Hasta La Gadget!

THE FIRST LATINA SENATOR: Why Chinese-Americans Should Support Catherine Cortez Masto!

By Don C. Reed

In high school, I worked one Summer in the fields.

Picking strawberries looked easy: just bend over to the ground, and twist each berry gently off its stalk, being careful not to bruise it, or you wouldn’t get paid.

Each double-sided row was a quarter-mile long, and completing it earned one dollar.When I finished the first row (it took three hours) an old woman called to me.

“You no make money that way–too slow! Come sit in the shade beside me and I show you how pull stems.”

As her fingers flew, yanking the stems, setting the berries into green plastic boxes, she told me about her life: how every year she and her husband and their children followed the crops.

One man told me he was building a house, working the season, buying a few more bricks every year.

They all sent money home, remittances, to keep the old ones in the family alive. (Taking those remittances, I would later learn, is how Donald Trump plans to make Mexico pay for his wall.)

Where did they sleep?

She pointed to a big packing crate, lying on its side. I peered within, saw the burlap sacks they used for blankets…

For me, it was a Summer job, one I would never wish to do again.

For them, undocumented Mexican-Americans, it was life.

They worked a land their ancestors once owned. One third of the United States had been Mexico–California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and Texas.

But the Mexican-American War, the “Invasion of the North” changed the boundaries. As one observer put it, “We did not cross the border–the border crossed us!”

Years later, I carried a sign and shouted “Huelga!”, marching, supporting the grape strike, as Cesar Chavez developed the United Farm Workers union.

Conditions improved, but the work remains brutal, exhausting, and ill-paid.

Today, Donald Trump is using Mexican-Americans as a political weapon, to frighten us about hordes of allegedly dangerous people, coming across the border to do crime.

For more than a year he has screamed in his hate-filled rallies, libeling Mexican-Americans as rapists and murderers; he has promised to build a wall against them, and to deport eleven million undocumented workers, people living in America right now.

The financial price of rounding up and deporting 11 million children, women and men? Perhaps as much as $285 billion over five years.

But our country opposes the vile deportation policies of Donald Trump.

More than three-quarters of Americans (76%) think “illegal immigrants are just as honest and hardworking as American citizens”.

Faced with an issue that no longer works for him, Trump is scrambling desperately to give the illusion of “softening” his policy, as if he has a “big heart“.

I hope he is not fooling anyone.

From Nevada, a spark of excitement: Catherine Cortez Masto (D) is running to become America’s first Latina Senator.

Her opponent? Joe Heck, Republican admirer of Donald Trump, funded by the billionaire Koch brothers.

Fair-minded people should rally to her side.

I particularly hope Nevada’s Chinese-American community will befriend her: because who knows better than they what it is like to suffer from racism?

They endured the Chinese Exclusion Act: the only time in U.S. history when an entire ethnic group was banned.

Signed into law by President Chester A. Arthur in 1882, the Exclusion Act prohibited Chinese from entering the United States. The act was renewed for decades, separating countless families. Men who had come over to work in the mines, expecting to bring their wives later, were denied their companionship forever.

Not until World War II, when China was our ally against Japan, did the Magnuson Act of 1943 permit Chinese-Americans to become citizens.

But on June 8, 2012, Congresswoman Judy Chu introduced a resolution expressing the “regret of the United States House of Representatives for the Chinese Exclusion Act, which…denied Chinese-Americans basic freedoms because of their ethnicity.”

That is how racism is fought: by women and men who will point out what is wrong, and fight to make it right.

Catherine Cortez Masto is just such a person.

“I support comprehensive immigration reform that secures our borders and allows millions of undocumented immigrants to come out of the shadows to earn a path to citizenship. Congress needs to do its job and pass immigration reform to keep families together.”

Will she stand up against Donald Trump and Joe Heck? Listen:

“Congressman Heck has endorsed Donald Trump, even adopting Trump’s talking points about “making America great again.” Well I have news for Donald Trump and Congressman Heck – America is already great, and Mexican Americans have played a role in making us great…We aren’t rapists and drug dealers, we’re judges, doctors, teachers, Attorneys General and even United States Senators. I’d be proud to be the first Latina ever to serve in the U.S. Senate.”

If you live in Nevada, consider volunteering for Catherine Cortez Masto’s campaign. Wherever you live, send her a couple bucks (I did); give her a chance against the millions of dollars pouring in from the Koch brothers and their groups.

Joe Heck chose to side with racist billionaire Donald Trump. That is his decision.

Now let America make ours.

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In every visit to Greece, I spent lots of time in the country’s museums. My hunger for the sculpture and architecture of ancient Greece remains constant and complements my interest in Greek philosophy, history and science.

It’s hard to explain, but being close to a Greek temple like the Parthenon is an experience of pleasure and satisfaction. The temple becomes a time machine, helping me appreciate the society that built it. I am convinced the marble columns and the remaining parts of a temple fit so nicely together they become magnets of beauty and harmony. But, at the same time, the ruined temple gives me clues of its aesthetic, religious, possibly healing, and practical use at the time it came into being.

It pains me that ancient and modern barbarians vandalized and looted Greece, including all of its magnificent temples and sculpture.

I relived that tragedy last summer in Peloponnesos where I spent a few days traveling in and around Argos and Arcadia. For the first time in my life I visited the Temple of the Epicurean (Helper) Apollo at Bassae on Mount Kotilion near the ancient Arcadian town of Phigaleia.

Pausanias, the second century Greek traveler who authored “Guide to Greece,” saw the Temple of Apollo at Bassae and admired its architecture and beauty. Iktinos, the architect of the Parthenon, also designed this gorgeous temple in late fifth century BCE. The people of Phigaleia dedicated their temple to Apollo the Helper because Apollo saved them from plagues.

Like other temples in Greece, this one is in ruins. Only its columns barely stand. So when I reached the temple sometime in September 2015, the entire temple was covered by canvas. The temple has been under the care of restoration experts since 1995.

I went inside the covered temple and tried to absorb as much beauty and knowledge as possible. This is a Doric temple that had a frieze running on top of the wall inside the main building. But the frieze, representing a struggle between Greeks, Amazons, Lapiths and centaurs, was looted by the British architect C. R. Cockerell in the nineteenth century and is now at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, UK.

I went outside the ruined temple for a walk. I imagined the sanctuary full of ancient Greeks celebrating the birth date of Apollo. People walking for hours through the woods, climbing the steep mountain so they would offer sacrifices to the Epicurean Apollo.

Those times are gone forever. We are left with ruins to recreate Greece and its art. Archaeologists have been digging the soil of Greece for more than two centuries. The debris they uncover could be humble clay vases or treasures of great importance, dating all the way from the Bronze Age to the time of the Roman occupation of Greece.

John Boardman, professor emeritus of classical archaeology and art at Oxford University, explains how and why the Greeks created their art and architecture. His “Greek Art” (fifth edition, Thames & Hudson, 2016) is a beautifully and lavishly illustrated book covering a millennium of Greek art history. But the book is more than a collection of images of Greek art. It is also a book of extraordinary insights, knowledge and wisdom.

Boardman has been studying and writing about the art of the Greeks for half a century. He is a masterful storyteller who knows the origins and history of Greek art. He rejects political correctness and calls things by their names.

The Greeks created art for personal and social needs. There were no museums or art markets in Greece. Boardman says Greek artists “were suppliers of a commodity on a par with shoemakers.”

The story of the classical art of the fifth century BCE is the story of the Greeks: how they rose in artistic, economic, and political power in the Mediterranean and defeated the greatest empire of that age, Persia. In art, the victory over the Persians probably speeded the abandonment of the Archaic conventions the Greeks shared with the Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Anatolians from the 8th to the 6th centuries BCE. But in the 5th century BCE, according to Boardman, the Greeks launched a Classical revolution. This meant “the artist shows complete understanding of how the body is constructed, how to express nuances of movement and… repose.”

Another insight of Boardman is that the Greeks used colors in their sculpture and architecture.

He is also right mythology for the Greeks was history. The Greeks always turned to their mythology-history for inspiration. They constructed beautiful temples for their gods, sculpted nude statues for their athletes, heroes and gods, and painted countless vases.

Reading Boardman’s book gives you the satisfaction of learning from one who knows. He says Greek art “needs to be… understood on Greek terms,” by which he means we need a thorough understanding of the Greek society that created that art. He guides you how to look at the masterpieces of the classical age, noting their “peculiar blend of idealism and realism.” At the same time he explains when the art came into being and why. “Knowledge of the date and origin of works is a necessary prerequisite for exploration of their function and quality,” he says.

“Greek Art” informs you that Greek sculpture and architecture have left their footprint on modern art and architecture. This happened through the Renaissance. Such a contribution was merely “one of the legacies of ancient Greece which have helped form western thought, society and art — the product of a civilization which… had a unique effect on the history of mankind.”

Boardman also says that the Greeks communicated with art at “all levels from the moral and political to the appropriately entertaining, far more effective than word of mouth or writing.” Art enabled the Greeks to explore their present through the past.

Read “Greek Art.” It is a lucid and timely account of the most important artistic tradition in the Western world.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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