The particularities of everyday life

Honestly, from my research, this is how you survive fascism. You put your head down, focus on the things closest to you (family, work), take life one day at a time and just keep on. It's not easy, and not everybody can do it. Not everyone does survive fascism.

But I wanted today's post to be a little more uplifting, so I wanted to share a story about how I embrace the particularities of everyday life.

My nephew is about 3-and-a-half years old. He's incredibly verbal, and he really loves Winnie-the-Pooh. A LOT. So much so that he has now decided to give everyone in his family Pooh names and refer to them only by their Pooh name. He's Roo. His mom is Kanga. His dad is Owl. One Grandma is Tigger, the other Piglet. One Grandpa is Rabbit, the other Pooh.

We don't really have an Eeyore in our family, and I guess that Christopher Robin is still up for grabs, so maybe I'll be the lucky person who gets to be him. Or C might think that his aunt is a meanie and call her a Heffalump or Woozle.

This whole situation is hysterical to me, especially the part where C refers to himself as Roo. The kid is committed. 

On feeling

After all of the horrible news last week about families being forcibly separated at the border, I know there are tears in me. And for some reason, they're not coming out. Well, one did while I meditated this morning, but for the most part, I'm stuck.

A good rule of thumb for understanding crying as emotional release is that it often cannot happen until some semblance of safety is reached. A kid lost in the mall might not cry until AFTER she's been reunited with her mother (obviously, a sense of safety is relative, and if the sensation is overwhelming, tears happen whether we feel safe or not, as we see with the wails of the children in the camp).

I know I need to cry about this (and probably some other things), so I'm contemplating bringing the tears out by force. I've already applied to volunteer at the border if needed, and I'm getting my application together to volunteer at a local center for victims of torture. Neither of these opportunities may pan out, though, which is why I'm also thinking that I may try to visit a movie theater in the next few weeks to catch the new documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor? 

I'll need an entire box of Kleenex because I will be a blubbering mess. I'm already a blubbering mess, and that trailer is less than two and a half minutes long!

How to live under a dictatorship

My interest in life under the Franco regime began during a class on 20th century Spanish history that I took when I studied abroad the summer before my junior year of college.

To my naive brain, the II Republic presented Spaniards with a golden opportunity for self-determination (especially for women), and the regime that resulted from the Civil War seemed unbearably cruel. At the same time, a lot of aspects of women's lives under the Franco regime seemed to reflect those of women living in the US in the 1950s (lack of access to bank accounts and loans, the rhetoric and societal expectations surrounding domesticity and motherhood, etc...).

For a few blessed years, Spanish women had the right to vote, and then, thanks to Franco, they didn't until 1976 (Franco supposedly restored suffrage to both men and women in a referendum in 1966, but, like all referendums that occur under a dictatorship, we can't really trust that the measure was free and fairly passed). In fact, the US and Spain had a pretty tense relationship between 1939 and 1953. After all, many in the US had supported the Spanish Civil War, and Franco rhetoric towards democracy and liberalism (hallmarks of US national identity) was particularly scathing during his first decade as Spain's head of state.

I wanted to know how just what made the lives of Spanish women different from those in the US at the time, and also what made them similar. My research led me to gossip, specifically to magazines, press and foreign films aimed at women. Gossip tells us what we value as a society, and it can help women survive rigidly patriarchal cultures. It is often a double-edged sword: policing women's behavior, even as it reveals areas of slippage where women might flout expectations. The film industry, too, can reinforce or undermine societal and gender expectations.

We've recently seen gossip's power in the whisper networks about sexual assault in various industries, and under the Franco regime, gossip and cinema served as a peek into other worlds. Press censorship was fairly stringent, but women's magazines were treated as fluff and not quite as heavily policed. So to survive a dictatorship, you do what you can. Focus on the frivolous, the particularities of everyday life. Escape into another world through a movie or television show.

The good news is that the US is not a dictatorship (yet), and we still can exercise our rights to organize and vote. The bad news is that the current administration bears some striking rhetorical resemblances to authoritarian regimes throughout history, and it will take a lot of survival work until it ends. 

Neri Oxman does not have an Instagram account

I need to talk about something lighthearted after all of the news of these past few weeks, and this one has been on my mind since mid-April.

You remember mid-April, right? We were all so innocent then. The WH hadn't yet announced its "zero tolerance" policy of forced separation, and Brad Pitt was trying to roll out MIT professor Dr. Neri Oxman as his next girlfriend (or something like that. I'm still not quite sure what the Pitt PR team was thinking about with this stunt, given that Dr. Oxman had a billionaire boyfriend at the time).

The gossip blogs back then called out Pitt's PR strategy as textbook plagiarism of George Clooney's rollout of Amal Alamuddin as his girlfriend all those many years ago. And then a few of them linked to an instagram account with the username of nerioxman. It's a lovely account, with lots of professional images of Dr. Oxman and her designs. And there's no way in hell it's actually her account.

Let me tell you a story about Instagram. This past spring, a person who had been trying to follow me for two years was able to finally get in touch with me to offer to purchase my username. He had a good pitch and was going to monetize the name, so I thought it over, settled on a price, and changed my instagram handle.

Dr. Oxman has been on Twitter since December 2015. She doesn't have a little blue checkmark, but her tweets all read in that intentionally obscure language of academic jargon used by people who love playing around with complicated words to express complicated ideas.

Page Six first published a story about Pitt + Dr. Oxman on April 5. The nerioxman Instagram account that I am referring to posted its first image on April 10. Someone opened an Instagram account within those five days and did a google search for all of Dr. Oxman's photo shoots. They published several images rapid-fire, but have only posted a few images in the past month. I imagine the account was opened in the hopes that either Oxman herself or someone from Pitt's PR team would pay good money to purchase the handle.

Pity for that person that Pitt and Dr. Oxman aren't actually dating.

PS: Based on a sample of all the academics and artists who I follow on Instagram, an account actually owned by Dr. Oxman would be far more interesting than professional glamor shots. 

The structures of fascism

There's been a lot of research about what makes fascism come to fruition, and I want to think about complacency (or perhaps apathy?) as one of the biggest factors.

The structures of fascism exist from the beginning of a nation-state. The creation of police, jails, the definition and protection of national borders...all of these aspects of contemporary democratic states also form the backbones of fascist regimes. The difference is in how the people respond to their use.

And that's where complacency comes in. Democracies require the voting populace to function as stewards; you've gotta keep up on your sh*t. You have to know election dates, locations and requirements to vote. You have build connections with new and old citizens alike, along with future citizens, in order to get anything done. And you have to focus locally, because space may be practiced place (see Michel DeCerteau), but nation is imagined community (Benedict Anderson), and you cannot imagine the community without practicing it locally.

There was a big kerfuffle over a jacket last week: a clear statement of apathy from one of the members of the current administration. In my research, I argue that apathy is not the appropriate affective response to scandal. But what happens when the scandal is apathy itself? Is the appropriate affective response to apathy... outrage? Or is it more apathy? Or must we calibrate our affective responses based on the power dynamics at play?

I've long thought that the only way to survive this administration is to ignore it, not apathetically perhaps, but more in the way that Buddhist monks were able to overcome their torture in Chinese prisons. The president was elected in large part thanks to his celebrity image, and the only way to weaken a celebrity image is to cease to be interested anymore. But that does not work while he continues to hold (and abuse) actual power.

What is clear to me is that maintaining apathy in the face of gross misuse of power only ensures further abuse of power. Therefore, apathy will not work to halt his actions just yet. It will only serve to aid abuses of power, as one of the primary structures of fascism. 

Post-Election Civics Resolutions Check-in

Back in 2016, I wrote about how I was going to approach life, my work, and civic engagement. I'd like to revisit that list now, and think about where I've succeeded and failed, and how the country as a whole is holding up under this administration.

First up, let's take stock of my goals from 2016 and see how I'm doing on them.

1. I have donated to organizations like the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, but I haven't given as much as I wanted to. Now that I've graduated, I'm going to take stock of my finances and see about setting up regular contributions. 
2. I have voted in all my local elections (I think), including the primary. I failed to vote in the primary run-off, though, so I give myself a C on this.
3. When I voted, I did research the candidates beforehand so as to better understand their stances on the issues. The Internet helps a lot with this, and it can be done while waiting in line at the voting booth. 
4. I have not yet volunteered as a poll worker or with Rock The Vote. This is easily fixable, however, and I will get on it. 
5. I rarely refer to the President by name. Haven't succeeded in "never," but I'm still conscious of what his name means to his brand, and I frequently choose not to use his name at times when I wouldn't have given it a second thought in a different administration. 
6. I do try to speak up for those less fortunate than me. I live in a bit of a bubble though, so I haven't had to do so very much with people who don't agree with me. 
7. I have not made holidays hell on my family. Partly that's just not in my nature, and partly, I've been able to successfully avoid talking politics with family members that I would disagree with. I have decided that I will not try to understand their point of view though, and I'll talk about that in a later post. 
8. I do work on practicing embodiment, empathy and proper boundary-setting. It's a process, but it helps me be able to engage with the world (and its atrocities) to my fullest. 
9. I practice self-care. Some is indulgent (barre class, massage), some is practical (paying my bills, eating healthily). All reminds me that I'm not yet compromised by this administration's desire to divide and conquer.
10. I am doing my work. I finished my dissertation. I've got another article coming out. And I'm trying to use my blog and social media to connect my research to the present day, to simplify it and make it more broadly available and applicable. 
11. Not everybody likes to be told that they need to set goals. I still think that people should make civic goal lists if they want to, though. 

And second, how's the country holding up as a whole? 

• Well, we've always struck a fine line between fascism and freedom (looking at you slavery, our treatment of Indigenous Americans, and Charles Lindbergh), and we've definitely been careening towards fascism under this president (the camps at the border and the discourse surrounding them are just two examples of a litany of authoritarian rhetoric and state-sponsored violence coming out of the White House). 
• A lot of the "honor system" of being a functional person in US society is being thrown out the window by our own president, and many of the unregulated traditions that bolstered governance are continually flouted by this administration (tax returns, lying on federal disclosures, detaining families with children), simply because they can. 
• We're pretty divided, and the midterm election in November may or may not help or change anything (I'm being pessimistically realistic here). 
• At the same time, we've seen a lot of empathy and unification in other ways. Lots of siphoning of affect, coming together in smaller communities, helping out neighbors, the Women's March, the March for Science, Charlottesville, Harvey, the Keep Families Together March coming up on June 30. 

One thing that gives me hope is the Facebook fundraiser for RAICES Texas, a non-profit providing legal services for immigrants and asylum seekers. D and I donated on Tuesday evening, and the total was around $8 million. It's more than doubled that amount within 2 days. Much of that will go into a bond fund that will help to get immigrants out of detention quicker (and ensure that they show up to all their immigration appointments). 

There are certainly other organizations out there doing good work (KIND, Al otro lado, The Florence Project, and more. The website ireallydocare.com will let you donate to 14 non-profits who are doing critical work at the border to protect children who have been forcibly separated from their families by the US government. 

On stolen children

The Franco regime stole thousands of children. Or lost them, depending on how you tell the story.

Many of the "niños perdidos" had been born in jail to Republican mothers, but were then removed from the jails at the age of 3, because of a law that governed how long children could stay with their mother in jail.

Some were kidnapped at birth and re-homed with pro-Franco families. Some ended up in orphanages. Others in convents. All were trafficked away from their families.

I remember (well, I don't because I was two, but my parents continue to remind me) getting lost at DisneyWorld as a child. Something about it was raining, and we'd stopped to purchase ponchos, and I just followed all the knees.

It's pretty easy to get lost as a child when all knees look the same. It's even easier to get lost as a child when institutions intervene.

EXCLUSIVE: Children from the southern border are being brought to NYC after being separated from their families.
Overnight, @joshrobin captured video of unusual activity at a foster agency in East Harlem. #MorningsOn1 pic.twitter.com/WhiN27wb5T

— Spectrum News NY1 (@NY1) June 20, 2018

Children get lost every day. Sometimes they're in a grocery store, or a mall, or DisneyWorld. Sometimes they're kidnapped, trafficked or ransomed. Our goal as a society should be to try to minimize the numbers of lost children, not aggravate them by promoting policies that separate infants from their parents.  Neither should we claim to be keeping families together by promoting the detention and jailing of refugees seeking political asylum. 

I leave this post with the words of my colleague Joseph Pierce: 

"We take children from mothers and fathers. We take them and we put them in cells. Like we took them and we put them in schools—in order to civilize them, save them from their own blood, from their inhumanity, from their fate to disappear to become the history that they were destined to become. And so we saved them from themselves. From their own disappearance. From their long braids and their almond eyes and their superstitions. Like we took them from the Black wombs of their Black mothers whose Black skin was a cosmic affront to the (manifest) destiny of a nation meant to forget itself and the bodies that grind within it.

Babies taken from mothers to be raised by white families. Because opportunity. And war."

On writing about celebrity in Spain

I often preface my research by saying that it is frivolous. I research celebrity, and my focus is the early years of the Franco regime. It's certainly not a moment in time that many in the US particularly care about, and sometimes it seems like not a lot of Spaniards do either. Or that people only care about this time period in certain ways: Post-Civil War repression, World War II, economic suffering.

Life under the early Franco regime was hard. And a distracting culture of escapism flourished and helped people survive that hardship. But even escapist culture is built within specific structures. And those structures persist in the present day. For example, ¡Hola! magazine was founded in 1944. It's now one of Spain's biggest international conglomerates, and it launched its US imprint in 2016 (just before the election. Hillary and Bill Clinton were on the cover of the October/November issue that year).

I study how the Spanish press wrote about foreign celebrities under the censorship of the Franco regime because it helps me understand my own country, both then and now. And while celebrities are frivolous in some ways, they shine a light on our best and worst selves. They show us the world we are and guide us to building the one we want to be.

The King and Queen of Spain, Felipe VI and Letizia, were in the US this past week "celebrating" 300 years of Spanish-US relations. They came to Texas, made a stop in Louisiana, and ended at the White House. This tweet allowed the White House to put forth a distracting headline in week of horrible news out of this administration.

A great visit with the King & Queen of Spain at the @WhiteHouse today. Queen Letizia & I enjoyed tea & time together focusing on the ways we can positively impact children. pic.twitter.com/IiaMQOil3K

— Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) June 19, 2018

What's interesting to me is how this visit has been covered in the Spanish-speaking press, especially given the current crisis at the US-Mexico border, and Spain's tradition of positioning itself as mediating "Hispanic" issues to the US (both under Franco and since). ¡Hola! primarily covered Letizia's fashion choices (see articles here and here), and OK Diario claims that Letizia almost caused an international incident over the "machismo" of being relegated to sipping tea with Melania while Felipe got to do the "real" diplomatic work of meeting with the President, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi.

I wonder if Letizia wasn't protesting about something else entirely, though. I want to think that part of Letizia's protests were against meeting with this family, period. She comes from the press. She knows about optics, and she knows that their visit would be used as a sort of international rehabilitation of the current presidency and its human rights violations. She knows that the tensions between the US and Europe right now make it look like F&L are choosing some sort of side.

The discussion of the ways they "can positively impact children" made a great distracting headline for the White House, as it deals with the crisis of family separation at the US-Mexico border, but it doesn't help Spain one iota. Image is never just image.