For the past three weeks I’ve been dealing with my mother-in-law’s lifetime possessions, the story of her deliberate accumulation of things that become, to the successors, “stuff.” It was all acquired during the course of forty years in the same house in Buffalo, then ten in Santa Fe. I’ve tried to be respectful of what to her were treasures, not stuff, sending the china (I knew her for 34 years and I don’t remember ever eating off it), crystal, antique chairs and dresser off to the consignment store, gifts of art or pottery or jewelry back to those who gave them, especially cherished things to friends, books to the library, and much, much more to St. Vincent de Paul.
My mother-in-law, an immigrant from Poland whose family came to New York when she was six, grew up desperately poor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She told us stories of getting thrown out of her family’s apartment for unpaid rent, carrying their belongings down the street in a wheelbarrow. One of her siblings was killed in World War II; an older half brother became a successful businessman; her younger brother a professor at New York University; and she, after twenty years of secretarial work, went to college and earned a master’s degree in social work. She and my father-in-law, also a social worker who headed a United Fund agency in Buffalo, became solidly middle class and enjoyed a fully pensioned retirement—fueled by a booming stock market—of world travel and portfolio security.
They were also of the generation that bought Dalton china settings for twelve on a trip to England, Waterford crystal at the factory in Ireland, Tibetan thangkas in India, gold jewelry from around the world, pueblo pottery and turquoise jewelry in New Mexico, and art from a sophisticated group of Buffalo painters with whom they socialized.
But what really got me, going through the stuff, was the thought of my own children someday going through mine. What do I have that makes me so anxious? A set of red dishes my mother-in-law bought me for my fiftieth birthday? My clothes, mostly acquired at thrift stores? The art gives me pause, but they can give Terri’s paintings back to her, if she outlives me (or keep them, of course), and they took some of Mark’s work after he died. The John Wengers will probably find their way to those who knew him.
What seems to be upsetting me are the floor to ceiling shelves with books, that, just like the china, nobody wants. James Woods, in a recent New Yorker article, wrote about inventorying his father-in-law’s library in upstate New York and finding out that “nobody really wants hundreds or thousands of old books.” I may not have 400 books on the Byzantine Empire, but I have, due to Mark’s love of him, every book ever written by or about Jack Kerouac; every beat poet ever published; every 18th and 19th century English novel ever written (I know that’s an exaggeration: let’s arrogantly say every “important” English novel ever written); political philosophy from the Greeks through the Enlightenment to Karl Marx and the poststructuralists; and 20th century paperback novels that everyone else has, too. Mark already sold the first editions and collectors’ items to folks like Nicholas Potter (secondhand bookstore owner in Santa Fe) of whom there are fewer and fewer in business. My kids will want only a select few, just as I wanted only a select few of my mother-in-law’s. Even if the iPad and the Kindle don’t destroy the book business altogether, nobody is going to want my “old books.”
When I don’t have anything of interest borrowed from a friend or checked out from the library, I go to my shelves and find stuff, like this incredible passage from George Elliot’s Mill on the Floss, which I’ve owned for 20 years but never before read:
“I will not believe unproved evil of you: my lips shall not utter it; my ears shall be closed against it. I, too, am an erring mortal, liable to stumble, apt to come short of my most earnest efforts. Your lot has been harder than mine, your temptation greater. Let us help each other to stand and walk without more falling—to have done this would have demanded courage, deep pity, self-knowledge, generous trust—would have demanded a mind that tasted no piquancy in evil-speaking that felt no self-exaltation in condemning, that cheated itself with no large words into the belief that life can have any moral end, any high religion, which excludes the striving after perfect truth, justice, and love towards the individual men and women who come across our own path.”
How can you not stop and marvel at a passage like that. It speaks directly to my post-Marxist humanist pragmatic self (see eponymous blog post), which is tied directly to all these books on my shelf that no one but me wants. While I’m not quite ready to let them go, not ready to consign them to “stuff,” I think it’s time to start culling: slowly, carefully, selectively (based on some criteria I’ve yet to determine). That, instead of an estate, will be my gift to my children: one small shelf of books when it’s my time to go.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Diary of a Bad Year: The End
This will be my last installment under the heading Diary of a Bad Year (two bad years, actually). It is signified by the death of Mark’s mother, from whom he was estranged when he died last year, on November 27. During this last year of her life we never discussed this estrangement, nor did we discuss anything that would force us into a place I did not want to go.
That being said, as she began to decline I did whatever I could to help, eventually moving her out of her house into a fairly nice residential facility, an “independent living” apartment. But once she made the physical move she essentially gave up: her increased dependency and loss of “control”, something she had hoarded all her life to compensate for a bad beginning, shut her down psychologically, emotionally, and physically. Her decline was dramatic: within three weeks of the move she required 24-hour care, and a week later she died.
Dealing first with Mark’s death, and now hers, has forced me to face my own mortality, which I’ve written about previously in other Diary of a Bad Year blog posts. But it has also forced me to think about not just the fact that I will die but how I will die. Not surprisingly, this is a topic that doesn’t generate much discussion in our youth obsessed society, but as we continue to live longer, buoyed by miracle drugs and interventions that may extend our life span but render us mentality and physically bereft, we better start doing some serious talking.
The so-called Death Panels that were a part of Obama’s health care reform package were quickly scuttled after that nomenclature stuck. In some more enlightened European countries there can at least be a discussion between the patient, family, and physician about “end of life” wishes, which is much more substantive than the health care directives we sign in this country saying we don’t want to be resuscitated if we’re already dying of cancer or heart disease. They don’t say anything about what our choices might be if we’re dying of old age and are so infirm that staying alive is cruel and unusual punishment. And the medical interventions that have gotten us to that state are also forms of cruel and unusual punishment. Two years ago I watched my beloved amigo y buen vecino slowly die of complications from diabetes, a stroke, and finally colon cancer. The last six months of his ordeal were in the hospital, where he was kept alive by extraordinary means, until finally he came home and said, “Ya basta, I’m tired and I’m not going back.”
While he had the wherewithal and presence of mind to refuse more hospitalization, that doesn’t really speak to the problem of those who are old and infirm and are ready to die before their bodies actually give out. There was a story in the newspaper the other day about a couple, in their nineties, who decided to stop eating and drinking because, like my neighbor, they’d simply had enough. They were kicked out of their retirement facility for taking this action. Let’s penalize those who actually make a decision to exercise choice, as opposed to default, which drains their—and everyone who loves them—physical, emotional, and yes, financial well being (the focus of Medicare on medical intervention rather than long term care is another story).
What about those who suffer from incipient Alzheimer’s, who are able to see what the future holds and don’t want to go there? What choices do these folks have who want to be the person they are instead of a person who will be unrecognizable to family and friends? Some would argue that as Alzheimer’s progresses you are unaware of the loss of identity, that it is those around you who do the losing, so that makes it OK. I don’t want my children to lose me. I’m their mother, the person with whom they share their most intimate thoughts, worries, and aspirations (caveat: I know there are tons of things they don’t tell me because it’s none of my business), but I am also a person they see in a larger context defined by my work, the way I choose to live, and how I treat them. When Mark’s mother was dying, what she talked about was not the present, her loss of control, what she suffered, or even those of us who were with her. She talked about her life when she was young, her parents, her brother who died in World War II, her youngest brother who she essentially raised, and her life with her husband, who died five years before her.
The image of the native Inuit putting the old person who can no longer contribute to society out on the ice floe remains very vivid to my generation. That is obviously not an option for today’s society (as well as the fact that there may not be many ice floes to put them on). So what are we supposed to do? I don’t have the answer, but if we can’t even have a conversation about it without a Death Panel label we are, as individuals, and as a society, complicit in what often amounts to torture.
That being said, as she began to decline I did whatever I could to help, eventually moving her out of her house into a fairly nice residential facility, an “independent living” apartment. But once she made the physical move she essentially gave up: her increased dependency and loss of “control”, something she had hoarded all her life to compensate for a bad beginning, shut her down psychologically, emotionally, and physically. Her decline was dramatic: within three weeks of the move she required 24-hour care, and a week later she died.
Dealing first with Mark’s death, and now hers, has forced me to face my own mortality, which I’ve written about previously in other Diary of a Bad Year blog posts. But it has also forced me to think about not just the fact that I will die but how I will die. Not surprisingly, this is a topic that doesn’t generate much discussion in our youth obsessed society, but as we continue to live longer, buoyed by miracle drugs and interventions that may extend our life span but render us mentality and physically bereft, we better start doing some serious talking.
The so-called Death Panels that were a part of Obama’s health care reform package were quickly scuttled after that nomenclature stuck. In some more enlightened European countries there can at least be a discussion between the patient, family, and physician about “end of life” wishes, which is much more substantive than the health care directives we sign in this country saying we don’t want to be resuscitated if we’re already dying of cancer or heart disease. They don’t say anything about what our choices might be if we’re dying of old age and are so infirm that staying alive is cruel and unusual punishment. And the medical interventions that have gotten us to that state are also forms of cruel and unusual punishment. Two years ago I watched my beloved amigo y buen vecino slowly die of complications from diabetes, a stroke, and finally colon cancer. The last six months of his ordeal were in the hospital, where he was kept alive by extraordinary means, until finally he came home and said, “Ya basta, I’m tired and I’m not going back.”
While he had the wherewithal and presence of mind to refuse more hospitalization, that doesn’t really speak to the problem of those who are old and infirm and are ready to die before their bodies actually give out. There was a story in the newspaper the other day about a couple, in their nineties, who decided to stop eating and drinking because, like my neighbor, they’d simply had enough. They were kicked out of their retirement facility for taking this action. Let’s penalize those who actually make a decision to exercise choice, as opposed to default, which drains their—and everyone who loves them—physical, emotional, and yes, financial well being (the focus of Medicare on medical intervention rather than long term care is another story).
What about those who suffer from incipient Alzheimer’s, who are able to see what the future holds and don’t want to go there? What choices do these folks have who want to be the person they are instead of a person who will be unrecognizable to family and friends? Some would argue that as Alzheimer’s progresses you are unaware of the loss of identity, that it is those around you who do the losing, so that makes it OK. I don’t want my children to lose me. I’m their mother, the person with whom they share their most intimate thoughts, worries, and aspirations (caveat: I know there are tons of things they don’t tell me because it’s none of my business), but I am also a person they see in a larger context defined by my work, the way I choose to live, and how I treat them. When Mark’s mother was dying, what she talked about was not the present, her loss of control, what she suffered, or even those of us who were with her. She talked about her life when she was young, her parents, her brother who died in World War II, her youngest brother who she essentially raised, and her life with her husband, who died five years before her.
The image of the native Inuit putting the old person who can no longer contribute to society out on the ice floe remains very vivid to my generation. That is obviously not an option for today’s society (as well as the fact that there may not be many ice floes to put them on). So what are we supposed to do? I don’t have the answer, but if we can’t even have a conversation about it without a Death Panel label we are, as individuals, and as a society, complicit in what often amounts to torture.
Friday, October 28, 2011
When You Got Nothing You Got Nothing To Lose
Bob Dylan’s iconic words carry several meanings. To those of us who decided (with the luxury of a middle class background) to live as leanly as possible, the meaning is literal: if you’re not part of the system, with a mortgage and credit card debt, when the system collapses you haven’t lost much. The other meaning, that when you’re poor and struggling and the system offers you nothing in the way of rising out of that poverty, you’re already lost.
Some of the folks who started Occupy Wall Street offer a third meaning. Many of them appear to be from recently achieved middle class homes—upward mobility from working class or minority assimilation—and aspire to professional work and home ownership—a piece of the American pie—albeit with a more sophisticated understanding of how that lifestyle is supported both economically and politically. Then they find out there aren’t any jobs doing what they’ve been trained to do, they can’t afford mortgage loans (and no one is building anything affordable anyway) because they’re deeply in debt from college loans. So what better way to spend the day than in the street with their cohort.
They are joined by an interesting array of other protestors, from all walks of life, including the working poor, college professors, union organizers, activists, and retirees. But the core group of folks, even with their different spin on “you got nothing to lose”, are the direct descendents of the protestors who were in the streets during the Vietnam war: people young enough and unencumbered enough to stay out there in the park day and night while a movement is created. Those of us who were in Washington D.C., Kent State, and every other city across the U.S. in the late sixties and early seventies keep saying to ourselves, “I wish I could be in Liberty Park, too.” But there’s the mother who requires 24-hour care, the house that needs to be ready for winter, the woodpile that needs to be split, and the animals that need to be fed and cared for.
The anti-war movement addressed all things that sustain a war of occupation: the imperialism of the war mongers, the military industrial complex, and the race and class distinctions that sent a disproportionate number of young men and women of color and low economic status to be killed. These power structures are still with us, and I suspect there’s plenty of conversation about them among the Occupy Wall Street protestors. But the overriding focus on the growing economic inequality illuminates Wall Street’s free market fetishism, which eludes the control of even the weakest regulatory oversight and defines an even more insidious hegemony than the war mongering political and corporate establishment we’ve been fighting forever.
I mentioned in a previous blog posting the conversation I had with a young friend who didn’t want to hear about what went on in the sixties, that the social network has supplanted the need for organizing in the streets. I’m sure all this twittering and tweeting is a lot less cumbersome than printing fliers on ditto machines, but there’s nothing like meeting your compadres face to face in a public space with a common sense of purpose. Maybe this time around, with their general assemblies, their consensus building skills, and the message on the wall “It’s the system, stupid,” they’ll avoid some of the internecine struggles that tore the New Left apart. Maybe not. But I’ve heard so many of the people interviewed in various Occupies around the country say, “I’ve been waiting for years for this to happen.” It’s impossible to keep cynicism at bay, without being part of an uprising of consciousness and spirit and action. (Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will—Antonio Gramsci.) I may not be there physically, but I’m there, one way or another.
Some of the folks who started Occupy Wall Street offer a third meaning. Many of them appear to be from recently achieved middle class homes—upward mobility from working class or minority assimilation—and aspire to professional work and home ownership—a piece of the American pie—albeit with a more sophisticated understanding of how that lifestyle is supported both economically and politically. Then they find out there aren’t any jobs doing what they’ve been trained to do, they can’t afford mortgage loans (and no one is building anything affordable anyway) because they’re deeply in debt from college loans. So what better way to spend the day than in the street with their cohort.
They are joined by an interesting array of other protestors, from all walks of life, including the working poor, college professors, union organizers, activists, and retirees. But the core group of folks, even with their different spin on “you got nothing to lose”, are the direct descendents of the protestors who were in the streets during the Vietnam war: people young enough and unencumbered enough to stay out there in the park day and night while a movement is created. Those of us who were in Washington D.C., Kent State, and every other city across the U.S. in the late sixties and early seventies keep saying to ourselves, “I wish I could be in Liberty Park, too.” But there’s the mother who requires 24-hour care, the house that needs to be ready for winter, the woodpile that needs to be split, and the animals that need to be fed and cared for.
The anti-war movement addressed all things that sustain a war of occupation: the imperialism of the war mongers, the military industrial complex, and the race and class distinctions that sent a disproportionate number of young men and women of color and low economic status to be killed. These power structures are still with us, and I suspect there’s plenty of conversation about them among the Occupy Wall Street protestors. But the overriding focus on the growing economic inequality illuminates Wall Street’s free market fetishism, which eludes the control of even the weakest regulatory oversight and defines an even more insidious hegemony than the war mongering political and corporate establishment we’ve been fighting forever.
I mentioned in a previous blog posting the conversation I had with a young friend who didn’t want to hear about what went on in the sixties, that the social network has supplanted the need for organizing in the streets. I’m sure all this twittering and tweeting is a lot less cumbersome than printing fliers on ditto machines, but there’s nothing like meeting your compadres face to face in a public space with a common sense of purpose. Maybe this time around, with their general assemblies, their consensus building skills, and the message on the wall “It’s the system, stupid,” they’ll avoid some of the internecine struggles that tore the New Left apart. Maybe not. But I’ve heard so many of the people interviewed in various Occupies around the country say, “I’ve been waiting for years for this to happen.” It’s impossible to keep cynicism at bay, without being part of an uprising of consciousness and spirit and action. (Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will—Antonio Gramsci.) I may not be there physically, but I’m there, one way or another.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Diary of a Bad Year: Mark and Steve
As the entire blogosphere knows, Steve Jobs died of complications from pancreatic cancer this past week. Although he lived for almost six years with a rare, “treatable” form of the cancer, it got him in the end. While the doc in the emergency room who treated Mark used Jobs as an example of everything that’s wrong with a medical system that provides every option for the rich and bankruptcy for the poor, not even a liver transplant and the best care money can buy could save him (see Diary of a Bad Year, February 13, 2011).
His death has elicited obituaries that run the gamut from the visionary genius “who knew what we wanted before we wanted it” to the capitalist exploiter who produced his slick products on the backs of foreign sweatshop workers. For me, however, his death elicited a resurgence of memories of Mark. It made me think about the disease itself and the differences in their treatment and their prognoses, but in a much more visceral way it made me remember Mark in his corporeality. Steve Jobs and Mark Schiller looked very much alike: tall, thin, close-cropped balding heads, graying beards, and dark brown eyes behind round wire rimmed glasses. When I saw pictures of Jobs in 2009, when the illness had made a thin man gaunt, I was seeing Mark.
I know nothing about the private Steve Jobs. He was seven years younger than Mark, but close enough in age to have experienced many of the same things. I don’t know if he loved Mavis Staples and Al Green, or Chet Baker and Thelonious Monk. I don’t know what his politics were: many capitalist entrepreneurs consider themselves liberals, especially those who came of age during the sixties and seventies. Mark’s politics guided his life from the time he helped organize his high school SDS chapter to his choice of where to live to co-founding La Jicarita News. To stir up the mix he’d declare he was the only Stalinist left standing, when in reality what we learned together about race, class, and absolutist positions in northern New Mexican made him a complex, thoughtful activist whose compañeros included loggers, Forest Service rangers, acequia mayordomos, and gasp, even a few environmentalists. His encyclopedic knowledge ranged through poetry, abstract expressionism, jazz, 19th century English literature, rock n’ roll (he always knew the names of the most obscure groups played on the oldies station, see Guilty Pleasures blog), the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, and Spanish and Mexican land grants. He wrote many, many articles about the history and politics of land grants for La Jicarita News, as well as scholarly papers for the New Mexico Historical Advisory Board and the Natural Resources Journal. He was working on a book about the tenure of New Mexico Surveyor General George W. Julian, who was responsible for the loss of millions of acres of land to their rightful owners, which he was unable to finish before he died. I’ve collected the chapters he completed as scholarly papers or articles, and with the help of University of New Mexico professor David Correia, plan to finish that book.
Steve Jobs legacy is unparalleled. I have two Mac laptops and an iPod. My kids have iPhones and iPads. I also have many questions about the value of all that technology and disgust, but not surprise, about its production (see the NYT article about Mike Daisey’s one man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” in the Sunday, October 2 issue), but that’s not what this blog is about. The Steve Jobs and Mark Schillers of the world who lived creative and intense lives and died before their time is sad, but what they did is what we have, tangibly and in our memories.
My son Jakob called to tell me that he’s planning on publishing a photo story about Mark, also triggered by Jobs’ death. He took many pictures of his dad over the years, and with Mark’s permission, some while he was sick. I started this blog the day before he called. Steve Jobs’ death, within a year of Mark’s and of the same disease, reminds us of our loss, and being the writers and photographer that we are, the need to express it.
His death has elicited obituaries that run the gamut from the visionary genius “who knew what we wanted before we wanted it” to the capitalist exploiter who produced his slick products on the backs of foreign sweatshop workers. For me, however, his death elicited a resurgence of memories of Mark. It made me think about the disease itself and the differences in their treatment and their prognoses, but in a much more visceral way it made me remember Mark in his corporeality. Steve Jobs and Mark Schiller looked very much alike: tall, thin, close-cropped balding heads, graying beards, and dark brown eyes behind round wire rimmed glasses. When I saw pictures of Jobs in 2009, when the illness had made a thin man gaunt, I was seeing Mark.
I know nothing about the private Steve Jobs. He was seven years younger than Mark, but close enough in age to have experienced many of the same things. I don’t know if he loved Mavis Staples and Al Green, or Chet Baker and Thelonious Monk. I don’t know what his politics were: many capitalist entrepreneurs consider themselves liberals, especially those who came of age during the sixties and seventies. Mark’s politics guided his life from the time he helped organize his high school SDS chapter to his choice of where to live to co-founding La Jicarita News. To stir up the mix he’d declare he was the only Stalinist left standing, when in reality what we learned together about race, class, and absolutist positions in northern New Mexican made him a complex, thoughtful activist whose compañeros included loggers, Forest Service rangers, acequia mayordomos, and gasp, even a few environmentalists. His encyclopedic knowledge ranged through poetry, abstract expressionism, jazz, 19th century English literature, rock n’ roll (he always knew the names of the most obscure groups played on the oldies station, see Guilty Pleasures blog), the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, and Spanish and Mexican land grants. He wrote many, many articles about the history and politics of land grants for La Jicarita News, as well as scholarly papers for the New Mexico Historical Advisory Board and the Natural Resources Journal. He was working on a book about the tenure of New Mexico Surveyor General George W. Julian, who was responsible for the loss of millions of acres of land to their rightful owners, which he was unable to finish before he died. I’ve collected the chapters he completed as scholarly papers or articles, and with the help of University of New Mexico professor David Correia, plan to finish that book.
Steve Jobs legacy is unparalleled. I have two Mac laptops and an iPod. My kids have iPhones and iPads. I also have many questions about the value of all that technology and disgust, but not surprise, about its production (see the NYT article about Mike Daisey’s one man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” in the Sunday, October 2 issue), but that’s not what this blog is about. The Steve Jobs and Mark Schillers of the world who lived creative and intense lives and died before their time is sad, but what they did is what we have, tangibly and in our memories.
My son Jakob called to tell me that he’s planning on publishing a photo story about Mark, also triggered by Jobs’ death. He took many pictures of his dad over the years, and with Mark’s permission, some while he was sick. I started this blog the day before he called. Steve Jobs’ death, within a year of Mark’s and of the same disease, reminds us of our loss, and being the writers and photographer that we are, the need to express it.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Christian Schizophrenia
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.
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.
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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