Twitter: “follow” on http://twitter.com/Adrienne_Redd   

The two-part MP3 from the interview on March 8 on KYNT can be heard at the website for the book.

Dr. Redd, Do you claim that there is a connection between the protests in Tunisia and Egypt and in Wisconsin and Ohio?

Even though people also express themselves though digital and remote media, people see on the news or on websites that public demonstrations get results so they get out there and they call for what they want.

When normal methods for differing viewpoints in society break down, people commit civil (and sometimes not so civil) disobedience, such as protesters in Madison, Wisconsin sleeping in the state capitol building hwww.msnbc.msn.com/id/41811389/ns/us_news-life.

Being able to disagree in a nonviolent way that’s integrated into the public discourse is a fundamental need. People must disagree in a normal way – through selection of their representatives in legislative bodies, the equal application of laws in the courts, and through a free and fair press.

When the already voiceless lose the opportunity to speak, literally to express themselves with words, they express themselves through assembly, disobedience and even violence turned on themselves, as was the case with Mohamed Bouazizi, the college-educated Tunisian fruit vendor who had had his little stand and his inventory taken away several times, who set himself on fire on December 17, 2010.

2 am votes held by Republicans in the majority that were cut off before everyone could be included are the identical phenomenon as shame elections in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other countries in the emerging east where there is a show or a shell of democracy but no real inclusion of the working poor.

The people in Libya today, now, and the protestors who shouted “Shame, shame” at Republican state Sen. Glenn Grothman while others shouted “peace.” Let’s remind ourselves that shame is peaceful. I feel it as the skin going up on the back of my neck, or the blood coming into my face, but I can feel it without someone slapping me. I feel it because I know the difference between right and wrong. Pretending to hold a vote or pretending to hear what people have to say, as Muammar Gaddafi has done for nearly 42 years, is wrong. Even he knows its wrong, which is why he pretends to be part of a democratic government in Libya.

Workers who want to retain the right to collective bargaining sent a message to Ohio Governor John Kasich http://theuptake.org/2011/03/02/workers-defend-their-rights-in-wisconsin-ohio/. In Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey, and elsewhere, workers know that they are going to have to tighten their belts a little. There are certainly limits to state budgets. Everybody can’t just have everything they want in terms of governmental services and have the cost be unlimited. However, skilled, semi-skilled and other workers need to be able to have the prerogative to negotiate together for safety, workers’ compensation, and other aspects of their employment. This is not about money. It’s about the right to have a say in what you do for more than half of your waking time alive and how you do it.

Are Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq and other countries in the Middle East and east and north Africa ready for democracy?

AR: Great Britain made an argument that predominantly Catholic Irishmen and women were not “ready” for self-rule and democracy. In fact, the English were the first people to make an argument about the “natural” inferiority of the “Irish race.” A question about whether Egyptians, Iranians, Tunisians, etc. are smart enough, or lawful enough, or educated enough to rule themselves is a secret question about the superiority of Western, English-speaking civilization. Of course Middle Easterners are smart, educated and empowered enough to rule themselves. If they are human, they can do it.

How can countries of the Middle East and African encourage development so as to be part of the global economy?

It’s true that there is a rule against charging interest on loans in several Islamic traditions. This rule against what is sometimes called usury was part of Christian medieval culture as well. Christians in Europe found ways to build their financial institutions, just as observant Jews find a way to switch on the lights on Saturday, which is the Jewish Sabbath and a day of rest on which no work is to be done and no “fire” is to be made. Investments for which interest is charged for loans are already being made in many majority Muslim countries. It simply requires the creation of a second layer of financial organizations. Where there is a will for development and investment, we will find a way.

How will the protests and calls for democracy in Middle Eastern countries affect the relationship between the United States and those countries?

The United States has full diplomatic relations with a number of Middle Eastern and north African countries: Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait, etc. Of course, the U.S. tends to be more deeply involved and more willing to be friendly the more valuable a given country is, either in terms of its oil reserves (as in the case of Saudi Arabia) or its military value in terms of location (as in the case of Bahrain, the tiny island country which is the base of operations for the fifth fleet in Manama of the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command. Of course, the U.S. and the rest of the wealthy world need to get off their oil addiction. Let me concentrate on saying that peace, stability, justice and cooperation in the interests of everyone, even members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The way for the U.S. To continue mutually beneficial relations with countries (on a case by case basis) of the Middle East and Africa is to look for the win-win-win conditions for each one. The United States would like to avoid armed uprisings anywhere. We want to make sure that civilians are protected. If we make a sweeping generalization, we can probably still say that countries of the Africa and the Middle East don’t want to be pressured into austerity programs by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, that they would like to receive aid that is neither simply a Band-Aid on a cut to the jugular vein of their economies, that they don’t want to be militarily occupied by countries of the wealthy world, but that they don’t mind some help in writing new constitutions after the dictators and other strong men have been thrown out of office.

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Adrienne Redd has taught Understanding Global News at Arcadia University in Philadelphia, as well as Contemporary Social Problems and other courses in sociology and political science. She is the author of Fallen Walls and Fallen Towers: The Fate of the Nation in a Global World. Visit the website for the book to read content from Fallen Walls and Fallen Towers, as well as to order the hard cover from Amazon.

Howard Zinn’s “Persons of Mean and Vile Condition” from The People’s History of the United States (1995), takes its evidence from “primary documents” from 17th century Colonial America. In it, Professor Zinn asserts that in the 17th century, land-owning elite Whites encouraged poor whites and indentured servants to group themselves with the most powerful members of society, rather than with other exploited people. Advancement of ideas of status, freedom and self-determination of poorer Whites prevented the lower classes from forming alliances with indigenous people and Black slaves, because the three groups (Indians, Blacks and poor Whites) would have outnumbered the most privileged people against whom the oppressed slaves, indentured servants and original people might have then been able to stage another armed revolt (such as Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676).

I have been thinking about Zinn’s thesis—that exploited indentured servants and other working Whites were manipulated into thinking of their racial status as more central to their identity than their class status—that they were, in actuality, persuaded to accept the rhetoric of empowerment, liberty, and White privilege trumping the necessity of revolting against their being economically used (and abused) by the powerful members of pre-America America.

I believe that this manipulation happened again 150 years later during the campaign of the man who would be the seventh president, Andrew Jackson (for whom an ancestor of mine was named). In 1828, Jackson advanced himself as the candidate, of the “common man.” The term “common man” meant several things; it referred to working White men who did not own farms of their own (whose sweat mingled with that of unpaid Blacks in building this country’s enormous wealth). The term also meant that Jackson did oppose the (even then) burgeoning power of the legal person of the corporation and of banks, also that he was a vulgarian and debaucher who drank and banged cups on the tables of the symbolic residence of American government, the White House. It seems also to have meant that he was he was neither an intellectual nor an elitist (as President Barack Obama is sometimes called), and that he was also, according to some documents, not too great at spelling. (One explanation of our ubiquitous affirmative “O.K” may have come from Jackson’s approval “oll korrect” scrawled on state papers.” Protecting the interests of the “common (White) man” meant getting the working man to ally his interests with that of the federal government, with those of White plantation owners and industrialists, and against the interests of Black slaves, and especially against the interests of Choctaw, Cherokee and other Indians, who were in 1831 marched off the land they had occupied for thousands of years.

Today, I think that this persuasion of working people to grope toward a mistaken (often Anglo-White) identity is happening again, and furthermore that it causes such people to misalign their own interests, categorizing themselves as hardworking, self-determining and indignant about “indolence” that purloins dollars from their ever-shrinking paychecks. In the name of liberty and the mythology that they can (or have already) pull(ed) themselves up by their own bootstraps, working people and members of various vocational solidarities have been talked into they idea that their decency, empowerment and identity lie with those at the pinnacle of society, Wall Street traders, bank presidents and executives of corporations who make a quarter of a million dollars per year per household or more (and who resent apportioning some of that vast prosperity) to increasingly expensive social service programs and other safety nets for people who fall on hard times, i.e. social problems—the other course I am teaching this semester at Arcadia University.

I have, of late, been filled with remorse and shame that I too have been manipulated into arguing against the interests of the most vulnerable people in the society in which I live. In a very real sense, the people in the most precarious position are those I call the working poor, that is to say, not the very bottom denizens of society, i.e. convicts in prisons, people institutionalized for other reasons, and people “poor enough” to fall under the Federal Poverty Threshold (which is about $26,000 per year for a family of four). The most vulnerable members of the society in which I live are the people not poor enough for the constellation of entitlements, subsidized housing, food stamps, and other assistance funded by a combination of the Federal governments, state governments and various other sources, such as state lotteries and “sin” taxes.

I have been seduced too. I have not been arguing on behalf of the working poor who have been mistakenly sucked into alliance with the so-called Tea Party, a tiny, vocal fragment group that is trumpeting the need to slash social programs and creeping government control of business interests and profit-makers. I was not arguing on their behalf because the barely-suppressed racism of “I’m not gonna let you take more taxes out of my pay check to redistribute it to those lazy, probably non-White urban people” is so terribly offensive to me. I was not arguing on behalf of the actual interests of working class supposed fiscal conservatives because I was filled with the joy of the potential for redemption on November 4, 2008 (the day that President Barack Obama was elected to be the 44th president of the United States). I failed to see until yesterday—when I saw more of the protests by teachers and other union members against not only the gutting of their previously-negotiated retirement funds, but also against their future potential to even bargain collectively for such plans. On other occasions, I have been vocal about the ways in which unionized teachers seem to argue on their own behalf against the interests of the students they teach.

However, yesterday I saw clearly for the first time that attempts by fiscally strapped state governments to de-fund retirement plans and other publicly funded supports of working people are in the interest of the people in the very top layer of society, and are terribly detrimental to the stability of and very foundations of justice and American ideals. I failed to see that I have a grave responsibility (as someone who teaches courses with titles like Understanding Global News, The Sociology of Whiteness and Contemporary Social Problems) that I need to explain in simple terms that a stable society, one in which my son and daughter and nieces and nephews are safe, is a society that like any good army does not leave its vulnerable or wounded behind. A good army or a secure and prosperous nation does not leave behind the people to whom it has made promises or who are in need of a hand in time of hardship. I takes them by the hand, carries them on a metaphorical stretcher, or slings them over its shoulder, though doing so may momentarily slow the advance of the whole.

Thanks to Chris Hedges, author of The Death of the Liberal Class, for this final analogy of the essay, employed in his NPR interview of February 22, 2011.

“I understand that I am talking to a 19-year-old man and a Marine, to boot (pun intended), and that you guys greatly enjoy blowing $*#@!$ up. That said, I urge you to explore the scholarship of some visionary military leaders and spooks. (I am thinking of President Dwight David Eisenhower and Chalmers Johnson), and there are other wonderful examples, as well. (If you would like me to put together a reading list, let me know).

The former was a general before he was the most powerful man in the world, and therefore no stranger to decisiveness and bloodshed. Yet, his greatest contribution to Western civilization was the speech he made on leaving office which warned against the injustices and cancerous decline of the U.S.A. via a standing army whose raison d’être becomes its own insatiable hunger to grow and gobble up the taxes (and liberties) of civilians.

The latter, Chalmers Johnson, who just died in late 2010, referred to himself (and was referred to by others in the know) as an “old Cold Warrior.” He was an analyst of the policies and capabilities of Japan and Maoist China for the CIA, but he also had an epiphany late in life and realized (as did Eisenhower) that American hegemony over the world is a dangerous tiger to get by the tail. Empire-like control is ever-hungry. Furthermore, it does not advance our precious and magnificent American liberties, nor propagate democracy. It merely rams our military might down the throats of those around the world whom we dominate, until our doing so bankrupts us and devastates the very stability we mistakenly thought we were advancing.

I don’t advocate peace through surrender. There is truly evil in the world against which we must fight, both metaphorically and with weapons. If I am a “peacenik,” I would like to think that I am in the same way as my friend and colleague, Amos Davidowitz, an officer and career solder in the Israeli army—a man who has spent his life respecting and protecting civilians and enemy combatants who often revile him, as a soldier, an Israeli, and a Jew.

I see Amos’s same nuanced intelligence and compassion in you; I urge you not to fear the use of force when it is the only way to protect your sisters and brothers in arms, or your fellow Americans, or other human beings whom you are charged to protect.

However, you should also strive to use force effectively—and only when it is necessary, and more importantly to help build a world in which less force is necessary. Doing that means striving to understand the complex political and social systems that cause societies to clash in the first place. It means understanding that people are radicalized not only by ideological memes but by the starvation thrust on them by former colonizers—and current colonizers, in the form of multinational corporations.

I happen to believe that only cowards urge the world to lay down its arms completely. And I also believe that only cowards attempt to completely crush their enemies. The heroes are those who navigate a path through the horrifyingly complex task of understanding exploitation, and economics, and culture and society and they are heroes who help those systems to mature and cope with vast differences—in moral values, religious traditions, worldviews, economies, and ways of sharing power. To some limited extent, this is what I have attempted to do in my book, Fallen Walls and Fallen Towers: The Fate of the Nation in a Global World.

I took your advice and have ordered Restrepo (2010) and will watch it with my husband. In turn, I urge you to watch and absorb the implications of the documentary Why We Fight (Eugene Jarecki, 2006). And it’s my hope that you and I will have many more conversations and debates. I hope that you will live up to being the best you can be.

Admiringly,

Adrienne Redd

Bethlehem is a place that I left twenty years ago, but I will always have a deep fondness for and loyalty to my home town, town of music, town of gritty iron ore red sunsets, home to a long, rusty dinosaur of the steel entombed by the Lehigh River, town of Asa Packer’s enterprise, town of drunks who recycle their glass bottles.

Arkady, my eight-year-old son, and I had an improvised lunch with my father and then zipped off to rendezvous with my old friend (another faculty brat, as I am) David Amidon and to visit his father, who taught in a self-created special subdepartment of history at Lehigh University, urban studies. As we came up over Wyandotte hill and down the other side, greeted by a topless bar where I applied for a job as a waitress some time in 1979 (but decided not to work there because there had been a knife fight the week before), I was filled with sweet nostalgia for the grungy little neighborhoods clinging to the mountainside and I began to sing softly to myself:

O little town of Bethlehem
How still we see thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.

Arkady repeated back to me the second-last line, “the hopes and fears of all the years…” and commented, “That must have been a scary night.” He was, of course, not thinking of the Christian mythology of the imminent birth of a messiah, but something more like how he and other ordinary people experience their hopes and fears. I tried on what his matter-of-fact perception of the lyrics might be like, the hopes and fears of the people all around me in the tiny gray, pink, and beige aluminum-sidinged houses teetering precipitously above Fountain Hill, and I replied, “Well, I think every night is like that–people’s hopes and fears come together.”

The next stop after lunch with my 79-year-old dad was to visit Big Dave Amidon, retired professor of history at Lehigh University.

Chandler Ullman Hall

Big Dave Amidon and the urban studies program. I remember that Yugo that Big Dave drove. He would leave tires on until they were completely bald – and when he got into that car, it literally sagged lower from his body weight.

Weirdly, I never took a single class with him, but I used to hang out and talk to him all the time. He taught me the true meaning of “diversity” something no liberal ever could.

Fritz Laboratory. I’m not completely sure I was ever IN Fritz lab. I do remember a contest (open to the whole university population) OUTSIDE of Fritz lab that I won – to make a contraption to protect an egg from being an egg from being broken for the fall off of the top of the building. There were some pissed off Physics majors with regard to an English major winning the contest. I put the egg in a small empty carton for orange juice (re-filled with popcorn) inside a second empty half-gallon milk carton also re-filled with popcorn. The egg remained unbroken for seven trips off of the top of Fritz Laboratory.

Joanne Dinsmore, whose father had his office there and says that she “practically lived in Fritz Lab” says, “It was so cool when they inaugurated the big stress tester. After smashing some shit, they cleaned off the plate and put an egg on it. Down came the crusher plate. Slowly. Slowly. It rested on the shell. Then a tiny bit more. A crack in the surface. They raised the crusher plate. A chick poked its head through the crack. Way cool. I’ll always remember that.”

Packard Laboratory. The huge, cattle-call 8 am lectures of Engineering 1 (taught for my incoming class in 1979 by Robert Johnson, angry at the world because he had just found out he had multiple sclerosis) and Economic 1 (taught by Richard Aronson, the last of “my” generation of professors to retire) took place in the auditorium at the basement level.

In that same year, there were roving fraternity dogs all around Lehigh’s campus – without collars or ID or anything. A pair of them got up on the dais and one started humping the other during a lecture for Eco 1. Not to be upstaged, Richie Aronson quickly made signs and taped them on the dogs, labeling the humper “supply” and the humpee “demand.”

Packard Laboratory. I also took Engineering I here. An 8 am lecture taught by a professor named Robert Johnson. He had just found out that year that he had multiple sclerosis and he was angry at the world. He stood in front of nearly a thousand students and told us that it was his job to flunk half of us – and he was fully enthusiastic about living up to that task!

Vine and 4th Streets. McAdoo’s, that was such a sweet place. David Stengle’s and my VERY first date was at his parent’s house at 520 West 3rd Street and David cooked for me. The whole family had cleared out so we could have privacy. Our SECOND date was at McAdoo’s. I am not completely sure which store front it is, but will take several from which you can choose. I paid for dinner, which was a pleasant surprise to David.

Joanne Dinsmore: I waitressed at McAdoo’s during Jimmy Carter’s campaign. Adrienne: 1980 was the first presidential election in which I was old enough to vote. I was a contrarian and therefore voted for Anderson.

(Formerly) Union Bank on West 4th Street. Jodi Dinsmore: My dad walked out of this bank one day and looked up and saw several flying saucers. Everyone on the street did. Several walked over to the Globe Times office to tell them. Dad has no recollection of this. Did I dream it?

Um, can’t help you with the flying saucers. I know that David Dowling told me that he saw flying saucers. He just in an untimely way in 2010. I do remember the fire at the theater at the corner of 3rd and Broadway, across from New Bethany Ministries, if that helps.

On Ontario Street in Bethlehem, where my ex-husband, still lived for several years after I moved away, there was a house of many children. That’s what my next door neighbor, Amy, called it, with irritation in her voice at their noise and at their hungry eyes peeping over her fence. Amy and her husband, Bill, moved in after my ex-husband and I did, and she was quick to tell people that she and Bill wouldn’t always live there. She was a little disappointed that this was the best they could afford. Me—I loved the muted clamor of kids and dogs, especially in the evening. At dusk, in the summer, the hilly neighborhood folded up around you like a blanket. You could camp out in the backyard and watch the sky turn pink. But I’m the one who moved away first before Amy did.

The children ran free like wild things and lived on ice cream from the truck that rolled down Ontario Street, beckoning with a jangly, tinny tune. They drank the Kool-Aid and ate the cookies I gave them and scraped their knees and accepted the Band-Aids I scrounged out of a drawer. They “helped” me in the garden by digging up newts and rocks until I couldn’t stand the distractions anymore and had to shoo them home for a while. Their pale, streaked faces looked up into mine when they’d taken a tumble and I’d asked them if they were okay. Their hair and hands smelled of earth, and sugar candy and the funny pages, which still caught children’s interest then.

The street on which my father’s parents lived in Toledo, Ohio — Victoria Place, with its huge oak trees and majestic front doors—had a house of many children, too. The neighborhood was turning (a racist comment), that my grandmother used to make, grimly, softly. The family name of the house of many children was Martin; I never once saw the parents, who seemed to have abandoned the oldest girl, Ann, to care for the brood of a dozen grubby little ones.

My grandmother, whom I called “Nana,” with soft vowels, “Aaah,” had eyes in the back of her head, as she said, and my grandparents’ house wasn’t an easy place for mischief, unless it was instigated by my grandfather, my “Pa.” The house of many children was a wellspring of cruel, destructive, and delicious pranks. My sister, Rachel, and I would sneak down the street with them and watch, guiltily and with glee, when they would stuff a sack with dog poop, light it and leave it on a neighbor’s doorstep, ringing the door bell. We laughed ourselves silly when tan occupant ran out to stomp out the fire only to soil his shoes. Or they would fill someone’s mailbox with shaving cream. Or feed peanut butter to the neighborhood dogs so their jaws became glued shut and their heads bobbed spasmodically as they tried to pry the goo off the roofs of their mouths.

But all was not carefree at the house of many children. The everyday nurturing that Rachel and I took for granted was not provided there. I nearly gagged one day when Maggie—a self-reliant waif, halfway between Rachel and me in age—sniffed at several bowls and cups festering in the sink, to find the least rancid ones in which to have a snack and a drink of water. Their house was a shambles; their faces dirty and streaked; their clothing tattered. To buy hot dogs, candy, soda and other summertime staples, Johnny and Justin, one of two pairs of twins, and my age, but seemingly worlds older, scrounged deposit bottles door-to-door, toting them in a red wagon with crooked wheels, and cashing them in for nickels at the grocery store. Tom and Al, the older boys, washed cars, mowed lawns and pawned things from their house—and other people’s houses too.

Though we savored their wildness and freedom, Rachel and I were a little wary of the Martins. When we tired of din and chaos, we walked back, past four or five houses, to the shade of the oak trees in the front yard and the sunny flower garden in the back yard. Inside the house, we could play with my grandmother’s collection of ceramic dogs or sit in the landing at the top of the stairs, with its magazine table filled with sewing notions, playing cards and my Pa’s word games.

Sometimes Pa would beckon to one or two children passing by the house to join him on the porch. Then more children would appear, as sparrows do, after you feed the first one. They were uncouth and raucous, jostling each other for a place at my Pa’s feet. Nana made a show of being annoyed, saying, “Oh Dale, you can’t adopt every child in town.” Then she would reappear with freshly baked raisin muffins. Pa had a magical, taming effect on the wild children. When they bickered or fought over the food, he’d settle them down with one look, so gently, it hardly seemed like discipline. “No manners, no treats,” he’d say. Referring to a cartoon book of ill bred youngsters, he’d ask, “Are you a goop?” After he’d shared the food — muffins or waxy, cheap hand-dipped ice cream cones from a carton he’d spirited from the basement—with five or six or eight or ten urchins, Pa would teach us rhymes, like:
“Fuzzy wuzzy was a bear
Fuzzy wuzzy had no hair
Fuzzy wuzzy wasn’t fuzzy, was he?”

Or he would sing a snatch of a popular song, like, “Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamsy d ivy; a kiddlede diivy too, wouldn’t you?” Though he did not finish high school, because World War I came along, Pa loved words, and word games, and reading, and funny expressions, like, “He’s so crooked, he could dive through a barrel of pretzels and not get salt on ‘im,” or “I’m so hungry, I could eat the hind end out of a hobby horse.” Or he was say, that someone was “more nervous than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.” Sometimes he’d sit and coax the children to take turns struggling through the funny papers, because he knew they didn’t much help with homework at home. A favorite was “Family Circle,” with its single, circular frame, chubby kids, and episodes from the children’s point of view, and childish drawings of the characters. Sitting on the porch, the Martins seemed less feral, and I felt safe and surrounded by good cheer.

My grandfather collapsed unexpectedly from an aneurysm on September 14, 1970. I was nine and a half. The call came in the morning from my Aunt Katie, my father’s brother’s wife. My grandfather had been rushed to the hospital. That night my aunt called again to say that he had died on the operating table. My father staggered a few feet from the upstairs hall telephone and sat down hard on the bed in my room. “My mother was there at my father’s side, pleading for him to share his feelings with her. “What Dick, what?” My sister and I were there, absorbing my parents’ grief, wordlessly, through our eyes, through our skin. The dog, Hector, a gruff old mutt, burrowed his head between my father’s hands. Then, my father sank over and allowed himself to cry into Hector’s patchy black hair.

Our family flew the five hundred miles to Toledo; it was the only time we spent the money to fly. We stayed at my grandparents’ house on Victoria Place. Before we left on the day of the funeral, Rachel and I played underneath the big oak in the front yard, making tiny men from sticks and using acorns for their heads. There was an emptiness on the street and a wound in the world, like the great gash from lightning through the tree in my aunt and uncle’s yard, next door. A tornado had ripped the mighty tree open. Half the tree died and rotted away, but half lived, gummed over with black tar. A little more died every year until the gash swallowed up the tree and one morning my Great Uncle Gordon, my grandmother’s sister’s husband, had men come and take the tree away.

My father and mother were not religious, nor am I today, but I made a cross, smaller than my palm, out of twigs lashed together with green strips of bark. I carried it in my pocket and I believed that if I had the courage to drop it in Pa’s coffin, to lay it on his chest, that he would come back to life. I was willing to try any magic there was to make him be alive on the front porch again, telling stories, making us share. I wanted him to tease a smile out of Nana, to sing a silly song, to fill the rooms with warmth again.

So many people loved my grandfather. They all came to the funeral, neighbors, my mother’s side of the family too, people who had known my Pa for half a lifetime, half a century. When we came home to Victoria Place, I looked at the mantle with its hundreds of cards, doubled and tripled in layers because there were so many. Nana saw me looking. Her face tight with the tears she couldn’t cry, she handed me a card. I looked at it; on the outside was a dove, all glitter and cheap iridescence, bought with those hard-sought nickels. On the inside, wobbly and smudged, were the signatures of the inhabitants of the house of many children.

Later as an adult, it seems to me that their sending that card, since there was no adult guidance in their lives, was one of their first steps into an adult world and my knowing that they would miss my Pa too makes my mourning, as it cascades back into the past, a shared thing, if not easier.

Below are my notes (not a transcript, but my talking notes) from my interview on December 7, 2010 with David Leonard,
 news director
 of www.kynt1450.com radio of Yankton, SD.

Buy Fallen Walls and Fallen Towers: The Fate of the Nation in a Global World.

DL: Who is Adrienne Redd? (This reply moved below).

DL: How has our world changed in the aftermath of 9-11?



AR: We were suddenly encouraged to be afraid, and therefore to embody the terror in the word terrorism, which is about our emotional reaction, by the way, not the perpetrators of politicized violence against civilians.

There is, of course Franklin Roosevelt’s first inaugural speech, in which he says, “This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5057/



But consider also Warren G. Harding’s first major speech in which he said, “Our people must give and take. Prices must reflect the receding fever of war activities. Perhaps we never shall know the old levels of wages again, because war invariably readjusts compensations, and the necessaries of life will show their inseparable relationship, but we must strive for normalcy to reach stability. www.firstworldwar.com/source/harding1921inauguration.htm



In contrast, we now have the Department of Homeland Security color-coded alert levels. Today, December 7, albeit the 59th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the day after a major terrorist attack, the threat seems unnecessarily high to me. The United States government’s national threat level is Elevated, or Yellow. For all domestic and international flights, the U.S. threat level is High, or Orange.
www.dhs.gov/files/programs/Copy_of_press_release_0046.shtm 




DL: What are the real threats that America faces both from within and without?


AR: The greatest threat is failing to economically, legally, and socially include people who can actually make the U.S. more secure and strong.

 Mention of Fareed Zakaria. Immigration hysteria and “slow motion holocaust.”

DL: Are we headed towards a one-world government? and if so what will that be 
like?



AR: Well, first all of all, we’ve never had never had anything remotely approaching world government and I feel that we never will. It just important to have a significant portion of leadership and policy-making that takes place closer to people and which takes into account their specifics of culture, local economy, even climate. If we did have more stipulation of human rights and global policies, such as pertaining to trade, that would be more like governance than government.

DL: Not yet completely answered question: How can we tell when international intervention is appropriate?

Adrienne’s version of the Sorting Hat (Harry Potter movies)

Four categories in which to place what I call the “political surprises” of the late 20th and early 21st century.

1) global-metanational structures (like so-called “one-world governance.”)

2) desire to participate in the “flat world” or global economy

3) ethnic chaos, such as seemed to spark the Bosnia wars.

4) imperial control to prevent chaos/ empire

For a brief discussion of rational anarchists listen to the interview. Please see also the attached chart entitled the American Political Landscape of Social Versus Economic Liberty chart.

Email me at adrienne@redd.com for an “invitation” to www.box.net so you can listen to the interview.

The one answer that I wanted to finish in response to David Leonard’s final question is when it is or is not appropriate to interview in the internal affairs of countries who are abusing or violating the human rights of their citizenry.

DL: Who is Adrienne Redd? (This reply moved below).

AR: Adrienne Redd is the wife of Philadelphia-area technologist and businessman, Rick Bunker, 2nd-grader, Arkady Redd Bunker, and author and dyspeptic Parisian, Dalea Redd Reichgott. She is the author of Fallen Walls and Fallen Towers: The Fate of the Nation in a Global World (2010), Nimble Books, LLC. A professor of sociology and communications at Arcadia University in greater Philadelphia, she has developed courses and seminars such as Understanding Global News, the Individual versus the Common Good, and the Sociology of American Whiteness. For over a decade, she has also taught Contemporary Social Problems, Race, Gender and Social Class, Introduction to Social Welfare, and Media Studies.

Dr. Redd holds a Ph.D. in human and organizational systems, and masters degrees in sociology and human and organizational systems.

From 1984 until 1987, along with three other students from Lehigh University (all in the philosophy club), she founded and operated a used book store, The Saurus, that became a hub for political discussion, community forums, and activism.

She was a freelance journalist between 1984 and 1998, writing about the environment, business, politics, as well as arts and culture. She has been the monthly film discussion moderator at several movie theaters in the greater Philadelphia since 1999 and has moderate discussions for the Regional Jewish Film Festival and the Holocaust Film Series.

She has made a life-long commitment to social change and activism, volunteering for years for New Bethany Ministries (homeless shelter in Bethlehem) and Manna on Main Street (soup kitchen in Lansdale). She has advocated for health care reform (introducing legislation in Pennsylvania in 2008) and helped to pass one of the first recycling programs in the eastern U.S., PA Act 101 of 1989.

She was the assistant recycling coordinator of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania between 1989 and 1991. The program is still considered one of the most successful municipal recycling programs in the United States, removing nearly half of waste stream for recycling.

She has coordinated numerous electoral campaigns, and has herself run for office. She is the former president of the Pennsylvania Young Democrats.

The nine years since the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center have been, for me, nine years of research to make sense of the events of that day. I have concluded that nations and international cooperations (which are made up of nations) must find new ways to contend with entities that are not nations, but which act in the global political sphere. This doesn’t mean giving up on the goal of stability in a community of nations. It means picking and choosing among the useful characteristics of long-established institutions and discarding what has become obsolete or overtly destructive.

On the day that passengers over western Pennsylvania forced down a plane aimed at the White House, ossified boundaries of national sovereignty, distance, and cost had been failing to stop forces of economic demand for at least a decade and a half. Globalization had been outpacing political evolution with terrible consequences in terms of poverty and exploitation of developing countries. Nations both great and vulnerable had already lost control over money, people, products and information. National governance and conventions couldn’t plug up a tidal wave of communication, workers and commerce.

Historical institutions and political barriers that once seemed as sturdy as the Maginot Line have been pressured by globalization for decades. As a result, between 1990 and the present, over 30 new nations were reconfigured, dissolved or came into existence—more than in any other historical period except the wave of decolonization after World War II.  Shocking transformations like the breaking of nations, the implosion of the communist world, and the events of September 11, 2001 are evidence that the affairs of the United States, of other nations, and of international governance need to be conducted differently.

Efforts by totalitarian countries to place watertight seals on borders resulted instead in their collapsing under the pressure of workers, commodities, and ideas that wanted to flow freely. The breaching of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and ensuing collapse of the Soviet Union stunned onlookers, but it need not have.

Here in Pennsylvania, we have seen centuries-old retaining walls unwisely mortared by new property owners. The old stone walls were built to keep earth in place but to let the rain run through. When the water can’t seep between the rocks, it overwhelms the barrier and the whole hillside comes down.  Expanding this metaphor to foreign affairs, it is a mistake to fail to understand what nations are and are not, and what they can and cannot achieve. Trying to control flows too absolutely may result in complete failure.

It is possible to see evidence of this along the line between the United States and Mexico. Border policies in need of update have destabilized communities between the countries rather than protecting them.

There is also grave peril in apprehending every globally relevant action as a reflection of national will. Seven thousand miles from a congregation whose pastor proposes to burn a Koran in reaction to the murders by 19 terrorists, citizens of other countries may interpret such misguided rage as an insult from Americans overall. Al Qaeda no more represents Muslims, nor the citizens of predominantly Muslim nations than Terry Jones represents Christians or Americans.

As a result of such inflexibility and miscategorization, either more collapses are impending, or the nation as it was conceived more than three centuries ago must update and refine its mission. The end stage of this massive shift is unpredictable. This acknowledged, I recommend that great nations—like the United States, and members of the EU and the G20 seek clarity about which responsibilities nations must fulfill, such as protecting and promoting the wellbeing of their citizens. What national governments shouldn’t do is trying to impose impermeable barriers or strictures, such as dictating cultural norms, or misunderstanding the lashing out of a few as the actions of a nation or entire religious group.

The flailing of non-nation actors and entities should not be confused with national policies.  Leaders and public intellectuals must reinvent global political order that continues to privilege nations as the most promising political structure but also identifies what a legitimate nation is or is not. Doing this may mean building on what is sturdy and useful in the institution of the constitutional democracy and discarding what is too rigid or fragile. It may also mean turning the problems cause by insurgencies and poor policy back over to nation-state governments rather than making all problems the responsibility of NATO, the UN, other macroregional alliance or the great, rich, imperialist powers, such as the U.S.

The way that we as individuals are empowered to do this is by choosing our words with precision. One persistent mistake in public discourse, for example, is the term “Af-Pak.” This pseudo-military jargon denies the potential for redemption, goals of autonomy, identity and rich culture of the two countries by conflating them.

Leaders and public intellectuals must reinvent global political order. The call to re-imagining international organization came nine years ago, so why haven’t they? One reason is that it’s difficult to know what hub the world turns on. Politicized ethnic identity? Something above nations? Or the global economy? My answer is that we have lost sight of the potential of the nation and that we must tirelessly pursue the necessary maturation that can follow from the trauma of 9/11.

What was my purpose in recording and presenting these messages? There is much wringing of hands over the lost voice of the ordinary person, subsumed in a sea of more polished, or at least more orchestrated and more widely disseminated information and media. Part of my purpose is to celebrate that common voice, which seems very strong and clear in this instance. This photo essay is about public display – and yet it pertains to all of our private responses, as well.

The photographs also contain a sense of my physical presence and thereby –  the viewer’s.  Shooting up at the signs causes a flattening of the image and quadrangles no longer have right angles. That sense of looking up, speaks of us, the readers, anyone passing by, being meant to see the signs.

The terrorists “hit us where we live” as it were – and roadside signs are similarly posted where the writer of the sign lives (or works). These are not dutiful corporate messages. In each case, the writer is an individual, your neighbor or owner of a small business. And the only agenda is that the writer has is to share how she or he feels.

New York seems to me to be the American ideal concentrated – “the best dream man has ever dreamed,” as Randy Newman put it in the song “Sigmund Freud’s Impersonation Of Albert Einstein In America.” I broke down again in tears for the twentieth time in days, hearing National Public Radio’s Scott Simon talk about the emptiness that those two towers left when they collapsed.  My husband wept, driving into the city for the first time after the attacks and said that the hole left by the towers was like a limb amputated from a human being. I hope, as many must, that lower Manhattan will be re-built.  (I wrote this nine years ago; I add to this hope now that the memory of the 60 Muslims who died when the World Trade Center Came down receive the same respect in the revitalization of the downtown as the other victims).

I experience in moments of grief not only horror at the loss of life, but the larger symbolic significance of on the attack on New York. Nonetheless, the Pentagon was attacked too, and passengers sacrificed themselves in bringing down a fourth plane in rural western Pennsylvania. So, Pennsylvania has a story to tell too.  These photos tell the story of the reaction of people 100 miles west of the great city, people 100 miles west feeling grief, seeking comfort, rallying around the flag, watching the story with horror through television and computer screens, asserting their pride, bolstering one another, worrying about war and offering their opinions to anyone who cares to read them, posted at the roadside, where Americans pass by in their cars.

“GOD BLESS AMERICA” photographed at ADULT WORLD on Bethlehem Pike in Montgomeryville, PA. Immediately following the attack, though filled with grief, I also had a warm sense that we, Americans, and other members of the western world were as one – shocked, mourning, but also proud of being free citizens of democracies.  Two days or so after the collapse of the World Trade Center, a friend commented that he felt that people were being “more gentle” with one another. Reaching for comfort those first painful hours, I emailed news items and my own thoughts to some 700 people, but was quickly caught up in disparate threads of discussion about how to respond, dispelling that sense of solidarity. This sign captured my sense of unity and yet embodies such irony. It combines a religiously articulated message of patriotism with the legal purveyance of pornographic media, of which the religious don’t approve. One doesn’t ordinarily connect such sentiments. This type of business whose right to exist is protected by our constitution, is also an example of the very libertine culture, which may have drawn the violent rage of religious fundamentalists.

“BE AN AMERICAN THINK UNITED WE STAND” photographed at the Colonial Market on Broad Street in Lansdale, PA. I find this sign to be one of the most conceptually complex that I have seen.  The injunction to “be an American,” implies that to be an American is a volitional act, which is not true for all nationalities.  I attended the service at City Hall in Philadelphia on Thursday September 13, 2001 and Governor Tom Ridge was there.  He said, and I paraphrase, that “America is not a place on a map.  It is not geographically defined.  It is not just a word. It’s an idea – the idea of liberty and tolerance and opportunity and that idea cannot be destroyed.”  This sign seems to reflect that idea, that one chooses to be an American and in making that choice, embraces an ideal, not a physical place.  I am not sure how to process the second part of the injunction, “Think: ‘united we stand.”  Perhaps it means, “let’s put aside our differences and address this crisis together, remembering that as Americans we have more that brings us together than divides us.”

“REMEMBER THE INNOCENT & OUR FALLEN HEROES” photographed at the Barren Hill Volunteer Fire Company on Germantown Pike in Lafayette Hill, PA.  This is interesting for several reasons.  This small-town volunteer fire company got a professional-quality sign up with blistering speed, for one thing.  Also, the phrase “fallen heroes” is very interesting.  It refers, of course, to the more than 250 firefighters and police who literally rushed into a burning building to help others and paid with their lives as the towers fell.  The phrase is interesting because it takes on the rhetoric of war and patriotism, which while not inappropriate, emerges as a kind of mythologizing of this tragedy.  It is interesting even to find myself using words like “hero” and “tragedy.” The firefighters are heroes and this is a tragedy, but there is a language inflation in the coverage of earlier events that cheapens this monumental and pivotal event – the first attack on civilians on American mainland soil since the war of 1812.  This claims-making is perpetuated in the recent decision to award a newly created “liberty medal” to civilians who died in the attacks.  It will be the equivalent of the Purple Heart, awarded to military personnel who are wounded. I can’t help but note the coalition of energies and perspectives that this event has stimulated.  Cerebral lovers of New York (as embodiment of the American ideal of diversity), allied with the blue collar interests of police and firefighters, and the global alliance which has come together to fight terrorism, while the crushed corpses of Americans, British, Canadians, Mexicans, Germans, Russians, Indians are interred beneath were once among the tallest buildings in the world. I heard a commentator say that “In some ways we’re joining the rest of the world” in that most of the people in the world live with fear.  And all but one or two nations are joining us, in realizing that liberty, diversity and tolerance are worth fighting for.

“GO EAGLES  GOD BLESS AMERICA  COME IN AND SAVE” photographed at a futon outlet just east of the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge on route 73 in Pennsauken, NJ.  The football fandom comes first, even before the most common wording of acknowledgment of the September 11^th attack), followed by an injunction to come into the store and spend money. This seems to me to be the distillation of the American sentiment: hoorah for our local team; hooray for us (and a supernatural being loves us too); participate in capitalism. In southern New Jersey, I noticed a similar mix of acknowledgement of the disaster and opportunism, young men selling tee shirts saying, “Get Fired Up! Get Strong!” (on one side) and “Wanted bin Laden – Dead or Alive!” (on the other.)

“HONK 4 USA” photographed on Torresdale Avenue in northeast Philadelphia. Twelve days after the terrorist attack, I drove up and down streets of row houses in scrappy, inelegant northeast Philadelphia, finding that here, words were not the manner in which people predominantly expressed their feelings, though flags in windows and flags on cars and other displays of red, white and blue abounded.  These displays included a plastic flag woven into a fence in front of St. Bartholomew School and a freshly-displayed flag painting on Torresdale Avenue in northeast Philadelphia. One of the few verbalizations was this three-word sign tacked to a telephone pole in front of one of those houses on Torresdale Avenue which says simply, “HONK 4 USA,” an abbreviated version of the longer statements of national pride found elsewhere in the region.

In a very different neighborhood of the sprawling five-county region, beside the fence around a suburban development, I photographed, “FLY – A – U.S. – FLAG EVERY DAY.” I particularly like its idiosyncratic punctuation (the dashes and the underlining) for emphasis.

Certainly the telegraphically short messages and non-verbal displays run roughshod over greater complexity that could be conveyed. What does a candle mean?  Does the viewer receive it in the same sense that it is offered? Does it add heat or light? What does the flag mean to those who display it? What does it represent to the average person? Like a sports team whose performance varies from season to season, for whom the management changes, for whom the players change – the fans cheer for the uniform. This may be the spirit in which people fly tattered American flags on their aerials and display flags in the rain and the night.  I steadfastly refused to display yellow ribbon during the Gulf War because I disapproved of the war, but I also wanted to share some symbol publicly.

“SEEK PEACE NOT WAR” photographed on Lincoln Drive in Philadelphia.  I noticed this sign a few days after the attack when raw grief had given way to controversy over how to respond.  By the time I came back a few days later to photograph the sign, it seemed to have been vandalized.

“PEACE IS MORE THAN THE ABSENCE OF WAR” photographed on Callowhill Road, Chalfont, PA.  This was a popular slogan chanted by peace activists of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.  Though these signs are so brief and simple, it’s interesting how eight words can injects a little more complexity into our thinking of how to act now that we have been attacked on our own soil. Though most of the signs I have seen and photographed have bordered on jingoistic and far fewer have advocated pacifism, it’s also very important to me to include opposing viewpoints, because the answer to speech with which one disagrees is more speech (not force).

“GEORGE U GET THE S.O.B.S. YOU DAMN WELL BRING ‘EM TO OUR COURT!” photographed on County Line Road in Colmar, PA. The man who posted this sign is the writer of hand-lettered road signs of political content who drew me into the project of photographing roadside signs with political content. An arch conservative, he has been posting signs for more than ten years.  I admire the semiotic density of this sign: the president addressed by his first name and his name abbreviated at that, the “U” for “you,” the abbreviation of the profanity “sons of bitches,” “’em” for “them” and assumption that the reader is sufficiently familiar with mutational organizations to recognize the abbreviation for the International Criminal Court.

“YOUR MOTHER BIN LADEN” photographed on Easton Road (route 611) in Warrington, PA.  This sign fairly vibrates with raw anger and yet the writer was unwilling to write, “Fuck your mother,” which seems to be what he was thinking.  Anger is certainly one of the responses that some of us traveled through.  I remember the day it hit me, the Friday of that week. I was running in the park and I found myself fantasizing about being one of the passengers on Flight 93 that crashed in western Pennsylvania. In my fantasy, I feigned hysteria or a seizure and then gouged a hi-jacker’s eye out with my spoon.  I’m not proud of those thoughts, but I thought them.  Interestingly, I observed a number of signs expressing anger.  One on Bustleton Pike in northeast Philadelphia read, “GOD BLESS AMERICA – KILL BIN LADEN” This evoked for me Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer,” in which he expresses the irony that both sides on any conflict invoke their god to do great harm to the enemy.

“STAND PROUD AND STRONG NEVER FORGET” photographed on Swamp Road (route 313) outside Doylestown, PA.  This injunction to “never forget” is interesting to me because evokes the struggles to find mottos and other assemblages of words to immortalize what will certainly be a life-changing event for many people. December 7, 1941 was the “day that will live in infamy.” This sign similarly evokes “Remember the Alamo.”

“GOD BLESS AMERICA STAND BESIDE HER” photographed on Ridge Avenue in Roxborough (neighborhood of Philadelphia.) There was a second sign, which read, “GOD BLESS AMERICA AS WE MOURN OUR COUNTRY’S LOSS.”  I especially liked the backwards “Y” on the second sign and the fact that fire engine drove up the street just as I was snapping the picture.

Artists and critics are ordinarily very comfortable with being cynical, not caring too deeply about any issue and deriding those who do.  For me, there is little space in these expressions for cynicism. Moreover, I find it comforting to see the words of people who are unselfconscious in sharing their feelings.

There were dozens of signs that I saw that I couldn’t photograph or which were redundant and which I therefore didn’t include here.  Even as you read this, other signs are out there in the countryside and the suburbs saying, Honor Our Fallen Citizens by the Way we Treat each Other,” “Give ‘em Hell George and then send ‘em there,” “We’re with you,” “Pray for our country,” “Pray for the fallen,” “Never forget 9-11-01,” “We shall overcome” and “Keep hope alive.” There is much invocation of prayer. Although not indifferent to why humans find it psychologically and socially valuable to construct the idea of god, I am an atheist, so I choose to have thoughts, not prayers to a supernatural being.  The other people who are living through this with me and the families of those killed continue to be present in my thoughts. I wanted to know how others are experiencing this crisis – which is what inspired me to record their words and share them.

~Adrienne Redd

Originally written Sunday September 30, 2001. Philadelphia, PA

This photographic essay appeared in the Canadian magazine, Wegway and as part of an exhibition in New York City in September 2002 that subsequently toured several American cities, including Detroit and Allentown.

Fallen Walls and Fallen Towers: The Fate of the Nation in a Global World is my seven-year project to make sense of the events of September 11, 2001 and other political surprises, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, in terms of the trajectory of international relations. The Kindle version is available at Amazon and the hard back book should be up within a few hours of this post. Direct sales are available at at Nimble Books

Buy my book. Write a review. Email an announcement to everyone you know. Comment on this blog. ~ Adrienne

Today, August 28, 2010, a television personality with little grasp of history, an alarmist who is prone to invoke half-remembered allusions to totalitarian debacles of the past, will stand again in this nation’s capital and claim that the United State of American needs to “restore honor.” “Restore honor” is code for Euro-White superiority, exclusion of immigrants, and a hypocritical social safety that reduces the contribution by the most prosperous members of society through regulation, taxation and other redistribution.

Good for him.

The antidote to speech is more speech, a principle I learned most vividly from Ann Baker, a pro-choice activist who has doggedly tracked perpetrators of violence against women’s clinics and wrote “friend of the court” briefs on bombers and shooters and potential bombers and shooters via the  National Center for the Pro Choice Majority. Ann understand that tireless, clear, accurate speech is the tool to be used against extremists and other political actors with whom one might disagree. She has organized counter-protests to oppose the aggressive gauntlet that “antis” set up outside of abortion clinics, and she has actually encouraged those who oppose the legality of abortion to speak, through placards and nonviolent protest, not to kill.

Say what you feel you need to say, Glenn Beck. It is my job and the job of Jon Stewart, Keith Olberman, news reports, and bloggers who disagree to do their best to inoculate readers and thinkers against misinformation, xenophobia and confused oppositional defiance disorder. That is the magnificence of the nation-state – its self-correcting property.

In my new book, Fallen Walls and Fallen Towers: The Fate of the Nation in a Global World, I discuss this self-correcting property of the nation-state, a political structure that I claim has yet found no peer in terms of, at least, its potential to effect social justice. One of 16 public intellectuals, whose work I examine to make this point, Jürgen Habermas asserts, “[T]he idea that one part of a democratic society is capable of a reflexive intervention into society as a whole has, until now, been realized only in the context of nation-states.” (2001, p. 60) By “reflexive intervention,” Habermas means national course correction or social reform. In chapter four of my new book, I review scholarship on several central properties of the nation-state. Hume, Locke and other writers contemplating the purpose of government gave justifications for full revolt by the citizenry, in the face of abuse of their rights. However, these theorists about (pre-nation-state) government expected the options for citizens to be: 1) submit to domination, or 2) rebel and start over with a new state. They did not seek—because there had been few examples of—ways for the people to peacefully influence the trajectory of a society as a whole (i.e., its population plus the government), the capacity for self-correction that Habermas touts.

The American, Canadian, Indian, South Korean and other Constitutions guarantee citizens’ rights to criticize their government, to gather publicly, and otherwise work within the system for revisions of public policy.Nation-states with provisions for free speech, assembly, and other forms of protest are able to (in theory) and do (in practice) accommodate dissent and social innovation with relatively little societal disruption. Neither empires, nor the corporations and other entities of the global economy, nor ideologically defined subnations currently provide such codified protections of disagreement and potential for changing existing power arrangements.

Fallen Walls and Fallen Towers: The Fate of the Nation in a Global World is now available for Kindle.

The book will be available in hardcover September 11, 2010 via online bookstores in the United States, the UK, France, Japan, Germany, Australia, and India.  Bricks and mortar bookstores can order the book via Ingram or direct from Nimble.

Cited:

Habermas, Jürgen. 2001. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Trans. Max Pensky. Cambridge: MIT Press.