BDS & the New York State Freedom to Boycott Coalition
by Pauline Park

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France 2015: Paris & Versailles

I lived in Paris from January through June 1992 but did not have the opportunity to return to the City of Light until May 2015; my week in Paris was a trip down memory lane, bringing back a flood of memories from the six months I spent there 23 years before. During the course of the week, I took one big day trip, To Versailles, which I did not visit while I was living in Paris in 1992 but rather in December 1981, while I was living in London. These are some photos I took in May 2015 and some thoughts about the city I lived in and fell in love with like so many American expatriates before me…

Thursday, May 21

I flew out of JFK on Wednesday, May 20 and arrived somewhat bleary-eyed at Charles de Gaulle on Thursday, May 21. CDG may have once been state-of-the-art, but the aéroport has not aged well. Before landing, I tried to take a picture out of my window, but my camera wouldn’t work, so when I met up with my friend Joyce, the first thing we did was go to a camera repair shop. Unfortunately, the camera could not be repaired on-site; since it would take 10 days to repair, I decided to buy a new one and found a good digital camera at L’Instantané; it wasn’t cheap, but I took 2,000 photos with it in one week in Paris and then over 6,600 photos in a month in Korea the following month, which made it worth it to buy.

Joyce and her partner Ellen were spending six months in Paris and invited me to stay with them for a week; it was an opportunity I didn’t feel I could pass up, especially as it had been a full 23 years since I’d been in the City of Light. Joyce very helpfully took me to a little shop where I bought a SIM card I could use in my cell phone during my week in Paris so I could stay in touch with her by phone and text message. Then we went back to their apartment in the rue Sedaine. The three of us then met up with friends of theirs at Les Philosophes — ironic because it was one of the few restaurants I dined in while living in Paris in 1992; and perhaps doubly ironic, given my background and interest in philosophy.

With my new digital camera from L’Instantané, I took a shot of the Place des Vosges one of the most architecturally and historically important squares in Paris, as the first mixed-use urban development (as we would call it nowadays) in France, with rows of shops at street level and elegant apartments above ground level.

Place des Vosges in the Marais (4ème)

Les Philosophes had been renovated since I last saw it and the interior was less quaint but considerably more accommodating than in the old days; but we sat outside, dining al fresco, enjoying the relatively warm May evening air.

les Philosophes

The food was good and it was interesting meeting Ellen and Joyce’s friends; but I was struck by the coincidence that they had chosen one of the few restaurants in Paris that I had actually dined at while I was living there in 1992. ‘Philosophes’ in French can simply mean ‘philosophers,’ but it has a particular meaning in French cultural and political history, referring to Voltaire, Diderot and the other writers of the French Enlightenment who were not for the most part systematizing philosophers like the Germans Leibniz or Kant or the English philosophers Hobbes or Locke; the French Philosophes had a particular agenda, which was to move France beyond the religiously based disputes of the Wars of Religion which tore France apart in the 16th century and into an era of rational discussion not based on religious authority or scriptural references.

The restrooms had been completely renovated since I was last at Les Philosophes back in 1992, with gleaming steel installed and clever little quotes on the mirrors (4ème).

On the way home, we walked down the rue des Rosiers, the main street of the old Jewish quarter of Paris…

We passed through the Place des Vosges around midnight, beautifully mysterious with only street lights to light our way through the great square…

Friday, May 22

On Friday, I took my only day trip out of Paris, taking the SNCF train to Versailles to see the most famous royal palace in Europe. I hadn’t actually visited Versailles during my six months living in Paris in 1992 and my only previous visit to the château and its gardens was in December 1981, when I was living in London; my memories of Versailles were not happy ones, as we had gotten thoroughly soaked walking through the vast gardens in the rain because we’d left the umbrella in our hotel room.

 rue Sedaine  in the 11ème (5.22.15)

That morning, I set out from the apartment in the rue Sedaine, eager to get to Versailles and all the more excited, having recently read a 600-page biography of Louis XIV. That’s not to say I’m a fan of Louis; le Roi Soleil was a distinctly mixed bag. The first 10 years of Louis’ reign was a stunning success, but his decision to make war on the Dutch Republic was the beginning of endless wars that eventually bankrupted France and ultimately contributed to the trajectory that led to the French Revolution.

Versailles: château de Versailles on the left, the royal chapel on the right

I didn’t buy a ticket in advance and my heart sank when I saw the enormous line to get into the château when I arrived around 11 a.m.; fortunately, it only took 45 minutes to get to the ticket counter, which was surprising given the length of the queue.

la Galerie des Glaces au château de Versailles

When I first visited the château way back in December 1981, the Galerie des Glace was not at all crowded, in part because it was raining and dreary, and the interior of the château was correspondingly dreary. When I returned in May 2015, the Hall of Mirrors was swamped at regular intervals by waves of tourists, like waves on the Normandy beaches. And 24 years later, everyone was taking ‘selfies’ with camera phones, something one would not have seen in 1981; in fact, there was an African immigrant in the courtyard of the château selling selfie sticks; I can’t imagine what Louis XIV would have thought of that~!

la Chapelle Royale au château de Versailles

When I was an undergraduate, I studied the music of François Couperin (1668-1733), who was along with Jean-Philippe Rameau, the greatest composer of the French Baroque. Couperin’s two books of organ works were published in 1690 and I studied a number of pieces from both the Messes pour les Couvents and the Messes pour les Paroisses. Couperin was appointed organist of the Chapelle Royale at Versailles in 1693, so it was thrilling to be able to see the great organ in the Chapelle Royale that Couperin himself played on for Louis XIV.

dans la Galerie des Glaces au château de Versailles

The Galerie des Glaces is the most celebrated hall in all of Versailles, the glittering core of Louis XIV’s enormous château; it was the scene of some of the most glittering and politically significant events the château saw in the century when it was the nexus of political power in France and in the centuries to follow, including the proclamation of King Wilhelm of Prussia as emperor of the new German Reich in 1871 and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1918. But to me, the most romantic event ever to have taken place in the Hall of Mirrors was the celebrated Bal des Ifs held in 1745 to celebrate the engagement of the dauphin to Maria Teresa, the Spanish infanta; it was at that Yew Tree Ball where Louis XV met and fell in love with the young Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, creating her the Marquise de Pompadour; Madame de Pompadour was the first bourgeoise in Bourbon French history to occupy the position of maitresse-en-titre and as the king’s official mistress would reign over the court at Versailles until her death.

Grand Trianon

Jules Hardouin-Mansart designed and built the Grand Trianon in 1687; it’s the second largest palace on the grounds after the château but even so, much smaller; the elegant pink marble is beautiful but could leave some cold.

in the Grand Trianon

Reading numerous books about Bourbon France and Versailles, including John B. Wolf’s 600-page biography of Louis XIV, gave me more background than most tourist bring with them to Versailles and helped bring all of those characters from the ancien régime alive. I’m guessing that most tourist who wander through the palaces and gardens at Versailles would only have vague familiarity with Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette; for me, they are very nearly as real to me and as complex as anyone I know; they are also profoundly flawed, including Louis XIV, Louis XV and Louis XVI, as well as Marie-Antoinette. I was astonished to read in Wolf’s biography that it was Louis XIV who set up the first concentration camp for political prisoners, for French Huguenots who tried to escape France after his revocation of the Edict of Nantes, his biggest mistake by common consent of informed historians.

the gardener’s house in the ‘domaine de la reine’ created by Marie-Antoinette around her hameau (hamlet) at Versailles

When I visited Versailles in May 2015, the biggest change was the reconfiguration and ‘branding’ of the ‘Domaine de la Reine,’ the area of the vast estate that was the special preserve of Marie-Antoinette. The hameau (hamlet) where the queen of France played milkmaid with her ladies-in-waiting seems like a pretentious folly to us, but reading in the biography of Marie-Antoinette by Evelyne Lever about the oppressive court ceremonial the queen had to deal with gives one a better understand of how this playing at milkmaid must have been a relief from the constraints of court life.

Louis XV built the Petit Trianon for his last maitresse-en-titre, Madame du Barry; it’s an elegant neoclassical building designed by Ange-Jacques Gabriel in 1768; but after the old king’s death, his grandson unceremoniously kicked out the late king’s mistress and gave the little palace to his wife as a birthday present; from that moment ever after, Marie-Antoinette regarded the Petit Trianon as her home as well as a refuge from the château and its oppressive court ceremony.

Marie-Antoinette continues to fascinate us to the present day; in truth, she was neither a heroine nor a saint nor was the doomed queen the nymphomaniac she-devil she was caricatured in in countless frankly deeply misogynist pamphlets printed during her reign; the woman known to her Habsburg family as ‘Antonia’ was a profoundly flawed character who brought her doom on herself with countless mistakes but who nonetheless rose to a level of true nobility in her last year of life, purified in some sense by her deep suffering, and one has to see the arc of her life in the historical, cultural and political context in which she lived it.

Saturday, May 23

I did not visit the Cimitière Père Lachaise when I was living in Paris in 1992, so I was delighted to have the opportunity to visit the most famous cemetery in the city when I was there in May 2015.

la famille Sauron dans la Cimitière Père Lachaise (20ème)

As a Tolkien fan, I was amused to see the grave of the Sauron family in the cemetery.

the sarcophagus of Oscar Wilde 

There were many famous people whose graves I wanted to see in the Cimitière Père Lachaise, but at the top of the list were those of Oscar Wilde, Frederic Chopin and Edith Piaf, all of whom hold a special place in my heart. Wilde, the outrageous trailblazer for LGBT rights and the author of “The Importance of Being Earnest,” one of the wittiest plays in the English language, has an enormous sarcophagus, which is so popular and has been kissed so often, now has a plastic wall around it to protect it from overly enthusiastic admirers.

When I visited the Cimitière Père Lachaise in the 20ème for the first time in May 2015, I found this memorial to the victims of the Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen; it wasn’t long ago that I discovered that Mauthausen was one of three Nazi concentration camps that my father helped liberate at the end of World War II, so it was especially meaningful to me.

at the grave of Edith Piaf in the Cimitière Père Lachaise (20ème)

Edith Piaf is far and away my favorite singer of French chansons populaires and I was happy to see a group of Piaf fans come to her grave when I was there and delighted to hear them break into popular Piaf songs.

After strolling through the cemetery, the young Austrian I wandered through Père Lachaise with and I came out to find a marché aux puces/vide grenier outside the cemetery grounds, where I found some trinkets to take home with me as gifts for friends. I then rushed back to the apartment for dinner with Ellen and Joyce, bringing dessert with me.

Sunday, May 24

In the morning, I went with Joyce to the green market known as the ‘Marché Bastille’ in the Boulevard Richard Lenoir to shop for fruit and vegetables. Joyce and Ellen then went up to the community garden maintained by the Association L’îlot Lilas (295 rue de Belleville 75019 Paris) at rue Haxo, where Isabelle greeted us and introduced us to some of the ‘regulars.’

The Lilolila  community garden is a wonderful example of a community-based cooperative organization maintaining a productive bit of greenery in the concrete  and relatively un-green 19th arondissement.

I had a number of delightful conversations in the Lilolila community garden, including with a Frenchman named Philippe and his Japanese wife Maki. I was gratified when Philippe told me he thought I was a native francophone and that he had never met someone who wasn’t a native French speaker who spoke French so well.

I was charmed to see a little henhouse in the garden.

Monday, May 25

Monday was Marais day for me, a trip down memory lane in the neighborhood composed of by the 3rd and 4th arondissements that I lived in and called home for six months in 1992.

29, rue des Archives: where I lived for six months in 1992

I just had to pass by my old building in the rue des Archives during my week in Paris in May 2015. The building was largely unaltered, except for a few of the shops and cafés on the street level.

29, rue des Archives, designed by architect Albert Le Voisvenel (1885)

I don’t know if I ever noticed it when I was living in the building, but passing by in May 2015, I saw the name of the architect and the date of the building’s construction carved into the side of the building, and reflected on the fact that it was built just three years before my grandmother’s birth.

Rue Vielle du Temple (a street in the Marais) (4ème)

Rue Vielle du Temple holds a special place in my memory; it was the street I walked up to go to my boyfriend’s apartment back in 1992; I couldn’t remember the address of his building or find it when I was in Paris in May 2015, so I had to content myself with a stroll down the Rue Vielle du Temple.

la pyramide du Musée du Louvre (1ère)

I can’t actually remember if I visited the Louvre during the six months I was living in Paris more than once, but it was before the pyramid designed by I.M. Pei was constructed, so it was interesting to enter through the pyramide for the first time. While the line looked enormous, it ended up being about 45 minutes, just like the line to get into the château and into Sainte-Chapelle.

les appartements Napoléon III au Musée du Louvre (1ère)

I had my heart set on seeing “Pélérinage à l’Île de Cythère,” my favorite painting in the Louvre and one of my favorite works of art in any museum, but Antoine Watteau’s vast canvas was in a wing of the museum that was closed for renovations when I arrived; I was disappointed, but the compensation was seeing the Appartements Napoléon III for the first time and soaking in their splendid opulence.

Musée du Louvre (1ère): table et fauteuil de toilette (Paris, c. 1819) designed by Marie-Jeanne-Rosalie Desarnaud-Charpentier (“acquis par la duchesse de Berry” pour “son chateau de Rosny-sur-Seine”) in the Louvre on my last trip to Paris (5.25.15)

la Cour du Musée du Louvre (1ère)

les appartements Napoléon III au Musée du Louvre (1ère)

les appartements Napoléon III: salle à manger, Musée du Louvre

Louis XVI period room in the Musée du Louvre (1ère)

Rue de Rivoli from the Musée du Louvre (1ère)

I spent some time in the Place des Vosges on Monday evening looking for a suitable restaurant for diner, settling on the Place Royal, then calling Joyce to bring Ellen down there to meet me at the restaurant.

Place Royal in the Place des Vosges

Ellen, Joyce and I enjoyed Place Royal, an elegant and rather expensive restaurant in the Place des Vosges with superb food; it was the most lavish dinner of the entire week in Paris; it was my gift to them for the week of hébergement and it wasn’t cheap.

Tuesday, May 26

Art Nouveau Style Nouille cast iron entrance at the Place de la Bastille Métro station

I love Art Nouveau and especially the Style Nouille (‘noodle style’) and was delighted to come across the cast iron entrance at the Place de la Bastille Métro station.

Sainte Chapelle on the Île de la Cité

Sainte Chapelle is in my view the most beautiful church in the world. I was fortunate enough to be visiting Paris in May 2015, just after the original stained glass windows were remounted after seven years of cleaning them; when the sun finally came out, the windows were dazzling with the light streaming through them.

Sainte Chapelle is a miracle of Gothic design and one of the supreme masterpieces of French architecture

la cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris: rose window & organ

Sainte Chapelle shares the Île de la Cité with Nôtre Dame de Paris. While the cathedral and seat of the bishop of Paris is darker and lacks the stunning stained glass windows of Sainte Chapelle, Nôtre Dame is far more historically important and politically significant; fortunately, it is also much easier to get into; there was no line when I arrived there after leaving Sainte Chapelle around the corner.

La crypte archéologique de l’île de la Cité est un musée de la Ville de Paris, situé juste sous le parvis de la cathédrale  de Nôtre-Dame

Underneath Nôtre Dame is a large archeological crypt that contains some of the foundations of ancient Paris; I’d never seen it before and took the opportunity to explore it after visiting the cathedral.

I crossed the Île de la Cité many times while living in Paris and had seen the Conciergerie from afar but had never gone inside; since the ticket to Sainte Chapelle included admission to the Conciergerie as well, I thought I would check out this imposing prison where Marie-Antoinette and thousands of others were imprisoned during the French Revolution and it turned out to be quite fascinating.

Conciergerie: a cell for poor prisoners

Conciergerie: a cell for wealthy prisoners

Even in prison, class distinctions were paramount: the cells for poor prisoners in the Conciergerie were filthy hovels, but those for prisoners who could pay an extra fee were relatively clean by comparison and those prisoners (aristocrats, undoubtedly) had cots to sleep on instead of straw. Seeing the cell where Marie-Antoinette lived out the last months of her life was really meaningful after having read two biographies of her; while I’m no fan of hers, the doomed queen rose to a level of true nobility in her last few months; had she displayed the same wisdom in her many years of foolish, frivolous, extravagant and even treasonous behavior as queen, she might well have kept her head.

courtyard of the Hôtel Carnavalet

After leaving the Conciergerie, I visited the Hôtel Carnavalet, which I had first seen when I was living in Paris in 1992; it was a wonderful reminder of the sweep of history of this great city.

golden statues at the entrance to one of the rooms in the Hôtel Carnavalet

I then proceeded to the Hôtel Salé, which houses the Musée Picasso, my first visit to this wonderful museum. The breadth and depth of the Picasso collection is unique in all the world, but the exceptionally beautiful elegance of the Hotel Salé itself makes a visit to this grand building worth one’s while.

I came across the Musée Cognacq-Jay on my walk through the Marais after visiting the Musée Picasso. Called the ‘Musée du XVIIIe siècle de la Ville de Paris,’ the Musée Cognacq-Jay is a tiny little jewel of a museum that can be seen in less than half an hour; while it can’t compare to the Musée Picasso in the importance of its collection and while the building that houses it lacks the grandeur of the Hôtel Salé, the Musée Cognacq-Jay will be a delight to anyone interested in the 18th century as I am.

an 18th c. clock in the Musée Cognacq-Jay

Wednesday, May 27

On my last day in Paris, I paid a final visit to the Place des Vosges and then went for the first time to the Hôtel de Soubise, which houses the Archives Nationales.

Hôtel de Soubise: le Salon du Prince (4ème)

Hôtel de Soubise: le Salon du Prince (4ème)

l’Hôtel de Soubise, a masterpiece of the Rococo style (4ème)

Hôtel de Soubise: le Salon de la Princesse (4ème)

The Hôtel de Soubise has only two rooms really worth seeing, but they are exceptionally beautiful and important: the Salon du Prince and the even more beautiful Salon de la Princesse, masterpieces of the Rococo.

One last farewell to the building in the rue des Archives where I lived in 1992.

…at the Arc de Triomphe on my last day in Paris

And then the Arc de Triomphe, followed by the Palais Garnier, the masterpiece of Second Empire architecture.

Palais Garnier

dome of the Galleries Lafayette

And finally, a glimpse of the sumptuous dome of the Galleries Lafayette before bidding Paris adieu.

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I spent five weeks in Europe in 2017, two in Norway, two in Spain and one in Iceland; it was the longest trip of my life, exceeding even the four weeks I spent in Korea in June and July 2015; these are some of my photos of the trip and some of my thoughts about what I saw there…

Monday, June 19

Flight from JFK to Stockholm Arlanda.

Tuesday, June 20

I flew Norwegian from Stockholm Arlanda to Oslo and arrived at Gardermoen airport. Unfortunately, my luggage didn’t arrive with me, so I had no choice but to take a train into Oslo, where I went to Morten and Rolf’s apartment in Grünerløkka.

Morten and I went out to an Asian fusion restaurant and had a wonderful dinner at Monsun.

We went back to his place and had a nice chat about art to the mellow light of his lamps; Morten then set me up in the guest room in the complex’s grendehus (garden house).

Wednesday, June 21

Waking up in the grendehus of an apartment building in Grünerløkka.

Olaf Ryes Plass at Markveien in the Grünerløkka district of Oslo

Trikk Trakk tram to Oslo City mall. Back to the Grünerløkka.

Oslo: in front of Sentralstasjon

Thursday, June 22

Royal Palace. Henrik Ibsen Museum. Trikk Trakk tram to Apothek restaurant for dinner.

Øystein Grønning & I spoke to members of the Palestinakomite i Norge at Maksitaksi in Oslo about the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine

Friday, June 23

Gol stavkyrkje (c. 1157-1216) is a stave church originally from Gol in the region of Hallingdal in Buskerud fylke (county) that was relocated to the Norsk Folkemuseum (Norwegian Folk Museum) on Bygdøy peninsula in Oslofjord (6.25.17)

“Descolonizar Espacios e Identidades” speakers

Pauline Park & Candy Yun at the Matadero for “Descolonizar Espacios e Identidades”

I was delighted to meet another transracial intercountry adoptee eight years ago after the forum. Søren Severino was born in Colombia and adopted by Danish parents; he is now trying to learn Spanish and reconnect with his Colombian roots.

나는 한국에서 입양되었다 입양 입양인 한국 조선 대한민국 남한 남조선 한국말 입양홍보

Saturday, July 1

Madrid: Lavapiés; World Pride; dinner at Il Piccolo Diavolo.

Madrid: Lavapiés

Antigua Taquería at Calle de Cabestreros 4, Lavapiés

I passed by the Catedral de Nuestra Señora Santa María la Real de la Almudena at sunset.

Plaza Mayor was built (1580-1619) during the reign of Philip III; I passed through Madrid’s elegant central square at night four years ago today & it looked strangely mysterious…

Sunday, July 2

El Rastro flea market & El Escorial.

El Escorial

El Escorial

Toledo: the Alcazar rising above the city

Toledo: Santa María la Blanca: a Jewish synagogue in the Moorish style that was converted into a church

Toledo street scene

Toledo: the cathedral

Toledo: the Alcazar at sunset

Tuesday, July 4

Atocha: Renfe train to Málaga; Hotel Ibis Budget.

Spain: a note on history…

To understand Andalucia, one must understand the ‘Reconquista,’ the Christian ‘reconquest’ of Spain from the Muslim Arabs and Berbers who defeated the Visigoths to conquer the peninsula centuries earlier. Ferdinand of Aragon Isabella of Castille (‘los Reyes Católicos) completed a very long process of pushing the Arab Muslim rulers of ‘al-Andalus, ultimately defeating the last Emir of Granada and seizing the last part of Spain still beyond the reach of the Roman Catholic monarchs who created the Spain we know today. The Reconquista  was a disaster for the Muslims and Jews of Spain, who were subjected to forced conversion and eventual expulsion, as well as for the indigenous peoples of Latin America, subjected to genocide as the result of the Spanish conquest of Meso-America and much of the South American continent. The south of Spain is known Andalusia, which in Spanish is spelled ‘Andalucía’ and derives from the Arabic word ‘al-Andalus’ (الأندلس); the etymology of the term is controversial, though the conventional explanation is that ‘al-Andalus’ is an Arabic word for the land of the ‘Vandals,’ among the Germanic tribes that conquered Spain after the fall of the western Roman empire.

Málaga

Wednesday, July 5

Seville: gardens of the Parque de María Luisa; university; Alcázar.

Seville: the Patio de las Doncellas (Courtyard of the Maidens), a masterpiece of Mudéjar style at the heart of the Alcázar in the palace of Pedro I of Castille, who somewhat ironically built a palace in the Moorish ‘Mudéjar’ style of his Muslim Arab predecessors after the reconquest of Seville, the most important example of the mudéjar style after the Alhambra of Granada

Málaga street at night

Thursday, July 6

Málaga

Friday, July 7

On my third full day in Andalucía, I took the train from Málaga to Córdoba, the first capital of Arab Muslim al-Andalus and the home to the Gran Mezquita, the largest and most important mosque in Spain.

Córdoba: la Gran Mezquita

Córdoba: la Gran Mezquita

Córdoba: a prayer alcove in la Gran Mezquita

Córdoba: arches in la Gran Mezquita

Córdoba: a prayer alcove in la gran mezquita

Córdoba: arches in the gran mezquita

Córdoba: a prayer alcove in the gran mezquita

Cordoba: a crucifix in the gran mezquita
Córdoba: bell tower of the gran mezquita

Pauline Park in the gran mezquita

arches leading to the cathedral chapel in the middle of the gran mezquita

Córdoba’s gran mezquita has a statue of a pope above classical columns: it’s a hybrid that embodies the history of Spain…

Córdoba’s gran mezquita is a forest of Roman arches brought in by Abd al-Rahman I from Roman ruins in and around the city; the addition of a Gothic barrel vaulted ceiling to this long passageway in the midst of the mosque shows how thoroughly mixed Roman, Muslim Arab and Spanish Catholic Baroque styles are in this extraordinary building…

I was struck by the sculptures of Christian saints being supported by Roman arches added to Córdoba’s gran mezquita after the Reconquista, which could be cited as a visual and architectural metaphor of Spain itself…

arches in the gran mezquita

Córdoba’s ancient walls

Málaga

Saturday, July 8

The last and finest flowering of Muslim Arab culture in al-Andalus is the Alhambra of Granada and there’s good reason why it is the single most popular tourist destination in Spain: there is no palace that I’ve ever seen that is more inviting and that I’d more like to live in; other palaces in Europe may be grander, but none is closer to a paradise on earth than the Alhambra.

I actually bought tickets a few days in advance because while one can enter the Alhambra without booking in advance, entry to the Palacios Nazaríes is by timed ticket only, and so planning is required. The Alhambra is actually an enormous complex and when I arrived there, I had several hours before my ticket to the Palacios Nazaríes was valid, so I started out by touring the gardens of the Generalife, which are luxuriant.

Jardínes del Generalife

Jardínes del Generalife

Jardínes del Generalife

Jardínes del Generalife

Alhambra seen from the Jardínes del Generalife

Spain: the emirate of Granada was the last to fall to the Reconquista

Mirador de Daraxa in the Palacios Nazaríes

Jardín de Daraxa in the Palacios Nazaríes

Jardín de Daraxa in the Palacios Nazaríes

Granada from the gardens of the Palacios Nazaríes in the Alhambra

Málaga

Sunday, July 9

I took the train to the airport in Málaga; adios, España~!  RyanAir flight to Sandefjord airport; bus from Torp to Oslo. Anker Hostel: bedding. McDonald’s.

Málaga airport

Monday, July 10

Oslo City: sandwich, umbrella. Oslo tourist info. office: booked train ticket to Bergen. Chinese restaurant in Oslo City.

Tuesday, July 11

Lunch; train from Oslo to Bergen; taxi to City Apartments.

Wednesday, July 12

Norges Fiskerimuseum (Norwegian Fisheries Museum): Von Tangens kremede fiskesuppe (creamed fish soup) for lunch (Kr 165)

Bergen Tourist Information office: bought Bergen Card. Bryggen. Hanseatisk Museum & Schøtstuene. Norges Fiskerimuseum (Norwegian Fisheries Museum).

Bergen: on the Brygge

Thursday, July 13

Bergen Tourist Information office: booked Zander K hotel. Brygge. Edvard Munch exhibition at the Kode 3.

Fløibanen funicular up Mount Fløyen

Friday, July 14

Bergen: tour bus to Troldhaugen, tour of Edvard Grieg’s house

Troldhaugen: the pond near Edvard Grieg’s house outside of Bergen

Gamle Bergen

Gamle Bergen

Gamle Bergen

Gamle Bergen

Gamle Bergen

Gamle Bergen

Saturday, July 15

Bus to Nordheim; Norled cruise on Hardangerfjord; Vøringsfossen; bus back to Bergen.

Hardangerfjord

Hardangerfjord

Hardangerfjord

Hardangerfjord

Hardangerfjord

Hardangerfjord

Hardangerfjord

Hardangerfjord

Hardangerfjord

Vøringsfossen in the Hardangervidda is the most famous waterfall in Norway

Vøringsfossen in the Hardangervidda

Hardanger fjord

Sunday, July 16

Checking out of the Zander K hotel. Bus to Haugesund via ferry on the Banenfjord & then crossing Stord. Taxi to the Scandic Haugesund Hotel.

Stord

Haugesund: the Brygge (wharf)

Haugesund: the bridge to Risøya

Haugesund: the Brygge (wharf)

Haugesund: the Brygge (wharf)

Monday, July 17

Bus to Avaldsnes; Nordvegen History Center, Vikinggard (Viking farm) on Bukkøy island, St. Olaf’s Church. Bus back to Haugesund. Skåre kirke.

Vikinggard (Viking farm)

Avaldsnes: interior of the Viking longhouse on the Vikinggard (Viking farm) on Bukkøy island

Avaldsnes: St. Olaf’s Church

Avaldsnes: St. Olaf’s Church  

Tuesday, July 18

Haugesund Brygge; bike to Skåre kirke; Byparken. Ferry to Røvaer; Vikingtuftet at Grønevika with Jan Torgesen; ferry back to Haugesund.

Haugesund: Skåre kirke

Haugesund: Skåre kirke

Røvær

Røvær

Røvær

Røvær

 Haugesund Bryggen

Haugesund: an old ship in the harbor

Haugesund Brygge (wharf)

Wednesday, July 19

Haugesund Folkebibliothek, Haugesund Rådhus, Lillesund skole, Haraldsgata.

Haugesund Rådhus (City Hall)

Lillesund skole

Haugesund: a house on Henrik Ibsens gata

Haraldsgata

Haraldsgata: a typical Norwegian Victorian building

Thursday, July 20

Haugesund Folkebibliothek; checked out of the Scandic Hotel; walked to busstasjon. Kyssbus to Stavanger via ferry. Taxi to Scandic Forum Hotel; checked in; bus to sentrum. Gladmatfestivalen on the Brygge, domkirke; Kirkebakken; taxicab back to Scandic Forum.

Haugesund Folkebibliothek (municipal library)

 Stavanger Gladmatfestivalen (food festival): festival stage

Stavanger Gladmatfestivalen (food festival): tiny canapé from the Suldal Skattkammeret (Chamber of Commerce) tent

Stavanger Gladmatfestivalen: free book tent

Stavanger Gladmatfestivalen (food festival): reindeer burger

souvenir shopping in Stavanger

Stavanger harbor

Friday, July 21

Checked out of Scandic Forum; bus to sentrum; Kirkebakken 16(a); Gamle Stavanger; bus to Bergen via Haugesund & ferry; checked into the Zander K hotel.

Stavanger: Kirkebakken

Saturday, July 22

Checked out of the Zander K hotel; train to Flesland airport; Icelandair baggage check & check-in; flight to Trondheim; flight to Keflavik; Flybus to Leifur Eiriksson hotel; check-in; Icelandic pølse on Skólavörðustígur street.

Keflavik airport

Reykjavík: Hallgrímskirkja

My hotel in Reykjavík was across the street from the Hallgrímskirkja, which was designed by architect Guðjón Samúelsson to celebrate the country’s extraordinary landscape.

Sunday, July 23

Mánudagur (Monday): Iceland weather report seen on TV in my rom at the Leifur Eiriksson hotel

Monday, July 24

Golden Circle Tour with Christian of Odinn; Mosfellsbaer horse farm, Þingvellir, Geysir, Gulfoss waterfall, Secret Lagoon. Reykjavík from the Hallgrímskirkja

Þingvellir

Gulfoss was the most spectacular sight (and site) I saw in Iceland and — along with Hardanger fjord in Norway — the most spectacular natural phenomenon I saw during my five weeks in Europe in 2017.

I walked down to Höfði to take a closer look at the house where the summit took place at which Ronald Reagan parlayed with Mikhail Gorbachev, the president of the United States shocking NATO allies by nearly negotiating away the US nuclear defense guarantee that was a central pillar of European NATO member states’ policies.

Reykjavík sunset

Tuesday, July 25

Reykjavík: the Hallgrímskirkja

Reykjavík: the Hallgrímskirkja

Reykjavík from the Hallgrímskirkja

Bus to Árbaer;

Árbaer Open Air Museum

bus from Árbaer back into sentrum; Rådhus; post office.

Reykjavík from the Hallgrímskirkja

Reykjavíka baðstofan: a communal living room (c. 1800-1900) in the National Museum of Icelandrom the Hallgrímskirkja

Reykjavík: the Hallgrímskirkja

Wednesday, July 26

Reykjavík from the Hallgrímskirkja

National Museum of Iceland; checked out of the Leifur Eiriksson hotel; Flybus to Keflavik; Icelandair baggage check-in; flight to JFK; AirTrain to Jamaica; E train to Roosevelt Ave.

The post Europe 2017: Norway Iceland Spain appeared first on Pauline Park.

Hillary Clinton & Park Geun-hye: a progressive feminist analysis of presidential politics in the US & Korea
by Pauline Park

Park Geun-hye is the first woman elected president of the Republic of Korea as well as the first president of the republic to be impeached. Hillary Clinton was the first woman to be nominated by the Democratic Party to run for president of the United States and won the popular vote by nearly three million votes in November 2016 but lost the electoral college to Donald Trump because she fell 107,000 votes short in just three key ‘swing’ states (Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania).

The impeachment of Park Geun-hye and the defeat of Hillary Clinton have prompted some feminists to cry foul and blame sexism for these developments; but can we explain them solely or even primarily with reference to misogyny? It seems to me that this question can only be answered by disentangling various threads and re articulating the question as at least three separate interrogatories. First, did sexism or misogyny lead the South Korean parliament to impeach Park Geun-hye and lead to American voters to reject Hillary Clinton in favor of Donald Trump? Second, are women inherently feminist and progressive? And third, is the election of a woman as the first president of the Republic of Korea or the United States necessarily a feminist victory in and of itself?

In the Korean case, we have those who point to sexist jibes being chanted in the crowds in Gwanghwamun near the Blue House demanding Park Geun-hye’s resignation; is this conclusive proof that there was no credible scandal but only an enormous wave of misogyny that led to Park’s impeachment in 2016? Difficult to believe, given that South Korean voters elected Park president in 2012 by a narrow majority of 51.6%; while there is no doubt that there are elements of misogyny in South Korean society, but such misogyny did not prevent the election of a woman as president five years ago, and Park’s fall to 4% approval in December 2016 can hardly be explained solely with reference to sexism, especially given that she had risen to a 63% approval rating as late as July 2013; ignoring the impact of the Sewol ferry disaster and the Choi Soon-sil scandal and attributing Park’s unpopularity solely to antipathy to women in Korean society is entirely unpersuasive. Rather, Park’s fall from power has to be understood in the context of the incomplete democratization of the Republic of Korea in the last three decades, following decades of military rule, including by her father, Park Chung-hee, who pursued the most successful industrialization of any national economy in the twentieth century, but at enormous cost to labor and human rights as well as the environment.

In fact, Park Geun-hye was elected precisely because of nostalgia for her father’s rule, especially by older Koreans who remembered the poverty that Korea was mired in before his taking power in a coup d’état in May 1961. Far more important than gender in understanding Park Geun-hye’s rise and fall is class: as the daughter of the dictator, growing up in the Blue House, she had the most privileged upbringing of any Korean child in the 1960s and 1970s; and her father’s symbiotic relationship with the chaebol – the huge conglomerates run by family dynasties that Park Chung-hee made enormously wealthy and powerful through his crash state-led industrialization – gave her the most effective base for gaining power through election in the post-dictatorship period. Indeed, Park Geun-hye’s relationship with Samsung and the other chaebol is a central cause of the deep resentment towards her by ordinary Koreans, both men and women, and the vast corruption revealed by the Choi Soon-sil scandal and not ‘sexism’ is what brought her down.

The Hankyoreh (the progressive Korean daily) ran this cartoon (8.14.16) to lampoon the dangerous game Park Geun-hye was playing in her foreign policy.

There are of course many differences between Park Geun-hye and Hillary Clinton, but there are also striking similarities, including the fact that they both came into office because of their relationship with the most powerful men in their families  – in Park’s case, that with her father; and in Hillary Clinton’s case, that with her husband, Bill Clinton, who was elected governor of Arkansas and then president of the United States; it is simply inconceivable that Hillary would have been considered a serious candidate for the United States Senate from New York – a state in which she had never lived when she ran for that office in 2000 – had she not been First Lady from 1993-2000, a status U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel explicitly referred to when recruiting her to run in that year.

Even more important to consider is the fact that both Park Geun-hye and Hillary Clinton have been associated with right-wing politics and policy-making that have on balance been counter to the needs and interests of women, regardless of the symbolism of the election of the former as president and the nomination of the latter as a presidential candidate. Park’s scheme to undermine labor rights by giving employers a free hand to terminate workers prompted massive protests in 2015 (“Massive crowd protest in South Korea against Park’s labor reform plans,” Reuters, 11.14.15), as did her plan to censor history textbooks in order to re-write the history of her father’s brutal dictatorship, which became notorious for human rights abuses (Agence France-Presse, “South Korea accused of rewriting history in new school textbooks,” Guardian, 11.3.15). Neither the elimination of labor rights nor the whitewashing of history textbooks through historical revisionism and censorship by the central government – a move absolutely unprecedented in the history of post-democratization Korea – strike me as being particularly ‘feminist.’

Hillary Clinton’s record is hardly more feminist thank Park Geun-hye’s. As First Lady, Hillary publicly supported Bill Clinton’s signing ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ (legislation that wrote into statute law discrimination in the military based on sexual orientation) and the ‘Defense of Marriage Act’ (DOMA, legislation that authorized state governments to discriminate against same-sex couples in the provision of marriage licenses); she also supported the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) and the welfare ‘reform’ bill that Bill Clinton signed into law that deepened the poverty of millions of women and children; and she aggressively supported the mass incarceration of people of color spearheaded by the Clinton administration that impoverished millions of families of color (Pauline Park, “Hillary Clinton: a progressive feminist perspective,” paulinepark.com).

In his eight years as president, Barack Obama has deported more than twice as many undocumented immigrants as George W. Bush and by some counts, more than all previous presidents combined, prompting La Raza to call him the ‘Deporter in Chief.’ Hillary fully supported those deportations as secretary of state and did not begin to distance herself from these deportations until she began her campaign for president (Betsey Woodruff, “Hillary Clinton’s Child-Deportation Flip-Flop,” Politico, 3.11.16). As secretary of state, Hillary also supported the 2009 coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras that brought a brutal military dictatorship to power and supported the junta despite its persecution of feminists, artists, LGBT people, indigenous people, environmental activists and political dissidents; she persuaded Obama to resume US aid to Honduras despite the fact that it was a violation of US and international law. In March 2016, Berta Cáceres was assassinated almost certainly on the orders of the junta (“Remembering Berta Cáceres , Assassinated Honduras Indigenous & Environmental Leader,” Democracy Now, 5.4.16). A leading environmental and indigenous rights activist, Cáceres held Hillary personally responsible for the violence and repression under the junta (“Before Her Assassination, Berta Cáceres Singled Out Hillary Clinton for Backing Honduran Coup,” Democracy Now, 5.11.16).

Hillary also supported the coup d’état that has plunged Egypt into an abyss of corruption, brutal repression and despair (Yahia Hamed, ”Egypt’s coup has plunged the country into catastrophe,” Guardian, 3.16.14). As in Honduras, Obama and Hillary resumed US aid to Egypt in direct contravention of US law, which prohibits continuing aid to a military junta brought to power in a coup. In Libya, Hillary notoriously spearheaded a disastrous intervention, repeating the folly of Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq (which she voted for), decapitating the regime and leaving a power vacuum which al-Qaeda and ISIS (‘Da’esh’) have filled.

As secretary of state, Hillary approved the brutal crackdown on the popular uprising in 2011 by the despotic Bahraini regime which teven arrested, imprisoned, tortured and murdered doctors and nurses who tended to wounded pro-democracy activists who participated in the uprising. Hillary also encouraged Saudi Arabia’s war crimes in Yemen in a war that continues to this day with the support of the Obama administration, with Saudi fighter jets dropping bombs on hospitals, schools and apartment buildings (“As Saudis Continue Deadly Bombing of Yemen, Is Obama Trading Munitions for Riyadh’s Loyalty?,” Democracy Now, 4.21.16).

Hillary Clinton’s outrageous support for Israeli apartheid and genocide is particularly disturbing; the Israeli military deliberately targeted civilians in its 2014 genocide in Gaza, killing over 2,500 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, a majority of them women and over 500 of them children; Hillary publicly supported and defended the genocide. In short, Hillary’s public record is clearly anti-feminist and anti-progressive, though her defeat in November 2016 is attributed to her supporters as nothing but an overt expression of virulent misogyny; is this really the case? Even the most cursory glance at the facts at hand will show this to be an absurd and entirely unfounded assertion.

First of all, to the extent that Donald Trump and others threw sexist jibes at Hillary, they almost certainly helped her candidacy, generating outrage from many women and ginning up enthusiasm for her election; in fact, her campaign used such sexism to fundraise for it. Second, it is significant that a majority of white women voted for Donald Trump, almost certainly in spite of his outrageous misogyny and not because of it. And no one has yet to produce evidence that the majority of American women are so consumed by self-hatred and internalized misogyny that they cannot even conceive of voting for or supporting a woman for president. The fact is, Hillary won the popular vote by nearly three million votes, so clearly, a majority of Americans did not reject the very possibility of a woman president; but many voters did not want Hillary Clinton to be the first woman elected president of the United States, especially ‘millennials’ and other  younger women, who overwhelmingly rejected Hillary’s candidacy in the primary season in favor of Sen. Bernie Sanders, the self-described ‘socialist’ from Vermont, prompting Gloria Steinem to make her notorious assertion that those younger women were only supporting Sanders because they wanted to get dates with ‘Bernie Bros,’ young men supporting the Vermonter’s candidacy; it is difficult to imagine a comment more demeaning to young women and more profoundly misogynist than that.

The real issue facing Hillary Clinton’s candidacy was that of her character. Hillary was the only secretary of state ever to have set up a private server secretly in the basement of her house in order to evade clear State Department rules and then attempt to mislead the public about the subterfuge, violating the Federal Records Act in the process; her refusal to meet with the Inspector General of the State Department as indicated in his May 25 report is as disturbing as her violation of department policy (Julian Hattem, “Watchdog: Clinton, top aides did not comply on records policy,” The Hill, 5.25.16). Destroying government documents is a serious crime and repeatedly lying about such behavior is an indictment of Hillary’s behavior (A.J. Vicens, “State Department Inspector General Finds Hillary Clinton Violated Recordkeeping Rules,” Mother Jones, 5.25.16). By November 2016, Hillary was viewed rightly by an overwhelming majority of Americans as dishonest and untrustworthy (Amy Chozick, “Emails Add to Hillary Clinton’s Central Problem: Voters Just Don’t Trust Her,” New York Times, 5.25.16). Part of that perception may be because of her corruption. Since leaving office as president and secretary of state, Bill and Hillary Clinton have cashed in on public office in a way absolutely unprecedented in American history. Hillary alone has received more than $22 million in speaking fees, while Bill Clinton has earned more than $132 million in speaking fees, in addition to book royalties and other income (Amy Davidson, “Bill Problems: As Donald Trump attacks both Clintons, it’s like 1992 all over again,” New Yorker, 6.6.16). ‘Hillary for America’ has received $147,840 in direct contributions from 65 fossil fuel lobbyists and $2,502,740 in bundled contributions (Charlie Cray, Fossil Fuel Lobbyists’ Contributions to the Clinton Campaign, Greenpeace.org, 4.22.16). In fact Hillary Clinton got more money from Wall Street than any presidential candidate in US history and far more than Donald Trump. It was the $675,000 Hillary was given in ‘honoraria’ from Goldman Sachs – the wealthiest and most powerful investment bank in the United States and possibly the world – that was a touchstone of criticism of her; no one has ever been paid ‘speaking fees’ in that amount by a Wall Street investment bank and those ‘honoraria’ appeared to many to be scarcely disguised bribes; Hillary’s refusal to release the transcripts of those speeches dogged her campaign right down to election day.

But despite all of the scandals dogging her, Hillary Clinton would have won an electoral college majority as well as the popular vote if she had simply turned out the same number of voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania as Barack Obama had in 2016; just 107,000 more votes in those states would have put her in the White House. Yet Democratic Party hacks blame ‘sexism,’ Russian hacking and Jill Stein for Hillary’s defeat, while an examination of the election shows that the fault lies with her. In fact, Hillary Clinton’s own campaign staffed begged her to campaign in Wisconsin, warning her that she could lose the Badger State, which she ultimately did; but she did not visit Wisconsin even once after winning the April Democratic primary there, supremely arrogant in her confidence that Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania were all ‘in the bag.’ Hillary’s refusal to visit Wisconsin despite pleading and urgent warnings from her own campaign staff there is particularly puzzling given that the Democratic presidential nominee won the state by less than 1% in all of the previous four elections (Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012). Hillary also refused to stand with African Americans striking in Philadelphia, which not only would have demonstrated her solidarity with the African American community as well as labor, but could have helped win her Pennsylvania. And of course, it is not Donald Trump who invented the electoral college, an institution that Hillary Clinton was more than aware of given Al Gore’s popular vote victory in 2000. In short, it was not ‘sexism’ that defeated Hillary Clinton but Hillary herself; while there is no question that misogyny remains a serious problem in American society, it is not the explanation for her defeat or Donald Trump’s electoral college victory. As the intrepid reporter Glenn Greenwald so trenchantly put it, “Because Democrats are so desperate to put the blame on everybody but themselves for the complete collapse of their party, they’re particularly furious at anybody who vocally challenges this narrative” (“Glenn Greenwald: Democrats Eager to Blame ‘Everybody But Themselves for the Collapse of Their Party,” Democracy Now, 1.6.17).

Hillary Clinton had the highest unfavorable rating of any Democratic presidential nominee in history, but anyone wishing to attribute this to her sex or gender should consider the fact that Donald Trump’s unfavorable rating was even higher. The truth is that Americans have internalized the binary opposition of our two-party duopoly, the false notion that we only have two choices in any presidential election and that a vote for a third party candidate is a wasted vote; but given that false dichotomy upon which American voters cast their votes in November 2016, the choice facing them was between two major party candidates whom a majority of voters found unacceptable. Voters found both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump thoroughly contemptible; both were multi-millionaire oligarchs (one of whom claimed to be a billionaire), but the former represented the status quo while the latter was seen as the candidate of change; in a change election, enough voters opted for what they saw as a risky change over a continuation of an unacceptable status quo; to interpret that choice as ‘sexist’ or having anything to do with misogyny is to misunderstand the election entirely. The irony is that American voters had a woman they could have voted for in the 2016 presidential election who was both progressive and feminist: Jill Stein, the presidential nominee of the Green Party, who was running on a platform that embodies all of the values that progressive feminists espouse.

Beyond the narrower questions of sexism and misogyny is the larger issue as to whether electing women to office has anything to do with feminism at all. There seems to be an assumption in certain quarters that electing women to office helps women, but that is an assumption that appears to be based on another unspoken assumption, namely, that women are all feminists. Having spent two years living in London under Margaret Thatcher’s rule, I can assure you that the Iron Lady was neither a progressive nor a feminist; and neither were Golda Meir or Indira Gandhi; and of course, neither are Angela Merkel or Park Geun-hye. Like most women who rise to the highest office in the land, all of these women came to power through a masculinist discourse of power, one which requires a woman to prove that she can be ‘more of a man’ than the men in her own government: Thatcher proved that by launching the Falklands War contrary to the advice of her entire cabinet; Indira Gandhi proved that by going to war against Pakistan as well as by sending troops into the Golden Temple of Amritsar – the holiest of all Sikh shrines, which ultimately led to her assassination – and Golda Meir proved that by building the Israeli war machine and the apartheid regime it maintains, denying the very existence of the Palestinian people, including Palestinian women and children, whom she treated with the same contempt as her male predecessors and successors. It is noteworthy that Ronald Reagan called Margaret Thatcher ‘the best man in England.’

Real feminism means rejecting a false ideology of representationalism that holds that the mere election of women to office constitutes feminism regardless of whether the women themselves are feminist or progressive; real feminism also requires that feminists reject anti-feminist and anti-progressive women such as Park Geun-hye and Hillary Clinton. It’s not about electing women, much less any particular women; it’s about pursuing the work of social justice for all.

This is the text of a presentation given by Pauline Park at the event “Feminists Take on Presidency” on 14 January 2017 at DCTV in New York. Pauline Park is chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA); she led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002. Park participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine in 2012. She did her B.A. in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her M.Sc. in European studies at the London School of Economics and her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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I want a president…
by Pauline Park
17 October 2016

I want a president who reflects my values, not the values of the Wall Street oligarchy as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump do.

I want a president who stands up to Islamophobia and all forms of bigotry instead of fanning the flames of prejudice and hatred as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton do.

I want a president who will curb the military/industrial complex instead of enabling its excesses with bloated budgets as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton would do.

I want a president who isn’t an enormously wealthy embodiment of class privilege as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are, multi-milllionaires who represent the interests of the oligarchy.

I want a president who doesn’t pander to voters or condescend as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton do but who addresses the real issues in a serious and policy-oriented manner.

I want a president who is willing to do something about global warming and climate change, unlike Donald Trump, a global warming denialist, and Hillary Clinton, whose agenda is to promote fracking, the new energy technology that’s contributing more to global warming than any other.

I want a president who really thinks #BlackLivesMatter instead of denigrating the BLM movement like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton do.

I want a president who actually understands the corporate culture of police violence in this country like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and is willing to address this serious problem affecting LGBT people and people of color, especially LGBT people of color.

I want a president who tells the truth and isn’t a pathological liar like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

I want a president who will challenge and downsize the National Security agency and end its illegal surveillance of US citizens and others instead of enabling the NSA like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

I want a president who will end support for and subsidies to brutal dictatorships in Honduras, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and elsewhere instead of supporting and enabling them like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

I want a president who will challenge and downsize the military/industrial complex, unlike Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, who would further enable its excesses.

I want a president who will take the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people seriously, unlike Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

I want a president who will stop subsidizing the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton do but who instead will end US subsidies to Israel’s brutal apartheid regime in illegally occupied Palestine.

I want a president who will challenge Israel’s illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip instead of supporting its policy of incremental genocide in Gaza instead as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton do.

I want a president who knows where Aleppo is, unlike Gary Johnson.

I want a president like Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential nominee, who reflects my progressive feminist values instead of embodying anti-progressive, anti-feminist politics as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton do.

I want a president like Jill Stein, the only feminist and the only progressive in the race~!

I want all Americans to vote for Jill Stein as president and say #NeverHillaryOrTrump; #JillNotHill~!

This is a statement read by Pauline Park (without any of the candidate references) on the High Line in Manhattan on 17 October 2016 as part of a project referencing Zoe Leonard’s poem, “I Want a President.”

Pauline Park led the campaign for the transgender rights law enacted by the New York City Council in 2002 and participated in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine in 2012; Park did her M.Sc. in European studies at the London School of Economics & Political Science and her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Memorial Day 2016 reflections on war

I’m watching all of the media coverage of Memorial Day parades and thinking about how superficial and simplistic it all is. War is never good, but is occasionally necessary (the Civil War, World War II); but most wars are unnecessary (the Hundred Years’ War, Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea, the Thirty Years’ War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the Spanish-American War, World War I, the Vietnam War, the Iraq war, etc., etc.). Soldiers do good things and terrible things in war; some are genuine heroes while others commit horrific war crimes; many are traumatized by war; some are courageous even fighting for a bad cause; war almost always causes massive human suffering, esp. among civilians. War is possibly the most expensive as well as the most destructive human invention of all time, but human beings aren’t unique in making war; chimpanzees make war, too, as Jane Goodall discovered, so humans aren’t unique in expressing animal aggression; we’re only unique in the destructive capacity of our war-making, which now has the possibility of actually destroying the planet we live on. I’m indirectly the product of two wars; my father served in World War II and helped liberate three Nazi concentration camps; I was born several years after the end of the Korean War, which devastated the land of my birth and profoundly shaped the circumstances that would lead to my adoption & relocation to the United States; I was also only a few years short of being drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. Unlike Hillary Clinton, I opposed the Iraq war from the beginning and predicted it would be a disaster, which it has been. The Israeli war of genocide in Gaza in 2014 is perhaps the most cynically manipulative war of modern times. George W. Bush and Barack Obama have gotten Americans used to permanent endless war and unlimited expenditure on it, at the cost of everything else; Bush and Obama have used drones ostensibly to kill terrorists but have in fact killed far more innocent civilians; drone war is the most cowardly form of war because the loss of life is entirely absent from the war maker’s calculus. War is always bad, but it’s important to avoid binary oppositions that are false dichotomies when thinking about war. We need more effective mechanisms to hold governments and leaders accountable for war crimes. We also need a more nuanced & sophisticated perspective on war. We need to take the opportunity to remember heroes, villains and victims alike…

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Hillary Clinton is not my abuela
by Pauline Park

“7 things Hillary Clinton has in common with your abuela” has provoked overwhelmingly negative reactions from Latinos and Latinos. Within hours of the posting of the absurd piece of #Hispandering on HillaryClinton.com on Dec. 21, outraged Latinas took to Twitter to denounce Hillary with the hashtags #NotMyAbuela and #NotMiAbuela, both ‘trending’ on Twitter throughout Dec. 22 and 23.

I’d like to offer my own response by talking about my own grandmother, who was a source of unconditional love throughout my childhood and youth and until her death at the age of 99. There are so many ways in which my grandmother was different from Hillary, but I’ll just cite seven, in keeping with her #Hispandering piece:

1) My grandmother grew up without a mother, having lost her mother when she was just a baby. Hillary Clinton grew up with both parents.

2) My grandmother she grew up in poverty in rural Wisconsin, in contrast to Hillary Clinton, who grew up surrounding by wealth and privilege in the all-white upper-middle-class Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. She went out into the field as a child, pitching hay and working the farm with her widower father. Hillary didn’t live on subsistence agriculture at any time in her life and never worked as a field hand on a small, struggling family farm; and she’s been a multi-millionaire for years now, controlling a foundation with assets in the billions. My grandmother died with no assets other than the radio she used to listen to Milwaukee Brewers baseball games (she was a huge fan of the great African American baseball player, Hank Aaron), her Bible, and a few pieces of costume jewelry. My grandmother never lived in the White House, though she did live in my parents’ house for many years, a small house with white aluminum siding and only one bathroom for six people.

3) My grandmother was the daughter of German immigrants from the part of Prussia that is now in Poland, unlike Hillary, who was born to an English-speaking WASP family of wealth and privilege; unlike Hillary, my grandmother did not speak English as her first language. Hillary went to Wellesley College — one of the elite Seven Sisters women’s colleges — and then Yale law school, one of the two or three top law schools in the country. My grandmother never had the opportunity to pursue formal education after high school, though she did volunteer to teach Native American schoolchildren on a nearby reservation in northern Wisconsin.

4) My grandmother never had any power over anyone other than her five children; as secretary of state, Hillary had power over the lives of many, directing US foreign policy for the first term of the Obama administration; Hillary may well be elected president of the United States, which would make her the most powerful person on earth. My grandmother died long before the Internet age, so she never had an e-mail account and unlike Hillary, never had a secret e-mail server in the basement of her mansion in Chappaqua from which she conducted State Department business in direct contravention of the rules and of all standards of ethics in government. My grandmother also did not approve the imprisonment, torture, and murder of thousands of pro-democracy activists in Bahrain and even of the doctors and nurses who attended to the wounded in hospital after the brutal crackdown by the despotic monarchical regime in Bahrain. Nor did my grandmother publicly approve of the Israeli murder of Furgan Dogan in the act of piracy committed by the Israeli military against the Mavi Marmara in international waters. Nor did my grandmother approve of the secret mass surveillance of US citizens, Europeans and others by the National Security Administration (NSA). Nor did my grandmother approve of the unprecedented deportation of undocumented immigrants by the Obama administration, or Obama’s killing of innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan by drone strikes — including the killing of Momina Bibi, a 67-year-old midwife and grandmother in rural Pakistan. My grandmother never approved of the murder of a grandmother.

5) My grandmother made mistakes but learned from them, unlike Hillary; my aunt once made a comment to me (I was an adult by this point) to that effect, saying that my grandmother had really mellowed and was quite a different grandmother than she was a mother; whether or not she ever acknowledged the mistakes she’d made with her children, my grandmother dropped the stern German matriarch role to become a loving, nurturing grandmother to all of her grandchildren; given her Christian fundamentalist background, she became quite astonishingly non-judgmental in her old age.

6) My grandmother died in poverty, being consigned by my aunts to a nursing home in the last decade of her life, having spent down all of her limited assets, living on Social Security and Medicaid. Hillary is a multimillionaire and she continues to control a foundation with billions of dollars in assets.

7) Most important of all, my grandmother was not a self-interested, grasping, power-hungry politician like Hillary who selfishly pursues power at all costs and routinely  lies about her misdeeds. Unlike Hillary, my grandmother was not a war criminal. Though Hillary does have one thing in common with my grandmother — like her, Hillary is a Republican~!

#NotMyAbuela #NotMiAbuela #NotMyGrandmother

The post Hillary Clinton is not my abuela appeared first on Pauline Park.

Coming Full Circle: The Journey of a Transgendered Korean Adoptee
By Pauline Park
Queens College
7 November 15

I was born in Korea in 1960 and returned earlier this year – in June/July 2015 – my first time in the land of my birth since I left at the age of seven months old and the most momentous since the trip that took me from Korea to the United States 54 years before. When I was born there, Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world and had only begun its recovery from the devastation of the Korean War that ended in 1953; but the country I returned to more than half a century later was the eleventh largest economy in the world, with large parts of its capital unrecognizable to those who knew it before the startling industrialization that transformed the southern half of the peninsula in the 1970s and 1980s.

The circumstances of my birth and adoption were as mysterious as the political backdrop to my birth and adoption were dramatic. My adoptive parents were told that my birth mother died giving birth to my twin brother and me and that our birth father died before I was born. It was not until 1994, when I was reading a history of Korea, that the thought occurred to me that my birth father might have been among the thousands who died in a massive popular uprising in April 1960 that ousted Syngman Rhee, the dictator/president-for-life installed by the US CIA, from power and ushered in the short-lived Second Republic, which ended when Park Chung-hee came to power in a military coup in May 1961. Of course, as an infant in an orphanage in Seoul, I was completely unaware of the tumultuous political drama that was the backdrop for my birth in October 1960 and adoption in June 1961, only a few weeks after Park Chung-hee’s coup d’état. So perhaps I was born to make revolution…

There is little that I know about the adoption and my trip back in June/July 2015 only brought to light two facts that I did not know before this year. First, I discovered I was in fact adopted through an adoption agency, or at the very least, that an adoption agency helped facilitate that adoption. I had correspondence to my adoptive parents from the Children’s Welfare Service that my mother had left in her papers when she died in 1984 and on one document, there was an address, which I had thought was the address of the orphanage I was adopted from; when I was in Seoul in June 2015, I met with the executive director of Social Welfare Services (SWS), which inherited the files of the Children’s Welfare Service; when the director showed me my file, I discovered that there was no information in it that was useful for a birth search, and she informed me that the address on my adoption papers was not the orphanage from which I was adopted but rather the old office address for CWS. And so what became clear to me was that I had come 7,000 miles only to have reached a dead end. While I gave DNA to a special unit of the Namdaemun police, I concluded by the end of my month in Korea that there was no realistic prospect of ever finding birth family. But then again, I had not gone back to Korea to pursue a birth search; the main objective was simply to see the country of my birth, and that I accomplished.

And so the story of my adoption begins, from what my adoptive mother told me and my twin brother, with the death of our birth mother in childbirth. Our adoptive mother and father sought to adopt only one child but were told they could adopt twins, which they chose to do. And so I was adopted along with my twin brother at the age of seven and-a-half months old. Northwest Orient Airlines brought us from Seoul to Tokyo and from there to Anchorage and onto Chicago. Our new parents – the only parents I would ever know – picked us up at O’Hare Airport. In a photo taken at the airport the very moment when our adoptive parents first held us in their arms, the shock of seeing two seriously underweight babies registered on their faces. Our adoptive parents took us back with them to the house in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with white aluminum siding that would be my home for the next seventeen years.

My father was Norwegian American and my mother was German American. I knew very little about their background and neither had any particular interest in genealogy, something I would become interested in only many years later. In genealogical research that I did in 2011-14, I discovered that my father’s parents had emigrated from Norway in 1883 and 1887 and that my mother’s four grandparents had all emigrated from Prussia in the 19th century – from parts of Prussia that are now in Poland. Through my genealogical research, I would learn far more about my parents’ Norwegian and European ancestors than they ever knew; ironically, I would come to know far more about my parents’ ancestors to whom I had no connection by blood or genes while remaining completely in the dark about the Korean ancestors from whom I am directly descended.

I grew up with my mother’s extended family, and above all, my maternal grandmother, who lived in the house until my senior year in high school. My grandmother was born in 1888 and had grown up working the family farm in northern Wisconsin with her father after her mother’s untimely death. Grandma’s first language was German, and she would sometimes read to me from her German Bible as I tried to make sense of the elaborate traditional Gothic script.

The piano was at the center of our family life, and the making of live music – including the frequent playing of Lutheran hymns – defined my childhood as much as anything else. Despite a modest family income, our parents paid for our private piano lessons. A few years later, my brother and I began violin lessons at our public school, and I would eventually begin organ lessons with our private piano teacher and later with a local organist at another church in the neighborhood.

While I honored my mother’s German heritage and my father’s Norwegian background, I felt compelled to try to connect to the land of my birth, the ‘homeland’ that I never knew. I had a small flexible looseleaf binder in a deep burgundy color that I would write in, and on the cover, I remember writing my birth name on it, frustrated that I could write my Korean name only in the Roman alphabet because I did not know hangul (the Korean alphabet). Without any opportunity to learn Korean and with none of the infrastructure of Korean culture camps like those currently available to young Korean adoptees, I had no direct way of connecting to my birth culture. Instead, I connected with Korean culture through books. In our local branch library, there was one book that resonated with me called “The Land and People of Korea.” I also scoured the three sets of encyclopedias at home for references to Korea. But in none of these books did I find an obvious answer to the elusive question: where was my real homeland?

I had known no ‘homeland’ other than the United States, but to strangers, I was a foreigner because I was Asian. Though I had never learned to speak Korean and had never lived in Korea since my adoption at the age of eight months, my Asian features defined my status as the ‘other,’ the foreigner, the outsider. It was because others challenged my ‘American-ness’ that I came to doubt my belonging to the great American family, and it was through this process of ‘othering’ that I came to be alienated from America, the only homeland I had ever known.

When we went out in public, the striking physical differences between my adoptive parents and my brother and me made it impossible for others not to notice. As we accompanied our parents – a tall, balding, skinny Scandinavian and a rotund German Hausfrau, our parents were constantly asked, “Whose children are they?” But that was life in an all-white neighborhood on the south side of Milwaukee in the 1960s and 1970s. Before the court-ordered desegregation of our local public school system, my brother and I were the only non-white children in our elementary school.

Every December 7, my brother and I were verbally harassed by the white kids at school. This happened more than twenty years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. ‘Chink’ and ‘Jap’ were hurled at us, and it made me feel ambivalent about my adoptive country. Because of this, I had a hard time thinking of myself as American.

Because of that harassment, my parents’ house became my childhood security. But when my father died just before I turned twelve, our household became insecure. My grandmother’s departure in our senior year in high school left only my mother, my brother, me, and our Scottish Terrier.

I had never known any other home, but when I was just turning eighteen, I left that house, never again to live there, despite frequent short visits while in college. Including the orphanage in Seoul from which I was adopted and the old house in Milwaukee, I have lived in 25 different places in thirteen different cities (Seoul, Milwaukee, Madison, London, Chicago, Champaign-Urbana, Berlin, Regensburg, Brussels, Paris, Lake Forest, New York) in six different countries (Korea, United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, France) on three different continents (Asia, North America, Europe). With each move came a subtle shift in my understanding of home and homeland.

Milwaukee, my childhood home, was a white working-class a city of beer and bratwurst with the feel of a small town, despite its one and-a-half million people. For the first three years of my adulthood, Madison would be home. Madison, the ‘Berkeley of the Midwest’ and the center of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam era, had a small but growing gay community when I first arrived in 1978. The Gay Center in the basement of a church on campus would be the site of my first coming out, as a gay male in my very first semester at the University of Wisconsin.

London represented the next shift in venue and identity. Living there for two years, I fell hopelessly in love with London and I was determined to stay. While there, I learned that I had been accepted into a master’s degree program in European studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

It was while living with my lover in London that I first went out publicly dressed as a woman, though without any encouragement from him. It was clear to me at that point that my gay male identity did not and could not adequately address my lifelong identification with women. I began to go out regularly dressed as a woman, and it was the most liberating experience of my life. For the first time in my life, I was presenting myself as I saw myself to be. Despite my nervousness and to my surprise, I encountered few problems, perhaps because of my youth and my natural femininity as well as my Asian features.

At the same time that I was exploring my gender identity in public for the first time, my two years in London provided the opportunity to reconsider my national identity.

Because I could not speak Korean, it was impossible to fulfill expectations of what ‘Korean’ meant; and because of the incidents of racial insensitivity and harassment that I had experienced in childhood and youth, it was difficult to identify unambivalently as American.

I returned to the United States in October 1983 and experienced reverse culture shock. Ironically enough, it had been the experience of living in Europe that had made me realize how American I was. Now that I was back in the country of my youth, I had to reconstruct my identity once again. If Madison had been my first experience of living away from home and had provided the opportunity for my first coming out, London had offered an opportunity to explore questions of national identity – as well as gender identity. In Chicago, I entered a career in public relations, but helping large corporations enhance their public image did not give me a sense of fulfillment, and so I decided to go back to graduate school to pursue a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a poor grad student, the days of wine and roses gave way to the years of rice and beans.

Chicago had been my home for five years, and I had ceased to think of London and England as ‘home.’ When my grandmother died in a nursing home just a year before moving down to Champaign-Urbana, I felt that I had lost my last deep connection with Milwaukee, my first real home. Although Milwaukee was not far away, the psychic distance from my new academic life in Champaign-Urbana was considerable.

I spent six years pursuing my Ph.D. In so many ways, those six years would prove pivotal in redefining my identity in all its facets. It was not so much my Ph.D. program in political science, but my year living in Europe doing dissertation research that enabled me to reconsider my national identity as well as my gender identity.

When I finished my dissertation in December 1993, I discovered Foucault while taking a graduate seminar in political theory. Reading the work of this radical gay French theorist helped me re-think my lifelong identity complex. I had labored for years under the feeling that I was a ‘fake Korean,’ unable to live up to the expectations of others. In light of my reading of Foucault and other theorists, I came to understand that the pursuit of – or flight from – ‘Korean-ness’ was doomed to failure from the start, since there was no ‘essence’ of ‘Korean-ness’ to pursue. I now came to see myself as having a distinct identity as a Korean adoptee, neither ethnically Korean in the way that Koreans or recent Korean immigrants were nor even Korean American in the way that US-born, English-speaking Korean Americans were.

The most frequent question I am asked as a Korean adoptee is whether I have ever gone ‘back’ to Korea. ‘Back’ always struck me as such an odd word, given that I had left at the age of seven and-a-half months old and had no memories of the country of my birth Until my return in June/July 2015, I usually responded by saying that I hoped to visit Korea one day, but that I had not yet had the opportunity. As a Korean adoptee that never learned the Korean language, I cannot have anything but a complex relationship with the country of my birth. While I am proud of my Korean birth, I cannot claim that ‘heritage’ easily or without lengthy explanation. The question of where I am from has provoked different responses over the years. I usually respond with, “I was born in Korea but adopted by European American parents, and I grew up in Milwaukee.” But I could just as easily answer the question with either ‘Wisconsin,’ or ‘the United States,’ or even ‘New York,’ depending on the context.

Other Korean adoptees have asked me, “Have you done a birth search?” On my trip to Korea in June/July 2015, I saw my adoption file and now know that there is no practical way to identify the orphanage from which I was adopted, which almost certainly no longer exists. I am occasionally haunted by the possibility that one or both of my birth parents may still be alive and may actually be looking for me and my brother; but if so, they would be at least in their 70s. Even if I were to find my birth family, as a non-Korean speaking, openly transgendered Korean adoptee and activist, I would probably find it difficult to relate to them – and they to me. But I have every reason to believe that the story that my adoptive parents were told was true and that my birth parents are dead; and I am now persuaded that there is no real possibility of finding out anything about them, and I have come to terms with the disappointing finality of the end of my birth search.

Whatever the circumstances of my adoption and upbringing, I have come to understand that I am not a ‘fake Korean,’ I am a real Korean adoptee; above all, I am the real ‘me.’ And I no longer feel any need to apologize for my history, any more than to apologize for a lack of Korean language proficiency. I can now locate ‘homeland’ in a way that does not diminish my own sense of wholeness or authenticity.

Becoming involved with the growing community of adult Korean adoptees has also been tremendously helpful in coming to terms with my identity as an intercountry adoptee. Not long after moving to New York City, I joined Also-Known-As, a group for Korean and other intercountry adoptees here that is playing an active role in the construction of that community. In September 2001, I went to Washington, D.C. for the first international gathering of the first generation of Korean adoptees. Being at a conference with over 2,000 adult Korean adoptees was an extraordinary experience. While a few of the attendees were initially shocked by my presence – most had never met an openly transgendered person before – they soon realized that my life story as a Korean adoptee was one that they could relate to, and my gender identity has never been an issue at any of the adoptee gatherings that I have attended.

I have recently begun formally studying the Korean language in a class specifically for Korean adoptees, and while I doubt that I will ever become fluent, it is a good experience for me to learn more of the language of my ancestors.

Just as I came to reject the self-imposed label of ‘fake Korean’ in favor of an accepting myself as Korean adoptee, I also came to understand transgender as distinct form of gender identity that challenged the false constructs of ‘man/woman.’ I would eventually come to call myself a ‘male-bodied woman,’ a concept radical even within the transgender community, because I reject the assumption that the presence or absence of the penis determined my status as a man or as a woman.

My move to Queens, New York in 1997 corresponded with the end of my academic career and the beginning of my activism and advocacy work in New York as well as my coming out as an openly transgendered woman. In January 1997, I worked with other Queens activists to co-found Queens Pride House, a small lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community center in the borough. In February 1997, I joined with other queer Koreans to co-found Iban/Queer Koreans of New York. And in June 1998, I worked with other transgender activists to co-found the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA).

I now see myself as a transgendered Asian American woman with a distinct identity as a Korean adoptee. And I now feel comfortable calling the United States my home, comfortable, in fact, with the ambivalence about my adoptive homeland engendered by my personal experience of harassment and by a study of the often problematic politics of the American republic.

Korean adoptees share much in common and yet there is an enormous variation in terms of the circumstances of our adoption and upbringing each of us has a unique story to tell. My story is unusual in a number of respects, and while there are quite a few LGBT-identified Korean adoptees, few are openly transgendered and few are LGBT activists.

I have gone from having grown up in an all-white neighborhood on the south side of Milwaukee and ending up in Jackson Heights, which one demographer determined is the most demographically diverse spot on earth.

If the circumstances of my adoption meant that I was torn from the country of my birth before living in it for even eight months, the trip ‘back’ to Korea in June/July 2015 brought me full circle. For the first time since leaving at the age of seven and-a-half months, I was back in the land of my birth, but even if I had had any memories of Seoul or Korea, I probably would not have recognized the country or its capital city, as completely transformed as they have been by the forced industrialization directed by Park Chung-hee. Ironically enough, half a century later, I returned to find his daughter, Park Geun-hye, in the Blue House once again, this time as the first woman elected president of the Republic of Korea.

But I returned as an adult in late middle age, as an openly transgendered 54-year-old LGBT activist. And while ten days in June were taken up with a tour for 22 Korean adoptees from the United States and one from Denmark, the second half of my stay was focused on activities related to my post-transition life in New York, including four speaking engagements. I spoke at a special meeting of Chokagbo, a new transgender advocacy project based in Seoul (and only the second ever in the history of Korea); at a meeting of Solidarity for LGBT Human Rights in Korea (Haeng Sung In); and I gave a presentation at a meeting of Palestine Peace & Solidarity in South Korea (팔레스타인평화연대) about my participation in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine in 2012. By far the biggest crowd I spoke to was at the Queer Korea Festival that preceded the Seoul Pride Parade on June 28 – a crowd that was estimated to be 35,000 strong. I had not sought out this speaking engagement, and it was an especially gratifying honor, given that I was an English-speaking Korean adoptee who had not lived in the country since leaving Korea in 1961. Afterwards, I participated in the Seoul Pride Parade, which – unlike so many pride parades in the US – was completely without corporate sponsorship, and was truly the most thrilling pride parade I have ever marched in. Rather than a corporate marketing event, which so many US pride parades have come to feel like, this one was as grassroots as they get, just members of a marginalized community marching for their rights. The fact that I as a non-Korean speaking adoptee could contribute in any significant way to the advancement of LGBT rights in the country of my birth made this the most important political moment of the entire trip and brought me full circle from the non-verbal infant I was upon my departure from the peninsula over a half century ago to the keynote speaker at the biggest event in the history of the LGBT community of Korea. What could possibly have been a more powerful indication of my having come full circle…?

Pauline Park (www.paulinepark.com) is the chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (www.transgenderrights.org).  She has written and spoken widely on issues of race and nationality, and gender identity and expression.

The post Coming Full Circle: The Journey of a Transgendered Korean Adoptee (11.7.15) appeared first on Pauline Park.

Korea 2015: return to the motherland
by Pauline Park

In June 2015, I returned to Korea for the first time since I left at the age of seven and-a-half months old; it was a momentous trip. 나는 한국에서 입양되었다 These are some photos from the month I spent in the Land of the Morning Calm. #입양 #입양인 #한국 #조선 #대한민국 #남한 #남조선 #한국말 #입양홍보

Sunday, June 14

On the eve of my flight to Korea, I visited my friend Mohammad in Brooklyn.

Mohammad made a splendid Palestinian dinner for me and for our mutual friend Ang and I played a little piano for them on the grand piano in Mohammad’s house.

Monday, June 15

I flew out of La Guardia the next morning to Dallas/Fort Worth.

I spent the night in a mini hotel at DFW — my first experience of a Japanese-style mini hotel; it was clean and comfortable and it was convenient, as I didn’t have to go out of the security perimeter of the airport; in the morning, I was ready for my flight to Korea.

Tuesday, June 16

An ill omen for the country — though fortunately not for my flight or my trip — was Donald Trump’s announcement of his presidential candidacy, which I watched on CNN while waiting for my flight to Incheon. But a good omen was something S-shaped that I will leave to the imagination of readers that I produced on the morning of my flight to Korea.

I flew out of DFW to Incheon, Korea’s largest airport; it was impossible for me to get more than just a few restless hours of sleep on the 13-hour flight, cramped as I was in coach; the saving grace was that — though I was up against the emergency exit — I didn’t have anyone in front of me on the flight.

At least I got a decent dinner on the AA flight from DFW; we were given a choice of an American-style dinner and a Korean one and I opted for the Korean.

Wednesday, June 17

Incheon’s new-ish airport impressed me with its cleanliness and efficiency.

I arrived at Incheon international airport, only to be confronted with bilingual posters in English and Korean warning of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) ‘epidemic,’ which turned out to be a hyped non-epidemic.

My first view of the city of my birth upon my return after 54 years from the patio outside Seoul Station. 서울

I took the AREX train into Seoul, arriving at Seoul Station around dusk.

I took a taxicab to the Ramada Hotel Namdaemun.

Thursday, June 18

I awoke the next morning to a spectacular panorama of Seoul as seen through the window of my room at the Ramada Hotel Namdaemun, with Seoul Station on the left.

The breakfast room at the hotel was large and airy and very woodsy.

I met two other participants in the Mosaic 2015 adult tour organized by Me & Korea which ran from June 17-28; we went out to lunch at Seoul Station and on the way back passed Namdaemun, the Great South Gate.

Namdaemun 남대문 has always held a special place in my heart: it is the only landmark in Seoul or Korea that I can distinctly remember from reading about the country of my birth in encyclopedias we had at home.

I was delighted to see Namdaemun for the first time.

I was delighted to meet Marie Frenette, a Canadian from Nova Scotia who had seen my post on Facebook about coming to Korea and was interested to meet me; after living in Korea for 9 years, she had become fluent in Korean — quite a feat for any North American with no familial connection with Korea. I remarked on the irony that I spoke the language of Marie’s ancestors (French) while she spoke that of mine…

Friday, June 19

I visited Soedaemun Prison Museum with my friend Kris; Korean nationalists were held here during the Japanese occupation and tortured and murdered. But the postwar Korean dictatorship continued to use Soedaemun to detain, torture and murder political dissidents for decades after the end of the Japanese occupation in 1945.

Saturday, June 20

Me & Korea’s Mosaic Tour began in earnest on Saturday.

After breakfast, we piled into a bus and drove to Gwanghwamun 광화문, the huge square in the center of Seoul that is where countless protests and demonstrations have taken place; there, we were greeted by an enormous statue of Sejong the Great 세종 대왕, the king who commissioned the creation of hangul 한글, the alphabet still in use today that is considered by many linguists to be among the most ingenious alphabets ever created.

I got to pretend that I was president of the Republic of Korea 대한민국 at the Cheongwadae Sarangchae 청와대사랑채 museum in Seoul 서울 한국 조선

I visited Gyeongbokgung 경복궁 — the largest of the five royal palaces in Seoul 서울 — at the beginning of my month in Korea.

It was raining so hard, the royal guard took cover under the great gate of Gwanghwamun 광화문 한국 조선 대한민국 남한 남조선

Gyeongbokgung houses a good part of the collection of the National Museum of Korea and I saw this magnificent dragon in the palace.

I saw many other fascinating works of art in the museum; perhaps the most unusual was a car once used by the royal family.

Sunday, June 21

On Sunday morning, Mosaic tour participants gathered in the lobby of the Ramadan Namdaemun.

We attended a service at the Jesus’ Love Church, featuring a rather extraordinary sermon by the Elder Pastor Kim, who told us that we shouldn’t think of ourselves as Korean adoptees but rather as warriors for Christ whose mission is to take over the United States so that it can convert the entire world to Christianity. I seriously doubt anyone in the group took the Elder Pastor Kim’s nonsense seriously either, but since the church was one of the co-sponsors of the tour, we all listened politely to his sermon. One of the two interpreters on the tour — a young progressive feminist who grew up in Korea but was by this point studying in the United States — was seriously offended by the sermon. But as for me, having been raised in a Christian fundamentalist household, I was in effect ‘inoculated’ against such nonsense and the sermon did not bother me; fortunately, the Elder Pastor Kim did not get into homophobic or transphobic discourse.

And thankfully,  the sermon was only half an hour long (even if it seemed much longer), and after the service, some of us were paired with ‘host families,’ others with ‘host buddies.’ I met my two host buddies, the wonderful Tae-kyung and Sinhae, and we saw much of Seoul together, including Changyecheon stream, one of the most delightful places in the city. The original plan for the members of the tour was to stay overnight with a host family from the church, but apparently after some internal discussion, the organizers quite prudently decided that pairing me with host buddies not associated with the fundamentalist Jesus Love church would make sense for the only openly transgendered or queer member of the motherland tour group.

Tae-kyung and Sinhae introduced me to the delights of Cheonggyecheon #청계천; the stream flows once again through the heart of Seoul as it did before being covered in concrete for 45 years; it’s a rare bit of nature in Korea’s capital 서울

We also visited Deoksugung Palace 덕수궁, one of the five royal palaces in Seoul 서울. I had been there the day before, but it was pouring rain on Saturday; on Sunday, it was gloriously sunny and the light brought out the wonderful yellow color on the side of the throne room building.

I was enchanted by the Joseon dynasty era architecture of the palace.

And it was sweet of Taekyung and Sinhae to be so patient with my touristy curiosity, Taekyung taking a number of shots of me in front of one of the pavilions.

Deoksugung 덕수궁 is the second largest of the five royal palaces but isn’t so much a single building as with most European palaces but rather a series of pavilions, this one being one of the largest and most prominent.

 

 

Monday, June 22

In the morning, I went with two other adoptees from the Mosaic tour and one of the interpreters to meet with staff at Social Welfare Services. Afterwards, we went out for lunch and I really loved the bibimbap that I had along with many other dishes I shared.

In the evening, participants in the Mosaic tour took a cruise on the Han River.

One part of a bridge on the river was spouting water from colored lights, which looked like the colors of the rainbow flag. It was a hot and humid evening, but the breeze on the river was wonderfully cooling.

And the nighttime views of Seoul were dazzling.

Tuesday, June 23

Around midday, Mosaic tour participants served lunch to elderly Koreans at a soup kitchen near Seoul station, which is the area where many of the city’s homeless congregate.

천 사 가 되 어 주 서ㅣ 요

Afterwards, we took a bus down to Gyeongju (Kyongju) in the southeast.

Cheomseongdae Observatory 첨성대 (瞻星臺) is one of the oldest surviving structures in Korea. Built in 647 during the reign of Queen Seondeok of the Silla kingdom, Cheomseongdae  was used as an astronomical observatory.

Gyeongju (Kyongju)경주 was the capital of the ancient Silla kingdom during the Three Kingdoms period and it was fascinating to visit.

Mosaic participants took a group shot at Cheomseongdae Observatory.

Dongung Palace 동궁과 & Anapji Pond 안압지.

Hanhwa Resort in Gyeongju was a nice place to stay overnight, but surprisingly lacked wi-fi in the rooms and non-Korean TV stations.

Wednesday, June 24

National Museum

The Mosaic tour wended its way to Pohang 포항 in North Gyeongsang 경상북도 where we dipped our feet into the waters of the East Sea (Dong Hae) — Koreans don’t call it the ‘Sea of Japan’~!

The waters off Pohang are so clear you can see the sea floor and all of the flora and fauna in the ocean.

I dipped my feet in the Donhae.

The pier at Pohang

Jukdo market in Pohang was huge and fascinating.

Jukdo market in Pohang had live octopus and fish of every kind.

Live octopus on display in Judo market made for a visual feast.

Thursday, June 25

In the morning, Mosaic tour participants visited the Gyeongju National Museum, which has an enormous collection of Korean art and artifacts.

The most impressive artifact was a crown from the Silla kingdom.

We then lunched at Choi’s Bobsang before visiting the Gyochon Traditional Village (경주 교촌마을) on the southern edge of Gyeongju.

Three ‘ajumma’ taught us traditional Korean tea service

The biggest challenge was actually sitting on the floor cross legged.

Mosaic tour participants were instructed in traditional tea service and taught how to sing “Arirang,” the most famous of all Korean folk songs — though I had already learned the song before going to Korea.

We had Korean archery lessons as well.

On the way back to Seoul, we stopped at a rest stop for dinner and I had ttangcho ramyeon, a wonderfully hot and spicy noodle dish.

Friday, June 26

On the morning of the last full day of the Mosaic tour, participants scaled Naksan fortress wall.

In the afternoon, I took the Seoul subway with Sina Lee and Jacob Bowman to Insadong, a popular shopping area that is known for offering more traditional items than Myeongdong.

Insadong is a popular shopping district in Seoul.

Mosaic tour dinner

Sunday, June 28

I had a small but perfectly serviceable room at the Itaewon Inn for 10 days and nights.

The Queer Korea Festival drew a crowd estimated at 35,000, making it the largest event in the history of the LGBT community of Korea.

Christian fundamentalists tried to block the event from going forward and then tried to drown it out with loud noise but abjectly failed in that goal.

This was the first Queer Korea festival in Seoul City Hall Plaza  in the heart of the city.

At the festival, a young man confronted a Christian fundamentalist — though they were speaking in Korean, so I couldn’t understand what they were saying; but I guessed that the young man was gay and was challenging the minister’s homophobia.

Christian fundamentalists had tried to stop the Queer Korea Festival, but organizers were successful in challenging them in court.

I was surprised and delighted to see a big banner declaring “Queers Against Israeli Apartheid — Free Palestine.” 

I was invited to keynote the Queer Korea Festival (퀴어문화축제 & 퍼레이드).

Chogakbo is a new transgender advocacy project and had a float in the Seoul Pride Parade.

Seoul Pride 2015 was the most exciting pride parade I’ve ever been in; there were no pandering politicians and no corporate sponsorship, just ordinary LGBT people marching for their rights.

The mayor of Seoul put 3,000 police officers on the ground to guard participants in the Queer Korea Festival and Seoul Pride Parade.

Seoul Pride drew thousands of LGBT Koreans and allies to march for LGBT rights.

Monday, June 29

On Monday, June 29, Larry Tung and I met with Bong Youngshik and Kim Jiyoon at the Asan Institute to discuss their report, “Over the Rainbow: Public Attitude Toward LGBT in South Korea,” on LGBT rights and discrimination in Korea. In the afternoon, we met with a Korean transgender activist.

I saw Pororo the Little Penguin 뽀롱뽀롱 뽀로로 & his friends in the Seoul 서울 subway; my favorite is Eddy 에디 the fox 여우

Tuesday, June 30

Larry Tung and I explored the popular shopping district of Myeongdong on June 30 and I commented on how very ‘metrosexual’ young Korean men were, especially in the promotional posters in Myeongdong, in which the young men are very boyish, some even quite girlish to an American eye.

Larry and I were amused by the cute products on the shelves in stores in  Myeongdong.

Myeongdong cut-outs of a Korean boy band with a K-Pop look, which seems to be a dominant influence among young Koreans in Seoul.

At Daeksugong palace, Larry and I watched the changing of the guard; I was absolutely enchanted by the bright yellow garb of some of the guardsmen, with the feathers on their Joseon (Choson) dynasty era style hats and their traditional Korean flute playing.

In the evening, we passed by Gwanghwamun, the great entrance gate to Gyeongbokkung, the main royal palace and the largest of the five royal palaces in Seoul.

King Sejong commissioned the creation of the Korean alphabet and is the most revered of all Korea’s kings.

July 1

I was invited to speak at a press conference at the Turkish consulate in Seoul protesting the Istanbul police violence against participants in the Istanbul Pride Parade.

July 3

In the morning, Larry Tung and I went to the Social Welfare Services office to film in front of the rock outside the SWS office. 입양인 입양인의 입양인이 입양정보 입양기록 입양기록을

In the afternoon, I went with Minyoung Kim to a local police precinct to register as an adoptee; though nothing came of it, I appreciated her going out of her way to make me accessible to any birth family who could be searching for me.

I had some noodles before my speaking engagement in the evening.

In the evening, I was invited to speak at a meeting of  Solidarity for LGBT Human Rights of Korea (Haeng Seong In) (행동하는성소수자인권연대) about my LGBT activism.

I talked about what might be helpful for queer activists in Korea as they advocate for equality for LGBT Koreans. I was delighted to speak to a full room of community members and I was told that a turnout of more than 50 people was a large turnout for the 행동하는성소수자인권연대는.

The organization had created a poster to announce my speaking engagement:

July 4

I spent the Fourth of July in the land of my birth, traveling from the city of my birth to Busan, the second largest city in Korea, with Larry Tung 부산

On the way, we passed through Namdaemun, the Great South Gate, which has always been for me the iconic image of the city of my birth.

In the arch of the great gate there’s a wonderful dragon painted on the wood frame of the inside of the arch (7.4.15) 남대문

Larry and I bought tickets for Busan at Seoul Station.

We visited Daegaksa 대각사 Temple (Nampo-dong) near Busan Tower.

The reclining Buddha was striking.

Larry and I went up Busan Tower and took in the spectacular view of the harbor and the city.

Afterwards, we went to Lotte Mall, where we saw everything on sale from pianos to Japanese-style toilet seats.

July 5

We visited the Haedong Yonggungsa Temple 해동 용궁사 outside of Busan 부산, one of the most famous Buddhist temples in Korea.

I found some lucky pigs on the grounds of the temple.

I love pigs and the fact that they are considered symbols of good fortune in traditional Korean mythology.

After touring the temple site, Larry and I visited Haeundae 해운대해수욕장 

Haeundae 해운대해수욕장 outside of Busan 부산, one of South Korea’s most famous beaches One of South Korea’s most famous beaches

After getting back into Busan, we visited Shinsegae, which claims to be the largest department store in the world.

Zooraji is a children’s playground on the top floor complete with a carousel and dinosaurs.

July 6

I joined friends in strolling through Naru Park in Songpa-gu 송파구 in Seoul 서울 on a hot and humid day.

And we

I walked through the neighborhood of Mapo-gu, parts of which looked like what Seoul was before Park Chung-hee’s crash industrialization.

July 7

I gave a presentation on the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine (Jan. 2012) at a meeting of Palestine Peace & Solidarity in South Korea 팔레스타인평화연대

After which they wrote:

오늘 폴린 박 토크 굉장했습니다. 팔레스타인연대운동과 성소수자 운동의 접점을 찾은 이 기분…! 앞으로 만들어나갈 연대가 기대됩니다. 오늘 후기와 녹화 영상도 곧 공유하겠습니다. 온오프로 함께 해 주신 분들 정말 고맙습니다! (7.6.15)The

The

The

The

July 7

I had breakfast with Sina in Itaewon.

It was wonderful to see Sina and to reflect on the Mosaic Tour that we’d participated in together.

July 8

I was delighted to have Marie’s companionship as we took the train to the end of the #1 line where we crossed a busy intersection in downtown Uijeongbu 의정부시 to get to the 무당 house 巫堂

Uijeongbu 의정부시 — like the rest of Gyeonggi Province 경기도 — is now part of the Seoul metropolitan area.

Uijeongbu 의정부시: the 신 altar in the 무당 house 巫堂

Uijeongbu 의정부시: inside the 무당 house 巫堂

Uijeongbu 의정부시: Marie and me outside the 무당 house 巫堂

Uijeongbu 의정부시

Uijeongbu 의정부시

July 9

I I had lunch with Hyong-Jin, Myunghwa & 나 양 in Itaewon #이태원 #서울

July 10

I visited Changdeokgung 창덕궁 with my friend Kris.

One of the five royal palaces in Seoul, Changdeokgung is a UNESCO World Heritage site and famous for its celebrated Biwon 비원 — the ‘Secret Garden’ that was intended for sole use of the king and the royal family.

Seoul: a small gate in the Piwon — the Secret Garden of the Changdeokgung (7.10.15)

July 11

Korean celadon 청자 in the National Museum of Korea 한국 조선 in Seoul 서울.

I came across this boddhisattva.

July 5

July 6

I met up with two Korean friends in Seoul and we strolled around Seokchon Lake Park 석촌호수공원 coming across a World Wildlife Fund promo with plastic pandas.

Strolling around Seokchon Lake Park 석촌호수공원 we came across this Korean flag made out of chrysanthemum flowers.

In the evening, I went to Mapo-gu Café for a meeting of Palestine Peace & Solidarity in South Korea Palestine Peace & Solidarity in South Korea 팔레스타인평화연대 where I gave a presentation on my participation in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine in Jan. 2012 to members of the group.

Afterwards, I went out to dinner with members of Palestine Peace & Solidarity in South Korea 팔레스타인평화연대.

The poster for my presentation to members of Palestine Peace & Solidarity in South Korea 팔레스타인평화연대 on my participation in the first US LGBTQ delegation tour of Palestine at their July 7 meeting (7.9.15)

July 8

I met up with Hyong-jin, Myunghwa & Kim Na-young in Itaewon for lunch.

I had had haemul pajeon (seafood scallion pancake) for dinner in Seoul.

I was amused by the fact that the Seoul Metro calls its subway currency ‘T money.’

I took 6,686 photos during 30 days in Korea — 2,658 with my iPad & 4,028 with my digital camera —  including 625 on the first memory card, 2,430 on the second card & 973 on the third. That compares with 1,996 photos that I took in 7 days in Paris in May, which averaged 287 photos per day, vs. 222.9 photos per day on average in Korea. So the Paris trip exceeded Korea for the most photos taken per day on average in any given trip, but the Korea trip topped the charts for the total number of photos taken on any trip until my five weeks in Europe in 2017, during which I took over 30,000 photos.

I arrived safely home after an uneventful three-hour flight from Dallas, following a more than 12-hour flight from Incheon, less than 12 hours short of 30 full days since leaving home on the biggest trip of my life (so far, at least). My month in Korea was the longest, most exhausting but most productive & most fun trip of my life and the most important since the trip that brought me to the land of my youth from the land of my birth so many years ago.

바울인 박
박 바울인

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QAIA & the pinkwashing of the NYC Council trip to apartheid Israel
speech at New York City Hall
Pauline Park
22 January 2015

I’m a member of New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (NYC QAIA) and I’m hear to talk briefly about the pernicious influence of the ‘pinkwashing‘ of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. ‘Pinkwashing’ is the attempt to use Israel’s supposedly superior record on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues to attempt to justify the illegal occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip since 1967. In fact, Israel is far less of a gay paradise than the picture painted by Zionist apologists for its apartheid regime.

One would get a very different impression speaking primarily or exclusively with wealthy gay Jewish Israeli men in North Tel Aviv than if one spoke with LGBT Israelis from more marginalized communities, including lesbians and bisexuals, who often feel marginalized by gay men in Tel Aviv and elsewhere in Israel, or transgendered women, who face police harassment and brutality in Tel Aviv and other cities in Israel just as they do in New York and other U.S. cities.

Nor do queer Palestinians have any ability to seek refuge in Israel, as Zionist apologists for Israeli occupation suggest; they have no right to remain in Israel, because the state of Israel does not recognize non-Jewish economic refugees or those fleeing political persecution — regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. So Israel’s record on LGBT issues is far more mixed than Zionist apologists for Israeli apartheid suggest, but even if it were a perfect one, it’s impossible to see how such a record could possibly justify the denial of basic human rights to millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories, some of whom are in fact LGBT and are subjected to the same brutal repression and daily humiliations as their non-LGBT Palestinian brothers and sisters living under occupation.

I participated in the first U.S. LGBTQ delegation to Palestine in January 2012 and I saw for myself the abysmal conditions to which Palestinians are subjected there. We met with many Palestinians — both LGBT and non-LGBT — throughout the West Bank, from Nablus in the north to Hebron in the south and Ramallah in between. Staying two nights with a Palestinian family in Dheishe in Bethelem, one of the largest refugee camps in the West Bank, I had the opportunity to speak at length with Palestinians about conditions in the occupied territories. We also met with members of alQaws and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (PQBDS) in Ramallah and Aswat (the organization for queer Palestinian women) in Haifa, and if members of the US LGBT community really want to help queer Palestinians, they should be working with LGBT Palestinian groups rather than helping to pinkwash the occupation.

One last important note: for those who think that the Israeli occupation and the apartheid regime constructed to enforce it is a purely foreign policy issue, they need only look to Roosevelt Island, where Technion University — which is deeply implicated in the occupation — is collaborating with Cornell University. And members of the LGBT community here in New York who think that the pinkwashing of Israeli occupation and apartheid have nothing to do with their lives should consider the two-year-long ban on all Palestine solidarity organizing — including the Siege Busters Working Group and Queers Against Israeli Apartheid — at the LGBT Community Center in Manhattan, which was in place from February 2011-February 2013.

The ‘pinkwashing’ of the Israeli occupation has implications for the ability of LGBT people of conscience to speak out and organize here in this country and in this city, which is why we must all become invested in challenging both pinkwashing as a discourse and the apartheid regime that such discourse would defend. Corey Johnson, Ritchie Torress and Jimmy Van Bramer are members of the LGBT Caucus who are going on this junket, but they cannot claim to be representing the LGBT community in expressing their support for apartheid Israel. Thank you.

Pauline Park is a co-founding member of New York City Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, founded in 2011. She was a member of the first U.S. LGBTQ delegation to Palestine in January 2012.

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ESPA dishonors the LGBT community by honoring Chris Quinn & Louis Bradbury
By Pauline Park

The Empire State Pride Agenda Foundation honored Christine Quinn and Louis Bradbury at its annual fall dinner on 16 October 2014, which was enough reason to boycott the dinner.

“As Chair of the Board of the Empire State Pride Agenda, which under his leadership helped to secure passage of The Dignity for All Students Act,” the announcement reads. I was on the steering committee of the New York State DASA Coalition and Louis Bradbury had zero involvement with that effort; the bill finally passed the New York State Senate when he was chair of the ESPA board, but enactment had nothing to do with him, and he’s just using his position as chair for yet further self-aggrandizement after he fired ESPA’s best executive director back in March 2012 in a sordid power struggle initiated by Bradbury that significantly undermined the organization’s credibility.

ESPA’s executive director announced the Pride Agenda’s endorsement of Quinn in the 2013 mayoral race with this statement in January 2013:

Chris Quinn was even less deserving of being honored, having disgraced the Speaker’s office with her slush fund scandal & having betrayed the LGBT community at every turn as well as the progressive political agenda she claimed to represent. The claim that “as Council Speaker, she was at the helm of some of our community’s most historic victories, including ensuring dignity and protections against bullying for all students, and New York’s momentous marriage victory in 2011,” also implies something quite false. Chris Quinn had little if anything to do with the marriage bill passing — the Speaker of the New York City Council has no authority in the state Senate — and she did nothing but sign her name to the New York City Dignity in All Schools (NYC DASA) bill as a co-sponsor; I was on the NYC DASA Coalition steering committee and Chris Quinn didn’t lift a finger to help us get the bill passed, which actually passed during Gifford Miller’s speakership, not Quinn’s; in fact, after NYC DASA was enacted, she conspired with Mayor Bloomberg to block its implementation by the NYC Department of Education (NYC DoE); so to give her credit for NYC DASA’s enactment is doubly false.

Truth does not come from falsity and honoring the dishonorable only dishonors the LGBT community that the Pride Agenda claimed to represent; honoring Chris Quinn and Louis Bradbury by making false claims about their achievements was a disgraceful act.

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The unprecedented assault on the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military this week brought to mind a hymn whose text was written by Johann Heermann in 1636, “Zion klagt mit Angst und Schmerzen” (Zion mourns with anxiety and pain); all one needs to do is substitute ‘Gaza’ for ‘Zion’ and the hymn could be sung today in mourning for the more than 300 (and counting) victims of Israeli bombardment in Gaza…

Zion klagt mit Angst und Schmerzen,
Zion, Gottes werte Stadt,
Die er trägt in seinem Herzen,
Die er sich erwählet hat.
Ach, spricht sie, wie hat mein Gott
Mich verlaßen in der Not
Und läßt mich so harte preßen!
Meiner hat er ganz vergeßen.

Der Gott, der mir hat versprochen
Seinen Beistand jederzeit,
Der läßt sich vergebens suchen
Jetzt in meiner Traurigkeit.
Ach, will er denn für und für
Grausam zürnen über mir?
Kann und will er sich der Armen
Jetzt nicht wie vorhin erbarmen?

Zion, o du Vielgeliebte!
Sprach zu ihr des Herren Mund,
Zwar du bist jetzt die Betrübte,
Seel’ und Geist ist dir verwund’t;
Doch stell alles Trauern ein!
Wo mag eine Mutter sein,
Die ihr eigen Kind kann haßen
Und aus ihrer Sorge laßen?

Ja, wenn du gleich möchtest finden
Einen solchen Muttersinn,
Da die Liebe kann verschwinden,
So bleib ich doch, der ich bin.
Meine Treu bleibt gegen dir,
Zion, o du meine Zier;
Mein Herz hast du mir besessen,
Deiner kann ich nicht vergessen.

Laß dich nicht den Satan blenden,
Der sonst nichts als schrecken kann!
Siehe, hier in meinen Händen
Hab’ ich dich geschrieben an.
Wie mag es denn anders sein?
Ich muß ja gedenken dein;
Deine Mauern will ich bauen
Und dich fort und fort anschauen.

Du bist mir stets vor den Augen,
Du liegst mir in meinem Schoß
Wie die Kindlein,
die noch saugen,
Meine Treu’ zu dir ist groß;
Dich und mich kann keine Zeit,
Keine Not, Gefahr und Streit,
Ja der Satan selbst nicht scheiden.
Bleib getreu in allem Leiden.

Zion mourns with anxiety and pain,
Zion, God’s dear city,
which he carries in his heart,
which he has chosen for himself.
Ah, says Zion, why has my God
abandoned me in my distress
and allows me to be so hard pressed!
He has completely forgotten me.

God, who promised me
his helping presence at all times
is sought in vain
now in my sadness.
Ah, will he forever
rage fiercely against me?
Can he and will he not
as before pity me in my wretchedness?
Zion, you who are greatly beloved,
says the mouth of the Lord,
you are indeed now distressed,
Your soul and spirit are wounded;
yet put aside all your mourning!
Where could there be a mother
who can hate or have no care
for her own child?

Indeed if you could find
a mother so minded
whose love could disappear,
yet I will stay as I am.
My faithfulness abides for you,
Zion,you who are my adornment;
You have taken hold of my heart,
I cannot forget you.

Don’t let Satan hoodwink you,
all he can do is just frighten you!
See, here on my hands
I have written it down.
How then could it possibly be otherwise
I must think of you;
I shall build your walls
And always watch over you.

You are continuously before my eyes,
You lie on my bosom
like a little child who still sucks.
My faithfulness to you is great;
there is no time,no distress,
danger and strife that can separate you and me,
Not even Satan himself.
Remain faithful in all your sufferings.

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