The buzzword for the new Obama administration is pragmatism. For those who find this word or what it stands for dirty, they should consider the real-life price tag of idealism.

Recently I went into four different bookstores in the Castro and Mission districts of San Francisco searching for a book about or by Ken Saro Wiwa. Surprisingly, in this liberal environmentally conscious city, only one person working in any of these bookshops had heard of Saro-Wiwa. These weren’t Barnes & Noble but neighborhood stores with plaques by Matt Gonzalez on the wall, stacks of feminist and Marxist theory books. Shelves dedicated to labor history. None of them carried any of Wiwa’s books which I found out are all out of print. Ken Saro-Wiwa’s son’s book, In the Shadow of a Saint: A Son's Journey to Understand His Father's Legacy, by Ken Wiwa, also out of print.

Maybe there’s a downturn in demand for environmental saints these days.

So I’ll have to construct this from memory. A few months ago I read a copy of Ken Wiwa’s memoir from the library. He revealed the shocking truth that carrying the triple name of your martyred and globally revered father for most of his life felt like a burden. Worse, Ken Wiwa creates a portrait of his father as a person who was not a saint in the American tradition; he was not a stolid church goer with a chiseled to perfection head of hair and personal life. Unfaithful to his multiple wives, and not really a great hands-on dad, he was not so much a saint lacking in sins, as one who cared more deeply and passionately about a cause than he did about his own comfort and safety.

For those who admire that sort of thing.

It’s hard to piece everything together thirteen years later after an unjust death. How do most of us focus just on getting our noses to work and back every day, and somehow some people have the energy to stick theirs into what is not, technically, their “business”?

You could say that the creation of an Ogoni Bill of Rights was audacious in 1990. The Ogoni people had little to no status in Nigerian society. Although many of the oil fields were located on Ogoni lands, and oil companies had extracted an estimated 30 billion in revenues from these fields in thirty years, the Ogoni people had no representative in Nigerian government, no electricity, no piped water, no public projects or job prospects. Worse, in the 1970’s there had been oil spills amounting to four times the Exxon Valdez spill, ruining fish populations and land for cultivation. The spilled oil was and is in fact was so bad it tends to create flare ups that look like this.

A recent editorial in the Guardian claims that the current government in Nigeria has recently been bad-mouthing Saro-Wiwa. Not surpringly. He was considered a class-traitor. Although he organized peaceful protests of 300,000 people, when the government soldiers cracked down, four Ogoni elders were killed. In one of the ironic twists of injustice that a corrupt government can make, Wiwa and eight others were tried and sentenced to death for the deaths of these four Ogoni elders. If they had not incited the protest, the elders would not have been killed. Ergo, Wiwa and the Ogoni Eight were guilty of murder.

The oil companies argued that they had no ability to distribute the monies they paid to the Nigerian government so they could not be responsible for the Ogoni people’s poverty or environmental devastation. Still, this argument that they had no influence on internal Nigerian politics was undermined when a Shell representative attended the closed trial of Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni Eight while the BBC and other news organizations were banned. In the weeks leading up to Wiwa’s death, Chinua Achebe wrote an impassioned letter to the New York Times, pleading that Saro-Wiwa's case be moved to a standard, civil court; that international media and legal observers gain full access to all parts of Saro-Wiwa’s trial; that they investigate Saro-Wiwa’s allegations that he had been mistreated while in detention. Not one of these demands was met.

In 1995 Saro-Wiwa wrote, “I’m in good spirits...There’s no doubt that my ideas will succeed in time, but I’ll have to bear the pain of the moment...the most important thing for me is that I’ve used my talents as a writer to enable the Ogoni people to confront their tormentors. I was not able to do it as a politician or a businessman. My writing did it. And it sure makes me feel good! I’m mentally prepared for the worst, but hopeful for the best. I think I have the moral victory."

And he did. As of the year 2000, big oil pulled out of the Ogonilands and their website claims that they will not return without an invitation by the Ogoni people, and that they are committed to cleaning up oil from earlier spills, although the evidence of this clean-up remains sparse.

Yet, reading Ken Wiwo’s book I felt reminded of both the appeal and the outrageous price of moral victories. Wiwa writes not only of his own experience as the child of a political martyr, but he interviews family members of Bogoyoke Aung San of Burma, of Nelson Mandela, of Steve Biko, and other human rights activists whose work has mandated personal sacrifice not only from themselves, but from those closest to them. Wiwa writes, “while it’s true that boys have to commit patricide to become a man, it is also true that at some point in life we eventually become reconciled to our fathers. I never had that reconciliation—the hangman cheated us of the opportunity just when we were starting to grow closer.”

My suggestion for the Obama administration’s new energy plan? Wind turbines.

Merry christmas, all.