I've often wondered why so few artists use their talents to fight social injustice. Recently I read something that sheds a ray of light on the issue. Early in her moving memoir Just Kids (NY: HarperCollins, 2010), the poet-musician & occasional activist Patti Smith is writing about a time in 1968, when she was 21 years old. Dirt poor but glad to be living in Brooklyn with her soulmate, fellow ex-Catholic artist Robert Mapplethorpe, Smith expresses doubts about her vocation.
"In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre? I craved honesty, yet found dishonesty in myself. Why commit to art? For self-realization, or for itself? It seemed indulgent to add to the glut unless one offered illumination. [ . . . ] I could not identify with political movements. In trying to join them I felt overwhelmed by yet another form of bureaucracy. I wondered if anything I did mattered," she modestly admits.
Patti Smith, of course, carried on drawing & writing despite those doubts. Eventually she composed songs & made illuminating records that helped other aspiring artists - especially misfit musicians - express themselves. R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, for example, named Smith's 1975 debut album Horses a key influence on his gestation as a songwriter. She came to be known as the Godmother of Punk.
During the restless struggles of her youth, Smith learned that there's a price to pay for being an imaginative person who challenges social norms. Yet she could take comfort in knowing that lasting art raises important existential questions - even if making such art fails to answer the artist's economic needs. Creative public protestors often face income deficiency, not to mention legal problems.
Perhaps that's why so few citizens, artists or otherwise, have the guts to risk their freedom by openly addressing controversial issues. Like intentionally funny politicians, courageous rebels with a cause are rare, but they do exist. One of them appeared in a Knoxville, Tennessee, courtroom last Tuesday (February 18th): an 84-year-old pacifist named Sister Megan Rice was sentenced to three years in federal prison for engaging in an act of civil disobedience.
What was this elderly nun's specific crime? Aided by a pair of fellow anti-war activists, Rice cut through three fences at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge (TN) in July 2012. She & her accomplices (one of them a Vietnam vet) then defaced a bunker holding bomb-grade uranium by hanging protest banners, putting up crime-scene tape & hammering off a symbolic chunk of the $548-million fortress. A devoted advocate for peace, Sister Megan expressed no remorse for her actions at the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility.
In fact, during her final statement to US District Judge Amul Thapar, Rice rather cryptically requested a life sentence. (The federal sentencing guidelines suggested six years in her case.) "Please have no leniency with me," the bespectacled, white-haired felon said. "To remain in prison for the rest of my life would be the greatest gift you could give me."
Rice took her religious vows at age 18, so she'd spent her entire adult life as a member of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. The mature Rice explained her 2012 protest in surprisingly practical terms. The US government was spending too much on the military & its weaponry, she told the court. She also cited concern for the well-being of young people, from the Americas to Afghanistan: "This is the next generation and it is for these people that we are willing to give our lives." Her co-conspirators, Greg Boertje-Obed & Michael Walli, credited their religious faith for the "miraculous" break-in at the deadly weapons depot.
"I was acting upon my God-given obligations as a follower of Jesus Christ," Walli told the judge, adding that he'd gladly do it again. All three activists agreed that God was using them to raise awareness about the USA's stockpile of nuclear weapons. Since the Cold War fizzled out circa 1992, people don't fret much about the prospect of nuclear war. The vast, globally dispersed arsenal of hydrogen bombs have almost come to seem like a harmless abstraction. The looming catastrophe that troubles most thinking people nowadays is human-generated climate change, which is precipitating ever more obvious eco-disasters.
Skeptical about whether the protestors had caused any real harm, Judge Thapar nevertheless washed his hands of the affair, asserting that he had to deter other activists by sentencing Rice to three years & her co-defendants to over five years in prison. The other antagonist in that Knoxville theater of the absurd, Assistant US Attorney Jeff Theodore, justified his zealous prosecution on flimsy grounds. He told the court (presumably with a straight face) that, by committing a clever act of nonviolent resistance to the masters of war, the defendants had destroyed the "mystique" (i.e. false claims of security?) ascribed to this "Fort Knox of uranium."
Despite their harsh treatment by the US Department of (irony alert:) Justice, the Knoxville Three should count their blessings. After all, President Obama's remote-trigger-happy anti-terrorist enforcers refrained from sending an armed drone aircraft to pre-emptively kill them. These naive believers had the gall to exercise their free-speech rights by staging a provocative demonstration on US government property. Their de facto crime, it seems to me, was the un-American activity of mocking militarism by exposing the lie of so-called national security. I guess Fort Knox ain't what it used to be, eh, Uncle Sam?
This whole saga of the pacifist sister and her lay brothers strikes me as an allegory of cruel persecution worthy of Orwell or Kafka. True martyrs probably don't expect justice, certainly not in a tragically flawed society like ours. And compassion fatigue may be a natural response to the daily media parade of senseless violence that plagues contemporary civilization. But that brave gentle trio - Rice, Walli & Boertje-Obed - deserved better treatment from our (nominally) democratic federal government, one based on Enlightenment ideas of individual freedom & responsibility.
When thinking about the Knoxville Three, I'm reminded of the beatitudes: Blessed are the peacemakers. Mere incarceration cannot break their spirits. Even so, this case cries out for a presidential pardon. Cynics might remonstrate that it's not much of a sacrifice for a senior citizen, one who's already reached her life expectancy, to spend her remaining days on Earth as a political prisoner. Anyway, I suspect that Sister Megan, who surely proved her bona fides as a wise moral force, had good reason for requesting a life term.
Lesson learned? Rice reportedly taught science for 40 years as a Catholic missionary serving the poor in western Africa. Now she's been given the chance to educate her fellow Americans, including the miserable masses who (like her) live behind razor-wire-crowned walls, if only by serving as an example of human dignity. Long live the Knoxville Nun! Patti Smith should write a song about her.
