A 65-page Letter

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John Nichols sent me a 65-page letter after he read Unf*#!ing Believable. Laid up with a bad back and unable to work (he usually stays up all night writing and sleeps during the day), he managed to type the single-spaced letter on the ancient computer he uses as a word processor and then got his IT friends to translate it to printable material.

So what did he say in a 65-page letter? Well, first off, he warmed the cockles of my heart by telling me how much he loved the book and that “it is a beautiful, and powerful political and personal work and one of the best I have read in a long time.” But that only took a page or so. The 65 pages came from “much of what touched me so deeply is that you and I have shared many similar experiences in life, and your recounting of these experiences really struck home” and “triggered so many similarities in my own life.”

He then went on to discuss, page after page, these shared loves and experiences. Ten years older than I am he talked about his musical inspirations like Carl Perkins, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Patsy Cline and all the old blues guys who were the genesis of much of the rhythm and blues folks I talk about in the book. He revealed that he actually took guitar lessons with the Reverend Gary Davis in the Bronx one summer. He plays guitar every other Monday with a group of friends in Taos.

A great sports fan, especially baseball, he couldn’t believe that I got so mad watching the Cubs and Indians (because of their mascot, Chief Wahoo) in the 2016 World Series that I turned off the TV (I turned it back on). When I saw him in person to talk about the letter I gave him some grief about his being a Boston Red Sox fan (racist town) and he explained it by referencing his childhood years of listening to their broadcasts on the radio and developing a loyalty. Loyalty came up a lot in the conversation: loyalty to teams (I lost my loyalty to the Lakers during the Kobe Bryant years); friends and family; political allies.

We share a history of journalism and political activism in northern New Mexico communities along with a love of the landscape that nurtures them. In the early 1970s I was a staff writer at the alternative rag Seer’s Catalog; John drew political cartoons for the paper. He was a contributor to the “muckraking journal” The New Mexico Review and helped Betita Martinez and Rini Templeton put out the Chicano movement newspaper El Grito del Norte. Arriving later in el norte, I regret never getting to meet Betita and Rini, but I did follow in their footsteps with my own radical rag La Jicarita News. We used to take photos of folks “reading La Jicarita” for promotion: Here’s John.

When we weren’t writing John and I were outdoors, he fly-fishing the Rio Grande, bird hunting, hiking, and snowshoeing; me, hiking, backpacking, cross-country skiing, downhill skiing. I put my love of the outdoors to financial use and published five guidebooks over the years while John found a more aesthetic value in publishing photography books (his latest, My Heart Belongs to Nature, was published this year). His roaming centered around his home in Taos County: the sagebrush mesas on the west side of the Rio Grande; the Wild and Scenic River canyon north of Questa; the Williams Lake/Wheeler Peak mountain terrain that he hiked and snowshoed. My ramblings took me further afield, throughout the vast Pecos Wilderness where I now live, across the Sandia and Manzano Mountains where I used to live, and all the places I explored for the guidebooks I wrote: San Pedro Parks Wilderness; Wheeler Peak and Columbine Hondo; cross-country skiing the Chama yurts; the Jemez Mountains; just about everywhere in northern New Mexico.

I learned about his health travails: asthma; a heart condition that led to open heart surgery in the 1990s; an inner ear condition that leaves him off balance; his struggles to get health insurance. About the only time he had it was when he worked in the movie industry writing screenplays and was covered under the Writer’s Guild. I learned a lot about that part of his career, too: the two years he was involved with Robert Redford’s filming of The Milagro Beanfield War that “almost killed me.”

He talked about capitalism, socialism, democracy, global domination, and conspicuous consumption. He’s about as close as there is to a Luddite: he’s not on the Internet (we communicate via the telephone and snail-mail); he lives in a three room adobe house near the Plaza; he drives a decades old truck; we share music via CDs as he has no iPod, no iPhone, no real computer (a word processor). He told stories about learning how to irrigate, grow gardens, raise animals and fix his first house in Ranchitos, helped and hindered by his neighbors who’d been doing it for centuries. He talked about the books we’d both read, the books he’s written, and the books I’ve written. And he talked about death. He lost his mother at age two and he almost died during the open-heart surgery.

When Mark died in 2010 John sent me two panoramas he’d constructed from photographs of the Lake Fork Peak area on the west side of Williams Lake, where he spent many days without seeing another soul. They highlight the peaks that ring the valley: Frazer, Wheeler, Simpson, Old Mike, Spoon Mountain, Lake Fork Peak. He wrote that my book, Day Hikes in the Taos Area, first guided him up Wheeler Peak. I have many chapters in Unf*#!ing Believable called “Diary of a Bad Year” that mostly talk about the 18 months Mark lived with the death sentence of pancreatic cancer. In his letter John says, “your descriptions of Mark dying break my heart and they are beautiful.” He’s working on a book about the “short life and quick death of my mom called Goodbye Monique.”

There was much more that was said in those 65 pages but this gives you an idea of the depth and breadth of John’s letter. He ended it like this: “As always, hasta la victoria, siempre. Or, as I remember Betita Martinez used to say, ‘Adelante, siempre! P’atras, nunca?’”

#MeToo Part 2

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I’ve been reading and thinking about the #MeToo movement since I posted my #MeToo blog on November 4. While the intent of the movement is to encourage women to speak up about sexual harassment and abuse in all facets of our lives as an attack on systemic misogyny, it has quickly become complicated by—surprise—political co-option, which like everything else, brings us both good and bad fallout.

The political pivoting point appears to be Senator Al Franken. In a December 7 article in The New Yorker journalist Masha Gessen laid out what she sees as the moral divide between the party Franken belongs to and the party of Roy Moore, candidate for senator from Alabama accused of pedophilia. She points out that Moore is just an example of that’s party’s depravity, exhibited in full force by the tax cut bill, the racist travel ban, the pending Medicare and Medicaid cuts, and the support of an admitted harasser in the Oval Office.

Forced to resign by the Dems, Franken became their sacrificial lamb, or as conservative leaning Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker put it, “it became clear that Franken’s job was to fall on his sword so Democrats could seize the high ground surrendered by Republicans.” Franken, who wanted to appear before the Senate ethics committee to explain his actions (he denies some of the accusations, has apologized for others, and says he “remembers things differently” on others), was forced out and denied due process.  

But Gessen takes the discussion beyond the argument over the moral divide: “The case of Franken makes it all that much more clear that this conversation is, in fact, about sex, not about power, violence, or illegal acts. The accusations against him, which involve groping and forcible kissing, arguably fall into the emergent, undefined, and most likely undefinable category of ‘sexual misconduct.’ Put more simply, Franken stands accused of acting repeatedly like a jerk, and he denies that he acted this way. The entire sequence of events, from the initial accusations to Franken’s resignation, is based on the premise that Americans, as a society, or at least half of a society, should be policing non-criminal behavior related to sex.”

The far right provocateurs are jumping into the sex policing business as well. As Rebecca Solnit writes in a December 10 Guardian article,  Mike Cernovitch, the alt-right conspiracy theorist, tried to get an MSNBC (left leaning) contributor fired over an anti-rape joke about Roman Polanski that Cernovitch didn’t get—or pretended not to get. Solnit points out, “if we’re going to fire everyone who has made a non-feminist remark we’re pretty much going to clear all the offices everywhere of almost every man and quite a few women,” and “when it comes to men in the legislative branch, they’re nearly all guilty of some form of sexual harassment, inappropriate behavior, insensitive remarks, and so forth. I suspect a high percentage of powerful heterosexual men in general are guilty of at least Franken’s degree of denigration of individual women, and if such things are grounds for dismissal, fairness would demand we dismiss them all.” (Former Lieutenant Governor Diane Denish just posted an opinion piece about legislator Michael Padilla, saying the allegations against him 12 years ago were heard and settled and now he’s being pushed out of his run for Lt. Gov. after no further accusations have been made.) 

So we become bogged down in who is guiltier than whom, who is going to decide that degree of guilt, and what is the punishment?  As misogyny exists in every aspect of our society, so should due process. That men like Franken are mostly seen as allies to the liberal cause and supportive of their female staff and fellow workers, so, too, should they abandon their support of positions that result in reinforcing systemic misogyny: Zionism, the American war machine, nuclear proliferation, etc.

Longtime feminist Robin Morgan addresses this disconnect in her blog post from December 4,  but from a slightly different perspective: “To prioritize a record of action on progressive issues—whether for racial equality, economic justice, environmental imperatives, peace activism, or any other aspect of forward-thinking politics, even including being supportive of feminism in the abstract—while abusing real women in the specific, sends what message? It sends the message that the female half of humanity somehow isn’t affected by racial inequality, economic injustice, environmental imperatives, war, and the rest—or else is affected only by those issues, which are important because they also affect men.”

As I wrote in #MeToo Part 1 I know the difference between rape and misconduct. It all has to go. As we wade through this difficult terrain, though, let’s prevent its hijacking by making sure we keep focused on never letting anyone treat us as less than a fully realized human being just as we treat them the same way.

James Baldwin and the Legacy of Racism

I don’t remember how old I was—maybe twelve or thirteen—when I read James Baldwin’s Another Country and my suspicion about what sexual intercourse meant was confirmed. If I didn’t know about sex I was too young to read Baldwin and come away with an understanding of American racism, but throughout the rest of my life he’s schooled me in what it means to be dehumanized and what it takes to reclaim that humanity.

I was 18 when Martin Luther King was assassinated and I remember attending a memorial service at the Broadmoor, of all places: the resort outside Colorado Springs that hosts a theater, skating rink, ski area (at least it did at the time), and other assorted recreational activities for the rich. King’s activism, deeply rooted in Christian charity, was palatable for the mainstream until he started talking about how militarism and poverty went hand in hand in an imperial state. I didn’t read Malcolm X until college, when his argument against integration forced activists to take sides: accept the message of King’s civil rights movement, so closely aligned with religious faith, or replace integration with separation and black nationalism, which would inspire the formation of the black power movement.

Baldwin, who published Notes of a Native Son in 1955, before this conflict between King and Malcolm X informed the dialog, examined a conflict within his own psyche that had to be  addressed in order to make his way in the world or be in a position to choose a side:

“It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair.” (“Notes of a Native Son”)

Baldwin’s peripatetic life was testimony to this conflict, but after reading a new book by Jules Farber, James Baldwin: escape from America, exile in Provence, about Baldwin’s life in the French village of Saint-Paul de Vence in his later years, I felt a great sense of relief to know that he enjoyed the success, companionship, comfort, intellectual stimulation, and safety that every human being deserves. While not immune to local French racism, his world was so expansive, so full of life and love that he was safe from the American racism that might have denied all of it.

That racism is what helped elect Donald Trump. It’s not the defining quality in everyone who voted for him but it’s the factor that keeps his base engaged when confronted with behavior that many of them find embarrassing or even intolerable. I recently heard an interview on the radio with a reporter talking with Trump supporters in a former steel town in Pennsylvania. This is obviously a place where the loss of jobs and the resulting economic desperation he exploited would explain his win, and many of the interviewees were former steel workers who were either unemployed or working low wage jobs.  Yet every single one of those interviewed engaged in some sort of racial slur, whether it was about “illegal aliens” taking jobs or those “NFL N-word” players taking a knee.

Baldwin understood the stranglehold of white supremacy: “At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself. And the history of this problem can be reduced to the means used by Americans—lynch law and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and concession—either to come to terms with this necessity, or to find a way around it, or (most usually) to find a way of doing both things at once.”

So this problem continues to play out in the election of Donald Trump and the resurgence of white supremacy groups ready to unmask themselves and take to the streets. But Baldwin sees that despite “the terrorization which the Negro in America endured and endures . . . despite the cruel and totally inescapable ambivalence of his status in this country, the battle for his identity has long ago been won. . . . It remains for him to fashion out of his experience that which will give him sustenance, and a voice.”

Many of those voices were heard in the local elections last week in various states throughout the country. Those voices are being heard from Black Lives Matter and other minority groups whose activism will put to rest Mark Lilla and his ilk who argue that “identity liberalism has failed.” Donna Brazile verified what we already knew, that the Democratic primary was rigged for Hilary. As I said in my La Jicarita post of September 11, “We’re not going back. The resistance is already here, in full force, in all its diversity, fomented at the community level where folks are making decisions based on circumstances and need. The focus is not on conversion of the racists and xenophobes and fundamentalists who will no doubt always be with us until the structure that supports these reactionary beliefs is relegated to the dustbin of history. The assault on that structure lies in minority emancipation, the emergence of a fully realized multicultural society, demilitarization, and economic equality.”

The last sentence of Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village” is: “The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.”

#MeToo

I refrained from participating in the #MeToo response to sexual harassment and assault until I could speak with my two sons about what happened to me in my early twenties. On a trip to Mexico with my mother a young Mexican man raped me at knifepoint on a beach in San Blas. We knew there was little hope of an arrest so we left and came back to the states, where over the years the only ones I told about the rape were Mark, my partner of 34 years, and a few friends when the subject of abuse came up.

I also refrained from participating in the #MeToo response until I could write a more complete account of my life in northern New Mexico, where I’ve lived most of my adult life. Here, in these rural villages and former land grant commons, where a cultural legacy of machismo power remains extant, I experienced a more complex—and positive—relationship with Anglo, Pueblo, and Indo-Hispano men.

But before I talk about these relationships, I want to address how complicated they are by the struggles all of us deal with establishing even our consensual romantic and sexual relationships regardless of whether we’re women, men, straight, lesbian, gay, or transgender. I came of age in the late sixties and seventies during the sexual revolution spurred by the loosening of middle-class morality and feminist assertion. I think most of us would concur this was liberating, terrifying, and not without residual trauma. So we headed out into a world forming relationships that often imitated the status quo in a search for safety or headed into the unknown where the struggles for equality often led to disappointment and even trauma. Some of us were able to find a middle ground where we continued to work through relational power structures within a relatively secure family unit.

Because of my generational and familial experience I was hyper aware of how I was treated in the world. That alertness was coupled with a life lived mostly outside the mainstream: no career path in a hierarchical system where women were often susceptible to abuse. For the most part self-employed as writers and publishers, Mark and I never had bosses and built a house without a crew. We socialized with like-minded alternative generation house builders and workers, where any relationships were consensual, if not sometimes confused.

That’s not to say I wasn’t exposed to abusive environments. When I worked as a seasonal employee for the Forest Service in my early twenties it was mostly as a fire lookout, alone in the tower with my dogs and various lovers (including Mark). Women who worked on the fire crews were often subject to sexual harassment. I not only avoided that kind of work because of the hot, dirty conditions it entailed but because of what I knew about its record of abuse.

Mark and I became involved in community organizing in both Placitas, where we lived for 20 years, and El Valle, where I’ve now been for over 25. As land grant communities surrounded by national forests, both villages were forced to deal not only with the United States Forest Service and its management plans but with real estate developers, county and state governments and regulators, and urban based environmental groups whose environmentalism often differed from that of land based activists. I formed many relationships with activists from both the Hispano land grant communities and Native American pueblos that were both professional and often personal (dancing at the Chamisa Lounge in Española was a favorite recreation). I never experienced or witnessed any sexual harassment or abuse. As we organized over many years we were also thrown together with numerous bureaucrats in hundreds of meetings, negotiations, and field trips. While the bureaucrats may not have liked me much, I never experienced, or witnessed, sexual harassment in these encounters.

These were situations that required the good faith necessary to achieve goals or negotiate compromise. They were also the purview of activists who brooked no bullshit, and when they did break down in discord, it was over conflicting principles and purpose. To use one’s power abusively towards the person bearing the message would have rendered everything pointless.

I don’t doubt for a minute that other women activists have been in uncomfortable or compromising situations. I suspect that like me, however, the nature of our work has created an environment less likely to tolerate the abuse prevalent in a hierarchical work force. Because of shared values and long-term egalitarian relationships with my colleagues and neighbors, hyper vigilance, and a lot of luck, I’ve been able to move far beyond a terrible abuse that happened many years ago.

I just read what Sarah Shulman posted on Facebook, and it struck home:

“A person's pain can be heard and they can be held and asked what they need. They can be validated as being in pain, their suffering can be recognized.

“At the same time—simultaneously—we can also look at the event(s) that they believe to be the source of that pain in the context of their whole lives. Because, two people can have the same experience and one can be devastated for life and the other can be "oh well", because sometimes it is not the event itself that has the inherent meaning, but the histories and characters and expectations and biologies (and other factors) that each person brings to it.”

Just Trying to Watch the Game

God, I just wanted to watch game 5 of the world series even though I don’t really follow baseball anymore and I don’t know who any of these players are (although I learned fast about the red head) and here comes George H.W. Bush, the fanny grabber, and George W. Bush, the war criminal, throwing out the first pitch. Last year we had to stomach the Cleveland Indians with their racist logo but the series was redeemed with a last minute win by the underdog Cubs and everyone was ecstatic.

What’s going to redeem this series? I used to watch with great anticipation who was going to sing the national anthem at the world series and the NBA playoffs cuz they were often great. Who can forget Marvin Gaye crooning at the 2006 NBA All-Star game, or all the times Robert Merrill sang at the Yankees’ games? Or Roseanne Barr pissing everyone off by scratching her crotch at the 1990 games? Not only has this series provided a lackluster lineup, but with NFL players taking a knee or turning their backs in protest, what we got was the sight of all the Dodgers and Astros with their hats over their hearts.

Was anybody talking about the fact that baseball players, unlike so many the NFL and NBA players like LaBron James and Steph Curry, were standing there, silent? Well, no, of course, because they’re almost all white. Where are all the black and Latino players? Then I wanted to know if anyone was talking about their absence so I went online and looked at what Dave Zirin had to say. He’s the host of the podcast the Edge of Sports and a columnist for The Nation. I didn’t find anything specifically about this year’s series, but in an article about the 2015 world series Zirin had this to say: “Here is that pitiless mirror baseball holds up: The National Pastime has become perhaps our clearest cultural reflection of how globalization, de-industrialization, and the subsequent gentrified looting of urban America have wrung so many US cities dry. Baseball, with its need for leagues, coaching, equipment, and players has suffered more than any other urban endeavor. This game that was once a cohesive glue, a “great teacher” of integration and the values of immigration, should never be a symbol of what divides us, but this is where we are. At least within the borders of the continental United States, baseball has, tragically, become the new lacrosse.”

But what really got me was his link to Chris Rock’s explanation of why there aren't any black players. You have to watch this: 

I hope all you stalwart fans enjoyed game 5, which sounds like it was pretty crazy, if way too long at over 5 hours. I’ll check out who’s singing the national anthem on Tuesday, but I’m not expecting Gil Scott Heron or Public Enemy.

Addendum: Why the fuck are they choosing the police to sing the national anthem??!! Three games that I counted and I may have missed some.

A Horrible Human Being

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The U.S. Electoral College chose a president in 2016 who is a horrible human being. His main motivation in running for president was opportunism. His insecurities manifest in bullying and power plays. He treats women like sexual objects and second-class citizens. He thinks the police aren’t violent enough. He and his father discriminated against people of color in their real estate deals. He is homophobic. He is stunningly ignorant and inarticulate. He doesn’t know what the word empathy means.

That almost 62 million people voted for this pathetic person can’t be ignored. What it says about America can’t be ignored. His constituencies have been scrutinized, analyzed, dissected, and dialected (I made up a new word form) by journalists, pundits, academics, liberals, and radicals until there aren’t many fingers left to point. As I said in a La Jicarita posting, if the white evangelicals “can literally believe in the Bible they can easily believe in Trump.”  Rich Republicans have every reason to vote for someone who represents the interests of the 1%. Many rust belt former Democrats were voting against Hilary Clinton.

But it’s folks in rural America I want to talk about here. This demographic obviously spills over into the evangelical and the job-loss categories, but has consistently been a conservative stronghold in American politics, a bulwark against the elitist urbanites and coastal liberals who they perceive as the “other.” Already members of the Republican Party, who else would they vote for? But the niggling question keeps getting asked, why do they continue to vote against their own self-interest?

I’ve lived in a rural area my entire adult life, but the distinguishing factor in my rural experience is color: the Hispano and Native American cultures of northern New Mexico are a very distinct demographic from the white, rural residents of the Midwest or the south. They may no less safeguard a land-based livelihood, a culture based on traditional family ties, and a certain insularity than the folks in the white, rural U.S., but because they are brown they are also the “other”—to white America in general. They have lived with discrimination, marginalization, and exploitation as colonial subjects of white America since the Europeans arrived.

Trump presented himself as the swamp cleaner and the man of the people who would make America great again. The brown people of northern New Mexico knew he meant “better for white people.” They’ve lived with broken promises and lies since the Spanish Conquest and the U.S. invasion. Unfortunately, they’ve also seen it in their own leaders and politicians, who established patrón systems to continue the exploitation. But in the community organizing in which I’ve been involved, their anger and activism is turned toward the exploiters. White Americans continue to support Trump because he keeps their anger directed at the exploited. The underpinning racism in this country cannot be ignored.

How do we combat that racism, which not only Trump embodies but the libertarian oligarchs like the Koch brothers support with their millions of dollars and the opportunistic Republican congressional majority embed in policy and law? The resistance is already there, in full force, and the focus is not on the conversion of the racists and xenophobes and evangelicals who will no doubt always be with us. The resistance lies in minority emancipation and the emergence of a fully realized multicultural society. If the Democratic Party decides to represent this movement it will survive and morph into something akin to what we see in other, more progressive societies in Europe. With or without the Dems, however, the movement continues towards inclusion and equality and against the bigots: we outnumber them, our young people will replace them, and eventually (though probably not in my lifetime), the capitalist system will implode.

Your Book That No One Reads

“In general, I try to be very honest in my memoirs. If I lose a few friendships, so what? On the other hand, I sometimes say the best way to keep a secret is to publish it, since no one reads it. My books aren’t indexed. So anyone who wants to know what I wrote about him has to read the whole thing.”

That’s Edmund White. I read this quip shortly after I published my memoir, Culture Clash: Environmental Politics in New Mexico Communities. It’s only kind of a memoir, really more of a political analysis of what went on in the 1990s over control of natural resources in the land based communities of northern New Mexico. It qualifies as a memoir, I guess, because I was not only a journalist covering these events but an activist who lived in the communities and played a role as the battles ensued.

 Unlike White, however, I didn’t lose any friends over what I said in the book—I only went after enemies—but my opinion of them went south when I realized his second point, that they weren’t going to read the book anyway. I had to nag my kids to read it (to his credit, one of them had a long conversation/critique with me about it). One of my closest friends apparently read it but then never said a word about it to me until I nagged her, too. Another one, whose book I was helping edit, has obviously never read it. Several others, whom I informed that it was coming out, never asked me about it again.

Then I published another book called Stories From Life’s Other Side: People Living on the Margins of Modern Day Society. I wrote these stories over many years as I encountered the characters who gave birth to these tales of struggle, grit, and acceptance. Same story.

So does this indicate that people don’t read or that people don’t know how to be friends or that everybody is so self-involved that you can’t really parse any meaning?

Yes, some of my friends and colleagues did read the books: several of them gave them good reviews in Taos Friction, La Jicarita, and Enchantment and several others told me they really enjoyed reading them (including John Nichols and Lucy Lippard). My thanks to all of you.

So what do I do now? Work on another book that no one is going to read?