Feb/Mar 2003

If Only I Could Be Like My Cells
Deepak Chopra, MD

Why Spirituality is Essential to Progressive Politics
Ana Villa-Lobos

The Spiritual Art of Peacemaking
James Twyman

Finding Answers in Community Meetings
John Darling

Reclaiming Our Courage
Paul Rogat Loeb

The Rhinoceros In Our Living Room is Slip Covered
Jeannie Azzopardi

Iraq and the Economy
Dennis Kucinich

Letter to a Warrior
Elias Amidon

Democracy in Action
Letter to Members of MoveOn

Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre, Brazil
America Vera-Zavala

American Revolt in Pennsylvania
Thom Hartmann

The Omega Point
Finn Honoré

We live in A World With Finite Resources
George Monbiot

Using Homeopathic Remedies
Doug Falkner, MD, M.Hom

The Healing Power of Touch
John Darling

A Somatic Contradiction
Peter Moore, MFCC, CGP

Shamanism and Psychology Join Forces
Jeanette M. Gagan, PhD

Natural Building: A New Course of Action
Coenraad Rogmans

The Movie Mystic
Stephen Simon

The Yearly Round
Richard Moeschl

Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain

BACK TO TOP

The Rhinoceros In Our Living Room Is Slip Covered

By Jeannie Azzopardi

In America the correlation between the level of fear and civil rights is homogeneous. The relationship is direct and succinct—when fear increases, civil rights decrease. Like the proverbial rhinoceros in the livingroom, the dynamic is something that we would like to deny. During times of crisis, America’s actions inevitably parade themselves through everyone’s livingroom. “Okay!” we say, “We see the damned thing, alright!” But we choose to throw a slipcover on it, thinking that if we downplay it, make it pretty, no one will pay attention to it.

In the 1940’s an extraordinary thing happened to the United States of America. We were attacked on our own soil. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The whole of the American populace got scared—exceedingly scared. Then another extra-ordinary thing happened—our government approved the building of internment camps for Japanese Americans citizens. Out of our fear as a nation, we took a step.

From that first step every other step taken could be more easily rationalized. Civil rights literally flew out every door kicked in and was ransacked with every search conducted. The Constitution suffered blows more drastic than those at Pearl Harbor. This does not diminish the loss of life; rather it amplifies the loss suffered by each American in succeeding years. The Webster’s Dictionary defines soldier as: “A person who works for a specified cause.” The assumption is that the cause is freedom. How remarkable that our nation would so enthusiastically forgo such freedom in the face of crisis.

Patricia Nelson, author of Haunted America, tells us “… the tragedies of the wars are our national joint property … as a people wearing the label ‘American.’” Although she spoke of the Native American-white wars, the same applies to the war fought at home with Japanese Americans.

When fear set in, the government stepped up. There was a war, had been a war, easily ignored over tsks and umms and thoughts of lands far away. It was unthinkable that it came calling at our own front door. We were so far removed. Overnight, yellow air raid signs were everywhere and we were creating propaganda. Even the kids watched Bugs Bunny outsmart a funny looking, bucked-tooth, cartoon Japanese.

There are chasms in schools of thought. For years, we thought little of the trauma suffered by Japanese Americans torn from their homes. We referred to the camps as “relocation” sites. In the 1960’s the civil rights movement included a focus on the use of these camps. It was a time of revolution and ripe for this issue. There were court cases filed and the wheel was beginning to turn in the direction that it would eventually take to culminate in an apology from the U.S. to its citizens of Japanese ancestry.

There are generally two opinions on the confinement of Japanese Americans. The first is a celebrated version that equates the camps with those of the Germans, at times using the term “concentration” camps. This ideology is sympathetic to the internees. We are comfortable with this ideology—it is the slipcovered rhino—more palatable. There are journals and accounts of the average man finding himself in a situation that was anything but average. Told to leave his home, business, and belongings to conform to a dramatically different geographic location and lifestyle. It doesn’t end there because the loss of freedom as an “enemy combatant” was the true reason for it all. He was the butcher down the street to whom everyone took shopping lists, who knew your name; now the source of so much fear that there was nothing to do but remove that man to where he would not have to be looked upon.

Stories are personal. In the anthology, Only What We Could Carry, a young girl wrote: “Last night I walked around camp. It was a very beautiful moonlit night and just right for romance, but I found myself wondering if this was my home.” This makes us uncomfortable, a teenager that never had a chance at a “real” adolescence. However, there was a certain acceptance that still baffles us. Why did they not protest … and keep on protesting? In answer, Lawson Inada writes in the same anthology “ … The F.B.I. swooped in early, / Taking our elders in the process / For “subversive” that and this. / People ask: “Why didn’t you protest?” / Well, you might say: ‘They had hostages.’”

The second dynamic, and one that may be clearer in the histories written from the other side, was rationalization. While on one side of the fence, the government was distributing propaganda that eased the public in their rationalization; the internees were finding ways to rationalize too. There is something to be said for justifying an idea that is hideous. The alternative is simply too unbearable to contemplate—self-destruction. This is an imperative point to consider. When we think of “a necessary evil,” it is rationalization that is the “necessary” part. Comprehending that some sort of justification was compulsory for the internees is to understand fully every description written or told by those inside the gates.

Outside the gates, justification was more overt. Henry McLemore, wrote in the San Francisco Examiner, “Herd ‘em up, pack ‘em off and give ‘em the inside room in the badlands … Let ‘em be pinched, hurt, hungry, and dead up against it … let us have no patience with the enemy or with anyone whose veins carry his blood. Personally, I hate the Japanese.” This quote is appalling, shocking and quite useful in support of the government’s propaganda. In Dishonoring American – The Collective Guilt of American Japanese, by Lillian Baker, we see a distinct rationalization—make “them” wrong. She begins by telling us, “Those who remained in the centers until the end of the war did so primarily because they preferred the security and comfort of the camps to the uncertainties of life in the outside.” She goes on to say that those Japanese American combat groups who won more medals than any other units in the war were given credit erroneously, “these statements are stolen praise meant for the people responsible for breaking Japan’s codes and ciphers.” It was the white “code breakers” that were her true heroes.

The thrust of Ms Baker’s history is to systematically show how well the Japanese were treated, the opportunities to be had by the internees (education, job training, etc.) and the disgraceful way “they” have turned against the very country they professed to adore. She points out that had the Japanese not bombed us, none of this would have been necessary. But they did, and so it was necessary and those who were “relocated” should be accepting, not angry.

In still another history, the California State University at Fullerton compiled an oral history. In an interview with Richard S. Dockman, a commissioned adjunct officer at Lordsburg Internment Camp, we see a different version of the experience. He says that the internees “had it pretty good.” He jokes about life at the camp. During a “barn dance” at the officers club, “Colonel Baker was the doctor who ran the hospital. He dressed as one of the Japanese internees, and he would say, “So solly, please.” Dockman speaks to an incident where a “POW” was shot with a matter-of-factness that is so ingrained that he could not remember what ever happened to the guards that wrongfully killed the internee. The Japanese had their “ceremonies” that he couldn’t “describe vividly” and lived a life of which he could not grasp—nor did he wish to.

This last chronicle is one that we can easily categorize. It is the rationalization that utilizes dehumanization as its pivotal point. As in every case of hatred, it is necessary to make the object of wrath a non-entity. We must, after all, pacify our conscience—even collectively.
America has once again been attacked. We cannot declare war on another country. Our enemy is much more surreptitious and the level of fear is extreme. Shall we round up all Arab-Americans and build more internment camps? How can we tell a Lebanese from an Iranian, an Afghani, an Egyptian? Does it matter?
This time things might be different. During the Japanese internment, tremendous propaganda rallied the public against “the enemy.” The government has chosen a new strategy. They don’t tell us anything—they don’t ask us anything—they just act. “The government has barred the public and the press from hearings for immigrants suspected of ties to terrorism,” The New York Times reports. One federal judge demanded that the government release the names of all detainees. The government has not yet complied. Another federal judge ordered officials to provide evidence of allegations that an Arab-American held was an “enemy combatant.” The Justice Department defied the order.

This flies in the face of what one author, Eric L. Muller writes in his article, An Arab American Internment? “Perhaps, most importantly, the law protects Arab Americans today in a way that it did not protect Japanese Americans in 1941 … the government may not take race or ethnic origin into account in its dealings with individuals … government often strays from this principle, as our experience with racial profiling shows us. But today’s courts have nearly sixty years of precedent to rely upon in condemning race-based government action.”

The rhinoceros has grown. We no longer concern ourselves with denial. We have moved to arrogant acknowledgement—the “Yeah? So?” retort. Former President Jimmy Carter makes an insightful observation, “Some reactions … seem to be developing from a core group of con-servatives who are trying to realize long pent-up ambitions under the cover of the proclaimed war against terrorism.” For those who believe that the internment camp experience could never be repeated, we look to another article in the New York Times that talks of the “profound regrets [that] set in later,” and the suspicious TIPS program that was initiated this past summer that aimed to recruit Americans to spy on their fellow Americans. Proposed by the Bush administration, it was quashed following public outcry. Ah, those nasty outcries—perhaps that is why the government is not telling the American public anything anymore.

As President Carter says in his optimistic closing, “Belligerent and divisive voices now seem to be dominant in Washington, but they do not yet reflect final decisions of the president, Congress or the courts. It is crucial that the historical and well-founded American commitments prevail: to peace, justice, human rights, the environment and international cooperation.” They are fine words indeed and ones to be recalled forty years from now when we, once again, look to our collective slates to take tally of the American phenomenon.

In our relentless traipsing through history, we are constantly attempting to wrench “lessons” from it. It is as though history, the events and deeds of mysterious minds, are colossal codes that must be deciphered to find “truth,” even if they must be hung by their metaphorical thumbs. Those who recount history, myself included, seem to do so as though our illuminations will make an impact that will change the way our readers view their lives in divergence with what has gone before. We write with the cosmic, Aha! The bona fide truth is, we are not prophets—we are bookkeepers. History is an accounting, not a lesson.

In closing, the human experience, the American experience in particular, should be considered as it may well need rationalization. Communally, we plainly cannot get away with denying the rhino. It is the epitome of our creature nature. So we hide it, diminish its importance and try our damnedest to make it toothsome. Perhaps, this is the lesson. As Professor Inada so succinctly writes in questioning himself in his memoirs, “What did I find? What I expected to find: Aspects of humanity, the human condition.”

Jeannie Azzopardi, a resident of Ashland, Oregon, is the mother of two and a full-time university student ready to graduate with honors. She would like to thank George W. personally for the closure of her son’s school, the raised tuition at the university, fear, panic, and the general muddle of the country, but he has not yet responded to her invitations.