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Small Huge Things

"The second victim, Krystle M. Campbell, 29, was at the marathon finish line to cheer for her boyfriend..." slnm.us/SZXWki7
— Salon.com (@Salon) April 16, 2013

Here's the small huge thing. Every bomb, every single one, every single where, cuts the thread of life like this.

Every mass shooting. Every mass poisoning. Every gas attack. Every bullet fired under the Geneva Convention. Every black site.

Every time, there is a world of people around the target, the victim, the injured, who go into that interruption with them.

And every single bomber, every single terrorist suicide bomber, wants one thing. Your pain, your fear, your death.

This is joy to them.

This is the small huge thing. Every shattering is unique for the day, the weather, the circumstance, the perfectly normal everyday civilian people it shatters. And it is huge for exactly that too.

Whoever you are, bomber, enjoying our grief, our shattered bodies, our sobbing children -- for you nothing but a little sadist -- one day not too soon, you too will be small huge thing.

Sleep well.

Tyrannical Government

Dear The Far Right and the NRA,

If someday a tyrannical government comes to power, and should that government have the obedience and support of the US Military, AND local law enforcement (the odds of which are so small that I have a hard time even writing that down), THEY WILL NOT COME DOOR TO DOOR if that tyrant wants to shut you up, stop your patriotic rebellion, or frighten the rest of the population into compliance by making an example of you.

The tyrant you fear will bomb you with an MQ-9 Reaper. It's safe for the troops, and effective for the purpose. Against this weapon, your arsenal will be useless. One day, without warning, your home will simply explode. 

Please stop making that ridiculous and impossible argument. If you need to make it, make with an eye toward what a 21st Century tyrant would do, not a 18th Century tyrant. 

If you're going to live in reactionary fear to the extent that the rest of us must live in a really more dangerous world so that you can live in a safer imaginary world -- at least fear the right thing.

Photo from an article Madison Rupert with great links on the domestic drone program at EndtheLie.com. MQ-9 Reaper mid-flight (Image credit: U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Brian Ferguson)

"Senseless" and the Great American Cop-out

I know why we do it. I do. I get it. We say that horrible, criminal, scary events are senseless because it gives us a break from the unrelenting reality of them. Of course, they have only the same reality as happy events, but they hurt, and we recoil.*

2012 was so blood soaked, so many were shot in so many places, that no matter how long I stopped watching TV, the news, every time I tried to check back in, there was another mass shooting. It just hurt, and it hurt in a freshly deep and miserable way in December.


However, that recoil is a huge, huge mistake and one that adults cannot keep making, nor be allowed to make.

And all the "un-talked-about" topics got some Facebook and Twitter and news cycle time: guns in general, assault weapons, extended cartridges, gun control, the pernicious weirdness of the NRA, cognitive disorders, mental health care's blazing dearth in our totally depressed America.
The shootings (or the gang rapes, but that's another, not unrelated, post), however, are not "senseless" violence.+ 

I submit to you that they are anything but senseless. They are screaming at us with meaning, replete, overwhelming, ontological clusterfucks of meaning. They are a sick America bottoming out over and over, and over again in the loop of helpless thrall that is Refusing to Deal. Their meaning is too big and too deep and too real and way too normal and way too about US (not some monster other) to deal with.

But, we are grown ups, we are supposed To Deal. Because when we deal, we get Better.
Pick your guru, Jung or Buddha, Tony Robbins or Jesus Christ, ... Kant ...  no matter. You gotta deal to get better. That shadow ain't going away on its own.

So let's try to examine some of the screaming meaning of these shootings.

Larger, more diffuse, harder to argue for meanings also howl from this abyss. American life, by which I mean the "vibe" here, the general tenor of our civic and cultural life, has intensified in the last four years. Now, this connection is a bit more tenuous, but give it a little slack and see what you think. 

We have reminded ourselves that American politics has always been a caterwauling brawl. But we used to have what we called a "loyal opposition." We had two parties dedicated to the health of the Republic and to the experiment of democracy. We differed often wildly about who counted as a full citizen (still do), about policies concerning the economic and civic health of the republic (still do), and so on. We don't agree about what's best. That's as it should be. But, what has gone awry is that we no longer have a loyal opposition. We have a fairly conservative Democratic party, a few moderate Republicans, and a most disloyal opposition put in place by a small cohort of The 1% and who seem to believe in a heady cocktail of Christian-hypercapitalized-militarized-anarchism. 

The continued taking-hostage of the whole economy, government, and large swathes of civil society can't help but add to the constant low-grade freak out that is the American vibe these last four years. In a contextual soup of which this is a key ingredient, even the stock, we should expect more shootings than usual. The free floating tension, the lessening of our ability to listen to each other in regular life,++ these things do not assuage the egos of the sorts of men who go out in public to punish the world for hurting them or preventing them from becoming The Man. 


You need an investigative reporter with some time to explore gun culture in the US, the way that tools whose sole purpose is death are a hobby, are a source of status. Most of us don't see how the gun enthusiast magazines/websites are full of soft porn images, and some of the consumer uncatalogued as well. The link between the gun, the penis, and the hot girl is not subtle in this pages. One does not need a a degree in cultural studies come to this observation. The gun is prowess, status, power, and in no small measure a really big loud cock. So, something very powerful and basic and important about guns, the possibility of violence, the glamour of controlling a tool of death, and sexuality and hetero-masculinity is also screaming at us in these events. One, admittedly perfect, example is Guns and Lace, “Guns and Lace features gun reviews, beautiful girls with guns and just a bit of lace.”  Pretty classy, for what it is.

The shooter in Jonesboro AK in the 1990s targeted only girls and female teachers. He was in middle school. He did it because a girl he had asked to be his sweetie had said no. He got the guns out of his grandfather's house.  Unfortunately, this boy did not grow up to become a responsible citizen. Clearly the counselling and social support he needed in order to cope with his violence and his actions has not been available to him. We could go back a few shootings from this year to Pennsylvania in 2006, another gendered act of violence. There’s so many instances of the deep connection between gender, sex, and gun violence, there’s just no way to present all the evidence, given that so much of it takes place in the home.

Masculinity could find its consolations and homosocial pleasures in other hobbies. A man could accrue the prowess, etc, including all the soft porn, by rebuilding classic cars. Cars that people don't often drive drunk and that kill almost no one at all, ever.

America is living another extended moment of intense insecurity. Threats real and imaginary blare out of our televisions and radios and podcasts and streams 24/7/365. We can be saturated in our economic fears. We can’t pretend that we don’t have an oppressive foreign policy, and we can’t any longer avoid worry over its blowback. We are all existentially aware now of our refusal to genuinely put people first, and of our climate's total willingness to abandon us to our fate.

In this moment in which all is intensified and most of it tastes of acid, the truly mad, the neglected, the angry, the laid off, the ignored, the narcissist, the--usually middle class, educated, white male between 18 and 40 with low social connection--will, from time to time, decide to take his fear, or angst, or pain out on the rest of us. 

When these boys and men, these white boys and men, no longer have access to assault weapons and high capacity magazines, they will still be angry or unbalanced. They will still want externalize their phallic angst, to hurt women, or anyone who happens to be in the theater or mall or mosque or grade school. But, they will have to work much harder to inflict their pain on others. The will have to get closer, maybe look their targets in the eye. They will have to risk injury. They will be easier to stop. 

So, yeah, SENSELESS is the wrong word. These shootings are, once we look past the surface, replete with meaning. They mean us. They mean our collective life is out of whack. They mean that we have lots to do in order to be a genuinely thriving people. You gotta deal to get better.

✁-------------------------------
* 9-11 was "unimaginable" and "senseless" and each of these shootings has been "mad" and "crazy" and "senseless." First, our imaginations are way powerful enough to get to 9-11, obviously; and see above for my refutation of all the latter.

+ I am swimming against the current here. A google search of "shootings senseless" returns just over 5,000,000 hits. 

++ Last year was politically intense. Many posts on Facebook had political, and often agressively political, content. In response a meme went up asking people to stop it so that the poster of the meme would not have to block, mute, or unfriend the politically minded. I suggest a more judicious editing of Facebook settings. After all, when we claim to be friends with someone we do claim to be interested in their values and beliefs and not just the entertainment value they bring to our newsfeed. An instrumental view of relationships is part of the problem of isolation and violent aggression I'm writing about above. 

Contempt #2

Contempt #1

In a previous post, I said : Passive acceptance of continuing and overt misogyny in society and culture. Whining that the girls aren't as nice to us now, after years of 'liberation' for which we did precious little. We men who enjoy our privilege and fail to join with our sisters feel their contempt and it makes us sad and uncomfortable. The cadres of men who belong in these categories have one more thing to understand.

Contempt #2

This is what it is to have another Subject in culture come into its own, alienated. This feeling that you are being seen, thought about, liked or not, that you might have a job to do and you don't know what it will take and that you are failing at it; this feeling is translated by most people as contempt. And, it is. 

The feeling aimed at you, Contempted Men, might have been exasperation or impatience or even sympathy and solidarity. But because you got through the first and second and third waves of feminism without ever seriously examining your own role, even your passive role, in the social hamstringing of women, well, because you did not get our backs, we find you lacking.

We published the books, we formed the organizations, we taught the classes, wrote the songs, made the movies -- and you didn't join in.

So, yeah, at this point, the fact that you still want us to gaze appreciatively at your oblivious ego is contemptible.

If you want to look at women, or at pop culture an not feel that contempt, then stop being a contemptible guy and you won't see the world that way and you won't feel so rejected. If the shoe does not fit, you can't wear it.


Learn, join, get your solidarity on, question your privilege.



Inside the feminist movement, we have these kinds of conversations between white women and our privilege and women of color. Feminists of color often look at white white feminists, who should be their allies, with contempt born of betrayal and impatience. We often don't think past our white middle class world, and given the books and classes and songs and movies women of color have produced to teach us about our blindness and our blithe innocence, they have every right to feel that contempt.

Grown ups don't complain that other people don't like them. They find out why other people don't like them, and do something about it. Get a conversation going between the Subjects in culture, and join us in our desire for a world made richer for all of us, and you will feel something new : that appreciative gaze you so want.

A Gaze Returned

*Note Bene: This post will contain some, I hope a minimal amount of, theory-speak. Take the word "gaze" for example. In theory-speak, it means what it means (a sustained observation, a manner of looking), but it is understood at both a personal level (I gazed at ________ in wonder) and at a more cultural level (the male or masculine gaze). At this level, a gaze is also the interpretation that one (dominant, powerful) part of the world makes of another (subordinate, powerless) part of the world. So, the male gaze is shorthand for the historical collection of judgements that a male culture has made and does make about women. Similarly, the white gaze re: people of color; or the straight gaze re: LGBTQ people, and so on. A gaze is associated with agency, legitimacy, power, with a body of knowledge (or superstitious bullshit, depending on your education and political persuasion).

Now, the thing is that straight, white, male gazes are not the only gazes zooming around the world and interpreting stuff or people. The American gaze is not the only way of looking at the world, and hosts of other gazes regard and interpret America. See how the wor(l)d works? Good. There is a female or feminine gaze, for instance. In the case of this essay, that feminine gaze is also coded as white and straight for reasons that will be made clear in just a sec.

 Circulating among some feminist women on Facebook is a recent post a Jezebel critiquing an essay in Esquire (hence the white and straight--and well educated and privileged--context in which we are working here). It's a sharp and funny and ruthless critique of an essay that doesn't make a lot of rational sense but that expresses an unexamined and not terribly focused sense of dread or anxiety or anger on the part of (at least some) hip and upwardly ambitious white men. The worry is that women view them with contempt, that the feminine is gazing at them with an angry kind of disappointment. The essay coincides with some recent main-stream media discussions about the familial and cultural implications of women in many families earning more than their husbands, more women getting advanced degrees than men, etc.

This trend does indicate a change at the root, of the very pattern of our culture--eventually, maybe. It also means that women, as a general class, are achieving a gaze. Men and the masculine elements of our culture are not at all used to being gazed in this way, they're not used to sharing cultural or social power (one element of subjectivity) with feminine kinds of people. Not surprisingly, some women are not or are no longer impressed with what they see.

Now, partly this is because there is a real, and radical, shift going on and men and the masculine in our culture are slowly redefining themselves and being redefined by other forces. That passive voice there, being redefined, which indicates men/the masculine as an object in the way that women/the feminine have been for centuries, millennia, this is new to men and understandably uncomfortable.

In the theory-speak of radical feminism: the masculine is now in the unenviable position of having to critique and investigate its own subjectivity, and likely change it--a lot. The Masculine has to take itself as its own object and, with the inflection of the feminine gaze, do a lot of self-referential work. Sort of like going through a 12-step program for getting over the bad parts of the masculine subject position, rewiring one's gender reflexes. It. Is. Hard. To. Do.

I would like to take my response to Stephen Marche's essay in another direction, and respond not his particular writing performance (or the editorial standards at Esquire, WTF?), but to the creeping malaise he wants to diagnose, but actually cure.

The way that Marche worries about this contempt is a worry from the masculine side, of course. It thinks about the sources of feminine contempt as being those that men in our culture would expect, would have for each other. Not being well educated, not earning more than the next guy, not being good in bed or choosing a relationship other men find questionable or dissatisfying. That is, real stuff. Real stuff that really happens because, as West at Jezebel put its, people are complicated. People being complicated is not part of the world view, the gaze, of the masculine. People are surfaces and outward actions and pretty easy to know and judge (objectify) in the traditional masculine gestalt (superstitious bullshit).

Now, I think there probably is a good deal of feminine contempt panoramically surrounding the masculine. In the present circumstance, I would expect so. I just don't think it's about what Marche thinks it's about. Here's what it's about:

It's about policy, its about culture and daily life, it about the "stand up" men in our lives not getting our backs.

In the last year, we have seen state after state come after women's general health care and reproductive choice. That's what it means when clinics close, when states and feds want to defund Planned Parenthood. It means lots of women (and kids, and men) won't get even basic health care. It means that our lives and our families are at risk. We have seen hosts of women protesting these reversals of public policy.

More obviously, the attacks on contraception mandates in the Affordable Health Care act are a central nervous system twitch from the old guard of masculinity that cannot abide the idea of women, or men, having sex for fun or love, or any purpose other than procreation. This after we have been doing just that for two generations. This after spending billions of dollars to create Viagra so that Baby Boomer men can keep having sex for fun. And when we watch these defenders of tradition, we can see how seethingly angry they have been all this time. In the symbol of Sandra Fluke, we have all been called sluts (again) because we have and like to act on our sexual energies. And again, our own private sexuality has been the public subject of rather unkind male fantasies and a desire to consume our sexuality as fair exchange for contraceptive medication. Women know all too well this kind of sexual extortion. And we have seen women protesting and responding to these attacks on our sovereign personhood, and we have seen precious few men at our sides.

I will spare us a discussion of rape culture, the rape jokes that about on Facebook, the recent blow-up over Jason Tosh, and all of that, street harassment, and so forth. It will just take too damn long. But, I will say that all of that is a sign of just how badly the masculine and its gaze want to hang to their position as The Boss. Rape culture goes hand in glove with recent policy reversals made by cultural conservatives in state and federal legislatures. We do not see lots of men telling other men to cut this shit out and change their attitude. A few, but not a lot.

This all has a very real impact on women. We feel the male gaze too, and we feel its anger and its danger, the threat in it, the deep-seething desire to get us girls back under control. We also know that our culture and our economy have changed so much that this mean desire is totally impossible to satisfy, so we have to live within that threatening panoramic male gaze.We remember what has been done to us before, the stones, the fires, the beatings. We know that these stones and beatings and fires are, right now, raining down on and destroying the lives and bodies of our sisters around the globe. We really do know what you are capable of.

And we know that you (many, most of you) are not standing with us, are not holding up placards, are not raising a ruckus, are not getting arrested with us. You do not have our backs. (Now, some of you do--you're home with the kids while we're at the demonstration, or you are at the demonstration, gods bless you.) The men who feel the way Marche does are the men who are not with us, who don't quite love us, who are not at the demonstrations and have not done the hard work of critiquing their own relationships with masculinity and with women in this new world. And so, yeah, we hold you in contempt.

No shit.

The tension running underneath Marche's essay and responses to it is the same tension in the apocryphal story about a professor who asked the men and women in class what they most feared from each other. The men said they most feared women laughing at them. The women said they most feared men killing them.

I can live through a bit of chagrin.

And that, well that is why a particular cadre of men might be sensing some contempt in the female gaze right about now. But, I tell you, that gaze can also shower you with admiration and gratitude and love and desire. All depends on what you do next. On whether you have the courage to question your subject position and get our backs. Because just being a boy and breathing does not suffice anymore.

Cleaning Out My Pocket

Yeah, I know. Like my father, I'm apt to squirrel things away. Two of my favorite caches: pens (crystal bics especially) and things to read. Pocket (the google app) is a dangerous thing. I can just store-it-for-later. It's time to clean. Here's some of the 23 pages of lint:

Women, buried with high honor, in Greece (!), on Mount Ida (the birthplace of Zeus). Apparently there's something about the ancient Greeks that we need to learn.

A complaint against our middle brow, bourgeois, lack of artistic adventure.

The fabulous, but largely ignored, intercultural work of one of my besties, Alison Scott-Baumann.

A feminist dust-up, with smartness.

Aggressively queer blogging.

The Philosophers Magazine, often interesting, and not ridden with academese.

Michael Ondaatje's homepage. ???

Elizabeth Hatmaker's book of poems. (A schoolmate and poetic genius).

The Dalai Lama's webcast page .

A book review of some conceptual poetry that I once enjoyed.

Military contractors, problematic.

The Facebook page of a band I should remember to catch.

A great photograph from NASA.

That should do ya for now.

My Bill Maher/ACLU/Rush Limbaugh Problem

Long ago, Bill Maher said something I didn't like, but had a hard time disagreeing with. It does take a certain kind of courage, an evil kind, a world-hating kind of courage to commit the attacks of 9-11. Courage, the commitment of soul and body to a clearly dangerous or life-ending action, can be bent to many purposes. Destroying thousands of people, and running toward and into those towers both took courage. One act was evil, one act was saintly.

I didn't want Maher kicked off the air.* I do want Limbaugh kicked off the air. For me, there's a difference that neither the ACLU nor Maher want to see.

Maher spoke his truth, and the truth. Courage is not a straightforwardly good thing. It's a quality of action, and even bad actions can take courage.

I mean, he's right. I really does not take courage to sit in a control station in the US and guide a drone in Pakistan. It's just doesn't. It might be an honorable thing to do, but it does not take guts to do it.


Limbaugh chose a rhetorical angle for ratings. That's his job. And he went one too far this time. His consistent references to feminists as feminazis are political, and annoying, but fair. Even clever. Calling a woman he's never met (and that's all I'm going to say about what he said) a slut, for three days, is personal attack, slander, and astonishing bad manners.

Now, what they have in common. Both of these media hosts committed acts of bad manners for which they were/are censured (not censored -- please note) by the public. Media broadcasts happen in a communal space, and one in which more than a host's target audience is listening. And if they hear you say FUCK around their kids, those other listeners are likely to tell you to watch your mouth. If they have any courage at all.

Because as a media host, answering to the public to which you speak, is, in fact, part of your job. Media hasn't been a one way messaging tool for a very, very long time now.

The fact of it is that birth control pills, which are used for all kinds of serious medical conditions as well, cost about $360 a year.** If you're in graduate school and have painful ovarian cysts, it would be really awesome if your insurance company would pony up for that co-pay. On a grad school budget, $360 is a lot of money. If you're on any financial razor's edge, that is money you have to think hard about spending. And, even if you just want to fuck-for-fun, that is way less of a burden to an insurance company's bottom line than the cost of pre-natal care, delivery, and the health care of that kid. If I were an insurance company CEO, I would be delighted with this particular mandate, which is why you haven't heard diddly from the insurance lobby about this burdensome mandate, fewer babies means more profit --- but I digress.

The ACLU might have said that Limbaugh gets to say what he wants, but the gov'ment is not going after Limbaugh, and the gov'ment did not go after Maher. The community did and is. And now, we have the tools to do that very, very loudly. We're all media hosts.

And like all communities, sometimes this community of media hosts will get it right, and sometimes we will get it wrong.

What's happening to Limbaugh is that he stuck his cigar into the wrong controversy at the wrong time. Women, it turns out, really don't want governments, or men, or insurance companies, or churches telling us what we can and can't have in terms of health care, or when and whom to fuck, or when and why to have children. We don't want our doctors to have the right to LIE TO US if they think that lie might prevent us of having an abortion (in both Arizona and Kansas, so far). It turns out this is really a bridge too far. And we said so. We brought the pressure. We exercised our moral agency. Like adults. We don't want to live in a climate of fear. One of the motives of feminism is that women are really tired of having to fear men. It gets in the way of loving them.

Now, did that action take courage? Have we, any of us, gone up to Limbaugh and personally told him what an unconscionable asshat we think he is? I haven't. I did publicly put my name on several petitions. I'm on the record. But that's all.

But those differences aren't helping me with the problem here. The problem here is that Maher wants Limbaugh on the air for first amendment reasons, and I LOVE the first amendment. Love it. The problem is that when a fellow citizen, or a whole bunch of us at once, tells someone that they should watch their mouths -- that's not a first amendment infraction. It's speech, it's an expression (in this case) of a community standard, and it can have real effects on real people in real and lasting ways.

So there's my answer to my problem.

Maher should not have been kicked off the air because he just hurt some people's feelings, at a time when they were really easy to hurt. The problem they had with Maher wasn't the solid logic of his statement, it was that he didn't seem to be sad and hurt enough, he didn't seem as freaked out as most of us were. Maher didn't say what we wanted to hear. And to that we should have put on our big-people pants and argued back. I mean, Maher can get up on his logical high horse sometimes and forget that he's also pushing (or intend to) emotional buttons.***


Limbaugh stuck his cigar into a matter that attacks women's health, sides with people who want us to live in fear of them, who want us not to trust our doctor's, to have sex only for procreation. (In which case, who is going to use all that Viagra???) They really want to hurt us for adhering to their religious or moral principles and beliefs. You can tell because these laws have hugely negative effects on us physically, emotionally, and financially. Limbaugh is adding to climate of fear for women, and he's doing it not because he believes in any thing, but just for the cash.

And that too is not courage.
_________________________
UPDATE: The Arizona law would make it possible for any employer to FIRE a woman for using birth control, even if she paid it for it herself, against the employer's moral objections. Yes, folks, your boss could be in charge of your private life. And this is where all this is going. Control of women is one of the goals here. And that's just bonus points, just gravy, just lagniappe. The real goal here is to kill the Affordable Care Law.

That your  personal life, or your own moral values or religious beliefs would be subject to the objections of the CEO of your corporation, and that your use of pills or condoms would be subject to inspection, I suppose, by your manager -- that is just sprinkles on the cupcake.
_________________________
* Yes, I was one of those un-American's who knew that there was more historical context to those attacks than simply a bunch of psychotic and hell-bent America haters deciding it was time to destroy us. Though, there are and were a bunch of psychotic and hell-bent America haters and I have no problem with hunting them. Though, I think drones and big footprint ops are the wrong way to do the hunting.

** If you don't know how birth control pills work, you might ask your state legislature or school board why that information was not in your abstinence only sex education course. Hint: they do not work like Viagra (which is covered for co-pays).

*** His show actually has a pedagogical goal, and that is to teach people to separate emotional responses from logical conclusions. His schtick is pretty intense, actually, because he's doing exactly, and strictly, what Socrates and Plato wanted us to learn about thinking logically.****

**** Problem is these are matters of moral reasoning, and that's a little fuzzier and more emotional than just straight up logic -- which is what hurt about Maher's courage argument. Most Americans were in no kind of shape for a coldly logical argument that week.

Before Europe: Or Life BE

Many events before I arrived in the city of Papa as a member of the 1% relative to Papa's average incomes, I jumped ship. After years of mucking away at a job at an educational corporation, I broke down and realized that I needed to go write my books. This was a near impossibility at the job. So, I stopped being a responsible adult and risked, well, all of it.

I made a cliched move back home, to live my parents. And there I had a rare chance to live as an adult with the adults who shaped me and to watch their post-child-raising lives up close. My parents have a good marriage, by any standard; and like all good marriages that last more than 40 years, theirs is complicated and private and it's meant to stay that way. Papa and I were sitting the barn talking. The barn is where the real talking happens with my dad. He's all set up with a fridge, a TV, a work bench, saw horses, blow torch, massive tool box, shop vac, the whole kit. He rebuilds cars in his retirement. I do a lot of cleaning small parts of engines when I'm there. And talking. I wasn't home a week when he said, "While you live here, you will do no marriage counseling."

He's fond of pronouncements.

That are not always followed.

At least not to the letter. Because I did do some mom-counseling. I realize this is a loop hole, but it seemed necessary. Here I am with my two best friends on the planet, and in the course of respecting them, their world, and our relationship, I couldn't follow the letter the law. Friends tell friends the truth, sometimes the hard truth.

I learned that there are basically two kinds of long marriages. There's the happy but melancholic marriage, the one my parents have, in which they do wonderful things for each other and are fabulous companions. The big Christmas present this year from Mamma to Papa was a warmly lined flannel shirt to replace the "Deliverance" shirt dad had been wearing for y e a r s   and   y e a r s and which was getting to ratty looking even for him. Problem, these shirt-coats had fallen out of fashion. Mamma hunted high and low, and bang!, found it. This shirt had become a symbol, a symbol of my father's rebellion against all formalities he deemed unnecessary (there are many, mostly to do with dress and hair cuts), and my mother's desire to appear in public from time to time with a smartly dressed man. Mom still believes in a number of formalities, so ok. Papa bought Mamma a massage table. This too is a symbol, in this case of the basic underlying intimacy and contentment they have and that has always held them together. But, let's say, Pops is taking it to a new level. The melancholic element though is this:

They have the same fight, in slight variations, on a nearly seasonal cycle.

Hence the mom-counseling. Papa wouldn't discuss it with me. And he told me it's not that he thought I would not have good advice, or that I would take sides. He thought that it's just not my business. And it's not. Until Mamma says, "I want some advice about your dad."

Now, I will not tell you the substance of the fight. That's clearly not mine to tell. What I will say is that this fight is the one place, the one, where they both failed, over and over again. It was the one place/issue/thing about which neither of them could ever learn to be generous. It was the one matter about which they both wanted the other person to change and the other person could or would not change. No way, no how. What this means is that every few months, for a week or so, they're both pissy and defensive and mad at each other for The Same Thing Again.

This got on my nerves. But I learned a thing. I learned that to have the other kind of good marriage, the one that bears less of the odor of melancholy, what we need is to learn a generosity that has no limit. The change they both needed sums up this way: one wanted total acceptance and other wanted more order. I know why and where those needs come from in my parents, but that's none of your business. What's important is that this is a tough nut to crack, so I understand how this conflict became a theme, a refrain. Neither wanted or wants something that would damage the other, so the two desires are perfectly fine--they just don't match. This where the generosity comes into play, that long lived love is a thing humans do in order to chafe off parts of our selves that we don't really need, or don't need all the time. And that's where the generosity would come it, that's what would smooth the chafe.

I think. I'm going to have to live a good while longer to find out.

Don't Be This Guy, Please.

 
Restaurant etiquette may not be universal, but the version of it I grew up on is well known and practiced in many nations and cultures, including Great Britan.

So, The Man and I are weekending in Budapest. I don't take pictures of famous things in cities anymore. All those things have much better pictures on the internet. I take pictures of smaller things I see. Mostly. This post    will have some of them.

I was interested to note that four deployments to war zones really does affect one's, well, affect. The Terror Haza did not phase him much. I however, have now been there twice, and being thus far a war-virgin --thank all the gods--, ... I'm not going back in. Sorry future visitors to my world, I'll be drinking a limonade with gin over at Karma. I'll be easy to find, and Just Far Enough Away from That.

But, we also wandered in the park, took in some art, went to the Great Synagogue,, did Budapest-y things. And then, we went to dinner at this little French joint in the old city of Pest, Gerloczy Cafe and Rooms deLux (where I hope to stay next time!! Swank at the price!). I mean, come on!, an excellent breakfast is In The Cafe Downstairs. Yes, please. And, it's the sort of place that serves good duck and good mackerel while projecting a pretty beach scene from the Normandy coast onto the wall opposite. There were little fairy lights and upside-down growing plants in special upside-down pots hanging in the tree over the spacious patio. It was completely charming in it's somewhat neglected Hungarian way. Good eye, The Man.

It was Tuesday, a night most restaurants do not expect to get slammed, and this was Gerloczy's unlucky Tuesday. They were all the way in the weeds, completely at sea. Hungarian service is traditionally leisurely, and this was a French joint, so I was doing my service math as HU / F = 45 to 60 min from order to plate. But, it was a longer time than that. Our server was impeccable, precise, efficient, eager for our comfort and happiness. The kitchen, however was overwhelmed. Ok then. Tonight is Slow Night for us and a really nasty Fast Night for the staff. The food was good, not write-to-your-mamma good, but good.

And This Guy. He and his whole family looked pretty peeved even as they were seated. They just had this slightly spiky sort of We Will Not Be Satisfied air about them, and boy were they not satisfied. They ordered, they ate, Mom and Dad and Son and Daughter, all in nearly complete silence ... grimly, you might say. And then, the server came to them and asked, in English as they were Brits, "How was everything?" And This Guy says, "Well, if you had not asked, I would not have to be truthful, but since you asked I will tell you." Notice how This Guy makes the totally undeserved reaming the server is about get all the server's fault. Love him. Oh yes. "The service is slow, the food was barely tepid when it arrived at table," blah, blah, blah, "and the something-he-had should have been just a little softer than al dente." Picky eater much? Flashing some culinary power plays in order to intimidate the server? Tacky, brother, tacky. After a breath, This Guy continues, "I am very disappointed. I see that you have a full house on a Tuesday and very likely the kitchen is overworked and has decided to take short cuts. However, I have emailed with the chef some six months ago as I researched this vacation, and she assured me that ...."

Dude. Shut up. Six months ago? Who are you? ... I mean other than a manipulative git.

Because there's this rule about etiquette in restaurants. If the food is not good, you say so BEFORE you, and I am not kidding in this case, clean your plate of all of it. Not a morsel left. Complain after a bite or two. It's like sniffing the cork and sipping the wine, people. In case the wine has turned, you get a minute to think it over BEFORE you pay for the bottle. Same thing goes for the chow. Complaining after you eat the whole meal is foul play. You are trying to rip the place off. And they succeeded. This decent, charming restaurant gave all four of them some merch, lovely T-shirts and their deepest and sincerest apologies for the inconvenience of ...

Some Bad Luck.

As they rose to saunter grimly off in triumph, the daughter, all of about 14 years old said, "Oh, that's nice. They've given us shirts to mend it."

Nice life lesson there, Dad.

I'm just glad This Guy wasn't an American. I would have had to apologize for him.

The One Percent

Four women and I are working on a project here in Papa. It's a ton of work, so one evening several of us went out to dinner together to  enjoy each others' company rather that doing comparative analysis of widgets and website editors. We're on the walking street in the centrum (pron: tsentrum), dressed for a girls' night out, speaking English, walking between dinner and a strong spiked coffee before heading home. Also on the street, three young men from Papa. They're dressed like most teens in Europe these days, the fashion rage being a re-hash of 1980s soft core punk.

"Fucking Bitches."

My first thought is, "So, that was excellent pronunciation." Because, you see, I've been called names on the street before, and it's getting a little boring. We walk on, ignoring them for a few steps, as women do the world over when harassed on the street. I failed in my allegiance to HollaBack here. The cell phone was in the bottom of my bag, but at about step four, I turned and looked at them, sternly, for a long time. My second thought was that teenage boys the world over need a few lessons in manners, but my Hungarian is not yet strong enough to have said, "That insult was delivered with perfect pronunciation. I congratulate you, little man, on your linguistic skill, but not on your courage. Were you alone, you would not have braved the reprisals four women. Iwill not even begin to imagine for you the frustration you will experience in the sexist life you appear prepared to live. And, just so you can be certain, I am a fucking bitch of what to you are extra-epistemological proportions." What I can actually say in Hungarian in this situation is, "Jo estet" ( pron: yo eshtate -- good evening). This does not pack the high handed diction of the classy version of "fuck you little boy."

I am, however, the international queen of The Withering Glare, which did its job here as effectively as in other locations.

But, then I had some conversations, made some connections. So, some anecdotes.

Papa is a smallish town in provincial Hungary. Descended upon it, all at once three years ago, came an international consortium in the form of a heavy air lift wing. Lots of people who spoke no Hungarian, lots of people needing homes. Homes became available. Other people's homes, homes rented at about 75% higher rates than any real estate agent had ever imagined here. Of course, this process inflated rental and home prices across Papa and in surrounding villages. Restaurant staff and store owners started learning English, or more English, toute suite. Partly, this was a bit of innate cultural generosity: Hungarians are often among the most generous of people, and they know that their language is a labyrinthine mine field for most others. Partly, this was good business sense: There are, relatively speaking, pots and pots of money to made from these foreigners.

In Papa, we are, I am, The One Percent.

That means the same thing here that it means in the US right now. It means that I am grudgingly tolerated. It means that many of Papa's citizens feel helpless in the face of changes to their world wrought by me and on my behalf. It means that I am part of a system that makes me, by analogy, Paris Hilton, and that creates fewer jobs for Hungarians than she does for Americans outside the paparazzi industry. In the US, I am a member of the middle class, or the upper middle class, really. I'm not upside down on my house, and my income (when I had one) was higher than that of 50% of my fellow and sister citizens. Here, I am Paris Hilton. I have a level of freedom, power, and social access that's embarrassing. I went to listen to the USAFE Band the other night, and I was ushered to the reserved seats for the fancy people.

One news report from the US recently informed me that over 900,000 people applied for 62,000 jobs at McDonalds, most of them floor jobs, literally the McJob of middle class high school days and working class everydays. 900,000 Americans would have been happy to get paid minimum wage with no benefits. In Hungary, it's been normal for people with magnificent educations, who speak 5 languages, play the violin, and can do higher math to make $500 per month.

Here, people don't garden because they want to be organic localvores. Here, people garden so that they can eat at all. A rooster crows every morning, just three houses over from my house. Two houses over, a man keeps a flock of pigeons. He feeds them, maintains a wonderful coop for them, and eats them.

I applied for a loyalty card to a local grocery store and the application was full of the usual marketing questions: gross income, number of kids, blah blah blah. The income brackets were defined monthly, per person in the household, and ranged from 10,000 HUF to 200,000 HUF. That's from $50 to $1000.

My rent is 400,000 HUF. Almost all the rents in this charming, crumbly, provincial town are $2000/month, for a house, for a two room apartment. A rent scale wildly out of proportion for this location, and that is creating some very difficult burdens for the people of Papa. For instance, there's a women's shelter here that I've come to volunteer for as they need me. When a woman moves out of the shelter, she usually stays in Papa, gets a job, an apartment ... and because the heavy airlift wing is here jacking up the local economy, she's up against some pretty stiff rental rates, and winds up living in a crappy apartment built in the 1960s by the Soviets. ... Not the local dream home.

I've heard a rumor that some people here are beginning to believe that the Hungarian government, not the most prosperous in Europe, is paying our rent for us, for all of us foreigners. This is preposterous, and dangerous, and hence testy teenage boys trying out their English on me.

For all kinds of reasons both linguistic (on which I'm working), and political and legal (about which I can do fuck-all), these flowing tensions are hard for me, for us, to address.

But, I get it, little Hungarian man, I get it.

So, Dear the One Percent of the United States:

There are reasons both real and imaginary that we don't like you. You would do well to address them. Then, you could come out and live among us, outside your gated and guarded communities, without fear of being called a Fucking Bitch.

Dear FIDESZ,

We could be following some priorities out here that would make life for your citizens in Papa hurt a LOT less in the wake of this wing's arrival. It would be lovely to discuss those with you, and to work together to create some decent interactions in this community. Because, you know, you have truck loads of money coming from this consortium, and not much of it is benefiting the people here who are discomfited by our presence and effects. Developing some real, not just showy, lines of relation and some real benefits to the people of Papa would be, well, the right thing to do. Any room in your new constitution for that?

No? Too busy making life hard for women and gays and ethnic minorities, unbalancing the balance of powers, enshrining the Christian roots of the Hungarian plutocracy? Knock yourself out.

Country and Western Music in Hungarian

So, this morning I am slapped in the face with a cultural hybrid I never imagined. That is my failure, of course. The Man was gallantly sleeping downstairs with neighbor's dog (said dog feeling a little bereft and being too old to get up our suicide staircase), but I had the alarm on upstairs. Promptly, as is the nature of alarms, this one went off at 5:45 and played ... a country and western song in Hungarian.

Given the country music genre's origins in the English and Irish ballads, I would not have been surprised to find it there. But I didn't. Country music and line dancing are huge in Hungary and The Netherlands.

This makes sense. It makes sense on every level. The line dancing even makes perfect sense. It all explains the suspicious numbers of western boots I've been seeing around here.

So, the great American musical exports include not only jazz and rap, but something white people cooked up: country music and line dancing.

The circle is complete.

Speech: Rights are Responsibilities to Each Other

From the 1:28 mark to the 2:21 mark, Sheriff  Dupnik of Tuscon notes that the "mentally unbalanced" are easily influenced by our public discourses. This happens to be a psychological fact. If the rants and YouTube video are the shooter’s, I'd be will to tag him as schizophrenic. Schizophrenics are like radios and kaleidoscopes combined, their minds take in the world and reshuffle it. They almost all suffer delusions of "mind control" because they sense their minds are not in their control. Their maps of reality share points with ours, and then diverge radically. Their particular way of being broken is always a reflection of what is really going on.


So, for the love of all that’s holy, I beg our public servants, our political pundits, our bloggers and radio show call-in listeners to put the CIVIL back in civil discourse.

There are too many undiagnosed schizophrenics, and too many people feeling a serious lack of faith in life in the US at present. Acts like this can and have become the inevitable and necessary “thing to do” for such people. They will again. From the broken mind that shoots a president or a congresswoman, to the racist who commits suicide by cop at historical memorial to the victims of vitriol and rancor in another civil society only a few decades ago.

The real rancor and hate and the metaphorical violence of our public discourse finally killed people yesterday, destroyed and damaged the lives of many more, and bruised the free and civil exercise of our democracy. And this after many threats, much indirect violence in attacks on campaign headquarters, and so on. The most telling thing about this present horror and grief is that none of us are surprised by it. Somewhere in us, we all knew this was coming.

Our manner of speech is part of our civic responsibility. Civility is much more than a formal arrangement of society. It’s how we exist together. How we talk, what we say, our tone and intention, the images and metaphors we choose, all these have consequences. Consequences can be good, and they can be this tragedy.

That’s our choice. Everyday. On every stage. In every publication. On every talk show. In every church. In every home. At the tables of every coffee shop and diner and private club.

We are called by these deaths, by the destruction and disruption of of these remaining lives, by the grief of these families to take to heart the requirements of our civil lives together. The least we can do to honor these people is speak to each other as fellow citizens, not as smack-talking enemies on a battle field. A nine year old girl is dead. A congresswoman will never, ever be the same person again. In all the lives ended and damaged by this boiling over of our public sentiment, what glorious and irreplaceable potential for good and betterment has been forever lost?

The least the pundits and talking heads and political celebrities can do is Stop Stirring the Pot. It's been boiling for a good while now. Time to turn the gas down. Souls are on the line.

Letter Home: Christmas in no Danger at All

Dear Aunt Susan,

I'm waiting for news of the Roberts-Freeman Christmas gathering. While I'm certain y'all had a grand time, I'm also panting for some details. I was a little bit heartsick at missing it, and wanted very much to be there with Adam and let y'all get acquainted with him. I'm hoping for next year, or the year after that at the longest. I really hope that Christopher and Alison got to riffing jokes with each other. They are two of the funniest people I have yet met in life. I'm sure I'll get some story from Mom and Dad in the next while.


Now, because I'm me, and this is us, my report on Christmas traditions begins with a political observation I don't expect you to share, but have a compulsion to express anyway.

I used to find those loose associations of "Keep the Christ in Christmas" people a kind of irritating minor element in the culture wars. Like Christmas is the only holy day at this time of year. They seemed to have problems with abbreviations and with consumerism (many fewer with consumerism, which is what I think is actually sucking the life out of the holiday spirit) and with people like me who think a cresh on church property is great and warms my heart, but in front of the county courthouse they're a serious Constitutional problem. Now I find these people pathetic and laughable.

That's not a real friendly way to open a letter about Christmas traditions in Old Europe, but hang on, it gets friendlier and I'll explain myself.

Stalin, that souless ass, and his political descendants would jail/exile to the Gulag/kill people for keeping the rituals of their faiths, and the USSR covered turf full of many faiths: Catholics and Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, and probably a few of the remaining Zarathustrians. People of faith here were not insulted by the abbreviation "Xmas," they were insulted in their being by the brutality of a government violently hostile to any form of social organization that did not consist of, well, it. And people lived like this for a good chunk of the last century. Hungary fell under Soviet control in 1956 and became free again in 1989 along with everyone else.

Christmas in the US has nothing at all to fear for its well being and continued celebration in the US. Of this we can be sure.

No one here forgot how to do Christmas, or what it's about, or why it's good. Even after not being allowed to celebrate it for 40-odd years. In Hungary, because the dominant faith is Roman Catholicism, it's not just Christmas. Every public calendar is marked with the season of Advent and a host of ceremonies and public caroling and performance events run all the way up to Christmas Mass. Small towns like Papa have a tiny Christmas Market, but cities like Budapest, or Prague, or Vienna have huge markets with vendors selling religious and merely decorative ornaments, foods of an astonishing variety, gluwine (mulled wine, we call it), gifts, the whole bit. It is Very Christmasy. The vendors are a mix of local restaurants, individuals with their one-food shops, artists and so on. It's amazing.Towns all decked out in lights and festoons of tinsel and fir branches. Saints are celebrated, like Saint Lucia (especially the Swedes are fond of her) who is the bringer of light in the darkness of winter -- a saint who folds the old solstice celebrations in with Christianity. People eat dinner with their friends a little more frequently, and there's also a good deal of shopping. Adam and I trekked up to the mall in Gyor to do some of our Gift shopping together (great fun learning each others' tastes there), and it was as busy and as much a place to display social status as any mall in the US. It has a Burger King, but also two cafes with good espresso and a couple of gellato shops, a good sandwich shop, lots of places to sit and people watch so the mall is an indoor version of a city square and walking streets. Europe if just fine by me.

As to Hungarian Christmas day traditions, I don't know because we had dinner with some Romanian friends. So, I can tell you about that. This is a big meal. Makes the feasts we typically put on look a little puny. There's a course of cold meats, cheese, bread and veg like olives and tomatoes. A course of salads, usually a kind of cole slaw and an eggplant puree (divine!) and a mixed veg salad with mayonnaise I know from Mom's French version, and a couple others that I've forgotten. I brought Grandma's spinach ring, which also came out perfectly, much to my amazement given that oven and total absence of saltine crackers from this country. Turns out that this oven only cooks at speed when set on convection, and then it cooks things F A S T. Then two meat courses, one of pork and one of fowl. In this case I brought the duck I roasted, which worked after much giggering in this infernal oven that I'm still learning to run. The pork dishes were cutlets mostly, and served with spiced potatoes. Then there was coffee. This after several rounds of whiskey (the 8 of us put down fifth of that), rum that our house had encased in ice that held fir twigs and oranges in it and kept the rum cold (a trick he learned from Jamie Oliver on TV), and a famous Romanian wine called Lacrima lui Ovidiu (Tears of Ovid) which is completely amazing and tastes a bit like a white port but more complex. Then desserts, plural, and about six of them, with coffee and digestives (read more port). These were a chocolate and sourdough bread, a sour cream cake in which are hidden little fortunes for the new year for everyone are folded tin foil and hidden in the cake (mine was an Emerson quote: "A hero is just as brave as a normal man, only for five minutes longer."), and last but not least a kind of cinnamon crumble cake with candied fruit in it. In short, our hostess informed us, that many Easter Orthodox fast during Advent, eating mostly vegetables and milk, and then feast like mad on Christmas and wind up in the hospital. I believe her. We learned that the Romanians of Transylvania like sugar, and Moldovans like salt, and this is a source of much amusement gentle cultural ribbing.

After dinner, because we're all about the same age, we used the TV and a laptop to watch 80s music on the TV, so that was Madonna and Depeche Mode, and some Satchmo because one of the guests loves Louis Armstrong, and a recently famous Romanian sheep herder (I am not making this up) who recorded a song about long memories and regrets that Romanians love for a chance to think back over the hardness of life and appreciate the joy they're having now. Adam and I have lots of Armstrong's music in our collections, so we're making that guest a CD or two. We talked about our various traditions and the vagaries of the Hungarian language (no verb for "to have," possession and various past tenses just work differently here) and how Ovid lived in Romanian, in Costanza where our hosts are from, when the Roman's exiled him for publishing some rather gossipy stories and having a affair with the wrong man's wife.

In short, it was fantastic.

New Year's will be interesting because for two days sales of fireworks are legal and everyone and their uncle shoots them off at midnight. There are parties to which one buys tickets at the local restaurants and hotels for dinner and drinks. It is rumored that people don't go home until 4 or 5 in the morning. Given the ZERO tolerance for drinking and driving here, I suppose the two cab companies in town make a mint that morning.

Other than that, we found a mutt at a shelter we might adopt. It's a mix of German Sheppard and Hungarian Viszla (a pointer), so he's marked like a Sheppard with a pointer head and ears. Ridiculous and adorable (on this page, he's the 19th or 20th picture down the page). He's six months old. We're giving this serious thought as we're keeping the colonel's Viszla now, and she's fabulous but a very "be with the humans" dog. These Viszla look like Wiemarnars, but they're red. Smart as whips, fast as light, and this one we're dogsitting hunts shadows because she hasn't figured out yet that they're attached to other real things. Better than television. Anyway, if this mutt has more of an independent Sheppard personality, then he's for us. Because I can tell from the size of this dog's legs in the picture that he's going to be humongous. I can't deal with a humongous needy dog. I'm sure all his commands are Hungarian, so we'll have to get a list of those!

That's the news, Susan. I send masses of love and heaps of goodness for the new year to you and all my cousins.

Huggin' your neck from Hungary!
M

Hugo Went Home: A Meditation on Otherness

In the back garden we have a stone fireplace with little stools around it, a fire pit really. Having no idea where to get firewood at a good price, and this being Hungary one should be able to find some, I asked the question on my military/ex-pat community's Facebook page, and Hugo said that there was good cheap wood at the Home Depot down the street, easy peasy. "Home sweet home," he said.

What Hugo is experiencing is the expansion of self that comes with familiarity, belonging, with not being the other.

In a moment when we're turning our attention to the needs of capital and away from the needs of humans, I think this is a good point on which to meditate -- because we are all other-marginal-instrumental from the point of view of capital as we experience it for now.

I'm an Anglo, a Celt, a white chick, so I don't look like a person who can't speak Hungarian. Nothing marks me other until I and a Hungarian try to have even a simple conversation like, "Thanks," and "You're welcome, here's your change." It's the clause"here's your change" that screws up my face and causes either an indulgent smile or a closure of expression.

So, the contraction of self that comes with being other doesn't have anything to do with being spotted, as does the contraction that comes with being othered racially. It's in my head. I know I'm lost and confused and a bit of an interloper and asking people to work harder than they otherwise would have to just to help me buy flour (of which there are 6 or 7 types and grades, bread being serious business in Europe). I feel contracted with confusion and humility and a whole aura of apollogetics. I do not fit, am capable of making a huge social mistake at any moment just by doing what comes naturally (by which I mean culturally) to me. I am marginal.

(Don't worry, I'm having a lovely time in my ex-pat adventure, it's just that there's this layer too, this sharpening of my awareness of this phenomenon coming to me thanks to being way outside my comfort zone, as people say.)

What this feeling reminds me of is those moments in being a woman when I feel endangered or just really alienated in very male spaces or in a world that still runs itself on their worst logics and wants no room for me other than as slut or wife-mom--no room for girl or professor or CEO. In that world I can be smart, but I had better be prettier than I am smart in order to get away with it. And if I'm too pretty, I can be fired for distracting the men from their work.

Which, by the way, masculine zeitgeist, would you just make up your damn mind?

Muslims in America and Europe, Roma in Europe, Hispanics and Latinos in America, immigrants of all stripes feel this, this contraction of self that comes with being other. Blacks in America can tell you long, interesting, heartbreaking, hilarious, and very detailed stories about this contraction. So can GBLT people. As other you have two roles: instrument or threat.

And the thing about that contraction is that the attempt to expand the self and relax into one's cultural space can happen like any other very energetic expansion -- it can become explosion. That is its natural-cultural form. It can be peaceful, it can be loving and gentle and insistent, but that is very hard work, as all the non-violent social movements demonstrate in their discipline.

The students and professors in the UK have just very actually learned what it feels like to be other of capital. That there have been little explosions in otherwise weeks and weeks and weeks of peaceful and very creative demonstrations is no surprise. There's money. It's just that 80% of current budgets for the humanities will be cut, and student tuition will triple all at once to $14,000 USD. There's money. Just not for education in meaning.

And not knowing how to mean, or what something means, or how to engage with the meanings that surround you, that are created by science-math-business and are very technical -- that is the contraction of self that comes with being other.

Welcome to the world of women, of non-whites in white nations, of immigrants, of fungible workers. It is not a comfy fit, being human in a wholly technical world. You'll see.

A Post by Way of Explanation to a Friend Unlikely Ever to Read It unless I Email It to Him

So, it keeps coming up, doesn't it? What you think of as my failure, my moral failure; or when you're calmer and feeling kinder, my infection -- which implies weakness rather than laziness.

You track some deep change, a growing unrecongnizability, a listing toward being "an ugly American" and a lack of seriousness that rattles your cage but good. You're disappointed and angry. And I know how hard it was to write that last email because I know how angry you were. Which tells me how much you respected me before (which had not really registered with me for complicated psychological reasons most people take for a charming humility), and so prompts this reply.

My reply email to you did not take several tries, it came fast and sure, and expressed mostly my exhaustion with the whole thing. I had in fact been waiting and waiting to write it. I tried for an explanation. I missed. I defended rather than explained myself, and I did that because the real explanation is so much worse than the one you're thinking of.

That I am supported now by a lover paid by the US DOD is not the problem, the source of my months of dark humor, bad jokes, and generalized laissez-faire-ah-fuck-it attitude. I have no trouble at all with my lover's employer, current or previous assignments. I have always had massive, insurmountable, trenchant problems with the policies and their makers that have determined the course of history for the last, it seems to me now, ever.

You liked the me that had a lot of fight in me. The obstreperous me, the oppositional and defiant me. You read that, my faith with Adorno and Marcuse, my company with experimental poetics, with feminist philosophers of a very difficult and visionary stripe, as a kind of intellectual integrity. I had a lot of fight in me.

And for the last little while, and still now, I don't, and you think me intellectually compromised by my relationship because of my lover's employer. You think I'm feeling stuck because this good person has killed people in two wars, and yet I get angry that world class football treats young players as disposable humans. You think that I have blinded myself to the presumed disposable of the people killed in these wars so that I can have some security of my own. You suspect that I'm making too many compromises, have traded my obstreperous integrity for love and a roof.

If only it were that simple, that easily changed.

The gig really is that I have been toying with the idea of decadence, of giving up, getting high, indulging myself dangerously, and letting that stubborn stupid world eat itself alive like it clearly, and dearly wants to.

That's what the real trouble is. I have been having a very hard time shaking off the cynicism, the bleak, near total certainty that my good work and integrity, or yours -- or that of all the brave and shining souls who still inspire me -- is all for fucking naught because the sheer inertia of the complexity of the proliferating, I'll be frank, intentional meanness of the administered-military-industrial-society with which we all live is inexorable, perfected, and utterly disinterested in any outcome other than its own self-annihilating satisfaction. I mean have you seen the stock markets? There is no real reason for those numbers.

I'm not intellectually compromised by having the DOD for a patron indirectly and unawares. I'm tired, and scared, and pissed at myself for even being remotely tempted to just go get seriously stoned and forget it all. Because the shining souls are still there, inspiring and perspiring and generally kicking ass and many of them are my dear friends, and how, my word, how can I let them down?

So, what you have read as selling out, and that's what you mean to say, is not that exactly. It's a soul-cleaving ambivalence, and I haven't even resolved it enough to sell out.

That's the thing, the unnamed quake that has rattled your cage and made you suspicious of and worried for and so angry at me. And that's why all my apologies have rung false. I can apologize for saying asinine things, even if I said them ironically. The irony was inaudible because of this that I can't apologize for: I am struggling, very hard, not to give up.

Roma: Un-Fashionable

It's not just the US where some growing up needs to happen. France's Sarkozy could use a dose of adulthood himself.

No one wants gypsies, travelers, Roma around, but many don't mind dressing like them even if they don't like the idea of the stubbornly other others.

Where the US is having a spasm of religious suspicion (you know, as kind of side dish to its constant ethnic tension), here it's gypsies and a couple governments stomping on the hornets' nest. It's easy to do because these are peoples who deliberately do not integrate, or assimilate, and frequent don't cooperate. They pretty much want to keep to themselves and do take care of their own. Independence is the key stone of their culture. They are not usually thieves and kidnappers of children (that's organized crime), but it's easy to think so since the odds that the average European is friends with a traveler or Roma are kinda slim. The contemporary gypsy is a slow moving nomad in a mobile home or a camper van, and Europe is a place where nomadic cultures settled down in one place a L O N G time ago. So, figuring out the legal status, which settled nations base on citizenship, of a nomad who moreover does not want to be a citizen is really hard to do.

But, it's grown a bit nasty again in the recession. All the people on a nation's soil cost money, and money is thin on the ground for the world's governments these days. So, where the American public is being childish and mean; France and Italy are leading a controversial push to make it easier to kick people out of their countries. Many of the Roma in France come from Romania, which Sarkozy argues, receives about 4 billion euros from the EU, but spends just .04% of that on their gypsy minority, which results in that minority moving off to other countries. The UN, Human Rights Campaign, the Vatican, about half of Sarkozy's cabinet and lots of Europeans think this policy is bad, wrong, and generally mean.They deplore it, loudly, on behalf of the Roma and against the precedent this move sets.

Sarkozy is in a tough fight for re-election, and he's running to the right. As he is wont to do, and as many US conservative politicians do (flags, guns, gays, god, immigrants, ....) when they feel a real challenge. It's a reflex. It's as dangerous and boring as most mental or cultural reflexes. What bothers me is that Sarkozy is flirting with cultural policies that are very close to those of national socialist groups in Europe whose economic policies would appeal to US conservatives, but whose cultural programs are openly reminiscent of those infamous national socialists. (Though, lately, it seems that those darker policies are developing some appeal as well.)

England is taking a slightly different tack. Here, the trouble with travelers is that they tend to set up camp on undeveloped land that doesn't belong to them. Not surprising, that's what travelers have always, for centuries (maybe millennia) done. Here, the government recognizes traveler communities, and is in a pickle over where to let them set up camps and how to balance that living space against local town's needs, taxes, green belt space, and other concerns. There's even work on making sure their children are decently educated. I'm not sure of the communities in France, but one factor that may ease some (certainly not all, hating on travelers is tradition here) of the friction between these margin dwellers and established society is that they share a language. French (the government I mean here) really don't like people who don't speak French.

So, what's going on there with the fashion trend right in the same season France and Italy are getting in snit over gypsies? Why do people like the food, the music, the style of this or that other-group (gypsy style and guitar, gansta rap, soul food, jazz, gospel, Tex-Mex,  ...) while despising the people who create it? The connection isn't that these others are all criminals, since they aren't or only pretend to be, or their criminality is a rather passive even a secondary effect of social forces other than their own will to break a law.

I am guilty of indulging in the identity appropriation of gypsy fashion, have been for a long time. A good chunk of my wardrobe is still gypsy-esque and "bohemian." This has a great deal to do with my antipathy for offices. And that's the link to my sympathy; well, that and the fact that gypsy guitar turns me on. In high school, I loved the aura of gypsies not for their nomadism, a little bit for the romantic image of them, and a lot for their deliberate alienation. I felt pretty darn alienated in the age of "greed is good," and was looking for ways to increase that feeling and status. I figured, the farther out of the current, the fresher the waters. Every Halloween, gypsy costume. J-Lo's Roma-inspired dance-centric video and that movie about chocolate with cinnamon and cayenne pepper ground in it, the one with Johny Depp and Juliet Binoche and the low key ultra sexiness of Depp's gypsy, those had not been made. So, it was mostly the travelers' ability to build a whole culture (I didn't know there several) outside/alongside the dominant one--their choice of the margin over the center, their willingness to do what it takes to live Out There. I admired that and their general talent for not being destroyed (shooed away, sure, and then the Nazi's really went for them, but mostly not destroyed).

What's interesting, I think, to America from the France vs. England approaches to these others is that it links to our issues and debates over migrant workers in the US illegally. They're not gypsies--not people who would prefer to roam--but economically dispossessed folk looking to feed their kin. The consequent effects of their presence in the US is not their goal. And like them, the gypsies over here are not interested in doing harm, they're just interested in getting by and doing right by their families and culture. France wants to throw them out, now, and finger print them so they can't sneak back in. England wants to work out what the British call "reasonable accommodation." They see these people as people, not problems and political pawns.

There's a surprising lot of good information about the Roma and British and Irish travelers here at the BCC, and much coverage of the current debates over at The Guardian. It's fascinating stuff.

Ok, so, next post: cabinetry. I promise. Time to lighten up a bit around here.

Mosque-a-pa-looza

So. The first post of this latest in the venerable tradition of ex-pat blogs was going to be on the theme of cabinetry. We will have to wait for that. Some friends encouraged this blog into existence, and I thought, "OK, I'll do a third millennium woman-feminist American abroad with the mechanisms of empire Mark Twain in Europe kind of thing." And, Dear America, you are making it way too easy.

One of the essays I used to teach in Comp 101 at several universities was by Twain who, after reading his recently delivered newspapers in Paris, implored the good people of the state of Missouri not to engage in the popular sport of lynching humans. This was somewhere around 1905. The good people of the state of Missouri did not listen to the famous son, and I don't expect you to listen either, America, for all the same reasons Twain was pretty sure humans were irredeemable as a species. Because, you know, you (we) keep doing unbelievably stupid and cruel things, it seems, for the fun of it.

Let's talk about Islamophobia, mosques, the flood in Pakistan, and the winning of hearts and minds. If you think the peoples of Middle East and Central Asia are not paying attention to your shenanigans, you are frighteningly naive. If you think that burning piles of the Qu'ran and a mosque here and there are turning moderate Muslims into the kind of friends abroad who trust the American people and consequently believe that American foreign policy might do the right thing -- you are patently out of your minds. I know you want to feel better, and that in America feeling better often means making someone or some group you don't know much about feel really awful and afraid of you, but it is time to grow the hell up.

Twain asked the good people of Missouri to be more morally righteous than the good people of Georgia and Mississippi and California. He appealed to their much vaunted Christianity. I am going to ask you to be adults. Just adults. Not morally righteous, or good examples of Christ's love for the needy and the stranger. I ask merely for grown ups who handle fear and confusion by learning a thing or two and who can handle the responsibility of living in a religiously plural society by honoring the very pluralism that allows each of you to practice your faith, build your houses of worship, and generally not fear a mob or sneaky coward of some other faith are going to drive you into the proverbial desert. It's called courtesy, and it is a basic American value we haven't talked about in a long, long time.

I realize that this opening salvo will not make me many friends among the camps and hordes who enjoy their fear and anger. I don't really want your friendship. I don't like you. I just want your ear, for just a sec. I'll thank you for your patience, as I am not the subtle subversive that Twain was.

These gestures of economic frustration (they're more common in recessions than when we're feeling flush), these acts of violent suspicion, this blanket assumption that a Muslim is a terrorist in the offing -- is a self-fulfilling prophesy and a play right into the closed fist of our real enemies who practice bad faith. The real bad guys are not good Muslims, as most good Muslims will gladly tell you. They're angry, power hungry, murderous, destroyers of the very possibility of a thriving, happy, contented Muslim world. The bad guys are sowers of chaos fed with rage.

And they are highly organized. Remember that.

In the absence of charity for the 20 million odd people of Pakistan, the Taliban and Al Qaeda are stepping right in with food, medicine, relocation, and protection for the people they can reach. They have learned a lesson or two from Hammas,* which does a great job of providing for the people of Lebanon, thereby securing their loyalty. And, not being the sorts of civilized folk who need a lot of the much missed infrastructure to get around, the bad guys in Pakistan are helping quite a few. Also, they can afford the $8 USD it costs to buy a water purifier that would let Pakistanis drink right out of the Indus river and not die a slow death from dysentery. And so, my fellow citizens, can you. But you're not, not in a way that will get the attention of the good Muslims suffering and watching the suffering.

This is bad news for us geopolitically. It's bad strategy to let this happen.

Now, tell me: to whom, after the devastation of your tiny farm that barely supported your family as it was, do you transfer your loyalty? The person or group who saves your kid from cholera and malaria. The person or group who brings you water, or a mule, or some bedding. That's who. That group should be us--along with the British and French people who are doling out money they can't spare in the recession either at a really holy and grown up rate. But the US, our good citizens seem to be punishing the people of Pakistan for the hypothetical mis-actions of their government. Nice. Real grown ups we.

We should have the facts on the mosque/community center in NY, on its creators, on their vision of its purpose. It's to be an interfaith center, is being established by exactly the kind of moderate Muslim we've been wishing would be more active in the US and abroad, and is in fact not even visible from the former site the World Trade Center. We should be grown up enough to know that, and to know that whenever you hear only what strokes your ego or confirms your fear from your leaders ... you are being distracted from the truth if not lied to outright. That's what grown ups are supposed to know.

We are also supposed to be grown up enough to remember that the Constitution does not apply to some of us, but all of us, and that if it were to apply only to some of us then some of you would be on the wrong side of it, too. And that thought, if no care for your fellow citizens, should be enough to scare you away from burning other people's holy books or their houses of worship or letting them starve after nature stomped all over their lives. It would seem that to many of us, that thought is not occurring.

More's the pity. Here's our collective chance to do some citizens in the US a good turn, to be bigger than our pain and fear, like grown ups. Here's a chance to give an unforgettable gift of charity to millions of Muslims and thereby prove to a billion people that we just want to get the bad guys, not all of the of Muslim world, and thereby get more of them on our side. Which is winning hearts and minds, which is good strategy in this situation, which is what grown ups do. Because doing so gets you lots and lots of good press all over the world, and lessens the chance that the bad guys can lie about us to frustrated, angry, scared people all over their corner of the planet.

But, if you prefer to throw your tantrum, don't be surprised when it blows up in your face in two, or ten, for twenty years.

One of my sharpest memories after 9-11 was of being in a bar in Dallas with some friends after dinner. Two strapping young men near us were getting a little sauced and smack talking slogans like, "Get those terrorists!," "Let's kick their ass!" I turned and looked at them and asked one question, "Are you going to join up and go fight?" They informed me that they had no intention of signing up to express their patriotism. My response, "Then shut the fuck up. Other American's will be over there dying for you."

And that's the other reason I really want America to grow up. These little fits of childish anxiety will not make the sacrifice of our citizens one bit less necessary or unlikely. For the love of country, people, grow up.

Update:  This from the New York Times notes the mourning and alienation of the very kinds of people we need and should want to be neighbors to, to work with, to welcome.

*Note: Two days later, my mind reminds me that I was not thinking Hammas in the West Bank, but of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Rather a crucial difference. My apologies.