Cosmic Cool 'women' of Robert Pruitt comes to the Studio Museum of Harlem (photos)

Is it possible to be a metamorphosis, while the remaining strongly punished at the same time? Series of crayon Robert Pruitt, titled simply "Woman", shows such not possible an existence - is everywhere.

Pruitt portraits of contemporary African-American women enter science fiction, hip-hop, black power in the 1960s, culture of the comic and romantic loyalty to realism. Conjure influences cultural build identity, Pruitt presented female force from inside collide with external forces to create a captivating and fantastic portrait.

Pruitt, who lives and works in Houston, Texas, uses pencils told as their medium of choice, a drawing made of coal and clay material. His wife, based on his friends and members of the community, enters a world of fantasy somewhere between a music video, tutorial of steampunk and exploration of colonial Africa.

While cultural infused portrait painter Mickalene Thomas permeates his subjects with style, Afrofuturism and a cosmic sense of cool permeate portraits of Pruitt, tying the trends of the time for a greater sense of eternity. Although Pruitt women occupy a changing set of times, places, moods and modes, strength in their eyes and their bodies keeps tied to the land under them.

"Women" is currently on view at the Studio Museum of Harlem until the 27 of October 2013. Check out a preview of the exhibition below and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

K light might stun

Be our world from space

Bombs over Baghdad

Pursued

Cosmic cube

Heavenly dream

The Saturn

Erika

Free

If you like my ticket history

Lauren (expected)

Rich Girl

D. Robert Worley: Allies or Protectorates

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After World War II, the U.S. deliberately built a system of protectorates. For curious reasons, voices from Congress, the administration, and the news media continue to refer to our allies rather than to our protectorates. Which best characterizes our system today -- a system of allies or a system of protectorates? Which would better serve U.S. interests and the interests of our friends?

U.S. presidents have gone back and forth emphasizing the role of ally or protector. The same mutual defense pacts can serve either purpose. The choice between a system of alliances and a system of protectorates has consequences, including the size of the Defense budget and the tempo of operations. A system of protectorates requires maintenance of a large military force and frequent military intervention -- a system of allies less so.

Prior to the U.S. entering WWII, FDR positioned the U.S. as the "Arsenal of Democracy," a provider of military supplies but not of warfighting forces. As it did in WWI, the U.S. entered the war late to tip the balance -- the balancer of last resort.After the war, the U.S. quickly established a system of protectorates to allow them to emphasize economic recovery rather than rearm. In perhaps the first postwar action as global cop, Truman took the U.S. into the Korean "police action" adding the costs of war and tripling the base Defense budget.Eisenhower ended the war, drew down the force, and expanded a system of regional alliances. Rather than military force, he used economic diplomacy against England, France, and Israel to resolve the Suez Crisis.Kennedy promised an anywhere, anytime, at any cost global defense, and expanded the military to make the promise credible.Nixon announced a return to Eisenhower's alliance approach, ended the Vietnam War, and drew down the force. Today's presidents, regardless of party, are under pressure to resolve regional conflicts around the globe. Anything short of immediate and decisive military response will be cited by hardliners as weakness, appeasement, and a failure to lead. A war-weary public introduces some caution, but the key factor is a president's strategic disposition.

One of the many ironies in recent politics is that the Obama administration appears to exercise restraint more like the old Republican Party from the Eisenhower-era while present-day Republicans John McCain and Lindsay Graham appear to argue from the direct military interventionism of the old Democratic Party from the Kennedy-Johnson era.

The idea behind a system of regional alliances is that regional actors have the most at stake, are best able to understand the problem, and best positioned to deal with it. The U.S. might provide advisors, trainers, and equipment, but regional actors would shoulder the primary burden and fight their own wars. Only when the outcome appeared counter to important U.S. interests would the U.S. intervene and then only with sufficient force to tip the scales. A regional political loss was preferable to direct intervention in never-ending conflicts where U.S. vital interests are not threatened. The U.S. would be the balancer of last resort. The "lead from behind" role played by the U.S. in Libya, among other responses, suggests that Obama has shifted toward Eisenhower's approach.

The idea behind extending a U.S. security guarantee to a system of protectorates is that secure protectorates won't enter into arms races to defend themselves that could raise tensions and inadvertently increase the likelihood of regional war. A system of protectorates not invested in their self-defense preserves the U.S. position as the last remaining superpower, and only that position makes the U.S. secure according to this line of reasoning. To defend its protectorates, the U.S. must maintain a preponderance of military power and must be willing to use it frequently even when vital interests are not at risk. Advocates of playing the role of global protector claim that the U.S. economy can support this approach.

In the realm of domestic policy, advocates of limited government often argue their positions on the basis of "moral hazard." That is, by creating social welfare programs for the poor, the state creates a dependency that undermines self-reliance and creates a permanent underclass of free riders. Extending the concept of moral hazard into the realm of international security, extending a U.S. security guarantee to a system of protectorates allows them a relatively free ride and little reason to invest in their own defense thus shifting the burden to the United States, its military, and its taxpayers.

Furthermore, granting unequivocal support may embolden the protectorate to pursue more aggressive policies than justified by its own power -- even in opposition to U.S. policy preferences -- thus increasing tensions and the need for a U.S. response. The tail wags the dog. Tension over West Bank settlement policies is one obvious example.

At the end of WWII, U.S. economic power was at its peak relative to the Eurasian states lying in rubble. It was deliberate U.S. policy for European and Far East economies to recover and grow. The U.S. economy has continued to grow in an absolute sense, second only to the European Union and with the prospect of being equaled by China in the coming decades. U.S. economic power may be at its peak in an absolute sense, but relative to the rest of the world, its economy peaked at the end of WWII and has been in relative decline since. Should the U.S. assume the same security posture given today's world economies as it did at the end of WWII?

Which security system should we rely on in the future -- a system of alliances or a system of protectorates? For reasons beyond my grasp, questions like this aren't asked of candidates for high office. If pressed, I'd wager that the wishy-washy response would be that the candidate preferred working through international bodies but would reserve the right to unilateral action. A reasonable position, of course, but it sidesteps the question. Where do you stand on the issue? Your friends? Your elected officials?

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Robert Koehler: Magical Thinking

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My laptop started making funny noises a few days ago and I knew that wasn't good. I'm embarrassed to say that my first instinct was to hope they'd just go away.

I also had a quick, guilty thought about an essay by Umberto Eco I read some years back, comparing science and technology. Whereas the former involves a painstaking commitment to gather knowledge and understanding over the long haul, the latter hides the process of its becoming, simply giving the user a raw upgrade of power - instant, godlike. Wow, look what I can do! Technology encourages magical thinking, Eco wrote. And no piece of modern, reasonably priced technology spews magical thinking into the social arena more seductively than the computer.

OMG! Seduction, indeed! We - I - have gotten so used to such dazzling possibility: all human knowledge at my fingertips, plus . . . cool games, great oldies, satellite photos of every square inch of the planet, ten thousand sources of news, video footage of dead celebrities, infinite trivia and the search engines to serve it up to me. Every time my creative process stalls, I can wander into the distraction of my choosing and stay there for as long as I like. As a modern man, this is my entitlement. And this is what the writing process has become for me.

So when my four-and-a-half-year-old laptop started crackling, softly at first, like a bowl of Rice Krispies, I refused to surrender to my dark trepidations. This doesn't sound so bad I actually need to deal with it, I reasoned. I mean, come on, I've got work to do! This is life on the far side of magical thinking, where reality's warning signals are held in subconscious abeyance for as long as possible.

The next day the crackling was louder. Fortunately, my housemate, who actually knew something about computers, was around. "It sounds like the hard drive spindle," he said. "You know, the only moving part."

And suddenly I felt an emotional shift. All the decades I'd spent achieving computer mastery, all my facility navigating human knowledge, all the brilliance of my ideas, paled before the clarity of his diagnosis. "Oh, the hard drive spindle." I felt grounded.

And I realized that I simply have not spent much time wondering how a computer works, even at the simplest level. And the more bedazzled I became over the decades by what I could do with it, and the more my self-importance swelled, the more I stopped caring. I gradually allowed myself to take its capabilities utterly for granted, at the same time that I spent more and more of my life sitting in front of it. All the important stuff I did was computer-centered.

You might say that virtual reality had come to feel like home. It's so much more convenient - no dusting! - than the multi-dimensional world I'd abdicated, and its fascinations were at my total disposal. Magical thinking is addictive, at least until it hiccups.

However, once I had a fragmentary grasp of what was going on, I came to my senses and instantly reprioritized. OK, I know, I'm supposed to write a column tomorrow, but this can't wait. I shut down my magic machine and headed off to my local Geek Squad to get it fixed.

Oh laptop, a mere four and a half years in my possession! Uh, it's kind of obsolete, they said. The money you invest in repair could go toward a new machine, one that's much faster. "More magical." They didn't say that but they meant it. And: "The prices start pretty low."

Well, what could it hurt to look around? As I did so, I thought about my mother's old Underwood typewriter. I think she acquired it in 1936. Twenty-five years later, I learned to type on it. You had to hit each key with a karate chop, or so I always mused in retrospect, but at the time it was still pretty much state of the art. I used it through high school and, at graduation, received my own manual typewriter. It was durable. Four years later, it was not obsolete. I loved it, but never got addicted to it.

I wandered through the store. "This one's on sale," the salesgal said. "It's a great price. It has everything you need." And I bought it.

Now they're transferring data from the old machine to the new one. They're a little backed up. It could take two days. So, in the meantime, I sit here poised over a spiral notebook, wielding a Paper Mate pen. I keep trying to check my email or search the history of Underwood or read the news, then, oops, calm yourself, man. What you see is what you get. Pen. Paper. That's it. I can't even play Free Cell. There's no button I can click, no fake cards that deal themselves out, no virtual shuffle sound. The only thing going on here is writing, just like the old days.

How disconcerting. Yet, anxious as I am to return to the 21st century, I realize that my brief plunge from the crazy graces of its technology has rendered me temporarily sober. I'd sort of like to stay that way. My name is Bob. I'm addicted to magical thinking . . .

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com, visit his website at commonwonders.com or listen to him at Voices of Peace radio.

© 2013 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

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Robert Kuttner: Thinking About the Government

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I remember a time when liberals were the people who used government as a democratic counterweight to the abuses of capitalism, and conservatives were those close to big business who wanted to limit government. Liberals also recognized, with the Framers of the Constitution, that government had to be strong enough to protect the rights of the weak. Conservatives didn't like the power of the state, but were fine with concentrated private power.

Yes, there were inconsistencies and exceptions on both sides, but there was a philosophical coherence to it. And when regular people got mobilized and attractive candidates appeared, we could even elect leaders who would direct government for the public good.

But, lately the lines have blurred. The old, stylized picture of what liberals and conservatives want of government doesn't mean much, especially to younger Americans, because they have seldom experienced it.

Consider: An administration currently run by supposed liberals thinks that it's ok for government to secretly seize phone and Internet records of citizens, without the kind of explicit search warrant contemplated by the Fourth Amendment. The conservatives who controlled the federal government in the Bush administration were even more cavalier about trampling citizen rights. You have to go to the libertarian right (Rand Paul) and the progressive left (Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkley) to find support for containing the national security state.

And the whistle blower who raised the curtain on some of the NSA's secret data-mining program? Edward Snowden worked for a government contractor, Booz-Allen-Hamilton. More and more of the government is being contracted out and privatized, even the most sensitive state secrets, not to mention basic public services. Even the U.S. armed forces depend increasingly on private mercenaries.

Far from being a counterweight to economic elites who invoke the freedom of markets, government has gotten into bed with those elites. Democrats are almost as corrupt as Republicans when it comes to raising money from the very rich, at using public service as a gateway to careers in private lobbying, at turning over public functions to private interests.

Once conservatives supported balanced budgets, while liberals were willing to use deficits to finance public investments to dig out of economic slumps. Today's conservatives run up deficits as a way of clubbing government, and liberals in the White House cut public spending as a way of showing fiscal responsibility. No wonder voters are baffled about who really stands for what.

The financial collapse and presidential election of 2008 were a moment for political reformers to dismantle the Wall Street power that caused the financial collapse and did such damage to ordinary people. But the moment passed with only feeble reforms, which are being dismantled daily as lobbyists eat away at the regulations to carry out the ambiguous constraints of the Dodd-Frank Act. Liberals would like to support their government in its effort to clean up Wall Street, but Wall Street is inside the government.

Or consider the public services that provide security and opportunity to regular people -- things like schools. A supposedly liberal administration has joined the assault against public schools, using the carrot of federal money to induce states and towns to shift to charter schools and hobbling public schools with teach-to-the-test requirements.

In embracing universal pre-kindergarten as a signature initiative in his State of the Union message, President Obama did not propose expanding public schools one year downward. Instead, his program, if enacted, would underwrite a patchwork of private preschools, church basements, and the occasional genuine early kindergarten.

A health reform that professes to use government to move us closer to universal insurance coverage is actually a command for people to buy insurance from private industry, which is fatter and less efficient than ever. Government is less of a counterweight than an enabler.

A liberal national administration has colluded with conservatives in failing to help state and local government bridge over economic recession without crippling layoffs. This is the first recession in a century when government employment and public services were cut rather than expanded to compensate for the weakness of the private sector.

Take enough resources away from government, and it becomes too enfeebled to do its job for regular people. Citizens then give up on government. Why throw good money after bad?

Both parties outdo each other to give away tax breaks to business. The tax breaks have little tonic effect on a depressed economy, but deny government needed revenue. Neither party has the nerve to mount a serious offensive against corporate tax cheats. Then both parties condemn deficits and cut government further.

An Internal Revenue Service, stripped of personnel and overwhelmed with applications for tax-exempt status, many of them from explicitly political groups that could not properly qualify, resorted to indefensible short cuts based on labels. The IRS went on auto-pilot. Bad management of a sensitive public agency gives the right ammunition and only further undermines trust in government.

We have almost reached a tipping point where majorities of Americans who want to government to be on their side look in vain for a government that actually serves them. Meanwhile, the national security state is more overweening than ever.

I'm glad that Barack Obama rather than Mitt Romney is president, and I'm grateful for clearheaded Democrats such as those of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. But when Democrats deliver such a mixed message about the proper role of government, it's that much easier for politicians to run against Washington in general and the public is bewildered.

Instead of having a government that delivers practical help while restraining its own excesses, we have one that is doing far too little to keep us economically secure and far too much in the name of keeping us safe. No wonder our politics is a muddled mess.

Robert Kuttner's new book is Debtors' Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility. He is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior Fellow at Demos.

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Robert David Jaffee: Attending My 30th High School Reunion as a Diagnosed Psychotic

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Five years ago, as Andrew Levy, leader of my high school class, was rallying the troops for our 25th reunion, one former classmate asked for an appropriate quote for what was transpiring. As no one else offered any, I invoked an exchange from Henry IV Part I in which Owen Glendower, a Welshman, rolls his r's in over-the-top fashion as he declares, "I can call spirits from the vasty deep." Hotspur replies, "Why, so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?"

I then hailed Andrew Levy as our anti-Glendower. As I wrote at the time in an e-mail thread, when Levy calls, we do indeed come.

Five years later, this was still true. Levy, a sports marketing agent and the subject of one of my previous posts, worked lovingly and tirelessly to throw us a wonderful party at Roia, a restaurant in downtown New Haven, not far from the Yale campus.

Levy negotiated with Roia to allow us to have New Haven's fabled, thin-crusted, brick-oven style pizza delivered from Modern, one of the town's well-known pizzerias. And he got us an entire floor to ourselves with an open bar. But it wasn't so much the food or beverage that mattered. What really mattered was that he reached out to all classmates, even if he did not know them well, because he loves people and he loved his experience at Hopkins, the New Haven prep school that we all attended.

Four or five days before the party at Roia, I phoned Levy and asked him if our classmates were going to be "weirded out" by my appearance. While I have been writing openly about my psychotic past since 2005, when I wrote an op-ed for the L.A. Times, titled "Shedding Stigma of the 'Psycho' Straitjacket," it is only since I started blogging regularly on this subject for The Huffington Post in 2009 that many people became aware of my past.

Even though Levy reassured me that I should have no apprehension about attending, I was concerned that I might be judged as a violent man based upon my delusion from years ago that I was going to be framed for a series of murders around the nation. I was also concerned that some might view me as a homophobe based upon another delusion from the late 1990s that people were conspiring to brand me as being gay. I have never been proud of these delusions, nor have I been ashamed of them either. They were metaphors for my feelings of powerlessness and alienation that I had experienced since childhood. Nonetheless, perhaps due to my proclivities toward paranoia, I worried a bit about being judged.

I need not have done so, as I found, to my delight, that I was welcomed by the vast majority of my classmates, including Kit Winter, a brilliant man who is now a lawyer and a gay activist in L.A. Winter always struck me as being one of the most eloquent, sophisticated and good-humored members of our class. Once a lithe fellow who is now muscled like a body builder, Winter and I chatted about his brother, Jeff, who, with his own litheness and an effortless swing, reminiscent of that of Shawn Green, had been a star softball player on my intramural championship team in 9th grade. Winter later told me that it will make his brother very happy to be remembered as an athlete.

Another classmate, Nora Colliton, a vibrant woman who hails from the Philippines, awed all of us with her e-mail about growing up as an orphan from a Third World country, something that I and most of my classmates had never known. Colliton, a graduate of Georgetown's foreign service school, and I reminisced about Madame Morse's French class in 7th grade, and then we discussed the Villanova-Georgetown championship basketball game in 1985. She was bemused that I had rooted for Villanova, a team that had many star players from Connecticut, including Harold Pressley and Harold Jensen. I told her that the Nutmeg connection and my fondness for coach Rollie Massimino, not any hatred for Georgetown, had led to my rooting for Villanova.

Karen Helene, whom I dated briefly the summer before 12th grade, showed me tremendous compassion as she listened to me tell my story about my psychotic breaks. I was heartened when she told me that she works with autistic children, a job that requires nothing but compassion, patience and wisdom. Tom Pinchbeck, with whom I played intramural basketball for many years, also works with those in the spectrum of autism disorders, teaching them how to grow roses at his farm in Guilford, Conn., about 20 miles east of New Haven. These were two beautiful stories to hear about six months after the Newtown massacre.

As the party carried on deep into the night, I told a few friends about how Toni Giamatti, late wife of the late Yale President Bart Giamatti, had told my 12th grade bildungsroman class that I should be a writer.

While I played Hotspur in that elective, I will always identify with Hamlet, my hero. At a time when many still equate mental illness with violence, I did not speak daggers at this party. Needless to say, I did not use daggers either.

I don't doubt that a few people projected their own delusions or fantasies onto me. Some people avoided me, and I avoided others. In the end, though, I did not hear a single negative word directed my way.

Let me conclude by saying that mental illness, like Hamlet, who may or may not be the only sane person in the play, is mysterious and paradoxical. And psychosis works the way nightmares do, by metaphor and symbolism. Delusions often stand in for something else. In my case, my delusions reflected the pariah status I had felt my whole life, to say nothing of my genetic predisposition toward psychosis, depression and suicide.

Hamlet would understand all that. Fortunately, so did most of my classmates, none more so than my baseball buddy since 1977, Andrew Levy, the anti-Glendower. I will always answer his call.

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Obama Judicial Nominees Include Patricia Ann Millett, Cornelia Pillard, Robert Leon Wilkins

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President Barack Obama nominated Patricia Ann Millett, Cornelia Pillard and Robert Leon Wilkins to the understaffed federal appeals court in Washington on Tuesday during an announcement in the White House Rose Garden.

The nominations set up an aggressive push against Senate Republicans who are trying to keep him from naming any more judges to the influential circuit.

According to the AP, it's the first time Obama has ever held an event to announce nominees to the federal bench other than the Supreme Court, an indication of the pressure the president is trying to put on the Senate to approve his picks.

The AP reports:

President Barack Obama is calling on Senate Republicans to allow prompt votes on three lawyers he's nominating to an understaffed federal appeals court in Washington.

In the White House Rose Garden on Tuesday, Obama criticized delays in votes on his prior judicial nominees as political and said that "for the good of the American people it has to stop." He says too much of the people's business is at stake.

Obama says his three nominees to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit are highly qualified to serve.

The nominees are Cornelia Pillard, a Georgetown University law professor; Patricia Ann Millet, an appeals lawyer in Washington and Robert Leon Wilkins, a judge on the U.S. District Court in Washington.

This post is developing and has been updated.

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Robert Scheer: China Benefits From Bush's Folly

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Imperialism doesn't pay. Of course, it never did for the common folk recruited to invade another country, or the natives they conquered. But still, the thought persists that occupying foreign lands -- particularly as in the case of Iraq, soaked in oil as well as blood -- is a winner.

True, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, with its nonexistent WMDs and virulent hostility to the religious fanatics that attacked us on 9/11, was a false target for a war on terror. And yes, a Shiite-run Iraq is now closely allied with co-religionists in Iran and Lebanon, whereas Hussein had once been our ally in containing the power of the ayatollahs. But "we" now control Iraq's vast oil reserves, some hawks will still argue in the manner of the idiot savant Paul Wolfowitz, who as then-deputy defense secretary promised that the oil would pay for the war. Only they, like he, have once again been proved wrong.

That myth of wealth following the flag can finally be put to rest with the report in Sunday's New York Times headlined "China Is Reaping Biggest Benefits of Iraq Oil Boom." What the Chinese have demonstrated is that in the modern world, to the conquerors do not go the spoils. The United States has spent well over $3 trillion on its Iraq War, while suffering and inflicting much mayhem. Yet it is the studiously neutral government of China that has most clearly benefited from George W. Bush's folly. Beijing refused to play the militarist's game but coolly picked up the winner's prize.

"Since the American-led invasion of 2003, Iraq has become one of the world's top oil producers," the Times reports, "and China is now its biggest customer." Almost half of Iraq's oil production already is shipped to China, and those once vilified commies, reincarnated as today's robber barons, are bidding for an even larger stake in Iraq's oil field production. The Cold War is indeed over, but China's red capitalists have won.

While the United States remains mired in the outdated task of establishing military hegemony through a vast network of advanced bases and sophisticated weaponry, the Chinese have emerged as the world's most nimble entrepreneurs, shrewdly covering their bets without the distraction of patriotic flag waving.

"We lost out," Bush Defense Department official Michael Makovsky admits to the Times. "The Chinese had nothing to do with the war, but from an economic standpoint, they are benefitting from it, and our Fifth Fleet and air forces are helping to assure their supply."

Actually, the Chinese had quite a bit to do with the war in that they profited from the interest on the loans they made that floated the U.S war debt. This debt will continue to increase as we remain stuck with the bill for that Fifth Fleet protecting the shipping lanes connecting Iraq's oil with China's ever expanding economy.

What all this underscores is that America, driven by an obsession with foreign enemies and burdened with a huge permanent military economy, lost its original sense of purpose, as outlined by George Washington in his Farewell Address:

"Harmony, liberal intercourse with all Nations, are recommended by policy, humanity and interest. But even our Commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce but forcing nothing."

Not exactly the tone of our policy toward China during the Cold War, or with Iraq more recently. Possessed of an armed forces power dwarfing all that came before, we have been drunk on the elixir of military confrontation. Ignoring the plea of Washington's farewell effort "to warn against the mischiefs of foreign Intrigue, to guard against the Impostures of pretended patriotism," we wallowed in that very imposture.

A nation born in revolt against the preoccupations of empire came to embrace foreign military conquest as its raison d'être. Particularly during the era of post 9/11 hysteria, the arrogance of unquestioned nationalist power has come to define our political culture. How ironic that the once ossified police state of communist China should now threaten us with a free market alternative.

The next time we feel the need to go to war -- Iran comes to mind -- we might be cautioned by Beijing's startling turnaround. This was the government that would never abandon its revolutionary politics, it was commonly said. And now an Iraq Oil Ministry official is quoted in the Times as saying of the Chinese: "They are practical people. They don't have anything to do with politics or religion. They just work and eat and sleep." Sounds like how we used to be.

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