“Without productivity, life is worthless and unbearable.” This is Friedrich Nietzsche, who, remember, went completely mad (I’m reading A Philosophical Biography of Friedrich Nietzsche by Julian Young). He did get to live in posterity, both worshipped and maligned, but I wonder how things might have turned out for him if he’d spent a little less time trying to figure out the meaning of life (to be fair, he was also trying to figure out how to have a peaceful and pleasant life).
My partner Mark used to tell me that my “productivity” intimidated him. I’m not sure he meant productivity in the sense of “producing” things, like novels and magazine articles or gourmet dinners and cherry pies, but my “busyness.” Because here’s the thing. Even though I’ve almost always worked at home, setting my own schedule and creating my own agenda, I’ve also had a rule that during the day I do not sit down and read a book. Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t read things during the day like information related to whatever article I’m writing, Environmental Impact Statements for whatever issue I’m dissecting, other people’s books that I’m editing, etc. But reading a novel, biography, or philosophical treatise is reserved for in the mornings with my coffee and after dinner until bed. I manage to get a lot of books read in those hours, but what in the world makes me think that there is something wrong with sometimes sitting down during the day and reading a book?
I don’t have weekends for reading books, either. Because of my self-employment I don’t really have Saturday and Sunday off. I take days off here and there, to go for a hike or ski or go to town for a movie or lunch, but there’s no designated day for lying around the house reading or watching TV, heaven forbid. Does it mean that I think life is worthless without productivity? Sort of. If productivity means using your individual talents to the best of your ability to create something that is uniquely yours or contributes to the common good or taxes your brain and body, then I’m definitely a fan of productivity. Again, according to Nietzsche: the well being of society is better promoted by everyone pursuing her own “highest good,” or becoming an “enlightened egoist.” If productivity means feeling that you have to constantly be doing something to prove your worth, then I think you’ve got a problem. Or I’ve got a problem.
This has become more obvious to me as I’ve gotten older. It’s a byproduct of having to look back instead of forward and make certain assessments about the outcome of your productivity. If an assessment of the outcome makes you say, “I never really did the things I wanted to do” or “I was never able to effect the changes I wanted” or “what I produced is a pile of shit,” then you better adopt the postmodern position immediately that all things are relative and there is no ultimate achievement or progress. That way your life can’t have been meaningless because there’s no such thing. You need to watch Casablanca again and listen to Rick when he tells Captain Renault, “Our lives don’t amount to a hill of beans.”
It was easier to live with that kind of attitude when I was younger. I have a kind of plodding personality that once I decide upon a course of action, say that of my organizing work that led to La Jicarita News, the radical rag I’ve written and edited with Mark for 15 years, I stay the course no matter how many battles we lose, no matter how many allies fall by the wayside, no matter how many nasty letters and e-mails and phones calls we get from the opposition. And there’s been plenty of that. But somehow I always manage to see as what I do is in my “self-interest” to further the “common good”
But now, as I face the fact that I’m going to retire La Jicarita News because of health issues and the fact that my energy has flagged with age, I can’t keep those nagging assessments out of my head. While I doubt that I would have ever made the choice to be a “professional” so that right about now I’d be looking at a well deserved retirement along with the rest of my baby boom cohort, I could have made other choices: committing much more time to creative writing and publishing, learning how to play the piano really well, traveling much more often to Latin America and speaking fluent Spanish (a more peaceful and pleasant life),
But I do appreciate the small changes I did effect, even if they only amount to changing someone’s life by knowing me or sharing in the work we did. And I don’t think I produced a pile of shit. I could have spent more time perfecting what I produced and been more confident about it, but I guess I had no burning desire to “prove” my self worth and leave something to posterity. So I guess I’ll muddle through this new phase in my life with the same mulish behavior that got me here, for better or worse. And maybe, just maybe, I can finish the Nietzsche biography and start that John Berger book in the middle of the day lying on the couch. Oh, what possibilities.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Baby Boom Regret
What follows is based on anecdotal, not empirical, evidence, at least the part about my baby boom cohort. But by the time I’m done you may want to eschew empiricism with the same abandonment we eschewed feudalism, monarchy, republicanism, and social democracy (at least those of us who think The Nation is wimpy).
My partner Mark is 62 and has pancreatic cancer. Our friend Richard is in his early sixties and had surgery for prostate cancer. Our friend Alan, who is in his fifties, lost a kidney to cancer. Gilbert, our neighbor, who in his sixties and a former Los Alamos National Laboratory subcontractor, also had kidney cancer. My friend Emma’s sister, who is fifty, has colon cancer. I am 60 and have an autoimmune condition called CREST syndrome. My brother-in-law has suffered from psoriatic rheumatism, another autoimmune disease, since his fifties. My sister was diagnosed with fibromyalgia in her late forties. The local postmistress, in her fifties, has lupus.
The list goes on and on, but what stands out about it are the predominant ages: fifties and sixties. Cancer and autoimmune diseases have been around for a long time, of course. But the frequency of their occurrence in my generation, the baby boomers, seems to me to indicate a causal relationship. Our post-World War II generation was largely bottle-fed, as the formula industry, in concert with the gynecological industry, convinced mothers (and fathers) that breast feeding was unnecessary. So our first line of defense—mother’s milk—was compromised right out of the womb (and now we know cancer causing chemicals leach from the plastic used in bottles). The formula industry, of course, was just part of the food industry in general, which proceeded to package our food for mass consumption by adding artificial colors, preservatives, and flavors made with cancer causing chemicals. The farms that produced the food also became highly industrialized as well, and the cancer causing pesticides and herbicides necessary to support that industrialization entered the food chain in massive doses.
This has all been documented in books like Silent Spring, Fast Food Nation, and Omnivore’s Dilemma, so I won’t belabor the point. Combined with an exponential increase in air pollutants, as urban areas became clogged with cars and the entire country was contaminated by energy and manufacturing development, baby boomers were clobbered from all sides. I’m afraid the environmental safeguards that were promulgated in the 1970s with the passage of government regulatory laws (the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, etc.) were too little, too late.
So what we’ve been exposed to by scientific (chemical), medical (gynecologists), and industrial (power plants) development, all in the name of progress, seems to be killing us. Whereas previously we died in massive numbers because of the lack of scientific discoveries like penicillin and medical inventions like angioplasties, now we’re dying in massive numbers (when you count the number of people who are dying not just from cancer and autoimmune diseases but industrial pollution and accidents, the number is massive) because of technological poisons. I can’t take the long view on this, that every generation has suffered its particular burdens, because this is my generation Most of our parents lived into their seventies and eighties (never exercising, drinking martinis). Many of us will not. That may not be such a bad thing, when I see the individual suffering of those kept alive by medical intervention and the burden that places on society as a whole. But we’re suffering, too, both physically and emotionally. We’ll probably be the butt of many jokes regarding our slogan—“Don’t trust anyone over 30” — and our delusions of immortality, but despite our excesses and self-indulgence, we developed a conscience and decided as adults to breast feed our babies, grow organic food, and riot for revolution. We were too preoccupied being active, political, and creative to see this coming.
My partner Mark is 62 and has pancreatic cancer. Our friend Richard is in his early sixties and had surgery for prostate cancer. Our friend Alan, who is in his fifties, lost a kidney to cancer. Gilbert, our neighbor, who in his sixties and a former Los Alamos National Laboratory subcontractor, also had kidney cancer. My friend Emma’s sister, who is fifty, has colon cancer. I am 60 and have an autoimmune condition called CREST syndrome. My brother-in-law has suffered from psoriatic rheumatism, another autoimmune disease, since his fifties. My sister was diagnosed with fibromyalgia in her late forties. The local postmistress, in her fifties, has lupus.
The list goes on and on, but what stands out about it are the predominant ages: fifties and sixties. Cancer and autoimmune diseases have been around for a long time, of course. But the frequency of their occurrence in my generation, the baby boomers, seems to me to indicate a causal relationship. Our post-World War II generation was largely bottle-fed, as the formula industry, in concert with the gynecological industry, convinced mothers (and fathers) that breast feeding was unnecessary. So our first line of defense—mother’s milk—was compromised right out of the womb (and now we know cancer causing chemicals leach from the plastic used in bottles). The formula industry, of course, was just part of the food industry in general, which proceeded to package our food for mass consumption by adding artificial colors, preservatives, and flavors made with cancer causing chemicals. The farms that produced the food also became highly industrialized as well, and the cancer causing pesticides and herbicides necessary to support that industrialization entered the food chain in massive doses.
This has all been documented in books like Silent Spring, Fast Food Nation, and Omnivore’s Dilemma, so I won’t belabor the point. Combined with an exponential increase in air pollutants, as urban areas became clogged with cars and the entire country was contaminated by energy and manufacturing development, baby boomers were clobbered from all sides. I’m afraid the environmental safeguards that were promulgated in the 1970s with the passage of government regulatory laws (the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, etc.) were too little, too late.
So what we’ve been exposed to by scientific (chemical), medical (gynecologists), and industrial (power plants) development, all in the name of progress, seems to be killing us. Whereas previously we died in massive numbers because of the lack of scientific discoveries like penicillin and medical inventions like angioplasties, now we’re dying in massive numbers (when you count the number of people who are dying not just from cancer and autoimmune diseases but industrial pollution and accidents, the number is massive) because of technological poisons. I can’t take the long view on this, that every generation has suffered its particular burdens, because this is my generation Most of our parents lived into their seventies and eighties (never exercising, drinking martinis). Many of us will not. That may not be such a bad thing, when I see the individual suffering of those kept alive by medical intervention and the burden that places on society as a whole. But we’re suffering, too, both physically and emotionally. We’ll probably be the butt of many jokes regarding our slogan—“Don’t trust anyone over 30” — and our delusions of immortality, but despite our excesses and self-indulgence, we developed a conscience and decided as adults to breast feed our babies, grow organic food, and riot for revolution. We were too preoccupied being active, political, and creative to see this coming.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
My Summer Job
I was listening to NPR the other day and there were these people describing what their summer jobs, oh so many years ago, meant to them in terms of life lessons. It seems that NPR is running a series on summer jobs and soliciting stories from all of us nobodies out in radioland. But rather than go through that process—I already know what it takes to get on NPR’s Click and Clack show, which my son did with his story about the time we were driving down from Mount Lassen and he decided to toot his horn at the slowpoke ahead of us . . . but that’s another story—I’m going to post my story here, where I don’t have to audition.
I learned to swim at the local YMCA and by the time I was 16 had my Red Cross Life Saving and Water Safety Instructor credentials under my belt. So now that I could also be legally employed, there was no question that I would try for life guarding at a pool; no bussing, waitressing, or housecleaning for me. I don’t remember how I got the job, but it was a lifeguard’s dream: a motel swimming pool in Manitou, the resort community “nestled at the foot of Pikes Peak,” where hardly anyone ever swam. The motel was owned by an older couple, who I’ll call Harvey and Helen Oakley, probably the only motel owners in town who provided a lifeguard for their guests. The motel had been in the family for a couple of generations, and apparently Harvey’s mother had run it in grand style, with evening barbecues and weekend square dances for the Midwest clientele that came back every year to enjoy the Rocky Mountains. After Harvey and Helen inherited the place, though, tourists seemed to prefer the newer motels with hot tub jacuzzies, and their old fashioned lodge, with no attendant restaurant or fancy features, was losing business.
But this meant nothing to me, at least at first, because all I had to do was show up in my bathing suit and sit out in the sun waiting for the occasional guest to take a dip. Helen never emerged from inside the motel where she smoked Camels and kept the books, but Harvey would come out periodically to check on me, apologize that there wasn’t much for me to do, I must be bored, and bring me sandwiches from the restaurant across the street.
Then Edward showed up. Edward was Harvey and Helen’s 14-year old son and was truly weird. He had pale, peaches and cream skin and jet-black hair that fell across his forehead and over his ears. He dressed only in black: black pants, black turtleneck, black fedora. I learned later that several of his bedroom walls were also painted black, while the remaining ones were covered with posters of Bela Logosi and Lon Chaney. At first Edward wouldn’t talk to me, he’d just come out and walk around the pool and look at me and act really annoyed if one of my friends was there hanging around with me. That was another perk that Harvey provided; permission to have my friends come swimming while I was on duty. I was just getting involved with one of the jet setters, what we called the older boys in high school who were the first to smoke dope and drop acid, and I was beside myself with nervousness when he began to show up at the pool to smoke cigarettes with me and laze around in the water. One day while he was there Edward showed up and jumped into the pool with all his clothes on; Harvey had to come out and apologize for his behavior, finally convincing him to get out of the water with the promise of a new guitar.
I was a kind person, even back then at the mixed-up age of 16, and I quickly befriended Edward, as I knew he desperately needed one. He used to show up at noon, after staying up late playing guitar or watching old horror movies, and Harvey would come out, lock up the pool, and send us across the street for lunch, which he paid for. Then Edward and I would play gin rummy all afternoon around the pool, waiting for guests. I finally persuaded Edward to swim without his clothes on (with trunks and a T-shirt) and I helped him practice his strokes. He’d still get pissed off when my boyfriend showed up on his way to work—he watered one of the local golf courses in the evening after everyone had left and would often take me for rides on the golf carts racing through the sprinklers—but resigned himself to going inside and bothering his parents until the boyfriend left. Then, unless I had to be home early or was going on a date, Edward and I would head back across the street to dinner.
This scenario played itself out over the course of two summers. For the second summer I got Harvey to hire all my girlfriends as maids. But also during that second summer Helen became ill and died of lung cancer. Everything quickly fell to pieces. After the funeral, Harvey took the night shift so he could drink without anyone knowing. Edward spent more and more time locked in his room with his stereo blaring, adrift at a tender age when he especially needed loving, involved parents. At the end of the summer Harvey sold the motel to a couple from Texas, who promptly fired me, having no intention of providing a lifeguard. They kept me on only long enough to teach them how to backwash the filter system, which I did every morning before opening the pool. Then, in a moment of contrition, they hired me as a maid. That lasted about a week, until one day I apparently put a bedspread on sideways, and between the time I left for the afternoon and drove home they called my mother and told her I was fired. When she told me, I immediately got back in the car, drove back to the motel, and told the Texans that if they were going to fire me they better do it to my face, which they did.
So did I learn a life lesson from this? As I said in my blog post called “Self Image,” maybe this experience helped me learn to “do what I want, say what I want, and expect results.” While I didn’t get the result of getting my job back (who wanted to be a maid anyway), I did get the satisfaction of telling someone what’s what, and knowing how to do that, my friends, is indeed worth learning.
I learned to swim at the local YMCA and by the time I was 16 had my Red Cross Life Saving and Water Safety Instructor credentials under my belt. So now that I could also be legally employed, there was no question that I would try for life guarding at a pool; no bussing, waitressing, or housecleaning for me. I don’t remember how I got the job, but it was a lifeguard’s dream: a motel swimming pool in Manitou, the resort community “nestled at the foot of Pikes Peak,” where hardly anyone ever swam. The motel was owned by an older couple, who I’ll call Harvey and Helen Oakley, probably the only motel owners in town who provided a lifeguard for their guests. The motel had been in the family for a couple of generations, and apparently Harvey’s mother had run it in grand style, with evening barbecues and weekend square dances for the Midwest clientele that came back every year to enjoy the Rocky Mountains. After Harvey and Helen inherited the place, though, tourists seemed to prefer the newer motels with hot tub jacuzzies, and their old fashioned lodge, with no attendant restaurant or fancy features, was losing business.
But this meant nothing to me, at least at first, because all I had to do was show up in my bathing suit and sit out in the sun waiting for the occasional guest to take a dip. Helen never emerged from inside the motel where she smoked Camels and kept the books, but Harvey would come out periodically to check on me, apologize that there wasn’t much for me to do, I must be bored, and bring me sandwiches from the restaurant across the street.
Then Edward showed up. Edward was Harvey and Helen’s 14-year old son and was truly weird. He had pale, peaches and cream skin and jet-black hair that fell across his forehead and over his ears. He dressed only in black: black pants, black turtleneck, black fedora. I learned later that several of his bedroom walls were also painted black, while the remaining ones were covered with posters of Bela Logosi and Lon Chaney. At first Edward wouldn’t talk to me, he’d just come out and walk around the pool and look at me and act really annoyed if one of my friends was there hanging around with me. That was another perk that Harvey provided; permission to have my friends come swimming while I was on duty. I was just getting involved with one of the jet setters, what we called the older boys in high school who were the first to smoke dope and drop acid, and I was beside myself with nervousness when he began to show up at the pool to smoke cigarettes with me and laze around in the water. One day while he was there Edward showed up and jumped into the pool with all his clothes on; Harvey had to come out and apologize for his behavior, finally convincing him to get out of the water with the promise of a new guitar.
I was a kind person, even back then at the mixed-up age of 16, and I quickly befriended Edward, as I knew he desperately needed one. He used to show up at noon, after staying up late playing guitar or watching old horror movies, and Harvey would come out, lock up the pool, and send us across the street for lunch, which he paid for. Then Edward and I would play gin rummy all afternoon around the pool, waiting for guests. I finally persuaded Edward to swim without his clothes on (with trunks and a T-shirt) and I helped him practice his strokes. He’d still get pissed off when my boyfriend showed up on his way to work—he watered one of the local golf courses in the evening after everyone had left and would often take me for rides on the golf carts racing through the sprinklers—but resigned himself to going inside and bothering his parents until the boyfriend left. Then, unless I had to be home early or was going on a date, Edward and I would head back across the street to dinner.
This scenario played itself out over the course of two summers. For the second summer I got Harvey to hire all my girlfriends as maids. But also during that second summer Helen became ill and died of lung cancer. Everything quickly fell to pieces. After the funeral, Harvey took the night shift so he could drink without anyone knowing. Edward spent more and more time locked in his room with his stereo blaring, adrift at a tender age when he especially needed loving, involved parents. At the end of the summer Harvey sold the motel to a couple from Texas, who promptly fired me, having no intention of providing a lifeguard. They kept me on only long enough to teach them how to backwash the filter system, which I did every morning before opening the pool. Then, in a moment of contrition, they hired me as a maid. That lasted about a week, until one day I apparently put a bedspread on sideways, and between the time I left for the afternoon and drove home they called my mother and told her I was fired. When she told me, I immediately got back in the car, drove back to the motel, and told the Texans that if they were going to fire me they better do it to my face, which they did.
So did I learn a life lesson from this? As I said in my blog post called “Self Image,” maybe this experience helped me learn to “do what I want, say what I want, and expect results.” While I didn’t get the result of getting my job back (who wanted to be a maid anyway), I did get the satisfaction of telling someone what’s what, and knowing how to do that, my friends, is indeed worth learning.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Funky Soul
If you don’t start dancing or break down in tears when you hear Jimmy Ruffin sing “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted” or Ben E. King doing “Stand By Me” (there’s also a heartbreaking video on YouTube of street musicians all over the world singing it) then you ain’t got any funky soul.
I know, this is ageism speaking. Who under 50 (or 60 maybe) knows who Jimmy Ruffin is (remember, this is a white girl speaking, who can never speak for the black community, who I’m sure know Jimmy Ruffin and Eddie Kendrick like they know their abc’s)? Their loss, I would say. They would say, in the person of my 29-year old son, what about Rage Against the Machine or Orishas? I happen to love Orishas—a great hip hop band from Cuba—but the rhythm and blues we grew up with came from a different place and time and evokes a different response.
When I was in fifth and sixth grade I watched American Bandstand on TV every day after school. My mother was at work, and this was my time to see the whole weird mix of acts Dick Clark brought to the stage: Stevie Wonder, Lovin’ Spoonful, Rascals, Shirelles, Bobby Rydell, Beach Boys, and Marvin Gaye. When the show was broadcast from Philadelphia, the teenagers who came to dance were all Italian kids with names like Carman, Dominick, Michael, and Loretta. I could tell by who was dancing with whom whether they were still going steady, whether they had just broken up, and whether there was any hope that they would get back together.
When I was a teenager, the music I listened to, locked in my room doing homework or lying on my bed daydreaming, came from the KOMA airwaves all the way from Oklahoma City (I was in Colorado Springs, remember). For some reason K-O-M-A had this powerful frequency that broadcast Motown, Philly soul, Memphis soul, the British invasion, and bubblegum pop all over the Rocky Mountain West to the bedrooms of fourteen- and fifteen-year olds like me, dependent on the radio to know what was going on musically. I was just starting to buy 45s, but albums were still too expensive for my measly weekly allowance. When I got my first job at sixteen—lifeguard at a motel swimming pool in Manitou Springs at $1.10 an hour— I still couldn’t afford many LPs.
But I did get to see a lot of groups at the Colorado Springs City Auditorium, like the Rascals (called the Young Rascals back then), the Beau Brummels (remember “Laugh Laugh”?), Spanky and Our Gang, and even Eric Burden and the Animals. I never wondered at the time how come these groups came to little old Colorado Springs, Colorado, for some unheard of cheap ticket price, but in retrospect I assume they played the big venues in Denver and drove the sixty miles down to the Springs for a little extra cash before flying out to Phoenix or Salt Lake City.
I was fourteen when the Beatles came to New York and played on the Ed Sullivan Show. The radio had been playing “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” but I was unprepared for the thrill I felt when I saw them bouncing their heads and tapping their feet to the screams of the fourteen-year olds who were actually in the TV audience. Their musical debt to rhythm and blues was evident in this visceral response. My father always ate dinner on Sunday night on a TV tray in front of Ed Sullivan, but this time we were all there: my mother, my two sisters, and me. And when he said, “They’ll never last,” I knew he was utterly, and irrevocably, wrong because anyone who could touch my soul the way they did, the way Marvin Gaye did singing “Sexual Healing,” the way the Shirelles did singing “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions singing “You Must Believe Me,” Aretha Franklin singing “Prove It,” and Jimmy Ruffin singing “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted,” would last forever in the heart and mind of a fourteen-year old going on 60.
I know, this is ageism speaking. Who under 50 (or 60 maybe) knows who Jimmy Ruffin is (remember, this is a white girl speaking, who can never speak for the black community, who I’m sure know Jimmy Ruffin and Eddie Kendrick like they know their abc’s)? Their loss, I would say. They would say, in the person of my 29-year old son, what about Rage Against the Machine or Orishas? I happen to love Orishas—a great hip hop band from Cuba—but the rhythm and blues we grew up with came from a different place and time and evokes a different response.
When I was in fifth and sixth grade I watched American Bandstand on TV every day after school. My mother was at work, and this was my time to see the whole weird mix of acts Dick Clark brought to the stage: Stevie Wonder, Lovin’ Spoonful, Rascals, Shirelles, Bobby Rydell, Beach Boys, and Marvin Gaye. When the show was broadcast from Philadelphia, the teenagers who came to dance were all Italian kids with names like Carman, Dominick, Michael, and Loretta. I could tell by who was dancing with whom whether they were still going steady, whether they had just broken up, and whether there was any hope that they would get back together.
When I was a teenager, the music I listened to, locked in my room doing homework or lying on my bed daydreaming, came from the KOMA airwaves all the way from Oklahoma City (I was in Colorado Springs, remember). For some reason K-O-M-A had this powerful frequency that broadcast Motown, Philly soul, Memphis soul, the British invasion, and bubblegum pop all over the Rocky Mountain West to the bedrooms of fourteen- and fifteen-year olds like me, dependent on the radio to know what was going on musically. I was just starting to buy 45s, but albums were still too expensive for my measly weekly allowance. When I got my first job at sixteen—lifeguard at a motel swimming pool in Manitou Springs at $1.10 an hour— I still couldn’t afford many LPs.
But I did get to see a lot of groups at the Colorado Springs City Auditorium, like the Rascals (called the Young Rascals back then), the Beau Brummels (remember “Laugh Laugh”?), Spanky and Our Gang, and even Eric Burden and the Animals. I never wondered at the time how come these groups came to little old Colorado Springs, Colorado, for some unheard of cheap ticket price, but in retrospect I assume they played the big venues in Denver and drove the sixty miles down to the Springs for a little extra cash before flying out to Phoenix or Salt Lake City.
I was fourteen when the Beatles came to New York and played on the Ed Sullivan Show. The radio had been playing “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” but I was unprepared for the thrill I felt when I saw them bouncing their heads and tapping their feet to the screams of the fourteen-year olds who were actually in the TV audience. Their musical debt to rhythm and blues was evident in this visceral response. My father always ate dinner on Sunday night on a TV tray in front of Ed Sullivan, but this time we were all there: my mother, my two sisters, and me. And when he said, “They’ll never last,” I knew he was utterly, and irrevocably, wrong because anyone who could touch my soul the way they did, the way Marvin Gaye did singing “Sexual Healing,” the way the Shirelles did singing “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions singing “You Must Believe Me,” Aretha Franklin singing “Prove It,” and Jimmy Ruffin singing “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted,” would last forever in the heart and mind of a fourteen-year old going on 60.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Obfuscation
I sat down to read the local paper today and it hit me hard in the head how every story—from the health care bill to Afghanistan to the Mexican drug cartels—was only that, a story made up to obfuscate the issues that lie not so deeply buried beneath the rhetoric and lies. These issues cannot be talked about in public (language is institutionalized) because the house of cards that has been carefully crafted to keep the powers that be in power would crumble like salted crackers into the deep wounds they have inflicted upon our society. Maybe then things would change.
Let’s take a look at today’s stories, one by one: 1) health care “reform”; 2) Hilary Clinton’s meting with Felipe Calderon on stemming the flow of drugs from Mexico to the U.S.; 3) sex abuse in the Catholic church; and 4) the war in Afghanistan.
Health Care Reform
There can be no equitable health care reform until it is taken out of the hands of for profit insurance companies. During the long and excruciating “debate” on fixing the health care mess in this country a few people talked about health care as a “right,” not a privilege, like education, police and fire protection, and social security. Well duh, who pays for those rights. Society does, that’s who, through taxation for teachers, cops, firemen, and so the elderly don’t starve—just barely. In Canada, where they have nationalized health care, the cost is 10 percent of the gross domestic product. In the United States, where insurance companies cover only those who they think are healthy enough to not rack up too many hospital bills—by denying coverage for preexisting conditions—we pay 16 to 18 percent of GDP towards health care. That’s for all those folks who don’t have insurance and end up in public financed emergency rooms and hospitals, all the enormous bureaucracy that goes along with all the complicated billing, denials, referrals, and appeals that should be covered by a single payer, We the people. That’s what a society is and does: it levels the playing field by helping those who need it and by regulating those who don’t.
War on Drugs
The war on drugs was lost before it ever began. As long as drugs are illegal there will be an underground market that will stop at nothing to keep the flow of money across la frontera de los Estados Unidos y Mexico. Yes, while the drugs flow north, the dinero flows both ways: to Mexican drug lords and their hordes of couriers and into the country’s economy (the second largest money maker next to oil); and to the U.S. border guards, DEA agents, prisons, and Homeland Security. The illegal drug industry is big business over here, too. When NAFTA was implemented during Bill Clinton’s reign, making the price of tortillas sky rocket as Mexico had to import subsidized corn the U.S. was selling, destroying the local agricultural economy, how was anyone in Mexico supposed to make a living other than selling drugs or leaving for the U.S.? Hillary recently admitted that the U.S. does bear some of the responsibility for the violent deaths of thousands of Mexicans caught in the drug war crossfire because of U.S. drug consumption. When she puts up a sign in her office that says, “It’s the Mexican economy, stupid,” we may actually get somewhere.
Pedophile Priests
I can’t really talk about this one without devolving into a diatribe about the evils of organized religion (which I’ve already posted on this blog), but in an attempt to be more specific and to the point I will state the obvious: the Catholic church could go a long way towards reducing priestly pedophilia by allowing them to marry, by recognizing women priests, and forcing priests to be prosecuted for child molestation in civil courts. Let the priests marry and at least have a chance at gratifying their libidos, even if marriage itself isn’t going to entirely solve the problem of sex and/or relationships (see Marriage). And, of course, marrying a woman isn’t going to do much for the priests who prefer men (can you imagine the day the Church ever let men marry men??!!), but maybe the latent pedophiles who currently fill the priestly ranks wouldn’t be so attracted to the profession. Maybe they would be less inclined to preach their homophobia from the pulpit as a distraction from their deceit. It’s hard for me to understand why so many women want to become priests, and why they think they can deconstruct church hierarchy without abandoning the church altogether. If it’s faith and observance they’re after, why can’t they do it outside the confines of a church that has abused and ignored them since it’s inception? But you have to admire their persistence and their desire to bring down the priests who have done so much harm to so many.
The War in Afghanistan
I thought we’d already won the war in Afghanistan. Isn’t that what the neo-cons told us when they said it was time to invade Iraq? The Taliban were on the run, the Afghanis had elected a great guy who would do the U.S. bidding, and the women there could walk around town without covering their heads.Of course, a few of us on the left were not in favor of that first war in Afghanistan, either, including Susan Sontag who caught all kinds of shit in the pages of the New Yorker, and Professor Ward Churchill, who lost his job, for daring to point out that maybe we should first look at the political and economic reasons for jihad against the U.S. before we started bombing Afghanistan back into the stone age. Of course, western society thinks Afghanistan never left the stone age. So now, after more than seven years of occupation in Iraq Obama decides its time to send “our good men and women” back into Afghanistan, in greater number, because surprise, the Taliban is back (seemingly the only ones capable of providing goods and services to the poor villages in the hinterland), President Karzai is more corrupt than ever and an anathema to his people, and women are still be abused and repressed and kept out of mainstream society. I guess because we’re a postmodern society we can’t factor Afghanistan’s long and unfortunate history into any decision making process where it’s recognized that imperialist countries are never going to “save” or “liberate” it. But that’s not really the goal, is it. This poor, volatile, and oppressed country is necessary to our geopolitical goals in the Middle East (see Globalism) and that trumps everything.
So the obfuscation keeps getting written and the wars on drugs and people keep being waged.
Solution? Just what I quoted Rick Lowry saying in my “Global Dominance” post: “ . . . the embrace of the U.N., the ridiculous talk of global disarmament, the distance from Israel, the slaps at American hegemony.” Thanks, Rick, for putting it so nicely.
Let’s take a look at today’s stories, one by one: 1) health care “reform”; 2) Hilary Clinton’s meting with Felipe Calderon on stemming the flow of drugs from Mexico to the U.S.; 3) sex abuse in the Catholic church; and 4) the war in Afghanistan.
Health Care Reform
There can be no equitable health care reform until it is taken out of the hands of for profit insurance companies. During the long and excruciating “debate” on fixing the health care mess in this country a few people talked about health care as a “right,” not a privilege, like education, police and fire protection, and social security. Well duh, who pays for those rights. Society does, that’s who, through taxation for teachers, cops, firemen, and so the elderly don’t starve—just barely. In Canada, where they have nationalized health care, the cost is 10 percent of the gross domestic product. In the United States, where insurance companies cover only those who they think are healthy enough to not rack up too many hospital bills—by denying coverage for preexisting conditions—we pay 16 to 18 percent of GDP towards health care. That’s for all those folks who don’t have insurance and end up in public financed emergency rooms and hospitals, all the enormous bureaucracy that goes along with all the complicated billing, denials, referrals, and appeals that should be covered by a single payer, We the people. That’s what a society is and does: it levels the playing field by helping those who need it and by regulating those who don’t.
War on Drugs
The war on drugs was lost before it ever began. As long as drugs are illegal there will be an underground market that will stop at nothing to keep the flow of money across la frontera de los Estados Unidos y Mexico. Yes, while the drugs flow north, the dinero flows both ways: to Mexican drug lords and their hordes of couriers and into the country’s economy (the second largest money maker next to oil); and to the U.S. border guards, DEA agents, prisons, and Homeland Security. The illegal drug industry is big business over here, too. When NAFTA was implemented during Bill Clinton’s reign, making the price of tortillas sky rocket as Mexico had to import subsidized corn the U.S. was selling, destroying the local agricultural economy, how was anyone in Mexico supposed to make a living other than selling drugs or leaving for the U.S.? Hillary recently admitted that the U.S. does bear some of the responsibility for the violent deaths of thousands of Mexicans caught in the drug war crossfire because of U.S. drug consumption. When she puts up a sign in her office that says, “It’s the Mexican economy, stupid,” we may actually get somewhere.
Pedophile Priests
I can’t really talk about this one without devolving into a diatribe about the evils of organized religion (which I’ve already posted on this blog), but in an attempt to be more specific and to the point I will state the obvious: the Catholic church could go a long way towards reducing priestly pedophilia by allowing them to marry, by recognizing women priests, and forcing priests to be prosecuted for child molestation in civil courts. Let the priests marry and at least have a chance at gratifying their libidos, even if marriage itself isn’t going to entirely solve the problem of sex and/or relationships (see Marriage). And, of course, marrying a woman isn’t going to do much for the priests who prefer men (can you imagine the day the Church ever let men marry men??!!), but maybe the latent pedophiles who currently fill the priestly ranks wouldn’t be so attracted to the profession. Maybe they would be less inclined to preach their homophobia from the pulpit as a distraction from their deceit. It’s hard for me to understand why so many women want to become priests, and why they think they can deconstruct church hierarchy without abandoning the church altogether. If it’s faith and observance they’re after, why can’t they do it outside the confines of a church that has abused and ignored them since it’s inception? But you have to admire their persistence and their desire to bring down the priests who have done so much harm to so many.
The War in Afghanistan
I thought we’d already won the war in Afghanistan. Isn’t that what the neo-cons told us when they said it was time to invade Iraq? The Taliban were on the run, the Afghanis had elected a great guy who would do the U.S. bidding, and the women there could walk around town without covering their heads.Of course, a few of us on the left were not in favor of that first war in Afghanistan, either, including Susan Sontag who caught all kinds of shit in the pages of the New Yorker, and Professor Ward Churchill, who lost his job, for daring to point out that maybe we should first look at the political and economic reasons for jihad against the U.S. before we started bombing Afghanistan back into the stone age. Of course, western society thinks Afghanistan never left the stone age. So now, after more than seven years of occupation in Iraq Obama decides its time to send “our good men and women” back into Afghanistan, in greater number, because surprise, the Taliban is back (seemingly the only ones capable of providing goods and services to the poor villages in the hinterland), President Karzai is more corrupt than ever and an anathema to his people, and women are still be abused and repressed and kept out of mainstream society. I guess because we’re a postmodern society we can’t factor Afghanistan’s long and unfortunate history into any decision making process where it’s recognized that imperialist countries are never going to “save” or “liberate” it. But that’s not really the goal, is it. This poor, volatile, and oppressed country is necessary to our geopolitical goals in the Middle East (see Globalism) and that trumps everything.
So the obfuscation keeps getting written and the wars on drugs and people keep being waged.
Solution? Just what I quoted Rick Lowry saying in my “Global Dominance” post: “ . . . the embrace of the U.N., the ridiculous talk of global disarmament, the distance from Israel, the slaps at American hegemony.” Thanks, Rick, for putting it so nicely.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Marginalization
I’ve acknowledged before that living in El Valle involves both privilege and deprivation. The privilege is the fact that we’re not dependent on wage labor, i.e., a nine to five job in a designated location, and can therefore live where we want, in a relatively isolated community that is beautiful, friendly, and restorative. The deprivation comes from living on a very limited income, where we don’t enjoy the luxuries most middle class folks take for granted—that is, until the economy tanked again and lots of middle class folks have lost their jobs, their new cars (I’ve never owned a new car), and even their houses. So while I wouldn’t wish any of this on anyone, except the bankers, Wall Street traders, and complicit politicians who brought us to this point (that comes to a lot of exceptions), the trade off has definitely paid off.
But as the years go by, the privileged part of getting to live someplace out of the way is being assaulted by a world that, in its march toward collective consumerism (cities) and globalization (see Global Domination), apparently would like nothing better than to marginalize us out of existence. As the “home becomes a private museum to guard against the ravages of time—space compression (David Harvey)”, it seems we spend way too much time on the phone trying to tell a computer that there really is a little village in northern New Mexico where you can send a package to our mailbox or door. We have this rural mailing address that says Box 6 El Valle Route, Chamisal (where the post office is located), New Mexico. This address gets rejected by computers that recognize only addresses that have numbers and streets or P.O. Box numbers. So we tell the computer — or very rarely, a person — that it’s OK, just let the computer change our address to P.O. Box 6, because as long as the name of the town, Chamisal, is in the address, the postmistress, who knows who everybody is, will make sure it gets delivered by the highway contract mailman to that green mailbox number 6 sitting at the head of our driveway.
Even she can’t compensate for some confusion, however. We were once given a subscription to the Sunday New York Times by a friend. After finally verifying that we did indeed exist, we got our first issue on the Monday after the Sunday it came out. We were ecstatic. The next Monday, there it was again in the mailbox. The next Monday there was no paper, and it didn’t come Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, either. But there it was on Monday morning, along with the new issue that actually came the day it was supposed to. From then on, on Mondays we either had no paper, or two papers, but I guess the Book Review and Arts and Entertainment section are never really dated for us, as we have to wait for new books to get to the library anyway (and take our turn on the request list, usually about thirty spots down) and we don’t often get to New York to go to the jazz clubs (I think the last time was around 1995).
United Parcel Service is another story. The main artery for northern New Mexico deliveries is in Santa Fe. There used to be a branch center in Española, the town of any size closest to us, and the man who made the deliveries to all of our little villages picked up his truck there. He, like the postmistress, knew everyone on his route. It didn’t matter how mangled the address was, even as UPS tightened up its requirements on rural addressing, if the name was on the package, Wilfredo got it to the right house. Alas, Wilfredo eventually retired. I think it took us a year to figure out what the current UPS regulations required for shipping, but once we got it right it didn’t mean we got our packages on the stipulated delivery day. The package may get sent out from Santa Fe, but if there’s no other delivery in El Valle that day, the driver doesn’t want to drop by. If it’s been raining or snowing, which is usually the case nine months out of the year, and our well maintained dirt road is wet, the driver may decide not to stop by. If we finally get the phone number of UPS in Santa Fe (they only list a central 800 number in the phone book, where you end up talking to someone in India) and tell them to just keep the package there until we come in to get it, they send it out anyway and the driver doesn’t deliver it because we’re not home, we’re in Santa Fe getting the package that isn’t there.
But I have no right to complain, really, because if I have these expectations that means I should move to town where the rest of the folks in the industrialized world conduct business, buy things, and communicate with people around the world without worry or complaint. Except for when the U.S. Postal Service deconstructs, which it did a couple of years ago, and everyone in Santa Fe started getting everyone else's mail, getting mail two months after it was sent, or not getting any mail at all, and went ballistic. The New Mexico congressional delegation had to intervene to demand better service for its constituents. While all this wasn’t as bad as the current meltdown of the entire financial system, it’s another reason I think I’ll just stay here.
But as the years go by, the privileged part of getting to live someplace out of the way is being assaulted by a world that, in its march toward collective consumerism (cities) and globalization (see Global Domination), apparently would like nothing better than to marginalize us out of existence. As the “home becomes a private museum to guard against the ravages of time—space compression (David Harvey)”, it seems we spend way too much time on the phone trying to tell a computer that there really is a little village in northern New Mexico where you can send a package to our mailbox or door. We have this rural mailing address that says Box 6 El Valle Route, Chamisal (where the post office is located), New Mexico. This address gets rejected by computers that recognize only addresses that have numbers and streets or P.O. Box numbers. So we tell the computer — or very rarely, a person — that it’s OK, just let the computer change our address to P.O. Box 6, because as long as the name of the town, Chamisal, is in the address, the postmistress, who knows who everybody is, will make sure it gets delivered by the highway contract mailman to that green mailbox number 6 sitting at the head of our driveway.
Even she can’t compensate for some confusion, however. We were once given a subscription to the Sunday New York Times by a friend. After finally verifying that we did indeed exist, we got our first issue on the Monday after the Sunday it came out. We were ecstatic. The next Monday, there it was again in the mailbox. The next Monday there was no paper, and it didn’t come Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, either. But there it was on Monday morning, along with the new issue that actually came the day it was supposed to. From then on, on Mondays we either had no paper, or two papers, but I guess the Book Review and Arts and Entertainment section are never really dated for us, as we have to wait for new books to get to the library anyway (and take our turn on the request list, usually about thirty spots down) and we don’t often get to New York to go to the jazz clubs (I think the last time was around 1995).
United Parcel Service is another story. The main artery for northern New Mexico deliveries is in Santa Fe. There used to be a branch center in Española, the town of any size closest to us, and the man who made the deliveries to all of our little villages picked up his truck there. He, like the postmistress, knew everyone on his route. It didn’t matter how mangled the address was, even as UPS tightened up its requirements on rural addressing, if the name was on the package, Wilfredo got it to the right house. Alas, Wilfredo eventually retired. I think it took us a year to figure out what the current UPS regulations required for shipping, but once we got it right it didn’t mean we got our packages on the stipulated delivery day. The package may get sent out from Santa Fe, but if there’s no other delivery in El Valle that day, the driver doesn’t want to drop by. If it’s been raining or snowing, which is usually the case nine months out of the year, and our well maintained dirt road is wet, the driver may decide not to stop by. If we finally get the phone number of UPS in Santa Fe (they only list a central 800 number in the phone book, where you end up talking to someone in India) and tell them to just keep the package there until we come in to get it, they send it out anyway and the driver doesn’t deliver it because we’re not home, we’re in Santa Fe getting the package that isn’t there.
But I have no right to complain, really, because if I have these expectations that means I should move to town where the rest of the folks in the industrialized world conduct business, buy things, and communicate with people around the world without worry or complaint. Except for when the U.S. Postal Service deconstructs, which it did a couple of years ago, and everyone in Santa Fe started getting everyone else's mail, getting mail two months after it was sent, or not getting any mail at all, and went ballistic. The New Mexico congressional delegation had to intervene to demand better service for its constituents. While all this wasn’t as bad as the current meltdown of the entire financial system, it’s another reason I think I’ll just stay here.
Friday, April 23, 2010
White Men in Suits
I sat in a room all day yesterday with white men in suits, and I’ll tell you, I can’t take it anymore. On my way home in the car I rolled down the windows, turned Aretha on full blast, and stopped for an Oreo ice cream bar to cleanse my soul and restore my sanity, or what’s left of it.
My poor compañera, the director of the anti-nuclear community group whose board I sit on, had to be in the same room with these white men in suits for two weeks straight while they bickered over the hazardous waste permit the state will be issuing to Los Alamos National Laboratory. How has it come to this, that these white men in suits can tell us it’s OK to burn chemical waste in the open air to rain down into our soil and water? How can they deny their fiduciary responsibility to clean up the mess they’ve made making bombs? How can they insist that their monitoring wells that have numerous structural problems can adequately tell if our aquifers are being contaminated?
Of course, I’ve also sat in many rooms with white guys in green uniforms telling me it’s OK to use herbicides on noxious weeds in the forest, that acequias need to get special permission from them—our friend the Forest Service—to work on our headgates or diversion dams even though the acequias predate them, and that ski area expansion are good because they provide jobs.
These white guys in suits and green uniforms are the professionals. Just because they’ve built enough bombs over the past 55 years to blow up the world a thousand times over and clearcut enough forests and suppressed so many forest fires that we now live in a tinder box waiting for catastrophic fire to burn us to smithereens doesn’t mean we have the right to question their authority or judgment. I can see it in the paternalistic roll of their eyes when we (brown people, women, white men in jeans) sit across the table from them, meaning, oh Christ, here we go again, what a waste of time this is when we know we’re going to go ahead as planned. They’re thinking, these people just don’t get it, they don’t live in the real world, while we’re thinking, these guys have created a world no one in their right mind would want to live in.
It’s a perpetual impasse, of course. It’s nothing new. It’s just the consequences are now so enormous and we all know they’re so enormous that apparently it renders us helpless. That’s not really a fair analysis, but that’s how it seems sometimes. Is our postmodern world so fragmented, so transient, ambiguous, and fetishized that we can’t figure out how to take unified action because we can’t figure out who the enemy is? Capitalism? Consumerism? Neo-conservatives? Religious right? (Unrepentant Marxist that I am I think it’s all about capitalism.) Arundhati Roy talks about this dilemma often in her activism—“To contemplate its girth and circumference, to attempt to define it, to try and fight it all at once, is impossible”—but hopes that we can all take on our individual, localized battles that remain connected to each other despite the power elite’s attempt to identify our common ground as the market place.
Occasionally there are signs of hope. Everyone is down in Bolivia right now at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, where President Evo Morales, who never wears a suit, said to the crowd, “Death to Capitalism!” Of course, some of his own people are concurrently demonstrating in the streets of San Cristóbal against the continued mining of silver by a Japanese corporation, the capitalist signifier of Bolivia’s colonial history, He has a tough row to hoe, figuring out how to nationalize foreign industries to benefit Bolivians while at the same time function in a global economy where capital accumulation continues to define how business is done. But apparently Bolivians have figured out who the enemy is and aren’t afraid to remind their fearless leader when they think he has forgotten. So keep wearing those brightly colored woven shirts and wool sweaters, Señor Morales, to keep our hopes close to your heart.
My poor compañera, the director of the anti-nuclear community group whose board I sit on, had to be in the same room with these white men in suits for two weeks straight while they bickered over the hazardous waste permit the state will be issuing to Los Alamos National Laboratory. How has it come to this, that these white men in suits can tell us it’s OK to burn chemical waste in the open air to rain down into our soil and water? How can they deny their fiduciary responsibility to clean up the mess they’ve made making bombs? How can they insist that their monitoring wells that have numerous structural problems can adequately tell if our aquifers are being contaminated?
Of course, I’ve also sat in many rooms with white guys in green uniforms telling me it’s OK to use herbicides on noxious weeds in the forest, that acequias need to get special permission from them—our friend the Forest Service—to work on our headgates or diversion dams even though the acequias predate them, and that ski area expansion are good because they provide jobs.
These white guys in suits and green uniforms are the professionals. Just because they’ve built enough bombs over the past 55 years to blow up the world a thousand times over and clearcut enough forests and suppressed so many forest fires that we now live in a tinder box waiting for catastrophic fire to burn us to smithereens doesn’t mean we have the right to question their authority or judgment. I can see it in the paternalistic roll of their eyes when we (brown people, women, white men in jeans) sit across the table from them, meaning, oh Christ, here we go again, what a waste of time this is when we know we’re going to go ahead as planned. They’re thinking, these people just don’t get it, they don’t live in the real world, while we’re thinking, these guys have created a world no one in their right mind would want to live in.
It’s a perpetual impasse, of course. It’s nothing new. It’s just the consequences are now so enormous and we all know they’re so enormous that apparently it renders us helpless. That’s not really a fair analysis, but that’s how it seems sometimes. Is our postmodern world so fragmented, so transient, ambiguous, and fetishized that we can’t figure out how to take unified action because we can’t figure out who the enemy is? Capitalism? Consumerism? Neo-conservatives? Religious right? (Unrepentant Marxist that I am I think it’s all about capitalism.) Arundhati Roy talks about this dilemma often in her activism—“To contemplate its girth and circumference, to attempt to define it, to try and fight it all at once, is impossible”—but hopes that we can all take on our individual, localized battles that remain connected to each other despite the power elite’s attempt to identify our common ground as the market place.
Occasionally there are signs of hope. Everyone is down in Bolivia right now at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, where President Evo Morales, who never wears a suit, said to the crowd, “Death to Capitalism!” Of course, some of his own people are concurrently demonstrating in the streets of San Cristóbal against the continued mining of silver by a Japanese corporation, the capitalist signifier of Bolivia’s colonial history, He has a tough row to hoe, figuring out how to nationalize foreign industries to benefit Bolivians while at the same time function in a global economy where capital accumulation continues to define how business is done. But apparently Bolivians have figured out who the enemy is and aren’t afraid to remind their fearless leader when they think he has forgotten. So keep wearing those brightly colored woven shirts and wool sweaters, Señor Morales, to keep our hopes close to your heart.
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