Carnival de Resistance

Please join us in remembering the life of Carnivalista Ted Lewis who died this week…

From Nancy Lewis:
"Dear Friends and Family--we are so grateful for all your memories and words of support during this time of pain and loss. It has been two months to the day since we found out about Ted's cancer. He crossed the threshold yesterday morning at 5:12 am in the arms of his wife and daughters. He is free of his suffering now, soaring like a bird in spirit lands!
Please keep checking the Caring Bridge site, as we will be posting the date for the celebration of his beautiful life. It will most likely be in two weeks on a Saturday. On Friday, he will have a green burial, in a pine box made by hand with wooden pegs, up in Grand Marais. Until then, he is resting in our living room and we are having visitation for those who live near enough."
We give thanks for Ted's liberation and for his life. Please offer prayers and support for his family. (Picture below of Ted's last cairn, built last week.)
--CM

“For me, art and activism are symbiotic. The performance challenges each of us to confront our role in the climate crisis and encourages a renewed commitment to meaningful change.”

Hovinga’s artistic protest will last 20 days in total. By the end of it, he will have punched holes for 120 hours, at a physical and mental cost. “It’s getting harder to sit in silence concentrating on the same repetitive motion. I didn’t expect it to be so intense. After two days, my back, neck, elbows and wrists all started to hurt. I’ve been taking painkillers daily since the second week.”

Artist punches holes in UN climate report six hours a day for Dutch installation Johannes-Harm Hovinga has to take painkillers to complete the 20-day artistic protest at Museum Arnhem

"Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable."

- Rebecca Solnit, from her book, Hope in the Dark

Remember to carry your rainbow magic markers with you for pride month!

My favorite pride activity 🏳️‍🌈

Useful post-human analysis of when the last light would go out.

https://youtu.be/8fADp43wJwU

If all humans died, when would the last light go out? Get a copy of What If? 2 and Randall’s other books at: https://xkcd.com/booksMore serious answers to absurd questions at: https://what-if.xkcd.com/If every h...

A useful visualization of what we have conceded to cars…

https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=834026238761277&id=100064617254550&mibextid=5irAu0

Respect the harmonic order of Nature.

really makes you think what we plan our cities around...

Do you have time? Or does time have you?

it's always in the last place you look!

Feel free to pass this along. We are looking for someone who is interested in this work trade summer internship.

Work Trade Intern - Dreaming Stone Arts and Ecology Center Summer Work Trade Intern

"'I had always dreamt of it but never really thought that I could do it. And then finally, a friend of mine invited me to join along with her, working at a carnival.'.

Each traveller’s story is different, but they are bound by a sense of community. Often unseen and mistaken by their appearances, they are some of the kindest people one might meet. Their souls are open and their gift is time. They will give you their time because time is all they have. And in some cases, in the family they have lost, they have found each other..

Like graffiti on the walls of the city streets, the subject’s bodies and faces become the visual storybook of their lives. Their clothing is often a mismatch of found items"

‘I have nothing and everything’: America’s young travellers – in pictures Hitching rides and hopping trains offers an escape from misery for many young people in the US. But, as Michael Joseph’s photographs and the stories behind them attest, the freedom of the road can come at a cost

Chewing gum was popular among teenagers 10,000 years ago:

"This time, Götherström and his team of paleontologists at Stockholm University were able to determine, again from the DNA found in the gum, that the teenagers’ stone age diet included deer, trout and hazelnuts. Traces of apple, duck and fox were also detected."

Ancient ‘chewing gum’ sheds light on stone age teenagers’ diet Traces of DNA found on lumps of tree resin suggest trout and hazelnuts were popular 10,000 years ago

A topsy turvy poem for Christmas Eve…

Empire Christmas Poem by Bill Wylie Kellerman.

What does it look like to journey from empire to emmanuel in this Christmas filled with war and violence?

Originally published by RadicalDiscipleship.Net and republished in Geez Magazine.

- Tim

Join Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries in Ojai in February!

“DEEP DIVES” – the 2024 Bartimaeus Kinsler Institute: BKI2024 will focus on two longstanding commitments of BCM: Building capacity for Decolonizing Discipleship andSabbath Economics. These four days offer an opportunity for deep dives into both themes for educator/practitioners. Two tracks will unfold in parallel: Because these themes speak to each other deeply, we will weave them together in plenary sessions to open and … Continue reading “DEEP DIVES” – the 2024 Bartimaeus Kinsler Institute

https://chedmyers.org/2023/12/01/deep-dives-the-2024-bartimaeus-kinsler-institute/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook

❤️🐝❤️

From Listening to the Noise until it Makes Sense blog and zines on being in relationship with someone who hopes for a different world:

“Activist relationships are the best relationships because you deeply care about one another, but you also deeply care about big ideas and helping the world. You’re gazing into one another’s eyes. But you’re also gazing out into the world to see what needs to be done, and what work is most suited to your values and skills.”

activist relationships - listening to the noise until it makes sense Activist relationships involve risk, but we stay honest to avoid the danger of being an echo chamber. We make a more just world with love.

Towards an ancient future of giant sailing ships:

“Wind is a near marginal cost-free fuel and the opportunity for reducing emissions, alongside significant efficiency gains in vessel operating costs, is substantial,” explained John Cooper, CEO of project collaborator, BAR Technologies.”

A cargo ship with 123-foot ‘WindWing’ sails has just departed on its maiden voyage Retrofitted with 123-foot ‘WindWings,' 'Pyxis Ocean' is testing two giant sails on its six-week journey from China to Brazil.

Barbie read through the garden of Eden…

Barbie is a Better Creation Story (and Grand Mama God)

Barbie as a creation story has been deeply resonating for me. There are already so many insightful reviews about the new Barbie film (like the one friend Gareth Higgins about how it's an example of holistic liberation and some good critiques for how it might have done more to address racism as a twin oppressor to patriarchy like this one--note: links in the first comment!). I’m sure there really doesn’t need to be another piece about Barbie, yet as I watched it with my teen daughter yesterday in what was my third viewing, the lens that kept moving me to tears was seeing Barbie as a creation story. And it’s a better creation story than the one most of us were immersed in that undergirds so much of our harmful patriarchal systems. (Spoilers ahead!)

We begin in Eden

Barbie begins in an Eden-like setting where every day is perfect. “[Today] is the best day ever. So was yesterday, and so is tomorrow, and every day from now until forever.” Of course, it’s a very pink and plastic kind of Eden with a lot of sparkly outfits and choreographed dance parties, but to the Barbies, this is perfection. Women run everything and the whole of Barbie Land works for the empowerment and fulfillment of the Barbies.

Ken, well—Ken is a helper, a secondary creation. He’s really an accessory to the main creation, and they all know it. Helen Mirren’s narrator even says, “Barbie has a great day every day, but Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him.”

By going to the absurd extremes, with actors who brilliantly pull it all off, co-writer and director Greta Gerwig scores hilariously resonant points about the harms and ills of gender inequality. (The screenplay was co-written by Greta’s partner, Noah Baumbach.) And for the few right-wing ranters about Barbie being anti-men, I wonder if they actually watched the film because it’s very much about how any system that dominates others ultimately needs dismantling.

This film does what the nonviolent elders such as Gandhi, Bayard Rustin, Dr. King, and Thich Nhat Hanh have tried to teach us: the goal is a double victory where the oppressors also get free of the harmful ideas perpetuating suffering. Ken clearly is suffering in the world where Barbie Land only thinks about the flourishing of the Barbies, and that’s what leads to his enthusiastic adoption of patriarchy.

The Tree of Knowledge, also called Reality

When Barbie begins to malfunction with thoughts of death, flat feet, and a small patch of cellulite, she’s given what appears to be a choice from Weird Barbie. Weird Barbie is possibly my favorite character (played to perfection by Kate McKinnon). She’s the trickster, the in-between worlds, wise woman character. She looks bizarre because she was played with too hard in the real world and is now mostly stuck in the splits. (Didn’t we all have dolls that we gave too many haircuts to and used marker on their face?).

And Weird Barbie gives her a choice to try to fix her malfunction with a trip to the real world. This is the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil moment. Does Barbie choose to stay blissfully ignorant of complex emotions and the reality of death? Or does she choose to step into Reality with all of its nuances? She isn’t one of the brave or adventurous Barbies—she’s Stereotypical Barbie—so she wants the pink high heel and to return to ignorance and bliss. It turns out not to be a real choice because she’s does have to go to Reality. We have to grow up.

Daniel Shroyer in Original Blessing, her book about why the concept of original sin is deeply harmful and also not actually shared by other major world religions outside of Western Christianity, puts it this way in her discussion of better readings of the Genesis poem:

“Peter never wants to leave Neverland, but Wendy wisely realizes it is better to grow up. And it is, even if the process is always bittersweet…God places the tree and the snake in the garden because they are necessary. If we are to live into the image of God, we cannot remain infants, or children, or even teenagers.”

Growing up is really bittersweet

My youngest right now (7.5—the one whose prayers inspired Dear Mama God) has suddenly been wishing she could return to being younger. She doesn’t always like what getting bigger means. She’s in a developmental threshold space, and sometimes we cry together about how we wish time worked like that. This is why Peter Pan remains such a classic story. Growing up as a human and becoming aware of the complexities of Reality is really hard!

This is how I read the Eden narrative of Genesis now: it’s a fable about growing up, both individually and as a species. Humans are the only animals, as far as we know, that have the level of self-awareness we have that leads us to anticipate death and loss. Wendell Berry in his beautiful poem, “The Peace of Wild Things” says:

I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.

To be a human means we “tax” our lives “with forethought of grief.”

We are aware. We wonder about the ethics of actions. We ruminate on loss and worry. Yes, we can also ruminate on joy, find rest, and experience great beauty, but we do not have the easy innocence of not being aware in the first place.

Ultimately, Barbie does meet her Maker.

At first, Barbie thinks the Mattel CEO is God who makes the rules. But he turns out to be a profit-driven, patronizing corporate suit (played with more than a touch of goofiness by Will Ferrell) who wants to control her emerging sense of self-awareness by literally putting her back into a box with her wrists tied down.

Instead, Barbie’s Maker is a kind, gentle Jewish grandmother who finds her best thinking place to be at a kitchen table with her pot of tea and sewing machine. This is the real inventor of Barbie—Ruth Handler (a perfect Rhea Pearlman).

Even typing this now I find myself overcome with tears because this story sees our Maker as very tender towards us. She doesn’t control Barbie. She’s curious and even surprised to see the choices Barbie is making as she grows up and decides to become fully human, complex emotions and thoughts of death included.

The Maker (now Grand Mama God in my mind) takes Barbie’s hand in the end. This is very much a commentary on the Michelangelo Sistine Chapel famous image that studies show we see when someone tells us to imagine “God,” even if we don’t want to imagine divinity as a bearded old white man! It’s such a central image to the creation story that undergirds Western thought and the current domination systems, including patriarchy, that do so much harm.

This Maker though is gazing at her growing-up creation with compassion, pride, and deep love. She warns Barbie: “Humans only have one ending. Ideas live forever.”

But humans? We are mortal. And it’s that awareness of our mortality that makes growing up so very bittersweet. The Maker also says that “being a human can be pretty uncomfortable. Humans make up things like patriarchy and Barbie to deal with how uncomfortable it can be.

Barbie knows. She’s realized that she wants the complexities and even the thoughts of death that come with being fully alive. And she wants creativity, which comes with this uncomfortable awareness. She wants to be “part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that is made.”

And in choosing to be fully human, she actually is a Brave Barbie.

This is how I view Eve now. She was brave to lean into awareness with all of the complexities that involves. She also didn’t really have a choice after all, even if sometimes there is the illusion of a choice. We can’t pick the pink high heels and stay in ignorance and bliss. It’s understandable that we try to distract ourselves away from Reality with our own escapist inventions. But, ultimately, we have to grow up. We have to become fully human, fully alive. Tears, cellulite, thoughts of death, and all.

And our Maker? She’s got nothing but tenderness and pride in that loving gaze.

- Daneen Akers, author of Dear Mama God and Holy Troublemakers & Unconventional Saints

Note: I send this via my newsletter earlier today, and I'd love for people who want to read my writing to sign up there as ultimately Meta owns the content on Meta platforms. You can subscribe at www.holytroublemakers.com or www.dearmamagod.com. And I love author and speaker Austin Channing Brown's note at the end of her newsletters: "Typos prove I'm human. Ignoring them shows that you love me." I have very little clear headspace time with kids not in school right now, so a little writing time with some imperfections is better than not writing :)

Jamming self-driving cars with traffic cones:

"The origins of the group’s tactics are murky, but at some point it was discovered that placing a cone on the hood of a self-driving car puts it into panic mode, shutting down the $50,000 vehicle until a human employee can come in person to get it unstuck.

Safe Street Rebel’s complaints about self-driving cars are multi-fold. The group has long campaigned for a less car-dominant San Francisco, promoting public transportation and advocating for pedestrian safety. It argues state funding and attention should be focused on public transit solutions, rather than on encouraging the use of personal vehicles, even self-driving ones. (Though the all-electric cars have been pitched as environmentally friendly, the group says constructing and charging the vehicles still poses environmental risks.) And it argues the widespread use of the vehicles poses a significant surveillance risk, as companies have already been hit with a number of law enforcement requests for footage collected by the cars’ cameras."

Full story in the The Guardian here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/26/san-francisco-stop-self-driving-cars-traffic-cone-safe-street-rebel

Rebecca Solnit on the importance of resisting ”Climate Doomers”

“They’re surrendering in advance and inspiring others to do the same. If you announce that the outcome has already been decided and we’ve already lost, you strip away the motivation to participate – and of course if we do nothing we settle for the worst outcome. It often seems that people are searching harder for evidence we’re defeated than that we can win. Warnings are a valuable thing, given with the sense that there’s som**hing we can do to prevent the anticipated outcome; prophesies assume the future is settled and there’s nothing we can do. But the defeatists often describe a present they assert are locking in the worst outcomes…

I don’t know why so many people seem to think it’s their job to spread discouragement, but it seems to be a muddle about the relationship between facts and feelings. I keep saying I respect despair as an emotion, but not as an analysis. You can feel absolutely devastated about the situation and not assume this predicts outcome; you can have your feelings and can still chase down facts from reliable sources, and the facts tell us that the general public is not the problem; the fossil fuel industry and other vested interests are; that we have the solutions, that we know what to do, and that the obstacles are political; that when we fight we sometimes win; and that we are deciding the future now.”

See first comment for full article from The Guardian.

Photo by Bimms Jetty

Sinéad O’Connor’s letter to Miley Cyrus 10 years ago:

“The music business doesn't give a s**t about you, or any of us. They will pr******te you for all you are worth, and cleverly make you think its what YOU wanted … and when you end up in rehab as a result of being pr******ted, 'they' will be sunning themselves on their yachts in Antigua, which they bought by selling your body and you will find yourself very alone.”

Sinéad O'Connor's open letter to Miley Cyrus Sinéad O'Connor: The full text of Sinéad O'Connor's blog warning Miley Cyrus that she is being 'pimped' by the pop industry

A detailed explanation of the layers of delusion and fiction in Jason Aldean's viral song about small town violence...

I didn’t know why people kept mentioning “small towns,” but assumed it was a pop culture reference I was missing.

So, I googled it.

Jason Aldean, a country singer I've never heard of and will probably never think about again after people stop talking about him, recently released a song called, "Try That in a Small Town."

The song, if you've not heard it, threatens violence on people who do various things like car jacking, stomping on a flag, “cussing out” a cop, or robbing a liquor store at gun point.

A friend of mine pointed out that Aldean is from Macon, Georgia, with a population of over 150,000.

That’s… not a small town.

I’m from Logan, WV. Population is 1,400.

I came from Chauncey, WV, a coal camp in Logan. Population is 283. I am actually from “Chauncey Holler” (Hollow). Population is probably fewer than 100 people.

I’m from an actual small town.

I’m descended from the Hatfield/Vance clan of Hatfield and McCoy repute. I’m cut from the Shawnee resistance to the Indian Removal Act. My ancestors were freedmen. My ancestors mined the coal that kept the pacified middle class warm and cozy in their domesticated complacency.

And yes, if you come to an actual small town as an outsider and do things that seem threatening to insiders, they’ll handle it internally.

That much is true.

What Jason Aldean is talking about isn’t anything like what people from actual small towns would say. In fact, you won’t hear from them at all because it is not in the ethos of people from insular, isolated communities to try and posture with the outside world.

They don’t think people are actually going to come there and try to burn their crumbling infrastructure and rob their single-wide trailers and their dead grandma’s house they squat with duct tape and cut up trash bags for windows.

No city person is traveling to the middle of nowhere to steal your Aunt Gert’s Buick Skylark, Jason.

They don’t carry enough jugs of oil and coolant to pull over every few miles and top it off because they have not been waiting on that black lung settlement for over a decade to get their car fixed.

Noey (Noah) Mullens, the town mechanic, passes everyone’s car inspection because no one cares about regulations. The police would not ticket Aunt Gert, either, because when most everyone is that Poor, the police know better.

The police don’t “cross that line.”

No one is afraid of getting caught or being reported because no one is looking.

No one cares. No city folk care. No suburban country music singers care.

They’re invisible.

Police do not have much of a role in small towns. People do handle things on their own. No one is spitting in a cop’s face in a small town because Officer Joe Sias and his brother Don aren’t patrolling.

They probably never fired their weapons on the job at anything other than a rabid raccoon or coyote, and they’re considerably less armed than the average citizen. No one calls the police to report crimes.

But in a small town, you are very likely to be robbed by your neighbor’s adult kid with a m**h or oxycontin addiction. They’ll steal your grandparents’ cancer and hospice meds and your tube TV.

And no one riots in a small town because they can’t afford to reach the power structures that left them so poor.

At nights, people steal the flood grates around small towns for scrap metal. They loot abandoned houses and businesses for copper wire and metal pipes to scrap. No one is ever going to revitalize those structures, so people just look the other way. By day they pick up beer and soda cans on the side of the road— for scrap.

Anything to avoid the mines.

Aldean’s video shows b-roll of protests, property destruction, violence, and generally unrelated incidents in big cities.

Nobody in those videos cares about what’s happening in somebody’s small town. This is the suburbanite white dude fantasy version of Scarface. It’s the product of having no sense of personal identity and appropriating some ill-imagined mixture of actual generational Poverty culture (which is not a white phenomenon) and a wholly American mythos of having a closed culture that worships assimilation.

They often don’t think they’re racist because they often do genuinely like their Black and Brown neighbors who fish and hunt with them and go to their churches and whose kids are on their kids’ little league team.

They have a vision of living in community that they can’t bring to reality because things have changed since the boomer generation's good hand. They have dreams of being financially successful if they just work hard enough, but those dreams are not coming to fruition because they’re an American myth.

They’re trying to hold on to a sense of grandiosity characterized by surviving struggles they never experienced and by having values they don’t understand or have no connection to.

They are angry at anyone defying the order because they cope with the loss of hope for a mythical future by trying to blame people being crushed by the systems that are also eroding the white working class (at a slower rate).

The rate has been so slow, they don’t realize their sentimentality about how great this nation is came from lies they were told and an identity that is as empty and illusory as the history they learned in school.

It’s the equivalent of trying to be the proverbial “golden child” to an abusive parent, maintaining the illusion that the truth-telling “scapegoat” is actually the problem.

That’s the “great again” that people like that bank on. The proverbial “New Jerusalem.”

Is the song racist?

That’s the wrong question, because it’s oversimplified.

Is the song a mediocre by-product of a mass delusion that white settlers have agreed to maintain because they too had their identities stolen by colonialism, so that they are also defined by Uncle Sam’s toxic legacy as the golden child who is too cowardly to ask questions, hear the truth, accept accountability, or fight back?

Yes.

This peacock of a song is a blatant and pitiable attempt at being unable to accept that they only get a pass from Uncle Sam when they assimilate into a fictional character that upholds the colonial ego of Big Daddy Nationalism and Mama Manifest Destiny.

Unpacking that everything you’ve ever been told is a lie is hard work, and they’re not cut out for that because they’re not actually workers.

They aren’t the cheap labor they benefit from. Their “small town” fantasy is as sincere as their “honest worker” fantasy.

They need to consult their ancestors, and not just the ones who got free [stolen] land.

My “small town” ancestors shot the sheriffs and the deputies, they burned whole towns to the ground, and they led the most violent uprisings in the history of Uncle Sam’s invasion because they did not see the people upholding the status quo as “their own.”

Jason Aldean has no idea who “his people” are. They’re not “small town” people. They’re the middle mass, the embodied entitlement that one inherits when they come from a legacy of settler colonialism, slave trading, and evangelical purity culture that justified genocide.

They’ve been convincing themselves they’re fighting for som**hing noble for so long, they see the loss of that illusion as a threat to the only identity colonialism left them with— generic whiteness.

What he can’t handle is that he’s not a “good ol’ boy,” he’s just a bully doing the business of an abusive parent to preserve the illusion of the “pillar of community.”

If he knew how to be in community, he would not be building a cult following on nationalistic propaganda.

A look at the living tradition of Amish witches:

“The practices and prayers of Braucherei have been passed down for the past three centuries via mentorships, with men teaching women and vice versa. Patrick Donmoyer, who directs the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University in eastern Pennsylvania, would tell me later that day that some consider Braucherei “to be a gathering of all those who ever were, who have ever participated in the ritual.” I see a green field and, on it, a congregation of hundreds, of thousands, standing silently in the setting sunlight. “I had one practitioner share with me that he was in the middle of doing som**hing once, and he felt as if he could see the person who had taught him to do that particular thing, standing over, doing it to him,” he said. “And the person who had taught her. And the person who had taught her. And who taught her, and her, and her . . . And he said it was like a glimmer . . . ”

In the Glimmer, by Rachel Yoder The good witches of Pennsylvania

This music video for one of Jay Beck's songs includes footage from the Carnival de Resistance. Check it out!

Lord, Don’t Move My Mountain by Holy Fool Arts For Pentecost we are sharing a final video from our Holy Week series originally produced by the United Church of Christ for their General Synod's Opening Wor...