Tag: Essay

Of Gas and Guilt

By Alexander Schuhr

 

My grandfather farted a lot. Sometimes it took as little as rising from a chair or a slight adjustment of his position and he’d let one fly. In my preadolescent years, I used to burst into laughter. And why not? Among my classmates, a thunderous salute called for proper acknowledgement. Embarrassment was so completely absent that we would occasionally force one out, just to obtain the cheers of adoring fans. But this response to my grandfather’s flatulence was not appreciated. Hushing, hissing, and poisonous gazes would hit me and abruptly end my delight. My grandfather’s farts were no laughing matter.

Much later, after my grandfather had died, I learned that leg prostheses often produce flatulence sounds. Air is trapped between stumps and prosthetic liners, and its release may sound like a fart. My grandfather had lost a leg above the knee. And while I can certainly not exclude that some of the sounds he produced were the real thing, I was shamed by the insight that I had often ridiculed a humiliating side effect of his handicap.

But neither my grandfather nor any other adult ever bothered clarifying this simple misunderstanding. The reason, I believe, wasn’t the poor taste of my reaction. The whole subject of my grandfather’s lost leg was off limits. Only at his funeral did my grandmother, no longer in possession of her full mental faculties, reveal the details.

The end of the Second World War was approaching, and allied troops had landed on the beaches of Normandy.

My grandfather sought shelter in in a trench when he spotted a hostile soldier, a few hundred feet away. “I got him,” he announced, and crawled out of the trench to take aim. Then came the explosion and the shrapnel that hit him. “My leg is gone,” he screamed, as he was dragged back into the trench. “Calm down, it’s still there,” was the response. But my grandfather was right. The impact had severed the bone.

Veterans were wounded, lost limbs, and were mentally scarred by the things they’d seen. But many took comfort in the fact that they’d fought for a good cause: for freedom, for democracy, against tyranny.

There was no such consolation for my grandfather. He had fought for Hitler.

He was only twelve when Hitler came to power. When the Nazis ignited the war, he was old enough to be drafted. Half a century later, I would see his reaction to images on TV, images of the war, images of the genocide committed in the name of German superiority. “We didn’t know that,” he would mumble, and then change the channel or take another sip from the beer bottle.

It wasn’t in him, the extraordinary heroism of resistance that some displayed, often paying the ultimate price. Perhaps he wasn’t aware of the extent of the war crimes and atrocities. Maybe he didn’t fully understand the meaning of war, what it led to, and how it would eventually ravage his own life. He had been deceived, he would claim.

But there was no deception in the politics that made it all possible. There was no deception in the public display of resentment and chauvinism. The incitement of hatred, the scapegoating of the marginalized, the terrorizing of easy victims—they all had happened out in the open, for many years before the killing began. Many Germans of my grandfather’s generation embraced these developments, or, at least, accepted them. And therein lies their guilt.

It was this guilt my grandfather tried to bury, although the guilt stayed, stalking him to his deathbed. It was this guilt that prevented him from mourning, from healing, from finding any meaning in his personal suffering.

Today resentful politics is on the rise again, and many give in to its cathartic temptations. But the price may be awful, and nothing may ever be innocent again. Not even the silly giggling of an immature boy at the supposed passing of gas.

 

Alexander Schuhr is an author, essayist, and scholar. He was born and raised in Munich (Germany). Before coming to the United States, he lived in various countries in Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. He holds an M.A. in political science and a Ph.D. in economics. He writes fiction and creative nonfiction. He has a wife and a three-year-old daughter.

Photo credit: Ninara via a Creative Commons license.

How to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich

By Maggie Downs

 

  1. Gather your ingredients. You’ll need peanut butter, jelly, the bread of your choice, and a clean, sharp knife.
  2. Spread peanut butter evenly onto one side of the bread using your knife. Acknowledge the fact that the winner of our constitutionally legitimate but antiquated electoral process is a person who threatens democracy on a daily basis.
    As Ian Millhiser of ThinkProgress says on Medium, “To declare him illegitimate is to shake the foundations of the American system, but to fail to do so is to risk leveling those foundations to the ground.”
    Our entire system is under assault. We must be clear about that.
  3. Wash your knife before dipping it into the jelly jar. Slow down, pay attention, remain alert. These thoughts pulse through your body so often they have become a mantra, suffusing even the mundanities of everyday life. Accept that resistance is a part of you now, because it has to be.
  4. Spread jelly evenly onto the other slice of bread. Strengthen your resolve. Defend journalists. Subscribe to newspapers and magazines. Do your own research. Read books and literature for valuable historical context. Call your elected officials and use your voice while you still have one. Learn from those in other countries. Defend facts.
    “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom,” says Yale history professor Timothy Snyder in his guide to defending democracy. “If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.”
  5. Press the two slices of bread together. Recognize that in order to prevent the next Donald Trump, we must find fierce leaders who are not just willing to reject the damaging policies from the last few decades, but those who will actively pass progressive legislation that furthers equality, strengthens civil liberties, and works to the benefit of every American, particularly those in marginalized groups.
  6. Cut the sandwich diagonally to form triangles. Enjoy! Know that without pushing the lever of justice forward, there is no victory. Without addressing the culture that brought us Trump, we are simply waiting for the next deranged figure to rise to power. Without hacking away at the roots of white supremacy, authoritarianism, and xenophobia, that toxic plant can bloom again.
  7. Hang on to the knife.

 

Maggie Downs a writer based in Palm Springs, California. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Today.com, and a 2016 Lonely Planet anthology of world’s best travel writing. She was a newspaper reporter for more than fifteen years and has freelanced for such outlets as Smithsonian, Outside, Palm Springs Life, and the BBC. Find her on twitter @downsanddirty.

Photo credit: K-B Gressitt ©2017

Uncle Sam Doesn’t Want You

By Tara Campbell

 

On June 29, to little fanfare, the State Department reinstated the approximately sixty Foreign Service job offers it had abruptly rescinded from Pickering and Rangel Fellows earlier in the month. The Pickering and Rangel programs seek to diversify the U.S. Foreign Service by providing undergraduate and graduate scholarships and Foreign Service jobs to women, minorities and low-income students.

For several of my seventeen years as a professional in international education and admissions, I had the pleasure of working with students and administrators of both of these programs. These fellows are some of the most sought-after applicants for an admissions officer, not only because they are intelligent and committed students, but because of the high level of academic and career support they receive from the fellowship programs before, during and after their degree programs. My admissions counterparts from other schools and I would compete for these students because we saw the good in diversifying both our universities and the Foreign Service.

State Department Secretary Rex Tillerson initially revoked the sixty positions offered to this year’s fellowship graduates based on the erroneous assumption that none of the Foreign Service positions had been guaranteed (the positions are in fact guaranteed—indeed, required—by the terms of the fellowship programs). The sixty job offers were reinstated after lobbying by the congressional and diplomatic communities.

Initially, I considered this a victory. But the more I think about it, the more troublesome this whole episode becomes. While the level of investment these students receive is considerable, it is a fraction of the total budget of the State Department. And yet, it was seen as low-hanging fruit in the current administration’s push to slash State’s budget.

I do not struggle to imagine why.

As I read the initial report of the offers being rescinded, I could almost hear the rumble of skeptical questions behind closed office doors.

“Why should they get special treatment?”

“Why shouldn’t they have to apply the same way as everyone else?”

“Why should we invest in these particular students more than others?”

I can easily imagine these questions because I heard similar grumblings about “reverse racism” in education when I was finishing high school in the late 1980s. A few of my fellow students were not pleased that some of the college scholarships I earned were for students of color, and they did not hesitate to share their opinions with me. No matter that I was graduating second in my class and scored in the 99th percentile in standardized testing; some white colleagues deemed certain investments in my education questionable because they were reserved for students of color.

How quickly we forget our history. But then, this essay isn’t about slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, racial gerrymandering, police brutality, inequity in prison sentencing, or any of those other historical means by which racial and socioeconomic elites have sought to retain their positions.

This is about Rex Tillerson’s counterproductive attempt to throw up a roadblock to the participants’ service after millions of dollars had already been invested in their education. If he or anyone on his staff had given the program an even cursory glance, they would have seen that the fellowships require students to accept employment as Foreign Service Officers after completing their education. Whether this program requirement was overlooked due to insufficient research, or it was intentionally disregarded, Secretary Tillerson’s attempt to renege on contractual obligations to these students is problematic. It is yet another example of how political victories are often sought on the backs of the most historically powerless members of society—women, minorities and the poor.

There could hardly be a more inauspicious message for a young person to hear at the beginning of their career representing the United States of America to the world: If you are a woman, a person of color, or poor, your country will only grudgingly keep its promises to you. Fortunately, these fellows had the benefit of other people with influence to agitate on their behalf. But what if they had had to scrape together the means to hire legal counsel? And what does this augur for the future of the program?

It is exactly because of situations like this that we are still not in a position to forget about slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, racial gerrymandering, police brutality, inequity in prison sentencing, or any of those other historical means by which racial and socioeconomic elites have sought to retain their positions. Indeed, because of the advances we have made, we must guard against the temptation to think that we no longer have to worry about structural inequity in society.

Under the guise of individual liberty through smaller government, the Tillersons of the world hold onto their positions of power by rolling back federally-supported opportunities for women, minorities and low-income citizens. Were it not for federal “interference” of passing and enforcing the 13th, 14th, 15th, 19th, 24th and 26th Amendments, political and economic power in this country would have remained solely in the hands of wealthy white men. The forms of exclusion are subtler today, but the urge of those in power to maintain power by halting progress remains the same.

So yes, the reinstatement of these sixty Foreign Service job offers is a victory, but not one we can rest on. Together we must defend the advances we’ve made and continue to fight for a more just, inclusive world. Some seek to preserve an America built by entrenched power on stolen land, to build a moat of wealth around their castles of privilege, and retain control over access to opportunity in this country. Without federal “interference,” their state government chambers, corner offices and boardrooms would be perennially white, perennially affluent, and perennially male. If anyone needs proof that we are not yet past this stage in history, look no further than the committee of thirteen wealthy white men chosen to hash out the ruinous Senate healthcare bill. The fact that this bill is now languishing at a 17% approval rate shows we as a country want a better, more humane society than any closed committee of elites can envision.

To the Tillersons of the world: you may try to keep us out of your castles of power, and tell us to build our own out of the scraps you leave behind. Let this case show that, while we build our own structures, you cannot keep the drawbridge closed forever. And as our realms of success overlap and blend with yours, we will continue to strive toward a future where your children and grandchildren see there is room for all of us here.

 

Tara Campbell is a Washington, DC-based writer, assistant fiction editor at Barrelhouse, and volunteer with children’s literacy organization 826DC. Prior to writing, she had a seventeen-year career in international education and admissions in Oregon, Austria and DC. Prior publication credits include Booth, SmokeLong Quarterly, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Establishment, Barrelhouse, Masters Review, and Queen Mob’s Teahouse, among others. Her debut novel, TreeVolution, was released in November 2016, and her collection, Circe’s Bicycle, with be published in fall 2017. Visit her website at www.taracampbell.com.

Rex Tillerson caricature by DonkeyHotey via a Creative Commons license.

The Tao that Trump Won’t Hear

By H.L.M. Lee

 

When I take my younger daughter to school, I see the rush of her first grade friends running to hug each other and share head lice (much to the chagrin of every parent). My daughter’s BFF has a father from England and a mother from Maine. Another girl’s father is Muslim and her mother is— I don’t know. My own two daughters are Chinese-Italian. They have friends who are African-American and Hispanic. One neighborhood boy has a blended family with a mother and two fathers. I am seldom overwhelmed by emotion, but the morning drop-off often makes me choke up. To these children, unconcerned about the larger world around them, all that matters is the joy in shouting about their newest toy or the treat they have for snack time.

Lately, when I sit alone in my office and stare at the computer screen, I find myself choking up for a different reason. I imagine the death of Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. In my more cynical moods, I give up and accept a world where, for my girls and girls everywhere, their gender is an insurmountable obstacle to reaching their potential. The sadness strikes me like the loss of a friend and I fight tears, because a man who couldn’t pass the vetting for babysitter has been elected president.

It takes a team of architects, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, decorators and more to build a house, but only one person with a match to burn it down. The Trump administration is making a shambles of democracy, damaging the environment, perverting our humanity and turning from knowledge. He has fired James Comey, Director of the FBI. Whatever you think of Comey, the action of firing the man investigating Trump and those around him should ring every fire alarm in the country.

In this dispiriting time, I have been reading the Tao Te Ching and keeping it on my nightstand. A classic Chinese text of 81 short chapters, it embodies a philosophy of Tao (pronounced “dow”), which has been described as Path or Way, referring to right conduct. This interpretation, however, is only a shadow of Tao’s many layers of meaning, which underlie all we are and all we perceive. The second word Te (pronounced “deh”) is often translated as Virtue, but virtue from following the Tao rather than transitory social rules.

Attributed to Lao-Tzu, who may or may not have been an actual person, and originating about 2,500 years ago, the Tao Te Ching is the basis of Taoism, one of Asia’s major religions, though it mentions no deity.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

—Chapter 1

Tao itself is undefinable—even in the original Chinese as these first lines admit. Yet, the Tao Te Ching with its terse poetry and insight resonates for many across enormous differences in time and culture. For me it is now a needed source of perspective.

Lifted from their metaphysical context, lines from the Tao Te Ching sound like the epigram in a fortune cookie, but Lao Tzu’s advice to Chinese lords is as relevant in the age of Donald Trump as it was 2,500 years ago.

Oversharpen the blade, and the edge will soon blunt.
. . .
Claim wealth and titles, and disaster will follow.

—Chapter 9

Can there be a better summation of Trump’s path? All his life he has crowed about his wealth and status. But creditors repossessed his 281-foot yacht in 1991 and imminent ruin forced him to take a $916 million write-off in 1995. He would have been richer investing his money in the S&P 500 and leaving it alone, instead of developing businesses and buildings. Trump Airlines was a bust. Trump University was a sham. Trump Steaks were greasy and tasteless.

The way of nature is unchanging.
Knowing constancy is insight.
Not knowing constancy leads to disaster.

—Chapter 16

“No drama” Obama’s steadiness during eight years as president contrasts sharply with Trump’s contradictory statements—often in the same sentence. Trump says that unpredictability gives him the advantage in business. Maybe, but it would be catastrophic in governance and we are seeing its harrowing consequences in real time.

Those who boast achieve nothing.
Those who brag will not endure.

—Chapter 24

Trump has the “best words.” He called the Trump Taj Mahal casino the “Eighth Wonder of the World”—before it went bankrupt and cost him real estate, the yacht I have already mentioned, his private plane, and his helicopter. Can anyone trust a man who masqueraded as his own publicist to bray about affairs with celebrities? Unlike the “fine tuned machine” that Trump touted, his White House lurches like Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein from one self-inflicted crisis to another.

Easy promises            make for little trust.
Taking things lightly results in great difficulty.

—Chapter 63

Trump pandered to supporters by saying he could “make possible every dream you have ever dreamed.” That’s not a campaign promise, that’s a skeevy pickup line. “We’re going to have insurance for everybody… great healthcare,” he vowed, “It will be in a much-simplified form. Much less expensive and much better.” Now that Trumpcare has passed the House—promising, instead, to throw tens of millions off health insurance and eliminate protections for those with pre-existing conditions—will his supporters finally take off their beer goggles and see, by the cold light of morning, who they brought home?

Knowing ignorance is strength.
Ignoring knowledge is sickness.

—Chapter 71

Science begins by accepting ignorance then moves toward knowledge. That’s how we learned to launch rockets into space and harness electricity, how we developed the Big Bang theory and quantum mechanics, and why we cook pork. To curtail the study of climate change, Trump seeks to cut funding for NOAA weather satellites, which would hobble the ability to forecast tornadoes and hurricanes, and endanger lives in the process.

Why are the people starving?
Because the rulers eat up the money in taxes.
. . .
Why are the people rebellious?
Because the rulers interfere too much.

—Chapter 75

Superficially, these lines support conservative beliefs that people are taxed too much and government regulations are a burden. But the brevity of the Tao Te Ching requires delving beneath the surface. Two chapters later is a more expansive passage:

The Tao of heaven is to take from those who have too much and give
to those who do not have enough.
Ordinary people act differently.
They take from those who do not have enough to give to those who
already have too much.
Who has more than enough and gives it to the world?
Only the wise.

—Chapter 77

If people starve, it is from taxation in the broader sense, from the wealthy taking too much as they fight the minimum wage and the social safety net, leaving the 99 percent to work more and more for less and less.

If people rebel, it is from interference with women’s control of their bodies; interference with civil rights and the right to vote; interference with the right to live, love and worship freely. These were the cries from protesters on Boston Common the day after Trump’s inauguration. My family and I were there, shouting with them, an official estimate of 175,000. But a number can’t convey the visceral punch from seeing broad patches of pink, like flowers, spread across the Common. The patches were masses of pussy hats and each flower was a woman, man or child gathered on that brisk, sunny day. I stood in awe, seeing that crowd filling the grounds in common cause.

Every morning I wake at 5:30 and lie quietly, a mundane start but one that prepares me for the day. At breakfast, I listen to the news and steel myself against yet another assault on government and society. The list of what’s at stake is overwhelming, but I find the will to persist in these words, implicitly reminding me that water can wear away stone—if it flows and agitates:

Under heaven nothing is more soft and yielding than water.
Yet for attacking the solid and strong, nothing is better;
It has no equal.

—Chapter 78

 

 

H.L.M. Lee is an electronics engineer with a background in English literature. While owning and operating a small high-tech company, he also writes web content and marketing materials, and develops video scripts for a peer reviewed scientific journal. He has recently finished a novel, Bleeding in Babylon, about the Iraq War.

Author’s note: All passages from Tao Te Ching were translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English, with Toinette Lippe, Third Vintage Books edition, 2011.

Photo credit: Derek Gavey via a Creative Commons license.

In the Trump Era, Factory Workers Send Secret Messages

By Amy L. Freeman

 

resist

Last Thursday, I found that single word scrawled in black Sharpie on the cardboard inside a package of photos I’d ordered. Odd, I thought, turning over the first of my photos.

The pictures were of me with my children, holding signs at the recent Women’s March, smiling and determined amidst a sea of humanity. I glanced again at the word. Was it intended for me? Vendors don’t send secret messages to customers. And photography places aren’t supposed to look at the content of what I’ve ordered, are they?

I lifted the second pile of photos—me with my children at the March for Science, still smiling, still determined, still amidst a sea of humanity—from a second piece of cardboard. There, in the same hand, another word:

persist

Okay.

Got it.

The words were for me. A photography company’s employee whom I’d never meet had probably broken corporate policy in sending them.

Why, though?

When I was in maybe third grade, a teacher assigned our class to create messages in bottles. We were to take glass bottles, decorate them brightly, write our messages on scraps of paper, stuff in the messages in and seal the bottles as cleverly as we could. I used melted wax, rubber cement glue and a top coat of clear nail polish. On a subsequent field trip, we would toss them off a boat and wait to hear back.

Alone in my bedroom, I had written my message. In the quiet of the night, as I pictured the stranger who would find my bottle, the note was more than a school assignment. I looked out my window at the vast darkness, the far-away stars, the scale of the universe dwarfing me. Torn from my heart, my message was a plea to the unknown:

Hear me. Let me know you’re out there, too. I don’t want to be alone.

That stranger would read my message. Without even knowing me, they would care.

Weeks went by, then months. No one ever replied to my message-in-a-bottle and I eventually forgot about the whole exercise.

That is, until I opened the package last week, when I was suddenly again nine. Except that now, I can see what I could not, then: The power of the exercise wasn’t in the anticipation of an answer but rather in the hopefulness of casting my words out to the universe. The act of writing my message, of fantasizing that someone might find it, of knowing someone could find it, was connection enough.

In that spirit, I’m not going to try to find out who sent me the note from the photography place.

Maybe I’m not even supposed to.

I read that employee’s message, and without even knowing them, I care. Today, alone in my study, I’m typing this message. It’s to you.

Hear me. Let me know you’re out there, too. I don’t want to be alone.

Resist. Persist. Connect.

 

An attorney by training, Amy L. Freeman’s day job is working with people suffering homelessness. By night she writes. Recent works have appeared in The Washington Post, The Huffington Post (featured content), Dogs Today UK and more. Visit her website at www.AmyLFreeman.com and connect on Twitter: @FreemanAmyL.

Photo credit: Carlo Villarica via a Creative Commons license.

Reflections on Trump, Torture and Camus’ The Rebel

By Karen Malpede

 

It will get worse.

Much worse with the Trump Administration fully in place. The Cabinet from hell, a collection of incompetents, racists, sexists, fossil fuel and other business moguls, Islamophobes, and ignoramuses, is in a slow, agonizing process of confirmation, one by one, against widespread civil protest and principled opposition from most senators in the minority and toothless Democratic Party. Some Cabinet nominees, like Betsy DeVos, sister of Eric Prince, founder of the notorious private contracting torture outfit, Blackwater, have direct ties to profiting from torture. DeVos is now Secretary of Education with responsibility for overseeing the education of the young.

It will get worse. Until … somehow— No one knows.

A nation can vote its (flawed) democracy away. Or, rather, a non-representational election system, the Electoral College, that favors states with smaller populations, plus half an eligible citizenry—demoralized, ill-educated or disenfranchised and refusing, forgetting or unable to vote—and an influx of billions over many years by the Koch Brothers and others to elect the most right-wing ideologues, can combine—did combine—to put a neo-fascist regime into the White House. One cannot call them public servants; they have been bought.

I was one among many who foolishly, it turns out, thought the nightmare would go away on November 8, Election Day. We were up most of the night, struggling with disbelief and woke to find the country we knew was gone.

What if we had held the Bush torturers accountable for their crimes? Starting with Jessen and Mitchel, the two psychologists who wrote the torture manual, and the private contractors, CACI, Blackwater and the rest, and going all the way up to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, himself. What if we had held Colin Powell accountable for lying at the U.N.? What if we had prosecuted the administration for leading the U.S. into an illegal invasion of Iraq, which posed no present threat? But, despite the efforts of dedicated human rights organizations and lawyers who represented detainees and authors who wrote against the torture program the war, there was not the public will or interest to hold the torturers accountable.

When President Obama announced we must look forward, not back, that, although he would not sanction torture, he also would not investigate the crimes of the past, torture, in journalist Mark Danner’s words, became “a policy choice.” And drone warfare became the murder weapon of choice.

Now we have an announced Islamophobe in the White House who says, against all evidence, “that torture works”; who says the nation and the world are under threat, not from global warming which he calls “a hoax,” or nuclear weapons, but from “radical Islamic terrorism,” which must be stamped out. When he starts a war and uses “national security” to silence all dissent, if and when he turns the police against his own people in order to shut us up, then the resistance will go underground, but its numbers will be eroded as many people concerned mainly with domestic issues will silence themselves.

Two questions occupy me now: how to resist and how to survive.

When I was young, we had assassinations, one after the other, of great leaders, principled if flawed young men: John Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X, and many Black Panthers, including Fred Hampton, said to be the new, charismatic leader of a movement and assassinated by “law officers” as he slept in his bed. We had Civil Rights, Anti-War, Native American, Feminist and Gay Rights movements, for which those men and other men and women gave their lives, each movement achieving freedoms that had been too-long denied. Today, we see these movements recognizing and building common cause.

It is in reaction to the freedoms these mass movements won, that the Trump regime vowing to “make America great again” has come to power. The fears of white people struggling with falling incomes and the loss of jobs have been conveniently tied to the interests of the corporate class. The urgency of the fossil fuel industry (predominantly white, male) to extract and sell every last bit of oil and gas under the ground, in reaction to a growing Environmental Movement, has led to “a corporate takeover,” as Naomi Klein said with her usual acumen. We are caught between two fiery methods of mass annihilation, living under a president who is, most likely, mentally unstable, a pawn for corporate interests, and who understands neither the dangers of nuclear war nor climate change.

We are all potential torture victims now. We watch and wait as the instruments of our misery are readied and engaged. We have nothing to confess but that we failed to secure our liberty and protect the earth on which we live, though some of us fought and continue to fight hard and long for just these things.

We make phone calls, sign petitions; we march, by the millions; we rely, again, upon our principled lawyers and judges; we struggle to mount an effective opposition; and we try to keep our souls alive.

I have been reading Camus’ The Rebel, slowly since just after the election. I finished it last night. Camus lived through the worst nightmares of the Twentieth Century in which Nazi Fascism and Soviet Totalitarianism (both begun as revolutionary movements to make things “great”) caused the murders of many millions and gave rise, eventually, to the perhaps now fading but no less dangerous hegemony of the United States.

What does Camus propose? A rebellious heart that governs principled action. “The rebel undoubtedly demands a certain degree of freedom for himself; but in no case, if he is consistent, does he demand the right to destroy the existence and the freedom of others. He humiliates no one. … He is not only the slave against the master, but also man against the world of master and slave.” Is this not a concise, persuasive anti-torture statement?

Moreover, despite his ever-present use of the masculine pronoun, Camus’ book proves itself to be a profound environmentalist, earth-centered, therefore, ecofeminist work. He insists upon limits, recognizing our concern for the present as the key to securing the future, and he acknowledges the finite sanctity of earth, earth’s creatures and earth’s biosystem as determinants of our actions. “The rebel thus rejects divinity in order to share in the struggles and destiny of all men. We shall choose Ithaca, the faithful land, frugal and audacious thought, lucid action, and the generosity of the man who understands. In the light, the earth remains our last love.” He reiterates the thought throughout: To earth we owe allegiance, earth’s needs set limits on our actions.

Camus does not promise success. The Rebel is not a hope-filled, revolutionary statement; Camus abhors the very notion of revolution. He offers, instead, description of an evolution of consciousness that is within the realm of human possibility and sentient being. Camus proposes an “insane generosity … which unhesitatingly gives the strength of its love and without a moment’s delay refuses injustice. … Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”

 

Originally published by Torture magazine.

Karen Malpede is an American social justice, antiwar and ecofeminist playwright. A collection of her plays, Plays in Time: The Beekeeper’s Daughter, Another Life, Prophecy, Extreme Whether, will be published by Intellect Press in 2017. She is a frequent contributor to Torture Magazine.

Illustration by Mario Piperni via a Creative Commons license.

The Violence of Ageism

By Margaret Morganroth Gullette

 

As the entire world now knows, Dr. David Dao is the passenger who was dragged off a United Airlines Flight on April 9th by Chicago police who broke his nose, gave him a concussion and smashed two of his teeth. He may need restorative surgery. Some media have treated this as a horror perpetrated by a single airline that bullies passengers, or by a business model that forces overbooking. It is a mistake to look so narrowly at the sources of harm. A few reports, and many Asian American social media users, have mentioned the possibility of racism. As I write, no mainstream news source or commentary has mentioned ageism.

Dr. Dao is 69 and from Vietnam. Both ageism and racism, I suggest, played a role in the quick decisions of the aviation security personnel as to how much force to use against him when he refused to leave. Dao is not just old, not just “Asian,” but “old Asian,” read as “weak, passive, handles without fuss.” Not likely to be strong and obstreperous, like a husky football player. When Dao refused to leave the fully-booked plane to give his place and his wife’s to airline personnel, explaining that he was a doctor, police manhandled him, crashing his face against an arm-rest. One dragged him down the aisle by the arms.

Stereotypes may be “compound” (as Carrie Andreoletti and her colleagues call them, in the International Jour­nal of Aging and Human Development 81). Like many complex or intersectional biases, they are less well studied and often disregarded. In this case, Dao’s appearance of vulnerability was doubled, or perhaps, given that he was wearing glasses, trebled. This might have stopped ordinary decent people from touching him with intent to dominate, but security men are trained differently. Indeed, his triple vulnerabilities may have led the police to expect that he would let himself be led away.

Each reductive assumption, as so often with stereotypes, is inaccurate. Old men are not always weak (if 69 is old) or, for that matter, docile. My grandfather, an immigrant iron worker in his youth, had powerful hands into his eighties, and a strong sense of dignity. Dr. Dao, who left Saigon on a raft in 1975 as a refugee with his family, appears to be a fierce survivor of calamity, resistant to oppression. At 69, on that airplane, he fought back, screaming and protesting. The security forces over-reacted, very likely startled and outraged by finding their expectation of a submissive ejection a failure. We see this with cops who beat or shoot suspects long after resistance has ended.

After being dragged away Dao returned to the passenger area with the blood from his teeth on his face. He might have been shamed by the beating, but without shame, he went up and back down the aisle to expostulate. It was a brave resistant gesture, to share his pain and grievance with the horrified passengers who had already been vocal about what they saw as it was happening. He showed respect for his own person, that he expected to be shared by them. It was a remarkable gesture. Despite the trauma he had endured, Dao made an appeal to fellow passengers for solidarity. When tyranny is powerful, collective emotion may be all that saves us from despair.

In an attempt to protect itself from charges of racism, United has said its system for selecting David Dao and his wife and two others is an algorithm that takes into account issues like disabilities and connecting flights. Use of the technical term “algorithms” can stymie the common reader by making such choices appear unknowable, but almost certainly passengers’ ages are known and weighted as an input, like gender; and data on race may appear or be inferred from names. In the process of selecting four people to be ejected from the plane, racism and ageism may both have operated as well. It would be worth asking about the algorithm.

Here is an obvious act of violence, legal assault and battery. Although some may think that ageism is limited to elder abuse, ageism is often violent. And its precipitating cause is, simply, a person who looks, to the perpetrator who is taking time for a mere glimpse, vulnerable. Sociologists tell us that seeing categories like gender, race, and age—what I call the body-based categories—we allot time for little more than a glimpse, a mere glimpse. So if stereotypes pre-exist, they are activated instantly. Aging, whatever else it is, can also be the trigger for ageism.

Some commentators think the violence was racism alone, even though Dao is 69. But that analysis again, would be to obstruct our view of the harms. An older person who looks weak can be white. My friend “Daniel” is white, Harvard-educated, a high-level public servant and head of a huge NGO, retired: at eighty, a big six-foot-two, over 200 pounds, well-dressed. From the back, though, a careless passerby might see only white hair, cautious walking—insignia of age. What does that sight trigger? Kindness, often enough. But a reckless man hurtling down the stairs of the subway kneed Daniel from behind. He wasn’t seen, he didn’t stop. Daniel fell. He endured a painful knee operation, hallucinatory opioids, weeks of rehab; then a cascade of ongoing problems. His condition is now being called “aging” rather than the results of depraved-heart battery. “Depraved heart” crimes are those where the perpetrator displays indifference to the strong likelihood that he will do harm.

In this new hit and run, victims can also be female and supposedly sheltered by their profession. As feminist age critic Leni Marshall has written, on college campuses, students walk into their professors. Female professors as young as fifty find that (mostly male) stu­dents bump into them on campus sidewalks or in hallways. And anonymous victims can be doing errands out on the public street. One tall white woman I know, only seventy-three but slender enough to appear weak, says, “They are playing chicken with you. They want the sidewalk. ‘Make that old lady move out of the way.’” Conscious that this is a chronic urban danger, she avoids main streets.

It would be misleading to call the source of danger simple rudeness, as if just anyone were now vulnerable to this experience—as if a distracted young man on a cell-phone were just as likely to crash into Hulk Hogan. Bullies and trolls are careless, but only when they feel safe.

Historically, in the United States, in the evil days of slavery and Jim Crow, a person of color was expected to abandon the sidewalk if a white person wanted the space. Walking while black can still be risky, even lethal. Now, a brand new compound assault is where (brown, black, or white, male or female, in any combination, but always older), you better stop, or step out of the way, when a younger person is about to walk through you. A new crime. Walking while old. On a plane, in the street, on the campus, by looking old you are taking up space that someone more favored feels entitled to.

The vulnerable-looking by reason of age, a minority, can be offended without receiving harsh reproof. We are scapegoated by pundits. Writers in mainstream media berate their old parents for getting expensive medical procedures that saved their lives. We are mocked by comics. Advertisers consider us targets; but as models for products, most avoid us. Web trolls—mostly men in their 20s—wish we would vanish. In some colleges, midlife faculty are belittled as deadwood, just as employees in other lines of work are considered “too old.” Some students think we smell. Scientists define our “aging” as a collection of diseases. The terror of Alzheimer’s—inflated even by the well-meaning Alzheimer’s Associations—makes growing into old age seem an unavoidable disaster.

It behooves us, who have eyes to see and hearts to be moved, to be vigilant about this bias, too.

 

Margaret Morganroth Gullette describes a wide array of ageisms in her forthcoming book, Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People (Rutgers University Press, August 2017). She is the author of prize-winning books in age studies, Agewise and Declining to Decline. Gullette is a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University.

Originally published by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Photo credit: Angus Fraser via a Creative Commons license.

First 100 Days: March of the Millennials and Grandmas

By Candy Schulman

Editor’s note: Trump’s inauguration initiated a series of public demonstrations that have continued throughout his first 100 days—including, challenging his refusal to release his taxes, in support of science and the environment, in defiance of his bigoted attempts to limit immigration and, as this essay reminds us, to make clear the power of women inspired to action by racism, misogyny, xenophobia, Islamophobia and injustice. 

“Does this bring you back to your protesting days of the sixties?” my 22-year-old daughter asked me.

We were gathered with a group of writers in my friend’s apartment to assemble for the Women’s March the day after the inauguration, a short walk from our larger group’s meeting place. Even more importantly, she had two bathrooms where we could eliminate our bladders one last time before chanting, “This is what democracy looks like!”

“I never thought I’d be marching again,” a friend remarked after her final bathroom run. She was a grandmother, her thoughts reflecting signs we’d later see: I CAN’T BELIEVE I HAVE TO PROTEST THIS CRAP.

My daughter’s friends gave our posse diversity. I was thrilled to share this event with her, the way we’d voted last November, posting a Facebook photo saying, “We’re voting for the first woman president of the U.S.!”

Now my daughter wanted to know if today was like the past.

“Yes,” I told her, “but the drugs are different.”

My comrades discussed how much Xanax they’d ingested. I tended to reduce anxiety through meditation and swimming laps. Today, I wanted to fully feel the vibrations of sharing my daughter’s first protest march.

She wasn’t sure how many friends would come until the last minute, texting her social circle.

My host had sent out official invitations and instructions for weeks, and we’d RSVP’d to meet at her place as though responding to a wedding invitation. She snapped a photo before we left: three generations ranging from 14 to she-who-has-never-revealed-her-age. We dressed according to assorted maladies and hormonal spikes. A mix of original knees and replacements, we were a rowdy arthritic bunch: eager, hopeful, filling our pockets with tissues in case we found ourselves someplace without toilet paper.

It was unseasonably warm, temperatures approaching 50. A cool breeze whipped up. Noticing my daughter’s friend in a gray turtleneck and thin hat, I refrained from saying, “Are you dressed warmly enough?” I didn’t want to sound like her mother. Besides, she was from Maine.

Arriving at our designated starting corner, we found peaceful chaos. Crowds had grown so thick, we were gridlocked on East 48th Street. Occasionally the crowd roared, as if we were starting to move, but it was the kind of cheer you’d see at a baseball game when the stands erupt in an impromptu wave.

My daughter and her friends posed for a selfie. They looked so innocent and fresh, yet I worried that the rights they’d always expected might now be eroding. And I realized that those rights would mean much more to them once they had to fight for them.

A friend photographed the two of us, holding the sign she had crafted: WE HAVE TO START TALKING ABOUT THE ELEPHANT IN THE WOMB.

“Look at that adorable little girl,” my daughter said, pointing to a three-year-old on her father’s shoulders, holding a sign: NEXT POTUS.

Ninety minutes passed and we still hadn’t moved. “We’re going to push ahead,” my daughter said with the impatience of youth. “Do you want to come or stay?”

I wanted to march with her, but I was supposed to remain with my group. The organizers urged us to follow the rules for crowd control. I was no longer that sixties antiwar protestor, unafraid to be tear gassed, bailing friends out of jail. I’d turned into an adherer of the rules, a college writing professor who taught students to abide by attending classes and meeting assignment deadlines.

I told my daughter to go and kissed her cheek, hiding my disappointment.

An hour later we were still stuck in place. I worried about my daughter being trampled if the crowd grew impatient. Life without Xanax.

“Let’s reverse direction,” my group suggested.

That’s when we splintered into three subgroups. And I ended up alone. I began to feel claustrophobic the way I do in airplanes. I pushed my way through throngs of shoulder-to-shoulder people, all remarkably calm, waiting their turn. All 400,000 of us. The mall in D.C. is spacious. New York streets are narrow and dark.

“I’m having a panic attack,” I explained, forcing my way through bodies, signs and babies. When I reached Grand Central, thousands were spewing from subways and trains, and I went the opposite direction, downtown toward home.

Landing in Union Square in the sunshine, I felt my blood pressure lower. I ended up sharing the march with my daughter the way Millennials communicate all the time:

“We reversed direction and found our way to the march,” she texted. “We’re on Fifth Avenue!”

“Store employees keep waving at us!”

“I think I just saw Senator Schumer!”

She kept the texts and photos coming. This wasn’t how I’d expected to share my daughter’s first protest march, but technology allowed us to do it together after all.

That night we cooked lasagna, craving comfort food. We formed a group message, sharing photos of protest messages from one edge of our country to the other. One of our favorites: NOW YOU’VE PISSED OFF GRANDMA. That was how I felt, a bit old to be protesting this crap anymore, but doing my part as much as I could. I was passing the protest torch onto my daughter, but I’d always be there to cheer her on.

 

Candy Schulman is an award-winning essayist who has published personal essays and political Op-eds in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, New York Magazine, Salon, and elsewhere. She is a creative writing professor at The New School. As an anti-war protestor at Ohio State University in 1970, she published an essay about the four students who were killed at Kent State, illuminating how peaceful student protests were combatted with tear gas and guns, whereas post-football game drunken brawls were overlooked by police.

Photo credit: Thomas Altfather Good via a Creative Commons license.

Impressions of the USA

By Cong Tran

Editor’s note: Cong Tran, or Tran Quoc Cong in Vietnamese naming convention, paid his first visit to the United States in 2007, an invited guest at the memorial service for author and Pulitzer Prize winning Vietnam War correspondent David Halberstam. Mr. Tran had guided and ultimately befriended the journalist during a return visit to Vietnam by the author some years before his death. Mr. Tran was so moved by his invitation to the memorial from Mr. Halberstam’s widow, and so honored to be among the literati in attendance, he saved the printed program (see below). Recently, Mr. Tran shared the messages he sent home from his 2007 visit and gave us permission to share them with our readers, which we are delighted to do. His observations of U.S. culture in contrast to that of Vietnam are insightful and entertaining—at reminder of our national character beyond the context of the Trump regime.
Mr. Tran suspects his first visit to the U.S. was also his last.

Dear Friends,

Good morning, America!

SEAT BELT makes me feel clumsy like spaceman in the spaceship. Trying to remember. It takes some time.

Crossing the streets here is a skill, not an art, like in Viet Nam. Press the button. Magical!

I borrowed a digital camera, but my mind still analog.

In Viet Nam, eat to live. Here, live to eat.

I have a dream. My dream comes true.

Thanks for all your help,
Tran Quoc Cong

 

Dear America,

Descartes in America: “I DRIVE therefore I am.”

You have driving license, you are somebody. You have wings like angels. I feel disabled because I cannot drive. In Heaven, the angels fly, not walk. My mind, eyes, body in Heaven, but I cannot fly, just borrow the wings.

Mr. Don Giggs offers me a car. Just looking, not driving. How can I change lanes? In Viet Nam, the lanes are built-in and invisible. Very happy to see the sign “Drive Less, Live More.”

House/home is really a castle, fortress. Cars are moving castles, fortresses on freeway.

Best,
Tran Quoc Cong

 

Dear America,

You are the XXXL country; your meal is, too. A cheeseburger is so BIG, it swallows me, not I it. If I keep on eating like this, I do not think I can walk through the door at the customs counter with the slogan “Keep American’s Door Open and Our Nation Secure” on the day I leave the paradise.

Things are expensive.

In the announcement for the memorial service for Mr. David Halberstam in NYT: “In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to Teach for America in the Mississippi Delta.” Flowers for David, food for me. Teach for America, Teach for my children. Mississippi Delta, Me Kong Delta.

This is an open eyes and mind trip for me.

Thanks for all your help,
Tran Quoc Cong

 

Dear America,

Memorial Day, Sunday 27 May. Riding bike in Westminster Cemetery, I agree with Thomas Jefferson that “All men are created equal” and buried, cremated equal.

“Flat” means equal in some way, in many ways. In Viet Nam, the graves are not equal at all. In Viet Nam, the hill is for the tombs, death, resting place. Turning your head to the mountain means “pass away.” Flat, low land is for villages, life. In U.S., in reverse.

Now, I know why you are “The Quiet American.” You do not blow the horns when you drive.

I sleep with the sound of click in my dream. “Click It or Ticket.” Seatbelt, please.

See you,
Tran Quoc Cong

 

Dear America, Good morning, Sun Valley!

Vietnamese local bus from Little Sai Gon to Phoenix, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Heaven to Hell. Just hot, not humid, like home. No sticky. Anyway, 5-star Hell. Just compare, not complain.

The pages of my high school textbook, Practice Your English, McGraw Hill, appeared along the road. The first time in life I saw desert, cactus, sand, small bushes, hot and dry. Before, I only see dessert, fruits, ice cream, sweets, caramel, after meals. I felt thorny, like cactus when coming to Arizona. Cowboy films 1965 to 67 replayed.

CARPOOL LANE = Mahayana Buddhism. You live, pray, do whatever to become Buddha, and help the others to become Buddha, too. The other lanes on freeway = Theravada Buddhism. One vehicle, one driver.

In the U.S., I live to be delivered. I cannot drive. Thanks for all help. I come to the U.S. with JFK Inaugural Speech, MLKing’s “I Have A Dream,” the image of Apollo 11, and all my high school textbook in mind.

It is my America.
Tran Quoc Cong

 

Dear Phoenix, Arizona,

Wooh! Grand Canyon, Great Wonder of Nature, so grand.

“No one should die before they see Angkor,” Somerset Maugham wrote somewhere. To me, “No one should die before they see Grand Canyon.” Coming to Angkor, we stretch our necks UP to see how high. To Grand Canyon, we crane our necks DOWN to see how deep. Angkor, the hand of Man. Grand Canyon, the hand of the Creator.

Riding bike in and around Phoenix in June, I know why the Phoenix puts its head in the ash. To hide from the HEAT.

Buying something, I have to pay tax. I feel itchy. You don’t, do you? Just the system.

See you,
CONG

 

Dear Old Town Scottsdale, the West’s Most Western Town,

I rode my Iron Horse—bicycle—to the frontier town 113 years after the first settlers came. I met again my boyhood with the cowboy films in my mind, Arizona Colt, Bonanza, The Wild Wild West.

I clicked my camera as fast as the sheriff shot his Colt to stop the bandit coming to town.

I pumped air into my bike tyre in front of the Cavalliere’s Blacksmith Shop, like the cowboys changed horseshoes.

I locked my Iron Horse at the rusty ring once used for horses and mules.

I sent two postcards home from Scottsdale’s first Post Office, where every founding father gathered at mail time, twice a day.

And, I had an ice cream in Sugar Bowl Ice Cream Parlor, to cool down the notorious Arizona dry heat. I am the Man from Nowhere. A really good day.

Bye bye, from Where the Old West Comes Alive,
Tran Quoc Cong

 

Dear South California and Arizona,

Walking in Mission San Juan Capistrano, I saw Silent Night, so quiet.

Standing in front of Crystal Cathedral, I heard Jingle Bells, so loud.

The bronze sculpture of a woman caught in adultery, “Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.” They mean tons, tons of glass of the cathedral, neither Magdalene nor adultery.

Thy kingdom comes. Maybe. Looking at all stuff in the U.S. so far, I have felt the Middle Kingdom comes. Everything made in China, except the Cowboys in Rawhide Steakhouse and Saloon.

How come? Hey, folks!
Tran Quoc Cong

 

Good morning, New York,

You are Grand Canyon turned downside up.

MANHATTAN, I dropped my HAT 3 times while looking at your skyscrapers, you made my neck painful. I became a MAN without HAT or sunTAN, you are my sunblock buildings.

I saw 3D New York vertically, on Top of the Rock and in subway. First time in my life subway, like guerrilla Củ Chi Tunnels. New York, you made my provincial heart choke.

Early morning walk in Central Park, the lung of NY. At home, when getting angry at somebody, we shout madly, “You are a dog!” Watching people dog-walking here, from now on, I will not shout like that. It is so nice. Will find something else, worse.

Oh, my God! I said, Oh, my Dog! I heard the echo from the bench behind. You made me confused.

CONG

 

Dear 13 Original States,

Promenade in and around Brooklyn (Broken Land), Greenwich, East Hampton, New Canaan. I wonder how many Gods you have. Only one, right? So, why you have so, so many different churches? It doesn’t mean that you are more religious than us. Maybe less. You make God lose his identity. Holding the banknote, I read “In God We Trust.” Singular? Walking around here, I see plurality.

Riding bike around East Hampton and Connecticut is like in the Anderson fairytales. Nice landscape, golden sunshine like honey, green forest, the weather just perfect. I wonder if we need paradise in the next life. God is unfair. Now, I know why you often end your speech, “God bless America.” You bribe Him?

Since coming here, I have had the feeling I am spewed out of the Horn of Plenty together with food. How can I control the temptation?

Forgive me,
CONG

 

Dear New York,

Welcome to Paradise. We know that even Paradise is not perfect. Spewing out of the subway, woo! Times Square, the Crossroads of the World, not easy to cross due to the crowd. Your five senses are raped by the Most Crowded on Earth, the Call of the Wild.

NEW York is new to me, but OLD to the immigrants in the Lower East Side tenements.

GRAND Central Station engulfs you.

GREAT Depression still in some corners I walked through.

BROADway is really broad.

LONG Island is a long drive, just like your common question in Viet Nam: “How
long to Ha Long?” So long to Ha Long, so long to Long Island.

Burger KING swallows you like King Kong does.

CENTRAL Park right in the center you never miss.

TOP of the ROCK is top of tops.

SUBways like submarines.

WALL Street is only WALLs and GLASS, which makes the TRINITY church so TINY, so PITY.

TIMES SQUARE is not square, but like the hands of octopus.

HOTline 1-888-NYC-SAFE is extremely HOT at Times Square to fight terrorism.

DEAR New York, you are very DEAR, not cheap to live.

Looking at Lady LIBERTY, I think of Lady Buddha. This with FIRE, that with WATER. Two basic things for life. (Lady Buddha with the flask in her hand pouring water down to extinguish the inferno of our life).

New York, you are XXXL. Forgive me, the frog, for the first time, leaving the pond for the ocean. How can I see you all, let alone understand you?

Take care,
CONG

 

Good Morning, Washington DC,

The bright sunny day: All the monuments, domes, spires, statues rise up to the sky, soar to the heaven, except Viet Nam War Memorial. Black, like the pin, goes deep to the soil. The White House is white. The Black Marble is black.

In the morning, coming to National Cathedral on the hill, I do not see God nor congregation. Emptiness.

In the evening, sitting in the baseball stadium, I see the holy congregation. Their religion is Baseball, singing like church choir. Eating and drinking like sharing the Communion. The 12 Apostles down there bring their spirits up to Heaven with Bats and Balls. When a ball flying to the seats, many people rise up trying to get it like holy blessing. At the back, food and drinks are their “daily bread” they pray for. Some people concentrate on the pamphlet of statistics like Psalms. Baseball caps everywhere like halos. Red and white T-shirts for sale like angel robes. Everyone is happy as they are in Heaven. The first time in my life I watch a baseball game right in the Baseball Cathedral.

I have some books on Baseball Saints by David Halberstam, whose death is the Visa for me to be here. Both Baseball Bible and Baseball Service in Baseball Cathedral are completely dark to me. But I enjoy the Touch of America.

Baseball Bless You, America. Baseball is with you, and you with Baseball.
CONG

 

Dear Philly, good day Atlantic City.

Woo! The Cathedral of Gambling with the double-ten commandments advised by American Gaming Association. Oh, my God. GAMING looks like GAMBLING. This is that. I wonder if caSINo has SIN within itself. Hope not. But I doubt. And I didn’t see any SAINT here.

Looking at the stream of people coming, focusing their eyes to the slot machines, I heard the words “free to pursuit of happiness” echoing. Losing, return to win back your losses. A win, return to win more. E-Z Pass. Go faster. Go ahead. No clock. Neither day nor night in casino. No-Times Square.

You are in Heaven with thousands of colorful neon lights, make everything DOUBLE, TRIPLE, One four Four. Ecstasy. Drinks are free and welcome to lure you to the dream of winner. Gambling is GAME and BLIND. Knowing when to stop?

Responsible Gaming means Irresponsible Gambling, doesn’t it?

A mime tried to be machine-like. Robot tried to be human-like. Foot Massage and Palm Reading next to each other.

SIN City Mt. Holy Town. The young smile, the old napping.

White, Black, Yellow, Brown skin, the Sun makes all shadows the same on the white sand.

Atlantic City always turned on.

On the drive back to Philly, I saw the sign STAY AWAKE! STAY ALIVE! Otherwise you die. You intend to gamble your life? BOARDWALK is life.

Horn of Plenty.

Food, Fun and Friendliness.

We the People, Pursuit of Happiness.

CONG

 

Dear Atlantic Ocean,

The first time in life, I dipped my hand into Atlantic Ocean. Just over there is Nantucket, where the ashes of David Halberstam will rest. May my soul hitchhike the ferry across. Should I take some ash and drop it into Me Kong Delta, so he can meet his youth again?

One Very Hot Day. I stopped by the house of Home Sweet Home in East Hampton, and the
birthplace of the author, America the Beautiful in Falmouth.

I walked step-by-step on Boston’s Freedom Trail, not crazy rush like on the Freeway.

In Boston, I slept in the bed of a Marine who was moving from Kuwait to Iraq. I saw all his high school and college pictures, books, souvenirs on the shelves.

In Falmouth, I sent a letter to SPC. Johnson Stephen, who was now somewhere in Iraq, telling him about his beautiful Falmouth village, lighthouse, fishing, swimming and wishing for his safe return, not mentioned the bullshit war at all.

During Viet Nam War, at 15, I found many Xmas cards handmade by primary students in the States, in the Rear, sent to the GIs in the Front. Those were my boyhood toys, which I found in the garbage dump near my school.

Goodbye, Boston. Farewell to the navel of American Revolution. My body is in Jacksonville, Oregon, now, digging gold, but my soul still somewhere in New England with golden memories.

Many American-Vietnamese here never touch the navel of U.S. history and Revolution. They just do nails, run barbershops, and mow the lawns, trying to make $$$. Gold Rush no longer rushes. Hair, nails, and grass keep growing. We cannot stop them. The longer they grow, the more $$$ my friends make. Their American Dream fulfilled. The streets are paved with gold.

Up near Crater Lake , the first time in my life, I touched snow. Two little girls threw snowballs to me. I sat and lay on it. I walked, doubting my feet like Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon.

Goodbye, Boston. 4 July. I left the Cradle of Liberty, Birthplace of American Independence right on her 231st birthday. I ate hot dogs, potatoes salad, baked beans on the East Coast, and watched fireworks in the West, Oregon.

I am in Arcata, CA now.
CONG

 

Dear friends,

Good evening America. I set foot in LAX at 6:25 PM 21 May. Like Neil Armstrong stepped out of the spaceship walking on the Moon, like the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock, I stood in line at Visitors Counter, Customs, at Tom Bradley Int’l Terminal in high spirit of Apollo and Mayflower. I giggled like the angels had the new wings ready to fly in Paradise.

My wife feels proud and happy back home in Viet Nam. At long last, at least once in life, her husband goes to America. The Promised Land, Paradise, Heaven, Something Number One.

She boastly told all the villagers, “My husband saw a pumpkin as large as a house in America.” All the villagers listened, mouths and eyes wide open.

Another lady said, “My husband also saw a cooking pot as big as the Village Commune.”

How come! What for?

The answer: “My husband’s pot is used to cook your husband’s pumpkin.”

Best,
Tran Quoc Cong

 

Dear America,

My soul and mind are untidy like NASA in Florida the day Apollo 11 returned from the Moon.

My visit to the U.S. Paradise is the reincarnation to me. I still have East-West jetlag. Climatically, Paradise. Purgatory, jet lag. It is The 0001 Place (not 1000) to see before you die. 101 Things to Do in life. Not many people have their dreams come true in this lifetime. I am one of the few. Out of more than 3000 photos taken during 90 days in the New World, the Dreamy Land, I had to choose the best, iconic 10. And if only 3 chosen, which ones should I pick out? I told my family, friends, neighbors, colleagues what I have seen:

  • the button to cross the streets
  • the subway in NY and Washington DC.
  • the snow in July at Crater Lake
  • the Atlantic Ocean
  • the Central Park in NY, desert in Arizona, Redwood Forest …

What I have tasted:

  • the biggest burger
  • the brownie and trail mix
  • the blueberry and yoghurt
  • the corn and salmon

What in USA scared me:

  • I almost burned my finger with the hot water tap in the kitchen.
  • the alarm at my classmate’s house. He gave me his house key, but his wife set the alarm as usual. I opened the door, and the siren barked fiercely. So scared, I just stood at the door holding my passport, just in case the police came. … Goose bumps. “Ask not what American will do for you, but what together we can do.” But, I am alone then.

Yesterday, my daughter asked me if I had any dream, dream to go visit somewhere, somewhere else.

No, I have no dream now. It takes time to have another dream. I feel full, my five senses.

Many thanks, USA,
C O N G

The Return of History

By Easton Smith

 

I was born in 1989, the same year that Francis Fukuyama published his essay, “The End of History?” The Berlin Wall fell that year, collapsing history (such a delicate thing, after all) underneath it. It was final: Liberal democracy and global capitalism were the inevitable tide to raise all boats. My whole life was to be post-historical.

As a young boy, adults talked to me daylong about my future, but never my past. Past was irrelevant at the end of history, and I was a child anyway. I had not lived long enough to have past, it was assumed. I began in the present moment and just osmosed into my long, uncomplicated life to come.

But still, I had these odd memories. I remembered finding my mother sad, head-cocked, staring at the wall with her nasty, ice-cubed orange juice in hand. I remembered bullies saying big words that didn’t feel safe. I remembered hearing about Kosovo. Bomb sounded historical to me. I had learned of the atom bomb that ended World War II. Old history, Grandpa’s dad old, so old that it seemed too far away to touch me at all.

But then, bombs were back one day after those planes hit the towers and everyone somberly adult-agreed that history was here again. “This is history,” they said, and I believed it. War, climate change, oil, dictators, democracy, I counted the history on my fingers. The world was suddenly soiled with history. By the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attack, I was thirteen and firmly historical.

When I was fourteen, my dad sat me down, read me some of the lyrics from the booklet of a punk CD that he had found in my bedroom (“Hey, Dad, fuck you! Hey, Dad, fuck you!” he read in deadpan), and asked me why I was depressed. I wasn’t depressed, I told him, just angry and not sure that anything mattered, especially school. “But what about your future?” he asked. I retorted, “Look at the world!”

Now, 27 years to the day from the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hillary Clinton conceded the presidency to Donald Trump: “This is painful, and it will be for a long time. … I still believe in America, and I always will. And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future.” But the people have spoken, those who voted and the many more who stayed home. They are tired of having some parent tell them to just believe, to always look ahead. History is here. They are hungry for it, even if it means the death of the future.

•

In Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson introduces the Greek poet Stesichoros (630-555 BC). According to Carson, before Stesichoros, certain adjectives were innately stuck to their subjects, like periodic numbers to minerals. Oxygen is always 8, just as to the Greek poets blood was always black, kidneys were always white. But Stesichoros wrote to “undo the latches.” For him, “there was nothing to interfere with horses being hollow hooved. Or a river being root silver. Or a child bruiseless.” Stesichoros, Carson writes, “released being. All the substances in the world went floating up.”

Our president-elect is a pre-Stesichorosian poet. He whips up digressive tales of Crooked Hillary and Lyin’ Ted Cruz, flat characters that are shackled to their adjectives. His narrative arcs follow familiar paths: us/them, big/small, winner/loser. He is a storyteller of the oral tradition, meandering, playing to his audience, but always returning to our favorite myth, where the villain’s name can be screamed out in unison by the audience with the adjectival cue, and the good guys (our guys) always win huge. The substances of the world fall back down.

George Lakoff, linguist, suggests that Trump repeats his adjectives to strengthen word association for his audience. If he always puts radical in front of Islam, people will associate the two subconsciously, without evidence. Trump creates a common mythology with his supporters, so that thoughts can go unfinished, even unsaid, and the implication still sits ripe for the taking. If Crooked Hillary “gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.” He doesn’t know, but everyone else does. They know what happens to the Crooked one in this story.

Bruce Lincoln, historian, writes that, “myth [is] that small class of stories that posses both credibility and authority.” Myths aren’t fables, which we enjoy but know to be fantastical. Neither are they history, which we know to be objectively true, but find unmotivating. Myths are nostalgia made actionable.

•

Trump deals in myths and has become one himself. Trump is Phaethon, Icarus, Tereus (I’m sick of the Greek myths, too, but where else can I find such hubris?). So as not to repeat the most repeated stories, I will summarize the moral of them all: Those mortals who think that they are gods lose. Every time.

“Make America Great Again.” It’s precisely the type of slogan about which the Greek poets wrote their moralizing tales. In Hesiod’s (8th century BC) long poem, “The Works and the Days,” the poet tells of five ages of humans. Hesiod’s era was the human era, the fifth, the Age of Iron, a time of stress and labor, full of hateful people destined to be destroyed by a vengeful Zeus. This Iron Age starkly contrasts with its predecessor, the Heroic Age, the “fourth generation on the noble earth … the generation of hero-men, who are also called half gods, the generation before our own on this vast earth.” The present is bad, but the past was great. It sounds familiar.

But Hesiod does not give us a strongman to strong-arm his way back to the fourth age and make the fifth one great (again). The realm of the past is inaccessible to base humans; it’s a place for the gods and spirits. To try to reach back is to step out of place, to attempt the impossible and the sinful. The poets knew well that nostalgia for a simpler time, when humans were gods, is a tempting and dangerous fire.

When the early Greeks of Hesiod’s time, the pre-Acropolis and pre-dēmokratia Greeks, looked out at the ruins of the great Mycenaean civilization, the collapsed palaces at Tiryns and Pylos, what must they have thought? What could create such structures, and what could kill such giants? These are the questions underneath their mythology.

What fireside myths will we create among the ruins of the American Empire? How will we explain the fields of dead oil rigs and carcassed pipelines, the trash islands, the air thick with smut, the eyes of a wolf, the flight of a California condor, a governmental agency, a climate accord, an electoral college, a Facebook fight? This country was founded upon too proud a mythology, blood too sure. May we find humility in our ruined palaces. May we be creative in our adjectives. What might the word great mean to us in the future?

•

Mythology withers, and we begin to see it fraying where our remembered past too cleanly contradicts the myth. “Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead.” Hillary’s myths cannot console anymore. It’s in our bellies: We owe him nothing.

In my belly: We can’t think piece our way out of this one; the rules have changed; I want to hold my people close; we need the stories of the body and the spirit; we need to “release being.”

Stesichoros took risks by deviating from the standard adjectives. The unexpected adjective is a sudden world. Blood can be red rather than the traditional black. A thing that was once huge can become irrelevant, puny, insecure. A president can go from strong to child taunted, disgraced, and even forgotten. The new adjective shakes us from myth, gives the story to the malleable present.

Many who thought our country was diverse and open are awed to find it angry, white, afraid. A myth has been upended. Shocked, people scream and plead for a re-assertion of their mythology of liberal tolerance and compassionate capitalism, for history to end again. But history is our seedy uncle, the underbelly of the myth, and it shows up whether we like it or not. He coughs, snarls into his plate, and tells us slur-ridden stories from a world far beyond the reaches of our Facebook feed that we would rather ignore. It’s a family feud now, the smug against the repulsive, comfortable family myths against the uncomfortable ones.

May I be excused from the table, please?

•

The day after the election I saw a woman walking her child home from school. In her stern movements I saw a depth of twirling currents underneath her skin, like under mine. Our outer surfaces, unable to express our large fears. Her child, adult-quiet, pulled his weight behind him in heavy little arms. We didn’t speak to each other, just walked our tired walk past each other’s sad eyes. In that moment, I felt alone in a collectively secreted pain, and for the first time since the results came in, I cried. It felt important to cry. I walked down the street in tears to announce to the world that things are not okay and that I don’t know what to do.

I don’t know how to affix an adjective to myself these days (hopeless, motivated, angry, anxious are all insufficient). The stages of grief are all out of order and moving too fast. My relationships strain from out-of-sync mourning. It’s a funeral for the future, and we all grieve the specific death we have individually imagined. I fear that Trump has already inserted a wall between our bodies, as we police each other’s ideas, move past each other’s woe like ships in the night.

Still, a moment of hope: I watch my friend Yaya’s exposed, muscle-shining, black body dance with two others in a choreography of anguish and healing, each movement a desperate push and a constraint at once. They weave through the audience, meeting our eyes, radiating stage from their bodies. Taking up space. I feel their love of self, and it is uncompromising. I feel their love for the rest of us, for my white and masculine body, and it’s more than I deserve. Such gifts, in the wake of these national declarations of scarcity. Amid empty placations and fearful declarations, here dances the past and the future at once.

Church music plays, some choir of old power, and Yaya moves to the red-cushioned throne in the room. Sits in it, a mythology not meant for their body. They perform pain, vulnerability, deconstruction. They walk amongst us, drawing our witnessing inwards, giving us in-sight. This is what’s at stake, I think. The opposite of a wall.

 

Easton Smith lives in Salt Lake City, land stolen from the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute and Northern Ute people. He likes to camp, try to play the banjo, sing with his friends, talk about his feelings, and run up big hills. Sometimes Easton organizes with Wasatch Rising Tide and Showing Up for Racial Justice SLC. Sometimes he labors for wages by writing things.

Previously published by Brine Waves.

Art credit: “Fallen Angel No.2” by Michael J Bowman via a Creative Commons license.

A List by Noria Jablonski

25 things, post-election:

  1. Normally I shy away from posting anything too personal, but this time isn’t normal.
  1. A year and a half ago I was diagnosed with MS.
  1. My professional life came to an abrupt end.
  1. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, I currently have access to health insurance.
  1. The medication I take to slow the progression of my disease costs $65,000/year.
  1. A drug that has been used for years to treat cancer and rheumatoid arthritis recently showed promise for treating MS. That drug was not brought to market because the patent was about to expire.
  1. I have profound hearing loss.
  1. Hearing aids are not covered by most insurance companies (hearing aids are considered elective).
  1. Healthcare should not be driven by profit motive.
  1. Neither should education.
  1. I became a teacher to help young people find their voices.
  1. I became a writer to find mine.
  1. “… it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature … literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear.” – Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill”
  1. On a Saturday night the spring before last, I suddenly lost vision in my left eye. Everything went dim, grainy, colorless, as if the brightness, contrast, and color knobs had been turned all the way down.
  1. A few days later my right leg went numb.
  1. Before MRI machines, a hot bath test was used to diagnose MS (heat worsens neurological symptoms).
  1. On a trip to Paris several years ago, I visited the library of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, who is most famous for his study of hysteria.
  1. Charcot was the first to give a name to multiple sclerosis: “la sclérose en plaques.”
  1. Sclerosis means hardening. It refers to scar tissue formed by lesions of the brain and spinal cord.
  1. Nothing is in my control.
  1. My body feels unsafe. I have been hurt physically and sexually.
  1. “Everywhere in the world they hurt little girls.” – Cersei Lannister
  1. My parents were Sufi. Sufism is a branch of Islam.
  1. My given name is Arabic. It means light of womanhood.
  1. I am not a terrorist.

 

Noria Jablonski is the author of the story collection Human Oddities (Counterpoint, 2005).

Photo credit: Connie via a Creative Commons license.

Curry’s Common Ground

By Mary Petiet

 

The man behind the counter glances between the potent spice mixes and my ten-year-old son.

“You like this?” the man asks in a heavy Pakistani accent. He starts ringing up the sale, and cultures connect as my blond towhead grins widely and tells him he loves curry.

When I was ten years old, I had never tasted it. Curry had not yet arrived in our small Massachusetts town, although I had heard rumors of it from my English cousins. Until a few years ago, I had to go into Boston to shop for Indian food.

Now, masala, korma, Punjabi chana, and fish biryani; vibrant spice mixes neatly packed in small boxes stamped “Made in Pakistan”: I wonder at their journey to the new storefront on our town’s main street and marvel at how easily they create amazing Indian dinners. The man behind the counter asks if I know how to cook with them. I recall tasting my first curry as a college student in Scotland in a restaurant promising the cuisine of the Mughal emperors. It made my eyes water and my nose run and I loved every bite of it. Awash in the new spices and always a cook, I asked the waiters, “How do you make this?” “Madhur Jaffrey’s cookbook,” they replied unanimously.

In the store, I regard the man over a box of frozen samosas. The store smells of curry in the way of all Indian markets. As my son runs back for a jar of chutney, I tell the man it took me years to learn how to cook this stuff, starting with a recipe called Malaidar unday in a dog eared copy of Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cooking.

Malaidar unday is a simple curried egg recipe and as I cooked it I realized that at its base, Indian cooking has a balanced trinity of flavors: ginger, chili and onion. Over the years, I learned to grind spices and puree pastes, and to add yogurt slowly so it doesn’t curdle. I spent hours filling the kitchen with potent smells from far off places and piling our plates with the spicy stews my son has grown up eating.

The man takes the chutney from my son and tells us his favorite is butter chicken and that the butter chicken spice mix feeds a lot of people. My son says he loves that one, too. We share stories of big butter chicken meals, agreeing there can never be too much of it. The man shakes my son’s hand, we walk out the door, and the fresh air hits us as we leave the smells of Pakistan behind.

Out on the sunny sidewalk, I seize the moment to connect cultures. I ask my son if he has been hearing a lot of scary things about Muslims recently. He says he has: terrorism, the refugee crisis, a possible registry. Just as I have feared, the vitriol has not escaped my child, hate does not happen in a void.

“That man in the store is a Muslim,” I tell him. “He’s from Pakistan, and he likes a good curry just as much as we do. Think of how the different spices in the curry work together to form the coherent whole of the dish. People are like that. We can work together to form a successful whole. The Koran says: Do unto all men as you would wish to have done unto you. Jesus also says: Do to others what you want them to do to you. We have common ground, and we can’t vilify an entire people based on extremists—just as we can’t dismiss all curries as bad when we add too much of one spice to overwhelm one dish.”

When we get home, we break out the butter chicken. I imagine the chicken floating in the marinade as the continents floating in the ocean, and the spices as the people and the animals inhabiting the land and the sea. Later, while the mixture simmers, I watch as it all comes together in a vibrant, balanced, colorful mass, connecting us to each other as surely as it connects us to the greater global mosaic.

 

Mary Petiet is a reporter, writer and storyteller. Her book Minerva’s Owls is forthcoming from Homebound Publications in April 2017. Visit her website, www.marypetiet.com, and follow her on Facebook.

Editor’s note: Learn more about Madhur Jaffrey, “The Queen of Curries,” and try a few recipes found here.

Photo credit: Sara Marlowe via a Creative Commons license.

Brother, Can You Spare the Time?

By Kevin Patrick McCarthy

 

Every day, impoverished buskers lay down a diverse soundtrack on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder. Even as we studiously avoid their eyes, we’re ensnared in their webs of mood and memory. They count on our collective wondering and remembered joys.

My favorite is a skinny longhair. His white whiskers are choppy, as if he shaves with scissors. He sits upright on a stool in front of Ozo’s Coffee, his guitar ringing as he keeps time with an artificial leg. His thin tenor pushes Dylan’s words a few scant yards.

How many roads must a man walk down,
Before you call him a man?
Yes, ‘n’ how many seas must a white dove sail,
Before she sleeps in the sand?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind

The old hippy sings it with conviction, reminding us of the essential problems of life. I give what I can. He seldom stops playing, so gratitude comes from the eyes.

About a block away, a newcomer paces a wide arc on the cobblestone. He looks like a surfer who’s seen too much – his downcast face flush beneath blonde bangs. He energetically strums an old Martin, accompanied by bells attached to one foot. He also sings a song from the ‘60s – “Do It Again,” by the Beach Boys.

Well I’ve been thinking ‘bout
All the places we’ve surfed and danced and
All the faces we’ve missed so let’s get
Back together and do it again

It’s a surprising choice for a lone minstrel. The original recording was stuffed with rich harmonies, yet this one scruffy guy takes it on without hesitation. A strong cadence in the lyric drives the tune, and the bummed beach boy carries it off well. By themselves, the words seem vapid, yet when ensconced in a deliberate groove, they conjure strong nostalgia. The simple song taps directly into the universal longing to rekindle old magic.

Eighty years ago, another haunting song symbolized an era:

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad; now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;
Once I built a tower, now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

Yip Harburg’s lyrics reestablished an essential link between working Americans and the downtrodden. Using code words of intimacy, they reminded us that panhandlers and hobos were the builders and doers of the recent past. There, but for ____, go I.

This time around, even in bleeding-heart Boulder, we’re not yet where old Yip would like us to be. When I expressed disappointment that I hadn’t thought to invite a genial pair of budget travelers in for coffee, our friends were scandalized. When thinly clad characters wander down alleys at dusk, the neighbors assume they’re casing homes for burglary, rather than simply looking for a warm place to sleep.

Make no mistake: However politicians and Wall Street sages want to finesse the narrative, we’re in the midst of an economic depression. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman made that clear in his excellent book, End This Depression Now! (W.W. Norton & Company, 2012). Real suffering permeates our culture. Business owners face tough choices, and it shows. Every day I see people driving unsafe cars, riding bailing-wire bicycles, or walking around clearly in need of food, a friend, or a doctor. Last summer, I picked up a hitchhiker deep in the mountains who did not own shoes.

It’s not just those people who are marginalized. It’s friends, relatives, and nearly any one of us who misses a paycheck or two. Yet we’re in denial. We hold street people at arm’s length because we want to believe they just don’t measure up. They’ve failed, somehow, in being Americans. Illogically, the dismissal is child of a larger fear: that this inadequacy, however deserved, is contagious. As a right-wing bumper sticker puts it, we must guard against “trickle-up poverty.”

The programs launched in the 1930s, to mitigate the Great Depression, were predicated on the notion that, in a foundering economy, or when mammoth undertakings are otherwise required, cooperation must supersede competition. Yet the cooperation we need today is unobtainable unless each of us breaks the dehumanizing habit. We’ll simply refuse to put our shoulders to the wheel of cooperative expansion. We’ll quibble over degrees of selfishness.

Now is the time to engage the strength of unity that our parents and grandparents knew. It’s our turn to be the greatest generation. It begins simply—with looking into the eyes of our brothers and sisters on the street. With crossing the bridge, as Martin Buber would say, from “I-it” to “I-thou.” From there it might progress, for example, to remembering better times with the sad surfer. Seeing the achievement and possibility within each ragged squatter. Seeing it within our collective selves.

Yesterday—a fall day drenched in blue and gold— my favorite busker was playing Neil Young’s “Sugar Mountain.”

Oh, to live on Sugar Mountain
With the barkers and the colored balloons
You can’t be twenty on Sugar Mountain
Though you’re thinking that
You’re leaving there too soon
You’re leaving there too soon

I dropped a bill in his guitar case, but didn’t stop, being Busy And Important. Only later did I realize that I’d actually had time for conversation. We might’ve basked briefly together in sunlight, drinking in the mingled aroma of coffee and rotting leaves. I wanted to tell him that a friend of mine once played the song beautifully, before we were twenty ourselves. I wanted to know how the busker learned it and what it means to him. I wanted to know his name.

The marginalized are casting nets—asking us to remember who we are. Let’s allow ourselves to be caught, if only for a golden moment. It’s not possible or desirable to forfeit our own ambitions and “save” everyone. But we can enrich many lives every day, including our own, by propagating the small kindness of not dismissing one another. This feeds an evolution upon which our long-term survival may depend. As the busker might say, there’s another way to interpret “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

 

Kevin McCarthy’s essays and poetry have appeared in many literary journals. “Enough Sky” was commended in The Poetry Society’s 2014 National Competition (UK). Kevin is also a fiction writer, teacher, and geologist. Please see locuto.com for funny stories, film recommendations, and Colorado perspectives.

Photo credit: Lincoln SL Photography via a Creative Commons license.

Black Lives Matter? Will Our Stories Save Us?

By Amy Abugo Ongiri

 

Asa Sullivan didn’t want to go back to jail and he shouldn’t have had to. But, on June 6, 2006, neighbors in a rapidly gentrifying area of San Francisco called the police to report what they believed to be suspicious behavior.

Though they did not have a search warrant, police entered an apartment that Sullivan and a friend were cleaning for another friend. Asa Sullivan’s friend quickly surrendered to the police but Sullivan—who had recently been released from jail and was on probation for selling pot—chose to hide rather than risk one more interaction with the San Francisco Police Department.

Unarmed and, by all accounts, terrified, Sullivan became trapped in that attic when police entered through the only exit. Although Sullivan was unarmed, police claim an “exchange” of gunfire caused them to shoot him five times in the face and sixteen times in total, killing him instantly. Police labeled it “a standoff,” but the entire event took less than fifteen minutes to unfold.

Asa Sullivan was a typical son of a San Francisco that was rapidly disappearing. Thanks largely to the technology boom of the 1990s, San Francisco had become the most expensive city in the world in the twenty-five years since Sullivan was born there. Working class and mixed-race, Asa did not fit the profile of what some newly-arrived residents thought their neighbors should look like. Both Asa and his friend had permission to be in the apartment, but, in a rapidly gentrifying San Francisco, who had the right to be where and when often became a police matter.

Asa’s brother, Khalil Sullivan, tells the story in a piece he wrote for the San Francisco Bay View.

I went into that attic myself, just as he had that night, and climbed to the area where he was last alive. I saw my brother’s blood covering the floor and walls. There were holes from bullets everywhere, in the rafters and the walls. … A big hole was in the attic floor over the bedroom, where they must have pulled him down.

I couldn’t help but cry while I was in that place, trying to put myself in his place to find out what happened.

After his murder, Sullivan’s surviving family members began what would turn out to be a protracted and painful attempt to get explanation and retribution for their loss through the court system. The case, which seemed to be a battle of competing narratives, eventually made it so far that an appeal from the city to dismiss the case was turned down by the United States Supreme Court. It raised the question: Can our information really save us? Can we ever tell our story in such a way that someone will hear it differently this time?

Khalil Sullivan’s account of his brother’s murder continues in the tradition of what literary historians call “slave narratives.” Black abolitionists not only organized against slavery, they wrote about it. They took written action to save their lives and the lives of their people. Henry Louis Gates and Charles T. Davis wrote one of the first academic studies of the literature created by African Americans during slavery. The Slave’s Narrative explores the fact that people of African descent in Europe and the Americas created a larger body of written evidence of their enslavement than any other people in human history. Slave narratives existed, according to Davis, “for the slave to write himself into the human community through the action of first-person narration.”

Like African-American abolitionists Frederick Douglas and Harriet Jacobs, and their Afro-British counterparts, Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince, Khalil Sullivan was writing about despair to literally save his life and the lives of those like him who are trapped in a system that otherwise refused to hear their story.

These abolitionists’ slave narratives were so popular in their lifetimes that they helped turn international opinion against slavery. Mary Prince’s autobiography, published in 1831, sold out three complete runs in its first year alone and Equiano’s autobiography, first published in 1789, has never gone out of print. Equiano was a founding member of the Sons of Africa, an influential British abolitionist group made up of the formerly enslaved, whose activism to outlaw slavery in the UK helped to trigger the end of slavery worldwide. A fundamental part of their activism was to write of their experiences as slaves and what that experience had cost them personally. But their larger concern was with the welfare of those who had not managed to make it out of slavery. When Louis Asa-Asa concluded the story of his enslavement in 1831 he wrote: “I have no friend belonging to me, but God, who will take care of me. I am well off myself, for I am well taken care of, and have good bed and good clothes; but I wish my own people to be as comfortable.” Frederick Douglass argued in 1855 that slave narratives were fundamentally necessary because those who were not enslaved “cannot see things in the same light with the slave, because he does not, and cannot, look from the same point from which the slave does.”

This strategy worked for Douglass, but can it work for Khalil Sullivan or his mother Kathleen Espinosa? They have both written persuasively about Asa Sullivan’s death and their family’s ordeal seeking justice through the courts. The family recently engaged in attempts to raise the $10,000 necessary to get transcriptions in order to prepare for an appeal against the last court verdict that ruled Asa Sullivan had “committed suicide by cop,” as the police department alleged. The family claims that inconsistencies found in the transcriptions will prove otherwise. The fundraiser failed to raise the necessary amount of money to appeal the case.

President Obama responded to the crisis in Ferguson, initiated by the police shooting of unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, with calls for national programs to arm more than 50,000 police officers with body cameras that would ostensibly “tell the truth” about policing and thus create accountability. Images of Eric Garner’s killing at the hands of the police, including his poignant pleas to be allowed to breathe created two narratives: one in the court of public opinion that helped give rise to the #Blacklivesmatter campaign and one in the US courts that said he had, in fact, not been murdered. Despite what the courts may tell us, more evidence doesn’t necessarily mean that these narratives will ever come closer together. Nevertheless, the Sullivan family continues to collect evidence and continues to tell their story in the hopes that somewhere someone will listen.

 

Amy Abugo Ongiri is Associate Professor and the Jill Beck Director of Film Studies at Lawrence University. Her book Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic, explores the cultural politics of the Black Power movement, particularly the Black Arts movement search to define a “Black Aesthetic.” Her work has appeared in Glitterwolf, Black Girl Dangerous, Black Lesbian Love Lab, Mutha Magazine and The Rad Families Anthology.

Photo credit: DFBM via a Creative Commons license.

March, redoubled: When plans go South by K Walton

Hi, Julie,

Thank you for writing your essay, “March, interrupted: When plans go South” (Writers Resist, February 2, 2017 issue). Thank you for raising your pen in service of the movement and for speaking from a place of awareness and resistance. Thank you for lifting up hope in the face of all the fear and anxiety in which we have been mired. We need more people like you—people who, as you put it, are inexperienced in civic activism, but are moving their voices (whether figuratively or literally) from the page to the street.

As a Southerner and an activist, a person both of great privilege and lack thereof, I would like to offer something for your consideration: The South is not a place which exists in opposition to the resistance. The South is the home of the resistance.

The narrative about the South that exists outside of the South (and, as we internalize it all too often, inside the South as well) is that we are ignorant and, in our ignorance, we are conservative. We are viewed as a people detached from the rest of the country; unmoored from the progressive agenda to which the North is both paladin and avenging angel; our church is our chain; our poverty, the cell to which our ignorance (sadly but justifiably) confines us.

The truth is that we are not so much a people detached as a people divided. The South is the seat of power in the United States. The 13 states of the Old Confederacy house 178 of the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency, 152 of the 435 members of the House of Representatives, and 26 of the 100 U.S. senators. Almost 38 percent of the U.S. population lives in the South. Our politicians are no strangers to these numbers. The South is also home to half the nation’s Black population, a third of its (known) LGBTQ population, and the highest poverty rates in the United States. And yet, consistently, the South as a political entity behaves in ways that are counter to the interests of Black, LGBTQ and poor people.

There’s an old saying, “As the South goes, so goes the nation.” If this is true (and it is), it becomes suddenly very important to our leaders (almost all of whom are not Black, LGBTQ or poor) to win the South. That is, it becomes important to out leaders to win over a people whose interests are not their interests, whose needs run counter to their own needs. To do this, they taught the South to vote against itself.

Let me say again: We are not a people detached; we are a people divided. They split us up and pitted us against each other. Literacy laws, the “one drop” rule, Jim Crow, voter suppression, gerrymandering, anti-LGBTQ laws, the Southern Strategy, North Carolina’s Amendment 1, and, most recently, HB-2 all serve an important function. Our leaders taught poor whites that black and brown people are a threat to white jobs, white security, white wealth. This is not true. They taught straight people that LGBTQ people are a disease and a menace to their children. This is not true. They taught Christian people that people of other faiths are predators, criminals and terrorists. This is not true. With coded language and the strategic application of resources, they taught us to hate and fear each other. We looked at each other sidelong. We voted against one another in hopes of protecting ourselves from monsters (that did not exist), and, in voting against each other, we voted against ourselves. They stole our power out from under us and so won the governmental seats they desired.

We are not ignorant; we are a closely-guarded federal resource. We are not powerless; we are enchained. So when you write of speaking out, do not write of speaking out even in southwest Georgia—write of speaking out especially in southwest Georgia. Look on your Fox News-watching relatives with compassion; they’re under the same spell as all the rest of us. Don’t hold yourself too far removed from those who are less knowledgeable than you or from those who are less sensitive or less aware. We’ve all been listening to the same propaganda, all drinking from the same poisoned well. What we need now is not to shun those who have swallowed more poison than us, but to extend to them our empathy and compassion. The work to be done now is the work of healing and bridge making. It is the hardest work of all, but it must be done if we are going to win back the power that has been stolen from us, whose origin is in our hearts and our hands and our throats.

I’m glad you’ve come here—we need people like you. Welcome to the South. Welcome home.

K Walton is a writer and activist in Asheville, North Carolina, where she lives in the sticks with her partner and their cat.

Image credit: U.S. Library of Congress, “The End of the United States Rebellion 1865.”

March, interrupted: When plans go South

By Julie M. Friesen

 

I’m at the center of the world right now, but soon I’ll go far right of center, to Southwest Georgia. My husband has lost a grandmother, and his mother has lost her mother. I need to be there, meaning I can’t be here.

After November 8, a groundswell movement has given me hope. Its extent is not apparent to the public yet, as the media is understandably busy covering the agenda of the new administration and the constant provocations of its leader.

Meanwhile, I’m getting invitations to secret Facebook groups. I’m reading the Indivisible Guide, that teaches those of us inexperienced in civic activism how to hold our members of Congress accountable. I’m watching grassroots-born rallies mushroom all over the country. I’m overhearing an acquaintance at a party casually mention holding resistance meetings in his living room.

As much as I dread January 20, I look forward to the 21st, the day the resistance moves from living rooms and secret groups to the streets of the nation’s capital.

I wanted to be there to make the statement that we will not sit casually by while our rights are infringed—and not just women’s rights, but First Amendment rights, Voting Rights, and Equal Protection rights.

We don’t approve of the discourse, especially that taking place in 140 characters or less. We don’t approve of the advisors or Cabinet nominees. We don’t approve of the proposed legislation. We don’t approve of the bizarre flirtation (and fear the possible collusion) with Vladimir Putin. We don’t approve of the ethics conflicts that are being minimized or outright ignored. We don’t approve of the attacks on the press. Or Muslims. Or immigrants. Or women. Or Black people. Or people with disabilities. Or the LGBTQ community. Or individuals like John Lewis.

We’re here, too.

Instead of marching in D.C., I will be driving past fields dotted with cotton and Trump-Pence signs. After the funeral, I’ll sit with my in-laws who voted for DJT, watching Fox News and biting my tongue raw. But, though I can’t be at the march, it still gives me hope to know that our freedoms of assembly and speech will be vividly on display. This time, I’ll put my voice on the page. Next time, I’ll take it to the street.

We have a voice so long as we exercise our right to use it. And that can be done anywhere, even in Southwest Georgia.

 

Julie Friesen is a lawyer in Baltimore, Maryland, and a writer in her living room.

Photo credit: Daniel Oines via a Creative Commons license.

Why I marched

By Julie Harthill Clayton

Two Saturdays ago, I stood, marched, cried, chanted and exercised my first amendment right “peaceably to assemble” with a diverse sea of humanity–500,000 or more–for the Women’s March on Washington.

It was one of the most memorable and moving experiences of my life.

Why did I march? Because “women’s rights are human rights.”

And I will vigorously defend the right of every woman—even the ones with whom I disagree—to express their views. This freedom is part of what makes America great.

But to dig deeper, why did I get up at 4:15 a.m. to finish adorning the pussy hat that I knit by hand, with purple ribbons representing men and women who couldn’t march with me?

Because I am a bisexual white woman. In a relationship with a man.

The color of my skin, my ability to pass as straight, affords me privileges that many of my LGBTQIA friends and family don’t have.

I own my privilege.

I choose not to hide behind it.

I am a loud, proud bisexual who refuses to pass.

A well-meaning acquaintance suggested that I just lay low for the next four years. Respectfully, I say “No.” That dishonors those who can’t pass, it dishonors my own long personal struggle with my sexuality and identity, it dishonors my fellow bisexuals who are afraid that the “B” in LGBTQIA will be silent.

The “B” must not be silent. We matter, too.

And so I marched. For all the LGBTQIAs. Because we deserve a world in which we don’t have to hide.

I marched for my kick-ass, superhero U.S. Army veteran fiancé. For the women who have shaped him into the feminist he is today.

I marched for those whose causes I agree with.

And for those with whom I disagree. “Whatever each individual woman is facing—only she knows her biggest challenge,” says Gloria Steinem.

I marched for the women who didn’t support the march. There are centuries of women who fought, suffered, and sacrificed so that today all women might feel empowered, respected, and treated as first-class citizens.

I marched for the male children I birthed and raised to be thoughtful, kind and compassionate. And to express their views and make their voices heard. I love them with all my heart, though our worldviews sometimes clash. I know that the women who brought them into being—my mother’s mother and her mother—are woven into their fabric.

I marched for the right for others to call me a “snowflake.” A “feathery ice crystal, displaying sixfold symmetry.” A snowflake is a thing of beauty. Fragile? Yes, at times. But each blizzard starts with a single snowflake.

I marched because I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

“Why I Marched” was previously published by GayRVA.

Julie Harthill Clayton is an out and proud bisexual with a passion for reading, writing and not arithmetic. Her work has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, the Internet Review of Books, Curve Magazine, Lambda Literary and more. She is working on her first novel, Two Tickets to Freedom, a semi-autobiographical queer coming-of-age tale. A paralegal by day, Julie spends her free time knitting, writing, and reading anything she can get her hands on. She lives in Richmond with her partner, local artist David Turner, and their mischievous and loving hunting dog, Max.

Photo credit: Julie Harthill Clayton

Why we march

By Rachel Federman

 

We march because we want to send a message to refugees, to Muslims, to members of the LGBTQ and African American communities, to recent immigrants and to all women, but especially young girls. The message is this: We stand with them and we will fight alongside them.

Because we believe in science.

Because we believe in public education.

Because we want to leave an inhabitable planet for our children.

Because we will not go back on marriage equality.

Because we have not given up on democracy.

Because we will not allow you to sell our national parks to make condos and drill for oil.

Because Black Lives Matter. Period.

Because we believe in freedom of speech and the First Amendment and will not tolerate a president—or anybody—attacking those basic American rights.

Because we will not stand idly by while you take away health care from millions of Americans.

Because we know we as a society have not yet made good on the promise contained in Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.

Because we still have that dream.

Because we have a right to peaceful assembly.

Because we know diversity makes us stronger.

Because we know all of us, except our Native American sisters and brothers, are immigrants. Some came here by choice and others were forced against their will, and we will not forget that history.

Because we will fight your pipelines that contaminate water, destroy sacred property, and continue the reliance on fossil fuels that scientists agree is heating up the earth.

Because Russia is not our ally and the clear Russian interference in our electoral process is—at the very least—a threat to all that we hold dear.

Because even the youngest among us knows it is wrong to mock people’s disabilities and even the youngest among us knows that if you see someone doing it, you stand up and tell them it is wrong.

Because we are not afraid of bullies.

Because the “alt-right” is not adequate to describe a global White Supremacist, White Nationalist movement and we will not be complicit with its normalization.

BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO ASK US WHY WE ARE MARCHING.

Because the problem is not voter fraud, but voter suppression.

Because we are on to your gerrymandering ways.

Because we will not go about our daily lives like this fascist kleptocracy is normal.

Because this is #NotNormal.

Because you were endorsed by the KKK and Neo-Nazis cheered when you won.

Because we are patriots who love our country.

Because you are the manifestation of everything we are teaching our children not to be. You are mean. You are petty. You are a bully. You’re greedy. You lie. If we did not stand up and let ourselves be counted, as strongly opposed to everything you are and everything you represent, we would be failing at our most basic task as caretakers.

Because we are stronger than you and we want to give you a little heads up.

Because we will #Resist your fascist agenda as long as we have breath in our bodies.

Because, whether we are Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus or members of any other faith, or members of what you might call the faithless, we believe in the commandment to “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Because we believe the Bible when it tells us, “He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that has none” and “Do not neglect to do good and share what you have” and “It is more blessed to give than it is to receive.”

Because we are not content with despair and don’t have time to waste engaging in any more battles about whether we had the right candidate (we did).

Because we do not agree on all issues, but we know that the right to life extends to a child with cancer to receive the treatment he or she needs to have the best chance at life. The right to life extends to toddlers whose parents leave loaded guns within reach. The right to life extends to the people of Flint, Michigan to have access to clean water. The right to life extends to people across the globe who risk malaria due to rising temperatures, while you threaten to defect from the Paris Climate Agreement.

Because we know it is a moral stain on our collective conscience that 40 million Americans live in food insecure households while the top 1% control more wealth than the bottom 95% and yet you propose to cut taxes again for that top 1%.

Because we know Obama was right in Grant Park on November 4, 2008 when he said, “Change has come to America,” and just because the white, male Aristocracy did not accept that change doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

Because. It. Is. Happening.

Because you just pissed off the wrong 3.52 billion nasty women. And the billions of non-Women who have our backs, and won’t grab us by the anything.

I’m a writer-mom and social justice advocate trying to live a simple, mindful life and mindful of how often I fail. I used to play in a band called Dimestore Scenario and now I write books like Writer’s Boot Camp: 30-day crash course to total writing fitness (HarperCollinsUK, 2017) and I work with nonprofits mainly in the field of minority education. I have a Master of Arts in English from Fordham University and blog about my efforts to live a country life in the city at Last American Childhood.

Bedtime Stories from Donald Trump

By Deanne Stillman

 

“Who has read The Art of the Deal in this room?” Donald Trump last year at a Liberty University rally. “Everybody. I always say, a deep, deep second to The Bible.”

Long before Trump requested a show of hands, there was someone who proclaimed her admiration for the book in an online forum. This was Laurel Harper, the mother of the Oregon school shooter, the man who shot and killed nine people last October at Umpqua Community College. She had read it to her son, she said, before he was born, as the New York Times reported shortly after the incident last year. “Now my son invests in the stock market along with me,” she said. “[He] turns a profit and is working on a degree in finance. His language and reading skills are phenomenal. I tell you this because it’s not too late for you to start helping your daughter.”

A nurse by profession, Laurel Harper was responding to a parent who had asked for advice about her autistic child. Her own son, Christopher Harper-Mercer, had Asperger’s syndrome and was apparently autistic as well, although Ms. Harper couldn’t have known that while he was in utero; she was talking about the importance of what one reads to unborn children and how that can help them later, as she came to realize, even if they have certain conditions. She didn’t mention other books that she had read aloud at the time; obviously it was something she wanted to pass on in a public conversation board.

For a number of days after the shooting, I couldn’t shake what I had read in the Times. I had heard much about The Art of the Deal from people I’ve written about over the years, many down on their luck, or just plain down for the count—just like their mothers and fathers before them, and the ancient ones who preceded their mothers and fathers on their particular circuit. They were looking for a way in, hoping to hit the jackpot, having been locked out of the American dream long ago. They figured that buying and selling real estate could give them a toehold, and they would say so as they sucked long and hard on their Marlboros, and once that was in motion, it wouldn’t be long before they were making deals with the big guys and even drinking the good stuff, instead of the Jack-and-Cokes they scraped up the coin to pay for during happy hour at the Cactus Lounge. “And then you can come and visit me,” they would say, “but you’ll have to be buzzed in at the gates!” You see, they wanted to live where they weren’t wanted, and they would laugh hard at the statement, knowing that behind it, such a fate was not in their cards, and really, the joke was on them.

Recently, I borrowed The Art of the Deal from the library. I wanted to take another look at the book that some now cite as the blueprint for Donald Trump’s campaign—and which, as was just revealed, has caused remorse for the ghost writer, who came up with the title and much of the framing of Trump’s life. What was in the bestseller, I wondered, that an expectant mother might want to pass on to the next generation? In the book’s own language, Laurel Harper was urging her son to dream a banal world of winners and losers, of striving and acquiring things, of air rights, valuable holdings, and letters of intent. Yet behind that language, she was urging him to make something of himself, hoping, as in a fairy tale—for this is indeed a modern one, stripped of gentility and beauty—that some day, he become a king. As I explored the book, I noted certain passages which might be inspirational for a future investor, and I also started to wonder about the conditions in which Ms. Harper might have read aloud. Was she sitting in a comfortable and favorite armchair, under an oft-used reading light? Did she read to him or actually to herself out loud and therefore her son at the same time, in bed as she drifted off to sleep? Did she read to him on breaks at work, or perhaps during a walk in the park? Here is the scenario I imagined. …

“In college,” she begins, quoting the fellow who flips hotels and once owned a beauty pageant, “while my friends were reading the comics and the sports pages of newspapers, I was reading the listings of FHA foreclosures. … I don’t do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form,” she continues as she pages through the book, perhaps giving this a flourish. “Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks. … No matter whom you’ve met over the years,” she adds, whispering possibly or invoking a soothing voice as the unborn boy floated in the primordial tides, “there is something incredible about sitting down to dinner with the cardinal and a half dozen of his top bishops and priests in a private dining room at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. … [The cardinal] is not only a man of great warmth, he’s also a businessman with great political instincts. … Even in elementary school, I was a very assertive, aggressive kid. In the second grade I actually gave a teacher a black eye—I punched my music teacher because I didn’t think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled. I’m not proud of that, but it’s clear evidence that even early on I had a tendency to stand up and make my opinions known in a very forceful way. The difference now is that I like to use my brain instead of my fists.” Perhaps she pauses here or stops for the evening, and then picks it up another time, in another place: “I finally found a plane,” she says, maybe with a bit of drama, for indeed, it seems to have been a big moment in Trump’s life. “I happened to be reading an article in Business Week, in the spring of 1987, about a troubled, Texas-based company name Diamond Shamrock. The article described how top Shamrock executives were enjoying incredible perks, actually living like kings. Among the examples cited was a lavishly equipped company-owned 727, which executives flew around in at will.” Flew around in at will, my little one, wouldn’t you like to do that? “There are people—I categorize them as life’s losers—who get their sense of accomplishment and achievement from trying to stop others. As far as I’m concerned, if they had any real ability they wouldn’t be fighting me, they’d be doing something constructive themselves.” Now here comes a really good part, I hope you’re paying attention! “I’m not looking to be a bad guy when it isn’t absolutely necessary. … It just goes to show that it pays to move quickly and decisively when the time is right. …” And here’s the best line of all, if you get anything out of this book, young man, I hope this is it. “I’m keeping my options open,” she reads and then she might have said goodnight and sweet dreams to her unborn son, for that is the way of mothers, and then possibly she blew out a candle.

•     •     •

The primordial stew furnishes us with the building blocks of life. This includes not just vitamins and minerals, but, as research shows, things of a more esoteric nature, such as music and art and literature—sounds and vibrations and words that are imprinted onto a seed and from which that seed goes forth and grows and tries to find his or her way in a world filled with obstacles that are seen or felt in the bones. When I first learned about Laurel Harper reading Donald Trump to her son before he was born, I asked some friends about the books or music that they conveyed to their children while in the womb. Several mentioned nursery rhymes, including those that were cautionary tales; writer Samantha Dunn and musician Jimmy Camp spoke of Bob Marley and the song “Three Little Birds,” which their son, now seven, still loves; John Densmore—the drummer in the Doors—sang “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” to his unborn child, and others played Beatles songs (“My son is now studying music in Liverpool,” photographer Elissa Kline told me).

I know all about the false hope that The Art of the Deal has conveyed to those who have nothing to lose so why not get into real estate? I’ve seen them take one last gamble on some land-buying scam and I’ve seen what happens when it falls apart and they are back at the Cactus Lounge during so-called happy hour. Mostly, they are destroying themselves, perhaps still harboring fantasies of living behind a gate, in a house that they own, free and clear, but knowing in their heart of hearts that such a thing is beyond their reach and the game is over. So they light up another Marlboro and order another Jack-and-Coke; as the old saying goes, the rich get richer and the poor get drunk.

What happens to someone when he soaks up the idea that the world is comprised of winners and losers before he is even born? That losers are people who stand in his way? What happens when this imprinting is later loaded with guns (trips to the shooting range with his mother) and the prospect of fame (numerous shooters who preceded him) along with Asperger’s syndrome, a parade of personal failures and myriad misread cues? After he was born, Christopher Harper-Mercer did indeed follow the urgings of his mother, for she boasted of her son making hay with investments—behold! a king!—and then, somehow, over time it seems, this path could no longer keep him and nor could the many forks he traveled and one day, he went to school and decided to cash in his chips. “I’m a good boy,” he may have thought. “I am moving quickly and decisively when the time is right. I have kept my options open.”

 

Originally published by LitHub as “The Art of Dividing the World into Winners and Losers.”

Deanne Stillman is a widely published, critically acclaimed writer, and her plays have won prizes in various festivals.  Her books include Desert Reckoning, based on a Rolling Stone piece, winner of the Spur and LA Press Club Awards, an amazon editors’ pick, recipient of rave reviews in Newsweek, the Denver Post, LA Review of Books and elsewhere; Twentynine Palms, an LA Times “best book of the year” that Hunter Thompson called “A strange and brilliant story by an important American writer”; and Mustang, an LA Times “best book of the year,” praised from The Atlantic to The Economist, and recently released in an audio edition with Anjelica Huston, Frances Fisher, Wendie Malick, John Densmore (the drummer in the Doors), and Richard Portnow. In addition, Deanne’s work has appeared in Angels Flight Literary West, Rumpus, Salon, the New York Times, LA Times, Tin House, Orion, Slate and other publications. She also writes the “Letter from the West” column for the Los Angeles Review of Books. She’s a member of the core faculty at the UC Riverside-Low Residency MFA Creative Writing Program and a winner of an Amtrak Writers Residency. For more information, visit her website.

Reading recommendation: Trump: The Art of the Deal by Donald J. Trump and Tony Schwartz.

Or the horror and read Deanne’s books, instead.

Desert Reckoning

Mustang

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Daughter by Lia Langworthy

Dear daughter,

Your body shook with tears as CNN declared him the winner. Numb and stoic, I held you, the circuits of my mind overloaded, broken, unable to process what I was hearing and seeing. I imploded with treacherous emotions. Comforting words eluded me.

I called your father, for him to deal with your fears and questions as I rubbed your back. I desperately wished I could cry with you but instead I waited for my body to catch up with my runaway emotions.

As you spoke with your father, I watched the television and heard my narcissistic black father in Donald Trump’s rhetoric. I saw my mother’s white privilege in the millions of white women who voted for him. I saw a sexual predator who went unpunished. I saw the ugliness of hate in the millions of racists that call this country home. I saw a system of white supremacy openly reclaiming the seat at the head of the table. I saw but was too frightened to feel. It was not safe, despite sitting safely on the couch beside you. The election results had rocketed my mind and my body to two different planets. When would they land and reunite?

I woke the next day, still having not shed a tear. Pain clenched my stomach and worked its way toward my heart. I was thankful for your Episcopal school, where you had chapel on Wednesdays and your brilliant female headmaster would try her best to make sense of the election outcome in a way I wasn’t yet able. We drove to school in silence. I couldn’t bring myself to turn on the radio. I pushed the hellish nightmare aside and focused on the space in our car and the matter at hand—getting you to school safely. I broke the silence only to remind you to gather your PE clothes. As we pulled up, relief crept into my lungs. You exited the car, and I exhaled deeply for the first time.

*     *     *

I drove my route home, up Wilcox to Franklin to Highland, onto the 101 toward Studio City. Nothing was normal, but everything appeared normal. People chatted on their phones, pumped gas, drank coffee. How could this be? Didn’t they know the world had just turned on its axis and we would all fall off into space? The last time I had this sensation was when my mother died.

*     *     *

She wanted to die at home. After weeks in the hospital, the social workers, doctors and nurses said the end was imminent, so an ambulance took her skeleton of a body back to her mobile home. She lay on the bed in her tiny living room, mouth agape, emitting horrid noises as she struggled to breathe. She held on. While I fed her ice chips, her two cats, Eartha and Kit, curled up and slept next to her head. Dozens sat in my mother’s tiny living room, all eyes on her, waiting for her spirit to leave her body.

I couldn’t stomach the sound of her labored breathing any longer and jumped on my bike for a ride. I rode long and hard. I cried even harder, finally releasing a small portion of my grief.

When I returned, my mother had gone and everything changed. I breathed air, but the air felt different. I ate and drank, but nothing tasted the same. I would never hold her, touch her, talk to her again. A huge monumental shift had happened in my life, but not in anyone else’s.

*     *     *

Driving home that day after the election, I felt the same exaggerated delineation in time, in space, irrevocable and unchangeable. Death had returned in the form of Trump’s victory.

*     *     *

Daughter, without you, alone for the first time since the election results, I felt safe enough to return to my body. As when my mother died, my body desperately needed to release my pent up fear, fury and grief. The release came as a scream. My screams shocked me as much as the passing drivers, who craned their necks to witness the crazy woman in her car. I didn’t care. The screams finally released tears, too frightened to appear before. My stomach hurt so badly I contemplated pulling over my car and taking a shit right there on the 101. Why not? Who would’ve stopped me? Fuck it. Grief fought with fear, but ultimately disgust won.

*     *     *

I drove toward home, crying and wondering how (and why) a highly educated, privileged, experienced white woman couldn’t win the highest office in our country, but a sexist, racist, sexual predator without any experience could. Oh, I knew how and why, but I wasn’t ready to accept the bitter truth.

*     *     *

After the election, I finally fell asleep around 4 a.m. I dreamt of my uncle, my white, racist, alcoholic Uncle Russ. In my dream I was helping him paint a room army green. He stood high on a ladder, where the wall meets the ceiling, and I stood below him, holding his wares. I loved my Uncle Russ, despite his constant racist jokes and insensitive name-calling. His pet name for me, his favorite niece, was his Little Niglett (nigger + piglet). He had a deep need to denigrate me, and my white mother allowed him to do so.

As a child, I always wished my mother would scream obscenities at my uncle or threaten to never speak to him again if he continued to insult me. Instead, she instructed me to ignore him, to take the high road. She claimed powerlessness and accepted my uncle’s sad excuse of “I mean no harm.” But harm me he did. His powerful and hurtful words, demeaning of my humanity, went unchecked. He took no responsibility for his actions and my mother was complicit. She chose to protect his power, to ensure her access to his privilege, however unequally it was shared. She couldn’t dare risk exposing my uncle for the racist, sexist pig he was. White women are collaborators of white male privilege, benefiting in part from their dominance, even if it’s not in their best interest.

*     *     *

As I drove home, thinking of my mother and her choice of white privilege over me, I grew enraged. The fact that millions of white women, like my mother, stood with Trump, not against him, enraged me further. I wanted to scream again, but instead cried as I exited the freeway onto Vineland.

*    *     *

Daughter, white privilege is real, even for an underprivileged, poor and uneducated white woman, like my mother. Raised by others as an unwanted orphan, my mother grew into a woman who demanded little. She accepted harassment as love. I knew my mother loved me, more than herself, but she was unable to stand up for me or herself. However, despite my mother’s difficult childhood, she nonetheless “belonged” as a white woman. When she bought nude nylons, they matched the color of her skin. When she turned on the TV, she saw her face reflected back at her. Being “underprivileged” did not negate all the subtle and unearned privileges her whiteness granted her.

My mother refused to accept she held any such privilege, and I accepted her ignorance, for she had been conditioned to believe such privileges didn’t exist. Yet history has shown, time and time again, white women choose their attachments to white men, the most powerful group in America, over themselves. They did so on Election Day. They chose to vote for a sexual predator ensuring the continuation of abusive white male dominance in this country.

Daughter, as a woman of color you will have many white women claim to be your allies. Be wary. I do not say this to inflict fear, hate or mistrust, but instead to share the truth, rooted in past betrayals. White women want women of color to join their feminist fight while failing to acknowledge their white privilege. Like my mother, many are completely unable to reconcile their powerlessness with their privilege.

During the suffrage movement of the early twentieth century, white women sought the right to vote yet fought blacks who demanded the same right, angrily claiming their inherent superiority over blacks. Historically, white women have abandoned their black sisters when their white privilege is threatened. White women who ignore their race-privilege and focus solely on sexism are blind to their status, power and authority.

Yet we women of color, with less status, power and authority, voted overwhelming for Hillary Clinton. Why could we see what white women could not? We don’t share their privilege. We women of color are of a different ilk. Our oppression is birthed from a different strain of contempt; one much deeper than most white women will ever know.

*     *     *

As I drove home, my frustration with the white women who decisively handed Trump the presidency became eclipsed by my rage for the narcissist himself.

*     *     *

Honey, take note, narcissists are pure evil unmasked, especially malignant ones. Pathological liars, master manipulators, out-right abusers: they believe they are above the law, above others, and don’t have to play by anyone’s rules. They crush all in their path without remorse. They negate others’ feelings yet demand honor, respect and reverence for their own. They refuse to see the error of their ways and instead deny, deflect or blame the innocent. They hate to apologize and admit defeat. They are easily enraged and hostile to anyone who challenges them. They spin lies into truth and truth into lies. Their intense sense of entitlement stems from a delusional belief they have an absolute right to fulfill their every want and lust. They are parasitical predators. They are moral and spiritual thieves, always on the hunt for that which is not theirs to take. I know because I had a narcissistic father.

My father usually got his way. He charmed, cajoled or bribed—whatever it took to ensure victory. Once he took me to a jazz bar and, when the bartender refused to give me a glass of wine, my father tried every trick in his book, but the bartender refused. I was your age—thirteen. He stormed out of the club and smoked all the way home.

My father was also defeated by a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. My black father hated my nose, and when I was a teenager he took me to a surgeon to remedy the situation, never mind I had no issue with my nose and still don’t. (Ironically my nose looks just like my white mother’s nose, but it was too black for my black father.) He claimed he knew what was best for me and I would thank him for my new and improved nose. He and the doctor talked like long lost frat brothers, ignoring my presence, hatching plans for my new nose. However, the surgeon grew silent after my father suggested the doctor falsely claim I had broken my nose in a swimming accident so insurance would cover the surgery. The surgeon shot me an “Is he for real?” look and requested I leave the room. I wish I could have stayed and witnessed the confrontation that followed. I heard only pieces of an angry conversation. I couldn’t help but smile when my dad busted through the door angry and upset. I knew the doctor had refused his request. I knew because my father was livid and speechless the entire ride home.

It didn’t matter to my father that he was asking the doctor to act illegally and unethically. It didn’t matter I didn’t want a nose job. It didn’t matter I was thirteen and not legally able to drink a glass of wine. All that mattered was my father’s needs.

*     *     *

As I drove home, I looked at my nose in the rearview mirror, glad my mother’s nose was intact, not some doctor’s re-creation. Honestly, I would have happily gone under the knife, if it meant the sexual abuse would stop.

*     *     *

My body was my father’s plaything, existing only for his sick amusement. The closest he came to physical abuse was once during dinner. I was eating spaghetti at the kitchen table when he suddenly appeared behind me and slid his hand down my top. I pulled away, and he threw my plate across the table, splattering spaghetti across the floor and walls. He screamed, “Look at what you’ve done. Look at what you made me do.” He forced me to clean up the mess and, after, made me sit topless at the kitchen table as he sucked on my breasts. I refused to show any emotion. I was stoic. I was not present. I stared at the wood grain tabletop. My refusal was my tiny victory.

Greater victory was mine when my father finally died, but he wouldn’t die easily. His cancer took a toll on me and my stepmom, but we played our roles in his tragic play to perfection. I watched him evaporate into a skeleton, one I couldn’t lift when he collapsed on his bedroom floor on the way to the bathroom. I watched with sick glee as he crawled to the bathroom on all fours, shit rolling down his legs. Beyond vain, my father couldn’t stomach such embarrassment and demanded to end his own life. His doctor gave into his demand.

My stepmother and I gave my father enough morphine to kill two elephants. We said our goodbyes. We cried. It was curtain call.

I went downstairs, believing my father was leaving the earth for good, and fell asleep in his brown Eames chair only to be woken by his skeleton hovering above me. Our goodbyes had been in vain. He stood in front of me, hungry. Minutes later, we ate scrambled eggs at the spaghetti table, in silence, my disappointment tasting bitter. The day my father finally succumbed to death, I was awash with relief.

*     *     *

I could taste that relief as I drove home, and I desperately clung to the euphoric fantasy. I yearned for the same release from this nightmare. I pleaded with the gods to let Trump join my father.

*     *     *

Escape fantasies were a normal part of my childhood, but I am no longer a child. I am your mother and it’s my job to protect and prepare you for the years ahead. My white mother was unable to educate me about the insidious ways of systemic racism. My mother was unwilling to call out my uncle’s racist bullshit or defend my mixed identity or humanity. I overlooked her limitations and inability to own her privilege because I needed to love her more than hate her, to excuse her blindness to my plight, but I will not follow her naïve and misguided advice to ignore racism, misogyny or oppression.

Instead, I will give you what I should have demanded from my mother. I will sit and share your discomfort. I will stand up against ugliness on your behalf. I will do what’s right even when my knees shake. I will not allow Trump’s ugly beliefs, policies or positions to infiltrate our home or your goodness.

I will channel my empathy toward all of those who received a painful and disempowering message when our country codified racism, misogyny, and bigotry. I will value the inherent human dignity of every person no matter what race, religion, age, identity or creed. I will invite Blacks, Muslims, dreamers, immigrants, and refugees to join our family. I will welcome LGBTQ friends and strangers alike to soldier on for love. I will celebrate women and our bodies, which belong to us and only us.

When I finally returned home, I crawled into bed and dreamt of my Uncle Russ. I screamed obscenities in his face, on my behalf and yours.

 

Lia Langworthy is a mom, writer, feminist, and native of Los Angeles. A published poet and TV writer (The Shield and Soul Food) and winner of the ABC Daytime Diversity Fellowship, FOX Diversity Writers Program and Writers Bootcamp Fellowship, Lia is currently writing a memoir. She holds a B.A. from UC Berkeley and is currently working on her MFA at UC Riverside Low-Residency Writing for the Performing Arts program.

Reading recommendation: Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison.