On the Other Hand

On the Cusp of Yes and No

2005-01-21T11:25:00.000-08:00

The coronation of King George has passed, and we are a poorer nation for it. We have chosen our course, our curse. It is easy to look at the larger national picture and see where things are headed (barring some unforeseeable intervention by God or other, wiser powers), but perhaps this is only true because there is a media to amplify and reflect the will of the fascists along with a sense among people that all of it is out of our hands, anyway. I long to feel the same certainty about my own life, to see where it is going with as much clarity as I see the fate of my nation. How confident I would be in my decisions if I had yes men and women all around, a giant publicity machine churning out adoration and affirmation, and $40 million to throw a party for myself!

But down here in real life, we do not have scripted roars of approval or syncophantic disciples or rich daddies to bail us out. We have our questions, our consciences, our variables and complexities. For a long while I have been struggling with the sense that life is a textile of sorts, that the trick is to figure out how to have all the strings (survival, job or work, lover, friends, family, individual interests) woven together at equal intervals and tension, so no one thing, if snagged or knotted, completely upsets the fabric. Too much pulling on one string and the entire pattern is skewed. Much effort has to be made to soften it back into a pleasing whole. In our quiet, humble lives, we are forever weaving and being unwoven by people or events or forces from deep within our own fumbling souls. Maybe I have had only a part of the picture until now: suddenly, it seems the primary occupation of life is to learn the patience of Penelope and the adaptability of Odysseus. Sometimes, in our dark nights, we have to take out the razor and slash our lives apart before we understand that a new design is forming in us, one based on the progress of desire and intention. It's a risky business.

When I left my stultifying but secure job as a manuscript editor, one of my biggest fears was that I would have a hard time getting back on the gerbil wheel of employment. After all, we are told over and over that the best time to look for a job is when you have one. I'd be dependent! I was middle aged! What would I do with my time?! (My hours have never been richer.) A towering fortress of fear and propaganda stood between me and the unseen source of my siren song, but I was hungry enough for excitement in my life to take my chances. The résumés I now fax and mail into oblivion and hand out to friends and acquaintances feel like little tiny arrows striking a stone edifice. Boulder-sized silences vault over my head from behind the wall. Flying past, they make a sound much like "I told you so." I have become less adept at putting myself out there and wanting to convince people what an asset I would be to their enterprise. I also live in a big city now, where I lack the advantage of being a familiar face with two decades of network built up around me. The surprising thing for me is how excited I feel about being forced to find a new warp and weft for the things that are mine: my thoughts, my abilities, my contradictions, the causes of the effects I live with moment to moment. Maybe I will never have a "real job" again. A lot of people don't these days. I'll have to be creative, stitch together something entirely different than the pattern that was handed to me when I was born into the middle class at the tail end of the Baby Boom.

I am reminded of a sensation I had as a child–an uncertain time if ever there was one. I cannot connect the sensation to an actual memory of a time or place: it is more like a image describing me to myself right now. I am standing at the edge of a river, holding on to a rope that is frayed and knotted by years of use and exposure. I don't know if it will hold me, and I'm scared. But something in me rebels against the fear, and in an instant I run forward, holding tight until I am out over the muddy, churning water, and I let go. All I know from there is that gravity forces me into the stream. I cannot see whether I swim or float or am pulled under.

Geomancy

2004-12-31T15:54:00.000-08:00

A year ago on this night, I was sitting outside in the with a small fire in the chiminéa when gunfire and honking horns announced the arrival of 2004. I was on the phone with my daughter, who had called to tell us that she had gotten married on the beach in Honolulu that morning. She and her husband were a couple of weeks from deployment to Iraq. I spoke to my new son-in-law on the phone and loved him instantly, unexpectedly. I did not have much hope for their marriage, given their recent arrival at the door of adulthood, but I trusted that each would carry the other to the next place as love does when it comes and goes from our lives. Earlier in the evening, my partner and I had examined the year just past and chosen one thing from many that would be our focus as we went forward from there: she chose more active engagement with the world, I chose less.

I remember contemplating the image of Janus as I hung up the phone and sat quietly burning old receipts, failed poems, and other detritus too personal for the winds of Chicago. Janus was the guardian of portals and the patron of beginnings and endings. He had two faces, one facing forward and one facing backward. Like him, I could see a whole chapter of my life ending and a new one beginning, but I could not grasp the forces that had authored them or given them points of origin and termination. When we stand at the doorway of futures past, are we more dead or alive? The question made me stop and take in the moment. Here and now I can still see the clouds around the waxing moon that fused 2003 to its successor and feel the warmth of cinders swirling around my face. I tried to imagine a grandchild who, unknown to me at the time, had already been conceived but would not make it into this world. I could feel the potential of her, but I could not see her face. Some other unseen thing was hurtling toward my life, but what was it? I had an instinct to rest up, to know who I was and what I wanted, because something was culminating in 2004 and it would shape the years to come. There was a crossroads ahead, but no map on which to locate it. Would I know it when I saw it?

As I recall my visitation of Janus, indoors tonight instead of out and facing north instead of west, I feel a sense of relief that this particular year is over. It seems right for 2004 to end with a waning moon. I do not know yet if I asked the right questions or opened the proper gates for my journey; affirmation is a process that takes its own time and carves out its own erratic course. My backward-looking face is pleased that we did what we said we would do: J. resumed volunteer work and pursued a raise and a promotion, both of which have affirmed her and restored a sense of joy in her relationship to the world. She made powerful, unprecedented contacts with people she has traveled beside for years but never really noticed. I strove inwardly in much the same way, finding my voice and valuing it, privileging it over others for a change. New friends filled in the spaces left by the ones who had fallen away to distance or divergence; bits of my writing went outside my orbit and found their own lives; our home became more reflective of our combined spirit; our losses brought surprising reconciliations; we awakened to deeper meanings and larger possibilities within ourselves. It is clear to me now the primary occupation for both of us was creativity. My daughter and her soon-to-be-ex-husband are on their way home from Iraq, having made a safe passage through their first deployment. My forward-looking face sees changes coming with a surgery, a reunion, a return to life outside myself already demanding their due on the calendar I hung up today. For the first time in three years, I noticed how I post my calendar on a door dividing the upper and lower halves of our house, the symbolic line between the conscious mind and the unconscious. Between what we can see and what we cannot, there is time laying invisible grids upon our experience, perceptual latitudes and longitudes, forcing us into the illusion that there was a yesterday, there is a today, a tomorrow is coming. In some places on our spinning world, it is already 2005. A year of wanting, watching, making, and letting go has become a fire that burns inside me now, consuming what is no longer of use and driving me deeper into this breath, this moment of my life.

Once More Into the Breach

2004-12-01T14:29:00.000-08:00

All indications are that it is time for me to return to the world. The election is over. I've said what I have to say, done what I could do. Time to get back to not-quite-living. The inner pressure to be able to describe in one or two words what I do is growing, though very few jobs I've had since I left teaching could be summed up that easily, or if they could, reliably brought casual conversation to a screeching halt: "I run a gay and lesbian resource center" or "I edit articles on astrophysics" worked like a great deflective shield in many social situations, pivoting flummoxed inquirers back over to the brie, thinking But she doesn't look like a homo! or Astrophysics? WTF is that? Is she really smart or, like, a fortune teller? My inner dominatrix tells me I should be making money--bringing home some bacon--because that's what we do here in America, that's how we stake out our worldly claim. It's been a scary and enlightening experiment to step off the fiscal compensation scale and see what really gave meaning to my days. Who knew I liked solitude so much? How can I explain to anyone what was gained by not adding my anxiety to the traffic jams, my ego to the petty office politics, my energy to the Great Insurance Caper? I would recommend the experience to anyone. We don't spend nearly enough time doing "nothing."

Although, truth be told, I did quite a lot this year. I traveled and spoke publicly, transcribed a long series of historical documents, educated myself about the real nature of the political landscape, read widely, lost the weight I gained trying to nurse myself through each day with Skittles, wrote and sent out a complex article, started blogging, began a certification course in astrology (I told you she was a fortune teller!), and met some of my neighbors for the first time. I figured some things out about myself. I was peaceful. I liked my life.

The thing that is going to be tricky now that I value what I bring to the working world is that I am going to be far less willing to settle for a bad script. I have so often been amazed at how little our jobs actually ask from us in terms of ability or experience, even as they drain us of all energy. It's amazing how little of the work in the world is getting done, given all the hours we put into it. Maybe that is because the coin of the corporate realm is time and not people. I like to imagine there is someone out there looking for a colleague or employee who is smart, conscientious, compassionate, fair, articulate, multifaceted, and engaged; someone who can write, speak, organize, mediate, teach, counsel, manage, lift, edit, create, advocate, synthesize, coordinate, respond, cooperate, research, and learn--someone who wants to make a valuable contribution to the world but has not yet found a place to do it. Salary is negotiable. At this point in my life, it's not about the money.

Grace Note

2004-11-23T14:13:00.000-08:00

It's a little tricky to affect an attitude of gratitude these days, with so much to be reviled and rejected--Bush and all that he connotes being foremost on my mind, of course--but 'tis the season. Thanksgiving has long been my favorite holiday. It's all the good things about Christmas without the stress. I look forward to getting into the time machine and going back, back to the place where people still see me as 15-year-old; to houses and towns that were once home, but are not any more; back to the place where Me in the present tense gets put on hold so I can play the part of daughter or granddaughter or far-away friend. At 43, I feel lucky to still have so many people to go see: my 92-year-old grandmother is more treasured with every November because ever since anyone can remember, she has sworn This was her last Thanksgiving. One time soon, this person who was the anchor of my earliest travels in the world will be gone, and my world will not be the same. I try to tell her how much I'm aware of her influence on me, for better and for worse, but she won't have it. She's not one for sentimentality or good-byes, but it seems like she's been saying good-bye to us forever. I'm grateful for what I learned from her about paradox.

The trip back to Chicago is always quiet, as I try to reorient myself to my life as I know it, shake off the past like it's snow in my hair. Every year, I come away with an ache that feels both familiar and new. Is it nostalgia? Disillusionment? A mild case of indigestion? It's one of those feelings that has no English word, something like zeitgeist in Germany. I touch who I was once and know profoundly that I am not who they see now. But they are so many pieces of me: Leah, my niece, a little wildflower planted in my chambered heart; my nephew Sam, who once believed--and made me believe--I was a mermaid; my Sister Moon and Leo mother, the other facets of my trinity, the three faces of my Eve; my brother-in-law, father, and stepfather, who circle warily at these tribal gatherings, withdraw into their own understandings of our strange customs; my cousin Evan, standing at the precipice of adulthood, looking around to see who will be his mentor and guide; my Aunt Donna and Uncle Chris, without whom I would have never become much of anything; and my Aunt Gisele, newly returned to my life, bearing gifts and glad tidings. These are just a few of the voices in my interior, the opportunities I have had to love and be loved--my blessings.

My daughter is alive and as well as can be expected in Iraq, and we are slightly more optimistic than not that she will be "home" early in February. What does she count as home, I wonder, in her nomadic desert life? Is she old enough yet to see her good fortune and know its worth? I have let her go, but I will not cease in wanting her happiness and health. Should she return to us whole, inside and out, my gratitude will know no bounds.

I am blessed beyond measure for the year I've just had, too; a year turned inward, relieved of the pressure and distraction of the world. I've been in my own private Tibet this year and I think its quiet will mark the rest of my inner life. I've had time to write, to think, to study and read more than ever, and to be still and listen. It would not have been possible without my sweet and sunny Goat Girl, who would bear any burden for love. In her odd way, she has taught me much about optimism and hope. She has made me want to be a better person, and better yet, she has helped me become one. I can only aspire to become as generous in spirit as she already is. (Sorry, folks, she's taken.)

I am reminded lately of a vision that burned itself into my brain when I was about 30: I would see it every time I closed my eyes, a golden triangle standing on its point in the palm of an upturned hand. What does it mean? I asked. The answer came some time later, by increments and in varying forms, but its essence was ask, and you shall receive. It was more than a hotline to Santa. It was a blessing, a responsibility, and an understanding that I was already living in abundance. For all my hopeless despondency, I cannot deny that my life reflects more of heaven than hell. It was true yesterday, it's true today, and it could possibly be true tomorrow. Possibly not. For this reason I am going to spend these next few days looking wide-eyed at the good raining down in my life, noticing the way each drop radiates rings along its surface, circle into circle, forging links that bind me to then and now and whatever the future holds, weaving me into the lives of others and giving form to my intricate, ephemeral soul.

The Global Soul

2004-11-17T20:24:00.000-08:00

"The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land." --Hugo of St. Victor, a 12th century monk

I have not seen nearly as much of the world as I would like, but I am wildly curious about it. Aside from attending preschool in the home of an elderly Swedish couple and a single visit to a Greek dentist when I was 11, I don't think I met people from other parts of the world until I was in college, and then they arrived in my life in a swirl of bright cloth and deliciously accented syllables from Libya, the Philippines, Poland, India, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Zimbabwe, China, Colombia, and Malaysia. My husband and I were one of three American couples in the married student housing complex that year. Four sets of cinderblock apartments faced the courtyard in which I first witnessed the midnight feasting of Ramadan and forged a rough understanding, through gestures and broken phrases, of the horror of my friend Grezyna, who had just learned she was pregnant when the radioactive fallout from Chernobyl crept across Poland. It was the Reagan era. On TV, there were instructive news clips of Iranians chanting "Death to America!" and burning our flag. Our next door neighbors, Muhammad and Zahra from Tehran, said, "If the people don't do these things, the police come and torment their families, arrest them. They write down names of people who do not make the signs and light the fires." These learned travellers were the friends who brought gifts and blessings when my daughter was born. Theirs are the faces in my mind's eye as I hear news of the world.

Later, I had students from Korea, Russia, Bosnia, and Sweden, a colleague from Argentina. It was hard not to notice their eloquent command of my native language and their surprising knowledge of the geography of my country. Their eager love for all things American baffled me, but I sensed underneath it a genuine affection for who we thought we were then: the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, and all that. I marveled at my brilliant luck of birthplaces, right in the center of the very place that people from all over wanted to call home. I learned how to pace my questions so they weren't like an interrogation, how to nudge out the details of what was missed and what was escaped when they arrived here. Their good humor and generosity never failed to astonish me.

I ventured off my continent once and went to London completely alone for a week, knowing little more about it than where to find a B&B owned by a nice Indian couple near the Paddington Station. I walked miles through the city, got off the Tube at random stops just to look around; I don't think I said more than two or three sentences to anyone the whole week. I did not shop, I hardly ate, but I saw as much as I could, and I listened. Then next week, I connected with two friends and we drove out past Avebury, Stonehenge, the moors, and the wind farms to Cornwall. Grafitti on a bridge near Bude announced CORNWALL IS NOT ENGLISH. I held this thought as we walked the coastal path in silence. For me, Cornwall became that worn path with its observant cows, its stone cairns and Celtic crosses. In that two-week period, I felt more at ease in the world than I have felt before or since.

Now I live in a city where a half-dozen languages--Spanish, Polish, Russian, Greek, Urdu, and Mandarin--jockey with English in any day of commerce. I find myself comforted by the rhythms of these conversations I cannot understand. The words are unfamiliar but the subjects are not. I feel almost ashamed that I have only absorbed the dialects of my America, though they are many. I am too shy to use even the little bit of Spanish I have learned from our Mexican waiter at our local Indian restaurant. Will I mess it up or somehow be insulting? Would it be too familiar, too presumptuous? Is it perhaps better not to paste the stamp of empire on every breath?

The quote above is from Pico Iyer's book, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home, published in 2000, before "9/11 changed everything." Iyer posits that the 12th century monk who made that observation was pointing the superiority of those whose feet are secured in heaven, but I see yet another possibility for those of us living in a country that has twisted off its foundation and suddenly does not feel like home. We find ourselves suddenly in exile in a place that was only recently the only place we knew. Freedom has taken on militaristic connotations, morality is defined in boardrooms and other dens of criminality. We can hardly bear to stay but we do not want to go. Cobalt strangers, we are, in a strange red land. Now is the moment when the veil is ripped away and we see with new eyes the world as it is, not as we believe it to be. We have become perfect in the truest sense, "without defect or omission."

We are the ones who appreciate the wonder-working powers of gay white men adopting unwanted black children, the salutary effect of Icelanders married to Turks living in Germany. We don't need to see our reflection in every shiny surface. We see God in every convergence that creates new forms. We enjoy the synthesis of seemingly unrelated elements because it affirms our integrity. We are the ones who can willingly endure the discomfiture that will upset our tribal sensibilities and nationalist tendencies, possibly even release us from the devisive delusions that drive our interactions now. Too many Americans admire George Bush for his insular, antagonistic world view, but they and George are simply scared of what's out there. It is a world that defies their simplistic categories and provincial tastes. It will not be subdued by any one god. These tender beginners fear the wild world cannot be kept from the gates of their McMansions.

The rest of us love this planet in all its dazzling complexity. We love its vicissitudes, its noise and confusion, its contradictions and knots even as we hear the single pulse underneath. We are unconvinced by the lines on the map because the image of this swirling blue ball was burned into our consciousness along with our respective languages. Many of us found families quite far from the ones into which we were born. We want to tuck our fear out of sight with our passports and money and go look for our friends in the places we don't know. In an odd way, we thrive in this disconcerting, uprooted age. We're the ones who will be here when the rest have been blasted off to Mars or Hoovered up to holiness. In this week's fondest fantasy, we reach across the latitudes and longitudes, link up across every kind of barrier to form a swift and powerful antidote to the gloating and preening snakes who have appointed themselves master of all they survey. We shift our gaze from their perceived power over us to our shared resistance. We don't wait for a leader or words of praise. We do it now, in our own remote interiors. Maybe this moment--this realization of each other, our apologies given and accepted--is the beginning of the paradigm shift we've waited for so long.

Go Ahead, Say You're Sorry

2004-11-13T19:28:00.000-08:00

If you haven't yet seen the Sorry Everybody web site, it's worth a look. I put it off for a few days after hearing about it, but when I heard the Freepers were doing a parallel site with "fuck you, world" messages, I had to go see what had them so bunged up. (Amazing, isn't it, that they have complete power and they're still so pathologically angry?) At Sorry Everybody, you can post a picture and text to express your intelligence and humanity to the rest of the world, lest they think we are all neo-Nazi thugs. All you need is a digital image (75 KB or less) to upload to their link on the Submit page. The best part is that people from all over the world are posting beautiful messages to the 56 million of us who did not choose Bush. There are thousands of messages, and sifting through them randomly, I was humbled and reminded of yet another good thing we all have to be happy about--friends all over the globe.

UPDATE: Eukabeuk points out that a response site has emerged: Apologies Accepted. If your faith in humanity hasn't been restored yet, go there now. It will make you cry, but you were crying anyway, so go. Feel the love.

Toe-to-Toe with Evil

2004-11-12T09:41:00.000-08:00

I just read a great essay called "Hung Over in the End Times", and while it was uplifting in its irreverance, it reminded me how much we are going to have to resist the Christian Reich on every front. We have to steel ourselves against the agitprop about how "moral values" decided the election by remembering the immorality of the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqis (which would be overkill, even if they had had anything to do with 9/11, and they didn't); the immorality of diminished citizenship or indefinite detainment for any dweller in "the land of the free;" the unfettered and well-documented criminality of the Bush administration. We have to be worked into a fit of moral outrage equal to that of our fevered fundamentalists. We have to quit wasting time trying to change their minds because their minds function at a reptilian level that we who dwell in the forebrain can only access in the face of actual, direct threats to our survival. We liberal, progressive "elites" (codeword for "educated") have to understand that our survival is threatened by these nutjobs. And we have to refuse to cooperate in our destruction.

One of the ways to do this, as I have said before, is to allow ourselves to grieve for a bit, then get up off the Bed of Pain and get in touch with our righteous anger. It is a matter of principle that no country has the right to steal the resources of other nations or topple their governments because it feels like it. It is a matter of international law that people cannot tortured, a conclusion of common sense that people who are willing to die for their cause will not respond to torture in a helpful way. It's a matter of time (and not much of it) before it is plain for all to see that global warming is real and could have been prevented. We cannot expect a group of people who see the end of the world as a good thing to solve these problems or address them honestly. We have to remember that we are the majority (if you can see the world beyond our blue borders) and we are on the right side of history, evolution, progress, geography, and demographics. We have to face Shadow America in all its paranoid, fearful, zealous, death-worshipping, neoNazi manifestations and unplug our energy from it. See it, name it for what it is, call it out. Until we do, it's going to be like the Middle Ages around here.

Forget about the vote recounts. There probably was plenty of monkey business in the Diebolds, but even if it is unequivocally proven, who will force accountability? Bush's boot-licking bitches in the press? The wheeler-dealers in the Senate? The Moonie-crowning House of Representatives? I don't think so. Assume the results were jiggered in the Chimperor's favor and pour your rage into demanding your local election board provide verifiable means of voting. Be an ass about it. Insist.

Forget about being nice and getting along. Go postal. Slam the door on the plastered-on smiles of the Bible zombies who come calling to bring you the Good News about your impending doom. Counter every Republican lie, smear, gloat, and "misunderestimation" you hear. Draw loud, informed parallels between George W. Bush and other failed presidents. Remind your Republican friends that a margin of victory of three million in a country this size is hardly a mandate. Use the old What Would Jesus Do? slogan to challenge gay-bashing and punishment of the poor. Turn off the "news," and let the bloviators know why you're doing it. Salve your wounds with an exposé of the cracks that already exist in the supposed bedrock of Christian conservatism. But more importantly, reinforce the better impulses at work around you. Take care of your body and spirit. Breathe. Praise moderation and reason. Donate time and money to the causes that tweak your heart. Arm yourself with information and like-minded friends. If you go to church, sing louder than ever. Don't ever, ever apologize for being a human being who values compassion or equality under the law.

If the radicals were right, they wouldn't have to lie, steal, or manipulate to take their power from you. Remember that, but don't count on anyone else to fix it.

Girl Surrenders Black Beret, Stops Writing Death Poems

2004-11-09T16:58:00.000-08:00

I'm going to feel bad a lot over the next four years. Last Wednesday, after the election results were certain (in the electronic voting, no-paper-trail, Republican manifesto sense of the word), I said, "OK, G, you have three days to be depressed, then you have to shake it off." Three days stretched into a week of fitful sleeping, surly encounters in the grocery store, and the resurgence of black in my wardrobe after a period of hot pink, blue, and violet. I brewed my cup of hemlock. And then tonight, on my power walk, I was listening to "Hot Hot Hot" by Buster Poindexter and I realized it is just impossible to feel the darkness with that song in your head. So yes, I'll continue to be a fairly reliable downer, but in the spirit of balance, I want to also dwell for a moment on things that really crank me up, even though they're all old and mostly queer songs that you never hear at clubs any more. Maybe that's why I like them so much.

Please add to the list in comments, Anonymously or otherwise.

How I Dance the Blues Away:
"We Are Family" by Sister Sledge
"Respect" by Aretha Franklin
"Sexual (La Da Di)" by Amber
"I Melt With You" by Modern English
"Forever Young" by Temperance
"Jellyhead" by Crush
"Ooh Aah Just a Little Bit" by Gina G
"I'm Too Sexy" by Right Said Fred
"Cotton-Eyed Joe" by Rednex
"Tribal Dance" by 2 Unlimited
"We Like to Party" by the Vengaboys
"Shoop" by Salt 'N' Pepa
"Tarzan & Jane" by Toy-Box
"Made in England" by Elton John
"It's Raining Men" by the Weather Girls
"Vacation" by the Go-Gos
"Coming Out" by Fem 2 Fem
"Turn Me Round" by k. d. lang
"Sexy" by West End Girls
"Ray of Light" by Madonna
"Brand New Lover" by Dead or Alive
"Better Be Good to Me" by Tina Turner
"She Bang" by Ricky Martin
"Pata Pata" by Miriam Makeba

Shiny, Happy Movies:
Airplane
I Heart Huckabees
Rat Race
Toto the Hero
Enchanted April
Made in Heaven (the Timothy Hutton & Kelly McGillis one)
Love Actually
The Big Lebowski
Shakespeare in Love
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
In & Out
and Grand Canyon, because it has one of the best lines ever regarding the appropriate response to miracles.

The only funny shows on TV are "Scrubs" and "The Daily Show." Other than that, it's pretty much a wasteland for wit.

The last funny book I read was Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach, and it was truly, hysterically funny. Mostly I read about plagues, betrayal, politics, estrangement, grief, history, survival, and lonely places. I have one called The Brighter Side of Human Nature by Alfie Kohn. Maybe I'll read it this year.

You're Either With Us or Ag'in' Us

2004-11-07T09:19:00.000-08:00

If you want to understand how Christian conservatives think, read this piece by a thoughtful former member of that tribe. I've known these people. He is exactly right.

The Apocalypse, Day 3

2004-11-05T14:09:00.000-08:00

Everyone I know is depressed. No sign of Jesus, no evidence of the Rapture. Lots of pride out there going before what will eventually--possibly even in our lifetimes--be a very hard fall for some jack-booted Red Staters.

What to do?

The only thing I can think of is to pour love, money, time, and energy toward what we DO want. It will be hard, given that we cannot afford to take our eyes off the political pythons for a minute, but when and where we can, we should enable the efforts of Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton and John Kerry in the Senate, communicate frequently with whatever freaks represent us in the House, and urge the Democratic Party not to become the Lesser Republican Party, but to speak out in the affirmative for real human values: kindness, inclusion, cooperation, strength through flexibility, creative problem-solving. You know, the girly-man values that promote life instead of destroying it. We have to stop believing that we can convince the other side with reason or education.

More than anything, we need to be good to each other. All 56 million of us. While the other 59 million glory in the hell they've created, we can quietly build an alternative.

Burn Down the Mission

2004-11-03T09:46:00.000-08:00

Well, there it is, the end of cautious optimism. Bush wins and believes he has a mandate to further the means of the very wealthy, "privatize" Social Security and slice up the social safety net, repeal civil rights and environmental protection measures, reverse Roe v. Wade, appoint radical theocrats to the Supreme Court and judicial circuits, to strafe and bulldoze and flip the bird to the rest of the world. Looks like he also will continue on course with the undermining of the public school system, but I can't really feel too sad about that given its results: a 51% idiocy rate. The brakes are off and the wingnuts control all branches of government. As Matt Yglesias says, we are about to see Bush Unleashed. Says gambling addict, S/M clubber, and right-wing moralist Bill Bennett in today's National Review:

"Having restored decency to the White House, President Bush now has a mandate to affect policy that will promote a more decent society, through both politics and law. His supporters want that, and have given him a mandate in their popular and electoral votes to see to it. Now is the time to begin our long, national cultural renewal ('The Great Relearning,' as novelist Tom Wolfe calls it) — no less in legislation than in federal court appointments. It is, after all, the main reason George W. Bush was reelected."

If I had a flag, it would be flying upside down today.

On the other hand (because that's the name of this game), lil' W is going to have to get his soft white hands dirty in the pile of sh*t he's created. How will he wage more preemptive wars without a draft or something like it? How will he bail out the economy as allegiance shifts from the dollar to the euro? How will he be able to maintain the mirage of keeping America safe when his tanned and rested friend Osama bin Laden strikes again, as he most certainly will? Will all citizens have to sign loyalty oaths now to keep themselves out of Guantánamo or some similar hell? With nothing to stop him, he is going to have to drive in the hateful, divisive wedges that his evangelical/elite base demands: gay men and lesbians will become second-class citizens, the Old Testament will replace the Constitution as our guiding document, and dissent and privacy will become relics of a different age. History will show that this was a wrong turn for America, but by then, as Bush himself says with a shrug, we'll all be dead.

I hope the Democratic Party finds its soul or that a new progressive party takes root and reclaims the word liberal, as in liberty, meaning "free, belonging to the people." It's not a dirty word. It's the foundation of the meaning of the Statue of Liberty. It's used in the Book of Leviticus, the same text frequently used to justify hate crimes against "Sodomites," and it's inscribed on the Liberty Bell: "Proclaim Liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof" (Lev. 25:10). In spite of the fundamentalist millstone around our collective neck, this close race proves there is a place in America for the values of compassion and inclusion, a desire for reason to triumph over fear. We just need to find leaders who pay no attention to that pollster behind the curtain and have the courage to enact the stronger side of our national character, the side that gave us Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King, Jr., John and Robert Kennedy, the New Deal, the Stonewall Riots, the massive protests against Bush's war. While the Republicans tacked to the Far Right, Democrats aimed for the middle Right and lost. The division would not be any deeper this morning if Kerry had taken a strong stand for the poor and disenfranchised, raged against the wrong-headed occupation of Iraq, or vowed to make America safe for all Americans.

There is a lot of gloating in Freeperville today. So be it. You can win the battle and still lose the war. And today, it is a war.

Excitable Girl

2004-11-01T09:02:00.000-08:00

On Friday last, we had the suitcases packed and the car loaded for a long-anticipated trip out of town when suddenly I was seized with an unusually strong case of momentum interruptus. It was my idea that we leave a day early so I could attend to some business in our destination city, but at the last minute I was overcome by something–anxiety, apprehension–I'm not sure what to call it, but it clearly said DO NOT TRAVEL TODAY. It was an indefensible position, and one I had to take. "Let's go tomorrow," I said to my partner. "The wedding's not till 5. We'll have plenty of time. We can hang here, go to a movie, sleep in our bed." I threw out all the hooks.

"OK," she said. "But I thought we were going today so you could do your research."

"I know. I just don't want to go today." A long discussion ensued, in which we analyzed the merits of the research question I was pursuing, the limits of logic, our very different approaches to travel (she: structured; me: serendipitous), and the meaning or meaninglessness of the choices presented to us by my fit of fickleness. She had already taken the day off. We called the hotel, brought in our bags, and had what turned out to be a pleasant day in our "village." (That's what they call suburbs here. It still makes me giggle.) We went to two movies and tried a new sushi place. All the school kids were out in their Halloween costumes, so the day ended up feeling decadent, like a suburban Mardi Gras.

We were up and out the door easily the next morning, caffeinated and launched like arrows. The sky was in flux: 50 MPH winds kicked cars and trucks across the white line and the sun was searing. At a rest stop, the wind drove against the passenger door. When she had finally summoned the strength to push back, my partner exited the car with her arms and legs out and leaned into the wind. "This is how it feels to free-fall!" she shouted, recalling her recent sky-diving trip. I recognized the feeling, but not from jumping out of perfectly viable airplanes. Later, an entire agricultural enterprise seemed to be airborne in a brown cloud that crossed the highway in front of us, peppering the windows with grit and corn husks. "Look, the earth's moving," I said. It was an observation reinforced by the Kerry/Edwards signs and stickers that seemed to at least equal the number of "Vote 4 W"s as we traveled deeper into Bush country. (It was a toss-up as to which side was represented by the "American Terrorist" bumpersticker on a white pick-up truck.)

We arrived at our hotel with just enough time to eat lunch, shower, and put on our finery for the wedding. The wind had actually whipped my hair into an attractive mess and I was feeling spunky in my girl costume. The hotel was filled with campaign workers for a Congressional candidate, all wearing "I [heart] Julia" shirts and talking on cell phones. I remarked to two of them on the elevator,"I hope Julia's a Democrat."

"Oh, yes," one of the young men replied. "Any time you see more than one black person working for a candidate, you know they're a Democrat." And indeed, all the people knotting the corridors of the hotel were African-American. Perhaps I did not need to be so disheartened by the Alan Keyes sign in my neighbors' yard. Barack Obama spoke for the hearts of most people.

At last we arrived at a Christian church in central Indiana. The cornerstone said it was built in 1892, and the elegant interior did reflect a more careful time. The stained glass windows were intricate as Celtic knots, pulling in light, soft and prismatic. The pews were rounded and elaborately carved, arranged in a semi-circle around the pulpit, which was as elaborate as a stage setting for Romeo & Juliet. But this stage was set for Robert and James, our two friends who had chosen this day to pledge their troth. The Reverend stepped onto the dais and focused our intent. No one was sure if Jim's family would show up, but they did. There were the usual prayers and vows, scripture read, a song, long and appreciative looks at the family and friends gathered in the round to witness this moment in their lives. Kids fidgeted and toddlers screeched at random intervals. To the church caretaker who watched from the wings, it must have seemed like every other wedding he had opened the church for as he followed along with the program someone had given him. When the grooms were pronounced "spouses for life" instead of "husband and wife," I tried to read the caretaker's impassive face. When they kissed, I glanced over again, and the man had tucked the program under his arm and was joined in the wild applause with the rest of us.

It could have been the wine or the joy of the occasion, or some combination of both, but by the time the music started I was giddy with excitement over the momentous shifts that seem to happen in a moment, with no discernible cause or effect. We are one day certain, the next day not; one minute a wall of resistance, the next moment all willowy accommodation. One of the guests at our table was a dance instructor to whom I confessed a complete inability to follow formal dance steps. "It all depends on your lead," he offered, graciously giving me a pass on my rigid desire to do my own thing. When the dance instructor's boyfriend pulled me on to the dance floor for a swing dance, I was mortified. "I can't!" I insisted. There were so many reasons: heels, spatial issues, pride.

But he (a burly, handsome policeman by day) took my hand and I went, calling on my grandmothers' youth to come through me now and fill me with flapper spirit. We swung. We spun. We dipped. Sensing that he knew the steps, I allowed myself to follow. It was as erotic for me as a tango, as unexpected for me as death. The dance was something to lean into and trust, and it left me breathless, heart racing, wanting more.

Aï aï aï!

2004-10-27T13:49:00.000-07:00

A friend tells me that in her native France, the above is the expression for "ouch, it hurts!" I am referring to the waiting game now in progress, the ticking of the clock toward what we can only hope will be a new and improved political situation. The wait is killing me. I can't read any more political books. I am filled and fortified by the insights of David Brock, Arianna Huffington, Ron Suskind, Paul O'Neill, Fareed Zakaria, Michael Moore, Lewis Lapham, Richard Clarke and many others, but how many have heard them, as I have? I've combed the blogs for a year hoping that some David would lob the stone that would bring down Goliath. I wonder if, six weeks from now, I'll think the bloggers saved democracy or only documented its demise. I'm making all the intellectual and spiritual adjustments that are necessary when you live in a nation where half the population is determined to go over the cliff with the First Lemming. It's hard work.

This past year, I've developed a habit of combing headlines every morning for news from Iraq. I cannot remember what it was like to wake up and have my first thought be something other than "What happened over there while I slept?" and whether any of it affected my daughter. I cannot answer this question without also learning about what is happening in the Sudan and England and Russia and Korea. Am I horrible for thinking a second Bush term would be just the thing to jar Americans loose from their delusions about we're doing to the world by way of Iraq? Am I naïve to hope that a Kerry presidency will end the occupation and its attendant horrors? When I consider the news that the explosives being used to blow up our kids are the very ones that were left unguarded while we did our victory dance, I think yes is the answer to both questions. So much is wrong with this picture and I fear I lack the imagination, courage, or conviction to change it no matter how many letters I write, how many opportunities I make or take to speak out, how many checks I write, no matter how clean the punches are on my ballot. Have I only now become aware of how my fate is tied to that of so many others?

Already, my attention is turning back to the wee protozoan puddle in which I swim and away from the larger pond and the sharks who rule it. At the same time, I want more than ever to be a citizen of the world and know its languages and customs, its differences and sameness. I am more curious than ever what it feels like to walk on streets where I cannot read the signs. Which way lies wisdom--turning inward or shoving off? It's more than a personal question, and one that all Americans might want to consider as they stand in line, or don't, on November 2.

Go Toward the Light of the Oncoming Train

2004-10-21T11:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the Wednesday equidistant between two eclipses, a solar eclipse last Wednesday and a lunar eclipse next Wednesday. All through human history, this confluence of events has been portentous. Tomorrow the sun slips from temperate, justice-seeking Libra into penetrating, no-bullshit Scorpio. As I write, we are 13 sunsets away from the polls closing and the 700 Club's Pat Robertson is positioning himself for a post-Bush America. Cooler northern winds are prevailing here in Chicago as the local GOP pretends like Alan Keyes isn't really their senate candidate. If there is any truth to the teaching, "As above, so below," the times they are a-changin.' No one really knows which way the wood is going to split, but boyohboy, do I feel the strain in the air.

I've been hunkered down with my affirmations and my wary eyes, poring over the political blogs and studying the planetary spin. There is much to say about the latter but I hardly feel qualified to say it, and as for the former, Kevin Drum, Markos Moulitsas, and Josh Marshall are saying it all very well. If W does get himself reappointed, I believe he is in for a rough ride in his second term. If we are agitated enough to demand a Kerry victory, our new JFK will need our continued aid against a hostile Congress and a hobbled press. Today I'm writing letters to 15 single moms in swing states, explaining why John Kerry is better for our kids' health. I have to do at least one active thing each day to fight the encroaching evil. Tonight, I'll be finishing up Pico Iyer's Sun After Dark: Flights into the Foreign before I drop off to sleep. This book is a perfect runway from which to enter the subconscious. It is a rich and contemplative examination of Other, best understood when we can see into the darker territories of ourselves.

As with every autumn, I find myself sleeping more and deeper as I adjust to the jiggered light and time. When I am in my yellow submarine, I'm subject to a more unified narrative than I seem to be out here in the cold light of day, where themes seems to shift and slide. A year ago last June, I had a dream in which I was at the top of Mt. Everest. The air was thin and the sun was blinding. The climb had been difficult, but I was in a place I had not been before and it was profoundly peaceful. A month later, I dreamed that I had found out that my mother was in fact my adoptive mother, and I was meeting my real parents for the first time. We met at an airport, and they were a stunning and dignified Indian couple who seemed as familiar to me as I am to myself. They said very little, but they were radiant and loving. I awoke with the feeling that I had encountered some essential facet of my identity. And then a month ago, I dreamed that I was face to face with someone who, in my waking life, once caused me a great deal of sorrow. We were in a school and I did not expect to see her, but there she was. Instantly, my midsection became the great hollow crater that it was at her departure, a long time after which I had been kicked squarely in the solar plexus and couldn't breathe. We embraced, and I said to her, "Here is my damage. I forgive you." Lately, I've had several dreams of holding my far-away daughter close, wrapping her in love and protection; in each, she is less than five years old. Last night, I found myself in school again. Everyone I knew was there in one form or another. The professor was someone altogether new and yet familiar, hunched over his desk and oblivious as I stumbled to my seat as class began. In the past year, my dreams have generally become busier and more vivid, the characters more elemental, like they were when I was quite young. I feel as though I have walked a great circle, back to some cosmic kindergarten.

Just today I read something that reminded me that we have two primary emotions: love and fear. We choose which one to use as our lens as we peer inward and around. Though I have been a fearful person all my life, my inner life suggests that slowly and incrementally, I am chosing to learn the way of love. I have just begun on the homework, but I think I've got the basic idea. Maybe I can add to the weightlessness on the Love side of the scale.

We are at the cusp of so many things right now. We are busy, and rightfully so, but it does seem that the time calls for something more than hyperkinesis. As I lean into these next contentious weeks, I am just as often closing my eyes and listening for the silences that punctuate my thoughts and seeking illumination in the night. The coin has been flipped into the air and down it comes, each side tumbling over the other, a single rhythm of glint and shadow. If, as it seems, some great wheel is turning, the only way not to be ground under it is to watch it fall, remembering to breathe. We will figure this out.

Republican Death Squads

2004-10-19T06:49:00.000-07:00

An article describing the reaction of three Reagan Revolutionaries to the Bush administration, from this morning's Salon.com opinion page (by James K. Galbraith):

"Paul Craig Roberts was assistant secretary of the treasury for economic policy in 1981. A former Wall Street Journal editorial writer, Roberts was chief propagandist for the tax-cutting juggernaut, armed with preposterous arguments about the effects of lower tax rates on the work, savings and investment behavior of the rich. . .Roberts is now a John M. Olin Fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. Here is part of the column he sent out on Oct. 15:

'Bush's supporters demand lock-step consensus that Bush is right. They regard truthful reports that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and was not involved in the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S.--truths now firmly established by the Bush administration's own reports--as treasonous America-bashing ... In language reeking with hatred, Heritage Foundation Town Hall readers impolitely informed me that opposing the invasion of Iraq is identical to opposing America, that Bush is the greatest American leader in history and everyone who disagrees with him should be shot before they cause America to lose another war ... Bush's conservative supporters want no debate. They want no facts, no analysis. They want to denounce and to demonize the enemies that the Hannitys, Limbaughs, and Savages of talk radio assure them are everywhere at work destroying their great and noble country.'"

Having Coffee with God

2004-10-18T10:43:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning, like every other morning, I was lined up with the other dull-eyed suburbanites for my caffeine communion at Caribou Coffee. Two earnest, clean-cut guys were standing just off to the left of the line handing out little blue cards and urging everyone to step to the second register, where drinks were free for the next hour. I took the card that was handed to me and eyed it suspiciously. "YES, it really is FREE!" the card said. "We hope this small gift brings some joy into your day. It's our small way of saying God loves you, no strings attached. Please let us know if we can be of further assistance." Beneath that was a beautifully scripted quote from Mother Teresa: "Do small things with great love." On the back, very low-key, were the web, street, and e-mail addresses for a local church, a map to its location, and the phone number. The givers of the gift were not taking names or handing out literature or asking if they could visit anyone's home with some uplifting literature. They were basically buying a round of drinks, and I accepted their kindness and the joy that coffee always brings to my day. Free coffee with a shot of God's love, especially.

I have to admit, I have several reactions to this event tumbling around in my head, even now, over 48 hours later. My first thought, once the mocha + espresso started working its magic on my crusty synapses, was "Wonder if they would have given me that little blue card if they knew I was an unbaptized gay Democrat?" Of course they would have. These are things that, in the past, have drawn religious zealots to me like flies to honey, hoping for a conversion or a cinematic driving out of my demons. The next thing I thought was what a savvy marketing drive this was for their church--kind of hip, definitely memorable, and very non-threatening. I might even go to a church like that. I have absolutely no objection to kindness in any form. At that point I realized they had me by my gratitude, just like the folks who send you return address stickers, and suddenly it didn't seem so clever.

Running errands that day, my decaffeinated partner and I passed a number of churches in our overwhelmingly churched community. One had a banner out front: "God Speaks the Truth About Marriage." No secret what "god" was saying there! Already word had gone out that religious rescue was the center of the sermon. An ex-gay man was speaking Sunday night about the need to save people from their gayness. Another church had a different banner: "Civil Marriage is a Civil Right." The marquee outside said All Are Welcome and had a little rainbow streamer underneath it. All week, Dick and Lynne Cheney had been feigning outrage about Senator Kerry using the word "lesbian" to describe their very out lesbian daughter in order to focus attention away from the fact that the radical right was on the march in states all across the nation. Just this morning, I read a disturbing article about Issue 1 in Ohio, a hate-based law that is whipping up the evangelical vote. All of this made me ponder the many faces of God.

The Bible says, "In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God he made him; Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created" (Gen. 5: 1-2). I have always read this as a statement of essential equality and self-determination, much like the Declaration of Independence. As candidate Kerry affirmed, "We are all God's children." Yet half of America is embracing a Republican agenda that is founded in no small part on a fear and hatred of gay people, foreigners, and anyone who walks a path different from their own, a call to war that is being amplified or refuted by Christian churches of various stripe. The fundamentalists see God as bitter and full of wrath. Others see God as loving and forgiving. It is probably true that we create God in our own image.

Since childhood, my relationship to God has felt very personal and direct and private. I was not forced into any congregation, but I went to a number of churches with various friends over the years and observed the stubborn literal-mindedness of "witnesses" at our door. The only thing I liked about church--Baptist, Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, or Unitarian--was the singing. The sermons varied in tone and message, but none could ever convince me that I was unloved or dirty or in need of some self-appointed guy in a costume to mediate my knowledge of heaven. I had played outside enough to have felt God on my skin in the form of sunlight or wind or rain: I had daydreamed enough to know that prayer was more like a quiet receptivity than a verbal beseeching. No one had to tell me that angels were powerful and real beings. They were all around. Trying to fit the depth and breadth of my experience with God into the churches' dry ministrations and cold rituals felt wrong and dishonest. Yes, the Bible is full of spiritual instruction, especially the New Testament, which seems to be largely ignored by many Christians, but it is also an historical document that has been revised and retranslated and shaped by a long stream of political and sociological forces. What I like about the Bible most is its humanity. Our fears, our wars, our petty differences, our longings, our abiding hope, and our great sense of mystery are all evident in its pages, as they are in the Upanishads, the Quran, and the epic of Gilgamesh. The language of the Bible is sometimes breathtaking in its sensuality: "I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk: eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved" (Song of Solomon 5: 1-2).

Sometimes I think God is a howling fit of laughter hoisting our tiny ideas by their collective petard. Other times I think God is a flood of despair at what we're doing to Creation. Certainly God's face shines through the good Christian who buys his neighbor coffee as much as it does the tired, hung-over barista who serves it and the grateful heathen who drinks it.

Round III

2004-10-14T08:24:00.000-07:00

Oh, yeah, the debate. Another total Kerry smack-down. And what was with Bush's flat-handed pounding on the podium? Did that remind you of a certain character from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, or was it just me?

Size Matters

2004-10-14T07:53:00.000-07:00

I believe we should call our new form of government a "phallocracy." As I may have mentioned before, there are Kerry/Edwards signs all over my neighborhood, some from Dem HQ, some hand-made, and Kerry/Edwards stickers are all over our bumper regions. The Republicans have noticed, because suddenly, with the first autumn rain, there sprang up a few HUGE Bush/Cheney yard signs. I mean 6' and 4' signs on real fence-post thingies! Some take up the full width of the yards in which they stand. The message seems to be, if we can't outnumber or outclass you, we will have bigger letters than you. As with all displays of Extreme Butchness, though, they just look silly.

On a possibly related note, I saw an ad for "The Vagina Monologues" the other day, and for the first few seconds, I thought it said "The Viagra Marathons." Too much spam in my mailbox. Or something.

Ennui

2004-10-11T11:28:00.000-07:00

We are only three Tuesdays away from knowing our fate and the fate of the world. Do I overdramatize? Maybe, but I don't think so. I want to say that I'm worried, but in truth, I have already begun the task of resigning myself to a deeper level of Bush fatigue. I have received two emails over the past week urging me to visualize a Kerry victory, to repeat the phrase "President Kerry," to imagine America returned to her liberal principles, our troops streaming home, and so forth. While I cannot dismiss the power of positive thinking, my sense is that we are going to get the government we deserve. Does that make me a "nattering nabob of negativism?" Then you can call me -bob. If my nattering is for naught, I'll be dancing in the streets with you on November 3.

Yesterday I was invited to participate in the production of a DVD for PILOT TV, a project described as "Experimental Media for Feminist Trespass!" The email invite went on, "PILOT TV is a hybrid activist convergence taking the form of a do-it-yourself television studio. We invite you to take part in 4 days and nights of participatory, creative problem-solving to rethink how we 'stage' protest. Help us turn this three-story Chicago building into a fully functioning Hollywood studio, replete with fantastical sets, collaborative crews, and improvised madness. . .PILOT will be an open-ended space for those of us involved in the global anticapitalist movement to come together in sweat-space, build momentum, and strategize our biopolitical resistance on (and off) camera. With friends and strangers gathering from across North America, a schedule packed with over 70 planned TV shows, workshops, and countless ways to participate ..the weekend is live with possibility!" Of course, I said yes, i wanna play.

The segment I was involved in had a brilliant conceit: the use of Eeyore, the blue donkey from the Hundred-Acre Wood as a symbol for Political Depression, i.e., depressed Democrats. He was a kind of mascot and Greek chorus for the rest of us as we explored "feeling good about feeling bad." Much of ensued was chaos, as I expected it would be. The set was built as the audience gathered, and too many techies played with too many wires for far too long and still managed to lose microphones and background visuals. In what was surely a middle-aged moment, I found myself annoyed by the lack of organization. After a little arm-wrestling with my own high hopes and expectations, I found levity in observing, as an anthropologist would, the interactions of a tribe very different from my own: the multiply pierced and tattooed "alternative" folks who filled the audience. (They were the ones I always felt an affinity for when I was a teacher.) As we waited for the actual filming to begin, one guy, filling out a questionnaire, was trying to think of the name of that guy who sang "Let the Eagle Soar" in Farenheit 9/11. "John Ashcroft," I offered. "Your attorney general." One of the production crew played a tune on the kazoo and asked the audience if they knew it: "The Internationale!" I blurted out. Often, when the audience was laughing, I just didn't get it at all, but I enjoyed the irony of my freak status in a warehouse full of rough-hewn artistes. My persona for the talk show was The Sentient American, and I was followed by the Revolutionary Spaniard, whose discussion of the effect of the Madrid train bombing on the election I listened to with great interest, even though nothing he said was revolutionary.

Late in the production--too late--the discussion turned serious. Some in the audience got fidgety and left, but I was riveted. Among people who had participated in the mass demonstrations against the RNC in New York, there was a feeling that fear had been internalized and that the street form of protest was ineffective: the protesters were too well-behaved. There was some real struggle in the minds of all the participants in the room with the question of what constitutes a meaningful act of dissent. They tried to assess whether sheer numbers of protesters were enough, and what, if anything, was changed by their protest. As soon as this level of engagement with hard questions began, time was up and the production came to a halt. No one really wanted to think about it too much. Even in this post-ironic, I-hate-it-but-I-love-it TV production, there seemed to be an underlying acknowledgement that protest was pretense.

After the outrage in November 2000, the rules changed. The old forms of protest no longer mattered, and if you doubt this, consider the massive, world-wide demonstrations before the invasion of Iraq. For thirty years, an increasingly rightward press has managed to conflate protest with drugs and rock & roll, to the point that now even protesters eyeballing their own ranks are distressed by the presence of grandparents and middle-class parents pushing strollers. Everyone described a moment in which they were looking around thinking, "But I don't have anything in common with these people!" What more do we need to have in common to unseat the boy king than a shared desire to do so?

As I was driving home, I realized that the Chicago protests in 1968 were powerful because of the awareness of the fact that "The whole world was watching," not because of the demonstrators per se. What the Republicans have done is to turn off the cameras, or to turn them to the khaki backdrop they want us to see. My personal response to this is to see it for what it is and to speak out at every opportunity, but to skip marching in the streets. I was distressed beyond reason to hear a couple of comments about not voting at all as a sign of "protest." If many people think this way, then, indeed, the terrorists have already won.

Skewl's Owt

2004-10-04T13:21:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to decide how much to blame the American press for our current sorry state of affairs. Conventional wisdom says they are the mechanics of the First Amendment, that their job is to investigate the odd pings of corrosion and corruption under the hood of the Great Democracy, yet everything most reporters say and do is circumscribed by their fear of losing access to the power lunches, boardrooms, and tour buses of the powerful. A song from Evita comes to mind: "They're hoping their lover will help them or keep them/support them/promote them/Don't blame them--you're the same." Who doesn't want a place at the table?

I get very impatient with the journalistic products of TV and newspaper, the putative domain of public discourse. Both media are subject to constant interruption by commercials of one sort or another, with a cumulative Harrison Bergeron effect, from the short story in which a state-installed headset shrieks and blasts thoughts away. (Don't get me wrong: I watch plenty o' the teevee, but with the explicit purpose of being passive and entertained. It's how I empty my vessel so I can sleep at night.) Given that the turning of the page or the perusal of a footnote is about all the distraction I can handle, I am more a consumer of books, as they inevitably lead to other books and therefore seem a more holistic and engaging pursuit. Today I finished Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy by Lewis Lapham, wherein I found this keen observation:

"The American news media are the product of the American educational system, and their unwillingness to speak for themselves (in Archibald MacLeish's phrase, 'to resign,' even momentarily, 'from the herd') should come as no surprise. The dumbing down of the schools is neither an accident nor a mistake. We are a people blessed with a genius for large organizational tasks, and if we were serious in our pious mumbling about the need for educational reform--if we honestly believed that mind took precedence over money--our schools surely would stand as the eighth wonder of the world. But we neither like nor trust the forces of intellect--not unless they can be securely fixed to a commercial profit or an applied technology--and if most of what passes for education in the United States deadens the desire for learning, the miserable result accurately reflects the miserable intent." (p. 103-104)

As I said in my previous post, I was once a tool of that miserable intent. My seven years as a high school teacher were the worst years of my professional life. Much of it was my own fault: I went into it both idealistic and well aware of the numbing function of schools, and I thought somehow that my classes could be different. I thought I could make a safe zone for thinking, for asking questions, for disagreeing about the answers. Nothing provokes adolescent angst more than increased expectation. Nothing makes parents more suspicious than a sleepy kid suddenly coming home agitated by an open-ended question. Nothing makes the Advanced Placement teachers more resentful than a colleague whose classes full of lesser lights are draining away the attention usually reserved for them. Nothing makes a school administrator more damp with glee than the prospect of rubbing out a weed in his astroturf. If you want to be a teacher, DO NOT read Rousseau or Adler. Ignore the exhortations of John Taylor Gatto, Neil Postman, Richard Paul, Theodore Sizer, Tracy Kidder, and John Holt. Renounce everything you know about cultural criticism. Prepare for Stepford.

If we let kids be smart, they start to question all kinds of things. Why do bells tell us when to move from one place to another? Why do the athletes get special treatment? What is "tracking?" Who decides what we have to read? If reading is so important, how have I been able to get all the way to 12th grade and be an honors student without ever reading a book? If grades are earned, why does the principal tell you that you have to give certain percentages of As and Fs?

Allowed to ask the questions, kids figure out the answers pretty quickly: The bells are training us to respond without thinking. Athletes bring money into the school, so their needs and desires are primary. Tracking is how we're sorted into Haves and Have Nots. Textbook companies and tight budgets decide what we read, and more than a little effort is made to make sure we encounter nothing that will upset the world as we have known it since first grade. As long as we can show word and pattern recognition, it is best if we don't read because there is too much out there that is disturbing and conflicting. Grades are rubber stamps on an academic passport, tokens on a social subway, not the trip itself. It is too dangerous for them to know any of this.

Thomas Jefferson wrote much about the vital importance of an educated populace and a free press to maintain democracy. Today a liberal arts education is about as sought after as smallpox. We prefer English teachers who don't use "big words," history teachers who step over the messy bits, and biology teachers whose primary text is the Book of Genesis. Meanwhile, the press has become the Jiffy Lube of corporate America. Yes, they should be asking the hard questions, but given the setup, can we really expect them to? And do we really want to hear the answers?

A Little Chat About the Weather

2004-10-02T11:10:00.000-07:00

For the past year, I have felt inclined to apologize to various friends and family members for "being so political," and lately this has struck me as an almost alarming development in my thinking. As a former public high school teacher, I know better than most the anti-intellectual climate in which we live. There is a subtle and amorphous pressure out there to pretend that history does not matter, that words and ideas are no more than dust, an irritant to the eyes. I'll allow that we tend to see only the things that reinforce what we already believe. I know it's not cool to get worked up about anything, and we sure don't want to be boring. So I've found myself apologizing, which means the Borg has claimed more of me than I thought. The Matrix, it seems, is operating at full capacity.

Most people are just now starting to pay attention to the upcoming election and its ramifications. I realize I'm out there on the edge with my fears about the future and the entrenchment of fascism in America. "You're so paranoid," says a relative. "You don't really believe that stuff, do you?" asks my brother, a devotee of Rush Limbaugh. "Oh, people always think the world's about to end," says a friend, with a dismissive wave of the hand. Somehow, every time I hear a comment like this, I expect it to be followed by "Now, watch this drive."

A professor once pointed out to me that people fall into two categories in how they respond to the world: they either augment or diminish what they see. I knew right away I was an augmenter, meaning that I tend to add everything up and join disparate scraps into cohesive wholes. The professor was a diminisher, in that he tended to separate information into discrete categories and to downplay, instead of seek, connections. Given this admittedly simple frame of reference, it was easy for me to see how I became Chicken Little.

A series of moments in my life, seemingly unrelated, had organized themselves in my mind as a narrative. My dad left when I was two, and in his place grew the impression that my brother and I had failed to hold his interest. The Bible that I got at my graduation from nursery school had pictures, and from them I learned that God was something to do with the clouds. Every thunderstorm became a message, a flaming arrow directed at my sense of safety from invisible forces. At six, without any overt instruction from my tribe, I found myself conscious of the fact that I was scared of the kids in my class with brown skin or deformed hands. I was molested at eight. By the time I was ten, I had lived at least ten different addresses. My mom remarried and a sister was born, relegating my brother and me to the margins of the new arrangement. I was a quick study in the position of powerlessness and obedient silence.

Feminism gave me language to describe my experiences. Feminism did not make me angry, but it helped me put words to the rage I felt when my Old World great-grandmother insisted that my brother was superior by virtue of his gender; it fine-tuned the dissonance between what was said and what was done to anyone who was unwhite and unwhole; it revealed the ease with which my needs and fears were discounted by the people who were meant to be my champions in the world. By the time I was nineteen, I was constitutionally unable to go back to willing acquiescence with the status quo. I could suddenly see very clearly the parameters of my experience as outlined by history. All the tools used to malign my intelligence clattered into plain view on the floor, like knives from an assassin's trenchcoat. Language did matter. Thoughts were powerful things. I could choose to be ground by great wheel of our culture--or not--but I could never expect to be loved for being wise to the choice.

The spheres of the personal and political are not separate in my mind. I take what happened in the 2000 "election" very personally. Once again, an outcry was smothered in the name of preserving the richest, whitest, most macho guy's place on the totem pole. We are encouraged to believe that "God" put him there. According to the script, we are to fall in line behind Dear Leader and trust that he's looking out for us. This is no time for questions or troubling facts. "We are at war" has become the new American mantra, and it seems to justify all levels of ignorance, to dry up all channels of discourse. I can say from experience that when you lack the means to accurately describe what is happening, you can be destroyed without so much as a whimper of protest. I look around and I see accumulating evidence. You, perhaps, see unrelated random events that, in sum, change nothing. Maybe I'm wrong, but lacking armies or hegemonic will with which to enforce my world view, I can afford to be wrong. These days, I certainly hope to be.

In my own zig-zag toward political consciousness, I have come across some quotes from before and after the other wars in which arrogance, racism, and the limits of our tolerance for self-determination were tested. Each one seems particularly relevant now, as I scan the political landscape and scramble to hold up my little bit of the sky. Each is instructive in its own way.

Benjamin Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberties to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Abraham Lincoln, at the start of the Mexican-American War: "Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion...and you allow him to make war at pleasure...If today he should choose to say that he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us,' but he would say to you, 'Be silent: I see it if you don't.'"

Abraham Lincoln, at the end of the Civil War: "With malice toward none; with clarity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations."

Adolf Hitler, before he invaded Poland: "The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war, it is not right that matters, but victory."

Hermann Göring, Nazi propagandist, at his trial in Nuremburg: "Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell [the people] that they're being attacked, denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

And last, lest you mistakenly believe I'm a pessimist, my all-time favorite by Mohandas K. Ghandi, the "Great Soul" (Mahatma) who led India to her independence from Great Britain:

"When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it. Always."

My LTE

2004-10-01T14:14:00.000-07:00

OK, so I did crank out one letter to the editor of USA Today (because of its wide circulation and my own low expectations) from MoveOn's magic LTE window. I've posted here on the likelihood that no one will see it in said rag. I promise not make a habit of quoting myself, though.

"According to the prescient pundits, the first debate between John Kerry and George Bush was supposed to showcase Bush's formidable debating skills. We were told repeatedly that this would be Bush's night. Polls said foreign affairs was where his approval ratings were highest. However, in this highly scripted event, George Bush was peevish and arrogant, incapable of responding coherently to someone who respectfully disagrees with him. Indeed, he did little more to respond to his own obvious discomfort than to repeat the now too-familiar talking points.

Were we supposed to be impressed when he said he wanted to put his daughters on leashes? Can we accept his assessment that homeland security is too expensive, while wars are not? As the mother of a daughter serving in Iraq, I was unimpressed by the man and his message.

John Kerry was informed, confident, thoughtful, and much more articulate than George Bush. Kerry clearly has the skills to repair our relationships with the rest of the world. He grasps the nuanced view that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are two different people, that the one who is our sworn enemy is still on the run. He sees the real threats to peace and is more interested in policing terror cells than American minds and bedrooms. John Kerry acknowledges what is happening in Iraq and, as a former military man with combat experience, understands very well the stresses our troops are facing. Furthermore, he has a plan for bringing an end to the occupation. A president who says 'you're either with us or you're with the terrorists' sees the world in stark, simplistic terms. He does not see the world as it is. We need John Kerry, and we need him now."

Gosh, when all this is over, I'll either be fleeing the country or getting a life. Hard to say which.

Round 1

2004-09-30T20:58:00.000-07:00

I just watched the debate. Now that I've done my victory dance and had some ice cream and whooped it up with Jon Stewart, I can honestly say I feel better. Much better. We might still choose a president who is coherent, thoughtful, informed, and presidential. Bush looked like Randy from "Pee Wee's Playhouse." Remember him--the little bully puppet? Couldn't get that image out of my head.

Too bad it's a school night. I'd love to pop open a bottle of wine right now and crank out a bunch more letters to those attack poodle beeeeeaitches who, by morning, will be mining the deeper regions of their imaginations for ways to call it for the Chimpster, but I know what I saw. John Kerry just kicked George Bush's ass.

Perfidy

2004-09-29T13:39:00.000-07:00

I just finished Homeland by R. H. Weber, the fictional counterpart to Cruel & Unusual: The Bush/Cheney New World Order that I wrote about a couple of days ago. Wow. Homeland's three main characters' lives are interwoven, each stationed at a different vantage point in the hierarchy of a not unrecognizable America in 2008: loyalty oaths are exchanged for academic grant money, Camp Delta is filled with "suspected terrorists" who are tortured into signing "confessions," travel in and out of the country is restricted, and most operations of the government are faith-based. Kids are scared. Adults are in various stages of rationalization and denial about the course of events since 2001. Everyone in this story is familiar. That's the scariest part of all.

In one particularly chilling moment, an ambitious professor of psychology has just participated in a nauseating sequence of interrogations of a prisoner at Guantánamo. The prisoner has been broken: the professor is washing away her qualms with a drink with her fellow interrogator, an Army major, who says, "The methods. . .are unattractive, I'll grant you that, Lara. No one in their right mind would debate that. I'm no brute. Both our motives are right, and in the end, that's what counts. Our beliefs are everything." The professor later reflects, "Quibblers may console themselves with upholding legalistic niceties; they may consider war and the striving for total security to be fit subjects only for dictatorships. But if a people can be toppled by eighteen or nineteen men infected with the [terrorist] virus, then history can, and must, be revised."

I could not put this book down. (If Grisham novels are anywhere near this good, maybe I'll read one some time.) Frequent references are made to Arthur Koestler's book Darkness at Noon, which I am off to the library to pick up now. But Homeland is a rich and timely instruction on how easy it is to bend to the will of our masters, even as we think we are resisting. As we struggle to get oriented in the huge gap between the words and actions of our real-life, real-time, "fictional" president (as Michael Moore famously said), this tiny novel (157 pages) is a useful guide to where we could be going. Read this one. It's too important to miss.

A couple of hours after I finished Homeland, I came across this disturbing post at Obsidian Wings: "Last month Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Congressman, introduced a bill that would clearly outlaw extraordinary rendition. But Markey only has 22 cosponsors, and now the House leadership is trying to legalize torture outsourcing--and hide it in the bill implementing the 9/11 Commission Report. These are excerpts from a press release one of Markey's staffers just emailed me:

The provision Rep. Markey referred to is contained in Section 3032 and 3033 of H.R. 10, the '9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act of 2004,' introduced by House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL). The provision would require the Secretary of Homeland Security to issue new regulations to exclude from the protection of the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, any suspected terrorist - thereby allowing them to be deported or transferred to a country that may engage in torture. The provision would put the burden of proof on the person being deported or rendered to establish 'by clear and convincing evidence that he or she would be tortured,' would bar the courts from having jurisdiction to review the Secretary's regulations, and would free the Secretary to deport or remove terrorist suspects to any country in the world at will - even countries other than the person's home country or the country in which they were born. The provision would also apply retroactively.

This provision was not part of the 9/11 Commission's recommendations, and the Commission actually called upon the U.S. to 'offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors.' The Commission noted that 'The United States should engage its friends to develop a common coalition approach to the detention and humane treatment of captured terrorists. New principles might draw upon Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions on the law of armed conflict. That article was specifically designed for those cases in which the usual laws of war did not apply. Its minimum standards are generally accepted throughout the world as customary international law.' These standards prohibit the use of torture or other cruel or degrading treatment....

Rep. Markey said, 'When the Republicans 9/11 bill is considered in the House, I intend to offer an amendment to strike the torture outsourcing provisions from the Republican bill and replace it with restrictions restoring international law as provided in my bill. It is absolutely disgraceful that the Republican Leadership has decided to load up the 9/11 Commission bill with legislative provisions that would legitimize torture, particularly when the Commission itself called for the U.S to move in exactly the opposite direction.'

There is no possible way for a suspect being detained in secret to prove by 'clear and convincing evidence' that he will be tortured if he is deported--especially when he may be deported to a country where has never been, and when the officials who want to deport him serve as judge, jury and executioner, and when there is never any judicial review. This bill will make what happened to Maher Arar perfectly legal, and guarantee that it will happen again. Markey's staffer wrote to me that 'this bill could be on the House floor as early as next week.'"

How boldy the Republicans go into territory that, until now, few us could even imagine.

And Now for Some Good News

2004-09-28T14:37:00.000-07:00

This is from the Iconoclast, the newspaper in Crawford, Texas, where Resident "All Hat and No Cattle" Bush has his ranch:

Kerry Will Restore American Dignity
2004 Iconoclast Presidential Endorsement
"Few Americans would have voted for George W. Bush four years ago if he had promised that, as President, he would:

* Empty the Social Security trust fund by $507 billion to help offset fiscal irresponsibility and at the same time slash Social Security benefits.
* Cut Medicare by 17 percent and reduce veterans' benefits and military pay.
* Eliminate overtime pay for millions of Americans and raise oil prices by 50 percent.
* Give tax cuts to businesses that sent American jobs overseas, and, in fact, by policy encourage their departure.
* Give away billions of tax dollars in government contracts without competitive bids.
* Involve this country in a deadly and highly questionable war, and
* Take a budget surplus and turn it into the worst deficit in the history of the United States, creating a debt in just four years that will take generations to repay.

These were elements of a hidden agenda that surfaced only after he took office.

The publishers of The Iconoclast endorsed Bush four years ago, based on the things he promised, not on this smoke-screened agenda.

Today, we are endorsing his opponent, John Kerry, based not only on the things that Bush has delivered, but also on the vision of a return to normality that Kerry says our country needs.

Four items trouble us the most about the Bush administration: his initiatives to disable the Social Security system, the deteriorating state of the American economy, a dangerous shift away from the basic freedoms established by our founding fathers, and his continuous mistakes regarding terrorism and Iraq.

President Bush has announced plans to change the Social Security system as we know it by privatizing it, which when considering all the tangents related to such a change, would put the entire economy in a dramatic tailspin.

The Social Security Trust Fund actually lends money to the rest of the government in exchange for government bonds, which is how the system must work by law, but how do you later repay Social Security while you are running a huge deficit? It's impossible, without raising taxes sometime in the future or becoming fiscally responsible now. Social Security money is being used to escalate our deficit and, at the same time, mask a much larger government deficit, instead of paying down the national debt, which would be a proper use, to guarantee a future gain.

Privatization is problematic in that it would subject Social Security to the ups, downs, and outright crashes of the Stock Market. It would take millions in brokerage fees and commissions out of the system, and, unless we have assurance that the Ivan Boeskys and Ken Lays of the world will be caught and punished as a deterrent, subject both the Market and the Social Security Fund to fraud and market manipulation, not to mention devastate and ruin multitudes of American families that would find their lives lost to starvation, shame, and isolation.

Kerry wants to keep Social Security, which each of us already owns. He says that the program is manageable, since it is projected to be solvent through 2042, with use of its trust funds. This would give ample time to strengthen the economy, reduce the budget deficit the Bush administration has created, and, therefore, bolster the program as needed to fit ever-changing demographics. Our senior citizens depend upon Social Security.

Bush's answer is radical and uncalled for, and would result in chaos as Americans have never experienced. Do we really want to risk the future of Social Security on Bush by spinning the wheel of uncertainty?

In those dark hours after the World Trade Center attacks, Americans rallied together with a new sense of patriotism. We were ready to follow Bush's lead through any travail.

He let us down.

When he finally emerged from his hide-outs on remote military bases well after the first crucial hours following the attack, he gave sound-bytes instead of solutions.

He did not trust us to be ready to sacrifice, build up our public and private security infrastructure, or cut down on our energy use to put economic pressure on the enemy in all the nations where he hides. He merely told us to shop, spend, and pretend nothing was wrong.

Rather than using the billions of dollars expended on the invasion of Iraq to shore up our boundaries and go after Osama bin Laden and the Saudi Arabian terrorists, the funds were used to initiate a war with what Bush called a more immediate menace, Saddam Hussein, in oil-rich Iraq. After all, Bush said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction trained on America. We believed him, just as we believed it when he reported that Iraq was the heart of terrorism. We trusted him.

The Iconoclast, the President's hometown newspaper, took Bush on his word and editorialized in favor of the invasion. The newspaper's publisher promoted Bush and the invasion of Iraq to Londoners in a BBC interview during the time that the administration was wooing the support of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Again, he let us down.

We presumed the President had solid proof of the existence of these weapons, what and where they were, even as the search continued. Otherwise, our troops would be in much greater danger and the premise for a hurried-up invasion would be moot, allowing more time to solicit assistance from our allies.

Instead we were duped into following yet another privileged agenda.

Now he argues unconvincingly that Iraq was providing safe harbor to terrorists, his new key justification for the invasion. It is like arguing that America provided safe harbor to terrorists leading to 9/11.

Once and for all, George Bush was President of the United States on that day. No one else. He had been President nine months, he had been officially warned of just such an attack a full month before it happened. As President, ultimately he and only he was responsible for our failure to avert those attacks.

We should expect that a sitting President would vacation less, if at all, and instead tend to the business of running the country, especially if he is, as he likes to boast, a "wartime president." America is in service 365 days a year. We don't need a part-time President who does not show up for duty as Commander-In-Chief until he is forced to, and who is in a constant state of blameless denial when things don't get done.

What has evolved from the virtual go-it-alone conquest of Iraq is more gruesome than a stain on a White House intern's dress. America's reputation and influence in the world has diminished, leaving us with brute force as our most persuasive voice.

Iraq is now a quagmire: no WMDs, no substantive link between Saddam and Osama, and no workable plan for the withdrawal of our troops. We are asked to go along on faith. But remember, blind patriotism can be a dangerous thing and 'spin' will not bring back to life a dead soldier; certainly not a thousand of them.

Kerry has remained true to his vote granting the President the authority to use the threat of war to intimidate Saddam Hussein into allowing weapons inspections. He believes President Bush rushed into war before the inspectors finished their jobs.

Kerry also voted against President Bush's $87 billion for troop funding because the bill promoted poor policy in Iraq, privileged Halliburton and other corporate friends of the Bush administration to profiteer from the war, and forced debt upon future generations of Americans.

Kerry's four-point plan for Iraq is realistic, wise, strong, and correct. With the help from our European and Middle Eastern allies, his plan is to train Iraqi security forces, involve Iraqis in their rebuilding and constitution-writing processes, forgive Iraq's multi-billion dollar debts, and convene a regional conference with Iraq's neighbors in order to secure a pledge of respect for Iraq's borders and non-interference in Iraq's internal affairs.

The publishers of the Iconoclast differ with Bush on other issues, including the denial of stem cell research, shortchanging veterans' entitlements, cutting school programs and grants, dictating what our children learn through a thought-controlling "test" from Washington rather than allowing local school boards and parents to decide how young people should be taught, ignoring the environment, and creating extraneous language in the Patriot Act that removes some of the very freedoms that our founding fathers and generations of soldiers fought so hard to preserve.

We are concerned about the vast exportation of jobs to other countries, due in large part to policies carried out by Bush appointees. Funds previously geared at retention of small companies are being given to larger concerns, such as Halliburton -- companies with strong ties to oil and gas. Job training has been cut every year that Bush has resided at the White House.
Then there is his resolve to inadequately finance Homeland Security and to cut the Community Oriented Policing Program (COPS) by 94 percent, to reduce money for rural development, to slash appropriations for the Small Business Administration, and to under-fund veterans' programs.

Likewise troubling is that President Bush fought against the creation of the 9/11 Commission and is yet to embrace its recommendations.
Vice President Cheney's Halliburton has been awarded multi-billion-dollar contracts without undergoing any meaningful bid process -- an enormous conflict of interest -- plus the company has been significantly raiding the funds of Export-Import Bank of America, reducing investment that could have gone toward small business trade.

When examined based on all the facts, Kerry's voting record is enviable and echoes that of many Bush allies who are aghast at how the Bush administration has destroyed the American economy. Compared to Bush on economic issues, Kerry would be an arch-conservative, providing for Americans first. He has what it takes to right our wronged economy.

The re-election of George W. Bush would be a mandate to continue on our present course of chaos. We cannot afford to double the debt that we already have. We need to be moving in the opposite direction.

John Kerry has 30 years of experience looking out for the American people and can navigate our country back to prosperity and re-instill in America the dignity she so craves and deserves. He has served us well as a highly decorated Vietnam veteran and has had a successful career as a district attorney, lieutenant governor, and senator.

Kerry has a positive vision for America, plus the proven intelligence, good sense, and guts to make it happen.

That's why The Iconoclast urges Texans not to rate the candidate by his hometown or even his political party, but instead by where he intends to take the country.

The Iconoclast wholeheartedly endorses John Kerry."

You Decide, the Sequel

2004-09-27T18:46:00.000-07:00

Does George Bush exhibit signs of malignant narcissism?

An article on Narcissistic Personality Disorder provides a compelling description. "A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:

1. has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements);

2. is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love;

3. believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions);

4. requires excessive admiration;

5. has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations;

6. is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends;

7. lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others;

8. is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her;

9. shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes."

Cruel and Unusual

2004-09-27T09:56:00.000-07:00

I spent much of the weekend reading Mark Crispin Miller's book Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order. I came across this book quite by accident on a trip to the library where my quarry was It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis (1935), which my library did not have. (It did not have any books by Sinclair Lewis, in fact; nor did it have anything by Hannah Arendt. I was looking for The Origins of Totalitarianism.) As I was huffing out in disgust, Miller's book caught my eye from its place low on the New Non-Fiction shelf. The picture on the cover, of Bush frozen in a moment of pure, primate aggression is a perfect mirror of my image of the man. As it turns out, the book is extensively about the phenomenon of projectivity that I wrote about in my previous post. Cruel and Unusual is richly substantiated and frank in its description of the "values" that underlie the Bush push for world domination. (The title says it all, but if you want the encapsulated version, read this interview.) Miller brilliantly examines Bush's troubled past, his garbled speech, and his apcalyptic world view and brings to light the paranoia and egomania that drive Bush's actions and inactions. Finally, a writer who just comes right out and says the man is nuts!

This is one of many books that we will look back on and wonder how we missed it, how we could have so quickly become Oceania while people were drafting viable lifeboats all around us. Reading this book and others I have mentioned before, I can see the future Bush/Cheney has sketched out for us. It is a future that is all about them, their power, their advantage, their gleeful destruction of everything not-them. That destruction will include me and, eventually, you. Finally, they will self-destruct because the evil they're really after is comfortably situated in the center of their hateful black hearts. In the meantime, we are either in the way or along for the ride.

Yeah, yeah, I know I sound like Debbie Downer, and that's unfashionable or not what the DNC recommends or whatever. As a nation, we have grown overly intolerant of anything that does not cater to our immediate sense of comfort. We have our bread and our circuses. What do we care? When I try to talk to others in my immediate circle about what I'm reading or imagining, they wrinkle their noses and turn away because it's all "too depressing." Someone "out there" will fix it. They always do, right?

I can't speak for always. I think these times are different, incendiary. I believe that being awake, aware, and informed could change things. When I pay attention, when I read writers who describe in detail the warts on the Emperor's bare ass, I am more able to manage my level of despair. On a practical level, every book I buy or check out sends the message that I am not complicit in the Bush/Cheney grand larceny. From these readings, I get affirmation that the things I see are real--the revision of history and the Constitution to theocratic ends, the silencing of dissent and the marginalization of the majority, the construction of a mass delusion flowing from one man's pathology. If you doubt this, notice how the patronizing, repetitious tone of CNN seduces you into believing that you are "informed." Refusing to be hypnotized is my first personal form of resistance.

When I am depressed, I feel compelled to do something to alleviate my depression. Every fiber of my being resists acting, of course. Being depressed tricks us into passivity, amplifying and even requiring our unwillingness to identify and clean up the mess as we see it. And in the case of today's politics, much of what is troubling is far outside my sphere of influence. However, I can sit right here and examine how much of my shadow is projected out onto Bush/Cheney. I can accept that there is a part of me that is terrified of what it cannot control. I can see how I crave approval and acceptance, and I wonder, if I was in their shoes, would I handle my ego any more gracefully? I can also account for the times when I've let my fear or rage control me and acted from it, to my detriment and others'. These are the things that I bring inward to my God, in all humility and in deepest privacy. I do not share their experience of God as a cudgel to be inflicted on someone else. I get that they are incapable of seeing me in themselves in the form of empathy, self-doubt, queerness, or fear. I can also see that I differ from Bush/Cheney in my fundamental optimism about people, about the power of goodness, and the general direction of Project Earth. I certainly think they can, and may, destroy the world and everything I love. It is a frightening prospect, but one that I see in a larger and decidedly non-apocalyptic context: they cannot destroy the fact or experience of my love. I am not an unfettered entity whose experiences are swept into oblivion at some preappointed hour. I feel, I think, I can speak, I can listen, I can gain wisdom. These are my immortal powers, my contribution to the collective pickle that has us looking at Bush/Cheney and seeing either a Satan or a Savior.

Quantum physicists tell us that the observation of a phenomenon changes that phenomenon. And so my second act of resistance is to bear witness to these cruel and unusual people and the world as they will have it.

The Swagger of Swaggart

2004-09-24T09:11:00.000-07:00

Jimmy Swaggart of televangelism fame recently received applause and hoots of approval from his "Christian" congregation for saying that he would kill any gay man who looked at him "with romantic intent." Before I go on, let me quote the sermon directly:

"I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry."

(shouts, applause)

"And I'm gonna be blunt and plain, if one ever looks at me like that I'm going to kill him and tell God he died."

(laughter, applause)

"In case anybody doesn't know God calls it an abomination. It's an abomination! It's an abomination!"

(applause)

..."I'm not knocking the poor homosexual. I'm not. They need salvation just like anybody else.... I'm knocking our pitiful, pathetic lawmakers. And I thank God that President Bush has stated we need a constitutional amendment that states that marriage is between a man and a woman."

I have so many reactions to this, it's hard to know where to start. First, if Jimmy was a reasonable man (which clearly he is not), I would love to ask him 1.) how he determines the intent of anyone's gaze, and 2.) why does the fantasy of what he would do with a gay man even enter into his heterosexual head? Maybe it's just because my fantasies focus more on what I do want than what I don't, I don't get the mechanics of Jimmy's desire. Perhaps gay men should stop assuming it "can't happen here" and start thinking about how to respond to the homicidal intent of Jimmy's eyes upon them. Perhaps they should be buying assault weapons (now that they're legal and all) and organizing themselves into tastefully dressed militias.

One problem with Swaggart's swaggering pronouncements is that we can be wrong when we assume we know the intent of another human being. Doesn't the Bible suggest that God is the only one who can see into the hearts of men? I've looked at the concordance in my St. James version, and nowhere do I see Swaggart the modern Pharisee conflated with God. And what about the Judaic edict "Thou shalt not kill" that the so-called Christians want with the other nine Commandments to inform future interpretations of the Constitution? But because Jimmy's homosexual fantasies are such a temptation for him, such an "abomination," such a threat to his sense of himself as a man, he must project them outward onto others and imagine that the "romantic intent" is coming from them. All you gay Republicans out there better keep your eyes on the floor. Straight Republicans, too: What if Jimmy mistakes your admiration of his macho stance as some kind of homo thing? In fact, the world would be a better place if ALL eyes were averted from this evil zealot. But here in America, he is applauded.

You Decide

2004-09-21T10:38:00.000-07:00

Psychologist M. Scott Peck, in People of the Lie, identifies evil as a "malignant narcissism" that features all four of the following characteristics:

• "consistent, destructive scapegoating behavior, which may often be quite subtle;"
• "excessive, albeit unusually covert, intolerance of criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury;"
• "pronounced concern with a public image and self-image of respectability, contributing to a stability of life style, but also to pretentiousness and denial of hateful feelings and vengeful motives;"
• "intellectual deviousness, with an increased likelihood of a mild schizophrenic-like disturbance of thinking in times of crisis."

Below is a definition of fascism from Lawrence Britt in Free Inquiry magazine, based on studies of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia. As Britt notes, "all these regimes have been overthrown, so a more or less complete picture of their basic characteristics and abuses is possible...Analysis of these seven regimes reveals fourteen common threads that link them in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power. These basic characteristics are more prevalent and intense in some regimes than in others, but they all share at least some level of similarity.

1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. From the prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia.

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights. The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.

3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people’s attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The methods of choice—relentless propaganda and disinformation—were usually effective. Often the regimes would incite “spontaneous” acts against the target scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and “terrorists.” Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly.

4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism. Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of national resources was allocated to the military, even when domestic needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite.

5. Rampant sexism. Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and the national culture were male-dominated, these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses.

6. A controlled mass media. Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes’ excesses.

7. Obsession with national security. Inevitably, a national security apparatus was under direct control of the ruling elite. It was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints. Its actions were justified under the rubric of protecting “national security,” and questioning its activities was portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.

8. Religion and ruling elite tied together. Unlike communist regimes, the fascist and protofascist regimes were never proclaimed as godless by their opponents. In fact, most of the regimes attached themselves to the predominant religion of the country and chose to portray themselves as militant defenders of that religion. The fact that the ruling elite’s behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the illusion that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and opponents of the “godless.” A perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion.

9. Power of corporations protected. Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production (in developed states), but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of “have-not” citizens.

10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. Since organized labor was seen as the one power center that could challenge the political hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was inevitably crushed or made powerless. The poor formed an underclass, viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Under some regimes, being poor was considered akin to a vice.

11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve thenational interest or they had no right to exist.

12. Obsession with crime and punishment. Most of these regimes maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuse. “Normal” and political crime were often merged into trumped-up criminal charges and sometimes used against political opponents of the regime. Fear, and hatred, of criminals or “traitors” was often promoted among the population as an excuse for more police power.

13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. Those in business circles and close to the power elite often used their position to enrich themselves. This corruption worked both ways; the power elite would receive financial gifts and property from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the benefit of government favoritism. Members of the power elite were in a position to obtain vast wealth from other sources as well: for example, by stealing national resources. With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, this corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the general population.

14. Fraudulent elections. Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion polls were usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates were held, they would usually be perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. Common methods included maintaining control of the election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite."

From Loose Threads, A Garment

2004-09-20T06:38:00.000-07:00

I haven't blah-blah-blogged for a week because I haven't had much to say. (Don't you wish more bloggers would follow this simple internal guide?) I woke up at 5:30 this morning and had an insight, so I thought this might be a good day to get back to it. The entire week past was devoted to Domestic Responsibility: I went to the grocery store more than once, did the Target/Home Depot run, visited our friendly neighborhood dry cleaner a couple of times, and painted the front porch, among other things. My daughter returned to Iraq, and I suspect my uncharacteristic interest in leaving the house was my way of managing the anxiety that comes with having your only child traveling into a war zone. I also imagine the Wet Paint sign across the front porch might keep the G-men from being able to deliver bad news, should there be any. This is how things work in my loosely constructed universe.

Aside from the wind whistling through my head, there has been a downturn in my political optimism. It is not based on polls, either, because I have been only remotely aware of their results lately. It's actually based on my observation that America identifies way too much with Dubya and my belief that Dubya needs to face the mess he's made and deal with the consequences. I won't bore you non-astrologers with the celestial details, but Dubya and America have some powerful mutual lessons to learn, and school began in earnest on 9/11. I don't see Dubya as big, strong Daddy to this nation of powerful, frightened children: I see the world about to take a Tough Love approach to a kid out of control. It may take a decade, but in the end, I think that's what will happen. And one by one, we Americans will have to learn what life is like in all those places we can't even find on the map. We'll learn what it is like to be truly poor and powerless, living in a contaminated environment subject to harsh weather patterns, unable to take safe food or water for granted. Oh, and everyone will have assault weapons. Until we learn how that's a bad thing, I think we will have the government that we deserve.

Also, I think John Kerry has been a bit of a wash. I remember back when I was very nearly a Deaniac, jaded eyes beheld me with pity and assured me that "Kerry was the only electable Democratic candidate." Kerry's a great senator and I have nothing but admiration for his anti-war stance given that he actually saw the war first-hand, but he doesn't understand that we need cartoon characters to inspire us to vote--brash, jibberish-speaking, looney types, like Dubya and the neocons. Dean at least had steam coming out of his ears, and I liked that.

Now you've probably forgotten about the aforementioned insight, but it does relate to the political preamble in that I have been thinking a lot about what we do in the world, and in particular what I do in mine. It goes back to this notion of meaningful work. Dubya was able to evolve from a guy who kicked Sammy Sosa to the curb and couldn't find oil in Texas to being president of the United States, something that should shine like a ray of hope for all of us--or at least those of us who have wealth, connections, and a pushy mother. I was reflecting on this year I've taken "off" and how it's affected my sense of "respectability." I took this time to work on something that was important to me: a family history. I did not do it because I thought my project would be published or profitable; I did it because I was interested in history. I did it because I wanted to see where I would go, left to my own discipline. The family bit has made a personally meaningful lens through which I have learned much about how my people, the "little people," experienced history from 1813 to now. Judging by the concerns reflected in the diaries and letters of my ancestors, even in war time, people stay focused on the things right in front of them: the checkbook, the cupboard, the vicissitudes of their own social standing. Indeed, these have been the things that have crushed some in my family and spurred others forward. These are the things by which we measure the success of a life.

I had to step off the gerbil wheel of consumer life and get in touch with my French ancestry to understand that I've been doing meaningful work all along. Now that economic survival has ceased to be my North, I see that I have always been a writer and an astrologer, though I have mostly denied both.

After a year of writing, I am just getting loosened up enough to truly inhabit this emerging identity. I read constantly. My mind is a humming network of questions that join territories of psychology and politics. The answers to the questions are shape-shifters, appearing in one domain as reason, in another as instinct. For a year I've felt the Venn diagram of Me and The World merging, so that inner and outer are in direct correspondence. It's an interesting viewpoint, one that I hope to articulate in the future. The simple act of writing, of blogging, in particular, has made me listen more. I've become more adept at identifying my voice and discerning it from the high-volume opinions of others whose books and blogs engage vast numbers of readers. It is an endless source of amusement for me that pundits are just now postulating that Rulership by Testosterone might be the road to ruin. I've known that since I was 12.

Astrology has been a useful map of my interior on this strange journey, with all its conflicts and confluence, as well as a way to understand the timing of events that seem to happen "out there." It has helped me to be calm and see order in things that might otherwise seem completely chaotic, and my mind, for one, seeks order. I have also studied astrology since I was about 12.

So there it is, the thing I've run from all my life: I am a writer. I am an astrologer. Totally useless in terms of income generation. Easily dismissed by people who fancy themselves rationalists. It is a comfort to me to know that no matter who is president, and no matter what distasteful tasks I have to endure to get money, I will measure my own life by growth in these areas and not on any other terms.

What I Said When I Spoke Truth to Power

2004-09-10T07:32:00.000-07:00

Whew. Well, I'm back from the press conference marking the 1,000th death of an American soldier in Iraq. I am so glad I went. People everywhere--cabbies, TSA employees, fellow travelers--hate George Bush. The ones who don't are quiet if they are within hearing distance of casual conversations in which Righteous Bush Fire breaks out, but don't trust them for a minute. They mean to steal your country and keep it. Washington was as fabulous as it was last time I was there and had no time to really go out and see the monuments and what-not, but one of these days I will go there expressly for that purpose. There was one delightful Asian cab driver who pointed out each monument with great pride and told us everything he knew about each one as we drove to our hotel. When we passed the Kennedy Center, he mentioned how he longed to see a performance there but he couldn't afford it. Is it really a good idea to have art out of the reach of the people? Couldn't a ghetto kid enjoy Yo-Yo Ma as much as the bored, rich white guy in the tux? I'm just saying.

The press conference was convened in Washington, D.C., by former Representative Tom Andrews of Maine, now director of Win Without War. Also on the panel were Jim Wallis of Sojouners, a group of churches speaking out against the political use of churches; Barbara Porchia, mother of a soldier killed in Iraq; Ivan Medina, an Iraq veteran whose twin brother was also killed in Iraq. Most of the American press were off covering the Abu Ghraib scandal trials, but several international press organizations were there. Apparently, Europe and Asia are vastly more interested in hearing from Americans who truly have an investment in George Bush's military adventures. Below is the text of my speech (minus my occasional stutter or fugue state!):

"When Military Families Speak Out asked me to speak here today, I was hesitant. Why would an avowed introvert want to leave the comfort of home and endure the indignities of air travel for a cause that is said to be unfashionable, even unpatriotic? Those of us who speak out are tired of being maligned and dismissed by the radicals in the White House and their media messengers. We are told that ours is the unpopular opinion, although unprecedented millions all over the world protested the attack on Iraq before it even began. Now it seems that war has dropped off our radar. America has turned its gaze inward, but in a self-congratulatory way--not a reflective one. Indeed, we are led by a president who prides himself on his lack of curiosity and an unwillingness to change his mind.

I was born in 1961, so war was the backdrop of my childhood. When we pulled our troops out of Vietnam, I was profoundly relieved by the quiet and the disappearance of body counts from the nightly news. It wasn't like now, when soldiers' deaths are hidden from view to keep public opinion subdued. Back then, it took 58,000 deaths for America to say 'enough,' though what was bought with those deaths, I can't say. Perhaps it is a sign of progress that we are compelled to stop today and acknowledge the loss of a thousand.

My daughter and son-in-law joined the military because they believed it was a force for good in the world. For most of my family's eight generations in this country, it has been. That aura of goodness faded somewhat when Iraq became the whipping boy for Saudi Arabia. It was tarnished further as a year passed without the discovery of any weapons of mass destruction. That's OK, our kids said, It will all be over when we catch Saddam. And they did, but they still could not come home. Now our soldiers are told that they are in Iraq to spread democracy, though many of them have yet to participate in an election themselves! Over the past year, families were getting emails that said things like this: 'Sorry it took so long for me to get back to you--been busy and the power has been surging on and off, so we haven't really had any way to access our lights, let alone the computers. . . Just two weeks ago, two people, one of them was a friend of mine, were killed on convoy. When we went to the remembrance ceremony, we were told they died honorable deaths fighting until the end. It was a bunch of b.s. Everyone from that convoy got up and walked out. . .Also, they probably didn't tell the civilian world that we don't follow the Geneva rules of engagement anymore. We are allowed to shoot anyone at any time for no particular reason and get away with it.' And this: 'With this occupation, there are always two sides. On one hand, I will not disagree that we have done a lot of good for this country. But let's look at the other statistics. The numbers of innocent Iraqi civilians that have been killed in this conflict. The number of wounded. The number of Iraqi widows and widowers and orphans we've made. The number of innocent Iraqis we've forced to live in horrible confinement camps because we snared too wide of a net in the search for insurgents. The amount of Iraqi homes we've ransacked in the relentless search for a few insurgents. I'd give you numbers, but no one's been able to get anything remotely accurate. But in the end, when your loved one has been killed by the occupation, there aren't enough schools that can be built to replace that. . .' Keep in mind that these were written long before Abu Ghraib cast its shadow across them. Confusion and frustration are not a part of the story that's been heard much, but I think we'll hear more of it as time goes on.

We've set a precedent that other countries will follow with our gamble of preemptive war. We have yet to hear neocon hawks admit that it has not been 'a cakewalk,' but I think the soldiers would tell you that it has not been. We have yet to see the thousands of injured soldiers and the effect of their wounds on our society. We are stuck in a quagmire that could cost me a daughter or you a son. We are not safer, and we are certainly not more free. We are unwelcome occupiers of a foreign country. How many more Americans and Iraqis will have to die before we admit that we have overstepped and bring our troops home?"

I don't know why I get so nervous about doing these things. It's like I swallow a golf ball and then try to emit a great big howling Walt Whitmanesque yawp. Once I do them and say what I have to say, I feel strong and ready to talk at length with anyone who looks in my direction. I learned a lot about how I cripple myself in my dialogue with the world by assuming that what I say isn't right or welcome or focused enough to get my message across. I second-guess myself into paralysis. I'm going to work on being less bunged up and more overtly pissed, but the universe is going to have to help me out by giving me more opportunities to refine my skill. Having said that, I am now going to resume the crouching position while secretly hoping I get a chance to do this again and to do it better.

Oy oy oy

2004-09-08T09:02:00.000-07:00

Recently I whined to my friend Mike, "So I'm fairly intelligent, articulate, and have skills that adapt to any number of environments. I work hard and play fair and try to live lightly on the Earth. Why can't I find meaningful work?!" I was particularly distressed by having presented myself at the very-nearly-invisible Kerry campaign headquarters as a volunteer and being told they didn't really need any help in my progressive little burg of Chicago. Reflecting on a long series of jobs I've held and how they all ultimately turned out to be unsatisfactory, and my great good fortune to have a partner who supports me while I thrash around and indulge my interests (hoping that something will come of doing what I do best), I recently decided to shrug off my apparent lack of usefulness in the world. "Fine, world," I said to no one at all, "I'll just go be a freelance writer-editor-voracious reader-astrologer-adventurer-activist-type person." Or whatever. I decided that I really had nothing to add to the political conversation going on at high decibels in the media and on the Internet. I had tried to organize a group of military moms into a cohesive, or at least audible, voice with no real success. I'd faced the fact that most of what I am interested in has no zap whatsoever for anyone else I know. It was time to simply enjoy the ride.

I had just swallowed this pill of self-pity when the phone rang. Could I come to Washington tomorrow to speak at a press conference marking the 1,000th death in Iraq? Would I share my experience as the mother of a soldier?

Be very careful what you ask for, at least in terms of meaningful work.

So after a sleepless night of wondering what to say, who I was speaking to, and whether or not it really mattered, I'm off to say what I've said all along: war bad. Now the Russians are pointing to Bush's pre-emptive doctrine as justification for attacking the terrorists next door in the wake of the deadly hostage-taking in Baslan. Look forward to the spilling of blood in Chechnya and Russia giving a whole new meaning to "red state."

The Vietnam War formed the backdrop for my entire childhood. When it ended in 1976, I was 15. I remember believing then that young people would no longer die in faraway jungles and feeling a profound sense of relief about this. Whatever was bought with those 58,000 American deaths is still not clear to me. When I became a mother myself I knew that there was no objective in the world--political, economic, or patriotic--that would be worth my daughter's life. When she decided to join the military, I expressed my objection to her, describing what I saw as a bellicose and reckless administration that would put her in harm's way unnecessarily. But as every parent learns, loving a child is a long lesson in letting go. And so she went, sure that she was "doing something good for the Iraqi people." This turned out to include shooting them with little or no provocation. Now our kids are occupiers, astonished at the Iraqis' lack of gratitude. The justification for the war has changed with the seasons. If it was about weapons of mass destruction, we were wrong. If it was about deposing Saddam, that's done. If it's about "spreading democracy," we're full of shit. Democracy comes from the will of the people. Authoritarianism comes from their/our lack of will. The growing mountain of dead bodies will not alter what is unfolding here or in Iraq. Let's face it-- it was and is about empire and hubris and an unquenchable thirst for power.

I'm not going to change anyone's mind with what I have to say. Most people already took a position and are dug in for the fight, me included. It is highly unlikely that the press conference will even find its way into the slimy stream of propaganda that passes for journalism now. But because I grew up in the shadow of Vietnam, I know that every death will diminish this armchair warrior fantasy in another home in America. Eventually we will have to accept the fact that we are not wanted and withdraw. How many Americans will have to die before that happens? And will my beloved, benighted girl be one of them?

Until I know, I have an obligation (to myself, anyway) to register my disgust with the course we have chosen and continue to pursue.

Love in the Time of Nazis

2004-08-31T14:54:00.000-07:00

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

2004-08-24T12:31:00.000-07:00

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!

2004-08-19T13:04:00.000-07:00

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

2004-08-17T10:06:00.000-07:00

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

2004-08-10T10:02:00.000-07:00

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

2004-08-02T12:29:00.000-07:00

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

2004-08-02T09:34:00.000-07:00

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.

The Kindness of Strangers

2004-07-29T09:56:00.000-07:00

I'm back from Hawaii a bit earlier than expected for reasons I won't go into right now because I want to focus on something else while I digest the events of my trip. The most amazing things happen to me when I travel alone, and as my distressed partner can tell you, that is how I prefer to travel, in general. My partner is game to go anywhere, any time. I am more reticent, preferring to have a reason or a pull in some direction. Usually I find out late in the trip what the pull was or why I was prompted to go there, and it is never what I expected. I am not interested in "bagging destinations," although once I wrote down all the places I had been for 24 hours or more and was surprised to see that the list included almost 100 different geographic locations. Inevitably, I encounter someone who says or does something that answers a question I have been struggling with, though I hardly think they know it. It has happened too many times to discount as "coincidence." This Oahu sojourn, my third, was no different.

I was walking from the Army base to a nearby town called Mililani, about 3.5 miles away. It was 90 degrees and humid, and I was hauling my luggage so I could catch an airport shuttle a few hours later. I had to be resolute about this because coming and going from an Army base is no easy matter. Without a military ID or accompanying soldier, there would be no way to return once I set foot outside the gate (ironically, in this case, named Foote Gate). It is equally difficult for a civilian to get a cab to pick her up on base. Indeed, many cabbies are denied the privilege of passing through the gates, even though they are native Hawaiians not predominantly Middle Easterners like they are here in Chicago! Schofield Barracks is in the center of Oahu, not close to much of anything, and a long walk before an interminable flight seemed like a good idea. And so I began.

I'm sure many people who passed me thought I was leaving my husband or some such, marching along with a stack of luggage on two tiny wheels. I suppose it was an unusual sight in a place where men vastly outnumber women, and the men are almost always armed and driving assault vehicles. Many drivers turned their heads or considered me in their rear-view mirrors. About a mile and a half into my journey, a guy in a smallish car, stick shift, pulled over and asked me where I was going. He had on an Army t-shirt and shorts. His right knee was wrapped in a bandage of some kind and an aluminum crutch lay diagonally on the passenger seat. "Mililani," I said, without urgency.

"Do you have any idea how far that is?" he asked, incredulous.

"Yeah," I answered, "it's three or four miles."

"Get in. It's only a mile or so out of my way," he said. "Your shoulders are really going to be hurting before too long."

I wanted to accept a ride more than anything at that minute. I was hot, thirsty, and focused on my goal. But all I could think of as I studied him and asked my intuition for guidance was Ted Bundy (charming serial killer who lured women to his car by feigning disability) and "Didn't your mother ever tell you not to accept rides from strangers?" And I'm not saying this guy had any evil intention whatsoever. He most likely did not. But I declined the ride and thanked him for his kindness. "Suit yourself," he said, and hit the gas. I felt bad, and I reflected for a while on the culture that teaches women to feel bad for being wary of men, whose record for violence against them is astonishing. And here was a guy who was trained to kill.

I continued down the road, over terrain that became increasingly hostile to the little wheels under my rolly-bag. After a while, I did not feel so bad about not accepting aid when it was offered. I thought of all the women who have been lost to that kind of trust. It was better to feel strong and self-protective just then. But I hated that I had to decline an offer of goodness from the universe, so I began talking to my guardian angel, who is a very real presence for me. I put forward this thought: "Thank you for sending someone to make this trip a little easier, but I don't think I was ready at that moment to accept help. I am committed to this journey because, after all, there is a Starbucks in Mililani. If you send some nice lady to offer me a ride, I will accept with gratitude."

Half a mile down the road I stepped aside to take a long drag off my water bottle and to assess my progress. There I was, standing and squinting at the road ahead, when a little car pulled up and a lady not much older than me with a bag of newly purchased baby clothes in the back seat. "Girl, you can not be hauling all your stuff along the road like that! Where are you going? Let me give you a ride!" She was Hawaiian, with gold bracelets on her warm-toned skin, and she radiated goodness.

I smiled and said, "Are you sure? I'm going to Mililani."

"Put your bags in the back. I'll take you there, hon," she smiled. "Just move that stuff over." She kicked the air conditioner up a notch. "It is too hot for you to be dragging all that stuff out there!" And she was right.

As we drove to Mililani, we shared more than many people do in the course of a long friendship. She had a daughter my daughter's age and was struck, as I was, by the singlular selfishness of kids that age. She had three older kids, none of whom were as challenging as her fourth, of whom she said, "We have tried so hard to save her from herself, and she thinks we are the enemy. We've spent thousands of dollars to help her get started in life and she has no regard for anything we do. So, we give up. We have learned to just let her go and make her own mistakes, no matter how terrible they are. It's tragic, though, how unnecessary all her suffering will be." None of her older kids had insisted on making the very bad choices her youngest had. I poured out a bit of the drama I had just been through with my own now-19-year-old daughter and told her I had finally reached the same point of surrender. I had done everything I could do, and now I had no choice but to step back and take care of myself.

"My girl is in the Army, and they're sending her back to Iraq," I said. "They thought she had cancer, but now they are sending her back." I did not describe the pain of our parting or how finally my daughter had refused my efforts to alter her self-destructive course. I spoke without any feeling other than resignation, but my friend could hear other voices.

"Listen to me," she said, "because I knew the minute I saw you that I was supposed to pick you up. Your daughter is going to be fine. It is all going to turn out OK," and she turned to me and smiled, patted my leg reassuringly. "I saw you a while back but I was going the other way, so I turned around and came back to get you. It's going to be fine. You'll see."

As we arrived at the Starbucks in Mililani, I put out my hand and said "My name is Gaia." Her name was Kanania. I thanked her as I got out of the car and asked God to please bless her and return kindness to Kanania and her family a thousand-fold. Maybe it was too much to ask, but hers is the kind of goodness that makes me feel safe in the world, even when I am far, far from home.

Hey 19

2004-07-18T14:43:00.000-07:00

Every time I'm about to board a plane, terror attack warnings are elevated and every newspaper and magazine has a blaring headline reporting more bad news on the sorry state of security at airports. One time, just last summer, we were at the gate at the airport, minutes away from boarding, when the anxiety level was being raised from yellow to orange. No information, no reason, just was. Today, at Whole Foods of all places, my eye seemed to go directly to the 24-point cover headline for an article in Mother Jones about two TSA employees who were fired for reporting that screeners were not inspecting bags that alarmed positive for explosives––in tests or in real life. Every time this happens, my guardian angel elbows me, winks, and says, "So how is the Hakuna Matata thing coming?"

I'm the only member of my family of origin who will get on a plane, bus, or subway, who doesn't avoid crowds, the only one for whom fear is not the guiding principle in life. I was raised on terror. Bogey men were always near, danger loomed with every dawn. Adventure could only lead to harm. No good could come of anything. Or so I was told. Somewhere along the way I acquired the understanding that destruction was both random and inevitable. The only intelligent response (for me) was to choose to live, in spite of the odds.

My daughter is back at her home base now, struggling to understand that she has a weird form of reproductive cancer. I think of all the fears I've faced since I left my parents' home, how I've taken them on one by one, first by simply admitting that I was afraid, then doing what I was afraid of anyway: walking outside in a thunderstorm, speaking to large groups, diving into a churning river, sharing creative work, following a cave to its darkest chambers, choosing to love the ones who could make my heart a wasteland. I think of my girl alone in Hawaii, where I last saw her six months ago, just before she depolyed to Iraq. We were scared then and of course we are scared now. We wanted her home from Iraq, and she's home. This week she will turn 19, and come what may, I am getting on the plane to spend her birthday with her. I want to tell her about the people who showed up in my life the year I was 19 and pointed me to my courage and strength, and I want to tell her about the abysmal times that led me to joy.

I don't know how it will go, but I know how I'm going. I know who I want to be when, God willing, my plane lands me safely back home.

Blame Canada!

2004-07-08T12:50:00.000-07:00

Just returned from a trip to Toronto. Wow. I think I have fallen in love with a city. Within an hour of our arrival, we were whisked away from the airport by a friend and on the ferry out to Centre Island. All of Toronto was on the ferry, too, in its multicultural splendor. Standing at the rail with the sun high above and a cool breeze sweeping the water, I closed my eyes and listened to the strangely symphonic blend of Arabic, Asian, Latin, European, and African dialects as they overtook the recognizable notes of American English and those round Canadian vowels that have crept as far south as Chicago in some instances. (Ask a native Chicagoan to say "farm" if you don't believe me. It's a hoot.) Once we reached the island, scores of families were picnicking under the trees. A Sikh family was admiring a robust blonde toddler named Nicola. A woman in a sari carried a bowl of something warm and curried to a woman in a burqa and introduced herself. Hasidic Jewish boys kicked a soccer ball with some boys who were rooting for Portugal in the World Cup. Interracial children were everywhere, beautiful hybrids of Korea and Ethiopia, Palestine and France, Greece and India. Everyone seemed to have a cooler and a dog, a wagon full of kids. It was dazzling.

We rented kayaks and paddled the waterways that laced the island. From there we were afforded fish-eye views of a number of 19th century arched bridges. Pilots of sailboats and motorboats navigating in and out of Lake Ontario would slow down to say hello and make small talk. One crusty dude sprawled on his boat at the water's edge, taking deep drags on a joint. He squinted, nodded, said "hey" as we passed. We paddled underneath two strings of gondola cars from which waved excited kids who were either coming from or going to the petting zoo. In one hour we heard shrieks from a small amusement park on the island fade to silence; for a while, the only sound was of water swirling away beside us, punctuated here and there by the fluttering of a duck or swan. At one point I turned to my partner and said, "I feel like we're in heaven." This was before we actually spent time in the city and noticed that no one thought it was remarkable for two gay men to hold hands or for a businessman to hold the door for lesbian couple with their hands full of babies and all their accountrements. This was before we saw the careful blending of historical architecture and modern aesthetics. Before we had a late dinner at a sidewalk cafe or danced in a bar where the windows opened fully along the street, merging the worlds outside and in. Before we bought scarves from the Tibetan Buddhist who was unperturbed by the more exotic patrons of the leather fetish shop next door. Before we got caught up in the eruption of joy and Greek flags and spontaneous dancing, shrieking, and honking that announced the end of a soccer match halfway around the world. Before the Sunday morning when we saw the Department of Health bus pull up at a park where homeless people were waking up just in time for their screenings and medications. This was before we saw that every other street corner was occupied by an unobtrusive drop box into which you could deposit your recyclable cans, bottles, paper, and trash. Did I mention that the people were friendly and did not seem to mind that we were Americans? The hotel clerk even laughed when I told her we were all fleeing our country. I guess she thought I was kidding.

But there you have it. The next time some xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, race-baiting Republican recites for you the perils of liberty and justice for all, point them in the direction of Toronto. Let them see for themselves that civilization is only advanced by the ways of cooperation and inclusion. Go there yourself when you need a positive vision for the future. If our country continues to go down the path bulldozed by Bush and his puppetmasters, the depth of our failure will be vast in contrast to the shining example of our neighbors to the north.

With God, Face to Face

2004-06-29T10:15:00.000-07:00

For the first time in three years, I feel a glimmer of optimism that W's Reign of Terra might end in his sound ass-whoopin' at the polls in November. I try to imagine him making his concession speech, humbly acknowledging his (second) defeat by the People of the Hanging Chad and the People Too Black to Vote, and I simply cannot conjure it up. Maybe it's the humility part that is getting in my way. Can anyone imagine lil' W losing gracefully? Being a good sport? Or will he and Cheney give us all the finger and impose martial law? Think, people, think. Imagination paves the way for reality. I'd like to hear your comments on which way the wind blows. Optimism is kind of a new thing for me. It's a bit like standing on top of a high-rise on a windy day, isn't it?

I feel this strange new force at work in my personal life as well. My daughter is out of Iraq, thank merciful God, but facing another battle altogether. People who know me expect me to be pretty wrought up and freaked out these days, and I expect to be, too. But I'm not. It occurred to me last night that I have simply lost my ability to worry, maybe simply worn it out. I was a tense, worried child and young adult. I was, by some reports, an overprotective mother and a fretful spouse. A demanding teacher. A petulant friend. I still care about things as much as I ever did, possibly even more passionately than ever, but the knot that once occupied my center has morphed into a fat, smiling Buddha who never says a word, no matter what the weather brings. I don't know when this happened or how--I hardly ever do yoga, and I'm a carnivore--but it is a form of grace that has so far led to one bit of wisdom: We are nothing if we fail to notice and nurture the tiniest filaments of hope.

The Tao of Trains

2004-06-25T14:18:00.000-07:00

When I moved to Chicago, I became rather fascinated by trains and their movement. The "L" was a novelty, of course, and mastering it made me feel sophisticated in a way that wearing lipstick, for example, does not. With tracks only two blocks from my house, I heard trains all night and saw them from the beginning to the end of each day. Two different classes of trains (Metra and the L, or Beauty and the Beast) bore me to work, where I was often compelled to take a brief walk by the sound of Amtrak on its sexy 3 o'clock charge through Hyde Park. I could hang over a fence near my house and observe trains on the track below, awaiting orders to merge into the wider streams of track in and out of the city. Listening to them come to a halt car by car, their momentum lost to the flagging engines in front, was like hearing the incremental freezing to death of a dinosaur or a towering woolly mammoth. The forward parts of the beast seemed to resist its thwarted progress, while the last cars, less invested in the whole venture, simply sighed themselves still and seemed to accept waiting as a natural part of progress. The trains have taught me much about my own impatience, the consequences of my naive willingness to connect, and my own halting progress toward goals.

I am fortunate to be in a position to have stopped all movement for a year: I submitted to inner promptings to simply resist striving, moving, and competing and took a one-year sabbatical to write, to think, and to be still. On purpose. I am a little over halfway through that journey now, and just today I received another message from The Trains. I was, as is often the case, trying to articulate an intelligent response to my internal sense of inadequacy. Must I publish to call this year a success? Do I lack some gene that could have made me ambitious in the way that most other people are? What is my life's work, anyway, if I've dead-ended with the thing I do best? Why doesn't my voice, when I hear it, blend with the chorus?

I decided to walk to a neighborhood cafe, get a sandwich, let the sun shine in a bit. What I noticed today was that the tracks were empty. One small three-car affair wheezed under the overpass, not a real train, but a corrective measure of some sort; other than that, the tracks were gleaming, as far as I could see, in both directions. Yet somewhere, out of my range of perception, they were working to guide some enterprise to completion. Some time, maybe in the middle of the night, I would hear a whistle or groan or screech that would let me know the nature of their burden and mine.

Nostalgia Trip

2004-06-24T10:52:00.000-07:00

Maybe it is the October-like weather we are having in Chicago, but I find myself in an autumnal mood these days. I sleep deeply, soundly, and more than usual, dreaming in muted colors of people far from the day-to-day bit of my life. After waking from a rather odd encounter with our frat-boy White House interloper, I went out and bought three tickets to tomorrow's opening of "Farenheit 9/11." During the day, I gulp down information about what is really going on out there, and I suppose by night I try to make sense out of it. But as I read and listen and watch, I am possessed of a quieting feeling that I associate with fall: an urge toward hibernation and a preoccupation with harvesting the fruits of the season past. I suspect I'm not the only one fighting off the urge to just turn away from the Great Train Wreck in progress. Sure, the movie will be depressing as hell, but I'll have a witness, in that old evangelical sense of the word. A whole room full of them. As I understand it, the 7:30 show here in my little town is nearly sold out.

I have a ticket to see Bill Clinton next week and to have him sign my copy of My Life. I saw him on "60 Minutes" last Sunday and listened to a taped interview with him on NPR this morning. For the record, let me say I think he is a formidably intelligent man and I share his impatience with the Lewinsky fixation. I want to scream at all the woo-woo journalists and their patrons to "Get the #&*% over it! The man got a blow job from a zaftig little social climber who now makes tote bags for a living!" It is a tedious story. Middle-aged men all over America have similar stories to tell, and while it may reflect poorly on President Clinton's control over his appetites, it hardly reduces his accomplishments. The book, for me, will be an antidote to six years of Starr porn. It will also give me something substantial to read while I stand in line. And while you couldn't PAY me to have some face time (in real time, dreams don't count) with the President Punk-Ass, I'll stand in line to see Bill. Or Hill. Or Chelsea, for that matter. Apparently, lots of other folks feel the same. Bill Clinton's memoir is already a best seller, which is more evidence that I am not alone in my nostalgia for those eight kind years of peace and prosperity.

A Family Affair

2004-06-17T10:19:00.000-07:00

I was gone for a while, but I'm back now. My family celebrated my maternal grandmother's 92nd birthday, and I got to spend some time with my mom, sister, and niece--all of this as I close in on finishing a history of my father's family that has occupied me for the past few years. My interest in family history began about the time my daughter was 13. I could see so much of the past encoded in her, even though she was a newly wrought being, that I began to wonder what legacy she and I unknowingly carried and transmitted into the future and how each of us left our own unique imprint on the familial baggage. I think my interest was also a late stage of my own separation from my parents, an assessment of who they have been and what they have been to me, as I progressed into mid-life. I see how much I am a reflection of those who came before me and how I am so different from them. I have gained a deeper sense of how my daughter is woven from me and how she is the product of her own choices and desires. Like all parents, I exist in her life as a landmark, not a map.

A health scare has had her medi-evac'ed to Germany for tests: we are awaiting a diagnosis. The word that has us so willingly patient is cancer. The thousand questions raised by this single word will have to wait until we know for sure, but the possibility alone has me ruminating on the interconnectedness of all of us by blood, tissue, and bone. Just as L. C. (my daughter) was arriving in Germany, her paternal grandmother was admitted to a stateside hospital for internal bleeding. Her father and I both noted the synchronicity of these events. What did it mean, I wondered, that two important women in his life--his past and his future--were losing blood? What sense can I make from the possibility that my daughter's body has turned on itself, like an artist deprived of a creative outlet? The poem that undergirds our existence is a multifaceted thing. It hums in the wires of our communication or lack of it, blares into our slackened senses from time to time, jolts us as a new stanza begins. The language is always the diaphanous stuff of dreams and ancestors, understood only in the most remote quiet and darkness of our individual souls.

Empty Handed

2004-06-08T09:22:00.000-07:00

I got an email from my daughter yesterday, three lines: "Hey mama. I miss hearing from you. You should write more. I got your box. Thanks. . .Write me momma, talk to me, tell me what's going on. Coffee talk, you know. Love you!" Enough to read five or six times over the course of the day, to parse for deeper meaning and to bask in her apparent lightheartedness. And of course I wrote back immediately, pouring out every bit of news and non-news I could think of, asking more questions than she can or will answer, telling her over and over to stay safe, and knowing her safety is out of her hands and mine. One of the most difficult lessons in mothering this particular child has been knowing when to press close and when to let her go. When I receive these little flashes of email from her, every instinct to hold her close is activated. I hear her voice, our goofy in-jokes, in the littlest things she says. I remember every time we laughed at something together and all the times we fought like wet cats. And I remember again how much is at stake in this arrogant, brutal endeavor.

I have started to dream about her every night. For a couple of weeks, she always appeared as a three-year-old in the fluid narratives of my interior. Suddenly, she was a teenager, all headphones and attitude. But toward the end of one of these dreams, she said it was time for her to go back to Iraq. I held her tight and wanted to stop her, but she was nonchalant. She said she loved me, and I asked her if she was happy there, and she said, "yes." And I knew I had to let her go.

All By Myself

2004-06-04T11:40:00.000-07:00

Well, OK, so life is all about learning. I initially set this blog up as a CentComm to gather my thoughts and resources and to invite commentary from other military mammas out there who were being slammed with group emails. I built it, and almost no one came. So I've opened a more democratic blog for those who have expressed some interest in dialogue and support for the good fight. And now I suppose I'm all alone over here, except for my two readers who pop in occasionally. Guess I can let my hair down, loosen the old foundation garment a bit. . .and think of what to say next.

Since there seemed to be some interest, you can go look at this while I cogitate.

Why We Should Speak Out

2004-06-03T11:29:00.000-07:00

• President Bush’s own military advisors estimated that the U.S. would need 300,000 soldiers to secure Iraq. Coalition forces have never exceeded 138,000.

• Of 553 members of Congress, only one has a child in the military's enlisted ranks. (Six are related to military officers.)

• Soldiers were sent to Iraq on false premises, poor intelligence, and/or blatant lies, creating an ongoing sense of confusion about the mission and our proper treatment of the Iraqi people.

• Soldiers were sent into Iraq with inadequate body armor and vehicle protection.

• Troops deployed to Iraq were not given any information about Iraqi culture or customs and they were not taught even the simplest phrases in Arabic.

• Troops in Iraq are receiving substandard food and medical care.

• Troops in Iraq are being exposed to depleted uranium.

• Female troop members are reporting a rising number of rapes in the ranks. Reported incidents are met with indifference and intimidation.

• Suicides among troop members in Iraq are unusually high.

• Injured soldiers who return to the U.S. are being denied health care and other benefits of post-war service.

• Stop-loss orders are indefinitely detaining soldiers whose enlistments have ended or whose retirement date has passed.

• Extended and repeated deployments are ruining families and careers.

• Our soldiers’ ultimate sacrifices of life and limb are being treated like a dirty secret, so most Americans have no idea of the true cost of this war to those who are fighting in their name.

And then there is the other reason, the most compelling of all: We gave life to these soldiers. We are bound by God or whatever makes the universe coherent not to be complicit in their deaths! If you can think of other reasons, shout them out in "Comments" (below).

How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Big Brother

2004-06-01T15:44:00.000-07:00

Ah, June. The month we pretend to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis. The month that will begin the long end of our occupation there. We are told to expect the impatience with our occupation to "heat up" after June 30. Many more of us will lose our kids, some of our kids will lose whole parts of themselves–to be sure, there will be no shortage of drama and bloodshed. But, the pro-war people keep reminding us, at least it's over there.

At the same time, we are told to expect an attack on American soil. Now we even have photos of seven suspects to look out for, although the CIA admits they could be anywhere in the world. We are encouraged to be fearful and suspicious, but I have to ask: Who benefits from our anxiety?

Being afraid only paralyzes me and makes me tired. It makes me want little more than survival: activism is a luxury when there is danger everywhere. My anxiety doesn't help my daughter in Iraq, who has to figure out every day who is an enemy and who is a friend. She needs my help to stay clear-headed and human. Being fearful of another attack makes family members of military personnel second-guess themselves, wonder if they really should be speaking out, after all. Fear and anxiety are effective weapons in the war on democracy.

In the novel 1984, the cynically named Ministry of Truth tortured people into submission to Big Brother with what they feared most. For Winston Smith, the protagonist, it was rats. What torments me is an image of Cheney and Rove playing a version of Rock/Paper/Scissors called Bio/Chem/Nuke, because honestly, when I imagine the boogie man, he's a Washington player who has everything to gain by my anxious acquiescence to his New World Order.

Remembering

2004-05-31T10:29:00.000-07:00

Memorial Day is one of those days that you have to have some maturity to appreciate. You have to have a deep feeling for life and how precious it is before you can appreciate the profound absence that comes with a death. Many young warriors seem to believe that death in combat is a glorious affair, a kind of celebration that bathes them in an aura of rock-star fame. They've seen all the movies. They pursue a reward that will not belong to them. They give up their lives to abstractions of Democracy, Duty, Righteousness, and Retribution. Do they believe that a moment after their passing, they get to jump up and partake in the eulogizing, to tell their story? Sometimes it does seem that way. But the reality is that they are silenced forever, quickly bundled up and put out of sight. We are left to remember them, mourn them, and miss them in all their particularity. Today my thoughts are with every mother and father still living who has lost someone to war. They are the ones whose spirits are weighted down with the cost of our illusions.

I wish the dead could speak to us. I would like to hear what they think of war and their deaths now, from the other side. I would like to know if the loss of their lives bought them what they hoped. I wonder what they would do differently, knowing what they know now. I suspect that many want nothing more than to be with us, back in the land of the living. Glory is something for the ego, not the soul. When the body is gone, only the soul remains. The soul craves life and love. It's what brought us to earth in the first place. As our warriors meet in the afterlife those they have killed on earth, or as they wait for the crossing of the ones who killed them, I hope the forgiveness given and the wisdom gained rain down on all of us and wash us clean.

We Are Everywhere

2004-05-28T07:43:00.000-07:00

I have heard from outraged mothers of soldiers in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Missouri, California, Colorado, Georgia, Utah, Oregon, Indiana, North and South Carolina, Ohio, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Texas. Two have lost their sons. Two sons, both career military men, declined to re-enlist after the invasion of Iraq. One son and one daughter were forced into combat with debilitating wounds that would have made running away impossible, had they needed to do so. Several went to Iraq hard on the heels of deployment in Afghanistan. Some have gone to Iraq for a second tour of duty. Many say their views on the war have changed over time, as have the views of their sons and daughters, from positive to negative: no one who was initially against the invasion is saying now they believe it was justified, after all. Depression and drug use are problems in the ranks, but we hear even less about them in the news than we hear about the soldiers coming home in flag-draped "transfer tubes." In fact, Ted Koppel was accused of being a traitor for listing their names and showing their pictures on Nightline.

We've all written letters and made calls to newspapers, TV stations, radio programs, and so forth. Only rarely does one of the letters get printed, one of the phone calls elicit a response. Inevitably, when we are heard, another two or three moms get in touch, saying, "I thought I was the only one who felt this way!" We assure them they are not. In addition to our little network, there are several books being written on the particular difficulties of loving a soldier but not the mission; a documentary called "Band of Mothers" is in the works; and there are many groups founded by women who want less spilling of blood and more common sense applied to the obstacles to world peace and order. Just click on one and see what they're up to: Military Families Speak Out, Mothers Acting Up, Mothers Against War, Mothers for Peace, Code Pink, Women Waging Peace, and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Imagine how much time and money it must take to convince us that we are insignificant.

The Fear Factor

2004-05-27T15:24:00.000-07:00

Our little band of subversives is growing. As we mothers of soldiers talk among ourselves, our omnipresent fear is that our children will suffer repercussions for our speaking out against the Bush Blunder. We hear that our kids' access to email and the internet is cut frequently, photo-phones are confiscated, and regular phone lines are monitored. If Iraq is such a success story, why can't the soldiers speak freely? "Major combat operations" were over more than a year ago, according to Mr. Bush. We are no longer at war. It's telling that the occupying forces are prohibited from talking about their occupation. We moms acknowledge only half-jokingly that sharing our stories and concerns has surely put us on the PATRIOT Act hit list. Out of fear for their safety in the ranks, we talk about our kids using pseudonyms. We whisper their locations (when we know them) like a prayer.

As Bush's poll numbers sag, a new threat emerges: Danger! Terrorists are here! They mean to do YOU harm! Beware large gatherings! The alarms sound along with the encouragement to "Go about your business." Remember when we were urged to go shopping to relieve the shock of September 11? I am reminded of the policeman at the perimeter of a gory accident: "Move along, folks, nothing to see here. Just move along." Yes, there is something to see here. It's the politics of fear and distraction. It's the increasing presence of a nebulous anxiety meant to keep us too intimidated to question authority. It's the gory accident of idealogues drunk with power at the wheel of the most powerful military in the world. It's what happens when you don't listen to the generals and intelligence agencies who know war, the enemy, and the way the wind blows. We are told that 9/11 changed everything while we are asked to behave as if it did not.

Moms who speak out against the war, or whatever it is, are not speaking out against the military. Most of us signed papers allowing our young people to join because of our deep regard for America's mostly honorable military history. My own family has served in every war but the Korean War, all the way back to the Revolution. We are speaking out against the blatant disregard for everything America traditionally stands for, plurality, decency, and restraint among them. It is instinct to protect our children. The craven flag-wavers who want to silence us know that and use it against us. Looking at today's news, the fact that military generals with long, distinguished service records are now denouncing the Chalabi chapter of the executive branch should give us courage. This is still the "land of the free, and the home of the brave." If we don't speak out when we see our children endangered, when will we?

Kerry/Gore in '04?!

2004-05-27T09:10:00.000-07:00

If you haven't read the speech Al Gore gave yesterday, do it now. Looks like Al's got his groove back. John Kerry, are you listening?

Talking Points

2004-05-26T08:07:00.000-07:00

This morning I had a nanosecond of my allotment of fifteen minutes of fame. I was supposed be the "No" voice in a discussion on MSNBC of whether or not we are on the right track in Iraq. The "Yes" voice did not get to her studio in time to do the full segment, but she came fully prepared with a statement: "we are fighting for democracy. . .I trust the president completely. . .the military is full of 'checks and balances' to make sure things are done right." I didn't see the segment, but I hope the camera caught my eyebrow going up to high arch. The Yes voice, whose name I don't recall, was proud of her brother who just returned from Iraq. She supports our troops 100% because they "know more than we do and we should just leave them alone to do their job," by golly. She pointed out that "these people want to kill us" but thanks to President Bush, we were killing them "over there instead of here." If you read the right-wing press (and you do have to have a strong stomach to do so), you will recognize The Message and its racist and xenophobic subtext. I think The Message is photocopied weekly and handed out at churches and yacht and gun clubs all over the nation.

I was asked to respond to a poll that revealed that 50% of Americans believe that Iraq will be under a dictatorship within the next decade or so. Why all the pessimism, the anchor asked? I wanted to point out how many Americans think America will soon be a dictatorship, but I didn't want to be accused of being "negative." I wanted to talk about our soldiers and what they are experiencing and why I am against the ongoing occupation of Iraq. I wanted to point out that the war itself was based on lies and bad intelligence, hubris, and a complete disregard for international or domestic opinion. I wanted to explain how dangerous it is for us to have a president who refuses to reflect, face facts, reassess, admit mistakes, or change course. I wanted to plead for an end to the occupation, to call in an international relations repairman, and to form a more intelligent response to terrorism than a bombing lottery in the Middle East. Maybe TV just isn't the medium for my message.

I think we should have our own Message, and here are my suggestions: (1) The war is unjust and has already cost too much in blood and treasure. Ask the moms of soldiers who have died or listen to the anguish of an Iraqi whose family member was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. (2) Our 138,000 kids are facing extreme heat, exposure to depleted uranium, substandard medical care, censorship and intimidation in the ranks, and 20 million people who desperately want them to leave. (3) There is no clear end to our mission in Iraq and no useful measure of its success. (4) Our soldiers face multiple indefinite deployments, extensions, and stop-loss measures, the uncertainly of which heighten the already stressful circumstances of war and occupation. (5) If the news from Iraq was all good, our kids would be able to speak freely about what they are doing and would not be expressing confusion or dismay about their role in Iraq. Top generals are beginning to speak out about how badly Bush has managed his neocan fantasy.

The argument that "casualties are the cost of war" is invalid. This war was unprovoked, illegal, and immoral. If the Bush family wants to walk its talk, they can send the twins, Barbara and Jenna, to Iraq to risk their lives. (Only one member of Congress has a child on active duty in the military.) The argument of "but look what they did to us on 9/11" is uninformed. Almost all of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis and even Bush has admitted that no evidence has been found of a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. When we are being mau-maued to "support the troops," we need to point out that no one supports the troops more than those who speak out for their proper use, fair treatment, and safe return. No one supports the troops more than those who fight for the medical care and counseling they will need as they return to civilian life. The people who are making the decisions that affect our soldiers' lives and ours have no love for them or us. And we need to look for opportunities to say so.

If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother

2004-05-24T14:29:00.000-07:00

Barbara Bush said she did not want to waste her "beautiful mind" thinking about our children coming home from her son's war wounded or lifeless. I will tell you right up front that I am no fan of Barbara: for many years, I have thought of her as a mean-spirited, arrogant prima donna who married well, and so far, nothing I have heard or read about her has altered my opinion. (It's a bit unusual for my mind not to change about people over time. I tend to give lots of benefit when there's a doubt.) I only wish Barbara's delicate sensibilities were passed on to her son.

I am just finishing up Arianna Huffington's book Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America. In her book, the divine Ms. Huffington shares some astute observations about how the model of "the strict father" animates our government, drowning out the voice of "the nurturing parent." The strict father views the world as hostile. He believes his kids (the citizens) should be competitive, disciplined, and self-reliant. Anything that curbs the competition or limits use of resources (such as oil or power) is evil because it thwarts his self-fulfilment. Strict Daddy's wealth is proof of his good character. The nurturing parent, on the other hand, has a more charitable view of the world: he agrees that it can be a difficult place, but challenges are met with cooperation and moral vision. The nurturing parent's children are expected to be empathetic, responsible, and protective of the least among us. His wealth is a resource, not a reward.

As a leader, the strict father doesn't want to hear any more whining in the back seat. We are to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and work for our own place at the wheel, just like he did(n't). Since God obviously likes him best, we better stay out of the way while he and his friends make their sacred profit. We better quit boo-hooing about our sons and daughters, our poison air, water, and food, and that silly idea about global warming––the world is his oyster, not ours. Greed is good! Compassion is for sissies! There is no place in his world for grief, remorse, or reflection. Those are pastimes of lesser beings. I'm guessing that Barbara of the Beautiful Mind and George the Elder took their parenting cues from the more Darwinian school of the strict father, aren't you?

If imagining what it would be like to have Barbara "Rhymes with Rich" Bush as your mom keeps you up at night, read this book.

Going to the Mall

2004-05-23T15:32:00.000-07:00

There are rumblings about a march on Washington in October, a Million Moms. Should scare the hell out of everyone, really. I think of the towering, omniscient Jewish mother casting shadows on New York in some Woody Allen movie I saw years ago. She was huge, and she was his conscience, just as we who gave birth to these soldiers are the conscience of the nation that is asking for their lives and spirits. Start talking to all the women you know about this and post comments, ideas, wisdom gained about political action, arguments, and musings below where it says "Comment." I'll be in touch. Code Pink, MoveOn, HipMamas–you in?

My beautiful girl writes sporadic, sad emails from Iraq, choking on things she cannot say or does not know how to put into words. She has become part of something that 18 years of life could not prepare her for, something that the rest of her life may not undo. I will be marching for her and for all the sons and daughters whose stories will never be heard.

What the Bush administration is selling, I, for one, am not buying.

The Gray Area

2004-05-22T09:18:00.000-07:00

The stories I'm hearing from other mothers and wives of soldiers are heartbreaking. Kids are being sent into battle with broken bones. There is little, if any, medical treatment being given to troops. People who have served two rotations in Iraq are being told to expect to serve a third. Some units are using winter uniforms in 130-degree heat. Power outages limit email contact with home. Many soldiers are experiencing depression; most seem confused about the mission. Some of the ones who have come home have no access to counseling and must languish on waiting lists for months before their damage–physical or mental–is even assessed. Three generals who directed Central Command have denounced the mission in Iraq and its neocon architects as complete failures. Meanwhile, Brother Bush and the Right Wing Chorus say it's all going according to plan.

If the plan was to amplify fear, derail democracy, damage the physical and mental health of thousands of people all over the world, leave our cities and ports unprotected, bankrupt the economy, widen the gap between the very rich and the very poor, and smash America's moral compass, then I guess this administration has been an astounding success. A second Bush term will mean amending the Constitution to make gay and lesbian people second-class citizens, giving the state control over women's reproductive choices, destroying public schools without providing an alternative, search and seizure of anyone–any time–for any reason, and the stifling of all dissent. We will become a "Christian" nation that makes a fetish of the Ten Commandments, despises the poor for lacking the "character" to become wealthy, and operates under the principle of might makes right. And that is just the plan as it has been revealed so far in campaign speeches and the poodle press.

Some mothers and wives of military personnel have apparently been told to shut up by groups of armchair warriors who thrill to the sight of bombs bursting in air. They don't want to hear all the "negative" talk! How any mother or spouse out there can tolerate the possibility of a loved one's death for Bush's vision of America is beyond me, but if they feel so strongly pro-war, I say give them group rates to Baghdad. Let them see for themselves what righteousness has wrought. But don't count on them to leave their cocoons. They are intolerant of people whose point of view is different from theirs and so sure of their superiority to all others in religious faith, race, and culture that they are reduced to the simplest intellectual paradigm: good versus evil. Why have doubts? The facts do not matter. The people who lust for war have entered a zone of moral relativity, where the new rallying cry is "At least we don't cut people's heads off." Thinking is for sissies! For all their Bible thumping, these folks forget that the devil tempts us to act from our basest fears and that the messages of angels are often the most unsettling of all.

Band of Mothers

2004-05-20T09:14:00.000-07:00

What if, before American troops crossed the Iraqi border, hundreds or thousands of soldiers' mothers received a postcard that said "Your son/daughter will die in this endeavor?" What if thousands of mothers in Iraq received the same postcard? Would we have done more to stop the invasion? Would we have done less? If we knew ahead of time the cost of this ill-advised and reckless incursion in blood, honor, or money, would we be able to say it was worth it?

Traumatized by the attacks of September 11, we Americans let ourselves be led into blind retribution against a country that was no threat to us and had no part in the atrocities in New York, Washington, or Pennsylvania. Real retaliation would have involved an attack on Saudi Arabia, home of many friends and business associates of the Bush family. Millions of people all over the world protested the attack on Iraq and were dismissed by Bush and his cabal as a "focus group" whose concerns for the future of international relations were "irrelevant." In Bush's fundamentalist mind, these are the End Times–there is no future. Bush believes he was appointed by God: he is not accountable to the people of the United States, so there is no risk for him in carrying out God's plan. But the truth is that this upsetting of the Middle East is Bush's long-planned crusade, our kids are his toy soldiers, and the world is his game board. Those of us who do not contribute to Bush's campaign for reappointment are not his concern.

Every day I think of my daughter in exile in the desert, surrounded by millions of people whose distaste for all things American has been whipped into hatred by the arrogance of our vainglorious president and his willing servants in the Pentagon and State Departments. This is not what I envisioned for her that beautiful Monday morning in July when I first held her in my arms. I think of the mothers whose sons and daughters who have come home with life-altering injuries, and the ones whose sons or daughters have come home wrapped in the flag under cover of darkness, laid to rest out of view of the nation in whose name they were sacrificed. I watch the neighborhood kids, busy today with band concerts and soccer games, unaware that plans are being made for their conscription. I think of the thousands of mothers in Iraq whose children are maimed or dead. I do not think this is the future they wanted for their children, either. We invest so much in our sons and daughters, only to see it taken away by an unreflective, nearly illiterate man who knows nothing about the past and cares little about the future. Some days it does indeed feel like the end of the world.

It is time for us, the mothers of soldiers, to shake off the muzzle of fear. Our kids are the ones who are caught in the trap of pre-emptive strikes and illegal occupation. We have to find a vehicle for our voices and refuse to be silenced by the self-proclaimed patriots who see war as a game that they will win at all costs–as long as we and our children are the ones paying those ever-escalating costs. We need to tell the stories we are hearing about crushed morale, inadequate medical care, the total disregard for the humanity of our soldiers and those they were sent to "liberate." We need to stay awake and aware of what our secretive White House is doing. We need to help our kids understand who the enemy is and who it is not. And we need to make sure that their votes and ours are counted in November. The cost of doing anything less will be unbearable.

What Would Mom Do?

2004-05-19T08:36:00.000-07:00

There was a scene in the movie Rat Race that my daughter and I just never got over: the one where Seth Green's brother, with his speech impaired by a newly pierced tongue, implores Seth to give up his hard-won Big Money to feed starving children. "Wot woo Mahm noo?" says the brother, looking wide-eyed toward heaven. It became a household joke, a bit of a riff on the "What Would Jesus Do?" bracelets that were everywhere, and then nowhere at all by the time we went to war.

There is no quicker way to destroy humor than to analyze it, but as I look back on it, there was in our shared hilarity a recognition that moms are the moral force in our lives. For better or worse, we learn from our mothers what it means to be in a family, and we carry that lesson into our interaction with the world at large. Even if we never think of the rest of the world as our extended family, our actions and inactions reveal what we learned at home about our relationship to other living things.

Now my daughter is a soldier in Iraq. That's a story for another day. I've had a long argument with myself about how much to say about her particular situation, but I can no longer say nothing about what's going on these days. I've heard all the tripe about how we're not "supporting our troops" if we speak out against the occupation of Iraq. I disagree. We are not supporting our troops when we put them in a foreign country on false pretenses, withhold the equipment and manpower it takes to do their job safely and effectively, and confuse the task of liberation with criminal interrogation. We do not support our troops when we direct them to violate international law and then scapegoat the expendable ones when they get caught. We do not support our troops when we swagger and bait the people who resist our occupation of their country to "Bring it on."

What I want most in the world is the continued life and health of every man, woman, and child, regardless of their geographical fortune or misfortune. As I have always said to my girl, "It's a mom thing." I do not see us buying anyone's freedom with the blood that is being spilled in Iraq. In fact, the loss of freedom here at home seems to be directly related to how much "freedom" is "exported" to the Middle East. If, as the evidence suggests, we are becoming a fascist nation, I plan to be hauled away screaming for what I feel is right: peace, cooperation, humility, creative solutions to the dire problems that we all face now. I don't care how uncool it is.

So I am staking out this little corner of Blogistan for the moms, because I think we have a more complex relationship to wars and the people who fight them than those who blindly lead the charge. These soldiers were our babies once. Time will tell what they learned from us, and the future will speak to how well they were able to hold onto sanity in an insane situation. I can't and won't pretend to speak for all moms. This is my blog, my evolution in progress, my voice. But if you're the mother of a soldier, I'd like to hear from you. Maybe if we speak out for our kids' lives now, we can be spared the heartache of having to speak about them as "fallen heroes."