The state (and I don’t mean Georgia) killed Troy Davis last Wednesday, a manifestation of what I call Christian schizophrenia. I could easily be talking about Muslim schizophrenia or Jewish schizophrenia or any number of religious schizophrenias, but right now I’m talking about the good old U.S.A.’s affliction.
People like Jimmy Carter and Reverend Al Sharpton represent one side of the schizophrenic code. They temper the hail and brimstone fervor of an “Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” with the “love thy neighbor as thyself.” They believe there is redemption in good conduct: society, as well as the individual, are responsible for creating an environment in which the human spirit can flourish and do good deeds. The death penalty allows no redemption. The commutation of Davis’ death sentence would have acknowledged his 20 years of self-improvement during his incarceration (or rather his 20 years of torture on death row).
The flip side of the schizophrenic code is represented by folks like Rick Perry, who as governor of Texas has presided over the execution of 235 people. As a fundamentalist Christian he’s definitely a “life for a life” kind of guy: no extenuating circumstances such as societal racism, poverty, or misogyny should ever interfere with the state’s license to kill. This license to kill is equated with God’s will.
Both forms of Christianity conflate justice and religion in their own perverse ways. While I admire many of the liberation theology priests and nuns who have devoted their lives to helping people around the world and who don’t want anybody killed in the name of God, they still believe there is a God to whose will we must submit. An NAACP leader outside the prison, right before Davis’s execution, said, when she heard of a rumored last minute stay, “We thank God, our prayers have been answered.” But then whoops, they decided to execute him after all: God’s will again. Within five minutes God had changed from the benevolent, merciful God of the Carters and Sharptons to the vengeful, unforgiving God of the Perrys. How schizophrenic is that?
I don’t know whether Davis was guilty or innocent, and the people (jury, lawyers, judge, guards, executioner) who participated in his death certainly didn’t know. Only Davis himself knew the truth. That he was put to death by state sanction (something different than the people) is tragic and inhumane. But the really unsettling part of this scenario is that the fundamentalist Christian schizophrenics (and complicity, the “love thy neighbor” schizophrenics) insist that this country was founded on Christian principles (they usually say Judeo-Christian, but that’s just a bone for AIPAC) and that these principles should guide every institution, not just the criminal [in]justice system. Its vengeful absolutism already determines the way many institutions are run: No Child Left Behind dictates that you teach kids to take a test and if they fail that test you punish the school by taking away its funding and firing its teachers. Now they want to punish all the old and sick people who don’t have IRAs, stock portfolios, or private health insurance because there is something sinful about these folks who haven’t achieved the American dream despite what Elizabeth Warren pointed out the other day, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.”
Fundamentalism has been around forever. But the increased fervor to make it the guiding “light” (darkness) of our combined lives when the Enlightenment is 300 years old, postmodernism permeates culture, and every prejudice the Bible holds dear is being smashed to smithereens is testimony to an even more insidious schizophrenia. It’s not endemic to the U.S., but when more than one of our presidential candidates is the face of this affliction it’s time to lock up the crazies instead of the criminals.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Guilty Pleasures
For anyone younger than 55 this posting is going to be in a musical foreign language. For those of us older than 55, it’s going to be a nostalgic tour of guilty pleasure (not the R&B of my Funky Soul blog).
Mark and I acknowledged our guilty pleasures to each other when certain songs came on the oldies station in Albuquerque that we’d listen to in the car when we couldn’t get anything decent on any other stations. I don’t know if other people our age also refer to these songs as guilty pleasures, but they know what I mean. (I have to acknowledge here that our son Max, who is 22, knows all these songs, too; from us or the oldies station, or both?)
Terri, my friend from Santa Fe, originally from Philadelphia, does, too. Although five years younger than me she never misses a beat (or title) when it come to pop music. She must have been listening at age eight. We were going to go camping last weekend up above Chama but it poured rain and I couldn’t find a housesitter who I could possibly ask to clean up my demented dog Sammy’s poop every morning (that’s another blog waiting to be written). So she came up to El Valle and we hung out yakking about this and that, watching the U.S. Open (Serena trash talking the umpire over her penalty), and eating. On Sunday we went for a hike up the canyon and then treated ourselves to brunch at the Sugar Nymphs, Peñasco’s own gourmet restaurant whose owners I sometimes sell produce to and drink a lot of mojitos with.
I can’t remember (my recurring theme) how we got started on guilty pleasures, a term she hadn’t before used but a concept she knew well. I started out admitting that I liked a couple of songs that were definitely pop, not rock, but had catchy enough beats that despite the inane lyrics got my toes tapping. Then she asked, “What else,” and I thought, I’m really going to be embarrassed to admit another guilty pleasure is “Brandi”, by a band called Looking Glass (I had no idea who recorded Brandi, I Googled it as I wrote this, but I bet Mark would have known) about this bar waitress named Brandi who’s in love with a sailor who’s love is the sea, not Brandi. I was just about to admit it when Terri blurted out, “Brandi.” I shot out of my chair and jumped up and down with delight.
When we got home we immediately went to YouTube and started playing all our guilty pleasures. We started querying each other about all those questionable pop/rock icons who actually had a good song or two: Rod Stewart with Maggie May, of course. Cat Stevens? (For those of you who don’t know who Cat Stevens is he started off as kind of a folk rock singer, then became more known for his writing, and finally became Yusuf Islam when he converted.) I knew there was a song of his I liked, and Terri actually had it on iTunes, but the song, The First Cut is the Deepest, was covered by someone else (Rod Stewart, among others, I just Googled that, too). Anyway, this went on and on and segued into other songs we had that the other one had never heard, like Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer singing Redemption Song.
After Terri left I remembered another guilty pleasure and e-mailed her about this particular embarrassment: Lying Eyes by the Eagles. Everybody has probably heard of the Eagles—they’re still out there touring with the same band members they started out with, I think. But Lying Eyes? This doesn’t jive with my criteria that a bad lyric song can only be saved by a good beat, or an edge. It goes: “Late at night the big old house gets lonely, I guess every form of refuge has its price. It breaks her heart to think her love is only given to a man with hands as cold as ice.” Or something like that. But the chorus picks you up and carries you along: “You can’t hide your lying eyes. And your smile is a thin disguise. I thought by now you’d realize, there ain’t no way to hide your lying eyes.”
Ahhhh. It’s just one of those anomalies I have to accept. When I’m in the car, singing “Brandi, you’re a fine girl, what a good wife you would be” at the top of my lungs, you just have to let it go and enjoy your guilty pleasures.
Mark and I acknowledged our guilty pleasures to each other when certain songs came on the oldies station in Albuquerque that we’d listen to in the car when we couldn’t get anything decent on any other stations. I don’t know if other people our age also refer to these songs as guilty pleasures, but they know what I mean. (I have to acknowledge here that our son Max, who is 22, knows all these songs, too; from us or the oldies station, or both?)
Terri, my friend from Santa Fe, originally from Philadelphia, does, too. Although five years younger than me she never misses a beat (or title) when it come to pop music. She must have been listening at age eight. We were going to go camping last weekend up above Chama but it poured rain and I couldn’t find a housesitter who I could possibly ask to clean up my demented dog Sammy’s poop every morning (that’s another blog waiting to be written). So she came up to El Valle and we hung out yakking about this and that, watching the U.S. Open (Serena trash talking the umpire over her penalty), and eating. On Sunday we went for a hike up the canyon and then treated ourselves to brunch at the Sugar Nymphs, Peñasco’s own gourmet restaurant whose owners I sometimes sell produce to and drink a lot of mojitos with.
I can’t remember (my recurring theme) how we got started on guilty pleasures, a term she hadn’t before used but a concept she knew well. I started out admitting that I liked a couple of songs that were definitely pop, not rock, but had catchy enough beats that despite the inane lyrics got my toes tapping. Then she asked, “What else,” and I thought, I’m really going to be embarrassed to admit another guilty pleasure is “Brandi”, by a band called Looking Glass (I had no idea who recorded Brandi, I Googled it as I wrote this, but I bet Mark would have known) about this bar waitress named Brandi who’s in love with a sailor who’s love is the sea, not Brandi. I was just about to admit it when Terri blurted out, “Brandi.” I shot out of my chair and jumped up and down with delight.
When we got home we immediately went to YouTube and started playing all our guilty pleasures. We started querying each other about all those questionable pop/rock icons who actually had a good song or two: Rod Stewart with Maggie May, of course. Cat Stevens? (For those of you who don’t know who Cat Stevens is he started off as kind of a folk rock singer, then became more known for his writing, and finally became Yusuf Islam when he converted.) I knew there was a song of his I liked, and Terri actually had it on iTunes, but the song, The First Cut is the Deepest, was covered by someone else (Rod Stewart, among others, I just Googled that, too). Anyway, this went on and on and segued into other songs we had that the other one had never heard, like Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer singing Redemption Song.
After Terri left I remembered another guilty pleasure and e-mailed her about this particular embarrassment: Lying Eyes by the Eagles. Everybody has probably heard of the Eagles—they’re still out there touring with the same band members they started out with, I think. But Lying Eyes? This doesn’t jive with my criteria that a bad lyric song can only be saved by a good beat, or an edge. It goes: “Late at night the big old house gets lonely, I guess every form of refuge has its price. It breaks her heart to think her love is only given to a man with hands as cold as ice.” Or something like that. But the chorus picks you up and carries you along: “You can’t hide your lying eyes. And your smile is a thin disguise. I thought by now you’d realize, there ain’t no way to hide your lying eyes.”
Ahhhh. It’s just one of those anomalies I have to accept. When I’m in the car, singing “Brandi, you’re a fine girl, what a good wife you would be” at the top of my lungs, you just have to let it go and enjoy your guilty pleasures.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Letter to Elizabeth
Instead of posting a comment to your blog, Elizabeth (elizabethtannen.com/blog), I decided to write you a letter via my blog. In the olden days I would have written you on paper and put it in the mailbox, but in those olden days I wouldn’t have read what you wrote because there were no blogs. So round and round it goes, but as long as we’re still talking, it’s OK with me.
I was 28 a long time ago but I remember it well. It was a time of angst and instability, largely precipitated by the pattern set at Antioch College, which I attended for a short but intense time. We went to school for half the year and spent the other half on co-op jobs around the country, in three or six month rotations: rural New Hampshire, Berkeley, and Santa Fe for me. Even after I left, the pattern continued: Colorado Springs (where I was raised and went back to briefly); Cloudcroft, New Mexico; Bend, Oregon; Albuquerque’s South Valley; and finally (but not lastly) Placitas. My friends from Antioch were all over the place, set in motion just like me. I had several relationships, both going nowhere from the get go, and many flings. These were the days when Okies (corner of University and Central), Rosa’s Cantina (Algodones), and The Golden Inn (on the east side of the Sandias) provided a community of sorts, if drinking, dancing, and having a good old time with a bunch of other students, hippies, and assorted misfits counted as a cohort (I never used that word until Jakob started referring to his PhD class as one).
None of it assuaged my anxiety, which we all seem to share at that age regardless of the time and place. But what I want to say in this letter to you and many others your age who feel disconnected, unsure of where they want to be and with whom, things will settle into place eventually. It may take longer than you’d like it to, particularly now, in the midst of a depression, which our politicians euphemistically call a recession. It’s going to be harder for your generation than it was for mine—fewer ways to slip through the cracks with cheap rents, cheap gas, and an appreciation of the second-hand (it’s all boutique now).
You may end up someplace you never thought you would, and with “someones” instead of someone. A lot of it will be determined by you—what work you end up doing, where you do that work, or where you to want to be instead of where you find work—but a lot of it will be serendipitous (which is a more elegant way of saying a crap shoot). When I think back on how I ended up where I am, in northern New Mexico, in El Valle, I’m amazed. At 28 I’d never heard of the place. And it happened just like I said: some of it willed, choosing time over money (living in rural New Mexico), bad luck (leaving my home in Placitas because of gentrification), and good luck (knowing someone who lived in El Valle). I ended up with the same partner for 34 years, but he had already been married to his high school sweetheart, divorced, and had somehow found his way from Buffalo to Placitas, a route full of serendipity and dumb luck (finding me). You never know where they’ll come from or who they’ll turn out to be, these people you’ll have relationships with. But it will be VERY interesting.
So, it sounds like you’ve had a love-hate relationship with the crazy twenties and are ready to leave them behind and make your life a little more stable, which will hopefully make it a lot less anxious. You’re right that we tend to think of ourselves “on some sort of ascending path” but that the “better future” may indeed be false, particularly now. But I think, relatively speaking, that it will be better, at least on the personal level. Dan Savage founded the It Gets Better web site to let gays know that the social ostracism they suffer in high school or their early twenties will subside, that they will find the homes and relationships and work that most twenty somethings segue into in their thirties.
There will always be something to worry about, regardless of where you live, what you do, and who your family and/or friends may be (and for many folks friends are family). But you are not going to “revert to an older, lesser version of yourself”, regardless of the circumstances (even if it’s where you started out). It’s what you will be doing, who you choose to do it with, both personally and professionally, and how you go about making a home that determine who you are—even if in the end, none of us quite have a handle on exactly who that is. I often think back on all the stuff I did, the people I did it with, what I built and grew and wrote and thought. Someday you will, too. And it will have been a great ride.
I was 28 a long time ago but I remember it well. It was a time of angst and instability, largely precipitated by the pattern set at Antioch College, which I attended for a short but intense time. We went to school for half the year and spent the other half on co-op jobs around the country, in three or six month rotations: rural New Hampshire, Berkeley, and Santa Fe for me. Even after I left, the pattern continued: Colorado Springs (where I was raised and went back to briefly); Cloudcroft, New Mexico; Bend, Oregon; Albuquerque’s South Valley; and finally (but not lastly) Placitas. My friends from Antioch were all over the place, set in motion just like me. I had several relationships, both going nowhere from the get go, and many flings. These were the days when Okies (corner of University and Central), Rosa’s Cantina (Algodones), and The Golden Inn (on the east side of the Sandias) provided a community of sorts, if drinking, dancing, and having a good old time with a bunch of other students, hippies, and assorted misfits counted as a cohort (I never used that word until Jakob started referring to his PhD class as one).
None of it assuaged my anxiety, which we all seem to share at that age regardless of the time and place. But what I want to say in this letter to you and many others your age who feel disconnected, unsure of where they want to be and with whom, things will settle into place eventually. It may take longer than you’d like it to, particularly now, in the midst of a depression, which our politicians euphemistically call a recession. It’s going to be harder for your generation than it was for mine—fewer ways to slip through the cracks with cheap rents, cheap gas, and an appreciation of the second-hand (it’s all boutique now).
You may end up someplace you never thought you would, and with “someones” instead of someone. A lot of it will be determined by you—what work you end up doing, where you do that work, or where you to want to be instead of where you find work—but a lot of it will be serendipitous (which is a more elegant way of saying a crap shoot). When I think back on how I ended up where I am, in northern New Mexico, in El Valle, I’m amazed. At 28 I’d never heard of the place. And it happened just like I said: some of it willed, choosing time over money (living in rural New Mexico), bad luck (leaving my home in Placitas because of gentrification), and good luck (knowing someone who lived in El Valle). I ended up with the same partner for 34 years, but he had already been married to his high school sweetheart, divorced, and had somehow found his way from Buffalo to Placitas, a route full of serendipity and dumb luck (finding me). You never know where they’ll come from or who they’ll turn out to be, these people you’ll have relationships with. But it will be VERY interesting.
So, it sounds like you’ve had a love-hate relationship with the crazy twenties and are ready to leave them behind and make your life a little more stable, which will hopefully make it a lot less anxious. You’re right that we tend to think of ourselves “on some sort of ascending path” but that the “better future” may indeed be false, particularly now. But I think, relatively speaking, that it will be better, at least on the personal level. Dan Savage founded the It Gets Better web site to let gays know that the social ostracism they suffer in high school or their early twenties will subside, that they will find the homes and relationships and work that most twenty somethings segue into in their thirties.
There will always be something to worry about, regardless of where you live, what you do, and who your family and/or friends may be (and for many folks friends are family). But you are not going to “revert to an older, lesser version of yourself”, regardless of the circumstances (even if it’s where you started out). It’s what you will be doing, who you choose to do it with, both personally and professionally, and how you go about making a home that determine who you are—even if in the end, none of us quite have a handle on exactly who that is. I often think back on all the stuff I did, the people I did it with, what I built and grew and wrote and thought. Someday you will, too. And it will have been a great ride.
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