Sustainability is a word often bandied about by environmentalists, economists, and politicians trying to establish a platform. I don’t remember ever using the word myself when I decided to live in rural New Mexico for the rest of my life. Whatever we were after was more along proletarian lines, or the opposite of whatever we defined as bourgeois. There were plenty of other words to describe these goals: hippie, back to the land, alternative generation, or counter culture, but they all somehow missed the fundamental motive of wanting to discard any notion of being part of consumer culture while advocating for the overthrow of the government. How we could achieve the second goal in Placitas or El Valle, New Mexico, I don’t know, but we certainly could be nonconsummers when we couldn’t afford more than a weekly trip to town or anywhere you could spend money. Did that mean we were living a sustainable life? Not really, but it was probably as close as we could come to being self-sufficient without being labeled Luddites and maintaining some semblance of normalcy for our kids.
We weren’t prepared to live like our Hispano neighbors had only fifty years ago, when they grew all the food they consumed except for coffee and sugar. They grew all their vegetables and fruit and canned it for the winter. They raised sheep, pigs, cows, and goats and dried the meat for the winter. They grew and milled their own wheat for bread. They made most of their own clothes and musical instruments and actually spent time at each other’s houses talking, singing, dancing, and being neighborly. That’s the most important thing we learned in our El Valle lives: becoming buen vecinos.
I was surprised to learn recently that writer Jack London moved to a 1,400 acre ranch in northern California in 1905 where he could “leave the land the better for my having been.” He wrote in his journal, “My work on this land, and my message to America, go hand in hand.” He said he spent two hours a day writing, which is how he supported himself, and ten hours a day farming.
I thought if I worked on the land then I could have a message for America, that there was a better (whoops, not a poststructuralist word), more equitable way to live, if not sustainably, then at least consciously and lightly. Like building your own house, cutting firewood to heat your house, growing some of your own food, fixing, or at least maintaining, your cars, learning how to take care of yourself. If we could do everything the pioneers did, we could at least get a taste of a day in the life where everything was tended to: your body out in the garden, your mind at the computer, and hopefully your soul, the melding of the two. I try to never sit at the computer for more than a two-hour stretch (except when I had a deadline to finish the index for Malcolm Ebright’s book, Witches of Abiquiu, after which I gave up doing indexes) or I won’t have a body left to sustain a mind.
Perhaps the agenda calls for watering the vegetable garden or garlic field, which is really not that difficult as almost everything is on a drip irrigation system—I turn a few valves on and off and the plants are wet in a matter of hours. Of course, because everything is so sufficiently watered, things grow in abundance, and more and more of my time is devoted to dealing with the harvest. Some days I’m on my hands and knees thinning the carrots that have to be thinned in stages, rather than one fell swoop. Other days I’m stooped over searching for string beans hiding on dense vines only a foot high. At least the sugar snap peas grow six feet tall, although that means I’m constantly adding new string to the trellis to catch the incessant growth. Every day I search for the disgusting green tomato worms that if left unsquished would soon look like the caterpillars in Dune.
Irrigating the pasture is not so easy. One of my neighbors calls the corner of the field to which he can never get the water “Arizona.” We have a Sahara, a Gobi, and a Death Valley. No matter how many feeder ditches we dig off the main acequia, no matter how fast we get the water, or how much water we get, there are bare, brown spots that will never receive the sparkling waters of the Rio de Las Trampas. Too bad for them.
On the days when I do have to go to town, I always anticipate with great relief the final turn onto the dirt road that leads two miles to this village of twenty families. I find myself playing a game, pretending that this is the first time I have come here, that I have never before seen the lush, green valley or mountain peaks that are the setting for the village homes. I try to remember what I felt years ago when we first stumbled upon this place on one of our periodic, wistful trips to northern New Mexico when we still lived in Placitas, where we no longer wanted to live. I distinctly remember saying to myself, “You’ll never be able to live here,” as we made our way along the road of tin-roofed, handmade adobe houses painted lovely greens and pinks, sitting in fields of timothy grass, grazed by cows and horses, with at least one mandatory junked car on display. I thought at the time that it was probably the most beautiful landscape in New Mexico, if not the world, and I still do: the 13,000-foot peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains provide the backdrop, the piñon-juniper hills rolling to sandstone cliffs the vista. Now, as I drive down the road, I never fail to marvel that I am able to live here, surrounded by all the things that are meaningful and comforting to me. I lead a privileged, if not sustainable, life.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Hero Worship
Ironically, my Westminster Dog Show piece, which ends with the phrase, “Yeah, Tiger Woods” (the dog), was posted just before the golfer Tiger Woods’ escapes were aired in public. The following piece, also written before the airing of Woods’ troubles, seems particularly appropriate to the situation.
They stripped Michael Phelps of his Wheaties gig for smoking pot. Gee whiz. He’s twenty-three or twenty-four, doing what most other twenty-year olds do at some point in their lives and he gets taken off the back of a cereal box. But the question is, why is he, or Alex Rodriguez or Mark McGuire or O.J. Simpson, on the back of a cereal box in the first place? I assume being on the cereal box means that kids are supposed to look at the picture and want to be just like you, meaning they want to be born with the physical attributes and the psychological ambition and drive that allow these guys to make it to the top in their respective sports, where they are paid millions of dollars to single mindedly pursue success in a very narrow field of interest. What is heroic about that? Is making millions of dollars heroic or simply what our society equates with success? If it’s heroic, why don’t they put the pictures of corporate CEOs on the back of cereal boxes. Or do you have to earn millions of dollars and play a sport to be a hero. Is it the single mindedness (or simple mindedness, as the case may be)? Then why aren’t members of the U.S. House of Representatives on the back of cereal boxes. One certainly has to be single minded to disrupt your life every two years to raise the money for re-election.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not shedding any tears for Michael Phelps. He knew what was expected of him when he signed up to make millions by selling Wheaties or Nike sneakers. It’s us I feel sorry for. Apparently our lives are so bereft that twenty- something swimmers (swimmers, for Christ sake!) are the people we find most interesting and want to spend time with by reading People Magazine and joining fan clubs. I could understand wanting to spend a day with, or wanting to know better, Emily Dickinson or Che Guevara or Raymond Williams, but what on earth are you going to talk about with Michael other than the finer points of the breast stroke or how to get the most out of your turn?
While this kind of hero worship reveals the bankruptcy of our intellect, raising a good Samaritan to the status of hero reveals our emotional bankruptcy. Shouldn’t we expect any and everyone to stop to help someone on the road who is broken down or been in an accident? Why then do you see the letter to the editor telling everyone about the “hero” who stopped to help his wife change her tire, calling it “beyond the call of duty. No, it is the call of duty to help your fellow man or woman. Poor “Sully” Sullivan, the pilot who set the plane down in the Hudson River last year. What a reluctant hero he was. Or rather, was his wife, who, when interviewed by every TV and radio station in the country said, “I really don’t think Sully is a hero.” With the skills and judgment he had honed over a long career, and with the luck of the day, he saved a bunch of peoples lives as well as his own skin. Do we elevate him to hero status because we’re wrapped in our cocoons of self-concern and self-doubt and worry we would fail the test?
They stripped Michael Phelps of his Wheaties gig for smoking pot. Gee whiz. He’s twenty-three or twenty-four, doing what most other twenty-year olds do at some point in their lives and he gets taken off the back of a cereal box. But the question is, why is he, or Alex Rodriguez or Mark McGuire or O.J. Simpson, on the back of a cereal box in the first place? I assume being on the cereal box means that kids are supposed to look at the picture and want to be just like you, meaning they want to be born with the physical attributes and the psychological ambition and drive that allow these guys to make it to the top in their respective sports, where they are paid millions of dollars to single mindedly pursue success in a very narrow field of interest. What is heroic about that? Is making millions of dollars heroic or simply what our society equates with success? If it’s heroic, why don’t they put the pictures of corporate CEOs on the back of cereal boxes. Or do you have to earn millions of dollars and play a sport to be a hero. Is it the single mindedness (or simple mindedness, as the case may be)? Then why aren’t members of the U.S. House of Representatives on the back of cereal boxes. One certainly has to be single minded to disrupt your life every two years to raise the money for re-election.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not shedding any tears for Michael Phelps. He knew what was expected of him when he signed up to make millions by selling Wheaties or Nike sneakers. It’s us I feel sorry for. Apparently our lives are so bereft that twenty- something swimmers (swimmers, for Christ sake!) are the people we find most interesting and want to spend time with by reading People Magazine and joining fan clubs. I could understand wanting to spend a day with, or wanting to know better, Emily Dickinson or Che Guevara or Raymond Williams, but what on earth are you going to talk about with Michael other than the finer points of the breast stroke or how to get the most out of your turn?
While this kind of hero worship reveals the bankruptcy of our intellect, raising a good Samaritan to the status of hero reveals our emotional bankruptcy. Shouldn’t we expect any and everyone to stop to help someone on the road who is broken down or been in an accident? Why then do you see the letter to the editor telling everyone about the “hero” who stopped to help his wife change her tire, calling it “beyond the call of duty. No, it is the call of duty to help your fellow man or woman. Poor “Sully” Sullivan, the pilot who set the plane down in the Hudson River last year. What a reluctant hero he was. Or rather, was his wife, who, when interviewed by every TV and radio station in the country said, “I really don’t think Sully is a hero.” With the skills and judgment he had honed over a long career, and with the luck of the day, he saved a bunch of peoples lives as well as his own skin. Do we elevate him to hero status because we’re wrapped in our cocoons of self-concern and self-doubt and worry we would fail the test?
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Westminster Dog Show
“Best in Show,” which is one of the funniest movie spoofs ever made, really doesn’t do justice to the absurdity and pathos of the Westminster Dog Show. The contrast between beautiful dogs (we’ll talk about the distastefully groomed and ugly ones later) and their handlers is almost too much to take. Do you ever notice the women handlers’ shoes? They sparkle. Remember those flats we wore to high school in the sixties, with our matching lime green and pink sweater and skirt outfits? Well, most of them wear flats like that but they actually sparkle. Usually they’re black, but in this year’s show one handler was actually wearing silver ones. Is there a dress code for women handlers that for some reason says that to run around the floor of Madison Square Garden with a dog on a leash you have to wear the ugliest shoes ever made?
Are they also required to wear these weird suits that have little flairs at the waist over tight skirts that show off their bottoms? And a lot of the bottoms are of ample proportions in the Westminster Dog Show, as well as bosoms, which when their owners run around the floor with their dogs do a lot of jiggling. To be fair, there are plenty of heavy-bottomed men handlers at the show as well, but their bulk is more discreetly hidden in your typical street suit (although one guy this year wore a tuxedo!). I didn’t see one handler who looked like that cute little Parker Posey from “Best in Show.”
But enough about the handlers. The huskies and terriers and St. Bernards and spaniels are all beautiful, of course: pampered, indulged, and treated like children rather than dogs, but still beautiful. Even the standard poodle, before grooming, is kind of cute. But what they do to the poor poodle — this year’s Westminster finalist was black, the one in Best of Show is white — is beyond the pale. First they shave all the hair off its skinny little legs except for these puffballs at the ankles. Then they attack the poor dog’s rump with the clippers until the only hair left on its body is around the ruff. Then they shave the dog’s face, where any semblance of its embarrassment could be hidden, and tease it’s topknot into a beehive. Finally, they produce a puffball at the end of its tail, and voila, you have the ugliest, most humiliatingly desecrated creature one could ever create. I don’t have the heart to do the research to find out who started this hideous practice, but they’re all complicit, as these poor poodles seem to win more Best in Shows than just about any other breed. This year, a cute old Sussex spaniel named Tiger Woods won Best in Show. I’m not quite sure how this happened, as the woman who is the judge for the final award not only wore sparkly shoes but a sparkly dress and arrived in a limousine after being sequestered in a hotel without a TV so she couldn’t see any of the previous Best in Breed winners before she picked the Best in Show. She stood imperiously on the floor in her sparkly high heels and diamonds while little old Tiger Woods ran his little old legs like spinwheels down the length of the floor, ears flapping, to the roar of the crowd. Yeah, Tiger Woods!
Are they also required to wear these weird suits that have little flairs at the waist over tight skirts that show off their bottoms? And a lot of the bottoms are of ample proportions in the Westminster Dog Show, as well as bosoms, which when their owners run around the floor with their dogs do a lot of jiggling. To be fair, there are plenty of heavy-bottomed men handlers at the show as well, but their bulk is more discreetly hidden in your typical street suit (although one guy this year wore a tuxedo!). I didn’t see one handler who looked like that cute little Parker Posey from “Best in Show.”
But enough about the handlers. The huskies and terriers and St. Bernards and spaniels are all beautiful, of course: pampered, indulged, and treated like children rather than dogs, but still beautiful. Even the standard poodle, before grooming, is kind of cute. But what they do to the poor poodle — this year’s Westminster finalist was black, the one in Best of Show is white — is beyond the pale. First they shave all the hair off its skinny little legs except for these puffballs at the ankles. Then they attack the poor dog’s rump with the clippers until the only hair left on its body is around the ruff. Then they shave the dog’s face, where any semblance of its embarrassment could be hidden, and tease it’s topknot into a beehive. Finally, they produce a puffball at the end of its tail, and voila, you have the ugliest, most humiliatingly desecrated creature one could ever create. I don’t have the heart to do the research to find out who started this hideous practice, but they’re all complicit, as these poor poodles seem to win more Best in Shows than just about any other breed. This year, a cute old Sussex spaniel named Tiger Woods won Best in Show. I’m not quite sure how this happened, as the woman who is the judge for the final award not only wore sparkly shoes but a sparkly dress and arrived in a limousine after being sequestered in a hotel without a TV so she couldn’t see any of the previous Best in Breed winners before she picked the Best in Show. She stood imperiously on the floor in her sparkly high heels and diamonds while little old Tiger Woods ran his little old legs like spinwheels down the length of the floor, ears flapping, to the roar of the crowd. Yeah, Tiger Woods!
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Consumer Culture
Somehow the idea of intellectuals deconstructing Enlightenment values that failed to enlighten and liberate while mindlessly participating in privileged consumer culture seems absurd. And the idea becomes more than absurd when it declares that the values that determine how I try to live my life are mere constructs based on style, not substance, that there is no rationality and truth, progress is a myth, and pluralism and heterogeneity are alternatives to mainstream, normative life. Of course, all of us who came of age during the sixties revolution of consciousness were creating and living these rejections and assumptions. But the hope was not that, in the inimical words of Terry Eagleton, “A radical assault on fixed hierarchies of value [would] merge[d] effortlessly with the revolutionary leveling of all values known as the marketplace.” In the rush to smash hierarchy, it seems the postmodernists forgot that it is necessary to smash capitalism as well.
The juxtaposition of two halves of page A12 in a recent New York Times couldn’t have been a more revealing testament to just how decadent, how obscene, really, our consumer culture has become. On the left side of the page was a Bloomingdale’s advertisement with an anorexic model decked out in a “dyed sheared mink double breasted coat.” On the right side of the page was an article detailing the incursions of Sudanese Arab gunmen into Chad, where they were killing and wounding hundreds of civilians.
How do these mink coated people live with themselves? I know that money buys you protection from things you don’t want to know or think about, but they do pick up the New York Times occasionally and see page A12, don’t they? Even if wealth is equated with success, isn’t there some line over which the excesses begin to bother them, just a little? Like “dyed sheared mink double breasted coats?”
Apparently not. Maybe this blog can’t really be separated from the one on Capitalism — cultural materialism is inextricably linked to an economic analysis — but there is still some part of me that believes there must be a human, gut level connection that transcends these analyses. I know, I know, this has been wrestled with by the likes of Rousseau,Voltaire, Locke and Weil and everyone one else worth his or her salt, but there’s just something about conspicuous consumption that baffles me. One clichéd answer is that once shopping and accumulating goods becomes the focus of your life, you can never have enough because then you wouldn’t have anything to do. But why does one think that shopping and accumulating goods is fun? I hate shopping: clothes shopping, household goods shopping, even food shopping. I rarely end up with any piece of clothing I truly like, buying toilet paper is boring, and I race through the grocery store as fast as possible so I can get home as fast as possible.
Maybe that’s my problem. I don’t particularly like leaving home. Home is my life’s work, essentially. It’s where I surround myself with everything, or almost everything (I can’t make my kids stay home forever) I value. Inside my passive solar adobe house I have access to an incredible music collection (Mark is an incomparable audiophile and our record collection is comprehensive); books I’ve read once, am waiting to read, and will probably read several more times before I die; a lifetime collection of art and photos on the walls, ranging from John Wenger’s spaceship landings, Mark’s contemporary santos (Emily Dickinson, Rene Magritte), and Alan Labb’s fat-bellied men to collages of each of our children from infancy to public school; our two dogs Django and Sammy, and Mavis the cat (who also belong outside, but seem to want to stay inside as they age alongside us); and various lifelines out—telephone, satellite internet, and satellite TV. Outside I have ten acres of pasture, orchard, vegetable garden, flower gardens, casita, river frontage, and small village life, which is both colorful, comforting, and fraught with annoyances, just like any other place one decides to call home.
Why do I need to go out other than to see some of my friends occasionally, go to a movie theater to see a first-run movie instead of waiting for it to appear on DVD (although I can barely stand the commercials and booming sound in the theater), hear some live music (there’s always YouTube), or god forbid, actually have to attend a meeting to cover it for La Jicarita News, the alternative journal we publish monthly. When we first started producing the paper we were caught up in the immediacy of the battles among the Forest Service, environmentalists, and community people over access to forest resources. Those battles, at least for the communities, were largely lost, and the Forest Service barely has a budget left to mark enough trees for community firewood. The environmentalists went on to other issues like wolves and salamanders, which fortunately don’t live in northern New Mexico (it was the spotted owl that started all the ruckus in the 90s when the enviros insisted it lived in our woods). While other battles still rage, over the commodification of water and the nuclear mission at Los Alamos National Laboratory, we see that our fourteen-year newspaper run may be nearing its end. We don’t even want to attend the few meetings we’ve determined must be attended to maintain our viability.
So because I don’t go anywhere, I certainly don’t need to shop for clothes. If I happen to find a good deal on a shirt or pair of shoes at the thrift store, which I do like to cruise through for additions to my cow collection or a file cabinet for 30 years of collected papers, I make it a policy to give away a shirt or pair of shoes I already own. One of my favorite entertainments is to periodically go through my closets and cabinets and throw or give things away. With tremendous delight I watch files of battles I’ve had with the Forest Service since 1985 burn up in the wood stove. I sigh with satisfaction when I’ve depleted a closet enough to be able to push hangers from end to end to see what I actually still own.
I chose time over money. If through some fortuitous circumstance I ended up in a life with both, maybe I’d like to shop, too. But if the “me” in that life was still the “me” in this life, I would hope I knew where draw the line in the sand. And a “dyed sheared mink double breasted coat” wouldn’t even be in my cultural vocabulary.
The juxtaposition of two halves of page A12 in a recent New York Times couldn’t have been a more revealing testament to just how decadent, how obscene, really, our consumer culture has become. On the left side of the page was a Bloomingdale’s advertisement with an anorexic model decked out in a “dyed sheared mink double breasted coat.” On the right side of the page was an article detailing the incursions of Sudanese Arab gunmen into Chad, where they were killing and wounding hundreds of civilians.
How do these mink coated people live with themselves? I know that money buys you protection from things you don’t want to know or think about, but they do pick up the New York Times occasionally and see page A12, don’t they? Even if wealth is equated with success, isn’t there some line over which the excesses begin to bother them, just a little? Like “dyed sheared mink double breasted coats?”
Apparently not. Maybe this blog can’t really be separated from the one on Capitalism — cultural materialism is inextricably linked to an economic analysis — but there is still some part of me that believes there must be a human, gut level connection that transcends these analyses. I know, I know, this has been wrestled with by the likes of Rousseau,Voltaire, Locke and Weil and everyone one else worth his or her salt, but there’s just something about conspicuous consumption that baffles me. One clichéd answer is that once shopping and accumulating goods becomes the focus of your life, you can never have enough because then you wouldn’t have anything to do. But why does one think that shopping and accumulating goods is fun? I hate shopping: clothes shopping, household goods shopping, even food shopping. I rarely end up with any piece of clothing I truly like, buying toilet paper is boring, and I race through the grocery store as fast as possible so I can get home as fast as possible.
Maybe that’s my problem. I don’t particularly like leaving home. Home is my life’s work, essentially. It’s where I surround myself with everything, or almost everything (I can’t make my kids stay home forever) I value. Inside my passive solar adobe house I have access to an incredible music collection (Mark is an incomparable audiophile and our record collection is comprehensive); books I’ve read once, am waiting to read, and will probably read several more times before I die; a lifetime collection of art and photos on the walls, ranging from John Wenger’s spaceship landings, Mark’s contemporary santos (Emily Dickinson, Rene Magritte), and Alan Labb’s fat-bellied men to collages of each of our children from infancy to public school; our two dogs Django and Sammy, and Mavis the cat (who also belong outside, but seem to want to stay inside as they age alongside us); and various lifelines out—telephone, satellite internet, and satellite TV. Outside I have ten acres of pasture, orchard, vegetable garden, flower gardens, casita, river frontage, and small village life, which is both colorful, comforting, and fraught with annoyances, just like any other place one decides to call home.
Why do I need to go out other than to see some of my friends occasionally, go to a movie theater to see a first-run movie instead of waiting for it to appear on DVD (although I can barely stand the commercials and booming sound in the theater), hear some live music (there’s always YouTube), or god forbid, actually have to attend a meeting to cover it for La Jicarita News, the alternative journal we publish monthly. When we first started producing the paper we were caught up in the immediacy of the battles among the Forest Service, environmentalists, and community people over access to forest resources. Those battles, at least for the communities, were largely lost, and the Forest Service barely has a budget left to mark enough trees for community firewood. The environmentalists went on to other issues like wolves and salamanders, which fortunately don’t live in northern New Mexico (it was the spotted owl that started all the ruckus in the 90s when the enviros insisted it lived in our woods). While other battles still rage, over the commodification of water and the nuclear mission at Los Alamos National Laboratory, we see that our fourteen-year newspaper run may be nearing its end. We don’t even want to attend the few meetings we’ve determined must be attended to maintain our viability.
So because I don’t go anywhere, I certainly don’t need to shop for clothes. If I happen to find a good deal on a shirt or pair of shoes at the thrift store, which I do like to cruise through for additions to my cow collection or a file cabinet for 30 years of collected papers, I make it a policy to give away a shirt or pair of shoes I already own. One of my favorite entertainments is to periodically go through my closets and cabinets and throw or give things away. With tremendous delight I watch files of battles I’ve had with the Forest Service since 1985 burn up in the wood stove. I sigh with satisfaction when I’ve depleted a closet enough to be able to push hangers from end to end to see what I actually still own.
I chose time over money. If through some fortuitous circumstance I ended up in a life with both, maybe I’d like to shop, too. But if the “me” in that life was still the “me” in this life, I would hope I knew where draw the line in the sand. And a “dyed sheared mink double breasted coat” wouldn’t even be in my cultural vocabulary.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Chatter
I’m sitting on the Chinatown bus in Philadelphia waiting to go to Washington D.C. and the man in the seat behind me is on his cell phone talking to his wife/girlfriend/ partner who just dropped him off and is herself driving home in their car. I know all this— which I don’t want to know— because I can hear every word he says through the crack in the seats. As soon as the bus leaves Chinatown and heads south along the river, he’s on the phone again, this time to someone he’s meeting in D.C. They proceed to have a 30-minute conversation about how the third person they’re meeting in D.C. screwed up by not getting in touch with them sooner so they could coordinate everyone’s arrival better: “I’m counting on the bus to not take more than two and a half hours or I’m going to be late for the meeting. So and so should have made her reservations weeks ago so we could have arranged to come in on our flights close to the same time. I know, I know, it’s too late to do anything about it now but . . . “ and on and on and on.
About half way to Baltimore (the guy is still on the phone) the bus pulls into a rest stop and we sit there for awhile until some of the passengers start wondering aloud if this is a scheduled stop or what’s going on. An Asian gentleman then approaches the rear of the bus where we’re sitting and explains that he’s having to translate for the two people who were on the bus from New York but slept through the stop in Philadelphia where they were supposed to get off. When they woke up and realized where they were they approached the bus driver and asked him to take them back to Philadelphia. The translator says, “We’re trying to decide whether to turn around and take them back to Philadelphia or continue on to Baltimore where they can catch a later bus back.”
Up jumps the cell phone guy who starts in, “There is no way this bus is going to go back to Philadelphia. I’m already late as it is. These people need to take responsibility for themselves.” That’s right, a chorus of voices ring out. We’ve paid good money (the Chinatown bus costs $15, as opposed to Amtrak’s $60 to $80) to get us on time to D.C. and we can’t go back because two passengers missed their stop! The woman in the seat in front of me wakes up and asks what’s going on. I explain the situation and she says, “I heard them come through the bus when we stopped and yell out ‘Philadelphia, Philadelphia,’ at least a couple of times.” I answered her, “I wish I could sleep that soundly.”
Several days later I’m sitting in the Philadelphia airport waiting for a flight that’s two hours late, knowing I’m probably going to miss my connection home. Sitting next to me is a young woman waiting for the same flight who decides to pass the time talking to her sister, who is also sitting in an airport waiting for a flight. They are both going home for Thanksgiving. No one wants to give up their seat in the waiting room because the room is packed and you’ll end up on the floor if you do. So I listen to her tell her sister every excruciating detail of her trip to the airport, what’s going on in the airport, what she’s got in her suitcase (five pairs of shoes for her four day stay), how her sister can possibly survive four days with only a backpack for a suitcase, etc., etc.
I actually need to talk on a phone because I have to call Mark and tell him to cancel my surgery for the next day (how crazy was I to schedule hand surgery on the day before Thanksgiving and then actually try to get home on time?) and give me the phone number of our friends in Chicago who I’m probably going to have to stay with when I miss my connecting flight home. I pile all my possessions on my chair while I go find a pay phone, for which my calling card company charges me ten times what they charge from a regular phone, and hope all my stuff is still on my chair when I return.
I do end up staying the night in Chicago with our friends, who can’t believe I don’t have a cell phone so I can call them when I get off the train at the stop near their house, The next morning I’m back again at O’Hare Airport waiting to catch my plane to Albuquerque. A young man in his late twenties or early thirties is pacing the floor with his cell phone, speaking loudly in what I think is an Australian accent, talking to his wife/girlfriend/partner about the fact that he is about to get on the plane and that the plan for New Year’s Eve at the hot springs outside of Denver is just “awesome” and that it’s going to be so powerful, the best celebration yet. Then he tells her goodbye, and as we’re walking down the ramp onto the plane (he’s right behind me) he’s on the phone with someone else explaining that the celebration at the hot springs is going to be truly “awesome” because 30 of his closest friends have already said they’re coming and can you believe how fabulous it’s going to be, better than last year, truly outstanding.
Of course, there he is when we get on the plane, sitting right in front of me and he tells two more people about the hot springs gig before they make everyone turn off their cell phones. But do I finally get a reprieve from the constant chatter than has taken over every public place and ruined it with private bullshit? Not on your life. It turns out that the guy sitting next to him is a student at a seminary and that the hot springs gig that the Australian (turns out he’s from New Zealand) has been raving about is some spiritual gathering that he and his “closest 30 friends” have been going to for the last few years. So naturally, their conversation turns to religion and they are off to the races. For the next hour they engage in a spirited dialogue regarding the church doctrine espoused by the seminary student and the freewheeling Christianity celebrated by the New Zealander. There’s a lot of scripture quoting, scripture interpretation, discussion of the merits of various popes, discussion of dogma regarding who’s going to heaven and hell, ad nauseum. While the New Zealander challenges the seminary student on a lot of his fundamentalist rap defending the church, it’s within the context of the sanctity of Christianity, and I’m hoping (I don’t pray) there’s not a Muslim or a Jew across the isle.
Finally, after a free bloody Mary from the airline attendant, who I’ve consulted about airplane etiquette, I’ve had enough. When the seminary student starts in about homosexuality being an abomination I stand up and say, “That’s it. I’ve listened to this crap for almost an hour but I’m not going to sit here and listen to offensive talk about homosexuality. You’ve offended any number of people on this plane, particularly me, and it’s got to stop.”
And it did. They listened to their iPods for the rest of the flight, and the guy sitting next to me bought me another bloody Mary.
Solution: Never leave home.
About half way to Baltimore (the guy is still on the phone) the bus pulls into a rest stop and we sit there for awhile until some of the passengers start wondering aloud if this is a scheduled stop or what’s going on. An Asian gentleman then approaches the rear of the bus where we’re sitting and explains that he’s having to translate for the two people who were on the bus from New York but slept through the stop in Philadelphia where they were supposed to get off. When they woke up and realized where they were they approached the bus driver and asked him to take them back to Philadelphia. The translator says, “We’re trying to decide whether to turn around and take them back to Philadelphia or continue on to Baltimore where they can catch a later bus back.”
Up jumps the cell phone guy who starts in, “There is no way this bus is going to go back to Philadelphia. I’m already late as it is. These people need to take responsibility for themselves.” That’s right, a chorus of voices ring out. We’ve paid good money (the Chinatown bus costs $15, as opposed to Amtrak’s $60 to $80) to get us on time to D.C. and we can’t go back because two passengers missed their stop! The woman in the seat in front of me wakes up and asks what’s going on. I explain the situation and she says, “I heard them come through the bus when we stopped and yell out ‘Philadelphia, Philadelphia,’ at least a couple of times.” I answered her, “I wish I could sleep that soundly.”
Several days later I’m sitting in the Philadelphia airport waiting for a flight that’s two hours late, knowing I’m probably going to miss my connection home. Sitting next to me is a young woman waiting for the same flight who decides to pass the time talking to her sister, who is also sitting in an airport waiting for a flight. They are both going home for Thanksgiving. No one wants to give up their seat in the waiting room because the room is packed and you’ll end up on the floor if you do. So I listen to her tell her sister every excruciating detail of her trip to the airport, what’s going on in the airport, what she’s got in her suitcase (five pairs of shoes for her four day stay), how her sister can possibly survive four days with only a backpack for a suitcase, etc., etc.
I actually need to talk on a phone because I have to call Mark and tell him to cancel my surgery for the next day (how crazy was I to schedule hand surgery on the day before Thanksgiving and then actually try to get home on time?) and give me the phone number of our friends in Chicago who I’m probably going to have to stay with when I miss my connecting flight home. I pile all my possessions on my chair while I go find a pay phone, for which my calling card company charges me ten times what they charge from a regular phone, and hope all my stuff is still on my chair when I return.
I do end up staying the night in Chicago with our friends, who can’t believe I don’t have a cell phone so I can call them when I get off the train at the stop near their house, The next morning I’m back again at O’Hare Airport waiting to catch my plane to Albuquerque. A young man in his late twenties or early thirties is pacing the floor with his cell phone, speaking loudly in what I think is an Australian accent, talking to his wife/girlfriend/partner about the fact that he is about to get on the plane and that the plan for New Year’s Eve at the hot springs outside of Denver is just “awesome” and that it’s going to be so powerful, the best celebration yet. Then he tells her goodbye, and as we’re walking down the ramp onto the plane (he’s right behind me) he’s on the phone with someone else explaining that the celebration at the hot springs is going to be truly “awesome” because 30 of his closest friends have already said they’re coming and can you believe how fabulous it’s going to be, better than last year, truly outstanding.
Of course, there he is when we get on the plane, sitting right in front of me and he tells two more people about the hot springs gig before they make everyone turn off their cell phones. But do I finally get a reprieve from the constant chatter than has taken over every public place and ruined it with private bullshit? Not on your life. It turns out that the guy sitting next to him is a student at a seminary and that the hot springs gig that the Australian (turns out he’s from New Zealand) has been raving about is some spiritual gathering that he and his “closest 30 friends” have been going to for the last few years. So naturally, their conversation turns to religion and they are off to the races. For the next hour they engage in a spirited dialogue regarding the church doctrine espoused by the seminary student and the freewheeling Christianity celebrated by the New Zealander. There’s a lot of scripture quoting, scripture interpretation, discussion of the merits of various popes, discussion of dogma regarding who’s going to heaven and hell, ad nauseum. While the New Zealander challenges the seminary student on a lot of his fundamentalist rap defending the church, it’s within the context of the sanctity of Christianity, and I’m hoping (I don’t pray) there’s not a Muslim or a Jew across the isle.
Finally, after a free bloody Mary from the airline attendant, who I’ve consulted about airplane etiquette, I’ve had enough. When the seminary student starts in about homosexuality being an abomination I stand up and say, “That’s it. I’ve listened to this crap for almost an hour but I’m not going to sit here and listen to offensive talk about homosexuality. You’ve offended any number of people on this plane, particularly me, and it’s got to stop.”
And it did. They listened to their iPods for the rest of the flight, and the guy sitting next to me bought me another bloody Mary.
Solution: Never leave home.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Electoral Politics
Only two days after the presidential election of 2008 Barack Obama hired as his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, whose father, an Israeli physician, was quoted as saying now that his son is in the White House Israel will certainly have the ear of Obama. Why shouldn’t it? After all, his son is no Arab, scrubbing the floor.
It just descended from there. Obama picked an economic team comprised of the current masterminds of unfettered capitalism who are responsible for our economic meltdown (if Milton Friedman were still alive Obama probably would have assigned him some job). He picked a secretary of agriculture who favors the development of genetically modified organisms, a secretary of defense who’s going to take more troops into Afghanistan, and Hilary Clinton as secretary of state, who is in favor of anything that keeps the Clinton dynasty alive.
Why do progressives fall for these figures like Obama who promise “change” and redemption. I guess because there’s not much of anything else to believe in. The sixties revolution of consciousness, that promised, and to a certain degree delivered, changes in how we view and relate to issues of gender, race, and postcolonial freedoms, had no lasting political effect, really. The same political elites are the ones getting elected to state and national office, with an occasional moderate swing from right to left. They’re still threatening to overturn Roe versus Wade. They’re still sending young men and women (mostly minorities) all over the world to kill and be killed. They’re still complicit in the capitalist system that continues to increase the disparity between rich and poor. And they’re still the only vote in the United Nations defending Israel’s incursions into the West Bank or the blockade of Gaza.
Our children see how our efforts failed to effect any kind of real political change, so what are they supposed to do? There are still young activists out there, like my nephew, who belong to radical anti-war or anti-capitalist organizations that protest and demonstrate and scream bloody murder. I don’t know how much community organizing they’re doing, but after the failure of my feeble efforts in that capacity, I’m not surprised they don’t bother. We marched by the millions against the war in Vietnam. How much did that actually undermine the U.S. role and bring about our withdrawal? I don’t really know. People all over the world marched by the millions against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and look where that got us.
So what motivated them to get out and vote in the 2008 election? Bush’s abysmal record on everything, of course, but what made them think that electing Barack Obama was going to really change anything. By the time you’re in a senate race, yet alone a presidential race, you’re already bought and sold. There’s no way around it. To be one of the elite you have to be able to raise the capital to compete in enormously expensive campaigns that get your face on the TV screen and your voice on the airwaves. You have to make promises to interest groups and you have to pay them back so they don’t abandon you in the next race. Here’s how J. M. Coetzee puts it in Diary of a Bad Year: “We do not choose our rulers by the toss of a coin — tossing coins is associated with the low-status activity of gambling — but who would dare to claim that the world would be in a worse state than it is if rulers had from the beginning of time been chosen by the method of a coin?”
In a recent issue of The New Yorker there was an article on Arthur Fisher Bentley, who wrote a book called The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures back in 1908 that claims all politics and governments are the result of the activities of interest groups (pluralism) that are engaged in a constant struggle for advantage. His argument gained traction after World War II because of people’s fears about the “big ideas of government,” i.e., Hitler and Stalin. Bentley himself was a progressive who advocated using government to curb the power of big business, but maybe he was right: reforming government, as it’s actually constituted, will never be possible.
I sometimes fantasize about what would happen if someone who got elected actually decided they would never run for office again and see what they could actually accomplish without fulfilling promises to anyone except their own conscience. This may be the collective fantasy that got Obama elected. So if Nobel Laureate in economics Paul Krugman can write an open letter to Obama detailing what he thinks he should do about the failing economic situation, here’s my open letter about what he should do about everything else. (Unless Obama is in favor of the violent overthrow of the government, which I doubt, he’s not going to change our economic system from capitalism to socialism, but some of the points I make in my letter may make us a bit more like Sweden or even Germany, economically speaking.)
Dear President Obama,
The first thing you have to do is bring all American troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Emergency negotiating sessions, involving every country with any kind of involvement with either county must begin immediately so as to deter reprisals by the warring religious factions in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The second thing you have to do is shut down Guantanamo and provide civilian trials for all those remaining who a case can actually be made against (the Center for Constitutional Rights has to be consulted, along with every other NGO or human rights lawyer who is working on individual cases). Then you have to replace Robert Gates with a Defense Secretary who will look into shutting down other military bases around the world based on the reduction of our military industrial complex, and who will pursue nuclear disarmament. You will get rid of the Reliable Replacement Warhead Program and begin to reduce the stockpile of nuclear weapons at all our nuclear facilities in order to comply with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. You will order a mission change at these labs to develop a renewable energy policy that will develop cars that run on alternative fuels, that develop local renewable energy grids that rely on solar, geothermal, or biomass, and you will redirect highway funds to subsidize mass transportation, in whatever forms are best suited for city, town, or rural area. You will rewrite an economic stimulus package that includes universal health care, whether it’s based on expanding what we currently have, such as using Medicare to cover all the uninsured and letting those with private health insurance keep theirs (which is probably the only way you’ll get it passed) or scrapping the entire system and doing away with private insurers altogether. There’s a ton of other stuff I could tell you to do, but I think I’ll finish by saying you can get rid of the Forest Service and manage our vast western public lands with what Daniel Kemmis describes in his book, This Sovereign Land, watershed-based local coalitions of citizen democracies.
So best of luck, and when you’re done, in 2012, if you last even that long, you can go back to Chicago and Michelle can go back to being a college administrator and you can write some more memoirs. Sounds like the good life to me.
It just descended from there. Obama picked an economic team comprised of the current masterminds of unfettered capitalism who are responsible for our economic meltdown (if Milton Friedman were still alive Obama probably would have assigned him some job). He picked a secretary of agriculture who favors the development of genetically modified organisms, a secretary of defense who’s going to take more troops into Afghanistan, and Hilary Clinton as secretary of state, who is in favor of anything that keeps the Clinton dynasty alive.
Why do progressives fall for these figures like Obama who promise “change” and redemption. I guess because there’s not much of anything else to believe in. The sixties revolution of consciousness, that promised, and to a certain degree delivered, changes in how we view and relate to issues of gender, race, and postcolonial freedoms, had no lasting political effect, really. The same political elites are the ones getting elected to state and national office, with an occasional moderate swing from right to left. They’re still threatening to overturn Roe versus Wade. They’re still sending young men and women (mostly minorities) all over the world to kill and be killed. They’re still complicit in the capitalist system that continues to increase the disparity between rich and poor. And they’re still the only vote in the United Nations defending Israel’s incursions into the West Bank or the blockade of Gaza.
Our children see how our efforts failed to effect any kind of real political change, so what are they supposed to do? There are still young activists out there, like my nephew, who belong to radical anti-war or anti-capitalist organizations that protest and demonstrate and scream bloody murder. I don’t know how much community organizing they’re doing, but after the failure of my feeble efforts in that capacity, I’m not surprised they don’t bother. We marched by the millions against the war in Vietnam. How much did that actually undermine the U.S. role and bring about our withdrawal? I don’t really know. People all over the world marched by the millions against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and look where that got us.
So what motivated them to get out and vote in the 2008 election? Bush’s abysmal record on everything, of course, but what made them think that electing Barack Obama was going to really change anything. By the time you’re in a senate race, yet alone a presidential race, you’re already bought and sold. There’s no way around it. To be one of the elite you have to be able to raise the capital to compete in enormously expensive campaigns that get your face on the TV screen and your voice on the airwaves. You have to make promises to interest groups and you have to pay them back so they don’t abandon you in the next race. Here’s how J. M. Coetzee puts it in Diary of a Bad Year: “We do not choose our rulers by the toss of a coin — tossing coins is associated with the low-status activity of gambling — but who would dare to claim that the world would be in a worse state than it is if rulers had from the beginning of time been chosen by the method of a coin?”
In a recent issue of The New Yorker there was an article on Arthur Fisher Bentley, who wrote a book called The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures back in 1908 that claims all politics and governments are the result of the activities of interest groups (pluralism) that are engaged in a constant struggle for advantage. His argument gained traction after World War II because of people’s fears about the “big ideas of government,” i.e., Hitler and Stalin. Bentley himself was a progressive who advocated using government to curb the power of big business, but maybe he was right: reforming government, as it’s actually constituted, will never be possible.
I sometimes fantasize about what would happen if someone who got elected actually decided they would never run for office again and see what they could actually accomplish without fulfilling promises to anyone except their own conscience. This may be the collective fantasy that got Obama elected. So if Nobel Laureate in economics Paul Krugman can write an open letter to Obama detailing what he thinks he should do about the failing economic situation, here’s my open letter about what he should do about everything else. (Unless Obama is in favor of the violent overthrow of the government, which I doubt, he’s not going to change our economic system from capitalism to socialism, but some of the points I make in my letter may make us a bit more like Sweden or even Germany, economically speaking.)
Dear President Obama,
The first thing you have to do is bring all American troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Emergency negotiating sessions, involving every country with any kind of involvement with either county must begin immediately so as to deter reprisals by the warring religious factions in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The second thing you have to do is shut down Guantanamo and provide civilian trials for all those remaining who a case can actually be made against (the Center for Constitutional Rights has to be consulted, along with every other NGO or human rights lawyer who is working on individual cases). Then you have to replace Robert Gates with a Defense Secretary who will look into shutting down other military bases around the world based on the reduction of our military industrial complex, and who will pursue nuclear disarmament. You will get rid of the Reliable Replacement Warhead Program and begin to reduce the stockpile of nuclear weapons at all our nuclear facilities in order to comply with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. You will order a mission change at these labs to develop a renewable energy policy that will develop cars that run on alternative fuels, that develop local renewable energy grids that rely on solar, geothermal, or biomass, and you will redirect highway funds to subsidize mass transportation, in whatever forms are best suited for city, town, or rural area. You will rewrite an economic stimulus package that includes universal health care, whether it’s based on expanding what we currently have, such as using Medicare to cover all the uninsured and letting those with private health insurance keep theirs (which is probably the only way you’ll get it passed) or scrapping the entire system and doing away with private insurers altogether. There’s a ton of other stuff I could tell you to do, but I think I’ll finish by saying you can get rid of the Forest Service and manage our vast western public lands with what Daniel Kemmis describes in his book, This Sovereign Land, watershed-based local coalitions of citizen democracies.
So best of luck, and when you’re done, in 2012, if you last even that long, you can go back to Chicago and Michelle can go back to being a college administrator and you can write some more memoirs. Sounds like the good life to me.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Colorado Springs
I grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a town I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. Colorado Springs is the home of NORAD (North American Air Defense Command), which is located under a mountain outside of town where at the touch of a finger the missiles will fly towards whoever our current enemy is. It is also home to Peterson Field, an Air Force Base, and the Air Force Academy, where male cadets harass and rape the female cadets with impunity. As if that weren’t enough, in the early 1990s the town also became the headquarters of Focus on the Family, the reactionary Christian organization that lobbies against equal rights for everyone except themselves. James Dobson, the founder (who George Lakoff uses as his example of the “strict father figure of the family” that the Republican right has been so successful in promoting) is carried on thousands of radio stations and has published millions of books. Not surprisingly, Ted Haggard, another Colorado Springs-based evangelical minister, who was one of the loudest denigrators of equal rights for homosexuals, was not too long ago outed by a body builder in Denver who said the minister had paid him for sex.
My mother, who lived in Colorado Springs until her death in 1997, was a member of the Unitarian Church and used to threaten to shoot Will Perkins, a big-name car dealer who had been one of the organizers of the initiative to get an anti-gay amendment on the state ballot. She figured since she was already in her eighties, if they arrested her it was unlikely they’d execute her, and she was prepared to die in jail. She had joined PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Gays and Lesbians) after my younger sister revealed she was a lesbian, but being a Unitarian was probably enough impetus on its own. She was a Jew, actually, but came from an assimilated family, and my father, raised a Methodist, called himself an agnostic. So they joined the Unitarian Church when we were kids, and both my sisters and I became members of the youth group, LRY (Liberal Religious Youth) and learned all about sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll there. When some members of the Jewish Conservative temple in town decided to break away and form a Reform congregation, their kids came to the Unitarian Church for Sunday school until their building was finished. So there is that element in Colorado Springs as well, but the casual observer would never be aware of it.
Most people go there as tourists, to enjoy its spectacular setting at the foot of Pikes Peak, and visit all the sites: the cog railroad to the top of the Peak, Cave of the Winds, Seven Falls, Manitou Springs, etc. When I was in high school I was a lifeguard at one of the motels in Manitou, where tourists from Kansas and Texas all stayed. The motel was owned by a husband and wife, who were probably in their late fifties at the time, and unlike other motel owners in Manitou or anywhere else, considered it their responsibility to guard their guests while swimming. But you know how it is at motels. Families go off to sightsee during the day and come in for a dip in the late afternoon, and that’s about it. So I spent a lot of time sitting around an empty pool playing gin rummy with the owners’ son, who was about fourteen, and who cultivated a weirdness that manifest itself in black clothing and an encyclopedic knowledge of cult horror movies. I was also his designated partner for meals, at various restaurants around the neighborhood, as his parents never seemed to leave the motel. But I was compensated for being saddled with the weird kid by being allowed to have my friends come swim in the pool, getting all my girlfriends hired as maids, and essentially becoming a member of the family.
But Colorado Springs isn’t what it used to be, and the motel, actually made of Spanish-style adobe, with individual rooms and suites centered around a central plaza-like area where the original owner, the kid’s grandmother, had apparently hosted great barbecues and parties for guests who came every year to vacation at her establishment at the foot of Pikes Peak, was losing business to the more modern motels and hotels that were being built by the developers taking advantage of the booming economy. The coup de grace, however, was when the wife died of cancer and the husband didn’t have the heart to keep going. He sold the motel to investors from Texas, and the first thing they did was tell me they wouldn’t be keeping a lifeguard. They offered me a job as a maid instead. But a week into my new job I put a bedspread on sideways and they fired me.
I left Colorado Springs right after high school, although when I dropped out of college I ended up back home for a stint until I left for good for New Mexico. But I often go back to visit, of course. My mom was there, my older sister eventually came back, and my younger sister ended up living in Denver. Also, my best friend from high school, who I got hired as a maid at the motel, also came back and lived there for a long time. There are some good thrift stores, and the downtown, although rather deserted these days, is still beautiful, with its wide, tree-lined streets that run north into the neighborhood of old mansions that were once owned by those who made it rich on the gold and silver mines. Now the town sprawls to the east, subdivision after subdivision, dividing the land into tracts of ranch style or split-level houses where I guess all the evangelicals live. Or maybe I’m kidding myself. Maybe they now live in the mansions with their new-found wealth along with their new-found religion.
But I still hate the town. On one visit Mark and I went back to my high school, Roy J. Wasson, where mediocrity ruled and the sensitive suffered. I had him take a picture of me standing on a wall in front of the school name giving it the finger. Silly, but somewhat cathartic.
Solution: You can’t go home again.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Enlightenment/Progress
Sometimes, when I’m stuck in city traffic, wandering the grocery store isle dedicated to high fructose corn syrup products, or fruitlessly trying to wend my way through recorded messages on the telephone, I imagine that Henry David Thoreau, Jean Jacque Rousseau, or Simone Weil were risen from the dead and there beside me to commiserate. The shock would probably kill them again, however. Despite all their prescient warnings that have been passed down in inspired writings over the decades and centuries, even they would not believe what we have wrought.
In his famous Discourse, The Origin of Inequality, Rousseau asks what it is that created the difference between “men and brutes,” and came to the conclusion that it is the “faculty of self-improvement,” why man alone is liable to grow into a dotard and makes him “at length a tyrant both over himself and over nature.” Not a great endorsement of progress, reflection, or our entire historical record. He and Voltaire are credited with bringing Enlightenment to an 18th century European world defined by tyranny, but Voltaire didn’t believe, any more than Rousseau did, that there was much hope for the dotard: “Enlightened times will only enlighten a small number of honest men; the common people will always be fanatical.”
Apparently the American founding fathers didn’t think much better of the common people than Voltaire when they created our representative republic and established the electoral college so the common people’s vote could be overruled by the aristocratic vote. They may have thought they were throwing off their European shackles during the American Revolution, but they were quick to identify themselves as the new elites of the vast American continent, ready to conquer the “savages” (Native Americans) and the wilderness, not to mention expanding their agricultural economy on the backs of their slaves.
While the abolitionists and Transcendentalists of the 19th century sought to enlighten American society to the evils of slavery and European religion and culture, Thoreau also talks about humanity distinguishing itself from the “brute beasts” through an unsuccessful striving for “purity.” I can just imagine him, more than Rousseau or Voltaire, who both led what he would probably have called “impure” lives, plunked down in the middle of a shopping mall in Los Angeles, crying out, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”
All my life choices have been based on finding that simplicity—avoiding consumer culture by living in the closest thing to its last vestige in northern New Mexico. Then I get here and I end up fighting the environmental “purists” who tell me that the indigenous folks who live up here aren’t pure anymore because they want to continue to harvest trees for firewood and graze their cattle on public lands that used to belong to them. The only thing pure is their environmentalism sin gente, which would like to consign everyone to town and consumer culture so we don’t pollute the wilderness. Civilization becomes the scourge of nature.
Raymond Williams said, in his essay Problems in Materialism and Culture, “It will be ironic if one of the last forms of the separation between abstracted man and abstracted nature is an intellectual separation between economics and ecology. It will be a sign that we are beginning to think in some necessary ways when we can conceive these becoming, as they ought to become, a single discipline.”
Thoreau, these environmentalists, and even the postmodernists fall into the trap of assigning progress an a-political, historically sweeping definition that negates the need to continually pursue a just and equitable world with small, but insistent victories. As I said in my introduction, there are incremental steps, measured within the circumscribed time and place we find ourselves, that provide enough reward and compensation to help define a life worth living. You don’t have to label it progress, but you do have to constantly evaluate it as a kind of enlightenment that allows an increasing number of us to flourish.
In his famous Discourse, The Origin of Inequality, Rousseau asks what it is that created the difference between “men and brutes,” and came to the conclusion that it is the “faculty of self-improvement,” why man alone is liable to grow into a dotard and makes him “at length a tyrant both over himself and over nature.” Not a great endorsement of progress, reflection, or our entire historical record. He and Voltaire are credited with bringing Enlightenment to an 18th century European world defined by tyranny, but Voltaire didn’t believe, any more than Rousseau did, that there was much hope for the dotard: “Enlightened times will only enlighten a small number of honest men; the common people will always be fanatical.”
Apparently the American founding fathers didn’t think much better of the common people than Voltaire when they created our representative republic and established the electoral college so the common people’s vote could be overruled by the aristocratic vote. They may have thought they were throwing off their European shackles during the American Revolution, but they were quick to identify themselves as the new elites of the vast American continent, ready to conquer the “savages” (Native Americans) and the wilderness, not to mention expanding their agricultural economy on the backs of their slaves.
While the abolitionists and Transcendentalists of the 19th century sought to enlighten American society to the evils of slavery and European religion and culture, Thoreau also talks about humanity distinguishing itself from the “brute beasts” through an unsuccessful striving for “purity.” I can just imagine him, more than Rousseau or Voltaire, who both led what he would probably have called “impure” lives, plunked down in the middle of a shopping mall in Los Angeles, crying out, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”
All my life choices have been based on finding that simplicity—avoiding consumer culture by living in the closest thing to its last vestige in northern New Mexico. Then I get here and I end up fighting the environmental “purists” who tell me that the indigenous folks who live up here aren’t pure anymore because they want to continue to harvest trees for firewood and graze their cattle on public lands that used to belong to them. The only thing pure is their environmentalism sin gente, which would like to consign everyone to town and consumer culture so we don’t pollute the wilderness. Civilization becomes the scourge of nature.
Raymond Williams said, in his essay Problems in Materialism and Culture, “It will be ironic if one of the last forms of the separation between abstracted man and abstracted nature is an intellectual separation between economics and ecology. It will be a sign that we are beginning to think in some necessary ways when we can conceive these becoming, as they ought to become, a single discipline.”
Thoreau, these environmentalists, and even the postmodernists fall into the trap of assigning progress an a-political, historically sweeping definition that negates the need to continually pursue a just and equitable world with small, but insistent victories. As I said in my introduction, there are incremental steps, measured within the circumscribed time and place we find ourselves, that provide enough reward and compensation to help define a life worth living. You don’t have to label it progress, but you do have to constantly evaluate it as a kind of enlightenment that allows an increasing number of us to flourish.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Success
I’m standing at the kitchen sink shelling shrimp for dinner and I’m thanking my lucky stars I’m not my famous (within certain political and literary circles) friend who is “terrified” (I know this because I’ve just got off the phone with her) at the thought of her reading later tonight in Santa Fe, where she will not only read to an eclectic group of unknowns but to her new boyfriend as well, who is also famous and flying in from out of town for the occasion.
I’m terrified only when I anticipate the nasty letters I might receive for the essay or newspaper article I occasionally write for a weekly Santa Fe paper that explore the political battles I deal with as a community activist. When the paper devoted an issue to the question of race and culture in northern New Mexico, where I live and work, I wrote about how the environmental movement fails to address issues of social justice. While I was careful not to call any particular enviros racist, I did identify the policies they effect as such. Surprisingly, I didn’t get any nasty letters for that article, but the one I called “A Question of Semantics”, which poked fun at these same environmentalists who co-opt language in an attempt to validate their positions (I questioned their use of the word “radical” to describe what I see as their reactionary politic) raised a lot of hackles.
However, this is merely a by-product of my by-default career, if one can call it that. With my “unmarried partner” (the box I checked for the 2000 Census) I write a community newspaper and organize around issues of environmental and social justice. If someone in high school had told me this would be a career, I would have laughed in her face. I was destined for academia, perhaps the law, at least “great things.” That I never got there is perhaps due to the fact that my concept of “there” was destroyed by the process of “getting”, which is essentially the substance of mine—or anyone’s—life. The “getting” took place in the late 60s and early 70s, when I and my fellow travelers were engaged in smashing the “there”—Vietnam, the military industrial complex, the nuclear family, etc.—as fervently as the times demanded.
But that’s only part of the story. My famous friend, who is “terrified” in Santa Fe, came of age alongside me, but obviously decided at some point in her life that she would dedicate it to writing books. And part of the dedication would mean being part of a national (i.e. “famous”) community that was writing and speaking to the same issues as she. I don’t know if people who so dedicate themselves to certain causes consciously say, to be successful in my endeavor I must be willing to promote myself, so that my voice becomes part of the larger voice that is listened to, that makes a difference.
Whether or not this is a conscious decision, the effect remains the same, be it Scott Nearing or Andy Warhol. I just finished reading a memoir by Helen Nearing of her life with Scott, who in an interesting twist of fate was first famous as an academic and political activist until he was banished from academia and became even more famous as a homesteader who repudiated academia and the public life (although he remained steadfast in his political life). Although a certain air of self-righteousness permeates this book and several of those they wrote together, it seems that Nearing genuinely believed that in order to share his private and political vision of what constitutes a good and moral life (he never would have embraced poststructuralism) he needed to lecture, write books, travel, spread the gospel, so to speak.
Warhol, on the other hand, dedicated his life to being as notorious as possible for the sake of that notoriety. Whether this was motivated by the Nietzschean “will to give expression to one’s personality” or simply the drive for “utter moral worthlessness”, like Colette’s first husband, Willy (from Secrets of the Flesh, Judith Thurman’s biography of Colette), doesn’t really matter. He procured his fame, just as Nearing and my friend did, and they all had or have to deal with what fame brings in our society: terror, unwelcome distractions, or attempted assassination (at least for Warhol).
It’s easier to stay home, both physically and mentally. In one of my feeble attempts to actually get a book published with the local university press, I remember telling the editor that I lacked the chutzpah it took to promote myself, and that if her press didn’t publish me this would be the beginning and end of that particular career (and it was, if you don’t count the children’s book I wrote that was published by a Santa Fe house that took 10 years to sell 2,000 copies). I’ve written some national magazine articles over the years that chronicled life in northern New Mexico, which people in mainstream America find fascinating, but the few attempts I’ve made to sell articles of import, where my voice could perhaps make a difference on critical issues of environmental justice, they were dismissed as too “local” or too hard to understand by an “eastern, urban readership.” Thus I learned that one has to pay dues, like my terrified friend, before one’s voice is heard.
I imagine that there are millions of us out here, voices that are knowledgeable, analytic, eloquent, profound (I’m not necessarily claiming all these qualities). Just like all the painters who may have been a lost link between cubism and abstract expressionism or abstract expressionism and Andy Warhol. Or composers, like the eccentric woman who hitchhikes around Taos in her mumu and straw hat and is occasionally acknowledged for her operas that are locally performed. I once wrote a short story (which sits in my bottom drawer) about her called the “Woman as Artist” (I turned her into a painter). In my story she sits on an old car seat on her back porch with her legs stretched out onto an adjacent chair to rest her varicose veins: “I’ll never be a huge success, honey,” she sighs to the narrator. “It’s not in the cards. Or should I say, it’s not in my blood. I can’t sell myself to the highest bidder to get there, like the cold-blooded ones do. Do you have any idea how many talented people there are out there in the world—painters, musicians, composers, writers, philosophers—living in places just as obscure as this crumbling adobe in El Rancho, who will never, ever see even the modest success that I’ve had in this fucked up society that defines your worth by how much you sell yourself for? Then once you’re sold they have to keep investing in you because so much money is at stake. Doesn’t matter if you’re old, stale, hackneyed and worthless—if some investment banker on the upper West side bought you for thousands of dollars to hang on his wall, by God you better double or triple by the time he’s ready to sell you to an investment banker on the upper East side to hang on his wall. ‘All the world’s a stage and we’re only the players.’”
Maybe some of this is sour grapes. I don’t have the talent that I give my Taos character, and I often lack her equanimity. But I do share her devotion to her old car seat on her back porch where she can see the Sangre de Cristo Mountains across the fields of irrigated pasture that have defined this view for 300 years. We also share a love for our neighbors, whose ancestors have lived here for 300 years. And I appreciate their regard for the work I do to help maintain these pastures and lives. That it is a way of life, not a career, is what I mean by “de-fault.” My friend who is terrified and famous also experiences this way of life, but it is within a different context, with an edge that, at least for me, spoils the quietness, the safety, the sameness. I don’t buy the adage that only things that terrify you are worth doing.
One day my almost grown son calls to ask me what I’m doing. When I tell him I’m working on my book about environmental justice, he says, mom, why don’t you publish your stuff. Ah, hito, if you only knew. But I tell him that I’m going to get down to work and finish up my memoirs of life as a norteño activist, my second novel, and edit my book of short stories so he and his brother can read it all when I’m dead. Mom,
I’m going to publish all if them, he says. Good luck, I tell him, you have my blessing. I won’t be around to be terrified.
I’m terrified only when I anticipate the nasty letters I might receive for the essay or newspaper article I occasionally write for a weekly Santa Fe paper that explore the political battles I deal with as a community activist. When the paper devoted an issue to the question of race and culture in northern New Mexico, where I live and work, I wrote about how the environmental movement fails to address issues of social justice. While I was careful not to call any particular enviros racist, I did identify the policies they effect as such. Surprisingly, I didn’t get any nasty letters for that article, but the one I called “A Question of Semantics”, which poked fun at these same environmentalists who co-opt language in an attempt to validate their positions (I questioned their use of the word “radical” to describe what I see as their reactionary politic) raised a lot of hackles.
However, this is merely a by-product of my by-default career, if one can call it that. With my “unmarried partner” (the box I checked for the 2000 Census) I write a community newspaper and organize around issues of environmental and social justice. If someone in high school had told me this would be a career, I would have laughed in her face. I was destined for academia, perhaps the law, at least “great things.” That I never got there is perhaps due to the fact that my concept of “there” was destroyed by the process of “getting”, which is essentially the substance of mine—or anyone’s—life. The “getting” took place in the late 60s and early 70s, when I and my fellow travelers were engaged in smashing the “there”—Vietnam, the military industrial complex, the nuclear family, etc.—as fervently as the times demanded.
But that’s only part of the story. My famous friend, who is “terrified” in Santa Fe, came of age alongside me, but obviously decided at some point in her life that she would dedicate it to writing books. And part of the dedication would mean being part of a national (i.e. “famous”) community that was writing and speaking to the same issues as she. I don’t know if people who so dedicate themselves to certain causes consciously say, to be successful in my endeavor I must be willing to promote myself, so that my voice becomes part of the larger voice that is listened to, that makes a difference.
Whether or not this is a conscious decision, the effect remains the same, be it Scott Nearing or Andy Warhol. I just finished reading a memoir by Helen Nearing of her life with Scott, who in an interesting twist of fate was first famous as an academic and political activist until he was banished from academia and became even more famous as a homesteader who repudiated academia and the public life (although he remained steadfast in his political life). Although a certain air of self-righteousness permeates this book and several of those they wrote together, it seems that Nearing genuinely believed that in order to share his private and political vision of what constitutes a good and moral life (he never would have embraced poststructuralism) he needed to lecture, write books, travel, spread the gospel, so to speak.
Warhol, on the other hand, dedicated his life to being as notorious as possible for the sake of that notoriety. Whether this was motivated by the Nietzschean “will to give expression to one’s personality” or simply the drive for “utter moral worthlessness”, like Colette’s first husband, Willy (from Secrets of the Flesh, Judith Thurman’s biography of Colette), doesn’t really matter. He procured his fame, just as Nearing and my friend did, and they all had or have to deal with what fame brings in our society: terror, unwelcome distractions, or attempted assassination (at least for Warhol).
It’s easier to stay home, both physically and mentally. In one of my feeble attempts to actually get a book published with the local university press, I remember telling the editor that I lacked the chutzpah it took to promote myself, and that if her press didn’t publish me this would be the beginning and end of that particular career (and it was, if you don’t count the children’s book I wrote that was published by a Santa Fe house that took 10 years to sell 2,000 copies). I’ve written some national magazine articles over the years that chronicled life in northern New Mexico, which people in mainstream America find fascinating, but the few attempts I’ve made to sell articles of import, where my voice could perhaps make a difference on critical issues of environmental justice, they were dismissed as too “local” or too hard to understand by an “eastern, urban readership.” Thus I learned that one has to pay dues, like my terrified friend, before one’s voice is heard.
I imagine that there are millions of us out here, voices that are knowledgeable, analytic, eloquent, profound (I’m not necessarily claiming all these qualities). Just like all the painters who may have been a lost link between cubism and abstract expressionism or abstract expressionism and Andy Warhol. Or composers, like the eccentric woman who hitchhikes around Taos in her mumu and straw hat and is occasionally acknowledged for her operas that are locally performed. I once wrote a short story (which sits in my bottom drawer) about her called the “Woman as Artist” (I turned her into a painter). In my story she sits on an old car seat on her back porch with her legs stretched out onto an adjacent chair to rest her varicose veins: “I’ll never be a huge success, honey,” she sighs to the narrator. “It’s not in the cards. Or should I say, it’s not in my blood. I can’t sell myself to the highest bidder to get there, like the cold-blooded ones do. Do you have any idea how many talented people there are out there in the world—painters, musicians, composers, writers, philosophers—living in places just as obscure as this crumbling adobe in El Rancho, who will never, ever see even the modest success that I’ve had in this fucked up society that defines your worth by how much you sell yourself for? Then once you’re sold they have to keep investing in you because so much money is at stake. Doesn’t matter if you’re old, stale, hackneyed and worthless—if some investment banker on the upper West side bought you for thousands of dollars to hang on his wall, by God you better double or triple by the time he’s ready to sell you to an investment banker on the upper East side to hang on his wall. ‘All the world’s a stage and we’re only the players.’”
Maybe some of this is sour grapes. I don’t have the talent that I give my Taos character, and I often lack her equanimity. But I do share her devotion to her old car seat on her back porch where she can see the Sangre de Cristo Mountains across the fields of irrigated pasture that have defined this view for 300 years. We also share a love for our neighbors, whose ancestors have lived here for 300 years. And I appreciate their regard for the work I do to help maintain these pastures and lives. That it is a way of life, not a career, is what I mean by “de-fault.” My friend who is terrified and famous also experiences this way of life, but it is within a different context, with an edge that, at least for me, spoils the quietness, the safety, the sameness. I don’t buy the adage that only things that terrify you are worth doing.
One day my almost grown son calls to ask me what I’m doing. When I tell him I’m working on my book about environmental justice, he says, mom, why don’t you publish your stuff. Ah, hito, if you only knew. But I tell him that I’m going to get down to work and finish up my memoirs of life as a norteño activist, my second novel, and edit my book of short stories so he and his brother can read it all when I’m dead. Mom,
I’m going to publish all if them, he says. Good luck, I tell him, you have my blessing. I won’t be around to be terrified.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Health Insurance
Preface to this blog: This posting was written in 2008. In 2009 my partner Mark had an experience with the medical industrial complex, as we now refer to it, which more dramatically reveals that it is irreparably broken, with no hope of repair beyond revolution. Stay tuned for that story.
I was fifty-six when I first got health insurance. Two years later, I’m wondering if it was more of a burden than a benefit. Here’s the story.
I have arthritis: I’ve had it as long as I can remember and in as many places in my body as there are joints. Before Insurance, which I will refer to as BI, I did what I could with over the counter pain relief, an occasional shot of cortisone, slings for my arms to relieve tennis elbow, and hiking poles for the downhill stretches. When I tore my meniscus hiking the Grand Canyon (I probably already had a partial tear due to weak joints caused by disintegrated cartilage) and could barely walk down the stairs, much less squat in the garden, I shopped around for the most affordable orthopedic surgeon, who gave me a discount for cash, and under a county indigent fund got the hospitable bill paid off. The surgery was arthroscopic, and I was hiking the trails again within a few weeks.
So when I actually qualified for insurance, through a new state program that covers the under-employed and self-employed who can’t afford private insurance, I figured I was home free, at least with the stuff that Western doctors are supposed to be able to deal with. I finally had the ugly subcutaneous benign something or other removed from my upper arm, a colonoscopy (ugh!), and a few other check-ups that I was supposed to have before fifty.
My left thumb was already in trouble before I got the insurance, but the bone spur that developed at the base of the joint became increasingly painful. If I accidentally banged it against a wall I almost fainted. So I got a referral from my doctor at the rural public health clinic, which is the only place I’d ever gone to see a doctor (other than the guy who repaired my meniscus) and off I went to the hand specialist in Santa Fe (it wasn’t really “off I went” because it took almost two months to get an appointment). He sent me for specialized x-rays, and another month went by before I got his pronouncement: I had a deformed bone between my thumb and wrist and the treatment is called arthoplasty — as opposed to an arthroscopic — surgery to remove the bad bone and either replace it with a small piece of tendon from my arm, fuse the bones together, or implant an artificial “spacer” between the bones. I opted for the tendon, and he told me I’d have to wear a cast for a month, then go to a removable brace so I could start physical therapy, and be good as new (with maybe a little less strength than before) in three months.
I kept putting off the surgery because my life kept getting in the way (should I not go back east to visit our younger son who was obviously depressed as hell his first semester at the University of Pennsylvania, should I not be able to make pies for Thanksgiving and Christmas, or should I miss cross-country ski season?). But eventually I couldn’t stand the pain, and I had the surgery January 16.
It is now the end of June and these past six months have been some of the most miserable of my life. My hand has not only not healed but has triggered a chain nerve reaction in my arm, shooting pain from my hand up to a frozen shoulder and across my shoulders and even down my back. The surgeon was prepared to recast my hand—“it shouldn’t be hurting like this”— and sent me off for an MRI for my shoulder, where they shove you into this tube that is inches away from your face and tell you to be sure not to move because then you’ll have to start all over. They give you a panic button to push (and many people do panic, you can bet on that) and then the noise begins, the whirring and pounding and whining, despite the ear plugs. I closed my eyes and didn’t move, so it was over in 20 excruciating minutes. When the surgeon saw the MRI he said I had a small tear in my shoulder tendon and some abrasion, but that it really shouldn’t be causing me this much pain, so he sent me to his partner, the shoulder guy. The shoulder guy saw me for ten minutes, max, and said the same thing: these injuries shouldn’t be causing your shoulder to freeze up, which we need to unfreeze. He didn’t even want to look at my hand until I insisted: “That’s Dr. _______’s business.” But then he looked at my hand for a few minutes, asked me some questions, and said, “I’m going to go call Dr. _______. So he spoke with Dr. ________ on the phone, came back into the room and said, “I think you have Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy.”
I, of course, had no idea what Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy was, and he didn’t enlighten me, except to say that surgery seemed to have set off some nerve problems in my arm, that he wanted me to get a bone scan for diagnostic validation, and then he’d send me to the pain clinic on the floor below where they’d give me a shot in the neck. “What kind of a shot?” I asked. “A local anesthetic,” he said. “You may have to get it a couple of times but that should do it.” I got him to write down the name of this diagnosis before I left, and I went home.
Notice that he said “A shot in the neck.” What he didn’t tell me was that the treatment he was prescribing is a shot in the spine, that Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy is one of those autoimmune classifications that doctors dump illnesses into when they can’t really figure out why you’re in so much pain, that there is no definitive diagnosis (not a bone scan or a blood test or anything else), and that there is no effective treatment. I learned all of this on the Internet the next morning, of course. As soon as I saw that RSD, or as it’s also called, Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, has a support group, like Sjogrens (which I already have) and fibromyalgia (which my younger sister has) and that I was consigned to a life of never ending pain and debilitation (as testimonials on the web site declared) I burst into tears.
After weeks of bitching and moaning and wishing that I’d never gotten the insurance and never had the operation, I decided to get a second opinion, which meant I had to be thankful that I could afford to do so—meaning that I had the insurance (fifty per cent of bankruptcies are triggered by medical bills). And I actually found someone who is trying to heal me. He’s a sweet Jewish doctor from New York, which immediately made me feel better, who had me in his office for two hours reading the medical records I’d brought with me from the other orthopods, listening to my story, asking me questions, looking at my whole body, recognizing me as a person with a medical history who might need some holistic treatment and gentle reassurance. He said, “Let’s not assume you have RSD, doctors don’t know everything,” and sent me back to the physical therapist, who is loosening up my arm. He also, without any request on my part, gave me a prescription for Valium, so I could sleep, and asked me if I wanted to try a new drug that might or might not work, to help relieve the pain.
So I took the drug, which does help, I’m loosening up my frozen shoulder with a physical therapist who also told me, “Let’s not go there.” I’m actually managing to fall asleep without the Valium, and the pain is diminished. So while I haven’t “gone there,” to the land of chronic pain and suffering, I still have a ways to go to the place where everyone experiences a little pain and suffering.
Solution: A complete revamping of the health care system, where everyone is covered by government, single pay, comprehensive insurance but also assigned a health care advocate who follows your course of treatment, informs herself about diagnoses and what treatments are necessary, possible side effects of treatments, what alternative treatments are available, etc. This person should be the doctor, but that probably ain’t going to happen, so let’s find someone else and pay them well to do it. The system would end up saving millions of dollars in uncalled for diagnostic tests, treatments, rehabilitations, etc. And patients might feel like human beings again.
I was fifty-six when I first got health insurance. Two years later, I’m wondering if it was more of a burden than a benefit. Here’s the story.
I have arthritis: I’ve had it as long as I can remember and in as many places in my body as there are joints. Before Insurance, which I will refer to as BI, I did what I could with over the counter pain relief, an occasional shot of cortisone, slings for my arms to relieve tennis elbow, and hiking poles for the downhill stretches. When I tore my meniscus hiking the Grand Canyon (I probably already had a partial tear due to weak joints caused by disintegrated cartilage) and could barely walk down the stairs, much less squat in the garden, I shopped around for the most affordable orthopedic surgeon, who gave me a discount for cash, and under a county indigent fund got the hospitable bill paid off. The surgery was arthroscopic, and I was hiking the trails again within a few weeks.
So when I actually qualified for insurance, through a new state program that covers the under-employed and self-employed who can’t afford private insurance, I figured I was home free, at least with the stuff that Western doctors are supposed to be able to deal with. I finally had the ugly subcutaneous benign something or other removed from my upper arm, a colonoscopy (ugh!), and a few other check-ups that I was supposed to have before fifty.
My left thumb was already in trouble before I got the insurance, but the bone spur that developed at the base of the joint became increasingly painful. If I accidentally banged it against a wall I almost fainted. So I got a referral from my doctor at the rural public health clinic, which is the only place I’d ever gone to see a doctor (other than the guy who repaired my meniscus) and off I went to the hand specialist in Santa Fe (it wasn’t really “off I went” because it took almost two months to get an appointment). He sent me for specialized x-rays, and another month went by before I got his pronouncement: I had a deformed bone between my thumb and wrist and the treatment is called arthoplasty — as opposed to an arthroscopic — surgery to remove the bad bone and either replace it with a small piece of tendon from my arm, fuse the bones together, or implant an artificial “spacer” between the bones. I opted for the tendon, and he told me I’d have to wear a cast for a month, then go to a removable brace so I could start physical therapy, and be good as new (with maybe a little less strength than before) in three months.
I kept putting off the surgery because my life kept getting in the way (should I not go back east to visit our younger son who was obviously depressed as hell his first semester at the University of Pennsylvania, should I not be able to make pies for Thanksgiving and Christmas, or should I miss cross-country ski season?). But eventually I couldn’t stand the pain, and I had the surgery January 16.
It is now the end of June and these past six months have been some of the most miserable of my life. My hand has not only not healed but has triggered a chain nerve reaction in my arm, shooting pain from my hand up to a frozen shoulder and across my shoulders and even down my back. The surgeon was prepared to recast my hand—“it shouldn’t be hurting like this”— and sent me off for an MRI for my shoulder, where they shove you into this tube that is inches away from your face and tell you to be sure not to move because then you’ll have to start all over. They give you a panic button to push (and many people do panic, you can bet on that) and then the noise begins, the whirring and pounding and whining, despite the ear plugs. I closed my eyes and didn’t move, so it was over in 20 excruciating minutes. When the surgeon saw the MRI he said I had a small tear in my shoulder tendon and some abrasion, but that it really shouldn’t be causing me this much pain, so he sent me to his partner, the shoulder guy. The shoulder guy saw me for ten minutes, max, and said the same thing: these injuries shouldn’t be causing your shoulder to freeze up, which we need to unfreeze. He didn’t even want to look at my hand until I insisted: “That’s Dr. _______’s business.” But then he looked at my hand for a few minutes, asked me some questions, and said, “I’m going to go call Dr. _______. So he spoke with Dr. ________ on the phone, came back into the room and said, “I think you have Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy.”
I, of course, had no idea what Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy was, and he didn’t enlighten me, except to say that surgery seemed to have set off some nerve problems in my arm, that he wanted me to get a bone scan for diagnostic validation, and then he’d send me to the pain clinic on the floor below where they’d give me a shot in the neck. “What kind of a shot?” I asked. “A local anesthetic,” he said. “You may have to get it a couple of times but that should do it.” I got him to write down the name of this diagnosis before I left, and I went home.
Notice that he said “A shot in the neck.” What he didn’t tell me was that the treatment he was prescribing is a shot in the spine, that Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy is one of those autoimmune classifications that doctors dump illnesses into when they can’t really figure out why you’re in so much pain, that there is no definitive diagnosis (not a bone scan or a blood test or anything else), and that there is no effective treatment. I learned all of this on the Internet the next morning, of course. As soon as I saw that RSD, or as it’s also called, Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, has a support group, like Sjogrens (which I already have) and fibromyalgia (which my younger sister has) and that I was consigned to a life of never ending pain and debilitation (as testimonials on the web site declared) I burst into tears.
After weeks of bitching and moaning and wishing that I’d never gotten the insurance and never had the operation, I decided to get a second opinion, which meant I had to be thankful that I could afford to do so—meaning that I had the insurance (fifty per cent of bankruptcies are triggered by medical bills). And I actually found someone who is trying to heal me. He’s a sweet Jewish doctor from New York, which immediately made me feel better, who had me in his office for two hours reading the medical records I’d brought with me from the other orthopods, listening to my story, asking me questions, looking at my whole body, recognizing me as a person with a medical history who might need some holistic treatment and gentle reassurance. He said, “Let’s not assume you have RSD, doctors don’t know everything,” and sent me back to the physical therapist, who is loosening up my arm. He also, without any request on my part, gave me a prescription for Valium, so I could sleep, and asked me if I wanted to try a new drug that might or might not work, to help relieve the pain.
So I took the drug, which does help, I’m loosening up my frozen shoulder with a physical therapist who also told me, “Let’s not go there.” I’m actually managing to fall asleep without the Valium, and the pain is diminished. So while I haven’t “gone there,” to the land of chronic pain and suffering, I still have a ways to go to the place where everyone experiences a little pain and suffering.
Solution: A complete revamping of the health care system, where everyone is covered by government, single pay, comprehensive insurance but also assigned a health care advocate who follows your course of treatment, informs herself about diagnoses and what treatments are necessary, possible side effects of treatments, what alternative treatments are available, etc. This person should be the doctor, but that probably ain’t going to happen, so let’s find someone else and pay them well to do it. The system would end up saving millions of dollars in uncalled for diagnostic tests, treatments, rehabilitations, etc. And patients might feel like human beings again.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Israel
When it comes to Israel and its position in the Middle East, there are no progressives in Congress, there are only cowards. I am an American of Jewish descent who has made it my responsibility to learn the history of the dispossession of 700,000 Palestinian people and the complicity on the part of the United States in the militarization of Israel to maintain our control of the region's resources. It's all there in the history books, but starting with the Woodrow Wilson administration and culminating with George Bush the Second’s, there has been a very calculated campaign to pervert that history to keep the American people ignorant and fearful of the so-called "terrorists" who supposedly threaten the existence of Israel and our interests in the Middle East. In actuality, the U.S. has helped create those "terrorists" in every perverted move it has made, from supporting the Muslim Brotherhood against Arab nationalism to invading Lebanon in futile attempts to squelch guerilla movements like Hezbollah, which gained the support of the Lebanese people in the conflict of 2006. The U.S., along with its other western allies who have allowed us to call the shots, is largely responsible for the abysmal situation in the Middle East and for the civilian deaths and destruction suffered by the Palestinians, the Lebanese, and the Israelis.
To my knowledge, not one Democrat (except for Dennis Kucinich). has had the guts to stand up and acknowledge the lies, distortions, and propaganda that are spewed out on a daily basis by every administration, by Congress, and by the mainstream media. How many Americans know abut the refusnik Israeli military pilots who have refused to fly bombing missions that kill civilians indiscriminately, or the editor of an Israeli newspaper who has provided a point by point analysis of how we have arrived at this insane moment in history when the Israeli government is perpetrating atrocities that turn the entire world against it (and its military supplier, the U.S.) and turn poor, disenfranchised, angry young Arab men and women into jihadists? What they do is tragic and counterproductive; what we are doing is obscene. And as one of the refusniks pointed out, as he traveled around this country speaking out about what is going on in his country, what is equally obscene is that the majority of Americans are completely ignorant of the fact that there is a peace movement in Israel and in Palestine. That knowledge would not serve our purpose of controlling the Middle East.
Until Congress takes a stand against these policies, now threatening the stability of the entire world, and the media begins to do its job of giving voice to those who try to speak truth to power, the Obama administration will have a free hand to continue its control by force. Is Iran next? I saw a film clip of the 60 Minutes Mike Wallace interview of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Or really, it wasn’t an interview but an assault, the only way the arrogant octogenarian Wallace knew how to pretend to be a journalist. As Wallace asked his snide questions and acted out his grievances, Ahmadinejad, through an interpreter, actually tried to say something about the relations between his country and the U.S. in the larger context of Middle East politics, but Wallace was not about to have him appear as a statesman, with opinions based in historical context (and, unfortunately, in an Islamic fundamentalist vision of economic progress and social regression). He had to be demonized, like all the rest of the Arab leaders (except for Saudi Arabian kings and princes who cut off peoples hands as punishment but send their oil in the right direction), so that our invasions become liberations and our occupations become democratization.
How did the Jewish lobby in this country become so powerful? Why do otherwise liberal and progressive Jews sit on their hands when it comes to criticizing Israel or Zionism? Why did they allow Bush and Cheney to invoke the Holocaust at every turn in the road in their “fight against terrorism”, which has suddenly morphed into a “fight against fascism”? Why do Jews continue to let a Holocaust culture excuse Israeli and American imperialism that continues to turn the world against us and create real anti-Semitism? Before he died, Columbia University professor, author, and activist Edward Said had come to the conclusion that a two-state solution to the Palestinian/Israeli problem would never work. The only hope was for a one-state homeland to both Arabs and Jews, where an elected government could actually represent the interests of the Palestinian population.
That will probably never happen in our lifetime. Palestinian political disorganization and lack of leadership are no match for the Zionist and Israeli guiding principle, aided and abetted by the U.S. Santa Fe author and activist Kathleen Christison, in her book Perceptions of Palestine, quotes Said complaining about the Palestinians’ “historical inability as a people to focus on a set of national goals, and single-mindedly to pursue them with methods and principles that are adequate to these goals.” And no American president and no American Congress, Republican or Democrat, will ever see Palestine as anything but an impediment to Israel. When as brilliant an advocate as Said becomes filled with such despair over any hope of solving the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, it makes us cynical as well. But I mourn the loss of his constant attention and passion to the situation. Without it, we are even further removed from a solution.
A Not Very Hopeful Solution: Create a one-state homeland to both Arabs and Jews, where an Arab majority will have to find the political will to create a democratic and just society.
To my knowledge, not one Democrat (except for Dennis Kucinich). has had the guts to stand up and acknowledge the lies, distortions, and propaganda that are spewed out on a daily basis by every administration, by Congress, and by the mainstream media. How many Americans know abut the refusnik Israeli military pilots who have refused to fly bombing missions that kill civilians indiscriminately, or the editor of an Israeli newspaper who has provided a point by point analysis of how we have arrived at this insane moment in history when the Israeli government is perpetrating atrocities that turn the entire world against it (and its military supplier, the U.S.) and turn poor, disenfranchised, angry young Arab men and women into jihadists? What they do is tragic and counterproductive; what we are doing is obscene. And as one of the refusniks pointed out, as he traveled around this country speaking out about what is going on in his country, what is equally obscene is that the majority of Americans are completely ignorant of the fact that there is a peace movement in Israel and in Palestine. That knowledge would not serve our purpose of controlling the Middle East.
Until Congress takes a stand against these policies, now threatening the stability of the entire world, and the media begins to do its job of giving voice to those who try to speak truth to power, the Obama administration will have a free hand to continue its control by force. Is Iran next? I saw a film clip of the 60 Minutes Mike Wallace interview of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Or really, it wasn’t an interview but an assault, the only way the arrogant octogenarian Wallace knew how to pretend to be a journalist. As Wallace asked his snide questions and acted out his grievances, Ahmadinejad, through an interpreter, actually tried to say something about the relations between his country and the U.S. in the larger context of Middle East politics, but Wallace was not about to have him appear as a statesman, with opinions based in historical context (and, unfortunately, in an Islamic fundamentalist vision of economic progress and social regression). He had to be demonized, like all the rest of the Arab leaders (except for Saudi Arabian kings and princes who cut off peoples hands as punishment but send their oil in the right direction), so that our invasions become liberations and our occupations become democratization.
How did the Jewish lobby in this country become so powerful? Why do otherwise liberal and progressive Jews sit on their hands when it comes to criticizing Israel or Zionism? Why did they allow Bush and Cheney to invoke the Holocaust at every turn in the road in their “fight against terrorism”, which has suddenly morphed into a “fight against fascism”? Why do Jews continue to let a Holocaust culture excuse Israeli and American imperialism that continues to turn the world against us and create real anti-Semitism? Before he died, Columbia University professor, author, and activist Edward Said had come to the conclusion that a two-state solution to the Palestinian/Israeli problem would never work. The only hope was for a one-state homeland to both Arabs and Jews, where an elected government could actually represent the interests of the Palestinian population.
That will probably never happen in our lifetime. Palestinian political disorganization and lack of leadership are no match for the Zionist and Israeli guiding principle, aided and abetted by the U.S. Santa Fe author and activist Kathleen Christison, in her book Perceptions of Palestine, quotes Said complaining about the Palestinians’ “historical inability as a people to focus on a set of national goals, and single-mindedly to pursue them with methods and principles that are adequate to these goals.” And no American president and no American Congress, Republican or Democrat, will ever see Palestine as anything but an impediment to Israel. When as brilliant an advocate as Said becomes filled with such despair over any hope of solving the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, it makes us cynical as well. But I mourn the loss of his constant attention and passion to the situation. Without it, we are even further removed from a solution.
A Not Very Hopeful Solution: Create a one-state homeland to both Arabs and Jews, where an Arab majority will have to find the political will to create a democratic and just society.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Invoking God
Mark and I always manage to have a Seder at Passover with whoever happens to be around and interested in attending: non-Jewish neighbors, Jewish friends from Santa Fe, family from New York, etc. One year, our friend Lisa, a Jew from Washington D.C., who was at the time living in a small Hispano village across the Rio Grande from us, decided to have a Seder and invite all her Catholic neighbors. We downloaded a liberation Haggadah from the Internet and went over to Servilleta Plaza to celebrate Passover in Lisa’s run down adobe house. Besides being the only Jews there except for Lisa and her mother, who was visiting from D.C., we were the only gringos as well. Everyone crowded into the large kitchen while we went through the ceremony and took turns reading the passages from the Haggadah before digging into a scrumptious meal of lamb, matzo ball soup, and frijoles. When it got dark we lit a bonfire outside, told stories and danced.
Mark and I also attend Catholic mass in El Valle, on Christmas and special occasions, and at funerals (or rosaries, where the penitentes sing on their knees in front of the alter). I’m not sure anyone in the village even knows we’re Jews, but they don’t care what we are as long as we come to show our neighborliness and respect for their religion and culture.
That being said, I truly hate organized religion. I hate the fact that certain friends find it necessary to “rediscover” their “spiritual” life (particularly after they become parents) that gets all tangled up in some form of religion, usually the one they grew up in, or sometimes, one they find more “liberating.” Religion is not liberating: it is suffocating. It is about taking on faith certain precepts that have nothing to do with liberation or freedom or goodness. It is about believing stories that were devised to control people by keeping them ignorant and disenfranchised. And it is about fomenting hate and intolerance. According to Voltaire: “Papist fanatics, Calvinist fanatics, all are moulded from the same sh . . . , and soaked in corrupted blood.”
This is the promo for a new video game:
Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to
remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of
the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech
military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of
New York City. You are on a mission – both a religious mission and a
military mission – to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists,
gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state –
especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is "to conduct
physical and spiritual warfare"; all who resist must be taken out with
extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose:
you are 13 years old. You are playing a real-time strategy video game whose
creators are linked to the empire of mega-church pastor Rick Warren, best-selling author of The Purpose Driven Life.
Actually, they’ve got it wrong when they target “moderate, mainstream Christians” because they’re just as insidious. This is author Sam Harris in his book The End of Religion, who is unafraid to state the obvious (although a certain political naiveté shortchanges the impact of the book):
“The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. . . . Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance—and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism. The test themselves are unequivocal: they are perfect in all their parts. By their light, religious moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness to submit to God’s law. By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. . . . Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities. . . . Moderates do not want to kill anybody in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word “God” as though we knew what we were talking about.”
My son Jakob, who worked in Evansville, Indiana as a photojournalism intern, told us about the church on every corner and even attended some of them to get a feel for what Midwest culture is really like. At the last one he went to, a middle-class mainstream Christian denomination that houses thousands of worshipers every Sunday, the minister’s sermon was singing a dirge for the church’s younger generation, who were not attending services with their parents and apparently showed little inclination in becoming members. So there is still hope, that the next generation, which already embraces a much more culturally inclusive lifestyle that bends gender and class rules, will eschew the trappings of organized religion and celebrate their spiritual lives through their acceptance and celebration of all human diversity.
Solution: Give all churches to their respective communities to be run as halfway houses, homeless shelters and training centers, domestic violence retreats, and dancehalls.
Mark and I also attend Catholic mass in El Valle, on Christmas and special occasions, and at funerals (or rosaries, where the penitentes sing on their knees in front of the alter). I’m not sure anyone in the village even knows we’re Jews, but they don’t care what we are as long as we come to show our neighborliness and respect for their religion and culture.
That being said, I truly hate organized religion. I hate the fact that certain friends find it necessary to “rediscover” their “spiritual” life (particularly after they become parents) that gets all tangled up in some form of religion, usually the one they grew up in, or sometimes, one they find more “liberating.” Religion is not liberating: it is suffocating. It is about taking on faith certain precepts that have nothing to do with liberation or freedom or goodness. It is about believing stories that were devised to control people by keeping them ignorant and disenfranchised. And it is about fomenting hate and intolerance. According to Voltaire: “Papist fanatics, Calvinist fanatics, all are moulded from the same sh . . . , and soaked in corrupted blood.”
This is the promo for a new video game:
Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to
remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of
the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech
military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of
New York City. You are on a mission – both a religious mission and a
military mission – to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists,
gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state –
especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is "to conduct
physical and spiritual warfare"; all who resist must be taken out with
extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose:
you are 13 years old. You are playing a real-time strategy video game whose
creators are linked to the empire of mega-church pastor Rick Warren, best-selling author of The Purpose Driven Life.
Actually, they’ve got it wrong when they target “moderate, mainstream Christians” because they’re just as insidious. This is author Sam Harris in his book The End of Religion, who is unafraid to state the obvious (although a certain political naiveté shortchanges the impact of the book):
“The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. . . . Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance—and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism. The test themselves are unequivocal: they are perfect in all their parts. By their light, religious moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness to submit to God’s law. By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. . . . Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities. . . . Moderates do not want to kill anybody in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word “God” as though we knew what we were talking about.”
My son Jakob, who worked in Evansville, Indiana as a photojournalism intern, told us about the church on every corner and even attended some of them to get a feel for what Midwest culture is really like. At the last one he went to, a middle-class mainstream Christian denomination that houses thousands of worshipers every Sunday, the minister’s sermon was singing a dirge for the church’s younger generation, who were not attending services with their parents and apparently showed little inclination in becoming members. So there is still hope, that the next generation, which already embraces a much more culturally inclusive lifestyle that bends gender and class rules, will eschew the trappings of organized religion and celebrate their spiritual lives through their acceptance and celebration of all human diversity.
Solution: Give all churches to their respective communities to be run as halfway houses, homeless shelters and training centers, domestic violence retreats, and dancehalls.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Some Things are Relative
When George Bush became president of the United States for the second time I remember lying on the floor in front of the TV sobbing uncontrollably. The wave of despair and misery that washed over me was palpable, even though I knew my life would go on, at least externally, in pretty much the same fashion as before. I would continue to live on my 10 acres in El Valle and irrigate my garden, orchard, and fields. I would continue to publish and edit La Jicarita News with my partner Mark, where we could pretty much print anything we wanted. Our kids would continue to attend public school and the college of their choice and pretty much say anything they wanted. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president of Iran, I read a profile of a young Iranian writer who described sitting in his room in despair, holding his head in his hands. His life, already in a state of precariousness, would certainly not go on as before. If he continued to write what he wanted to write, he would probably end up in jail. If he continued to associate with those who believed in a secular, democratic Iran, he would probably end up in jail. And if his girlfriend continued to refuse to wear a jihib, she might be whipped or end up in jail.
His suffering is more profound. My suffering is complicated by my privilege. It is only because of where I live that I have the leisure and capacity to be writing this attempt to deal with what makes me suffer, the dichotomy of the tomato in the global society. While I struggle to reconcile my faith in the Marxist analysis of capitalism with a more postmodern, unhistorical exploration of how cultural conditions figure into the equation, the student in Iran is still very much aware of a systematic, historical process that controls and dominates his life, leaving not much room for worrying about how to appreciate the tomato.
Those of us who live in privileged American society, which is responsible for much of the oppression in places like Iran, seem incapable of figuring out how to smash the power elite after losing the will of the sixties and early seventies, when the political system seemed vulnerable, at least momentarily. Michel Foucault gave up the barricades for the San Francisco bathhouses and Abbie Hoffman killed himself. A young friend of mine, who is in her late twenties and graduated from Antioch, where I also went to college, doesn’t like to hear my stories of the sixties. My best one, about the time in Berkeley the cops surrounded our house with a swat team, looking for a fellow Antioch student who was on the run after being arrested in Cambridge at an anti-war demonstration and tying up the sheriff on Telegraph Hill when he tried to arrest him, bores her silly. She bristles when we complain about the lack of young people out in the streets protesting the invasion of Iraq or the prison at Guantanamo Bay. She says demonstrations are useless, that the mainstream media subverts the intent by refusing to cover them.
But then, after a month of student and worker riots in the streets of France the government capitulates and rescinds the law that caused the riots in the first place (a labor law that would allow employers to fire workers younger than 25 without cause). It took ten years of demonstrating in the streets of the U.S. before this country pulled out of Vietnam (and it’s debatable how much of our withdrawal was due to political unrest at home, see the Civil Disobedience blog) and millions of demonstrators in the streets of all the major cities didn’t deter George Bush from invading Iraq. Why did the French government respond so quickly to its student uprising? In France labor unions remain strong and viable and a force to be reckoned with, while here in the states the unions have largely been emasculated, through a calculated campaign by the power elite and because of internecine fighting and corruption in the unions themselves. So not only are we ignored in the streets, we have no organizations with any political clout that can actually threaten the status quo of the government. Our privilege extends only as far as the marketplace: We have the power to consume but lack the power to change anything. I can write and speak out about whatever I want but my words effect nothing. Internet blogs can appear on our computer screens in a blink of an eye but we can’t stop the bombing in Iraq and we can’t make sure no person goes to bed hungry.
A lot of us spend a lot of energy trying to figure out how this has happened and what we can do about it. That doesn’t stop us from continuing our own struggles that manifest in a million different ways, but it’s obviously not enough and periodically it results in the malaise that I am now struggling with. But, as the Mexican immigrants who took to the streets during the last election to agitate for immigration reform, like to remind us, “Si se puede”—if only fleetingly, if only temporarily, if only in the alleviation of the suffering of a few at the hands of many.
Solution: Hasta siempre liberación.
His suffering is more profound. My suffering is complicated by my privilege. It is only because of where I live that I have the leisure and capacity to be writing this attempt to deal with what makes me suffer, the dichotomy of the tomato in the global society. While I struggle to reconcile my faith in the Marxist analysis of capitalism with a more postmodern, unhistorical exploration of how cultural conditions figure into the equation, the student in Iran is still very much aware of a systematic, historical process that controls and dominates his life, leaving not much room for worrying about how to appreciate the tomato.
Those of us who live in privileged American society, which is responsible for much of the oppression in places like Iran, seem incapable of figuring out how to smash the power elite after losing the will of the sixties and early seventies, when the political system seemed vulnerable, at least momentarily. Michel Foucault gave up the barricades for the San Francisco bathhouses and Abbie Hoffman killed himself. A young friend of mine, who is in her late twenties and graduated from Antioch, where I also went to college, doesn’t like to hear my stories of the sixties. My best one, about the time in Berkeley the cops surrounded our house with a swat team, looking for a fellow Antioch student who was on the run after being arrested in Cambridge at an anti-war demonstration and tying up the sheriff on Telegraph Hill when he tried to arrest him, bores her silly. She bristles when we complain about the lack of young people out in the streets protesting the invasion of Iraq or the prison at Guantanamo Bay. She says demonstrations are useless, that the mainstream media subverts the intent by refusing to cover them.
But then, after a month of student and worker riots in the streets of France the government capitulates and rescinds the law that caused the riots in the first place (a labor law that would allow employers to fire workers younger than 25 without cause). It took ten years of demonstrating in the streets of the U.S. before this country pulled out of Vietnam (and it’s debatable how much of our withdrawal was due to political unrest at home, see the Civil Disobedience blog) and millions of demonstrators in the streets of all the major cities didn’t deter George Bush from invading Iraq. Why did the French government respond so quickly to its student uprising? In France labor unions remain strong and viable and a force to be reckoned with, while here in the states the unions have largely been emasculated, through a calculated campaign by the power elite and because of internecine fighting and corruption in the unions themselves. So not only are we ignored in the streets, we have no organizations with any political clout that can actually threaten the status quo of the government. Our privilege extends only as far as the marketplace: We have the power to consume but lack the power to change anything. I can write and speak out about whatever I want but my words effect nothing. Internet blogs can appear on our computer screens in a blink of an eye but we can’t stop the bombing in Iraq and we can’t make sure no person goes to bed hungry.
A lot of us spend a lot of energy trying to figure out how this has happened and what we can do about it. That doesn’t stop us from continuing our own struggles that manifest in a million different ways, but it’s obviously not enough and periodically it results in the malaise that I am now struggling with. But, as the Mexican immigrants who took to the streets during the last election to agitate for immigration reform, like to remind us, “Si se puede”—if only fleetingly, if only temporarily, if only in the alleviation of the suffering of a few at the hands of many.
Solution: Hasta siempre liberación.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Higher Education
When my younger son called to tell me he’d just found out, via the Internet, of course, that he’d been rejected by Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Cornell, and Stanford, was on the waiting list at Columbia and Brown, and was accepted at Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania, my immediate reaction was, “What does it take to get into these fucking schools?”
Silly question, really. It obviously doesn’t take overachieving by a white kid who attends a public high school in Santa Fe: a 4.60 GPA, between 750 and 800 on all his SATs, captain of his chess and tennis teams, an internship with the ACLU, a stint with Amigos de las Americas, fluency in Spanish, a writer for the teen section of the city newspaper, and on and on and on.
Neither does it take that special something that makes him stand out from other overachieving white kids. He was raised in El Valle, an Hispano village of 20 families in northern New Mexico by a couple of parents who dropped out of mainstream culture a long time ago to try to get real. He lived on 10 acres with a horse, burro, chickens, cats and dogs, vegetable garden, orchard, and hay fields. His neighbors were descendents of settlers from Mexico and indigenous Pueblo Indians. He helped clean the acequias—irrigation ditches—every spring and gathered wood in the fall.
That wasn’t the path he wanted, however. By ninth grade he’d rejected everything rural, had picked one of the few sports that required proximity to concrete—tennis—and made it clear that if he wasn’t more challenged in school he was going to quit and do it on his own.
Se we moved him to the big (1,800 students) public high school in Santa Fe. For the first two years he lived with his dad’s parents, who we’d just moved out from Buffalo. When that became untenable because of his grandfather’s Alzheimer’s and his grandmother’s inability to deal with a teenager, his dad (Mark) and I rented a house in Tesuque, a Santa Fe suburb (we totally lucked out through a friend of a friend with a cheap rent), and took turns living with him: we split the week between Tesuque and El Valle, where one of us had to be to take care of the animals.
Mark and I, of course, never wanted him to go to Harvard or Yale. We don’t want him going to school with elitist rich kids—or what he aspires to be. Are there so many of these kids applying to these schools that there’s no room at the inn? What about all the public school kids like our son who are their class valedictorians and captains of their cross-country and swim teams who deserve to go to these schools if that’s what they want? And why are they convinced that they have to go to Cornell or Princeton to get a good education? Why are their parents spending thousands of dollars to hire tutors to raise their SAT scores to 800? Why are these kids applying to 10 or 14 schools, screwing up the admissions process and driving their parents crazy with admission and financial aid forms?
Seems like a vicious cycle to me. The Ivy League schools reflect the increasing disparity in our society between the haves and have-nots: prep school kids with money and connections and minority kids enrolled to fill quotas. The two kids from our son’s high school who were accepted at Harvard are an Hispana and the daughter of an alumnus. The co-valedictorian, who got accepted at MIT, is Asian. For the prep school kids, it will be a validation of their privilege. For the minority kids, it will be a struggle, and many of them won’t make it.
Our son will go to U Penn or New York University (where he got accepted in the Scholar’s Program) or Oberlin or somewhere perfectly reasonable and he will have to figure out what to do with his life, just like the rest of us. This was his first real taste of how badly the system sucks; I hope that helps him make a life-affirming choice rather than a cynical one.
Solution: Make all higher education free, which will quickly pay for itself.
Silly question, really. It obviously doesn’t take overachieving by a white kid who attends a public high school in Santa Fe: a 4.60 GPA, between 750 and 800 on all his SATs, captain of his chess and tennis teams, an internship with the ACLU, a stint with Amigos de las Americas, fluency in Spanish, a writer for the teen section of the city newspaper, and on and on and on.
Neither does it take that special something that makes him stand out from other overachieving white kids. He was raised in El Valle, an Hispano village of 20 families in northern New Mexico by a couple of parents who dropped out of mainstream culture a long time ago to try to get real. He lived on 10 acres with a horse, burro, chickens, cats and dogs, vegetable garden, orchard, and hay fields. His neighbors were descendents of settlers from Mexico and indigenous Pueblo Indians. He helped clean the acequias—irrigation ditches—every spring and gathered wood in the fall.
That wasn’t the path he wanted, however. By ninth grade he’d rejected everything rural, had picked one of the few sports that required proximity to concrete—tennis—and made it clear that if he wasn’t more challenged in school he was going to quit and do it on his own.
Se we moved him to the big (1,800 students) public high school in Santa Fe. For the first two years he lived with his dad’s parents, who we’d just moved out from Buffalo. When that became untenable because of his grandfather’s Alzheimer’s and his grandmother’s inability to deal with a teenager, his dad (Mark) and I rented a house in Tesuque, a Santa Fe suburb (we totally lucked out through a friend of a friend with a cheap rent), and took turns living with him: we split the week between Tesuque and El Valle, where one of us had to be to take care of the animals.
Mark and I, of course, never wanted him to go to Harvard or Yale. We don’t want him going to school with elitist rich kids—or what he aspires to be. Are there so many of these kids applying to these schools that there’s no room at the inn? What about all the public school kids like our son who are their class valedictorians and captains of their cross-country and swim teams who deserve to go to these schools if that’s what they want? And why are they convinced that they have to go to Cornell or Princeton to get a good education? Why are their parents spending thousands of dollars to hire tutors to raise their SAT scores to 800? Why are these kids applying to 10 or 14 schools, screwing up the admissions process and driving their parents crazy with admission and financial aid forms?
Seems like a vicious cycle to me. The Ivy League schools reflect the increasing disparity in our society between the haves and have-nots: prep school kids with money and connections and minority kids enrolled to fill quotas. The two kids from our son’s high school who were accepted at Harvard are an Hispana and the daughter of an alumnus. The co-valedictorian, who got accepted at MIT, is Asian. For the prep school kids, it will be a validation of their privilege. For the minority kids, it will be a struggle, and many of them won’t make it.
Our son will go to U Penn or New York University (where he got accepted in the Scholar’s Program) or Oberlin or somewhere perfectly reasonable and he will have to figure out what to do with his life, just like the rest of us. This was his first real taste of how badly the system sucks; I hope that helps him make a life-affirming choice rather than a cynical one.
Solution: Make all higher education free, which will quickly pay for itself.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Civil Disobedience
“All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when tyranny or inefficiency are great and unendurable . . . In other words when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.”
Henry David Thoreau was of course referring to the Mexican American War, but his words hold true for any number of our military incursions, either overt or covert, via the CIA, into the Philippines, Yugoslavia, Panama, Cuba, Chile, Sudan, and today, Iraq.
What form could Thoreau’s exhortation to commit civil disobedience take today to actually be effective? The way I see it, every American soldier would have to refuse to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. Bush and the neocons went to war despite the millions worldwide who took to the streets to express their vehement opposition to the invasion. They’re certainly not going to end the war even if people are enraged enough to continue to stay in the streets or smash windows like they did in Seattle. During the Vietnam War we managed to stay in the streets, largely, I guess, because of a sustained youth movement fomenting on college campuses, the emerging of identity politics with Black Power and the Brown Berets, and the thousands of body bags that were brought home that touched thousands of other lives.
But what really ended the Vietnam War was when the soldiers there started to mutiny, refusing to fight the people the U.S. government told them were the enemy, and deciding the real enemies were their commanding officers. And oftentimes they were, literally as well as figuratively. For the past few years I’ve arranged for a group of Veterans for Peace from Santa Fe to come to the high school in Peñasco to make a presentation on Full Disclosure Recruiting. The Vets, who served in Korea, the Vietnam War, and the first Gulf War, try to provide the kids the kinds of information they need to make an informed choice, when deciding to join the military. It’s always disheartening when the first thing they ask is how many of the students have family or friends who are currently serving in the military, and 75 percent of them raise their hands. Military recruitment in northern New Mexico is extensive, and many of the kids have a long family history of military service.
One of the Vets who came was a woman named Joan Guffy. She served as an Air Force nurse in the Vietnam War, where she was exposed to Agent Orange and was twice raped by American military officers. She suffered from ovarian cancer and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: “The military is a macho system where women are demeaned. I had to be afraid of my own soldiers.” Joan died in 2007.
The soldiers who served in Vietnam were drafted, of course, and were there by default: their families weren’t rich enough and they weren’t educated enough or life-experienced enough (most of them were taken right out of high school) to be able to avoid the draft. The dehumanizing conditions fueled already existing feelings of futility and hopelessness, and their training to be killing machines backfired: there are stories of soldiers throwing grenades into their commanding officers tents and mutinying in the middle of battles, leaving the officers to make it on their own. Today, the men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan are military volunteers, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t from the same families and communities that supplied the Vietnam War. What will it take to raise their consciousness as to the futility of both their personal and societal positions, to “rebel and revolutionize” against their commanders and refuse to fight?
Maybe the straw that breaks the camel’s back will be the gut wrenching returns to duty of those who thought they were only signing on for one tour—or the older, National Guard men and women who have families, jobs, and lives that are devastated by two or three tours. There just aren’t enough of these volunteers, or guardsmen, to maintain a force that even the Bush administration begrudgingly admitted wasn’t enough to “liberate” Iraq. There’s even a movie about it playing right now, called Stop-loss, which all the critics say no one is going to go to because no one wants the war to be any closer than reading another article on the inside pages of the local newspaper.
In an interview we did with Ike DeVargas for La Jicarita News in the late 1990s, he told us how he had come to his activism. “Most of us went there [Vietnam] believing what the government told us, that what they were doing over there was good and necessary, and most of us came back knowing that if they were lying to us over there they were lying to us here, too.” It took Ike only one tour to make the connection, and it led to a lifetime of civil disobedience. If only all the other soldiers would refuse to take up their weapons, just one time, all together, we could end these obscene wars.
Henry David Thoreau was of course referring to the Mexican American War, but his words hold true for any number of our military incursions, either overt or covert, via the CIA, into the Philippines, Yugoslavia, Panama, Cuba, Chile, Sudan, and today, Iraq.
What form could Thoreau’s exhortation to commit civil disobedience take today to actually be effective? The way I see it, every American soldier would have to refuse to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. Bush and the neocons went to war despite the millions worldwide who took to the streets to express their vehement opposition to the invasion. They’re certainly not going to end the war even if people are enraged enough to continue to stay in the streets or smash windows like they did in Seattle. During the Vietnam War we managed to stay in the streets, largely, I guess, because of a sustained youth movement fomenting on college campuses, the emerging of identity politics with Black Power and the Brown Berets, and the thousands of body bags that were brought home that touched thousands of other lives.
But what really ended the Vietnam War was when the soldiers there started to mutiny, refusing to fight the people the U.S. government told them were the enemy, and deciding the real enemies were their commanding officers. And oftentimes they were, literally as well as figuratively. For the past few years I’ve arranged for a group of Veterans for Peace from Santa Fe to come to the high school in Peñasco to make a presentation on Full Disclosure Recruiting. The Vets, who served in Korea, the Vietnam War, and the first Gulf War, try to provide the kids the kinds of information they need to make an informed choice, when deciding to join the military. It’s always disheartening when the first thing they ask is how many of the students have family or friends who are currently serving in the military, and 75 percent of them raise their hands. Military recruitment in northern New Mexico is extensive, and many of the kids have a long family history of military service.
One of the Vets who came was a woman named Joan Guffy. She served as an Air Force nurse in the Vietnam War, where she was exposed to Agent Orange and was twice raped by American military officers. She suffered from ovarian cancer and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: “The military is a macho system where women are demeaned. I had to be afraid of my own soldiers.” Joan died in 2007.
The soldiers who served in Vietnam were drafted, of course, and were there by default: their families weren’t rich enough and they weren’t educated enough or life-experienced enough (most of them were taken right out of high school) to be able to avoid the draft. The dehumanizing conditions fueled already existing feelings of futility and hopelessness, and their training to be killing machines backfired: there are stories of soldiers throwing grenades into their commanding officers tents and mutinying in the middle of battles, leaving the officers to make it on their own. Today, the men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan are military volunteers, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t from the same families and communities that supplied the Vietnam War. What will it take to raise their consciousness as to the futility of both their personal and societal positions, to “rebel and revolutionize” against their commanders and refuse to fight?
Maybe the straw that breaks the camel’s back will be the gut wrenching returns to duty of those who thought they were only signing on for one tour—or the older, National Guard men and women who have families, jobs, and lives that are devastated by two or three tours. There just aren’t enough of these volunteers, or guardsmen, to maintain a force that even the Bush administration begrudgingly admitted wasn’t enough to “liberate” Iraq. There’s even a movie about it playing right now, called Stop-loss, which all the critics say no one is going to go to because no one wants the war to be any closer than reading another article on the inside pages of the local newspaper.
In an interview we did with Ike DeVargas for La Jicarita News in the late 1990s, he told us how he had come to his activism. “Most of us went there [Vietnam] believing what the government told us, that what they were doing over there was good and necessary, and most of us came back knowing that if they were lying to us over there they were lying to us here, too.” It took Ike only one tour to make the connection, and it led to a lifetime of civil disobedience. If only all the other soldiers would refuse to take up their weapons, just one time, all together, we could end these obscene wars.
Monday, June 29, 2009
The Scourge of Computers
This particular diatribe was written in 2004.
My El Valle neighbors drive the buses that deliver Forest Service fire crews to forest fires. Which is what they’ve been doing, quite successfully, for almost 20 years. This year, however, the first thing the Forest Service supervisor’s office tells my neighbors is that they have to have a DUNS number, an official number assigned by Dun and Bradstreet, before the business can be listed in the official Forest Service file of available contractors. OK, they call the toll-free number and are assigned a DUNS number. Then the Forest Service gives them a website address where they must register their business in a centralized system (a system run by the Department of Defense) that lists every contractor in the country who does business with the government.
My neighbors do not own a computer, have never used a computer, and certainly have never registered for anything, bought anything, or browsed for anything on the Internet. So I log onto the site for them, which takes 20 minutes to access on rural phone lines that urban, broadband users wouldn’t even deign to use. I should have known immediately what was in store when one of the first instructions on the site cautions me to save data so I can come back to it later. All in all, I “come back” to the site at least ten times as my neighbors and I struggle to find the information it requests on five different required forms: General Information; Goods and Services; Corporate Information; Financial Information; and Points of Contact.
All of these categories have pages of questions that request information on a marketing contact and alternate, sales contact and alternate, accounts receivable contact and alternate; financial institution, routing number, bank account number, bank contact, and e-mail address for direct deposit of checks; type of business; name and type of prior business, ad nauseam. If you don’t fill out every single line, with every single name, address, e-mail address, phone number, and alternate, the registration is incomplete. None of these categories allow a simple “Not Applicable” answer for those of us registering sole proprietor businesses with one employee: the bus driver. There are no sales, marketing and accounts receivable positions; there is no type of prior business or auxiliary business. And there is a healthy distrust of providing the government with a bank account number when for twenty years checks have been mailed to the post office or rural mailbox that has worked just fine.
When I finally realize just how long it is going to take me to finish this registration (besides the 20 minute wait to access the site, it takes at least 10 or 15 minutes to process the information in each category) I decide to find a computer with a broadband Internet connection. On a friend’s PowerBook the site informs me that some Macintosh computers do not allow access to this Department of Defense site because of certain security set-ups. Does this mean that the DOE suspects that Macintosh users are generally not good security risks, or that Macintosh designers decided that the DOE is not user friendly?
Meanwhile, my neighbors, and many of their bus driver friends who are also bogged down in this debilitating process, decide they do not want to provide the government with their bank account numbers. When I call up the Forest Service and tell them this, the clerk says, “Then they won’t get paid.” When I ask to speak to the supervisor, he says, “Believe me, I know some people don’t want to give out this information, but our hands are tied. This is a directive from Washington and we can’t do anything about it.” When I suggest that it might behoove the Forest Service to have a workshop for contractors who might be reluctant to supply some of this information, explain the procedure, and help them through the registration process, he says, “We barely have the staff capability to do our own work, much less theirs.” I ask for his boss’s number in Albuquerque, but she’s out of town.
Two weeks later I finally finish the registration. My neighbors and their friends figure out a way to supply the government bureaucracy with the financial information it demands without completely jeopardizing their privacy. The process leaves all of us a mess: the website technology staff that listens to complaints all day long from frustrated contractors; the Forest Service staff that listens to complaints all day long from frustrated contractors; the frustrated contractors who believe the process is a total waste of time and an invasion of their privacy; and me, the friend of the frustrated contractors whose blood boiled and guts churned over the insensitivity and complicity of the bureaucrats who designed this system that demands the entire world buy into technology that makes our lives more complicated, more anxious, and less our own. Welcome to the world of techno-fascism.
Solution: Businesses will answer phones with real people, not automated systems run by computers; all new software systems will be compatible with older versions so we may avoid spending the bulk of our time dealing with technological problems instead of the problems they were supposedly invented to address; no one will be required to conduct any kind of business or communication online. Instead, if we so desire, we will conduct business and communication face-to-face, or voice-to-voice, with people, not machines.
My El Valle neighbors drive the buses that deliver Forest Service fire crews to forest fires. Which is what they’ve been doing, quite successfully, for almost 20 years. This year, however, the first thing the Forest Service supervisor’s office tells my neighbors is that they have to have a DUNS number, an official number assigned by Dun and Bradstreet, before the business can be listed in the official Forest Service file of available contractors. OK, they call the toll-free number and are assigned a DUNS number. Then the Forest Service gives them a website address where they must register their business in a centralized system (a system run by the Department of Defense) that lists every contractor in the country who does business with the government.
My neighbors do not own a computer, have never used a computer, and certainly have never registered for anything, bought anything, or browsed for anything on the Internet. So I log onto the site for them, which takes 20 minutes to access on rural phone lines that urban, broadband users wouldn’t even deign to use. I should have known immediately what was in store when one of the first instructions on the site cautions me to save data so I can come back to it later. All in all, I “come back” to the site at least ten times as my neighbors and I struggle to find the information it requests on five different required forms: General Information; Goods and Services; Corporate Information; Financial Information; and Points of Contact.
All of these categories have pages of questions that request information on a marketing contact and alternate, sales contact and alternate, accounts receivable contact and alternate; financial institution, routing number, bank account number, bank contact, and e-mail address for direct deposit of checks; type of business; name and type of prior business, ad nauseam. If you don’t fill out every single line, with every single name, address, e-mail address, phone number, and alternate, the registration is incomplete. None of these categories allow a simple “Not Applicable” answer for those of us registering sole proprietor businesses with one employee: the bus driver. There are no sales, marketing and accounts receivable positions; there is no type of prior business or auxiliary business. And there is a healthy distrust of providing the government with a bank account number when for twenty years checks have been mailed to the post office or rural mailbox that has worked just fine.
When I finally realize just how long it is going to take me to finish this registration (besides the 20 minute wait to access the site, it takes at least 10 or 15 minutes to process the information in each category) I decide to find a computer with a broadband Internet connection. On a friend’s PowerBook the site informs me that some Macintosh computers do not allow access to this Department of Defense site because of certain security set-ups. Does this mean that the DOE suspects that Macintosh users are generally not good security risks, or that Macintosh designers decided that the DOE is not user friendly?
Meanwhile, my neighbors, and many of their bus driver friends who are also bogged down in this debilitating process, decide they do not want to provide the government with their bank account numbers. When I call up the Forest Service and tell them this, the clerk says, “Then they won’t get paid.” When I ask to speak to the supervisor, he says, “Believe me, I know some people don’t want to give out this information, but our hands are tied. This is a directive from Washington and we can’t do anything about it.” When I suggest that it might behoove the Forest Service to have a workshop for contractors who might be reluctant to supply some of this information, explain the procedure, and help them through the registration process, he says, “We barely have the staff capability to do our own work, much less theirs.” I ask for his boss’s number in Albuquerque, but she’s out of town.
Two weeks later I finally finish the registration. My neighbors and their friends figure out a way to supply the government bureaucracy with the financial information it demands without completely jeopardizing their privacy. The process leaves all of us a mess: the website technology staff that listens to complaints all day long from frustrated contractors; the Forest Service staff that listens to complaints all day long from frustrated contractors; the frustrated contractors who believe the process is a total waste of time and an invasion of their privacy; and me, the friend of the frustrated contractors whose blood boiled and guts churned over the insensitivity and complicity of the bureaucrats who designed this system that demands the entire world buy into technology that makes our lives more complicated, more anxious, and less our own. Welcome to the world of techno-fascism.
Solution: Businesses will answer phones with real people, not automated systems run by computers; all new software systems will be compatible with older versions so we may avoid spending the bulk of our time dealing with technological problems instead of the problems they were supposedly invented to address; no one will be required to conduct any kind of business or communication online. Instead, if we so desire, we will conduct business and communication face-to-face, or voice-to-voice, with people, not machines.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Hitchhiking
When I was in college I hitchhiked everywhere. It was 1968 and everyone hitchhiked everywhere. A friend and I hitched from Antioch, which is in south-central Ohio, to a wedding in Kansas. I hitched to work every day on my co-op job at a private elementary school in Berkeley. Another friend and I hitched a ride to San Francisco in an 18-wheeler when our Volkswagen bug died in northern California. We hitchhiked down to New York City from another co-op job in New Hampshire with a series of truck drivers.
I also picked up hitchhikers. I drove with one of my workmates at the New Hampshire job to Antioch one weekend to visit our friends there and we got the last tank of gas paid for by the student hitchhiker we picked up on the interstate. I picked up hippies with dogs, Okies, drunks, students, people with broken down cars, dueling couples, just about anybody. There were a few rules I tried to follow, both as a hitchhiker and a giver of rides. If I was driving by myself I always gave rides to women, almost always to male-female couples, and cautiously to single men or groups of men. I accepted rides from women, mixed gender groups, and tried to avoid single men. Sometimes, however, you couldn’t tell who was driving until they slowed down or stopped, and it was always a leap of faith to take the ride. You thought you could appraise the driver with a quick once over—older than a certain age, dressed beyond a certain style, and with a certain ambiguous look—were usually good indicators that you let this one drive by. But you never knew, really. The truck driver who picked us up in northern California had needle marks up and down his arms but insisted on taking us over the Golden Gate Bridge, down Van Ness to Market and then to the corner of 19th Street where our friends lived. “I wouldn’t want my kids stuck out on the highway.”
Now, everybody’s afraid to hitchhike and nobody wants to pick one up. The descent into this condition was gradual. After college I moved to a New Mexico village named Placitas and the hitchhiking culture was still viable there, for a time. But as the nature of the community changed from local Hispano land grant peppered with back to the land immigrants, to commuter suburb of Albuquerque, hitchhiking became reduced to picking up only those on the highway from the freeway to the village—still assuming no one who had business in Placitas could be bad, and finally, to only those you knew, who were few and far between because we’d all given it up.
Why did it become unsafe to hitchhike in Placitas? As a microcosm of society in general, one would think that the gentrification of the community would translate to the gentrification of hitchhiking. People with more money and better cars could pick up the less fortunate with impunity and deliver them with grace. Those of us still out on the road could trust those behind the wheel to provide a ride in style. Alas, it doesn’t work that way, of course. As we become more comfortable we become more afraid of those who don’t share our comfort. Those who are still not comfortable aren’t benign college students anymore (college students don’t hitchhike to demonstrations in Washington D.C.; the few who go fly) but those perceived to be the losers who haven’t bought into consumer culture to the extent necessary to avoid any kind of disruption or break down that necessitates hitchhiking. It’s a vicious cycle: the perception becomes reality as those of us who still haven’t completely bought in rarely have to look for a ride, and when we occasionally do, don’t bother hitchhiking because we know they aren’t going to pick us up. So the ones left out there on the highways are what Hank Williams called them, the ones from Life’s Other Side.
I recently picked up a hitchhiker, however, from Picuris Pueblo, hitching a ride from one small village to the next, and I was very glad I did. He asked me if I was coming to the buffalo dance at the pueblo the next day, and then he told me that he had danced in the previous day’s deer dance. He said it was such an overwhelming experience that he couldn’t remember much about it except who was dancing on his left and who was dancing on his right. He didn’t know if there were people watching, he didn’t know how long he danced, he only knew that he danced as a deer would dance and then he ran for his life as the hunters came after him for the kill. He had a big grin on his face throughout this whole story and I then I dropped him off at the post office, where he met another friend and got in his car for the next leg of his journey. The commuters rushing down the highway missed a great story, and missed the opportunity to remember that theirs is not the only way to live.
Solution: Car companies will discontinue the manufacture of any car that doesn’t run on four cylinders and the government will run van taxis, like they do in third world countries that stop and pick up all the people on the street who need a ride, for a minimal fee. They will also run the taxis out on the highways between cities and so there are no more hitchhikers, only passengers.
I also picked up hitchhikers. I drove with one of my workmates at the New Hampshire job to Antioch one weekend to visit our friends there and we got the last tank of gas paid for by the student hitchhiker we picked up on the interstate. I picked up hippies with dogs, Okies, drunks, students, people with broken down cars, dueling couples, just about anybody. There were a few rules I tried to follow, both as a hitchhiker and a giver of rides. If I was driving by myself I always gave rides to women, almost always to male-female couples, and cautiously to single men or groups of men. I accepted rides from women, mixed gender groups, and tried to avoid single men. Sometimes, however, you couldn’t tell who was driving until they slowed down or stopped, and it was always a leap of faith to take the ride. You thought you could appraise the driver with a quick once over—older than a certain age, dressed beyond a certain style, and with a certain ambiguous look—were usually good indicators that you let this one drive by. But you never knew, really. The truck driver who picked us up in northern California had needle marks up and down his arms but insisted on taking us over the Golden Gate Bridge, down Van Ness to Market and then to the corner of 19th Street where our friends lived. “I wouldn’t want my kids stuck out on the highway.”
Now, everybody’s afraid to hitchhike and nobody wants to pick one up. The descent into this condition was gradual. After college I moved to a New Mexico village named Placitas and the hitchhiking culture was still viable there, for a time. But as the nature of the community changed from local Hispano land grant peppered with back to the land immigrants, to commuter suburb of Albuquerque, hitchhiking became reduced to picking up only those on the highway from the freeway to the village—still assuming no one who had business in Placitas could be bad, and finally, to only those you knew, who were few and far between because we’d all given it up.
Why did it become unsafe to hitchhike in Placitas? As a microcosm of society in general, one would think that the gentrification of the community would translate to the gentrification of hitchhiking. People with more money and better cars could pick up the less fortunate with impunity and deliver them with grace. Those of us still out on the road could trust those behind the wheel to provide a ride in style. Alas, it doesn’t work that way, of course. As we become more comfortable we become more afraid of those who don’t share our comfort. Those who are still not comfortable aren’t benign college students anymore (college students don’t hitchhike to demonstrations in Washington D.C.; the few who go fly) but those perceived to be the losers who haven’t bought into consumer culture to the extent necessary to avoid any kind of disruption or break down that necessitates hitchhiking. It’s a vicious cycle: the perception becomes reality as those of us who still haven’t completely bought in rarely have to look for a ride, and when we occasionally do, don’t bother hitchhiking because we know they aren’t going to pick us up. So the ones left out there on the highways are what Hank Williams called them, the ones from Life’s Other Side.
I recently picked up a hitchhiker, however, from Picuris Pueblo, hitching a ride from one small village to the next, and I was very glad I did. He asked me if I was coming to the buffalo dance at the pueblo the next day, and then he told me that he had danced in the previous day’s deer dance. He said it was such an overwhelming experience that he couldn’t remember much about it except who was dancing on his left and who was dancing on his right. He didn’t know if there were people watching, he didn’t know how long he danced, he only knew that he danced as a deer would dance and then he ran for his life as the hunters came after him for the kill. He had a big grin on his face throughout this whole story and I then I dropped him off at the post office, where he met another friend and got in his car for the next leg of his journey. The commuters rushing down the highway missed a great story, and missed the opportunity to remember that theirs is not the only way to live.
Solution: Car companies will discontinue the manufacture of any car that doesn’t run on four cylinders and the government will run van taxis, like they do in third world countries that stop and pick up all the people on the street who need a ride, for a minimal fee. They will also run the taxis out on the highways between cities and so there are no more hitchhikers, only passengers.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Capitalism
“If civilization is to go no further than this, it had better not have gone so far: if it does not aim at getting rid of this misery and giving some share in the happiness and dignity of life to all the people that it has created . . . it is simply an organized injustice, a mere instrument for oppression, so much the worse than that which has gone before it, as its pretensions are higher, its slavery subtler, its mastery harder to overthrow, because supported by such a dense mass of commonplace wellbeing and comfort.”
William Morris wrote this in 1880. It could, of course, been written by any of us today. I read this quote of Morris, a British writer and social critic, in The Essential E.P. Thompson, and I’ve also read about Morris, as well as other writers, who railed against what capitalism and the industrial revolution were doing to the people and culture of 18th and 19th century Britain, in Raymond Williams’ book The Country and the City. Historians Williams and Thompson take a look at how the notion of cultural materialism enhances—or detracts from —Marxist economic theory. This is a subject that any of us who were active in the 20th century’s sixties revolution of consciousness had to deal with, whether we were conversant with the terminology “cultural materialism” or just knew, in our guts, that while we were intent on smashing an economic system we also had to be intent on smashing racism, sexism, homophobia, and hierarchy.
Now that it’s the 21st century, it’s both helpful and painful to read the comments of Morris or Samuel Taylor Coleridge or D.H Lawrence, who lament the losses associated with capitalism—the cultivation of our humanity—and its emphasis—the “forcing of all human energy into a competition of mere acquisition.” It’s helpful, of course, because it binds us to these historical figures in a way that ensures a continuum of caring and activism. It’s painful in that we’re still, 200 years later, struggling against the same system that consigned the British laborer to the stultifying slums of London, the African slave to the plantations of American, and the Mexican peasant to las maquiladoras de la frontera.
The fact remains that neither Morris’ literary assault nor the Students for a Democratic Society’s physical assault on the imperial bastions of Britain and the U.S. have done much to rein in the “organized injustice” of capitalism. Its reach is now global, and threatens the last isolated societies that have somehow managed to maintain a semblance of communal or subsistence living. The one revolutionary society we have witnessed over the course of our lives – Cuba – will inevitably transition from its relative isolation and self-determination once Castro is gone. As soon as the U.S. lifts its embargo – which has caused enormous pain and suffering in that country – the exerted economic and political pressures may be too much for Cuba to withstand. Will its fate come down to a power struggle between the U.S. and Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela? It’s hard for most of us in this country to understand what is really happening in Venezuela; all we get are sound bites from the mainstream press and the occasional alternative reports that either glorify or criticize Chavez with a cynicism born of the history of too many Latino strongmen in too many countries with too many ties to empire.
So where does this leave us? The debate between revolutionary and evolutionary change that engaged us for so many years seems largely irrelevant. In his book After Theory Terry Eagleton reminds us “it is one thing to make a revolution, and another to sustain it. “ What is it about this country, established by revolution (elitist as it was) that created the notion of the rugged individualist, the mentality of “pulling oneself up by his or her bootstraps”, so pervasive and so ungovernable? In a pithy few sentences in Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs the mother says to her son, “You don’t identify with people worse off than you are. You make your deals, if you can, with those who have more, because you hope one day to have more yourself. Understand that, she claimed, and you understand America . . . “ Max Weber’s theory, of course, is that it’s the spillover of the individualistic Puritan ethic once the religious asceticism has escaped from the cage: “In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport,” i.e., competition. In his brilliant book Diary of A Bad Year, South African writer J.M. Coetzee, who now lives in Australia, reminds us that it is not just Americans who embrace this philosophy, it’s also true of Australians, who believe they live in a “no-class” society where “energy, hard work, and a belief in one’s self” make us all equal partners in the global market. “If we don’t compete, we will perish.” Americans still set the standard, however, and even European countries that many liberals look to as better models of how to achieve prosperity and enlightened social policies were part of the “coalition of the willing.”
I still believe there is a desire in humankind to live in societies that provide for everyone equally, but our lack of altruism, on any kind of organized level, and our admiration of the accumulation of money, which translates into success and power, are unabashed.
I find myself worrying about Malthusian disasters – mass starvation due to the complete loss of topsoil or the collapse of genetic diversity; global warming that melts the icebergs and raises the sea level whereby New York City and Los Angeles drop off into the ocean ¬– that leave those of us with access to clean water and land to grow food holding the proverbial bag. And it better not be a bag full of greed and competition and built-in obsolescence and material accumulation, or the cycle repeats itself again. I don’t really know if there is such a thing as progress (an upcoming blog called Progress/Enlightenment) but there has got to be a better way to ensure that all of us have access to our material, cultural, and spiritual needs.
William Morris wrote this in 1880. It could, of course, been written by any of us today. I read this quote of Morris, a British writer and social critic, in The Essential E.P. Thompson, and I’ve also read about Morris, as well as other writers, who railed against what capitalism and the industrial revolution were doing to the people and culture of 18th and 19th century Britain, in Raymond Williams’ book The Country and the City. Historians Williams and Thompson take a look at how the notion of cultural materialism enhances—or detracts from —Marxist economic theory. This is a subject that any of us who were active in the 20th century’s sixties revolution of consciousness had to deal with, whether we were conversant with the terminology “cultural materialism” or just knew, in our guts, that while we were intent on smashing an economic system we also had to be intent on smashing racism, sexism, homophobia, and hierarchy.
Now that it’s the 21st century, it’s both helpful and painful to read the comments of Morris or Samuel Taylor Coleridge or D.H Lawrence, who lament the losses associated with capitalism—the cultivation of our humanity—and its emphasis—the “forcing of all human energy into a competition of mere acquisition.” It’s helpful, of course, because it binds us to these historical figures in a way that ensures a continuum of caring and activism. It’s painful in that we’re still, 200 years later, struggling against the same system that consigned the British laborer to the stultifying slums of London, the African slave to the plantations of American, and the Mexican peasant to las maquiladoras de la frontera.
The fact remains that neither Morris’ literary assault nor the Students for a Democratic Society’s physical assault on the imperial bastions of Britain and the U.S. have done much to rein in the “organized injustice” of capitalism. Its reach is now global, and threatens the last isolated societies that have somehow managed to maintain a semblance of communal or subsistence living. The one revolutionary society we have witnessed over the course of our lives – Cuba – will inevitably transition from its relative isolation and self-determination once Castro is gone. As soon as the U.S. lifts its embargo – which has caused enormous pain and suffering in that country – the exerted economic and political pressures may be too much for Cuba to withstand. Will its fate come down to a power struggle between the U.S. and Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela? It’s hard for most of us in this country to understand what is really happening in Venezuela; all we get are sound bites from the mainstream press and the occasional alternative reports that either glorify or criticize Chavez with a cynicism born of the history of too many Latino strongmen in too many countries with too many ties to empire.
So where does this leave us? The debate between revolutionary and evolutionary change that engaged us for so many years seems largely irrelevant. In his book After Theory Terry Eagleton reminds us “it is one thing to make a revolution, and another to sustain it. “ What is it about this country, established by revolution (elitist as it was) that created the notion of the rugged individualist, the mentality of “pulling oneself up by his or her bootstraps”, so pervasive and so ungovernable? In a pithy few sentences in Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs the mother says to her son, “You don’t identify with people worse off than you are. You make your deals, if you can, with those who have more, because you hope one day to have more yourself. Understand that, she claimed, and you understand America . . . “ Max Weber’s theory, of course, is that it’s the spillover of the individualistic Puritan ethic once the religious asceticism has escaped from the cage: “In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport,” i.e., competition. In his brilliant book Diary of A Bad Year, South African writer J.M. Coetzee, who now lives in Australia, reminds us that it is not just Americans who embrace this philosophy, it’s also true of Australians, who believe they live in a “no-class” society where “energy, hard work, and a belief in one’s self” make us all equal partners in the global market. “If we don’t compete, we will perish.” Americans still set the standard, however, and even European countries that many liberals look to as better models of how to achieve prosperity and enlightened social policies were part of the “coalition of the willing.”
I still believe there is a desire in humankind to live in societies that provide for everyone equally, but our lack of altruism, on any kind of organized level, and our admiration of the accumulation of money, which translates into success and power, are unabashed.
I find myself worrying about Malthusian disasters – mass starvation due to the complete loss of topsoil or the collapse of genetic diversity; global warming that melts the icebergs and raises the sea level whereby New York City and Los Angeles drop off into the ocean ¬– that leave those of us with access to clean water and land to grow food holding the proverbial bag. And it better not be a bag full of greed and competition and built-in obsolescence and material accumulation, or the cycle repeats itself again. I don’t really know if there is such a thing as progress (an upcoming blog called Progress/Enlightenment) but there has got to be a better way to ensure that all of us have access to our material, cultural, and spiritual needs.
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