It's Better Over There
Katha Pollitt
The Nation: In the September 20, 2010 edition
My first day back in New York after a year in Berlin, I got on the subway
and found my end of the car dominated by an obscenity-shouting black man
with a crutch and a suitcase spilling garbage. When he tried to leave the
train at Penn Station, he fell and cursed so loudly at two young men who
tried to help him up that they backed off. Not once in my time in Berlin did
I see anything remotely like this scene. Berlin is a poor city by German
standards, with homeless people and beggars and presumably mentally ill
people as well. But it doesn't have the kind of destitution we take for
granted in the United States, especially for African-Americans. The strong
German safety net keeps people from plunging into the abyss.
Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?, Tom Geoghegan's clever and immensely
appealing book contrasting Western European social democracies with
laissez-faire America, is primarily concerned with the middle class, not the
poor. Still, one of the many delusions of middle-class Americans is that
ameliorating poverty would be, if not impossible (see Big Government,
wastefulness of), a big, expensive, unfair burden that would reward the lazy
and the criminal while producing no benefit to upright citizens. As
Geoghegan shows, that's not true. Poverty is expensive. It costs
middle-class Americans a lot to avoid the poor: in police, in prisons, in
home-security systems, in ever more distant suburbs that must then be
commuted from, in private schools, in anxiety and fear and hardening of the
heart.
Geoghegan argues that, contrary to US popular opinion, life is better for
almost everyone in a social democratic system like those in Western Europe,
especially Germany. Thanks to strong unions, people work less-Germans get
six weeks of vacation and twenty-seven (!) paid holidays, while Americans
are lucky to get two weeks off. Germans have job security, retirement
pensions, free or nearly free education including college, and healthcare
including nursing care. (In fact, their system, in which individuals are
legally required to buy insurance, with subsidies for low earners, resembles
the much-reviled Obamacare. My German friends found opposition to Obama's
plan utterly bewildering.) You might think, as Geoghegan points out, that
this cornucopia of rights and benefits is unsustainable-the American media
delight in predicting the end of Old Europe-but in fact, the German economy
is doing better than our own. Cutbacks in European government spending get a
lot of attention over here but, as Geoghegan shrewdly notes, are often
compensated for by increased spending on something else. In 2004 Gerhard
Schroeder's Social Democrats pushed through the widely despisedâ?¨Hartz IV
reform limiting generous long-term unemployment benefits. The end of the
welfare state? Not exactly. During the downturn, the government prevented
mass unemployment by providing partial compensation for lost wages and
encouraging companies to shorten hours rather than lay off workers. Compare
that with the American way, which is to fire lots of people and make the
remaining staff work even harder.
Geoghegan makes Old Europe sound completely delightful. Trains! Clean
streets! Nice restaurants and lots of free time to spend in them! It's not
all beer and bratwurst, though. German children are tracked at age 10 and,
as here, the results follow class and income. One recent study showed that
teachers graded papers supposedly written by "Cindy" and "Kevin"-TV-derived
names favored by lower-class people from the former East Germany-lower than
the same papers ascribed to kids with traditional names. Once Cindy and
Kevin have missed out on the top track, that's pretty much it for their
college chances-and although being, say, a baker or a cashier is more
pleasant there than here, it's striking how the class system thrives within
social democracy. Another feature Geoghegan overlooks is that, in some ways,
the slower-paced, more leisured life he admires rests on the semi-exclusion
of mothers from the workforce. Mutti is the one doing the shopping and
running the errands throughout the week because the stores-all the
stores-are closed on Sundays. And Mutti stays home because the school day
ends at lunchtime. (Geoghegan is wrong, by the way, to assert that Germans
have free daycare. In fact, one of the effects of reunification was to shut
down East Germany's excellent childcare system. Only now, because of the
extremely low birthrate, are the Germans talking about setting up public
childcare, which so far exists primarily in Berlin.)
Still, it is hard to understand why Americans fight so hard against the
nanny state, which provides so many good things. My friend David Abraham, a
historian and legal scholar, gave a fascinating talk at the American Academy
in Berlin in which he suggested that the European welfare state is linked to
ethnic homogeneity: people are more willing to share with those who seem
like themselves. Could it be that the social solidarity on which Germany's
welfare state rests is not entirely unconnected from its terrible past, in
which the Nazis promised to create a wonderful country just "for Germans"?
Muslim immigration will be the moral test, and not just for Germany but for
the rest of Europe as well.
Abraham wondered if the weak US safety net is a byproduct of our openness to
immigration: you can come here, the message is (or was until recently), but
you're on your own. My theory is more primitive: a critical mass of white
Americans would rather not have something than see black and Latino
Americans get it too. No matter how often progressives point out that most
welfare mothers, and most poor people, are white, Big Government means the
hard-working white taxpayer heaping largesse on shiftless people of color.
The Tea Party movement suggests that trope is alive and well. In the
twenty-first century, the problem is-still-the color line.
Katha Pollitt
***
Dear Ed,
I saw Neshoba last night. It is definitely worth seeing. Micki
Dickoff said the theatre in New York was filled, thanks to Amy
Goodman's promotion. People should go see it while it is here.
It is playing at Laemmle's Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Boulevard,
Beverly Hills. Parking is available around the corner at the WGA
Theatre. I paid $5.00 for parking last night.
Please pass this on to your list. Thank you.
Best regards,
Sheila Goldner
NESHOBA director Micki Dickoff and Ben Chaney, brother of film
subject James Chaney, will participate in Q&A's after the 7:20
screenings on Friday, September 10th, and after the 5:00 and 7:20
screenings on Saturday and Sunday, September 11th and 12th.
NESHOBA portrays a Mississippi town still divided decades after the
murders of three civil rights workers. Though Klansmen bragged
openly about what they did in 1964, no one was held accountable
until 2005, when the state indicted Edgar Killen, the alleged
mastermind of the killings. Through intimate interviews with the
victims' families, candid interviews with black and white Neshoba
citizens, and exclusive, first-time interviews with Killen, the film
explores whether healing and reconciliation are possible without
telling the unvarnished truth.
---
http://www.indypendent.org/2008/11/14/threat-to-justice/
A Threat to Justice Everywhere: Chaney, Goodman, Schwerner Murders Haunt
Filmmakers
By Eleanor J. Bader
From the November 17, 2008 issue
NESHOBA
Directed by Micki Dickoff and Tony Pagano
Pro Bono And Pagano, 2008
Emmy-winning filmmaker Micki Dickoff was 17 in 1964, the year Freedom Summer
sent people south to register African-American voters. "I wanted to go but
my father wouldn't let me," Dickoff told a packed audience at the New York
premiere of NESHOBA, a gripping 90-minute documentary about the murders of
civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in
Neshoba County, Mississippi. "When the three boys were killed, it haunted
me."
Years later, Dickoff was still thinking about the incident. Specifically,
she wondered if Neshoba County had come to terms with its racist past, or if
the area remained as racially segregated as it had been during the first
half of the 20th century. She teamed up with award-winning filmmaker Tony
Pagano, and the pair spent four and a half years probing for answers, along
the way interviewing Mississippians of all political leanings and
backgrounds.
The result, NESHOBA, culminates in the 2005 trial of Rev. Edgar Lee Killen,
an unrepentant white racist believed to be the mastermind behind the
activists' murders.
The film provides a detailed history of Neshoba County and residents'
reactions to shifts in racial attitudes. At the same time, it addresses how
local police and the Ku Klux Klan worked in tandem with the FBI and
Department of Justice to preserve the white-dominated status quo in the
murders' aftermath. Dick Molpus, a civil rights activist, sums it up: "For
40 years our state judicial system has allowed murderers to roam our land."
Key leaders in 1960s politics - from Mississippi Senator James Eastland, the
pro-segregation chair of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, to the
state's overtly racist governor, Ross Barnett, to local civil rights
champions - are introduced using archival footage. In addition, recent
interviews with surviving members of the Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner
families offer compelling insights about their kin, humanizing them and
fueling our understanding of their commitment to equality. Chaney, we're
told, was a 20-year-old Mississippi native who'd joined with New Yorkers
Schwerner, a married, 24-year-old social worker, and Goodman, a 20-year-old
college student who had not previously been involved in politics. The trio
was killed en route to the recently burned Mt. Zion Church in Longdale,
Miss.
The voices of countless Neshoba natives add to the mix, exemplifying both
racial progress and resistance to integration. Some, like Deborah Posey and
Jewel McDonald, one white, one Black, are members of the Philadelphia
Coalition, a multiracial organization seeking racial reconciliation. NESHOBA
chronicles the coalition's push to uncover what really happened to Chaney,
Goodman and Schwerner - organizing that led the county district attorney and
Mississippi attorney general to re-investigate and finally charge Killen.
Dickoff and Pagano spent months interviewing Killen, both before and after
his 2005 conviction on three counts of manslaughter. "When he was indicted
he gave four interviews, including us," Pagano says. "We later went back and
said we wanted to tell his story. We tried very hard not to demonize him. He
paints his own picture."
Indeed. While Killen comes across as an old-school bigot who makes repeated
quips about commie-Jewish-Christ killers, the film nonetheless presents him
as a scapegoat. The point is simple: Killen did not act alone. Justice,
Pagano and Dickoff argue, demands that all involved have their day in court.
What's more, Dickoff believes that justice requires a reckoning with
racism's
legacy. As she said at the premiere, "With a Black man running for
President - unthinkable 40 years ago - our film serves as a reminder of how
far we've come in race relations and how far we need to go."
For information about showing the film, email neshobafilm@yahoo.com or
ProBono3@aol.com.
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