Love in the Time of Nazis

I've had a month to mull it over and I am ready to put words to my situation with my daughter. I am prompted by an e-mail I received from her today--nothing personal, just a random (and poorly informed) anti-French thing she forwarded to her whole list--but it left me with the feeling that she was reaching out to someone, somewhere. At least she did not delete me from her e-mail list, which I take as a hopeful sign.

We have had a difficult relationship, as many mothers and daughters do. But it wasn't always so. I remember the many times I felt completely blissed out by the smell of her hair or the little dimples on the back of her hands, how complete I felt with her tucked in safe in the next room. I treasure every one of her childhood particulars and can hear her voice in my mind at two, and six, and twelve. I will always have knowledge of her as the sweet and divine being she was before the culture and hormones took her to some dark place from which she has not returned.

I can see now how I have played Demeter to her Persephone, clinging and wailing as she pulled away from me and put herself in Pluto's path. And I can see that it is time to let her go. I was reminded of this last week when my partner and I happened to catch "The Horse Whisperer" on cable. That movie came out in 1998, the year before our lives fell apart. Because she was enamored of horses and a gifted rider, I took my daughter to see the movie after school one day in May of that year. It turned out to be one of those stories in which the characters were, then and now, archetypal forces that I recognized and felt deeply. There is a scene near the end where Robert Redford's character, who has been instrumental in healing a damaged horse and its damaged rider after a horrible accident, tells the young rider "There's a time coming when you're not going to need me any more, and that's time's now." It's a wrenching moment. It's the essence of what it's like to know the end of your abilities and the beginning of possibilities that will not be yours to see. It is a potent reflection of where we are now, my willful sprite and me. The time for assessing and intervening is past, and she can ride this horse or not. Time will tell.

It was a blessing to see her emerge from the crowd at the airport, from the nightmare of Iraq, into real time and a common place. We had a few good moments in which I remembered how we laugh at the some things and speak to cats in a language that only we comprehend. But too much of our time together was hard. During the course of our visit, I was ignored, snarled at, thanked sarcastically, and pummeled verbally. I was told not to touch her, not to talk to her, that I wasn't on her side, that I didn't understand, that I was beneath contempt. After spending my savings on furniture for her apartment, I was dismissed because I would not buy her cigarettes. I took as much as I could and then I left. We are two very different people traveling radically divergent paths. And yet we are so very much alike: strong, independent, even defiant in our urge for authenticity. Her choices have been driven by her desire to differentiate herself from me, so she quit school, refused counseling for her depression and self-destructive behavior, and joined the military, in part to distance herself from her educated, self-aware, peace activist mom. She accused me of loving her too much and not loving her at all, and the things I endured to find out which one was true would fry anyone's hair. I can still see my beloved baby in her face, contorted by rage and frustration at what she has created for herself, but since our visit I can also see the mask that covers it with false pride and unwarranted confidence. She has set a hard course for herself and it is inevitable that I am somehow to blame for all of it.

So what did I do wrong? I did not take charge soon enough or forcefully enough to shape her. I became a parent with the idea that a child is a full being unto herself, and I was too passive, letting her unfold like a little flower to reveal herself over time. Lacking authoritarian instincts, I failed to provide the rigid structure that I think she needed and that she has found in the military. I was too temperamental and wrapped up in my own difficulties to have known the depth of hers. I let myself believe that others knew better than I did what was best for my child, and we both suffered for it. Damaged by my own ancient history, I failed to assert my place at the center of her childhood with confidence.

I did some things right, too. I was there, and I made sure her dad was, too, even though we were divorced. I made a home that was clean and attractive and full of good things for her mind and body. I filled her life with people who shared her ever-changing interests and opened doors for her in music, dance, gymnastics, ice skating, horse riding, martial arts, and spirituality. Our house was filled with books--the one thing I could hardly ever say "no" to--and there were no questions I was unwilling to answer if I could. And I asked her questions. I encouraged her to think critically and follow cautiously. I shrugged off the blue hair and Goth clothes as a necessary station of the passion of her identity formation. I claimed my own flaws and kept them separate from her, apologized when I needed to so she would learn what it meant to be human and in progress.

Oh, to do it again knowing what I know now. It's every mother's lament.

I suspect there will be a long silence between us, and she will go through some trials by fire. She will be drawn to male authority and rigid dogmas and throw her righteous wrath my way. She will fail to understand the history leading up to the moment in which she lives. She'll rally with the gay-bashers and racists and fundamentalists and think that she's found something solid there to stand on. She will continue to engage in dangerous behavior until some germ or psychopath takes her dare and ups the ante. She'll fumble and fall, like we all do, until she recognizes that the monster she is fighting is herself, not me. Then her life will truly begin.

Until that day, I'll content myself with loving my vision of her and keeping it, like an heirloom, for the day this howling breech between us is closed, all the time knowing that it may never be.

A Pox on All Our Houses

As I sit down to write, a storm threatens--literally. It's going to rain any minute now. It seems like appropriate weather for what I'm about to say. I've been flat on my back for two days, revisited by a stiff neck that comes around every five years or so, pinching brachial nerves and forcing me to keep my eyes fixed dead ahead, which is what I think it's meant to do. Either I tweaked some vertebrae at the Air Show last weekend or this is evidence of my spiritual stubborness making itself manifest. (The cure for the latter, according to Louise Hay, is to affirm "It is safe to see other points of view.") In the name of looking ahead, seeing other points of view, and being temporarily paralyzed, I've read two books these last two days that make for some interesting notes on all three points.

The first was by British legal scholar Didi Herman. It's called The Anti-Gay Agenda: Orthodox Vision and the Christian Right, published in 1997. It was written in the clunky academic style that obscures good thinking. I stuck it out, though, and was surprised to find myself somewhat heartened by the internal fissures of the Christian Right movement where I could stay focused on them through the machinistic prose. (Herman studied over 40 years of Christianity Today and interviewed several background players in the evangelical takeover of the U. S.) It's good news, to me at least, that the same people who want to return to the cultural rigidity of the 1950s are the same ones who were fuming about the outrageous immorality of those very days. It's also good news that someone is documenting the layered demonology that first applied to "Christ-killing Jews," then "Communists" (real or imagined), and--since those devils have been forced out of the cross-hairs by theology and history--now the Homosexual, specifically the gay man. While that should be good news because it leaves me out of the first roundup of undesirables, at least, I am haunted of the words of Pastor Niemoller, imprisoned by the Nazis at Dachau for not singing the praises of their party:"First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing. Then came the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left to stand up for me." The bad news, of course, is that these evangelicals who spoke to Herman in the late 1990s have taken over schools, the media, and the government.

The devil, whoever he is in any given decade, is always described as immensely powerful and predatory. Given the description of the Omnipresent Homo in Christian pamphlets, who wouldn't want to be gay? He has everything: money, control, power. He is the antithesis of the maligned Christian, who simultaneously despises and plays the victim. The Evil Homo is in our schools, brainwashing our children. He is at the controls of the media, manipulating what we see and hear so that we, too, will be seduced by his hypermasculine = gay = Satanic message. He has usurped our government and is waging a covert war on our values, our way of life, and our security. His very presence is the cause of all disease and suffering. It is the good Christian's duty to "eradicate" homosexuality! Evangelicals advocate stoning gays as community-building events. They want to make America a theocracy not at all unlike Iran under the Ayatollah. Their vision of paradise is a world of only their kind, cleansed of all dark-skinned, foreign, poor, gay, liberal Others. They have been working to make it so for years. And Jesus is coming very soon to help them out.

The other book I read was Further Along the Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck, psychiatrist and late-in-life Christian convert. I'd read The Road Less Traveled many years ago, along with his second book, People of the Lie. Further Along the Road was published in 1993. In all of his books, Peck describes evil as narcissistic, fanatically smug, unable to admit to fault, blaming, addictive, and exclusive. Peck's devil projects his own diminished qualities onto someone or something for whom he knows there is already antipathy, quite opposite to the Christian teaching to "love thy neighbor as thyself." Peck's devil sees the world in black and white: "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists." Peck also lists the ten characteristics of a cult in a discussion of the failure of many types of dogmas (Christian, Hindu, secular, and New Age alike):

1. Idolatry of a single charismatic leader.
2. A revered inner circle.
3. Secrecy of management.
4. Financial evasiveness.
5. Dependency.
6. Conformity.
7. Special language.
8. Dogmatic doctrine.
9. Heresy.
10. God in captivity.

And now we have an evangelical president, appointed with the vote of Antonin Scalia, Supreme Court End-Timer, whose administration meets all of the above criteria. Bush and his supporters believe that "God is finally in the White House." The hubris of the Bush cabal is documented world-wide, and it is well known that the president is simply incapable of admitting to his own errors. He is inarticulate and vain. And he has managed to hitch his wagon to the anti-gay star, promising to make a preemptive strike against gays and lesbians by amending the Constitution to make unions among them illegal and therefore immoral or immoral and therefore illegal. Either way, as much as 10% of the population will become less-than. It happened in Germany, too, when the Nuremburg Laws went into effect. Marriage between Jews and Gentiles was made immoral and illegal, like marriage between blacks and whites in the U.S.

You really don't have to be wearing a tinfoil hat to come to the conclusion that America is at war with itself. Do we love freedom or crave security? Are we many, or are we one? Liberal or conservative? Simple-mindedness has triumphed over reflection and reason, giving birth to a movement that needs an easily defined enemy to purge all its nasty fantasies and conflicts. The movement is organized and quietly advancing on schools, the media, and all levels of government. Hate and fear are evident everywhere this beast has walked. We are entrenched in a dream state where we accept lies and diversions as truth and evil as good. History is being redacted. There is a lot of noise out there. It's hard to think. But maybe that's the point. If we can believe that there is no precedent for what we are seeing and we lack the skills or will to stop it, anything can be perpetrated in our name.

Vive La Dorothy!

A woman whose internet persona is Hecate (daughter of the moon, earth, and underworld--one of my kind of people) posted this poem by the incomparable Dorothy Parker in response to a discussion of how the Bush administration continues to alienate every group but its evangelical wing-nuts:

Sanctuary

My land is bare of chattering folk;
The clouds are low along the ridges,
And sweet's the air with curly smoke
From all my burning bridges.

I've been chuckling about this for over 24 hours now. It also prompted me to go pick up a copy of Penguin's Complete Poems of Dorothy Parker. Of course, while I was looking for this book, I came across an out-of-print biography of Dorothy Parker, which I bought from a local resale shop. I have more than a passing familiarity with DP. When I was a morose teenager, my mom liked to quote Dorothy's poem Résumé:

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Though I despised the sing-songy dismissal of my despondent state, I actually came to agree with DP's assessment. You might as well live. (This was many years before I learned the rate of suicide among my recent ancestors might predispose me to ponder self-destruction in a more-than-casual way.) When I read the jacket of Parker's biography, I felt the same odd pull that I felt toward the work and biographies of Djuna Barnes, Lillian Hellmann, and Gertrude Stein. Perhaps I am just naturally drawn to brilliant women who defy convention, decry fascism, and like to have a good time. I certainly seem to have developed an affinity for the second and third decades of the 20th century. (How do I know? Both my houses have been Craftsman bungalows. I saw "De-Lovely" opening night. My hair is bobbed and I love Art Deco. Need I say more?) The years 1924 and 2004 do indeed seem to have some similarities: a reckoning following a period of peace and prosperity, a collision of the forces of Progress and Resistance. "Debauchery" is everywhere and the self-appointed Righteousness are bathing the world in blood again as they thump-thump-thump those Bibles. It's like deja vu all over again! But reading DP's poems (for the second time), I am struck by her astute observations of vanity and other forms of silliness. Her self-mocking curmudgeonliness suggests, to me at least, that she was a disappointed idealist. I certainly can appreciate that. And God, is it ever good to laugh. Had she not gotten so bored with us, DP would have been 111 years old this Sunday. To celebrate, I'll be reading her biography, subtitled What Fresh Hell Is This?, by Marion Meade. After all, the book group at the library was reading Diana: The Story of a Princess. I'll take my icons surly, thank you.

Friends

I love it when this happens: I have a plan for the day, all errands and pragmatism, some loose ideas about the writing bit of the day, and then the phone rings.

"Hey, I called in sick today. What are you doing?" And suddenly, redundantly, what I thought the day was about changes. A friend who is moving away soon wants to spend her day with me, just hanging out, talking, maybe take a walk and throw down some Pad Thai. I rush through the errands that might have dragged on all day, and by mid-morning I am home and contemplating the coming and going of various friends from my life.

Just the other day, I spent a considerable amount of energy resisting the urge to contact someone who's been out of (my) orbit for about a year. We had a falling out when some past treachery dropped into plain view and caused me quite a bit of pain, for which I could get no healing response. Her reluctance to acknowledge that she had behaved dishonorably--her denial that I even had a right to say so--confounded me. The last words she said to me were, "Well, I'm not giving up on our friendship."

"No, me neither, that's why I think we should keep talking about this," I replied. But then she never called, and I wasn't sure that I should. Over the year, I've thought of her often and laughed about so many of the things we used to laugh about. I've retold the stories that she told so much better, watched a couple of movies we disagreed about the first time, wrote her a birthday card and then threw it in recycling. Why insinuate yourself where you're not wanted? But it is a loss. She was one of the funniest, most gregarious people I've ever known, though perhaps not the most honest. I miss her.

I often find myself comparing new friendships to old ones, the friends who seemed at the time like a rather harmonious mix of almost-middle-aged, highly educated women. We had varying and not always compatible views, but almost every weekend we ended up passing the evening on someone's deck, grilling salmon, drinking wine, and hashing out the complexities of the world. We didn't know how good those times were. A variety of forces, including a bit of treachery, tore the group apart after several years, but I have realized that those evenings and those women became my gold standard for friendship, warts and all. I know I have a tendency to see people as what they could be more clearly than I see what they are and to love them accordingly. I also know they gave me up much more willingly than I let them go: this is not a point of pride for me, just an observation. And a cautionary note. I guess I was a bit naive, so I'm embarrassed by how much real estate those women own in my psyche.

I find myself more reticent now, less willing or able to extend myself in friendship. I'm far less extroverted than I was then, for one thing, and lots more wary of duplicity. I am also now a part of an urban scene that has very different rhythms and customs than the small college town where I spent the last 19 years. People are busier and there is no such thing as spontaneity. The friend who is coming over today is from "back home." My Chicago peeps wouldn't dream of calling on the fly or coming over with no particular plan of action. I will occasionally email some blogger whose voice I like, but there again, it's all a product of my imagination of that person, not in any way likely to become a friendship. These attempts at contact strike me as Morse code signals from one ship to another on a dark sea, or a satellite blinking a message to an inanimate receiver far below. Geography is important, at least at the beginning.

Susie Bright wrote in her recently published Mommy's Little Girl that she "didn't know how to fall in love in L. A. anymore." She feels disheartened by the emphasis our culture puts on posturing and "auditioning" and keeping things light and cool. I agree. Form has replaced content in every area of American life: you don't have to be a hard-working employee, just know how to portray one. Pose as a reporter while you regurgitate memos from the politically powerful. Talk like you're 30, even if you're 13. You can be a sexual virtuoso without a heart. You can even be president without an intellect. It does not seem to matter. Friendship has hollowed out and become more a concept than a practice. My sense is that we have become confused about what is supposed to excite us in life. We have lost our ability to simply be and to enjoy each other's company. We seem to think it's a waste of time.

Maybe I'm behind the times, or maybe I'm ahead. I don't know. But I do know that I don't want to lose one opportunity to hang out with a friend, no matter what elements of life's edifice are clamoring for my energy and attention. Those people who come and go from our lives--the ones with whom we briefly share an outlook, a joke, a fear, an interest--are the only things that really matter in the end.

Dog Days

I've never much liked August. It seems to be not quite summer, not quite fall. When I was a kid, it was always hazy, hot, and humid. It was boring, back when I was fluent in boredom, and on the other end was school: the land of law and order (in contrast to the chaos at home) and occasionally something to entertain. When I was a teenager, I had to have surgery in August, and it did not go well. I began to think of it as a month of incapacitation and despair, and subsequent events supported that notion. As August of 1985 approached, I was at the peak of pregnancy in an un-air conditioned apartment. I got divorced in August. When I was a teacher, the advent of August meant school was going to start again and I was going to be faced with the daunting prospect of a whole new tribe of savages to civilize, a new set of hearts and minds to win. July was really summer, the only month untouched by the academic year. It was always August when the car needed repair or the garden went to seed or some conflict that had festered came into view. It was August when a partner of seven years jumped ship without warning or explanation. It was another August some time later when I left behind my old life and began a new life in a new city, far from old friends and family and the easy familiarity I had had with my home of 19 years. When I see August coming, I always look away, just as I have learned to do with hostile canines.

I decided late in July to lie low and listen to the wisdom of August, to sit down at the table with August and look him in the eye, in spite of all the bad blood between us. The first cool "northers" blow in. Flowers seem to know the end is near. Astrologically, it is the month when the fire and drama of Leo gives way to the humble service of Virgo. It's harvest time, time to turn our attention to preparing for the winter ahead. You can see this sensibility in the world this year, too: the Olympic Games will end just as Europe comes back from holiday, and school begins, and people begin to think seriously about their options in upcoming election here in the U.S., the show-boating Captain Codpiece versus his wonkish, professorial opponent. Although I hate to see summer end, I am much more comfortable with the second half of August than the first. I like service and dislike ostentatiousness. I have lived long enough to recognize my gifts and talents (Leo), but I suspect I am only beginning to put them to use (Virgo). Perhaps this August I am more a peer to the time than I have been at any other moment in my life.

I have found myself honoring the Lion part of August by thinking a lot about pride and what it makes people do and not do. I've rummaged through Augusts past and examined the role of pride in events as they have unfolded and concluded that I probably should have had more of it, and much sooner than I did. I've also thought a lot about courage, the word itself derived from cor, the Latin word for heart. (Pride, it turns out, is from the Latin prodesse, literally, "to be useful.") So the question now is How can I use what I have learned? And will I have the courage to act on the answer?

The Other Two Americas

Our country is not split along partisan lines alone. On United Airlines, you can listen to tower communications with all aircraft at the pilot's discretion. To me, pilots are kind of sexy (unresolved daddy issues, no need to email me about this), so I geek out on this kind of pleasure when I can. An elderly couple across the aisle was enjoying this feature of our eight-hour flight, too, but they didn't seem to understand that they could take the headphones off at some point and use their inside voices, so they kept them on the whole time and TALKED VERY LOUDLY. Everyone forward of the tail section of the massive 777 got to hear the conversation of these two geezers, which went something like this:

"DID YOU HEAR THAT, HONEY? AN ASIAN PILOT! HE'S FROM JAPAN! I COULDN'T UNDERSTAND A WORD HE SAID! I'M GLAD WE'RE NOT ON THAT PLANE!"

"WHAT DO YOU THINK UNITED 2 'HEAVY' MEANS? DID YOU SEE A LOT OF FAT PEOPLE UP THERE?"

"WHAT THE HELL?! A FEMALE FLYING A PLANE! WHOO BOY, I SURE AM GLAD WE'RE NOT ON THAT PLANE!"

"IT SURE IS STUPID THAT YOU CAN'T HEAR THE MOVIE BACK HERE. THEY SHOULD FIND SOME WAY TO PUT IT IN THE HEADSET."

"HOW DO YOU WORK THE LIGHT?" (said as finger pushes button over and over, making strobe effect with reading light overhead)

The flight attendants, whose job it would normally be to handle this kind of buffoonery, were distracted by some belligerent ass in the row in front of me who was just sure he had heard one of the flight attendants say "shit" in front of his kids. And he wasn't letting it go. For six hours, there was mediation between the ass, the young and admirably professional flight attendant in question, and the flight purser. By the time we landed, the pilot was involved and charges were going to be filed by the ass, who was NOT going to leave the plane until he got to talk to someone from United.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the ass was a massive white guy whose impressive musculature was apparently built to support the enormous chip on his shoulder. The flight attendant was smallish African-American guy. As for the buffoons in 51H and 51J––they were wearing Bush/Cheney '04 buttons.

The Two Americas

I've been reflecting on John Kerry's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention for several days now, studying the punditry to see where my assessment stands compared to more knowledgeable types. I watched it on CNN and was appalled by the ongoing commentary by Republicans pretending to be objective journalists, e.g., Wolf Blitzer and Judy Woodruff. Will Democrats provide the commentary at the Republican convention? Will they openly make jokes about being "inside enemy territory" and repeatedly draw attention to their towering chutzpah? Of course not. To me it seems that we are two different tribes forced into common territory, all references to singular Americanism aside. John Edwards is not wrong when he says there are two Americas, but they are not just two socioeconomic Americas. There is the America of fear and destruction, which aches for fascist control and an ending of all difference, and the America of hope and idealism, languishing and intimidated by the boldness of the End-Timers who are now in power.

Overall, I trust John Kerry more than I did before. He was more forthright in his criticism of the Bush administration than I expected he would be and fairly pointed in describing how he would do things differently. Many a blogger has leveled a critical gun on him, so I'll not address what I felt were his deficiencies here. I am repulsed by George Bush's frat-boy machismo and much prefer a more thoughtful and reflective type in the White House. Give me a patrician intellectual over Top Gun any time when it comes to understanding and defending our nation's principles. I long for a First Lady who is more than an adoring handmaiden or Campaign Barbie. I prefer John Edwards's lawyerly charm to Dick Cheney's Slime-Shady. The thing is, they have all been reduced to caricatures by a populace that demands simple story lines and uncomplicated personalities. In general, Republicans are probably not nearly as evil as I imagine them, nor are Democrats likely to defend my progressive, liberal America in the ways I hope. The difference I see is in how the Republicans seem to revel in the politics of fear and loathing. Their single note seems to be hate, and their list of targets is endless: the Clintons, "libruls," poor people, gay people, dark-skinned people, non-Christians. When I hear people like Rush Limbaugh or Pat Buchanan or Ann Coulter, I find myself wondering What made them this way? Bush is especially mystifying to me. How can anyone who has had so much handed to him be such a failure? How can the Cheneys, whose daughter Mary is an out lesbian, actively work to make her a second-class citizen? How can this army of self-proclaimed Christian soldiers be so out of touch with the teachings of Christ?

If I was not a Democrat before now, I would certainly have no choice but to become one this year. If I believed before that there was no difference between the two parties, events of the last three years have made it abundantly clear that there are, and they are stark.