Someone asked me once about the difference between a real witch and a wannabe-one. All I could say was: "I can't put my finger on it, I just know it when I see it."
In the 1980s, I spent a lot of time working with witches. Real ones. In Europe. Italy, Switzerland, Ireland, and above all in Germany--the place where the greatest number of historical witches is said to have gone to the grave in the Burning Times. In Italy, where the Witches, rather than be burned at the stake, filled their pockets with stones and walked into the sea--only to emerge centuries later, in the form of the women with whom I was working. In Ireland, where I once sat for hours on end in this little Witches' Hill. There's an inscription on the back of this picture. It reads: October 30, 1987. Love, Margareta.
Over there, common wisdom--backed by research gleaned from the painstaking study of archival records and historical documents--would have it that millions of witches, 90 % of them women, were "burned at the stake." Pouring, pouring over the archives. The parchment. The pain. Pouring down, like so much rain.
So I've been mulling this over, this question of what marks a real witch from a wannabe, and this is the closest I've come: a real witch knows her heritage, her history: it's there, all around her. In the rocks, the islands, the trees and the hills. Externsteine. New Grange. Blocksberg. Hunsrück. Sleive na Caillighe. Oh, what was the name of that Fairy Ring in County Cork? Or was it Kerry? Of that Foundling Stone near Wulfshagenerhütten? Places I remember, not from pictures, but from presence: my blood, menstrual blood, flowing straight from its source into the sources of sorceresses, and back.
A real witch, in all likelihood, can trace her genealogical roots to one or another of those "wise women" whom Paracelsus is said to have claimed as his teachers. His greatest source. From whom he claimed to have gleaned all that he knew, even as he placed his own pages on the pyre.
It's not unlike the difference between a real Indian and a wannabe. The real one can tell you: I am descended from SoandSo, who was begotten by X, descended in turn from Y, and before that from Z. In this place. That place. This or the Other: I know who I am. I know the names of those wombs bearing the fruit of this tree. And the apples that fell not far from there. This is the rock, this the island, from whence I have come.
The real witch? If she cannot trace them, she can feel them. There. In the stone.
It's a dangerous argument: The Nazis used it to wipe out millions; had I been born but 50 years prior, I'd have gone up in that same historical heap of ashes and smoke. Shulamith. Margarete. Death ist ein Meister aus Deutschland, indeed. Golden hair. Ashen hair. The thin ashen soul of these ties that don't bind. The New-Nazis in the NeoCon-Camp are already stoking the flames of the same blazing bullshit. What's in a name and one drop of blood. Barack. Hussein. Obama? From whence do you come?
But bloodlines do matter, as best I can tell. They may not make us who we are, but they can act as maps--guideposts, compasses--in the quests of our lives. It's hard to know who you are and where you're headed without knowing who you were and where you've been. Indeed, from whence do you come? I mean, really. Adam and Eve? Well who the hell's Adam, and where the hell's Eve?
Americans know this. On some level, some very profound level, they do. A bitter pill to swallow. Knowing from whence they come. From an army of cowards who jumped ship when the going got tough, when the waters turned rough: bye, bye, my billy-goat gruff. Set sail for the New World. Rugged individualists. Pilgrims, plunderers, thieves. Leave this past, this place, its people (our people, my people, your people) behind. Ashes to ashes. Dregs be to dust.
Adios Hermanos, adios!
In the years since my return to the US, how many times have I called Paracelsus' words to mind: "all that I know, I know from the witches"? (And it matters not how it was said, nor whether he ever said such a thing: these words form a fragment of the folklore I carry in this bag of tools and of tricks I call "who I am." Signposts on the map of my mind. Markers. Memories.)
Of all the horrors I encountered upon my return to a country I no longer recognized as "mine," the predatory capitalist strictures and structures so firmly woven now into the fabric of each shred of our lives have been the hardest to handle. I for me and me for me, and none for all. Golden Cocks and the three Fucketeers. Survival of the fattest. The savviest. Catch as catch can and cover your own ass. I'll take the best, to hell with the rest. You are not your brothers' keeper. Thirteen years hence: humans helping humans declared a "criminal offense."
"Humanity can take the Truth," Ingeborg Bachmann once said, "it cannot be the writer's task to deny the pain--to cover up its tracks, to deceptively gloss over it. He must, on the contrary, perceive it to be true and, in order to open our eyes to it, re-construe it as true. Because we all strive to see. And that secret pain is precisely what sensitizes us to the experience and particularly to the truth. When we arrive at that enlightened, laboring state of terrible pain, we say simply and aptly: my eyes were opened. But we don't say that because we have actually physically perceived some thing or incident, but rather because we have grasped [with our senses] what we cannot see with our eyes. That is what art is intended to do: to open our eyes in this sense."
And I have often wondered: if Bachmann was right, what does that mean for this country, once mine? For me, my fellow Americans: for me and for mine? Are we not human? Incapable as we are of "taking the truth"? Would we rather deny this great pain? And our writers? Their task be to cover it up, deceptively gloss over it? Do we not strive to see? Frightening, the implications if this be the case. God help us Rilke, Kafka, hail Heine, come hither. Indeed, Dr. Bachmann: the stone it is blind. Many are stricken. None of them saved. We have all drunk from it. This golden cup, guzzled golden gallons, gallons, and gallons of gas. Oh Daddy, you do not do. This poetry will not suffice. Not to my mind.
Almost every time I have tried to equal the task of the writer outlined by this great, legendary lady laureate of German letters, I have been nearly shot down. Shunned. Stopped in her tracks. Banned. Burned, like a witch. Or worse.
Was Bachmann a witch? I don't know. Many a woman who followed in her wake sought to claim her as such. We'll never know. She died, early and often, in Rome. Giordano Bruno among the voices she saw and heard there. In Rome. Where she died a "fiery death" that's more the stuff of legend than truth. Todesarten. These manners of death. Murder. Homicide. Genocide. (Collective) suicide?
One thing I do know is that I learned a lot about surviving predatory capitalism from those witches--real ones--over there, where the historical witches were burned. Lots of them. Whether by the million or by the bushel: at any rate, more than a handful on the gallows in Salem Square.
Predatory capitalism. What is it? Reams have been written, too many to read. One thing Chomsky says about it is
Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid-twentieth century. It is incapable of meeting human needs that can be expressed only in collective terms, and its concept of competitive man who seeks only to maximize wealth and power, who subjects himself to market relationships, to exploitation and external authority, is antihuman and intolerable in the deepest sense. -Noam Chomsky, "Freedom and Language"
But to me it's like asking the difference between a real witch and a wannabe: I know it when I see it. And, riffing off the Know your isms distinctions in wide circulation in the lefternmost climes of the blogosphere, I have defined it as follows:
Someone who is not your neighbor, but who has heard about the lovely cows you have on your property makes the trek over to your place, knocks down your fence, tramples all the chickens, children and dogs in the yard, makes off with your cow, milks it for all its worth, patents the product, then kills the cow and leaves the rotting corpse in your yard. When you come out your front door with this "wtf-look" on your face, the predatory capitalist who just destroyed your life chains you to the fence and leaves you there to starve and stare at the spoils he left in his wake while he moves on to greener pastures in search of another cow to milk and another way of life and land to lay to waste.
That's the bloody truth of the matter. Bloody, and bitter. Like ash on the tongue.
I didn't know much about predatory capitalism before that day I crashed my boat upon the rocks of this island-unto-itself phantasm my home had become in my near ten year absence from here. I completed my degree (BA) and entered the workforce in the Sozialmarktwirtschaft system of Germany-brought to you by the atrocities of history, with a little help from the Marshall Plan. Economic miracle. Wirtschaftswunder.
The predatory capitalist system was a minefield I learned to navigate by trial and error. It cost me a few hundred grand, and more than a million Mastercard moments in heartbreak. It's blown holes in my soul. The limbs of my life and livelihood scattered now from one end of the continent to the other. The scarring is permanent. The damage done. And yes, what is done really is done. But sooner or later we all learn to live with our wounds. If we are smart, we grow wiser. If we're lucky, our hearts are not hardened. They are opened-along with our eyes.
About four years and a coupla ten-thousand-grand into the American Nightmare my homecoming had been, I started to wonder: Is this shit just my imagination, or what? What? What? What the fuck is going on here?
Then I picked up a book, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, by William Greider. A lifeline to sanity, that. At least I knew it was not my imagination running away with you.
It really was no miracle, what happened was just this.
A few select quotes from Greider's chapter on "Schraube nach Unten/Twisting the Screw" to explain what I mean:
After World War II, Germany and Japan rebuilt their social systems from the bitter ashes of fascism and total defeat-new arrangements inspired not only by their traditional cultural values, but also by the tragic knowledge of what can happen within an industrial society when large groups of citizens are marginalized and pushed into a corner. Each of their social systems is peculiarly ingenious in how it functions, and up until now each has largely succeeded in terms of generating a broad sense of social cohesion and equity. Because of their guilty historical burden, neither Germany nor Japan ever received full recognition for their political inventiveness....both of these welfare-state systems are now under intense pressure from market forces to reform in different ways. The economic model they are expected to emulate is that of the United States. The choice might seem obvious to self-satisfied Americans, but not to many people in other countries who observe the social disintegration underway in the United States and the deepening inequalities of income and wealth.
...The German and Japanese systems both manage to distribute the economic returns among all their citizens much more evenly than does the American welfare state (indeed, the same can be said for virtually all the other advanced economies.
...The global market's imperatives are, in effect, pushing both of these powerful nations to engineer greater income inequality among their citizens-more like the wider class divisions within the United States.
...A terrible potential lurks in these developments, not widely appreciated because it seems so remote: fascism. (363)
Revisiting these words now, for the first time since I underlined them back in '96 or '97, is chilling in its effect. Mindnumbing. Maybe humanity can't take the truth after all?
Crushing to look back and recall the writing that was not only writ large on the wall, but printed there in black-and-white on the page:
For nearly fifty years German prosperity has been widely shared through a complex system of public and private understandings that reduced income inequality and fulfilled the nations new civic sensibilities. Now the system was under assault-too expensive, too rigid, too centralized-from the relentless arithmetic of price-cost competition in the global marketplace.
The generous benefits of Germany's social safety net, from pensions and universal healthcare coverage to the stipends for families and the unemployed, were the most visible aspect of the social-market system, but really only a subset of a larger political apparatus designed to promote consensus and maintain a bedrock of economic equality. (366)
Quoting Stephen J. Silvia of the American University, in his explanation of the "heritage" (also anchored in the Nazi period and its seductive appeal to the populace):
"Capitalism can't just be brutal. It has to be inclusive because, if it's not, those people are going to organize themselves in revolutionary or reactionary parties."
This principle was embedded in the institutional mechanics of both politics and economic enterprise, encoded in law but also enforced by popular expectations.
...Corporate governance itself followed broader social values, organized as the so-called stakeholder company that reflected the priorities not just of the stockholders, but of workers, managers, communities and allied suppliers as well.
...Each of these elements interacted with the others, reinforcing the cooperative ethos, the impulse to compromise and avoid extreme ruptures. Conflict did not disappear, of course, but there were numerous safety valves in place for talking things out. Germans talked and talked and talked-a political dialogue that sounded richly detailed, deliberative and rational, compared to the empty slogans and half-clever sound bites of, say, the American political dialogue.
In concrete terms, the economic results were envied widely, too. Germany not only had the highest wages and shortest working hours among the leading industrial nations, but also one of the lowest rates of income poverty-one third of the US rate. (367)
There were other paths we might have gone down. Other models. The choice was not between commie pinko repression and predatory capitalist freedom of oppression.
..A well-developed system of social obligations did not stand in the way of successful capitalism. (368)
And perhaps the most painful, eye-opening, earth-shattering words of them all :
German social consciousness was anchored in the country's tragic knowledge of guilt and defeat, a humbling encounter with self-doubt that Americans have so far evaded in their national history.
Gee, thanks Hitler.
Followed-up with a footnote, italicized by Greider for emphasis:
American history did provide ample basis for humility and social introspection: slavery and the enduring wounds of race, "winning" the West by armed conquest, Hiroshima and the nuclear potential for mass destruction, the bloody failure of neocolonialist war in Vietnam, to name several large and obvious examples. the social meaning of these experiences was usually deflected, however, and repackaged by the optimistic American culture as stories of triumph (or as bureaucratic betrayal as in the case of Vietnam). Thus, Americans generally managed to evade any national sense of guilt or defeat. Critical reflection on the national character was discouraged, ridiculed as "un-American."
The acrid sting of those words amplified now, ten years hence, by the scarring from wounds sustained on the brutal battlegrounds of these mean streets; the myriad attempts to speak--again and again and again--precisely these truths to power. In the concrete jungles of predatory capitalism created by those who chose to leave their ancestors behind. In search of a bigger island. A bigger piece of the rock, and the pie.
These truths I know to be self-evident not by virtue of abstract reasoning or the reading of second-hand chronicles: truths I know to be true because I entered adult life in the very system Greider describes here. Germany's social market economy: this "successful capitalism" that was not hindered, but enhanced by a "well-developed system of social obligations," encoded in law, and perhaps more importantly, enforced by popular expectations.
When I entered the workforce in Germany in 1984, upon completion of my BA, I held these economic truths to be self-evident:
-- My basic human right was to have a roof over my head, food on my table, shoes on my feet and a shirt on my back. No ifs, ands or buts about it. Where the state could not provide, individuals stepped in.-- My basic human right was to have adequate health care. No "pre-existing conditions," no exorbitant "co-pays," no catches, no caveats, no Cash-on-Delivery-or-Die. (Hospitalized for a 10-day stay in 1989, I paid the equivalent of about $100 for the highest quality care).
-- My employer was legally obligated to pay me a salary commensurate with my education (an education which, had I been a German citizen, would not have cost me a DIME).
-- My employer was obligated to allow me a minimum of six-weeks paid vacation; after the first year of employment, said employer was not only obligated to give me paid vacation, he was obligated to pay me a vacation bonus. Hard. Cold. Cash. Direct deposit. To my account.
-- If I fell ill, I was legally entitled to miss three days of work with no further explanation. If I was laid up for more than three days, I had to provide written confirmation for my illness. Under no circumstances could my employer terminate my contract because I was sick.
-- Should my employment contract become terminated, I was entitled to unemployment compensation in the amount of 68% of my salary: deposited directly to my account, and for a minimum of 6 months, perhaps longer, depending on the number of years I'd been employed. After that, the amount decreased in increments. To something like 54%. (please forgive me if these numbers are not exactly correct; I'm citing from memory-but you get the gist).'
-- As a condition for receiving these benefits, the state could not force me to accept any position whose salary was not commensurate with my last salary-again, with a minimum stipulated by law based on my education, my age and my experience.
-- If I became chronically unemployed, my unemployment benefits became "welfare" benefits-about half my original salary: again, deposited directly to my account. No standing around in the welfare line. No stigma of food stamps at the checkout in the grocery store. As I recall, one was required to report to the "welfare office" every three months, and I believe there was no expiration placed on the length of the benefits.
These were "self-evident" truths, encoded in law. And enforced by popular expectations. The expectations of a populace descended--directly--from those witches. The real ones. Burned, but not forgotten. Banished, but not dead. They never died, are no more dead than Joe Hill. They walked into the water, but later returned to those shores. They perished in the flames, but rose again like Phoenix, from the ashes. Descended, not unlike the sweet strains of Laurie: From. The. Air.
Good evening. This is your Captain. We are about to attempt a crash landing. Please extinuish all cigarettes. Place your tray tables in their upright, locked position. Your Captain says: Put your head on your knees. Your Captain says: Put your head on your hands. Captain says: Put your hands on your head. Put your hands on your hips. Heh heh. This is your Captain-and we are going down. We are all going down, together. And I said: Uh oh. This is gonna be some day. Standby. This is the time. And this is the record of the time. This is the time. And this is the record of the time. Uh-this is your Captain again. You know, I've got a funny feeling I've seen this all before. Why? Cause I'm a caveman. Why? Cause I've got eyes in the back of my head. Why? It's the heat. Standby. This is the time. And this is the record of the time. This is the time. And this is the record of the time. Put your hands over your eyes. Jump out of the plane. There is no pilot. You are not alone. Standby. This is the time. And this is the record of the time. This is the time. And this is the record of the time.
They returned. From the air. In the form of rain, not bombs. Bursting in air. By land and by sea. There on the opposite shore: these things shall be!
So what, really, did I learn from those witches? Those German witches, Italian witches, Irish witches? Was it all hocus-pocus? Smoke-and-mirrors? Blood spattered on stones, at Stonehenge and Avebury? Witches' Sabbaths celebrated once a year like Black History Month here?
No. It was hardcore economic reality. Survival strategies, developed in the context of social market capitalism threatened by the predatory capitalist machine in its rapid approach from the "New World" created by those who jumped ship and set sail with Columbus to find another island.
First and foremost, the iron-clad rule: either we swim together, or we sink. Together. Collective survival. Number one goal. Either we stick together, or we all go up. In flames. We are all in one boat. When the ship's going down, it's "I jump, you jump"-or we all drown together. Simple as that.
In concrete terms, some lessons learned from just one real-life example (I am deliberately leaving out specific names, places, etc., because this organization is still in existence, and many of these practices were in flagrant violation of labor law at the time).
Sometime around 1986, a grassroots non-profit organization was formed in Germany. Let's just call it "The Net(work)." I was not among its founding members, but joined shortly after its inception. It was founded by witches. Real ones. Witches weaving a Web. But they didn't look like witches. No pointy hats, not draped in capes with crystal bobbles round their necks, nor drenched in patchouli. Pretty average-looking Janes. Bourgeois as Betty Crocker. An attorney. An academic. An accountant. A social worker. As far as I recall.
The organization's purpose was to create a "network" of women: professionals, non-professionals, the educated, the "un-educated", artists, academics, accountants, carpenters, mechanics, (and especially!) the unemployed-women from all walks of life who would collectively pool their resources, talents, skills (or lack thereof), and know-how to create employment opportunities and healthy work environments for women. Environments and opportunities that were healthy for women, children and other living things. The organizational structure of the Network itself formed the basic model--the microcosm for the "bigger picture" of their utopian dreams.
Some of their policies:
The salaries stipulated by law for an attorney, an academic, an accountant, a social worker, etc. varied.
Let's just lay it out in approximate terms (listed here in US dollars):
Attorney: +/- 5,000/month
Academic: +/- 4,000/month
Accountant: +/- 3,500/month
Social Worker: +/- 3,000/month
The plan was to address the state and the city to request salaries in these amounts. Women who qualified by state standards to receive said salaries would be hired on a full-time basis to facilitate programming and execute the "bigger plan." These dollar amounts were posted directly by the city and state to their accounts.
Everything legit and completely above board. On paper. For the record.
But because these women were the "I jump-you jump" kind, they placed themselves above the strictures of patriarchal law. In the interest of collective survival and the equal distribution of funds for equal distribution of work, they said: to hell with state stipulations that would pit me against you and place my education over yours. We're all doing the same job here. To hell with the law.
They got the grants, and had a total of $15,500 in funds allocated for monthly salaries, for women who would assume full-time positions within the organization. They sat down and decided that a basic salary of $2,500/month (with benefits) was enough for any of them to lead a comfortable life. That left $5,500/month in excess funds: to be applied to hiring independent contractors-women whose professional expertise-be it in the field of art, or economics, sports, nutrition, midwifery, public health, whatever-was suited to enhancing the organizational goals, but who for whatever reason were women who "fell through the cracks" in the system. Women who did not have the same educational background of the full-time employees, but who had valuable knowledge to share and impart. They were paid, and paid well. With the surfeit from salaries those witches created--in defiance of the law--but in the interest of collective survival.
The way it worked was that the attorney--who received a direct deposit from state coffers in the amount of $5,000 a month--wrote a check back to the organization in the amount of $2,500 each month, a tax-deductible contribution. For the academic, it was $1,500. And on down the line. The more you gave back, the better your tax break.
No one ever questioned the legitimacy of this policy. No one ever tried to cheat. The attorney never whined about the fact that she was giving up a full half of her salary to which she was entitled by law, where as the lowest witch on the burning stake was only kicking back a fifth of that. Sure, the attorney had a right to that money. By law she was entitled. But she was a Witch --a real one--so her responsibility to the collective of women was greater. It went without saying. Popular expectation. A sefl-evident truth.
This is just one of many, many policies and structures I learned from these women. These witches. Real ones, whose lives were governed not by what they had a right to do, but by what their responsibility to the collective compelled them to do. Even if that meant--for an attorney (!)--violating the law.
We worked on a strict consensus basis. That meant no one walked away from the negotiating table without a solution she could at least learn to "live with." We sat down at the table and we talked. And we talked, and we talked, and we talked. We talked ourselves blue in the face, many a night way beyond midnight. And damn, was it hard. Those days and those nights were long, damn long. It was fucking exhausting. At times infuriating. My back still aches with the thought of that table, those chairs. That coffee, all those gray hairs!
And did we always simply just "get along"? As if by magic, the wave of a wand? Did we always agree? Was there never a hint of conflict or strife? Hell fucking No. It was hard work coming to consensus, guaranteeing collective survival, relinquishing rights for the sake of responsibility. It was hard to be my sisters' keeper.
The salary issue was by far not the most serious matter we had to hash out. That one? Shit. That was no-brainer. Absolute no-brainer. Simple arithmetic and basic calculation of the cost of living.
Since these policies, as official policy, were--I repeat, repeat, repeat--in violation of the law, our distribution of income had to remain off the record. This was a handshake deal. Word of honor. Sure, it might have looked suspicious to the state to see those kinds of tax-deductible contributions coming in from the same contributors on a regular basis, but there was no law against giving half of your salary back to the cause. We knew that. What do you think lawyers are for? Course, our accountant had a few tricks up her sleeve, too. So, yeah, we covered our asses. Our collective asses. I jump, you jump. No "I swim, you sink"-bullshit about it.
The only time our salary distribution policies became an issue--oh god I remember it like yesterday-was when we made the mistake of hiring a woman who'd just returned from an extended period in the United States. None of us really knew what life was like over here. I sort of had an idea, because I'd grown up here. But, as I said, I entered adulthood-the job market, the economy-under the strictures of the social market system as outlined above. Even I had no idea how vicious-how dishonest, how irresponsible--a human being could be, under certain circumstances. Like those of predatory capitalism. So maybe it wasn't about bloodlines after all. Maybe it was about picking up bad habits. About "popular expectations" for rights without responsibilities.
So we hired this woman. We explained to her in detail the equal distribution of salary policy. She was all for it. Great. She said, it's a done deal. Not long after those $4,000 deposits started coming in to her account. Well...... It became a problem. And for the duration of her one-year contract, we wasted many a day, many a night, sitting at that table trying to get this one individual to understand: Yes, dear, you do have the right, but please: in the first place, you agreed, and in the second, it's your responsibility. We're all in this together. And we're all doing the same job.
Thank goodness those teachers of mine were smart enough to reserve their right to exercise the responsibility of firing the predatory capitalists among us. We had to put up with this bitch for a year. But only one year. She laid down the law, took the money and ran. She was the only wannabe witch and the biggest bitch I ever encountered in my work with the rest of them, over there. I sure hope I never run into her over here.
It may have been sheer coincidence that this woman had only recently returned from the United States. I don't know where she picked up those bad habits, bad manners or bad character, whatever you want to call it. It's certainly not to imply that every American woman would trump responsibility with her "I-have-a-right"-card : of course not, I'm an American woman and I was one of the four. One bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch. It doesn't mean that every American woman who calls herself a witch is a bitch. But somehow, especially now--with thirteen years' experience in the real world of this predatory capitalist jungle under my belt--I just can't envision the same kind of network being woven over here. I can't imagine it.
And I think that's really sad. I miss those popular expectations. I miss Margareta. And all the rest of those witches. I miss them. Really, I do.
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