for the fact that you may not want to put it down once you start.
A sweet space of talking, listening, and learning
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged books, faith, family, feminism, intellectual, interfaith, Joanna Brooks, LDS, memoir, Mennonite In a Little Black Dress, Mormonism, Mormons, reading, Rhoda Janzen, seeking, Terry Tempest Williams, The Book of Mormon Girl on September 12, 2012| 3 Comments »
When I heard Joanna Brooks on The Daily Show I put her memoir on hold at the library. The Book of Mormon Girl is a thoughtful, warm, intriguing book about Brooks' growing up in a devout Mormon home, becoming a feminist and gay rights advocate, then an interfaith parent married to "a man whose religious practice entails a combination of Judaism, Buddhism, and ESPN." And it's the story of Brooks' learning to assimilate these parts of herself — her faith, her belief that God is loving and kind, her warm memories, her stories, her search for truth.
To Brooks, Mormonism "is my first language, my mother tongue, my family, my people, my home; it is my heart, my heart, my heart." She is heartbroken when in the midst of her own intellectual awakening at Brigham Young University, beloved professors and feminists are fired and excommunicated. It's the 1990's, when Mormon leaders decide that "feminists, intellectuals, and gays and lesbians enemies." She returns her diploma in protest, despite fearing she too will be excommunicated.
In grad school, she meets her future husband. She marries him, entering "a sweet space of talking, listening, and learning." At first she's miserable anywhere near a Mormon church, but when her daughters are born she begins to find her way back, to come to a grown-up understanding that "This is a church of tenderness and arrogance, of sparkling differences and human failings. There is no unmixing of the two."
During California's Prop 8 fight she's horrified anew by the large, well-funded mobilization of Mormons to fight gay marriage. But she continues to find ways to make herself heard, including writing and posting her essays online. When she's overwhelmed by hateful responses, she prays. And realizes, "I knew what the voice of God felt like, and it did not feel like rocks against the side of my house. . . The voice of God I knew was gentle, kind, and deliberate. And that voice was not forbidding me to write or speak, so long as I did so honestly and without malice."
The Book of Mormon Girl is very strong for the first 160 pages. I felt like the last 40 were less cohesive, and perhaps even a bit rushed; in just a few chapters Brooks covers early motherhood, losing her grandmother, Prop 8, her budding activism, and her family's interfaith life. She alludes to reconciling with her parents but says very little about their feelings when she left and married outside the church. Her siblings are almost absent from the book, even though she mentions many times that large, close-knit families are one of the bedrocks of Mormonism.
But her stories and her writing are heartfelt and lovely and capital T true, and those qualities outshine any flaws in the memoir's narrative structure. If anything, these very minor imperfections add a raw quality that enhances the authenticity and personality of the book. If you liked Mennonite In a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen (which I wrote about here) you'll probably enjoy this book. In fact, Brooks thanks Janzen in her acknowledgements; I wondered if they've met since they're both Californians and scholars who write about faith and family.
If you're just curious about Mormon beliefs, what a bishop does, etc., reading The Book of Mormon Girl is a nice way to learn. Or if you admire Terry Tempest Williams' flowing and spirited prose, which I could sense in Brooks' writing as well, you'll enjoy this book. Or, if you yourself have felt lost or wandering or seeking, you may find a kindred spirit here, or at least a safe space in which to rest. By the time I read the last page, I felt as if I'd love to talk with Brooks, which is a nice way to end.
The Uninvited Guests and this month's Mindful Reader column
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Alan Bradley, books, Cascade, David Budbill, Downton Abbey, farce, Flavia de Luce, Jane Austen, Jay Wexler, Julian Fellowes, L. Annette Binder, Maryanne O'Hara, Park Songs, reading, Rise, Sadie Jones, satire, Shakespeare, social satire, The Adventures of Ed Tuttle, The Mindful Reader, The Uninvited Guests on September 9, 2012| 1 Comment »
September's Mindful Reader column is up on the Concord Monitor** website. Check out my review of Cascade, by Maryanne O'Hara, Rise by L. Annette Binder; The Adventures of Ed Tuttle, Associate Justice, & Other Stories by Jay Wexler; Understories by Tim Horvath; and Park Songs: a Poem/Play by David Budbill.
This weekend I read The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones — a very fun romp. The book combines the social wit of Jane Austen with the eccentricity of Alan Bradley (author of the Flavia de Luce mysteries), a dash of Julian Fellowes, and a bit of wild stagecraft Shakespeare could love. In fact, if you're a Downton Abbey fan pining for season three, this might be a quirky distraction.
The book opens at a crumbling great house, Sterne, in 1912, on the morning of Emerald Torrington's twentieth birthday. Her mother is preoccupied with her stepfather Edward's trip to Manchester, where he plans to ask an unpleasant business acquaintance for a loan to save Sterne. As the day unfolds there is a visit from a potential suitor, John, a self-made man who Emerald doesn't really want but who has plenty of money. A telegram from her childhood best friend, Patience, whose mother has come down with influenza. And news of a terrible train crash on a branch line nearby, resulting in the uninvited guests, who the Torringtons must take in after their ordeal.
The housekeeper, Mrs. Trieves, and Emerald's mother, Charlotte, are dismayed to find a man they once knew has crashed Emerald's party, claiming to be the sole first class passenger among the train wreck victims. Everyone can see there is some sort of secret among these three. Meanwhile the eccentric little sister, Imogen, known as Smudge, takes advantage of the chaos to smuggle the family pony, Lady, into her room to sit for a portrait.
Emerald finds herself strangely drawn to her best friend's brother Ernest, a medical student who has escorted his sister to Sterne in place of his mother, and Clovis finds that Patience, who he used to find annoying, is actually not anymore. As the party takes stranger and stranger turns. The finely dressed guests and hosts (except for Charlotte, who retires to her boudoir to sulk) end up serving the carefully prepared multi-course birthday feast to the train passengers. They sit in their spoiled finery making a meal of the bits and pieces. And the strange "gentleman" entices them into a humiliating party game.
In the frenzy of emotion and tension that follows, all of the twists of the day resolve themselves and in Shakespearean fashion, many matches are made. The pony is led back downstairs. And in the morning, once the mess is cleared and the uninvited guests are gone (and their nature made clear), Edward returns with news of a strange turn of the family's affairs.
If I'm being unspecific it's to save you, dear readers, from a series of spoiled surprises. The Uninvited Guests is such a delightful literary romp that I don't want to ruin the fun. Just imagine an Edwardian house party with "dark surprises" as the jacket blurb surmises, plenty of social satire, and a rather arch look at human nature.
** Text if you can't find it online:
Deb Baker
Cascade, by Massachusetts author Maryanne O'Hara, grew out of three story ideas. O'Hara didn't really know how the stories might connect but sensed they should. The result is a historical novel that focuses on Desdamona Hart, or Dez. She has come home to Cascade, Mass., in 1935 after art school in Boston and travel in Europe, determined to help her dying, bankrupt father save his Shakespearean playhouse. She marries Asa Spaulding, a pharmacist, who takes them in.
Her father thickens the plot by leaving the theater to Asa. Dez wants to paint and to keep her promises, so for a time she tries to "have it all" as both a dutiful wife and an artist. She takes portrait commissions to resurrect the theater as her father asked. Anyone who has ever juggled responsibilities while trying to pursue work they love will understand her struggle.
Dez befriends Jacob, an artist and peddler, and their friendship sustains her as she tries to fit back into small town life. Meanwhile Asa is pressuring her to start a family and disapproves of another man spending time with his wife.
And Cascade is under persistent threat from the water authority, which plans to flood the town for a reservoir.
Her postcard series about Cascade's possible destruction becomes a regular feature in The American Sunday Standard, whose editor invites her to illustrate for the magazine in New York. She and Jacob become the subject of town gossip when a man working on the reservoir plans is found dead on Asa's land with Jacob's truck nearby. Dez risks everything to clear his name, and Jacob leaves for New York and a job in a New Deal art program.
In the aftermath of this episode, Dez has to choose – stay with Asa, pursue Jacob, or simply follow her dream of a career in art, regardless of the men in her life. The burden of the playhouse, which she must persuade Asa to move before the town is flooded, weighs heavily. I found myself having nasty thoughts about her father, who appears to have cared more about his theater than his only child.
O'Hara touches on issues familiar to contemporary readers, such as the conflicts surrounding public works projects and eminent domain, or the painful gossip and bigotry that sometimes plague small towns. She tells a very interesting story about an unsettling time in history as well, during the Depression and the run-up to World War II. And she tells a timeless one too, about a woman working to balance her promises and her passion. I enjoyed each aspect of this atmospheric novel.
Short fiction and a poem / play
I also read three short-story collections and a poem/play: Understories by Tim Horvath, Rise by L. Annette Binder, The Adventures of Ed Tuttle, Association Justice and other Stories by Jay Wexler, and Park Songs by David Budbill.
Horvath is a professor at New Hampshire Institute of Art. The pieces in Understories not only share a philosophical, whimsical, darkly humorous aesthetic, but also seem to come from a world that resembles ours but is riddled with portals into imagined places beyond anything you or I could dream up. I loved the way reading these evocative stories left me feeling slightly off-kilter.
The Conversations, which I read as a satirical poke at the breakdown of civil discourse, and The Understory, about a German botany professor who escapes Hitler's rise to power, settles in New Hampshire, and loses many of the trees on his land in the 1938 hurricane, are two of my favorites. Horvath doesn't just tell a story, he gives readers a window into the hearts, minds and souls of his characters.
Binder, a part-time New Hampshire resident, fills Rise with fantastical details: a giant woman who is half-angel and still growing in her 50s, a boy who sees shadow-like halos over the heads of people who will die soon, a child who only speaks dead languages. At the same time, her stories are about everyday realities, such as people dealing with illnesses or struggling to get along. Rise is a book about transcending life's emotional and psychological turbulence.
Wexler, a law professor at Boston University, has written a zany collection of stories that had me laughing out loud. In one, Henry Clay advises a teen and her mother on college. Another is written as a script for a sitcom pilot about a prison's death row.
Wexler hits on a number of brilliant ways to skewer government and politics, such as a story about a man filing a "horn incident report," and another in which Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearing is conducted by the 1977 Kansas City Royals instead of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Adventures of Ed Tuttle, Associate Justice is offbeat, absurdist and thought provoking.
Budbill is a Vermont poet and playwright whose work reflects his father's advice, "Stick up for the little guy, bud." Despite its genre-bending, Park Songs: a Poem/Play is a very accessible book about people in a city park on a single day. In addition to R.C. Irwin's "absurdist and nostalgic" photographs, traditional blues lyrics complement the dialogue. Budbill's note to readers suggests that any parts of the book could be staged, that a blues band could act as a Greek chorus, and that "Let's Talk" could be its own one-act play. That section features very funny, touching banter between Fred, who is lonely, and Judy, who is reading in the park because she wants to be alone. Budbill captures the essence of human communication – the misunderstandings and connections, hurts and expectations – in one scene on a park bench.
With fall around the corner you can curl up on a cool evening with any of these books and enjoy fictional worlds grounded in very realistic human hopes and struggles.
Who's better off now? Michael Lewis's The Big Short
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged books, Facebook IPO, financial crisis, Ira Glass, Libor scandal, Michael Lewis, reading, The Big Short on September 5, 2012| 2 Comments »
As I've listened to the presidential campaigns, news analysts and comedians argue about whether Americans are better off now than four years ago, I've been reading The Big Short by Michael Lewis. My dad sent me a copy last fall and I finally pulled it off the "to read" shelf, in light of the economic debate and because I recently read Ira Glass's take on the book. I also thought it would be interesting to read as Teen the Elder studies American politics this semester and Teen the Younger learns about psychology.
The Big Short is about the murky world of subprime mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, hedge funds, and other financial stuff most people will never fully understand. To his credit, Lewis makes it slightly less murky even for this English major with finance-phobia. But the book is also about a handful of people who knew what was happening — and in one case even tried to alert the media and the SEC — and were mostly ignored. Lewis's handling of these characters make the book a good read.
I'd argue that the story Lewis tells is also a psychological drama, with very rich, very powerful bankers and investors indulging in self-protective cognitive tactics to avoid facing what they could not imagine or believe. Traders and regulators ignoring what they could not understand, or refusing to believe there was anything beyond them. And ordinary people placing blind and undeserved trust in the system that lends money to potential homeowners and sells them property beyond their means as well as the system in which most retirement money now sits in 401k's.
The Big Short isn't obviously political, but I think Lewis exposes the way the U.S. government (both the previous and current administration; this is a bipartisan critique), also acting in fear and ignorance and also convinced of its own ability to understand the unfathomable, blundered around the financial system, rescuing some firms and allowing others to go bankrupt, bandying about the term "too big to fail" (coined much earlier by a man called Jamie Mai in a memo to his two partners in a very small firm called Cornwall Capital) as it snowed the public into believing everything was under control.
I finished this book convinced of a few things. The first is that Michael Lewis is a very talented writer who brings people right off the page — I could almost hear the folks he profiled talking. Lewis manages, as Ira Glass noted, to make readers love the "rich know-it-alls" who saw the crisis coming, he humanizes them, but he also points out that without exception the people who saw what was happening, who understood, were also complex moral figures. Also as Glass points out, these "contrarians" are funny. I think their stories are unbelievably entertaining; they could be characters straight out of a tragedy.
The second thing I'm convinced of is that our economy and our government are too big and complicated for the people working inside them ever to fully grasp, and that reform is unlikely because the systems are absurdly complicated and influenced by money. Who is better off now than in 2007/2008? Well, Wall Street for one. A few firms went under, were bought out and absorbed into other firms, or downsized, but the financial sector's recovery has been quite good considering the size of the crisis.
Worse, there has been no psychological recovery — the hubris and greed that allowed the financial industry to create the entire mess has never gone away. Just look at the Facebook IPO and the "selective disclosure" of key information in the days before it by firms like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan Chase (who all appear in The Big Short). Or the Libor scandal. Michael Lewis tells readers at the beginning of The Big Short that he had personally given up on waiting for "the end of Wall Street as I had known it," (his first book, Liar's Poker, is about his time at Salomon Brothers). He says there is no "scandal or reversal . . . sufficiently great to sink the system."
I wonder where he invests? Anyway, Dad, you were right, it's a good read. Absurd. Horrifying. But well done.
My 8th Europa Challenge book of 2012, An Accident In August
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged An Accident In August, Europa Challenge, Europa Editions, fiction, Laurence Cosse on September 3, 2012| 2 Comments »
I looked around at the library last week for a Europa Editions book, giving myself permission not to choose one if there wasn't something that interested me. Laurence Cosse's An Accident In August looking appealing, so I decided to try it and keep up with the 2012 Europa Challenge.
I'm glad I did. For the first time in a few months I can say I really liked my challenge book. When the novel opens, Lou (short for Louise), has just pulled into her garage in her white Fiat Uno, and she is very shaken. She's just been part of an accident in Paris in the Alma tunnel; a Mercedes barreled into the tunnel behind her at top speed and scraped her car before crashing spectacularly into a pillar. She had reacted in a panic, driving straight out of the tunnel and home. Lou is trying to calm down and deal with the fact that she should have stopped, and that she could be charged with failure to assist at the scene of the crash.
Then she turns on her radio in the bathroom and realizes not only was she involved in a horrible crash, but also the victims of the incident are none other than Lady Diana and Dodi Fayed and their driver. What was already upsetting becomes Lou's obsession. She gets through the rest of the weekend pretending to be ill, and then takes her car to a different town on Monday to have the taillight and paint repaired.
But even with the Fiat patched up she is unable to think about anything else. She's afraid she'll be arrested and that the press will make a spectacle of her. She tries to just go on, but can't stop thinking about getting rid of the car and running away. Her employer and her boyfriend both notice how strange she's acting; she finally feels she really has to act.
She's about to leave her apartment, with a somewhat amateur plan to ditch the Fiat and go away, when a mechanic from the garage appears. He's put two and two together and he wants a cut of the money and fame Lou could achieve selling her story to the press. He kidnaps her, telling Lou he has all the evidence that her car needed repairs just a couple of days after the crash, and she has to do what he says.
I don't want to give away the rest of the story, but will just say it wasn't what I expected. An Accident In August succeeds as a psychological thriller even though I could not really understand why Lou didn't just come forward immediately, tell the police the car hit her and that she was so startled she drove off, in shock. Given the details in the news — that there were hordes of paparazzi in several cars — she could probably have escaped serious prosecution if she simply admitted being afraid.
At any rate, Cosse wrote an interesting tale, and it made for entertaining reading. The setting in and around Paris and the fact that I remember the general and widespread hysteria surrounding Diana's death added to my enjoyment of the book, not because I liked reading about the tragedy, but because I can recall a person I knew who followed every detail of the crash and investigation, like one of Lou's co-workers. Also in May when we met up with Teen the Elder after his gap year, I saw the Dodi & Diana memorial at Harrod's and a display in Kensington Palace about Diana's dresses, so I'd actually thought about her death again recently.
I'd recommend An Accident In August as a light but well-written thriller with a strong psychological aspect to the plot.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Very nice little puzzler. Maneuver the light in the correct order to collect spheres and get to the exit the level. It's what you were born to do, apparently.
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text:
"It's like a magic formula to us," says Olivia Merilahti, referring to the title of The Dø's sophomore record, Both Ways Open Jaws (Six Degrees, November 15). "It produced many different images in our minds. It refers to A Mouthful, but in a more dangerous way. It can be a two-headed monster with jaws wide open on both sides, or anything you want to imagine."
Nothing seems straightforward in this unique band's history. When meeting French composer/producer Dan Levy in 2005, the French/Finnish vocalist/guitarist had found a partner to score films and dance performances with. Little chance they would have expected their debut album, A Mouthful, to become the first English-speaking record to top the charts in that country. While three years is not exactly overnight, the duo struck a chord with their irresistible pop songs informed from such wide-ranging influences as Björk, Bela Bartok and Finnish choral music.
The Dø transcends language, however. Songs like "Stay (Just a Little Bit More)" and "On My Shoulders" struck a chord with the French public and, as the duo toured internationally, worldwide audiences. "The one difference between albums is that we had three years of touring behind us," Merilahti reflects. "We also decided to focus only on The Dø, whereas with the first album, we had a lot of other projects going on at the same time."
The attention to detail has paid off. In today's single-driven music industry, Both Ways Open Jaws' 15 songs span an incredible range of emotion, depth and musicality. The opening track, "Dust it Off," is undoubtedly the most Björkian, with simple keyboards and bass creating an ambient bed for Merilahti to rest her lyrical metaphysics. The beat that eventually emerges is more punctuation than rhythm, resulting in a collage of colors that keep the ears glued in the earbuds for nearly four minutes.
The duo's cross-disciplinary past immediately surfaces in "Gonna Be Sick!," which Merilahti wrote in an attempt to translate the physicality of a visceral experience. The slick drum beat and buoyant bass line offer lightness against the subject's headiness: losing someone, either in a love story or more dramatically, in death. The neurological consequences of sadness and confusion manifest physically, and like a powerful blues number, tragedy is circumvented through the triumph of music. It's also a damn catchy pop song.
Yet not every track is so airy. "Slippery Slope," with its rolling tribal beat, warns of the dangers of falling over an emotional edge. The video, created by American director Noel Paul, is an imaginative rehash of the 1964 Japanese horror movie, "Onibaba." Translating as "Demon Women," this film proved to be a major inspiration, telling the story of a woman and her daughter-in-law killing samurai and selling their armor to make a living. Somehow that storyline is melded with Russian composer Igor Stravinsky's ballet, "The Rite of Spring," for The Dø's intriguingly psychedelic video.
"We wanted choreography," Merilahti says. "And elements of Japanese graphic minimalism. 'Onibaba' is a black-and-white Japanese movie that inspired us a lot during the creative process for this album. There are hints in the video to that movie. The choreography sometimes refers to 'The Rite of Spring' by Stravinsky. We like to mix our influences in a personal way so that it serves our purpose better."
Merilahti and Levy were so happy with Paul's work they invited him to direct the second video for "Too Insistent," which features the full touring band as well as a now emblematic elder couple. "They were characters even when we weren't shooting," Merilahti adds. "We had this idea of making something eerie and mysterious and weird for a very simple pop song. It was Noel's wish to have two strong faces, not necessarily dancing, just moving in a very peculiar way, which is not choreographed at all. They just did it on the set, and it looked amazing."
There is, in fact, no end to the merging and melding of influence on Both Ways Open Jaws. Legendary Hungarian composer Bela Bartok is invoked. ("When Dan discovered Bartok when he was 15, he felt that his music was written only for him," Merilahti reveals.) Cuban classical guitarist Leo Brouwer is the muse behind "Leo Leo"— Merilahti played his pieces when studying classical guitar. A student's harpsichord bought on a whim became the melodic inspiration for "The Calendar," a track that references American Appalachian music. And Finnish folk masters Värttinä round out perhaps the most interesting cultural connection in The Dø, considering how little of Finland is known beyond Jean Sibelius.
"The Swedish are so much better in pop music, and good in exporting their artists," Merilahti says. "In Finland you have a lot of black metal, which I'm not very familiar with. I grew up listening to my mom singing to me in Finnish, and I listened to Värttinä, a Finnish collective that has played together for many years. And a bit of Finnish pop that I won't quote here that I liked as a teenager (laughs)."
It would be hard to imagine Both Ways Open Jaws not achieving the breakthrough success of The Dø's debut. With irresistible hooks and boundless imagination, it is an album that merits repeat listens. In an era of hit singles, this band has given us 15, a hearty achievement in an age where musicians struggle to even offer one. The most surprised person might just be Merilahti herself, who didn't think meeting a person such as Levy was possible in France.
"French music is often more brainy than soulful" she says. "They are focused on the lyrics, not so much on the physicality of the music. When Dan and I met, I was really surprised – he was exactly the type of producer you don't find in France. He's really versatile and able to produce any kind of music."


Double-booking: what's at stake here? Why did it happen?
Double-booking: what's at stake here?
There's a controversial practice that existed ages, it's been pretty much the standard in many-many places for decades, but during the last couple of years, there's been a huge uproar about it. The problem in question is, of course, surgeons operating on 2 patients at once. The problem of overlapping surgery has lead to some serious debates in the medical field and the media.
Usually, the hospitals themselves make the decision, whether to ban this practice.
People call it running 2 rooms or being double-booked. The general rules in the USA actually allow this practice, as long as the doctor is present during the most important portions of the both surgeries. However, the definition of these "portions" are up to the doctor. The problem started reaching the general public way back in 2015, after a thorough investigation of surgeons that work two rooms at once.
The article itself highlights some morbid cases, namely 1 person getting paralyzed and two dying, the cause of these unlucky events being, you know it, the surgeon operating two rooms. The patients said that they were never informed that their surgeries were overlapping, and the better part of them say they wouldn't have said yes if they were informed in advance.
Nowadays, according to the more recent research, patients don't seem to be too keen on their surgeons working two rooms.
A recent research shows that only 4% of 1454 people had some knowledge of overlapping surgeries. Only thirty-one percent supports it and over 90% thinks that that's something to be disclosed well in advance. Because of the uproar, most people involved in the health industry have decided to eliminate concurrent surgeries in all the specialties.
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Just purchased a 25 year old house. Just noticed today that the siding on the South West side seems to be buckling and pulling away a bit. Inspector mentioned that a small section of siding was pulling away, but we didn't notice it being this bad. There is also a section on the opposite side of the house where some of the siding buckled.
It's super cold, about 18 degrees at night. I assume it's original vinyl. What causes this? Does it just need replaced, can it be repaired?
It probably worked itself loose over the summer and got stuck when it got cold.
Wait till the weather warms up some and try to snap it back into the piece below it. If it's to cold you'll risk cracking it.
Can I just say that this sub is extremely fast, and always informative. I almost always get an answer within an hour of posting. One of the last good subreddits. Thank you very much for your answer.


text:
Fifty years of the Socialist Equality Party of Sri Lanka
Arm the working class with the program of socialist internationalism and with revolutionary leadership!
By the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP), the Sri Lankan section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), today marks 50 years of struggle for the political independence of the working class and the program of world socialist revolution. On June 16-17, 1968, at a congress in Colombo, the party was founded as the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL). In line with the other sections of the ICFI, the RCL was transformed in 1996 into the SEP.
The RCL was founded to resolve the crisis of revolutionary working class leadership amid a growing upsurge of the world working class. It was an audacious but urgently necessary and theoretically grounded challenge to the political forces that then dominated the international working class: the vast and seemingly all-powerful Stalinist and social democratic bureaucracies; Maoism, with its glorification of peasant-based armed struggle; and myriad bourgeois nationalist movements in the historically oppressed countries, including India's Congress Party, which presented their state-led development projects as "socialism" and maneuvered between Moscow, Beijing and world imperialism.
What was common to all these forces was their adherence to a nationalist program and virulent opposition to socialist internationalism.
In the most immediate sense, the RCL was founded in answer to the ignominious betrayal of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), which claimed to be Trotskyist and had until shortly before been a leading section of the Pabloite United Secretariat.
In 1964, after years of opportunist backsliding, the LSSP had betrayed an insurgent mass working class movement of which it was in the leadership and entered into a bourgeois government led by the Sinhala-populist Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). In seeking the LSSP's support, Prime Minister Madame Bandaranaike had made clear that for the crisis-ridden Sri Lankan bourgeoisie, the only alternative to bringing "the workers' leaders" into government was, to use her words, "dictatorship" and making the workers "work at the point of gun and bayonet."
In becoming the first-ever party claiming to be Trotskyist to enter a bourgeois government, the LSSP repudiated any and all connection with permanent revolution. In 1947-48, when British imperialism relinquished formal political control over its South Asian empire, the Sri Lankan Trotskyists had denounced "independence" as a sham and the ethno-communal partition of India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as an historic crime. The transfer of power to the rival factions of the colonial bourgeoisie merely changed the form of imperialist domination with the aim of suppressing an increasingly rebellious working class and preventing the revolutionary liquidation of landlordism, casteism and numerous other feudal vestiges.
Alone the Trotskyists had opposed the denial of citizenship rights to the Tamil-speaking plantation workers, then the largest section of the Sri Lankan working class, warning that communalism was a weapon to divide the working class.
But by the early 1960s, the LSSP was advancing a diametrically opposed perspective. It now claimed socialism could be achieved within the framework of the Sri Lankan state and through parliamentary reforms and alliances with the bourgeois SLFP and other noxious Sinhala chauvinists.
In the aftermath of the "great betrayal" of 1964, many in and around the LSSP, including the newly constituted LSSP (R), claimed to oppose its reformist, parliamentary politics. But they did so on a superficial and thoroughly nationalist basis.
The RCL and the fight against Pabloite opportunism
The RCL was founded by a group of youth, radicalized by the Vietnam war and the manifest failure of decolonization to resolve any of the problems of the masses, who—under the ICFI's influence and guidance—drew far-reaching conclusions as to the roots and significance of the LSSP's betrayal and its lessons for the building of revolutionary workers' parties in Asia and around the world.
Part of an RCL demonstration in the 1970s
The LSSP's political degeneration and transformation into the most important social prop of bourgeois rule in Sri Lanka was rooted in broader social processes: the emergence within the Fourth International of a petty-bourgeois liquidationist tendency which, in response to the temporary restabilization of capitalism, abandoned the Trotskyist characterization of Stalinism that had underpinned the very formation of the Fourth International, renounced the struggle for revolutionary working class leadership, and looked to other social forces to establish "socialism."
Led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel, this tendency, in the name of integrating into the "real movement of the masses," advocated the liquidation of the Fourth International's national sections into the Stalinist and social democratic parties and, in Asia, the bourgeois nationalist movements, with the stated aim of pushing them to the "left."
The ICFI was founded in 1953 to oppose Pabloite liquidationism and defend the Trotskyist program and strategy of permanent revolution.
The LSSP claimed to oppose the most extravagant of Pablo and Mandel's claims about the purported revolutionary role and "self-reform" of the Kremlin Stalinist bureaucracy and its satellite Communist Parties. Nevertheless, it refused to join the ICFI, fearing the orthodox Trotskyists' struggle for the political independence of working class would cut across its own increasingly class conciliationist politics.
Thereafter, an opportunist working relationship developed between Colombo and Paris, whereby the LSSP lent support and prestige to Pablo and Mandel's phony Fourth International and the latter provided a political cover for the LSSP's descent into parliamentarianism and trade unionism, and its adaptation to the bourgeoisie's promotion of Sinhala populism as a means of splitting the working class and binding it to its rule.
In 1963 as they "reunited" the "Fourth International" on the basis of the claim that the Cuban Revolution proved socialism could be established without a proletarian party or proletarian revolution, the Pabloite leaders of the United Secretariat hailed the LSSP as the exemplar of the "mass Trotskyist parties" they wanted to build.
Those who founded the RCL recognized that the forging of the political independence of the working class—its transformation from an object of exploitation into the protagonist of a new social order—was bound up with an unrelenting political-theoretical struggle against Pabloism and all forms of national opportunism. Or, as the pioneer American Trotskyist James P. Cannon put it, "Nine-tenths of the struggle for socialism is the struggle against bourgeois influence in the workers' organizations, including the party."
The RCL founding congress
The June 1968 founding congress clearly defined the RCL as a revolutionary party of the working class dedicated to the fight for socialist internationalism.
It passed three resolutions. The first pledged to build the RCL as a section of the ICFI. It summed up the congress discussion, which had emphasized the international character of the class struggle, the need therefore for an international party, the correctness of the Fourth International's characterization of Stalinism and social democracy as counterrevolutionary, and the "inseparable" connection between "an uncompromising struggle against all forms of revisionism" and "maximum" participation in the class struggle.
The second resolution saluted the May-June 1968 revolutionary upsurge of the French working class and indicted the Stalinist Communist Party for rescuing De Gaulle's regime and French capitalism. "This gigantic struggle," it stated, marked the onset of revolutionary struggles in Western Europe and "shattered the Pabloite revisionist theories that the center of revolution had shifted to the colonies and semi-colonies and that the Stalinists would be transformed into revolutionaries under mass pressure."
The third resolution supported the Vietnamese workers and peasants in their struggle against US imperialism. It emphasized that genuine national liberation could be secured only through the overthrow of world imperialism and that this required the revolutionary mobilization of the working class in Europe and North America as well as Asia.
The founding congress warned of the deeply reactionary implications of the embrace by the LSSP and, before it, its now close ally the Stalinist Communist Party of Ceylon (CPC), of "Sinhala first" policies. Prophetically, the congress warned that the "nationalist campaign carried out by the coalitionist camp (the SFLP-LSSP-CPC alliance) has prepared suitable ground" for a "Sinhala Buddhist dictatorship."
Above all, through its affiliation to the ICFI and the revolutionary perspective it elaborated, the congress revived the fight for the program of permanent revolution among the workers and oppressed toilers of Sri Lanka. This included the understanding that in the epoch of imperialism, the unresolved democratic tasks in countries of belated capitalist development will be resolved only through a working class-led socialist revolution.
In keeping with this, the RCL reaffirmed the Trotskyist characterization of the reactionary nation-state framework established in 1947-1948 as part of the post-war restabilization of capitalism and rejected any nationalist conception of a Sri Lankan revolution, independent and separate from the development of socialist revolution across South Asia and, ultimately, throughout the world.
The LSSP's role in rescuing bourgeois rule in Sri Lanka presaged and paralleled events around the world.
Between 1968 and 1975, as the post-Second World War capitalist boom collapsed, the working class mounted a global revolutionary offensive. As the RCL founding congress anticipated, the French general strike of May-June 1968 was followed by a succession of upheavals. These included the 1969 "hot summer" in Italy, the 1974 British miners' strike that brought down the Heath Conservative government, and the collapse of fascist regimes in Greece and Portugal.
But imperialism was ultimately able to withstand this offensive due to the counterrevolutionary role of the Stalinist and social democratic parties. In suppressing the revolutionary strivings of the working class, the bureaucratic "workers' parties" were aided and abetted at every turn by the Pabloites, who systematically promoted illusions in them while working to isolate the ICFI and deny the working class access to the revolutionary Trotskyist program.
In Sri Lanka, the short-lived coalition of 1964 was followed by the "second coalition" from 1970 to 1975, which increasingly came into open conflict with the working class and rural masses. The criminal role of the LSSP was exemplified by the chauvinist 1972 constitution. Authored by LSSP leader Colvin de Silva, it imposed discriminatory job and education quotas on the Tamil minority and enshrined Buddhism as the state religion and Sinhalese as the sole official language.
An RCL meeting in the 1970s
The LSSP's betrayal buttressed all manner of rightwing forces, creating immense challenges for the newly formed RCL.
In India, the Stalinist Communist Party (CPI) was badly discredited by its close relations with the big business Congress Party and open support for New Delhi in the 1962 Indo-China border war. But the Stalinists, especially the Maoist Naxhalite movement, were able to point to the criminal role being played by the LSSP (far and away the best known "Trotskyist" party in Asia) to wall off revolutionary minded workers and youth from genuine Trotskyism.
In Sri Lanka, the LSSP's political suppression of the working class opened the door to the unrestrained growth of communal politics, both by legitimizing Sinhala communalism and shattering the confidence of the Tamil minority that it could look to the working class to defend its democratic rights.
The RCL's struggle against the petty-bourgeois radical JVP
Critical to the development of the RCL was the principled stand it took against the petty-bourgeois radical politics of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), which gained widespread support among students and peasant youth based on an eclectic mixture of Maoism, Castroism and Sinhala "patriotism" or chauvinism.
In 1970, Keerthi Balasuriya, who had been elected RCL general-secretary at the party's founding congress at the age of just 19, wrote a withering Marxist critique of the JVP, The Politics and Class Nature of the JVP. He exposed the JVP as organically hostile to the working class, rooted in reactionary nationalism and peddling dangerous illusions about the "progressive" potential of the national bourgeoisie and the efficacy of peasant-based armed struggle. Rejecting those who claimed armed struggle was the touchstone of revolutionary politics, Comrade Balasuriya wrote, "The question of revolution cannot even be posed without a genuinely objective evaluation of the interrelationships between the classes and their dynamics."
Keerthi Balasuriya addressing an RCL meeting in early 1970
The RCL's general secretary warned that the JVP's Sinhala chauvinism, which included denunciations of "privileged" Tamil-speaking plantation workers, led to fascism. "The JVP," he warned, "is creating an anti-working class movement in Lanka that could well be utilized in the future by a fascist movement."
Through its exposure of the politics of the JVP, the RCL deepened it class differentiation from radical Sinhala populism and from all those parties, including the LSSP and LSSP (R), which adapted to it.
This same revolutionary orientation impelled the RCL to oppose the vicious assault the capitalist coalition government launched against the JVP and rural youth in the south of the island the following year, after the JVP launched a politically bankrupt "armed uprising." For this principled stand, the RCL's newspapers were declared illegal in 1971 and for a period the party had to function underground and under threat of state violence. Nonetheless, it campaigned for the working class to oppose the state repression and raised the demand "Free the political prisoners." As we explained at the time, the working class had a responsibility to defend the rural masses as part of the process of forging an alliance with the peasantry against the bourgeoisie and its state.
On his release from prison in 1978, JVP leader Wijeweera was forced to acknowledge the importance of the RCL's defence campaign, conveying his personal thanks in a visit to the RCL offices.
The bourgeois counter-offensive and the anti-Tamil war
The derailing of the global working class upsurge of 1968-1975 laid the basis for a capitalist counter-offensive, which began in the late 1970s and whose initial stages will forever be associated with the names of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
The efforts of the "socialist" SLFP-LSSP-CPC coalition to place the burden of the capitalist crisis on to the backs of the working class and rural masses paved the way for the coming to power in 1977 of an openly rightwing United National Party (UNP) government under J. R. Jayewardene. It threw Sri Lanka open to unfettered exploitation by global capital, smashed the 1980 public-sector workers' general strike, and ratcheted up Sinhala communalism to channel mounting social tensions and anger in a reactionary direction. This process culminated in Colombo's launching of a civil war against the Tamil minority in 1983.
The RCL/SEP alone fought to mobilize the working class against the war, which would dominate the island's political life for the next quarter century. It demanded the immediate withdrawal of all troops and security forces from the majority-Tamil north and east and systematically exposed how the war was being used to attack the social and democratic rights of the entire working class
At the same time, it opposed the nationalist-separatist perspective of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the other Tamil nationalist organizations, such as the People's Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE), fighting to forge the unity of the working class in opposition to the Sri Lankan state and capitalism.
The Tamil nationalist movement was thrown into crisis in 1987 when the Indian government, to which it had looked for support and which had been providing it with arms in a cynical maneuver to advance the geopolitical interests of the Indian bourgeoisie, changed course. Fearing that the crisis in Sri Lanka was undermining the reactionary South Asian nation-state system as a whole, New Delhi withdrew its patronage of the Tamil insurgent groups. Under the July 1987 Indo-Sri Lankan Accord, which initially was supported by all the Tamil groups, including the LTTE, Indian troops were deployed to the island ostensibly as peacekeepers, but in reality to ensure the unity of the Sri Lankan capitalist state.
The RCL stood alone in opposing the Indo-Sri Lankan accord from the standpoint of the interests of the working class.
Following intensive discussions with the RCL leadership, the ICFI issued a comprehensive statement titled "The Situation in Sri Lanka and the Political Tasks of the Revolutionary Communist League." Based on a review of the experiences of the independent states established after World War II in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, it explained: "Invariably, imperialist-sanctioned 'independence' has meant the setting up of bastard states whose very foundations have been built upon a fatal compromise of democratic principles. In this process, the national bourgeoisie has functioned not as the liberator of the oppressed masses, but as a junior partner in imperialist plunder. The type of state created in this process has been nothing more than a prison ground for putrefying capitalism, upon which the progressive development of the productive forces has been impossible… Arising out of such conditions, with the joyous approval of the bourgeoisie, are the horrors of inter-communal warfare. This state of affairs cannot be altered as long as bourgeois rule prevails. The post-independence history of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Burma—in fact, of every former colonial country in the world—decisively proves that the bourgeoisie cannot establish genuine national unification and political independence."
Keerthi Balasuriya
The statement, while reaffirming the RCL's implacable opposition to the communal war waged by Colombo, unambiguously asserted that the democratic rights of the Tamils could be realised only through the struggle for socialism. In opposition to both Sri Lankan and Tamil factions of the bourgeoisie and their rival nationalisms, it advanced the call for the Socialist United States of Sri Lanka and Tamil Eelam.
Tragically, this was the last major statement on which Comrade Keerthi Balasuriya would work. His death of a coronary thrombosis in December 1987 robbed the Sri Lankan and international working class of a brilliant strategist of world socialist revolution. He was just 39.
Based on the development of the program of permanent revolution made by the ICFI and RCL in response to the Indo-Sri Lankan Accord, the RCL was able to intervene among young Tamil militants who had been forced to take refuge in Europe. The most farsighted drew the conclusion that it was only on the basis of the ICFI's perspective and an orientation to the international working class that the oppression of the Tamils could be ended. These forces joined the ICFI, strengthening its work in both Europe and South Asia.
R.A. Pitawela, an RCL member murdered by JVP thugs, photographed at Keerthi's funeral one year before he was killed in December 1988
In the years that followed, the RCL/SEP intensified its struggle, under conditions of the renewal of civil war and repeated violent attacks by the state, the JVP and the LTTE. Yet such was the strength of the Trotskyist program and tradition established by the RCL that it was able to maintain links with supporters in LTTE-occupied parts of the island and, with the ICFI's assistance, mount an international defence campaign in 1998 that won the release of four SEP members who had been detained by the LTTE for agitating for the party's program. With the end of the civil war, the SEP was able to resume open political work in the north and east and broaden the struggle to unite the working class in opposition to all factions of the bourgeoisie and their nationalist-communalist politics.
Ultimately, the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie, with the aid of the imperialist powers and India, was able to vanquish the LTTE and in 2009 "reunite" the island under its reactionary rule.
The SEP's 2011 perspectives resolution, The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party, provided an assessment of the tasks facing the working class in the aftermath of nearly three decades of savage communal war.
After noting the utterly fraudulent character of Colombo's claims that the end of war would bring "peace and prosperity," and warning that the bourgeoisie was maintaining a vast military-security apparatus for use against the working class, it declared, "None of the underlying issues that led to the protracted civil war has been resolved by the LTTE's military defeat… The legitimate grievances and anger felt by Tamils over decades of entrenched discrimination will inevitably erupt in new forms. The necessary political lessons have to be drawn, however. The LTTE's defeat was not primarily a military one, but was the product of the inherent weaknesses of its political perspective. From the outset, its aim was to carve out a capitalist Eelam on behalf of the Tamil bourgeoisie with the backing of India or other regional and world powers. When these same powers decisively turned against it, the LTTE was reduced to impotent pleading to the 'international community' to halt the military onslaught. The only social force in society capable of waging a struggle for genuine democratic rights against the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie and its imperialist backers is the working class. However, the LTTE was always organically opposed to any orientation to unite workers—Tamil and Sinhala—on a class basis. Its indiscriminate attacks on Sinhalese civilians played into the hands of the Colombo establishment and deepened the communal divide. In areas under its control, the LTTE rode roughshod over the democratic rights and social needs of working people."
The RCL and the ICFI
If the RCL/SEP has been able to articulate a revolutionary line for the working class and defend and develop the strategy of permanent revolution under the tumultuous conditions of civil war and the essentially reactionary political environment that prevailed in Sri Lanka, this is due to its unwavering commitment to, and active participation in, the theoretical-political work of the ICFI.
The leadership and cadre of the RCL unanimously supported the ICFI's break in 1985-86 with the national opportunists of the British Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), who had long exploited the authority they had gained due to their role in 1950s and 1960s in fighting Pabloism to seek to impose a Pabloite line on the ICFI. This included publishing, promoting and assisting the LTTE "theoretician" Anton Balasingham in writing a 1979 article "On the Tamil National Question" that sought to turn Lenin into an apologist for bourgeois nationalism. As we have previously explained, "Whilst Lenin had insisted that for Marxists the most important consideration in the national question was 'the self-determination of working class,' Balasingham argued that Lenin required Marxists to be uncritical supporters of the separatist aspirations of the Tamil bourgeoisie."
RCL General Secretary Keerthi Balasuriya contributed to many of the key documents analyzing the WRP's abandonment of permanent revolution, including How the Workers Revolutionary Party Betrayed Trotskyism, 1973-1985.
With the defeat of the WRP renegades, the Trotskyists regained full control over the ICFI, that is, their own organization, successfully bringing to an end a three-decade struggle against Pabloite opportunism, which inevitably was associated with adaptation to the national milieu.
The strengthening of the proletarian internationalist foundations the ICFI would prove vital in the development of the ICFI's analysis of fundamental political and socio-economic shifts in the ensuing decade. These included: the revolutionary significance of capitalist globalization, which has raised the contradiction between the development of world economy and the nation-state system in which capitalism is historically rooted to a qualitatively new level; the advent of Gorbachev and the turn of the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy to capitalist restoration; and the transformation of the pro-capitalist trade unions into corporatist appendages of management for increasing the exploitation of the working class.
1968-2018 and the vindication of permanent revolution
The full significance of the stand taken in 1968 by the few dozen people, almost all under the age of 25, who founded the RCL can be understood only in light of what the past five decades have demonstrated.
Wije Dias, current SEP general secretary, addressing a meeting on the 60th anniversary of the October revolution in 1977
The parties and organizations that had the allegiance of the working class and oppressed masses in 1968 and whose claims to represent socialism the RCL emphatically challenged have been exposed as imposters, enemies of the working class and secondary agencies of imperialism.
In its ultimate betrayal, the Kremlin Stalinist bureaucracy restored capitalism in Russia and the other Soviet republics, a process completed with the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991. Similarly, Mao's pursuit of "socialism in one country" led first to an alliance with US imperialism, sealed by the "great helmsman" himself in his 1972 meeting with President Nixon, and then the transformation of China by his successors into global capital's principal cheap-labour production hub.
The social democratic Socialist and Labour Parties long ago shredded their reformist programs and have emerged as parties of austerity and imperialist war.
Numerous bourgeois nationalist regimes that postured as socialist have spent the past quarter-century and more prostrating themselves before imperialism. Until the Indian bourgeoisie made the Hindu supremacist BJP its principal party of government, the Congress Party spearheaded the drive to make India a sweatshop for international capital and to forge an Indo-US "global strategic" partnership.
As for the Indian Stalinist parties, the CPM and CPI, they have propped up a succession of Indian national governments that have pursued neo-liberal policies. Wherever they have formed the government of an Indian state, they have implemented what they themselves describe as "pro-investor" measures.
The putrefaction of all these organizations is rooted in their nationalist programs and orientation, which are in contradiction with the development of an ever-more integrated world economy—a process that under capitalism fuels imperialist exploitation and war, but that objectively has created the prerequisites, if freed from production for profit and the capitalist nation-state, for socialism.
The same processes have transformed the Sri Lankan political landscape.
As a result of their decades-long alliance with the SFLP, the LSSP and Stalinist CP have been reduced to empty shells that are kept around only to give the occasional "left" garland to the likes of Rajapaksa and Kumaratunga.
The JVP, after collaborating with the gangster president Premadasa in the Sinhalese bourgeois elite's scuttling of the Indo-Sri Lankan Accord, including launching fascistic attacks on the RCL, other left parties and trade unions, was subjected to a new round of violent state repression. Soon after, however, it integrated itself into the bourgeois political establishment.
The Tamil National Alliance, which acted as a parliamentary mouthpiece for the LTTE, continue to chase after the blessings of Washington and in pursuit of them are happy to whitewash Colombo's crimes against the Tamil people.
The Nava Sama Samaja Party (NSSP) was only the most unabashed of the pseudo-left organizations in supporting Washington's intervention in the 2015 presidential election to replace Rajapaksa, who was deemed too close to China, with a hastily selected "common opposition" candidate. The NSSP hailed the election of Sirisena as president and the appointment of Wickremasinghe as prime minister as a "democratic revolution." No matter that the former was a Rajapaksa henchman and the latter leads the UNP, the party that launched the communal war. Fittingly, the NSSP is the Sri Lankan affiliate of the Pabloite international, which has openly supported US imperialist operations in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, the struggle against capitalism only grows more urgent.
Social inequality has reached unparalleled levels, with the eight richest billionaires owning more than the poorest half of the world's population.
Ten years after the global financial crash, world capitalism is mired in an historic breakdown, to which the universal response of the rival nationally-based bourgeois cliques is to intensify the drive to sweat profit from the working and more aggressively pursue its predatory interests on the world stage through geopolitical intrigue and trade and shooting wars.
After a quarter-century in which US imperialism sought to offset the drastic erosion of its relative economic power through a series of ruinous illegal wars in the Middle East, the Balkans and Central Asia, Washington now declares a new age of "great power competition" and is systematically ratcheting up military-strategic pressure on nuclear-armed Russia and China. The other imperialist and great powers, with Germany in the lead, have taken note and are rearming.
South Asia and the Indian Ocean region have been sucked into the maelstrom. Desperate for a leg up in the scramble for markets and profits, the Indian bourgeoisie has aligned itself ever more closely with Washington, transforming India into a "frontline state" in the US military-strategic offensive against China. Politics and class relations in every state in South Asia, from Sri Lanka and tiny Maldives to India and its arch-rival Pakistan, are being convulsed by the region's emergence as a central arena of imperialist and great power conflict.
While India's 120-plus billionaires join Modi in celebrating India's "rise," three-quarters of the country's 1.3 billion people eke out a harrowing existence on $2 US per day or less.
What emerges is that the only viable program for the working class is the program of permanent revolution—the unification of the struggles of the working class the world over in an offensive against capitalism and for the socialist reorganization of society. That is the program of the SEP and ICFI.
Because this program corresponds to the objective needs of the working class, the ICFI has grown immeasurably stronger over the past three decades.
Recognizing the change in class relations represented by the political and organizational collapse of the bureaucratic national-based "labour" organizations, the ICFI in 1995-96 transformed its sections from leagues orientated to exposing the perfidy of the old organizations into Socialist Equality Parties. It thereby assumed direct responsibility for providing revolutionary leadership to the working class.
Some two years later, the ICFI initiated the World Socialist Web Site, the first and most popular socialist website in the world. Through the WSWS not only does the ICFI provide the world working class with a daily analysis in English, Sinhalese, Tamil and other languages of the most important developments in the class struggle and world politics and geopolitics so it can orient its class response. The WSWS also unifies and integrates the work of the ICFI as the highest conscious expression of the developing international struggle of the working class, a struggle that can and must spread across national borders and continents.
A new era of revolutionary struggle
The ICFI's struggle to defend and develop the program of permanent revolution is now intersecting with a growing movement of the working class. After decades in which the class struggle was artificially suppressed by the trade unions and Stalinist and social democratic parties, the working class is beginning to reassert its class interests. 2018 has seen a wave of militant strikes in the US, France, Germany, Britain and the Middle East.
In India, the Modi government and the Indian ruling class sit atop a social powder keg, as underscored by last month's massacre of working people in Tuticorin, Tamil Nadu protesting against the poisoning of the environment by a copper smelter owned by an Indian billionaire. In Sri Lanka, workers, youth and farmers are challenging the government's imposition of brutal austerity and wholesale privatizations at the behest of the IMF.
The task of the RCL and ICFI is to lay bare before the working class that the objective logic of its opposition to social inequality, poverty, the ruling class assault on democratic rights and militarism and war is the struggle for workers' power. This requires, to borrow the words of Lenin in his seminal work What Is To Be Done?, saturating the working class with socialist consciousness.
It is with this aim and as part of the struggle to forge the revolutionary party the working class needs to prosecute the fight for socialism that the SEP will mark fifty years of struggle with a series of meetings, lectures, WSWS articles and interviews with party leaders. These will review the party's history from the standpoint of clarifying the key questions it has tackled in elaborating a program and perspective that articulate the objective revolutionary interests of the working class.
This campaign will be mounted in conjunction with, and as part of, the ICFI's marking of the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Fourth International, under Trotsky's leadership, in 1938.
Build the SEP as the mass revolutionary party of the working class, rallying behind it the rural toilers in struggle against all sections of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie and in the fight for a workers and peasants' government!
Bring the program of permanent revolution to the workers of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and throughout South Asia!
Make the struggle to build a global socialist movement against imperialism and war the cutting edge of the fight against social inequality and austerity!
Appropriate the revolutionary program, principles and history of Trotskyism—the Marxism of the 21st Century—and build the ICFI as the World Party of Socialist Revolution!
The author also recommends:
The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)—Part 1
Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka)
Strong support for Julian Assange at Sri Lanka's Jaffna University
SEP (Sri Lanka) to hold Free Assange meetings and demonstrations
SEP wins support for Assange and Manning at Sri Lanka's Peradeniya university
Sri Lankan workers need a socialist program to defeat Colombo's police-state preparations
Aftermath of terrorist attack: Sri Lankan SEP public meeting warns about threat of dictatorship
This week in history: July 15-21
Charité at War: A chilling portrayal of Nazism and its crimes
Britain: Gang convicted of running "extensive and prolific" modern slavery network
Part 2: Stalinism, communism and anti-Semitism
Paul Hanebrink's A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism
Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna calls for removal of Sri Lankan government
Sri Lankan prime minister promotes US defence agreement
Sri Lankan writer still detained on bogus blasphemy allegations
Sri Lankan president signs four death warrants


^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w Mari Jo (1994). The American Radical. New York, NY: Routledge.
^ a b c d e Halford Ross Ryan (1988). Oratorical Encounters: Selected Studies and Sources of Twentieth Century Political Accusations. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, Inc..
^ Margulies (1968) ch 3–5.
John D. Buenker, The History of Wisconsin. Volume IV The Progressive Era, 1893–1914 (1998), detailed narrative and analysis.
Carl R. Burgchardt; Robert M. La Follette, Sr.: The Voice of Conscience Greenwood Press. 1992; on his oratory, with selected speeches.
Garraty, John A. "Robert La Follette: The Promise Unfulfilled" American Heritage (1962) 13(3): 76–79, 84–88. ISSN 0002-8738 article.
K. C. MacKay, The Progressive Movement of 1924 (1947).
Herbert F. Margulies; The Decline of the Progressive Movement in Wisconsin, 1890–1920 (1968), detailed narrative.
Karen A. J. Miller; Populist Nationalism: Republican Insurgency and American Foreign Policy Making, 1918–1925 Greenwood Press, 1999.
David Thelen, Robert M. La Follette and the Insurgent Spirit 1976. short interpretive biography.
Nancy C. Unger. Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer (2000), full scale biography.
Carl R. Burgchardt; Robert M. La Follette, Sr.: The Voice of Conscience Greenwood Press. 1992; contains selected speeches.
Senator LaFollette in the Senate on March 11, 1908 – financial oligarchy and the story of the 1907 money-panic.
Senator LaFollette in the Senate on March 19, 1908 – watered railway stocks as basis of legal-tender circulation.
Senator LaFollette in the Senate on March 24, 1908 – industrial concentration.
publ015.109, An Act to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 215 Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard in Madison, Wisconsin, as the "Robert M. La Follette, Sr. Post Office Building"