Leftists Explain Things to Me

By Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch

27 September 12

ear Allies,

Forgive me if I briefly take my eyes off the prize to brush away some flies, but the buzzing has gone on for some time. I have a grand goal, and that is to counter the Republican right with its deep desire to annihilate everything I love and to move toward far more radical goals than the Democrats ever truly support. In the course of pursuing that, however, I've come up against the habits of my presumed allies again and again.

O rancid sector of the far left, please stop your grousing! Compared to you, Eeyore sounds like a Teletubby. If I gave you a pony, you would not only be furious that not everyone has a pony, but you would pick on the pony for not being radical enough until it wept big, sad, hot pony tears. Because what we're talking about here is not an analysis, a strategy, or a cosmology, but an attitude, and one that is poisoning us. Not just me, but you, us, and our possibilities.

Leftists Explain Things to Me

The poison often emerges around electoral politics. Look, Obama does bad things and I deplore them, though not with a lot of fuss, since they're hardly a surprise. He sometimes also does not-bad things, and I sometimes mention them in passing, and mentioning them does not negate the reality of the bad things.

The same has been true of other politicians: the recent governor of my state, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was in some respects quite good on climate change. Yet it was impossible for me to say so to a radical without receiving an earful about all the other ways in which Schwarzenegger was terrible, as if the speaker had a news scoop, as if he or she thought I had been living under a rock, as if the presence of bad things made the existence of good ones irrelevant. As a result, it was impossible to discuss what Schwarzenegger was doing on climate change (and unnecessary for my interlocutors to know about it, no less figure out how to use it).

So here I want to lay out an insanely obvious principle that apparently needs clarification. There are bad things and they are bad. There are good things and they are good, even though the bad things are bad. The mentioning of something good does not require the automatic assertion of a bad thing. The good thing might be an interesting avenue to pursue in itself if you want to get anywhere. In that context, the bad thing has all the safety of a dead end. And yes, much in the realm of electoral politics is hideous, but since it also shapes quite a bit of the world, if you want to be political or even informed you have to pay attention to it and maybe even work with it.

Instead, I constantly encounter a response that presumes the job at hand is to figure out what's wrong, even when dealing with an actual victory, or a constructive development. Recently, I mentioned that California's current attorney general, Kamala Harris, is anti-death penalty and also acting in good ways to defend people against foreclosure. A snarky Berkeley professor's immediate response began, "Excuse me, she's anti-death penalty, but let the record show that her office condoned the illegal purchase of lethal injection drugs."

Apparently, we are not allowed to celebrate the fact that the attorney general for 12% of all Americans is pretty cool in a few key ways or figure out where that could take us. My respondent was attempting to crush my ebullience and wither the discussion, and what purpose exactly does that serve?

This kind of response often has an air of punishing or condemning those who are less radical, and it is exactly the opposite of movement- or alliance-building. Those who don't simply exit the premises will be that much more cautious about opening their mouths. Except to bitch, the acceptable currency of the realm.

My friend Jaime Cortez, a magnificent person and writer, sent this my way: "At a dinner party recently, I expressed my pleasure that some parts of Obamacare passed, and starting 2014, the picture would be improved. I was regaled with reminders of the horrors of the drone program that Obama supports, and reminded how inadequate Obamacare was. I responded that it is not perfect, but it was an incremental improvement, and I was glad for it. But really, I felt dumb and flat-footed for being grateful."

The Emperor Is Naked and Uninteresting

Maybe it's part of our country's Puritan heritage, of demonstrating one's own purity and superiority rather than focusing on fixing problems or being compassionate. Maybe it comes from people who grew up in the mainstream and felt like the kid who pointed out that the emperor had no clothes, that there were naked lies, hypocrisies, and corruptions in the system.

Believe me, a lot of us already know most of the dimples on the imperial derriere by now, and there are other things worth discussing. Often, it's not the emperor that's the important news anyway, but the peasants in their revolts and even their triumphs, while this mindset I'm trying to describe remains locked on the emperor, in fury and maybe in self-affirmation.

When you're a hammer everything looks like a nail, but that's not a good reason to continue to pound down anything in the vicinity. Consider what needs to be raised up as well. Consider our powers, our victories, our possibilities; ask yourself just what you're contributing, what kind of story you're telling, and what kind you want to be telling.

Sitting around with the first occupiers of Zuccotti Park on the first anniversary of Occupy, I listened to one lovely young man talking about the rage his peers, particularly his gender, often have. But, he added, fury is not a tactic or a strategy, though it might sometimes provide the necessary energy for getting things done.

There are so many ways to imagine this mindset -- or maybe its many mindsets with many origins -- in which so many are mired. Perhaps one version devolves from academic debate, which at its best is a constructive, collaborative building of an argument through testing and challenge, but at its worst represents the habitual tearing down of everything, and encourages a subculture of sourness that couldn't be less productive.

Can you imagine how far the Civil Rights Movement would have gotten, had it been run entirely by complainers for whom nothing was ever good enough? To hell with integrating the Montgomery public transit system when the problem was so much larger!

Picture Gandhi's salt marchers bitching all the way to the sea, or the Zapatistas, if Subcomandante Marcos was merely the master kvetcher of the Lacandon jungle, or an Aung San Suu Kyi who conducted herself like a caustic American pundit. Why did the Egyptian revolutionary who told me about being tortured repeatedly seem so much less bitter than many of those I run into here who have never suffered such harm?

There is idealism somewhere under this pile of bile, the pernicious idealism that wants the world to be perfect and is disgruntled that it isn't -- and that it never will be. That's why the perfect is the enemy of the good. Because, really, people, part of how we are going to thrive in this imperfect moment is through élan, esprit du corps, fierce hope, and generous hearts.

We talk about prefigurative politics, the idea that you can embody your goal. This is often discussed as doing your political organizing through direct-democratic means, but not as being heroic in your spirit or generous in your gestures.

Left-Wing Vote Suppression

One manifestation of this indiscriminate biliousness is the statement that gets aired every four years: that in presidential elections we are asked to choose the lesser of two evils. Now, this is not an analysis or an insight; it is a cliché, and a very tired one, and it often comes in the same package as the insistence that there is no difference between the candidates. You can reframe it, however, by saying: we get a choice, and not choosing at all can be tantamount in its consequences to choosing the greater of two evils.

But having marriage rights or discrimination protection or access to health care is not the lesser of two evils. If I vote for a Democrat, I do so in the hopes that fewer people will suffer, not in the belief that that option will eliminate suffering or bring us to anywhere near my goals or represent my values perfectly. Yet people are willing to use this "evils" slogan to wrap up all the infinite complexity of the fate of the Earth and everything living on it and throw it away.

I don't love electoral politics, particularly the national variety. I generally find such elections depressing and look for real hope to the people-powered movements around the globe and subtler social and imaginative shifts toward more compassion and more creativity. Still, every four years we are asked if we want to have our foot trod upon or sawed off at the ankle without anesthetic. The usual reply on the left is that there's no difference between the two experiences and they prefer that Che Guevara give them a spa pedicure. Now, the Che pedicure is not actually one of the available options, though surely in heaven we will all have our toenails painted camo green by El Jefe.

Before that transpires, there's something to be said for actually examining the differences. In some cases not choosing the trod foot may bring us all closer to that unbearable amputation. Or maybe it's that the people in question won't be the ones to suffer, because their finances, health care, educational access, and so forth are not at stake.

An undocumented immigrant writes me, "The Democratic Party is not our friend: it is the only party we can negotiate with." Or as a Nevada activist friend put it, "Oh my God, go be sanctimonious in California and don't vote or whatever, but those bitching radicals are basically suppressing the vote in states where it matters."

Presidential electoral politics is as riddled with corporate money and lobbyists as a long-dead dog with maggots, and deeply mired in the manure of the status quo -- and everyone knows it. (So stop those news bulletins, please.) People who told me back in 2000 that there was no difference between Bush and Gore never got back to me afterward.

I didn't like Gore, the ex-NAFTA-advocate and pro-WTO shill, but I knew that the differences did matter, especially to the most vulnerable among us, whether to people in Africa dying from the early impacts of climate change or to the shift since 2000 that has turned our nation from a place where more than two-thirds of women had abortion rights in their states to one where less than half of them have those rights. Liberals often concentrate on domestic policy, where education, health care, and economic justice matter more and where Democrats are sometimes decent, even lifesaving, while radicals are often obsessed with foreign policy to the exclusion of all else.

I'm with those who are horrified by Obama's presidential drone wars, his dismal inaction on global climate treaties, and his administration's soaring numbers of deportations of undocumented immigrants. That some of you find his actions so repugnant you may not vote for him, or that you find the whole electoral political system poisonous, I also understand.

At a demonstration in support of Bradley Manning this month, I was handed a postcard of a dead child with the caption "Tell this child the Democrats are the lesser of two evils." It behooves us not to use the dead for our own devices, but that child did die thanks to an Obama Administration policy. Others live because of the way that same administration has provided health insurance for millions of poor children or, for example, reinstated environmental regulations that save thousands of lives.

You could argue that to vote for Obama is to vote for the killing of children, or that to vote for him is to vote for the protection for other children or even killing fewer children. Virtually all U.S. presidents have called down death upon their fellow human beings. It is an immoral system.

You don't have to participate in this system, but you do have to describe it and its complexities and contradictions accurately, and you do have to understand that when you choose not to participate, it better be for reasons more interesting than the cultivation of your own moral superiority, which is so often also the cultivation of recreational bitterness.

Bitterness poisons you and it poisons the people you feed it to, and with it you drive away a lot of people who don't like poison. You don't have to punish those who do choose to participate. Actually, you don't have to punish anyone, period.

We Could Be Heroes

We are facing a radical right that has abandoned all interest in truth and fact. We face not only their specific policies, but a kind of cultural decay that comes from not valuing truth, not trying to understand the complexities and nuances of our situation, and not making empathy a force with which to act. To oppose them requires us to be different from them, and that begins with both empathy and intelligence, which are not as separate as we have often been told.

Being different means celebrating what you have in common with potential allies, not punishing them for often-minor differences. It means developing a more complex understanding of the matters under consideration than the cartoonish black and white that both left and the right tend to fall back on.

Dismissiveness is a way of disengaging from both the facts on the ground and the obligations those facts bring to bear on your life. As Michael Eric Dyson recently put it, "What is not good are ideals and rhetorics that don't have the possibility of changing the condition that you analyze. Otherwise, you're engaging in a form of rhetorical narcissism and ideological self-preoccupation that has no consequence on the material conditions of actually existing poor people."

Nine years ago I began writing about hope, and I eventually began to refer to my project as "snatching the teddy bear of despair from the loving arms of the left." All that complaining is a form of defeatism, a premature surrender, or an excuse for not really doing much. Despair is also a form of dismissiveness, a way of saying that you already know what will happen and nothing can be done, or that the differences don't matter, or that nothing but the impossibly perfect is acceptable. If you're privileged you can then go home and watch bad TV or reinforce your grumpiness with equally grumpy friends.

The desperate are often much more hopeful than that -- the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, that amazingly effective immigrant farmworkers' rights group, is hopeful because quitting for them would mean surrendering to modern-day slavery, dire poverty, hunger, or death, not cable-TV reruns. They're hopeful and they're powerful, and they went up against Taco Bell, McDonald's, Safeway, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe's, and they won.

The great human-rights activist Harvey Milk was hopeful, even though when he was assassinated gays and lesbians had almost no rights (but had just won two major victories in which he played a role). He famously said, "You have to give people hope."

In terms of the rights since won by gays and lesbians, where we are now would undoubtedly amaze Milk, and we got there step by step, one pragmatic and imperfect victory at a time -- with so many more yet to be won. To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.

There are really only two questions for activists: What do you want to achieve? And who do you want to be? And those two questions are deeply entwined. Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as do it with generosity and kindness and style.

That is the small ongoing victory on which great victories can be built, and you do want victories, don't you? Make sure you're clear on the answer to that, and think about what they would look like.

Love,

Rebecca

Rebecca Solnit is the author of 15 books, including two due out next year, and a regular contributor to TomDispatch.com. She lives in San Francisco, is from kindergarten to graduate school a product of the once-robust California public educational system, and her book "A Paradise Built in Hell" is the One City/One Book choice of the San Francisco Public Library this fall.

Inside the War on Weed

By Winston Ross, The Daily Beast

27 September 12

Seventeen states say it’s OK to distribute medicinal marijuana, but increasingly, the feds don’t seem to care. Chaddwick McKeen found out the hard way, when his pot shop was raided, his Corvette seized and his business closed down for good. Winston Ross reports.

hen the telltale banging came to the door of Chaddwick McKeen's upscale condo in the Orange County town of Newport Beach, Calif., he was sure it wasn't meant for him.

"I think our neighbors are getting raided right now," he told his wife, Alysha, lying in bed next to him.

Sure, McKeen was selling pot out of a shop he says did a quarter of a million dollars worth of business in its first 10 weeks. And sure, the federal government doesn't seem to give two tokes about the California law that allows holders of medical marijuana cards to legally possess cannabis, and has been cracking down hard on alleged dispensaries over the past year or so.

But McKeen, 42, says he was operating according to the law. His OtherSide Farms-where "the grass is always greener"-was a nonprofit collective, he says, which has been a legal way to distribute marijuana in California since 2003. Also, he only had 200 plants, and he didn't plan to sell more than 200 kilograms of pot annually. As far as he knew, the feds were only targeting large-scale outfits or ones that fit certain criteria, like being close to schools or playgrounds (he wasn't anywhere near a playground).

The story of how McKeen-along with his wife and stepdaughter-found himself handcuffed, his belongings seized, and his business shuttered, shows the extent to which even bit players in the booming marijuana business are finding themselves in the crosshairs of a simmering battle between states and the federal government over who has the right to make and enforce drug laws. It's also a rare look inside what grumpy stoners across America are calling Obama's "War on Weed."

Over the past two decades, as more states have allowed some form of medicinal pot use, a growing number of entrepreneurs have rushed to meet the unflagging demand for cannabis. In Venice Beach, entire downtown blocks are lined with dispensaries, with touts on the sidewalk pushing their products. In Denver, there are more weed dispensaries than there are Starbucks.

For a while, the feds tended to look the other way-until last year, when the Obama administration began stepping up enforcement of a law that supersedes the writs of the 17 states that have legalized marijuana. The Controlled Substances Act, which classifies pot as a "schedule one" drug on par with heroin, makes it illegal to sell or possess it.

Now, the federal crackdown appears to be expanding. On Tuesday, officials raided several pot shops in Los Angeles and sent letters to dozens more warning them to close or face criminal charges. Last week, the DEA raided one of Oregon's largest medical marijuana operations. In Washington, U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan sent a threatening letter last month (PDF) to 23 pot dispensaries identified as being within 1,000 feet of a school, prompting many of them to close. And in Colorado, 57 dispensaries have quit so far this year after the U.S. attorney there announced it would prosecute shops that were deemed too close to schools.

"Large commercial operations cloak their money-making activities in the guise of helping sick people when in fact they are helping themselves," said Benjamin B. Wagner, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of California, at a press conference last year announcing a statewide effort to tackle the "commercial marijuana industry." "Our interest is in enforcing federal criminal law, not prosecuting seriously sick people and those who are caring for them."

The feds aren't bluffing, and Chadd McKeen knows that better than most. When he opened the door on Jan. 16, McKeen was greeted by one DEA agent and eight city cops, who marched in and seized the books for OtherSide Farms and McKeen's cell phone, according to DEA documents. They also took his 2009 Corvette ZR1.

McKeen says he assumed the car would be towed. Instead, he says, one of the cops hopped in, opened the garage door and sped off, while his family sat detained in the living room.

The only pot found in the apartment was a couple small piles of "shake" (basically marijuana crumbs) that McKeen and his wife are allowed by state law to possess, because they have medical marijuana cards for injuries Chadd suffered when he was younger and to treat the symptoms of Alysha's skin cancer.

Officials with the U.S. Attorney's office in California, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Costa Mesa Police Department all declined to speak directly to the circumstances of the raid at OtherSide Farms. "I'm not going to respond to something about a car that was seized," wrote U.S. Attorney spokesman Thom Mrozek in an email to The Daily Beast. Mrozek did say that there's been a general shift toward more enforcement, but didn't elaborate.

The real bounty would later be found at OtherSide Farms itself, which McKeen calls the "Taj Mahal" of pot shops. He believed he'd set himself apart from other providers in Costa Mesa by offering a superior product in a posh setting at a reasonable cost. The 6,500-square-foot space, next door to Dippity Donuts on Broadway, had a window that looked into the 300-square-foot grow facility, right in the middle of the showroom. All 15 employees, from the $15-an-hour "bud tender" to the $25-hour-gardener, had full health insurance, says McKeen.

"I built a facility that was like the Ronald McDonald House for kids, but for medical marijuana patients," McKeen said.

The reviews were positive. "Very fresh, great tasting, and dang does it get you high," wrote one user on Weedmaps.com, which is kind of like the Yelp of places to buy pot.

"I just have to mention that the guys who deliver are so knowledgeable and very, uhm, CUTE. :)" wrote one reviewer, lauding the shop's "discreet, professional and fast" service.

Reviews from law enforcement were less effusive. In Costa Mesa, as it is everywhere in California, it's illegal to sell marijuana for a profit. State law only permits "collectives," whereby multiple marijuana permit holders can grow the product together and distribute it to each other. McKeen says he was operating a nonprofit as part of a collective. He paid himself $750 a week and everything else went back into the business.

Yet not long after OtherSide first opened, McKeen got his first fine, a few hundred bucks for allegedly violating the conditions of his building permit. Two weeks later, came another, bigger penalty, for the same infraction, and then a third.

Rather than fight those fines in court, McKeen says he chose to pay those fines, chalking them up to the cost of doing business, like a tax. But that didn't pacify Johnny Law.

Once the DEA-deputized team finished scouring McKeen's condo-he claims they took his wife's jewelry, and the $15 in his wallet, though none of the records reviewed by The Daily Beast mention these items- they headed to OtherSide Farms, where audio-equipped surveillance cameras (that the feds didn't seize) captured footage of the raid.

In the footage, the officers' mood appears jovial. Some of them seem impressed by McKeen's digs. "I would definitely come buy my weed here," says one person on the tape, which The Daily Beast reviewed.

Says another: "This place is a-fucking-mazing."

None of that adulation altered the outcome, though. McKeen's plants were destroyed, his ATM machine seized, along with various marijuana-laced confections, according to DEA records. McKeen says the officers also took the money from a tip jar at the front desk, clearly labeled, "Help the homeless," though it isn't listed in the DEA's records.

In the search warrant affidavit provided by the U.S. Attorney's office for OtherSide and McKeen's condo, the reason for the raid is laid out: a city code enforcement officer had visited OtherSide back in 2011, and McKeen allegedly said in that visit that he intended "to make so much money at the location and that he was going to give the city 'a donation' each and every year to offset the city's current budgetary issues and help city employees keep their jobs." The first donation would be $250,000 by the end of 2011, and $500,000 every year after that, said McKeen, according to the warrant. The code enforcement officer replied that "was a lot of money." McKeen said it wouldn't be a problem, as he was going to "drive the other dispensaries out of business."

McKeen told The Daily Beast he was actually talking about the amount of revenue a plan to tax all dispensaries in Costa Mesa could raise. (He also says OtherSide wasn't a dispensary, because dispensaries are technically for-profit, and illegal.)

As a candidate, Obama promised in multiple interviews to avoid using his resources if elected president to go after medicinal marijuana users. Targeting patients who use the stuff as medicine "makes no sense," he said at a 2007 town hall meeting in Manchester, N.H.

In a February 2011 letter from U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag to Oakland City Attorney John Russo, Haag called prosecuting businesses that market and sell marijuana a "core priority." While the government wouldn't "focus its resources on seriously ill individuals who use marijuana as part of a medically recommended treatment regimen in compliance with state law," any who manufacture and distribute the substance would be targeted, "even if such activities are permitted under state law."

In a Rolling Stone interview earlier this year, Obama clarified his campaign promise. "What I specifically said was that we were not going to prioritize prosecutions of persons who are using medical marijuana," Obama said. "I never made a commitment that somehow we were going to give carte blanche to large-scale producers and operators of marijuana-and the reason is, because it's against federal law."

McKeen believes "the worst president we've ever had for medical marijuana is Barack Obama."

The reason for the recent enforcement actions has to do with the skyrocketing growth of dispensaries, said a former U.S. Justice Department official who spoke to The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity. "We are responding to a very aggressive effort to expand the distribution of marijuana. By making it medicine, kids think it's safe. Same as prescription drugs," the official said. "For the most part, all they're doing is traffickers. They never prosecute anybody who isn't a trafficker."

Neither McKeen nor any of his employees or family members were prosecuted in the wake of the raid, which is partly why he thinks it was really about money. "In my mind, it was a home invasion robbery, under the auspices of the federal government," said McKeen, who hasn't been able to reopen OtherSide and instead is working in marketing. "Not only that, they carjacked me."

The former DOJ official who spoke to the Beast said that money does play a role: "Seize a couple buildings, then it's a profit center. You sell the buildings and make money."

The cops didn't get much from OtherSide farms, McKeen is happy to report, and no charges were filed, he said. He even got his Corvette back, albeit several months after the raid and, he says, with the tires worn down.