Been in a Family Way

Which is my way of explaining not posting for weeks.  There has been much going on in the world at large -- the repeal of DADT, the possibility of murderous anarchy in the Ivory Coast -- and in the mini-universe of my own family (extended and otherwise).

The news round-up for my small world is:

1.  the world's tallest 4 1/2 year old is now smitten with Lady Gaga.  This is what happens when you let Uncle Mark babysit for a week.  Nuff said.  As long as this love affair doesn't get in the way of her getting a full scholarship to play basketball for UConn (which I assume will still be a powerhouse in 2024) then I'll turn a blind eye ....

2. Daughter No. 1 is getting married on her 30th birthday, a day I've always called One Onedy One Onedy One (01/11/11).  It's bittersweet; she and Son-in-Law No. 1 have been together for several years, and will have a good good marriage, of that I'm sure.  But, frankly, I know I'm losing her and with that realization comes sorrow.  As it has always been it will always be.  I know I'll get over this transitional grief and when I do I will become annoyingly relentless about grandbabies.

3.  This morning we will head out for the East Village to have New Year's Eve dinner with Mel and Fred.  Being with old friends tonight (and at Christmas) is a remarkable feat.  People who have known you and who you've known carry your history.  I continually learn who I was and who I am now through them.

As for the traditional festivities,  I won't make any pretense of staying up until midnight.  Rest assured I am as happy as the next person to wake up in the morning which is celebration enough these days.  And, have you noticed that the friends who send photos on or with their holiday cards are the friends who drink Elixir de Dorian Gray?  Gawd, don't you people ever age?  Can't you leave anything up to the imagination?

Happy New Year to You.  I hope we all have the grace we'll need.

Here's to Depression

I was texting this morning with a friend who's in therapy.  (Don't worry, there are so many of you your identity is safe!).  It reminded me of my time in therapy during the late 1980's through the early 1990's.  I wouldn't be here today without the work I did then and while no one would nickname me Sunny, I am a happier person because of it.

There are many names for depression and if I weren't in such a hurry to get ready to go to NYC for the weekend I'd look up what William Styron or Andrew Solomon had to say about the matter.  I think one thing depressives have in common is that they name their enemy.  Mine was called The Sludge, I explained to my friend this morning.  I envisioned it as a black, viscous, slow-moving organism that took up every molecule of optimism and will to live I owned.  (Remember the movie, "The Blob"?  It looked like that, I kid you not.)  In the process of leaving me, The Sludge would tear through my soul (thanks to the catalytic nature of psychotherapy) and I would be sick, inert with suffering and doom for days.  But it was leaving, that was the difference I intuitively realized.  It was leaving.  The feeling was different than my standard issue depression where I could feel it settle into some region of my body and leave barely enough energy for me to eat, sleep, job and take care of a kid.  I managed to endure this metamorphosis and since that time I've rarely been depressed in the way I once was.  Unhappy?  Yes.  Miserable?  Indeed.  But a depression that wasn't precipitated by a specific event (a break up, a literary rejection) but only by having the audacity of being alive?  Never again did I suffer one of those.

Every day without The Sludge has been a blessing magnified.  Now if I could do something about my visceral fat ...

We Can Dance Until We Die

How lucky I am to live in this modern age:  We here have progressed from seeing cancer as a moral failing to seeing dying from cancer as a moral failing.  The body dies in many ways, aided and abetted by the toxic shitstream we've made of Mother Earth, but it dies nevertheless.  It is never about how you die, it's about how you live.  If there is one gift of knowing in advance when one's contract with life is over is that we can choose what we do with our selves.  And, Elizabeth Edwards did so superbly.  With outspoken courage.  So, thank you Elizabeth Edwards.  I hope you see your son.

I'm Still Not Hearting Diane Ravitch, Part II

Although I was sober yesterday I wrote a convoluted paragraph about the way to teach children that mention private schools and public parks.  What I mean to say is that (as a generality) all children benefit from the same ways of teaching.  I don't believe that there's a way you teach kids who'd attend Choate that is profoundly different than the way you'd teach kids who'd attend any big city's public schools.  What had infuriated me with the Old Ravitch and others is that too often education is talked and written about as if there are some evolutionary differences between white and black kids.  Or, more to the point in Our America:  there are intractable differences between White and Asian (i.e., honorary white -- and if you don't believe me read some California history) and Black and Hispanic and Native American children.  The dirty little secret is that so many folks on all sides of the issue fear that it is innate and genetic.  (We are all evolutionary biologists now.)  Maybe, just maybe Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein were right after all.

I said it then and I'll say it now; I call bullshit on that.  My bona fides:  I'm black, which means that the percentage of African "blood" exceeds the percentage of European "blood" in me and my siblings.  And it means that by choice (and so as not to be classified as barkin' mad) I self-identify as such.  I'm middle class -- always have been, and sigh, unless the real estate market in NYC really goes crazy, always will be.  I grew up taking standardized tests such as the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and never met a standardized test I didn't like.  And I'm not unique.  So, can we stop with all lot of the racialized "black and brown" this and "black and brown" that and start looking at how class affects education?  Then let's talk.


These dispatches are about convincing myself to take Diane Ravitch seriously, since the positions she promulgated, defended and believed in were so obviously flawed.  I -- bet I'm not alone in this -- have trouble taking apostates seriously.  (And yes, Glen Loury and David Brock I'm talking about You!!)


To be continued.

I'm Still Not Hearting Diane Ravitch, Part I

Last night I attended a School Change Summit organized around Diane Ravitch's “The Death and Life Of The Great American School System”.  Disclaimer:  I have not read her book.  Yet.  So, my remarks are based on the panel's responses to her book, to her own responses during the forum and to my incomplete knowledge of her thinking and impact on American education.  The summit itself was a terrific idea.  Paul Bass, publisher of the New Haven Independent partnered with the Community Foundation and others to convene a panel of New Haven parents, educators, scholars and students to read the book and join Ravitch onstage.  Meanwhile (in the winds section) radio, print and net journalists (I don't know why I feel the need to make the distinctions), one of New Haven's state reps and the Mayor live blogged.  People could and did send in their comments while the Summit was live-streamed, and, the auditorium held a great and lively audience.

I like to "touch and smell the produce" so I actually attended.  Before I go off (I'm afraid I will) let me share my frame of reference because you know that people-of-a-certain age always look back.

I started teaching writing in New York City public schools in the mid-1990's.  That was during the years when Rudy Giuliani had school chancellors jumping the turnstiles faster than a broke pickpocket.  The work was great; I, and other writers and artists like me were on a mission, and there was a great deal of respect (tempered by many educators' skepticism and their own fear of writing) for teaching poetry, fiction and drama to city kids.  By the late 1990's the climate was changing as "standards" and "accountability" took up more of the educational airwaves.  All of us in the education biz fell down the rabbit hole of metrics and quantifying the work we did as if it were possible to slice thinner and thinner slivers of raw learning and still call it tuna.

Don't get me wrong.  I am all for standards and any child or adult who has survived one of my courses will tell you that if I get a whiff that you aren't challenging yourself to do better I will make your ears bleed.  But even back then I felt that whole school systems were heading off in the wrong direction where in the effort to quantify they would deracinate the joy of learning and erode what little autonomy public school teachers have.  I remember thinking at the time that if "they" wouldn't teach this way at Dalton or Brooklyn Friends or St. Ann's (to mention a few of the estimable private schools in New York) why would "they" think that teaching merely to pass standardized tests even for poor kids, kids with massive educational deficits, emotionally damaged kids is the right way to teach?  (Kind of reminds me of the welfare reform conundrum:  if you're a middle-class or upper middle-class mom we are all for you being a stay-at-home mother; but, if you're poor and we must supplement your living, raising children [which you are no damn good at anyway, or we wouldn't be having this education debate now, would we?] is second to cleaning the public parks.)

And back when I was on the Advisory Board of City-As-School High School I was part of a group of teachers, students and administrators who had a meeting at Tweed Hall with Joel Klein.  The meeting opened with us all introducing ourselves.  When the Chancellor, who by that time had been on the job close to a year said to all of us, "This is the first time I've met with students ...." I was stunned.  It was all I could do not to look around the table as if to say, did you hear what I heard?  Didn't this man think that his learning curve might have been accelerated by hearing how adolescents saw their own education?

Ohhh.  Kay, I said, don't make too much of one boneheaded executive oversight.  Change takes time.  I'll give Bloomberg 7 years.  Then we'll see how things work out.

 If I dwell on New York's reform experiment I will never, and I mean never, get to my thoughts about New Haven's.  So, let me say this.  If you asked any New York City public school supervisor, administrator or educator if they had to send their children to a New York City public school randomly assigned using some obscure algorithm would they be comfortable with that assignment, I bet their answer would be [expletive inserted] NO!  You can reform education all you want but I'll wager that there will never be an actualized urban public school system that adequately (and beyond) serves its children.  Public school education must be examined through the prisms of late-stage Western capitalism, the effects of race and class on urban demography, and the particular impact of the finance and real estate sectors on municipal development (to name just 3 factors).

I've gotten this far without actually talking about Ravitch.  (I haven't mentioned Sarah Palin either and that's something to be applauded.)  Last night's summit is the hanger on which I'm exploring my ideas about and relationship with public education.  That's why I'll call this posting Part I.  Part II (soon to a cinema near you!) will follow tomorrow.

Black Manhood is the Devil's Playground

It is now 3 days after the midterm elections and here in New Haven I did my small part to get Democrats elected.  I thought I'd be tired from the Election Day efforts, I just had no idea how tired I'd be and looked forward to having a quiet Thursday evening at home.  But, an e-mail landed yesterday morning advertising a community discussion that very night facilitated by Community Mediation with New Haven's Chief of Police, Frank Limon.  In a larger city I could have ignored it but on my way downtown I was picked up by Stacy (Are you coming?), had lunch with John (who sent the e-mail); and saw Kevin and ran into Blest (both of whom worked to bring a contingent of YBM to the meeting.)  This community dialogue had been planned way before the recent deaths of 2 young men, but the timing made it more urgent.  So, no way I couldn't be there.

The story of New Haven varies with the storyteller and the neighborhood.  It's one thing to live your life in the tony precincts of East Rock.  Another to live it in Newhallville or Hill South.  Last night was dominated by reportage from young men talking about life lived as perpetual suspects and perpetual targets in retaliatory "beefs".  They spoke of encounters with the police ranging from the annoying to the physically violent and emotionally humiliating to the likelihood of getting "violated" over some bullshit so that you're headed back to prison.  There were counternarratives offered, if not direct rebuttals to their lived experience.  Everyone in the room, even those who fear and despise the police, understand that their function is necessary and complex, and that not all cops are bad.  And yet, and yet.

It's national news that  intra-community murders and shootings plague New Haven.  It is a trope of inner city life that law enforcement is more to be feared than trusted.  So the dilemma is, if there is violent crime in your community you can 1) be a snitch, 2) settle it on your own or 3) mind your own goddamn business and hope it doesn't happen in your family.  Choice 1 will get you ostracized, maybe even killed.  Choice 2 means that you have vigilante "justice" in your community and when you do, at some point someone you know, and perhaps even love, is going to lose a fight with a bullet.  Which means that Choice 3 is no choice at all.

The police, the law-abiding, the formerly criminal, the safe and those at-risk know this state of affairs can't go on.  Last night we didn't hear much from the Chief about what the police see as solutions (although he did close with an anecdote illustrating disrespect towards him, his wife, and parents of some kids).  It wasn't the time or place; he came to listen, as did many of the rest of us.  In my understanding, for many YBM (and not-so-young BM), this problem with the police begins with respect.  They know that they are fundamentally held in suspicion and contempt by the NHPD.  That gets translated into police behavior that, ehem, if it is perpetuated on Yale students would make national news and invites lawsuits; but if done to YBM it is business as usual.

The young men talked about the boredom that comes from not having "anything to do" all day.  How they remembered the PAL Leagues and the recreational activities or community centers that were available to them when they were children.  And while I sympathize with them I was looking at young MEN not BOYS.  I can't speak for other adults in the room but as an older woman who has done more than her share of childcare (paid and unpaid), menial work, some of it under the watch of assholes with roving hands, and any kind of job in order to survive, I kept thinking that creating more recreational outlets is a palliative. Don't get me wrong, recreation has its place for all ages, but a 19 year old male should NOT be spending his day playing ball (unless, of course, he’s paid), he should be working.  I'm thinking, if legitimate pathways to respectable manhood weren’t so meager for these YBM we wouldn’t be sitting in a room with a dozen of them talking about disrespect.

The fraught relations between the police (in this city and any other) and YBM are a symptom of a greater, more insidious phenomena.  These young men and their predicament are the waste product of our post-industrial decline.  They were obsolete before they were born.  How are we going to address that?

A Modest Proposal for Improving American Public Education

Let's return to the days of of de facto or de jure sexual segregation in employment.  Let's close the doors to careers in medicine, law, science and engineering, business, elective office, finance and academia.  Preserve those fields for men and men only.  And where do you think all those ambitious, brilliant, passionate, innovative, driven, visionary women will go to make their mark?  The Post Office.  Nope.  Into public education.  Problem solved.

One of the hallmarks of my upbringing was that I was raised in a university town during a time when it was all too common for wives to put their husbands through school.  Many of those wives, after having obtained their bachelor's entered teaching, and we kids in the 1960's and 1970's were the beneficiaries of these smart, often brilliant, women supporting their families.  By the time I entered college that compact was eroding as more women opted for pursuit of advanced degrees in higher-status and more lucrative professions. 

I liken this change to the documented unintended consequences of racial desegregation for African-Americans -- given choices ambitious and affluent blacks left their communities leaving the poor and unemployable behind.  (And yes, I know I'm collapsing a complex phenomena, but allow me this concision.  My argument is also culturally-specific to the United States.  In Ireland, for instance, the expansion of opportunity probably meant that fewer gifted men and women trained for the religious vocations.)  In cities that led to what's described as a permanent underclass -- the very object of much of the anguish and frustration that accompanies school reform.

The success of post-WW II feminism (and increasing literacy) catalyzed analogous results.  Many (not all) gifted college-educated women, given opportunities to pursue other professions ignored elementary and secondary education.  In my grandmother's time teaching and teachers were respected and revered.  (The quartet of high-status occupations pre-segregation?  Doctor, lawyer, teacher, preacher.)  In our current time other professionals condescend to "those who teach" and too often, teachers, the training programs that produce them, and the school systems that hire teachers don't do themselves any favors.  Too many students attend and sustain Schools of Education where the admissions and competency standards are too low.  Too many unions have resisted squarely addressing some of the most troubling byproducts of guild protection such as job tenure for the incompetent.  And too few school systems have not created advancement pathways that reward teachers who want to stay in the classroom yet need more challenges.

So many ways to address this topic.  Maybe I'll do a post called"13 Ways to Look At American Public Education".  But for today I'm serious, what will it take to restore a universal sense of mission in American education?  And who should be leading the charge?


 

I Saw Michelle Obama and You Dinnit (Minny Minny BooBoo)

Way, way way back when I went to college (for the second time) at the University of Iowa (not my alma mater, but a holding pen while I had a slo-mo nervous breakdown) I had a great job, perhaps one of the best jobs of my life.  I was part of a group called the Commission for Alternative Programming (CAP), founded by a couple of visionary friends, Dave Olive and Jim Tade, who were multimedia artists long before the phrase had air quotes.  (I remember back in 1974 Olive asked me if I could rap [which I couldn't and still can't].  I looked at him for a beat and said, "I just delivered the Gettysburg Address."  Asked and answered.)

Anyway, CAP produced concerts at the University and within a couple of years I had helped present Keith Jarrett, Pharaoh Sanders, David Bromberg, McCoy Tyner and others.)  After a while what with all the sound checks, the missing luggage, the hotel accomodations and the groupies you're just too busy getting the show up to be in awe.  The gene of sangfroid in the presence of fame or greatness was seeded for me during those days; it got catalyzed in the 1990's when I was writing for opera and musical theatre.  (But that's a story for another day.)

A few days ago when Susie V. told me that she had an extra ticket to hear Michelle Obama speak at a fundraiser for Dick Blumenthal in Stamford my first thought was "Naaaah, do I really want to go?"  Then I have a vision of Husband No. 1 screaming in my ear like a drill sergeant who can't find his Preparation H:  You never go anywhere except to the bathroom!?"!+!$^@!  I'll show him, I huffed, and told Susie V. yes, even though it meant that it was going on 2 weeks where I had to be somewhere or be with somebodies instead of having an unscheduled and solitudinous (get used to that word because you are going to see it A Lot) day here at home.  I told Lilli that I was going to see Michelle Obama, and in that lovely way of children she asked, "Can I go, too?"  I told her I'd tell Michelle Obama hi for her and that was enough.

We arrive in Stamford on Monday morning.  I see a line snaking around the block, thinking, these folks are too well-heeled to be applying for food stamps.  (An overactive imagination makes you stupid.)  We park and join the line.  It slithers.  We get into the Palace Theater.  With a little VIP treatment we get seated.  We wait having been warned by someone who's "done this before" that the Secret Service observes the crowd for an hour.  Someone (god bless 'em) has programmed great music over the PA system.  I swear I'm listening to Charlie Parker.  Susie leaves to say hello to a few of the thousands of politicos she knows.  I lean over the balcony looking at, not for, people from New Haven.  I'm hoping "In a Sentimental Mood" is up next.

It's the usual set up:  the disembodied voice thanks us for our patience, the pre-introductions are done by campaign workers with circles under their eyes, the beneficiary speaks, and then the star appears.  We stand in unison and give her a standing ovation and sit down to be charmed.  After all, this is what we came for, right?


Michelle Obama is a pro who knows what her job is and does it.  She came to Connecticut to buck up the troops which she did with wit, panache and efficiency.  There is something in her voice which belies an attractive warmth that can seduce you into thinking she could easily be your BFF.  But her job that morning was to "carry water" for her husband, the administration, and Democratic candidates nationwide all under the guise of merely being the Mom-in-Chief and The Wife.  And I thought to myself:  I hope this isn't all there is (for her) because this woman is being wasted.  Wasted.

Overheard on the way to Grand Central

I'm riding the 7:35 Saturday morning on my way to Brooklyn.  Surrounded by a gaggle of girlfriends, nurses, I think, on their way to Manhattan to play.  Talking about work, life, sick parents.  One describes her father's last days in a hospice and how, after one visit, she greeted an acquaintance, another patient.  Have a nice weeked, she told him, or words to that effect.  And he says:

So little time.
So much pain.

Are There Third Acts in American Life?

Aaah, middle age.  You meet yourself coming and going.  I'd always heard that age begat wisdom, but what I wasn't prepared for was the notion that it also begats (pardon my conjugation) obsolescence.  By this time of life hopefully you know what you're good at and what you're very good at.  For instance, I am very good (if I may say so myself) at not cooking for my family.  Here's a typical dialogue that happens every year around a major feast:

Them:  So.  What'll we do for (insert your favorite holiday)?

Me:  Hey, I got an idea!  I'll cook.

Them:  Gaaaargh!!!(not an exact translation).  Oh no.  Oh HELL no!!!!!  And then the sound of feet big and small running upstairs to throw themselves out a window.

And that's that.  Each year I'm spared doing something I really don't want to do anyway.  But what of those things I do do well and want to do?  And what of the aforementioned set of things I do do well and want to do can I still be paid for?

That's where  the obsolescence comes in.  Those who know me well have heard me say that there are only two things I wanted to be in life -- a mother and a writer.  And I am.  But in my late 30's another calling emerged, one that is a tributary of mothering (at least for me), and that was teaching.  I became a teacher -- of writing primarily, but not exclusively.  I worked for many organizations, one of the best was Teachers & Writers Collaborative; it has a storied and sterling history in New York's public schools.  I taught (and played) with children and teachers all over the city (except Staten Island).  What an education that was.  A dispatch for another day when I get myself worked up over public education.  (I can feel it coming on.  Don't get me started on No Child Left Behind or Michael Bloomberg or, pause for steam to come out of my ears, Diane Ravitch, who has finally "seen the light".)  But, I digress ...

As I was saying, I taught for many years, some of them when Daughter No. 1 was in high school and I recall having a conversation with Bob Lubetsky, former principal of her alma mater, City-As-School High School.  I confessed that I'd been struggling with the need to remain a writer and the desire to teach mathematics.  I'm still struggling with it more than 15 years later.  (My experience with teaching is that it draws from the same well as writing.  The more I taught, the less I wrote.)

Over the years I've trained myself to accommodate my ambivalence, even ignore it and take the next step.  Today I'm headed over to Southern Connecticut State University for their Graduate School Open House.  I'll probably be mistaken for an adjunct faculty member but I'm going as a prospective student and I'll ask what it would take for someone who got her bachelor's degree in 1980 to get a master's in Mathematics.  I decided I want to teach math although I may be 60 years old before I'm fully qualified to do so.  From this distance it seems like folly if the point is to get a job.  It's not, though, is it?  The point is to answer yet another call.  That never gets old, even if I do.

On New Haven

Tim Holahan, a man with long roots in this city recently published a brilliant essay in The New Haven Independent about the city.  He views it through the prism of "The Wire".

Health Insurance or Russian Roulette for the Self-Employed

It's a beautiful Saturday morning and before I have my next attack of housekeeping I want to talk about getting old(er).  Here are a few things I don't understand and probably never will:

Lindsay Lohan.  Who is she and why should I care?  (I do get Paris Hilton.  I see her as this era's Edie Sedgwick, with better rehab options and without the Mayflower cred.)

Or Lady Gaga.  Ditto.

Or why Twitter matters.  (The Japanese invented haiku and any talkative 4 year old is an exemplar of non-consequential chatter, so why do I need Twitter?)

Or paying the equivalent of a house note for health insurance and still having a deductible so high that it's as if I weren't paying insurance at all.  (Every few months I get the equivalent of an F-bomb of a bill from some physician's practice, or some lab for work that was done long ago.  Sigh.)  When people are diagnosed with a life-threatening or terminal illness one of the questions that caroms through the mind is:  What did I do?  Could I have prevented this if only I did X or Y?  Will people add:  "What if I had affordable health insurance?  Maybe this wouldn't have happened."

As bad as it is to pay for health insurance out of pocket what's worse is not having it at all.  Years ago Husband No. 1 was doing a kitchen for a client on Long Island.  He didn't like the client, and he didn't like the kitchen.  One Saturday he drove there from Brooklyn, against his will or better judgment, to work on the job.  From what I've gathered he was both mad and bored.  Add distracted to the mix along with a running table saw and voila, he makes a nice 45 degree slice through the fingers of his left hand.  He and the carpenter he was working with pick up his fingers.  (Contractor's Rule No. 1:  clean up your job site when you are done for the day.)  Luckily, the next door neighbor was an EMT.  He wraps what was a hand up and Husband No. 1 is helicoptered to a Long Island Hospital.  The surgeons were thrilled to see him.  They get so many motorcyle accident middle-aged hot dogs that they're bored piecing those fools back together.  Here was something exciting!  Fingers to be reattached so that the patient can make a fist and hold a pencil.  Wooo-Hoo!!

After some very good surgery and weekly visits to a very good physical therapist HN1 regained almost full use of his hand.  (Funny gross out moment:  While tissue and bone are growing the fingers have to be kept straight.  To do this pins the diameter of paperclips are inserted in each finger.  One day buttoning his shirt cuff I accidentally caught one of the pins and pulled it out.  By the time you can pull a clean pin out the finger's close to healing, but still ...  I wished then he liked polo shirts half as much as he did button-downs.)

Re-attaching HN1's fingers qualifies as a success story you'd think.  A man can continue his work and he won't scare the little children, what could be better than that?  Except that this EMTing, and helicoptering and surgery and PT was done on a man who did not have a lick of health insurance.  So not only was he left with having to go back to Long Island to clean up all that blood in the client's kitchen (which the thought of still makes me laugh as in Annals in the History of Renovations From Hell) but we had our own metaphorical blood to clean up which was a $35,000 and counting bill.

Lesson learned.

There are so many things I'd love to be doing during my favorite season, and shopping around for health insurance is not one of them but given the choice between something we can afford (at least until 2014) and sounding like an old crank because I don't understand the aforementioned phenomena, well guess what I'll be doing?

Do You Really Think John Boehner is Going to Return Your Calls?

Last night I spent some time making phone calls on behalf of CT's Attorney General, Dick Blumenthal.  He's running for the US Senate.   (Reading the tea leaves, Chris Dodd "retired".)  Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not a phone fan.  (Average waiting time to get a call returned from me = 2-3 days.)  I sat in a crappy, windowless office overhearing people I don't know, calling people I don't know to vote for a man that I don't know, will probably never meet, and having not lived in this state long enough to know or care about his record, have no personal stake in him triumphing over the Republican candidate, Linda McMahon.  I did it because I consider myself a liberal, Democratic pragmatist, and as such, I think it is important for each of us to perform the 1,001 things that are required to get the party's candidate elected in the best of times, much less some of the worst.

As a woman who can vividly recall Reagan's winning the Presidency (because my now almost 30 year old daughter was in utero and just as the election was called for him kicked me with a violence she hasn't displayed since); who remembers the 2000 Presidential election, and who spent part of November 2004 in West of Nowhere, Ohio, on my own dime working to get John Kerry elected (a man for whom I felt even less affinity for than I do Blumenthal).  I am here to tell you that it makes my blood boil to read "progressive" ideologues neigh about the Obama administration's perceived betrayals and shortcomings.  So much so as to decide not to vote in the midterm elections.

I am not saying oh don't talk about such things in public because anyone who knows me knows that I can sling dirty laundry when I want to.  But, really now, until we get a parliament instead of a 2-party representative democracy, power (and the ability to wield it skillfully) is situated in either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.  There are a few elected independents, an occasional Socialist, but even they have to caucus with one party or the other. What I'm saying is, we don't have the luxury of sitting this election out because Obama and the Democratic Party sometimes have feet of clay.  How effective was Cynthia McKinney when she was representing Georgia?  How effective is Dennis Kucinich?  And what voter anywhere wants to defend voting for Raph Nader in 2004?  If the outcome of that split vote didn't teach us that elections do have disastrous consequences, I don't know what will.

We have got to stop pretending that Congressional and Presidential politics are like modern marriage; that our feelings matter and that we need to dialogue about them.  Lyndon Johnson was a son of a bitch's son of a bitch but his presidency will forever rank as one of the most pivotal to the lived lives of Americans, particularly African-Americans.  (Him and Lincoln.)  Graze through Robert Caro's "Master of the Senate" or Taylor Branch's "Pillar of Fire"  to understand the kind of Congress that Johnson was up against.

Before November 2nd I will be making calls on behalf of Dan Malloy who is running for Governor, Rosa DeLauro (to return her to the House) and some more for Blumenthal.  As much as I love it and read it avidly, this is no time to sit back and hurl snark.  This is a time to step by step, vote by vote, elect people who have made peace with the down and dirty of politics (and the accompanying criticism).  They stay in the game and they get things done.  Wherever you are I hope you'll do the same.

This Keeps Up I'll Need Support Hose

This is the problem with a blog, you have to feed it.

I resumed my weekend subscription to the Times what with the summer being over and whatnot, so I've been trying desperately to get the papers read before the next week's arrive.  A losing battle that, but I mention it because you'd think that I'd have something in the political or cultural world to rant about, declaim on because I'm reading.  But I don't.  Others do it so well anyway, and one of these days when I take the next lesson in How to Blog, I'll start adding sites I really really like and they can say it for me.

I called this Dispatches From Middle Age because this middle age is a time like no other.  Not dead yet, but you take life for granted at your peril.  One of the the things settling into middle age causes you to do is fret about physical calamities large and small.  (Add a dash of not having health insurance and whoo-whee, more's the fun.)  For now my greatest pre-occupation is my amazing feet which are starting to resemble ham hocks.  You see, I have had hypertension for longer than I've had children.  Sometimes it's up; sometimes it's down.  I can no longer control it with diet and exercise alone.  Believe you me, that train has left the station.  I need diet, exercise and expensive meds.  Lately I've been lazy in my diet and it shows.  I've been lazy with my exercise and my body knows it.  But, I still had my 2 meds -- one relaxes my veins, the other causes my body to immediately siphon off water and direct me to the nearest bucket.  So, when my feet began swelling so badly that they looked like a couple of watermelons with toenails I got concerned.  It's happened before, but only if two conditions existed:  1) the temperature is 90 degrees or more or 2) I run out of the aforementioned diuretic.

Lately, the weather's been lovely -- just another perfect September in the northeast.  I always think of these days as a reward for having survived another summer.  And, unless the last few pills in the bottle were placebos, I was still taking my daily diuretic.  Yet my feet kept growing so that by day's end my skin was taut.  The logic of the damned always kicks in for me in moments like this and I went on a mini-bender of pretzels and processed food (which by definition has tons of salt in it).  And guess what?  Down the feet went from size 666G to a mere size 100D.  That lasted for a day or so and up they went again.  I haven't had this much fun walking since I was in the end-stages of pregnancy.  Each morning I weigh myself and each morning I am 2-3 lbs. heavier than the morning before.

Before Metro North makes me pay for 2 seats I'm going down to New York to see the very same internist I so blithely told I wouldn't be seeing anymore because I'd find someone here and that I'd have insurance.  (My last insurer only covered New York residents.)  That was six months ago and neither assertion is even close to being true.


In middle age, correction, in life, we learn:  It's always something.  Once I have some kind of answer to the latest something I'll turn my attention outward.

American Patriots

 No long dissertations on American politics or ethics today.  I don't have the skill or the time.  I did want to introduce two thinkers whose work I follow.  Like disheartened lovers, Bacevich and Power are having passionate arguments with the United States:
 
I first heard Andrew Bacevich in 2008 or 2009 speaking about his book, The Limits of Power:  The End of American Exceptionalism.  I consider him a historian specializing in American foreign policy.  I read The Limits of Power, agreeing with much, misunderstanding much.  An introduction to his theses (developed over several books) is this recent Salon essay, The unmaking of a company man.

I recommend that his work be read in tandem with Samantha Power's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide.  It's been several years since I read it but I thought of it because I see Power as an adherent of American exceptionalism (at least as it pertains to humanitarian actions).

Why We Heart Sarah Palin

Before I officially became middle-aged I was "middle-aged", i.e., an invisible woman.  I started graying in my 20's and by my early 40's I had more gray hair than black.  Much of my adult life I've been "chunky", a euphemism for one fried chicken leg shy of fat.  And, I live in America.  (As it so happens I'm married to an immigrant who thinks the zenith of American Beauty are women like Venus and Serena Williams, and Queen Latifah.  His white brethren have been trying to set him straight ever since.)  Years ago if you were dating a white man how could you tell that his father approved of you?  He'd confess (after a drink or two) that he'd always had a crush on Eartha Kitt.  Now I suppose said father would admit that he always had a crush on Halle Berry.  I got it: mulatto women who were first runners up in the American Beauty pageant.  I know it was meant to be a compliment, but I'm a body double for Whoopi Goldberg so why would I care?  What does this have to do with ...?  (Mama Grizzly) Bear with me.

So, I'm talking to a friend a few weeks ago and she wonders out loud why the media pays so much attention to Sarah Palin.  And I sigh as if to say, "Haven't you figured this one out yet?"  It's not that her name won't guarantee page mega-hits if they write about her.  (Even though it will; I fall for it all the time and I've been tired of her since 2008.)  It's not that she was a prominent politician and therefore newsworthy.  (Without googling, name the last 4 VP candidates on the losing side.)  It is that journalists are still primarily men and they, like a lot of American men, want to bone Sarah Palin.  Many of them might have to put a brown paper bag over her politics, but they still want to bone her nevertheless.  It's "as long as I'm lookin' I might as well write somethin'" journalism.

Got Your MY NAME IS HUSSEIN T-shirt?

More than a week ago my husband (who still lives in New York) asked me what I thought about the "ground zero mosque".  I don't know if those were his exact words, but what I do know is that after almost 15 years of being married to this man I've been drawn into more pissing matches than I care to admit.  So, I was wary of his question and hedged, fudged a non-answer.  Shame on me.

That continues to bother me while I spend too much valuable time reading and re-reading Ross Douthat's NY Times column (that crash you heard was the sound of my head hitting the desk in disbelief), and all manner of blogs (and the commentary) about the controversy.  Much of this seems like a bad accident on the interstate and I am just one more rubber-necking bystander about to miss my exit.

So, let me weigh in (hopefully so that I can move on).  I'll preface my remarks by talking some about September 11th and the years immediately afterwards.  I don't want to get into the particulars (where were you when?) of that day; I already have elsewhere and it's not germane to the point I want to make except to say that the day was as grievously painful to me as it was to so many; acute and visceral memories remain.  My husband and I had talked about leaving New York for years, but after September 11th we made a tacit agreement to stay longer to be with our fellow New Yorkers and to help rebuild the city saying:  we live here and we stand in solidarity with fellow New Yorkers (those we like and those we don't).  We support others making a living here.  We are not afraid.

It was the least we could give to a great city that nurtured us both and where we realized many of our dreams.  Our commitment to New York was personal and understandable.  What I couldn't fathom was how much of the rest of the country felt, and while I was touched I was still baffled because it seemed like a lot of idealized love from afar.  I mean I felt that there was this exaggerated wailing from people who actually despised or feared New York and it's "cityness".  But, in times of grief and mourning, you don't apply a cultural "means test" to others' condolences.

Where this really troubled me was when it became apparent that we were going to war with Iraq.  I marched with thousands of others in protest as a way of saying "not in our name" and I was appalled by what I considered hysteria across the country about why we must attack.  I bitterly said that people in Huntsville, Alabama or Omaha, Nebraska shouldn't flatter themselves; nobody gave a flyin' fuck about them enough to attack them in the first place.  But then I came to realize that there is a hierarchy of suffering and back in the early 2000's to be associated with September 11th was to trump all other American tragedies and to elevate one's self and life.  (I'll never forget being in Cleveland in 2005 and a woman, learning that I lived in New York, asked me "what was it like?" with an avidity that made me mute.  It was as if she wanted to shake the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand ...)

I feel the same kind of self-inflation is happening around the proposed Cordoba House; that it's a way to assert a claim to specialness for some people who really "don't have a dog in this fight".  But, what of those who do like the immediate families and friends of victims of September 11th?  This society has done as much as it can do to repair an irreparable wound -- attention, adulation, money, preferential treatment in public policy matters and political campaigns, and a displacement project -- the Freedom Tower and the WTC site to battle over.  We understand those offerings are proxies for the actual needs, that of having the loved one restored to life and of justice.  But, that cannot be done.  There is such a thing as collective suffering, but I don't think there is such a thing as sustained, collective grief.  (Sustained trauma is another matter.)  Are we to be uncritically deferential into perpetuity?  (We're not capable of it.  How many Martin Luther King Day celebrations have you attended that have made you cringe or merely bored?  How many of you have opted to commemorate certain events --  especially if there's no feast associated with them -- privately as opposed to communally in order to restore or preserve some meaning?)  No society owes any people an unending obligation regardless of the enormity of the crimes committed against them.  Not Native Americans.  Not African-Americans.  Nor European Jews.  The list of atrocities is endless, but the obligation should not be.

Years ago in writing the opera, "The Negros Burial Ground," I did research on the then recently unearthed African Burial Ground (in lower Manhattan).  The more the archeologists dug the more the controversy grew about the dispensation of the remains, who owned access and rights to them, which archeologists were going to get to study the remains (the City? local universities? Howard University?) and who was the official custodian of the narrative.  I remember thinking that here was a world-class historical find, one that would make many an archeologist's or a historian's reputation, and the pious wrangling over the Burial Ground had as much to do with career-making and political power plays in New York as it had to do with historic preservation.  Jockeying for position is what it is, but don't try to bullshit me that you're doing this for The Ancestors.  The more important point I'm making is that that hallowed ground was covered for 200 years while commercial New York morphed and grew.  Now what sits atop a graveyard holding the remains of 10,000 enslaved Africans are city and federal buildings, streets, drugstores, shops, franchise restaurants and subway tunnels where every day thousands of people walk, ride, drive and bike.  There is a small parcel (adjacent to the federal building whose construction led to the burial ground's discovery) that has been saved as sacred ground.  It contained the skeletons of 200 people, and that parcel and those skeletons are the proxies for the others.  Would the recovery of more lower Manhattan land (and more skeletons) exponentially increase African-Americans' connection to our past and elevate our status by eroding the stigma and shame of enslavement?  Not enough to justify the reclamation of prime real estate.  Monuments (and the dead) can only do so much.

What do I say to those (such as Mr. Douthat and others) who argue that while the Cordoba House proposers have a constitutional right to build the community center they have an ethical obligation to consider moving elsewhere?  I think that King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" has already answered the incrementalists, the gradualists who suggest that a vilified, unpopular or oppressed minority must, among all its other responsibilities, be sensitive to the discomfort of the fully privileged majority.  There are plenty of glib responses to that obligation -- "above my pay grade" is one of the least profane.  More seriously, though, the struggle to reconcile America's ideals with its practices always requires pressure being applied against the status quo.  The acquisition of justice is always a fight; justice is not bequeathed, it is won.  As in any battle, certain proprieties are abandoned, not forever but for a time.

How often have I heard "we are a nation of laws" and how often I have agreed to abide by a legal decision (see Bush v. Gore) even if I abhor it.  If a law is morally untenable to me then I should actively pursue its repeal until such time when the law is changed or superseded.  If people are offended by the building of the Cordoba House in lower Manhattan, then they should advocate loudly and long for laws that would prohibit such building and let it stand the test of constitutionality.  (Recently a dubious political hit job was sanctioned by the state:  after James O'Keefe's discredited ACORN video sting, within weeks Congress passed legislation which intentionally put the organization out of business, and the law was subsequently upheld by the courts.)

For those who don't mask their animus towards Muslims by making arguments about "sensitivity", I say that my experience with bullies (growing up African-American in Iowa has "blessed" me with a cornucopia of experience with bullies) is that bullies perceive concession and accommodation as capitulation and capitulation as an invitation to demand more concessions.  In other words:  if I can get you to do X, I'm going to demand that you do X+1 next, and then, having succeeded with that demand I'll insist on X+2.  If the builders of the Cordoba House concede to moving location, will they be asked to let an outside board monitor their programming or financial statements, and to permit non-Muslim overseers (and yes, I use that word deliberately) monitor their operations?  Why not?

If, for instance, I wanted the Cordoba House builders and its future employees and patrons to submit to screening to detect the possibility of criminal behavior then I would advocate for changes in land use law in New York City and make sure the law made screening demands on Century 21, various professional services firms, small retailers, restaurants, titty bars, government agencies and colleges operating within Ground Zero's radius.  That way it would be more difficult to accuse me of being xenophobic, racist and politically opportunistic.  (Well, no, not more difficult, just harder to make the charges stick.)

I hope I'm done.  I may not be for if this goes on much longer I think I'm going to find myself at some demonstration in lower Manhattan and you know how much I love going back to the city these days.

One more note regarding President Damned-If-He-Do/Damned-If-He-Don't.  Lately I have heard or read far too many commentators say that Obama "walked back" the statement he made at a White House Ramadan dinner when days later he refused to comment on the "wisdom of building a mosque ...."  I thought him prudent to refuse to be drawn further into the discussion.  The more he says the more the story becomes about Obama.  One major speech on Race; one set of remarks on constitutionally protected religious practice.  Move on.

End of dispatch.