Wisdom from Octavia E. Butler

I noted in my last post that I was reading Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. Having finished that rather dark volume, I have gone on the read the sequel, Parable of the Talents. This is the story of a small community trying to survive in a country that has gone mad. The story is set in the very near future.

The protagonist of both books is Lauren Olamina, a young visionary who has created a non-theological religion she calls Earthseed. The U.S. has just elected a president who is a Christian Nationalist. (Butler doesn’t use that term, but the designation seems appropriate.) Members of the community, called “Acorn,” are anxious.

Each chapter of Parable of the Talents begins with an excerpt “From EARTHSEED: THE BOOK OF THE LIVING.” The situation cannot help remind one of our own situation on the precipice of an election. Chapter Eleven begins with this excerpt:

Choose your leaders
    with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
    is to be controlled
    by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
    is to be led
    by the opportunists
    who control the fool.
To be led by a thief
    is to offer up
    your most precious treasures
    to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
    is to ask
    to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
    is to sell yourself
    and those you love
    into slavery.

Here endeth the lesson.

Gaza, Israel, Biden, and Harris

This afternoon, I listened to an interview with Palestinian poet and essayist Mosab Abu Toha on Fresh Air. Apparently, his literary credentials were in part responsible for his getting out of Gaza with his immediate family. He nevertheless was apprehended by Israel’s IDF and tortured, and, although he escaped with his wife and children, he lost friends and extended family in Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. He is now living in Syracuse, New York.

I have been reading Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower. That novel is set in an American future characterized by ecological disaster, societal disintegration, and police and fire protection that offer more aggression than protection. Parable would have been distressing in 1993. It is more upsetting today, when the diary entries of protagonist Lauren Olamina carry dates of 2024 and beyond.

Listening to Abu Toha describe life in Gaza under Israeli attack reminded me of the trials of Lauren Olamina as she journeys north with her pick-up group of fellow travelers in search of a place of safety. But the horrors of that journey were at least mitigated by some minimum sense of agency for Olamina and her company. They were armed and smart. Ordinary Palestinians have no such agency. They are at the mercy of Israeli troops, Israeli air power, and the hellish environment created by Netanyahu’s war machine. They move from place to place in response to warnings from Israel, but Palestinians are neither safe indoors nor out of doors.

Terry Gross raised the question of whether what was happening in Gaza is genocide. Abu Toha did not call Israeli actions genocide but suggested that it would be so recognized decades from now. Does Netanyahu mean to kill all Palestinians in Gaza? We don’t know that he does. It is clear, however, that many Israelis would raise a collective sigh of relief if there were no more Palestinians in Gaza, a piece of real estate rapidly becoming uninhabitable.

The Israeli attack on Gaza after the Hamas October 7 incursion a year ago is both understandable and justifiable. Yet, this war looks different from other modern conflicts. American journalists have been kept out of Gaza, and many Palestinian journalists have been killed. Not even Israelis—maybe especially Israelis—have a clear view of what is happening in Gaza. We have not seen the kind of firefights one expects to see in urban warfare. Israel’s strategy is to protect IDF troops and to show little concern for civilian casualties. The response to the alleged presence of Hamas fighters is not to attack them from the ground but simply to obliterate them from the air. And the Israeli efforts to disrupt humanitarian aid for Gaza suggest that Netanyahu believes that every Palestinian is Hamas until proven otherwise.

Muslim and Palestinian Americans are understandably concerned about what is happening in Gaza, not to mention events in the West Bank and Lebanon. Unfortunately, President Joe Biden has a longstanding and unshakable allegiance to Israel. Despite multiple instances of disapproval by the American government of Israeli actions such as the building of illegal settlements in the West Bank, Biden’s support for Israel has shown no sign of weakening.

The present question is whether Biden’s support for Israel will be the downfall of the American Republic. Will the disgust with America’s support for Israel among certain groups of voters cause Kamala Harris to lose the presidential election to Donald Trump? Harris, as a member of the Biden Administration, is in a difficult position. Her credibility as a candidate is based partly on her contribution to that administration. Despite Harris’s decrying the suffering of Palestinians brought on by the war, serious criticism of the Biden policy would be seen as a repudiation of her own administration and a self-serving political move. It might gain pro-Palestinian votes but lose the larger, usually reliable, Jewish vote. Lacking evidence, we cannot know Harris’s true feelings about the Mideast war, though we are likely to learn should she become president.

It was reported today that the administration has given Israel a 30-day deadline to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza. The implication is that military aid may be imperiled if the situation in Gaza does not improve. Was this warning an attempt to help Harris out of her dilemma? Perhaps, but the fact that the deadline comes after the election diminishes its salience for the Harris campaign.

Some Random Comments on the Presidential Campaign

I watched the vice-presidential debate Tuesday night to the bitter end. The debate was disappointing in that JD Vance managed to impersonate a normal human being, and the event did not expose his most extreme, odious views. That said, the debate was civil—that counts for something—and Tim Walz , who lacks Vance's Ivy League background, mostly held his own. Vance, of course, is slick—I don’t mean that in a good way—and anyone who pays close attention to politics could see through his myriad lies. I rate the debate as a tie. These vice-presidential debates seldom make a real difference, and this one likely is no exception.

Although I won’t try to analyze the entire two-hour event, I will offer two rejoinders to Vance’s arguments that I had hoped Walz would deliver. They are important for the presidential campaign generally.

First, Vance continually blames Kamala Harris for not having pursued programs she is now advocating while she was vice president, during the “Harris administration,” as Vance would have it. This is ridiculous. One would think that the Republican candidate for vice president would have some clue as to what his role will be should he be elected. (Perhaps his arrogance leads him to believe that he will rule the White House.) The vice president’s role is to support the president, offering advice, to be sure, but standing with the president, who ultimately determines policy. Never, referring to the time when Donald Trump was president, have I ever heard anyone refer to the “Pence administration.” Harris cannot be blamed for the policies she didn’t initiate because she wasn’t president.

Then there is the concept, so enamored of Donald Trump, that (1) abortion law is properly handled by individual states and (2) that this is what “everybody” wanted all along. The second proposition is, of course, so ridiculous as to simply be an outright lie. When Vance asserted that abortion should be a state responsibility, Walz countered by saying that control over one’s body should not depend on one’s place of residence. Were I debating Vance, I would say that also. But I would go further. I would ask whether freedom of speech should be left to the states. Surely, Mississippi is less fond of this freedom than, say, California. What about freedom of religion? Or freedom of the press? Should states decide whether women can vote? How about black men? To say that abortion should be left to the states is to admit that states may make different choices. That abortion rights have been affirmed whenever put a vote of the people, and the fact that restricting abortion is damaging the practice of medicine and actually killing women, abortion should be left to the people, an option offered by the Tenth Amendment.
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I am repeatedly irritated by interviews of voters who say they will vote for Donald Trump because of high grocery prices, presumably because they think we will return to 2017 prices if the Republican candidate is returned to the White House. These people are mistaken, or, should I say, deluded. The recent inflation is mostly the result of COVID disruptions. It has come down dramatically under President Biden. Reduced prices will only happen if we have a severe recession, something unlikely to be appreciated by Republican voters. Moreover, if Trump is elected and imposed his promised tariffs, prices across the economy will go up. In other words, Trump will create more inflation. In fact, the economy (Biden economy?) is in fine shape. That, of course, does not mean that everyone’s economic situation is equally satisfactory/
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Donald Trump is a master of projection (the attribution of one’s own ideas, feelings, or attitudes to other people or objects—https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/projection). He is fond of accusing others of what he is doing. He accused Democrats of stealing the 2020 election, for example, but it was Trump who directed an election-stealing scheme.