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Confederates and a Copperhead Seize White House

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Reality Trumps Dystopia

By Nat Krieger

Reality is morphing so fast that even dystopic entertainments are struggling to catch up.

Confederacy, a drama series green lighted in July by HBO, posits an alternate future where the Confederate States of America has triumphed in their bid for secession, and the Mason-Dixon Line continues to divide slave from free. In the actual Civil War Jubal Early’s II Corps got within six miles of Washington, but 21st century Confederates ruling from the White House? Not even the creators of Game of Thrones came up with that one.   [Read more…]

Bridges and Walls

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“While some are thinking of walls, we will continue building bridges of understanding.”

By Nat Krieger

Even though the American Society of Civil Engineers has rated 60,000 U.S. bridges structurally deficient, Donald Trump’s top infrastructure priority is building a wall.

Bridges and walls. Both learned from nature. The walls of the Alps that have protected and/or isolated Switzerland for millennia. The now flooded earthen bridge linking Asia to the Americas that brought the first immigrants to these lands.

When it comes to the imitations built by humans it may be surprising to discover that the most ancient surviving bridges are over a thousand years older than the oldest still above ground frontier walls. Surprising because Homo sapiens sapiens—the species so wise we have to say it twice—have raised a genetic propensity for group raiding that we share with chimpanzees, to the heights of planned, civilized slaughter. If the great walls that gird cities and frontiers are built on assumptions of endless war, bridges are bets on peace, exposed connective tissue born from the confidence that there other people and places worth checking out.   [Read more…]

American Dreamtime for San Diego Refugees

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By Nat Krieger

The story being read out loud in the room is illustrated with black, gray, and white sketches. It is about a man who visits the land of his birth. He brings his wife and son. The man is shown greeting a grandmother who he knew as a younger person before. Before.

Does that picture really explain before to a ninth grader with almost no English who has arrived in San Diego from a refugee camp in Thailand three weeks before? We need a bridge and Paw, a junior at Hoover High provides one.   [Read more…]

Psychology and the Cubs Fan: the World Turned Upside Down?

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By Nat Krieger

One hundred and eight years without a (I’m not superstitious, but one must respect local taboos) you know. This heritage has left Cubs fans the clearest eyed realists around. You never have to remind a Cubs fan that life is harsh and bloody, and beauty fleeting…“do tell, how about the collapse in ’69? Now that was a team, but Durocher played those guys into the ground…” And Cubs fans have little doubt what ball club life was playing for when Macbeth called it “a walking shadow, a poor player…” And what Cubs fan can forget the sound and fury over a muffed foul pop fly that signifies very little compared to the double play botched by a guy paid plenty to turn them….in short, there is no justice.   [Read more…]

Between Allah and Ennui

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By Nat Krieger

When you tire of the televised prescriptions of funereal amnesiacs, and you’re feeling nauseated by generalizations repeated so often they become shorthand for not thinking, you could do worse than listen to voices from a Muslim land where the hatreds and the loves produced by the encounter with the West—specifically La France—have been cooking and periodically exploding for a long time.   [Read more…]

Paris’ Forgotten Massacre of October 1961

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By Nat Krieger

To call the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris the worst mass killing in the City of Lights since World War II is evidence of the mainstream media’s collective and selective amnesia.

On October 17, 1961, at the climax of the Algerian War of Independence against France, tens of thousands of peaceful protesters filled the boulevards of Paris to demand an end to a police ordered curfew that prohibited “Algerian workers…[and] French Algerian Muslims” from being in the streets from 8:30 pm to 5:30 am. The Prefect of the Paris police, the same man who rounded up 1,600 Jews for the Nazis during World War II, was ready for the demonstrators. The police cordoned the Algerians off into small groups, or trapped them on bridges over the Seine, and either opened fire or waded in, batons swinging.

Thousands were arrested and detained in the same velodrome where the Jews of Paris had been held for transport to Auschwitz 19 years earlier. An estimated 200 demonstrators (the exact number will never be known) were shot or beaten to death in the streets of Paris, in prisons across the city, even in the courtyard of Police Headquarters steps from Notre Dame, their mutilated bodies dumped into the Seine for nights afterward.

As with the hundreds of other massacres committed by all sides in the decades of struggle between France and her former colonies there has never been an accounting, a trial, or any kind of process to establish the truth, let alone reconciliation.   [Read more…]

Monument Valley: The King Memorial

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By Nat Krieger

An archeologist honing her professional chops in 4015 could be forgiven for concluding that the marble and granite ruins in Washington D.C.’s Monument Valley were temples, each devoted to a deified human, or perhaps a god who took human form. If only it were so simple.

Those of us living in the third century of the republic know these were mortals. For one thing they’re all dead. Among the sons of the South for example, Thomas Jefferson has remained dead for 189 years, Martin Luther King for 48. The sanctity of their memorials’ dutifully hushed spaces is fortified and mocked by the swinging elbows of ideas, dreams, hypocrisies, even dodgy ruminations on the roles of the architect and the visitors–all stuff we can’t declare dead, or even quantify.   [Read more…]

7 billion Others : A Sea of Stories at the Museum of Photographic Arts

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By Nat Krieger

One hundred years ago movies were a new technology and folks were getting excited. Humans had been making images since there were humans but for the first time ever pictures could move, and laugh, and cry. The possibilities seemed so deliriously infinite that in 1908 Brazilian essayist João do Rio was moved to declare that, “in the future, the man of our era will be classified as the homo cinematographicus.”

Breakthrough technologies are never only children and the telephone, motion picture’s slightly older sister, was also inspiring some pretty high hopes. Writing in 1891, AT&T’s John J. Carty doffed his chief engineer’s cap and slipped into a prophet’s robe: “Someday we will build up a world telephone system, making necessary to all peoples the use of a common language or common understanding of languages, which will join all the people of the earth into one brotherhood. There will be heard throughout the earth a great voice coming out of the ether which will proclaim, ‘Peace on earth, good will towards men.'”   [Read more…]

Monument Valley: The Jefferson Memorial

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By Nat Krieger

No one else was in the place—just me and Tom Jefferson.

The only sounds came from a brutal wind lashing the bare branches of the cherry trees just outside. Austere even in warmer times, the marble walls of Jefferson’s memorial wrapped themselves in the cold, believing as marble often does that frigidity equals immortality. The early morning sun, all light and no heat, poured through the memorial’s open sides transforming the white Ionic columns into black cylinders that fell across the floor and left most of the third president in darkness.

The wind flips my notebook open but Jefferson’s bronze pony tail remains unmoved. He isn’t saying much either, strange in view of what we know of the man.   [Read more…]

Old Town Time Trip

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By Nat Krieger

Late at night in Old Town it’s not hard to time travel. The cars lining the narrow streets have turned out their lights and gone to sleep. Human activity is reduced to three women walking together. They are wearing white blouses with multicolored skirts synced by a red sash.

If you don’t see the cars or buses or trolleys the women are heading for San Diego’s past clings to their rapid steps. With straight black hair and features that cover the distance between Cortez and the Kumeyaay the women are actors leaving a set where they have been playing the sartorial and biological roots of San Diego as imagined a century and a half later.

Along the eastern side of La Plaza de Las Armas in the heart of Old Town the thick adobe walls of Casa Estudillo release the heat of the day into the night, as they have for 185 years. The casa’s tall wooden doors are shut and the courtyard garden within, visible only through a skeleton key shaped hole, dreams again of the corn and beef flavored smoke that once poured from the outdoor clay oven.   [Read more…]

Yazidi Moon

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By Nat Krieger

On the night of August 10th the people of San Diego looked up in the sky and saw exactly what thousands of Yazidi men, women, and children trapped on the slopes of Mount Sinjar saw: a supermoon, the moon closer to our planet than it will be for more than another year.

In the day leading to the super, or perigean moon, I searched the web trying to find something out about this people on the verge of extermination. There isn’t much. First the shock of learning that for nearly a thousand years a faith described as syncretic and nonviolent had withstood the never ending storm surge of monotheism spinning across the Middle East and Mesopotamia…

…Followed by the realization that, as with most religious minorities who don’t force their beliefs on other groups and rely on oral tradition to teach their children, the few written accounts of the Yazidis are nearly all by outsiders who offer mainly speculation as to when the religion started, or why, or what its roots are.   [Read more…]

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