Book Review/Heather Seggel

Seedlings of Change

As I write this my hometown is sandwiched between three expanding wildfires. We’re some distance away but have had two extended blackouts and spotty radio and internet access, all nerve-jangling occurrences. We talk about fire season getting longer and more extreme, but not about the man-made impacts on climate change that have helped to make it so. When it’s possible to open Twitter there’s our president, calling the investigation into his numerous transgressions a “witch hunt,” willfully oblivious to the arrests and indictments piling up in his wake (witch trial indictments remain at zero at this time). When we sacrifice accuracy and precision it can be hard to aim at what we truly want to change; a surgeon would be remiss in operating on the body or whatever when what’s called for is an appendectomy. In Call Them By Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays) (Haymarket Books), author Rebecca Solnit looks at several events of the past few years with close attention so that we might better assess the current moment and where we stand in it. It’s a bracing experience to take in.

There are two themes woven throughout the book. The first is addressed directly in a foreword whose title nods to George Orwell: “Politics and the American Language.” The book’s focus on accurate language and “true names” is asking to be sure we’re attacking the right problem. Solnit compares it to medical diagnosis: “Though not all diagnosed diseases are curable, once you know what you’re facing, you’re far better equipped to know what you can do about it.” This can mean the painstaking work of re-explaining that misogyny is not the fault of women for merely existing, or facing and addressing the unintended consequences of gentrification, one of which is racism.

An online acquaintance of mine is curating a list of perceived offenses white people have called the police on people of color for; they range from selling bottled water to cooking out in a public park with barbecue pits “while black,” but are largely a matter of someone being uncomfortable and seeking an easy solution via 911. This would be laughable but for the fact that in many cases, rather than de-escalate these situations the police exacerbate them, sometimes fatally. Solnit writes about Alex Nieto’s death at the hands of police, and how a lifelong resident of a neighborhood can suddenly become an outsider when the population around him changes; his 49ers jacket, normally a matter of local pride and connection, was suddenly flagged as possible gang attire when the police were called to a park where the young man was merely eating dinner. Minutes after the call was placed, Nieto was dead. The police chief lied about several facts in the case and justice twists in the wind.

The second theme that reappears is one that’s evergreen in Solnit’s work: Hope. In this book, she reminds readers that what often feel like futile actions in the moment can yield entirely unexpected results years or even decades later. She offers many examples of “indirect consequences,” recounting for example an interview between Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg where Snowden said that without the story of the Pentagon Papers as a point of reference, he would not have known how to blow the whistle on the NSA. Protesters at Standing Rock were on a mission to defeat a pipeline, but those protests united Native North Americans in numbers never before seen, and brought veterans to the site where they offered apologies for past atrocities while on their knees. The reverberations clearly extend beyond the oil.

“Call Them By Their True Names” links these two themes artfully despite their seeming opposition. Naming things precisely lets us see them truly, but what they mean may not be revealed for years or decades. The sheer volume of people willing to show up to resist the Trump administration has been astonishing and inspiring, yet there he sits still Tweeting away. Does that mean the protests failed? Solnit would say emphatically not. There’s ample evidence that engagement in state and local politics has increased in response to the 2016 election, but what’s even more exciting is what we can’t see yet: The next phase still gestating as a result of the Women’s March, or the airport protests, or some other moment still cocooned and waiting to unfurl its banners.

Heather Seggel is a writer living in Mendocino County. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2018

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