sal-muh-GUN-dee, noun. 1. A salad dish originating in early-17th century England containing cooked meats, seafood, vegetables, fruit, leaves, nuts and flowers and dressed with oil, vinegar and spices. 2. A mixture or assortment of things forming an incoherent whole.
Recently
I've discovered the music of Carrie Newcomer (www.carrienewcomer.com). I
urge you to have a listen. Just go to her website, and some of her most
recent music (in collaboration with Indian sarod players) will start
playing automatically.
Tune into the words. Deeply
spiritual, from the heart. To quote the first track you'll hear on her
website, "Breathe it in, breathe it out, let it go." What a gift her
music is!
As a sidenote, I'm happy to say that I found
Carrie's music because she found my books. I've enjoyed a little
correspondence with her and consider her a sister in the work of growing
peace in a wounded world.
Note: This is a letter to the editor that I wrote after the
"United for Women" march & rally, held last Saturday here in
Brookings. I submitted an abbreviated form of it to the Sioux Falls
Argus Leader, and it was published today (May 2, 2012). If all goes
well, a nearly identical version to the one below will soon appear in
the Brookings Register.
On
Wednesday, April 25, South Dakota Representative Kristi Noem called
concerns for women’s rights a “sideshow” and chastised her constituents
for “wasting” their time in standing up for them (Argus Leader).
This was only two days after I had sent her office a news release about
Brookings’ upcoming “United for Women” march & rally, held this
past Saturday. Part of a national day of rallies for women’s rights, our
Brookings event focused on the right to (1) accessible and affordable
health care, including contraceptive and reproductive services; (2) to
equal pay; and (3) to freedom from violence, in public and in the home.
Perhaps
the timing of our good Representative’s remarks, coming as they did on
the heels of our rally announcement, was simply coincidence.
Nevertheless, as only one of her constituents who turned out for the
Brookings rally on a dreary day with fire in my belly, I respectfully
disagree with her notion that our concerns are but a “sideshow.” Women
in America are seeing a major erosion of their rights. To offer just a
few examples:
Due to new state laws passed in record
numbers around the country, many of us will be experiencing major limits
on our contraceptive and reproductive choices. In some states we will
even have to ask our employers to cover our birth-control pills (men,
meanwhile, will not have to ask their employers for Viagra coverage).
Women
with low incomes are now in danger of losing vital health services
funded through the Title X Family Planning Program, which some
politicians are threatening to eliminate. Title X does not fund abortions. It does
fund gynecological exams, contraceptive services, pre- and post-natal
care, screening for breast and cervical cancers, and much, much more.
All of these services will be gone if certain politicians have their
way.
Women are at risk of not having the Violence
Against Women Act reauthorized by Congress—this, despite the fact that
the law has been incredibly successful, helping to reduce the rate of
non-fatal domestic violence against women by 63% since its passage in
1994.
Women are paid much less than our male coworkers
for doing the same jobs. And now we’re seeing rollbacks in “equal pay”
gains that had been made in some states—for instance, Governor Walker
recently repealed Wisconsin’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act, saying it
“clogs the courts” with lawsuits.
In addition to
experiencing such erosion of their rights, women in the middle and lower
classes will suffer, as will their families, if we allow Congress to
pass more unfair austerity measures. Such measures decrease government
spending for social programs, education, roads and bridges, and other
essentials that a vibrant society needs, while at the same time we
continue to pour money into endless wars and to reduce the amount of
taxes upon the wealthiest among us. Our nation’s burdens are gradually
being shifted to our most vulnerable citizens. I believe that those
burdens should be fairly distributed among us all, according to our
ability to shoulder them.
I would point out to my
sister Kristi that according to various studies, South Dakota currently
ranks (with #1 being the “best” among the states):
#7 in the size of the pay gap between women and men
#29 in the rate of teen births
#30 in basic health care for women
#39 in overall quality of life for women
#42 in the rate of women murdered by men
#44 in efforts to help women avoid unintended pregnancy
#45 in the number of women serving in political office
#50 in the percent of businesses run by women
…shall I go on? Obviously we have some significant work to do in this state in support of half its citizens.
What
benefits women ends up benefiting us all. That has been proven over and
over again, in this country and around the globe. Am I wasting my time
standing up for women’s rights here in South Dakota? No. I’m investing
it. For the sake of my family, my community, my state, my nation, my
world. And I’m far from alone in making that investment.
What
you call a sideshow, my dear Kristi, is one of the main events. You’ve
got a ticket, and there will always be room for you in the tent. Come on
in!
(Note: This piece of political satire, which I authored, was published on the editorial page of The Brookings Register today, April 19, 2012.)
Corporations are now being sought as candidates for elective office at all levels of government in South Dakota, as elsewhere in the United States. Interested corporations should immediately contact the local offices of the Republican and Democratic parties.
“Corporations shouldn’t hesitate,” says Phyllis Cole-Dai, a local member of the national “Elect a Corporation 2012” movement. “Murray Hill Inc. was the first corporation in U.S. history to run for Congress, back in 2010, and it performed quite well. It didn’t get elected--newcomers seldom win against incumbents--but it reached nearly 15,000 likes on Facebook.”
Corporations have maintained for years that they have been unfairly discriminated against and prevented from full participation in the electoral process, among other things. But the Supreme Court’s Citizens’ United ruling in 2010 finally rectified this. It pronounced once and for all that corporations are, in fact, persons. Now that they as persons have been granted the right of free speech (inviolable when expressed in dollars), corporations no longer need to be content with private influence-peddling and public campaign donations. They can run for and hold elective office. Someday one of them might even fulfill that traditional dream of so many American child-corporations and become President of the United States.
Murray Hill Inc. was the first corporation to take the first step toward that patriotic dream, running as a Republican in the 2010 primary race for Maryland’s 8th Congressional District. Since the end of its campaign, it has kept busy with a full slate of high-profile personal appearances and is rumored to have signed a lucrative book deal. Last August the company was happy to endorse Republican Mitt Romney for president. In a statement issued to the press, Murray Hill Inc. commended Romney for being “brave enough” as a bodied person to endorse the Citizens United ruling. The company lauded Romney for publicly agreeing “with corporate personhood and our right [as corporations] to give large, unchecked donations to the political process. When corporate civil rights history is written years from now, content providers will point to this moment as a significant turning point in U.S. politics."
If you are a corporation with political ambitions, contact your local party office today, or get in touch with Elect a Corporation 2012. Bodied people routinely get in the way of politics. Corporate persons are the real future not only of politics but of democracy in America. “One thing’s for sure,” said Elect a Corporation’s national spokesperson Dona U. Gettit, “money’s no obstacle.”
I remember the day my grandmother Smith died: The stunning call, before dawn, saying that she had been taken by squad to the emergency room. The instinct to get there now. The delays, arrangements needing to be made to cover workplace obligations. The second call, while I was packing my bag, saying not to hurry, she was already gone. The sickening grief. The long, aching drive. The sight of my mother as I pulled into my parents' driveway, she and my father just arriving home from a trip, as yet unaware. The look on her face when she saw me. The god-awful telling: her mother dead, far too young, of causes that would never be known. Deeper grief.
More than 20 years ago, that day still haunts me as if it were yesterday.
And now, another of my grandmothers--and the most important--is dying. Her decline is totally unexpected. She is ancient, to be sure--many are the "greats" in front of her name, all of them earned--but by the miracles of nature, her health has been remarkably robust until these latter years, when suddenly she has begun to suffer a number of significant ailments. The calls come, updating her condition, worsening by the day. "Multiple systems failure," say some specialists gloomily. Others, meanwhile, say, "Nothing at all to worry about." I'm dumbfounded by their rosy reports. Which patient are they looking at? I don't know much, but even I can tell that Grandmother is in bad shape.
I'm speaking of Unci Maka, "Grandmother Earth" in the language of my native neighbors, here in eastern South Dakota. My Grandmother--your Grandmother, too. And she is in distress. Just this morning, I read how government geophysicists believe that a series of recent earthquakes from Alabama to the Northern Rockies have "almost certainly" been caused by drilling for oil and natural gas. Then, this afternoon, I watched a video about the "clean-up" by the Enbridge corporation of a tar sands oil spill in Michigan's Kalamazoo River. Enbridge had, among other things, deposited clean sand on the riverbottom, clearly visible through water that the company claimed was no longer polluted. But stick a little shovel into that sand and dig around a bit, and guess what happens? A sheen of oil instantly appears atop the river. I guess you can judge a clean-up by its cover-up.
Pollution, habitat destruction, destabilization of the land, climate change.... Grandmother trembles. Grandmother moans. Not for herself only, but for all her grandchildren, even for those of us who live off her without acknowledging it, or without caring; those of us who, in our ignorance or our indifference, are slowly but surely killing her off, and ourselves with her.
Some among her grandchildren do understand what's happening, however, and they are raising their voices and offering their bodies to protect her. Native people have been particularly inspiring. Consider their resistance to tar sands oil mining and related pipelines--remarkably strong, yet it has gone largely uncovered by the mainstream media. Their witness, their struggle in defense of Grandmother Earth, should not be ignored. We in the majority culture could take a lesson or two.
Here in South Dakota, the Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council and the Oglala Sioux Tribe both passed legislation opposing the Keystone XL pipeline. They also adopted the "Mother Earth Accord," calling for a moratorium on tar sands oil extraction because it is so destructive to Grandmother Earth and her inhabitants.
White Plume outside the White House
Words are important. Declarations matter. Especially when they are reinforced by significant actions. Last September, Debra White Plume, an Oglala Lakota, was arrested outside the White House while participating in a nonviolent protest against tar sands mining and the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.
Then, in March of this year, White Plume was among 75 Lakota who set up a human road block to prevent a convoy of two enormous trucks and a dozen other vehicles from transporting oil pipeline components across the Pine Ridge Reservation. The trucks were en route from Houston, TX, to Alberta, Canada, the site of tar sands mining. The roadblockers also included Renabelle Bad Cob Standing Bear, defiant in her wheelchair, and 92-year-old Marie Randall, who eloquently reminded the tribal police of native values.
Roadblock on the Pine Ridge
Though the six-hour road block was peaceful, five Lakota, including White Plume, were arrested for disorderly conduct because they refused to leave when the police finally cleared the protesters. But the police also escorted the trucks, which were too big to turn around and force back the way they had come, off the reservation and denied them access to any other reservation roads.
White Plume commented, "We stood our ground for our land, our treaty rights, our human rights to clean drinking water and our coming generations. We did this in solidarity with the First Nations people in Canada, who are being killed by the tar sands oil mine, which is so big it can be seen from outer space. It is as big as the state of Florida."
Tar sands hunger strikers in Eagle Butte
As a final example of native defense of Grandmother Earth, a group of Lakota in Eagle Butte, SD, held a 48-hour hunger strike against tar sands pipelines in early April. Eagle Butte is located on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, close to the route that TransCanada has proposed for its 1700-mile Keystone XL pipeline. The Lakota fast was undertaken in solidarity with native children at the Bella Bella Community School in British Columbia. Those students had done a hunger strike to protest a plan to move millions of barrels of tar sands oil through the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline. Who would build and operate that pipeline? Enbridge. Yes, of Kalamazoo River infamy.
Unci Maka. Grandmother Earth. We know that she is sick. Desperately so. Even those of us who want to deny this are now finding it difficult to dispute. The evidence is all around us. We can all see the extreme shifts of weather, from mountains to plains. We can see the rising seas swallowing islands. We can see the snowcaps disappearing from the Alps, the gigantic icebergs breaking off Antarctica. Though we may not recognize or understand all the causes of Grandmother's suffering, there is much that we can say:
It is not good for Grandmother that we poison her.
It is not good for Grandmother that we disrupt her natural systems.
It is not good for Grandmother that we act as if she exists simply to serve us.
It is not good for us if Grandmother dies.
Please. Let's listen to our best instincts, and join the struggle for her life. We need to get there now. We can no longer afford to monitor Grandmother's condition from a distance. Direct intervention is needed. You and I must step up, ask the tough questions, make the tough decisions. No more delays. This is the only grandmother we have who is meant to live forever. And she will live forever, if we can only save her from ourselves.
Give us this day that we may see the beauty before our eyes Give us this day that we may cherish the earth before it dies
Note: The verse above is the refrain of the beautiful choral anthem in this video. You can read the rest of the lyrics here. If for some reason you can't see the viewer above, please click here to watch the video.
Perhaps, like myself, you make use of Amazon.com. In my case, I’ve been not only an Amazon customer, primarily buying books, but also a seller, offering some of my self-published works there. Over the years I’ve been willing to put up with the deep “cut” Amazon takes of my sales proceeds. However, I’ve been increasingly concerned by some of Amazon’s marketing tactics, which are clearly deliberate attempts to undercut local businesses around the country.
Now there is even more reason for dismay. As you can read in the article below, Amazon is now, among other things, effectively restricting access to some titles through its aggressive marketing practices. This is a form of capitalistic censorship. As a bookbuyer, an author, and a believer in both intellectual freedom and a vibrant (i.e., non-monopolized) publishing industry, I can’t just “go along” with this any longer. Therefore, I’ve decided (1) to no longer to buy products from Amazon.com, despite the savings; and (2) to no longer sell my titles on Amazon.com, despite the income loss. In the coming days, I’ll be working to remove my books from Amazon’s listings. (Titles of mine sold by other sellers/publishers, I have no control over.)
Please reconsider your own use (if any) of Amazon.com. At the very least, I hope that you’ll sign the petition against the company's assault on independent publishers and distributors. Please also consider passing the word about resisting Amazon to others. Resistance is not futile.
Amazon’s Assault on Intellectual Freedom
By Bryce Milligan, publisher/editor of Wings Press, award-winning poet and author of books for children and young adults.
There is an undeclared war going on in the United States that threatens the lynchpins of American intellectual freedom. In a statement worthy of Cassandra, Noah Davis wrote in a Business Insider post last October, “Amazon is coming for the book publishing industry. And not just the e-book world, either.” When titans battle, it is tempting to think that there will be no local impact. In this case, that’s dead wrong. Amazon’s recent actions have already cut the sales of the small press I run by 40 percent. Jeff Bezos could not care less.
One recent battle in Amazon’s larger war has pitted it against a diverse group of writers, small publishers, university presses, and independent distributors. It is a classic David-and-Goliath encounter. As in that story, however, this is more than just pitting the powerful against the powerless. In this case, the underdogs have the ideas, and ideas are always where the ultimate power lies.
Wings Press (San Antonio, Texas) is one of the several hundred independent publishers and university presses distributed by the Independent Publishers Group (IPG), the second largest book distributor in the country, but still only a medium-sized dolphin in a sea of killer whales. In late February, IPG’s contract with Amazon.com was due to be renegotiated. Terms that had been generally accepted across the industry were suddenly not good enough for Amazon, which demanded discounts and practices that IPG—and all of its client publishers—could only have accepted at a loss. Yes, that does mean what it sounds like: To do business with Amazon would mean reducing the profit margin to the point of often losing money on every book or ebook sold.
IPG refused to accept the draconian terms and sought to negotiate further. In what can only be seen as a move to punish IPG for its desire to remain relevant and healthy, Amazon refused to negotiate and pulled the plug on all the Kindle ebooks distributed by IPG, marking them as “unavailable.”
Not a big deal? Imagine that Walmart controls everything you eat, and Walmart decides to stop selling fish because it thinks that fishermen are making too much profit. Amazon is the Walmart of online bookselling. The dispute between Amazon and IPG will affect every literate person in America. It is a matter that goes to the heart of what librarians have termed “intellectual freedom.” In other words, the resolution of this dispute, one way or the other, will affect every individual American’s access to certain books. It will affect your ability to choose what you read.
Restrictions on access to literature generally have more politically motivated origins. The banning of certain Native American and Mexican American authors and books in Arizona, for example, is purely political. Attempts in the past to ban literature based on its “moral content” were largely political in nature. This dispute is purely capitalistic, and is much more difficult to fight.
A single practical example. Wings Press had offered up one of its Kindle titles, Vienna Triangle by California novelist Brenda Webster, for the Amazon daily deal— a limited time offer of 99 cents per download. The book zoomed to the top ten of one of Amazon’s several bestseller lists. While it was still listed as a bestseller, Amazon suddenly marked the title as “unavailable.” The trail of loss increases in impact as it descends the food chain: Amazon doesn’t notice the loss at all. IPG sees it as one of its 5,000 Kindle titles that vanished. Wings Press sees it as one of its 100 Kindle titles that vanished. The author sees it as the loss of her book, period.
Lest one think that eliminating a single ebook novel is a loss of little consequence, Wings Press also publishes the works of John Howard Griffin, including Black Like Me, one of the most important works of the civil rights movement and widely considered an American classic. Amazon’s refusal to sell the ebook of Black Like Me should be of serious concern to every American.
Ebook sales have been a highly addictive drug to many smaller publishers. For one thing, there are no “returns.” Traditionally, profit margins for publishers are so low because books that remain on shelves too long can be returned for credit—too often in unsalable condition. No one returns an ebook. Further, ebook sales allowed smaller presses to get a taste of the kind of money that online impulse buying can produce. Already ebook sales were underwriting the publication of paper-and-ink books at Wings Press.
It has been increasingly obvious to independent publishers for the last two years that Amazon intends to put all independents out of business—publishers, distributors, and bookstores. Under the guise of providing greater access, Amazon seemingly wants to kill off the distributors, then kill off the independent publishers and bookstores, and become the only link between the reader and the author. The attack on distributors like IPG and on some larger independent presses is only part of the plan. Amazon has also been going after the ultimate source of literature, the authors.
Having created numerous (seven or more) imprints of its own, Amazon has begun courting authors directly by offering exorbitant royalties if the authors will publish directly with Amazon. Among the financial upper echelon of authors, Amazon is paying huge advances. Among rank-and-file authors, not so. Here they are offering what amounts to glorified self-publication. The effect is to lure authors away from the editors who would have helped them perfect their work, away from the publishers and designers and publicists and booksellers who have dedicated their lives to building the careers of authors, while themselves making a living from the books they love. Even the lowly book reviewer has been replaced by semi-anonymous reader-reviewers. All these are the people who sustain literary culture.
For Amazon to rip ebook sales away from independent publishers now seems a classic bait-and-switch tactic guaranteed to kill small presses by the hundreds. Ah, but predatory business practices are so very American these days. There was a time not so long ago when "competition" was a healthy thing, not a synonym for corporate "murder." Amazon could have been a bright and shining star, lighting the way to increased literacy and improved access to alternative literatures. Alas, it looks more likely to be a large and deadly asteroid. We, the literary dinosaurs, are watching closely to see if this is a near miss or the beginning of extinction. Fortunately, this generation of dinosaurs is a little better equipped than the last one to take measures to avoid such a fate.
One can choose to buy ebooks from bn.com or from almost any independent bookstore rather than Amazon. One can buy directly from IPG. A free app will allow one to read those books on a Kindle. The resistance has already begun, and it starts with choice.
The Arvada United Methodist Church in Arvada, CO, is putting The Book of the World to good use during the Lenten season. This “contemporary scripture,” which I prepared for publication a couple of years ago, was created and offered to the world by an unknown author. It is a collection of
3000 quotes from 1200 people, some of them living, some long dead, hailing from every continent but
Antarctica. The quotes are woven together into a continuous exploration of the themes of human life.
Intending to use the book as a Lenten study, and also reading selections of it during worship, Arvada UMC originally ordered 25 copies. Since then, it has placed two additional orders, for a total of 70 books. Apparently the book has struck a chord in the congregation!
The church's website says, "Our study will be merely a peek at the book. It is far too rich to read in three weeks.... Our three weeks of conversation will simply be introductory, looking at a few of the rich passages and asking what they spark for us."
If you, too, might be interested in digging into The Book of the World as spring approaches and signs of new life emerge all around us, please visit www.phylliscoledai.com to learn more about this unique text. You can read excerpts of it (visit my "publications" page), and if you're so inclined, you can purchase a printed copy on the "books" page in my store, or even download it for free.
