Sarah Palin and the five stages of grief

This little narrative said it all to me: succinct, hopeful, yet with a soupçon of pending doom. Eric Muller is a law prof who writes a really great blog on civil rights and research on racial classification in the US. It was his recent book, American Inquisition, that clarified to me that there were (was?) not one, the War Relocation Authority, but several separate agencies in charge of interning Japanese Americans during WW2. Anyway, remember the Elizabeth Kübler-Ross cycle of grief, from the ’70s? It is supposed to describe the steps you go through in dealing with a terminal illness, or a big change. I remember reading her big book as a kid, because we had that kind of thing laying around the house. Also, because I have a fatal curiosity for “step”-psychology and anything involving a bubble test, preferably in the context of perfume and cosmetics (“if so, you are a floral, if not, a woodsy…”).

M

y Five Stages:

1. Astonishment.
2. Perverse joy.
3. Disbelief.
4. Anger.
5. Abject terror.

I’ll be stuck at stage 5 from now until Election Day.

Ditto. And I would add step 4.5, “utter mortification at that woman claiming the mantle of feminism.”

Here is the Wiki, with links to excerpts of the Kübler-Ross.

Screening of Passing Poston (cheap/free stuff about Japan)

I was asked by the film-makers to spread some news about this new doc, about the internment of Japanese Americans during the war (roughly from 1942-1945). Besides these dates, it’s also playing for free at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) on June 28, with a panel afterwards with three of the film’s interviewees.

The trailer doesn’t actually refer to what makes this film different from other films about internees’ experience, or even a visit to JANM itself, which is a bit of a shame. But the LA Times did a nice piece following up the film, and cut to the chase of what is different about these internees (19,000 of the roughly 110,000 total people interned)–the transfer of farmers to an Indian reservation, in Poston Arizona, because of their special skills. The “Berkeley researcher” referred to here is an artist, Ruth Okimoto, one of the people who will be at the JANM screening.

What the Berkeley researcher would discover was that the U.S. government had deliberately selected Japanese Americans with farming experience from California Central Valley towns like Sacramento, Bakersfield and elsewhere, to help develop the reservation’s agricultural potential, Okimoto said. Researching documents in the National Archives, along with Colorado River Indian tribal archives and other sources, Okimoto discovered the then-named Office of Indian Affairs partnered with the War Relocation Authority to develop an internee labor plan.

I have spent a lot of time reading and talking about the internment and its processes in both the US and Canada, but I am still getting my head around this, as the precursor to the prison industrial complex, in its very intricate bureaucratic plans and use of confined labor, and the deliberate forced mobility of farmers from the Central Valley and other agro areas. My thoughts are hovering back and forth between “man, this is really screwed up,” and wow, I am really glad to be in LA to have a chance to see this, and hear what people have to say.

I’ve been wanting to get to the ImaginAsian theatre downtown for a while–partly to see films, and partly to see the building, and what kinds of spaces might be used for programming.