On not drinking the Kool Aid

We’d booked ourselves into a cheap hotel after a lavish country club wedding reception. Our newish honda stood out in a lot full of dented cars, rusted vans, worn trucks and trailers. From a crowded parking space near the inn’s rear door, we skittered inside, avoiding the gaze of two young guys in a parked car as we clasped our possessions to our bosoms. Three doors down the unwashed hallway stood our smoke-free, well-kept room for the night, and we were grateful.

Dancing and wine and decibels set for the young can fray the nerves of the most stalwart elders, which I’ve become unbeknownst to my eternal child. My rest was fitful, raked by random voices, sputtering mufflers and hyperbolic TV audio.

A dawn walk took us behind the strip of cordoned-off restaurant shells and abandoned stores along crumbling sidewalks, unmowed grass, dilapidated trucks and small houses individually built before the tract housing boom, or maybe in spite of it. The neighborhood said there was no time or money or inclination to paint or repair or weed anything. The birds sang, the flowers bloomed, the people rested as we walked back to indulge in bagels and muffins included in the price of a room.

There was no point pretending the lobby’s restroom was clean enough to use. Without pause I backed out, intending to visit the one in our room before breakfast. But just outside the vending machine cubicle stood my husband Tom, talking with two strangers, an African American, call him Buck, and Indian-American, call him Dev. It went something like this:

Buck: I worked 25 years for a gas company and have skills in 40 areas there. Last year I broke my hand on the job (holding up a gloved, crippled hand) and they fired me. I said I’d do anything, but they just said, ‘Bye bye, have a good life.’

Dev: The workers are loyal to the companies, but the companies aren’t loyal to us.

Tom: These are the corporations getting tax breaks so they’ll create jobs.

Buck: Not for me. I’m 55 with one hand I can’t use. They got rid of me so they could hire two 20s... Only in America.

Dev: Companies take advantage of workers because of the economy.

Buck: Right - they know they’ve got lines of people who’ll work for low wages.

Dev: The government bails out Goldman Sachs and the CEOs get big bonuses. It’s not right.

Tom: The stimulus is supposed to trickle down, but where are the jobs?

Buck: Obama did it wrong. He shouldn’t have given all that money to the big companies.

Dev: Help people pay off their mortgages, give us jobs. We’ll get the economy going.

The focus turned to our multiple wars, suitcases of cash disappearing in Afghanistan, new bombings in Libya - gushes of money exiting U.S. coffers, with Buck’s ‘Only in America’ punctuating the proceedings.

The impromptu think tank dispersed down scuffed hallways. I said to Tom, ‘that conversation redeemed this whole experience - we never would have heard that at the Hilton.’

When politicians say with certainty that whatever they’re selling is ‘what the American people want,’ I want to know if they’ve stopped by Days Inn Columbus North lately. Informed and realistic citizens dwell there. They don’t buy the rhetoric, they recognize lies and fools and charlatans and they do know what they want.

Who are these Real Americans we hear so much about? You tell me.

Bob Dylan: Ageless sage

A little kid at my school assembly grinned up at me after the show. ‘You remind me of somebody I know!’ he chirped. ‘Who?’ asked I. ‘My Gramma!’

It wasn’t the first time my internal chronometer got a jolt of sudden aging. My dad’s friend told me one day I looked more and more like Frieda, my paternal grandmother he’d known as a child.

All this grandma talk can get a girl cranky in the bones.

Music, as usual, to the rescue. Fan of anything Bob Dylan (Verlaine, Rimbaud, Steinbeck...), I ran across this Guthrie quote:

I just reared back and soaked in every note and every word of their singing. It was so clear and honest sounding, no Hollywood put-on, no fake wiggling. It was better to me than the loud squalling and bawling you’ve got to do to make yourself heard in the old mobbed saloons. And, instead of getting you all riled up mentally, morally and sexually - no, it done something a lot better, something that’s harder to do, something you need ten times more. It cleared your head up, that’s what it done, caused you to fall back and let your draggy bones rest and your muscles go limber like a cat’s.
Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory

I'm a whole lot better off than the dust bowl refugees Woody put his mind to. I've got work, respect, food and home for which so many yearned (and still yearn). It’s the ode to musical truth I can relate to best in his words.

The Grammys’ red carpet is a gawker’s paradise of swank primp and tasteless swagger. You can almost see the cogs reel behind the brittle eyes: ‘To be heard I must be herded.’ The term ‘cattle call’ does come to mind.

I didn’t see Dylan on this year's carpet squares, but he of silk shirt and suave shoes dignified the Grammy stage when he broke out with Maggie’s Farm, backed by a dozen prize contenders and his own jokerman shadow dance. True to Woody, Dylan eschewed the fake wiggling and got down to it, the point of it all, the crux of art, the pith of poetry. The good bard applauded his humanity and ours with his ageless delight in the moment’s rich élan.

Now, with an artist like that at work to clear my mind, how can I stop singing?

This just in: As I looked up a clip of Dylan’s Grammy performance, I felt tingles up and down watching Mumford & Sons, the next generation of artists in the Guthrie-Dylan tradition.

Photo njnnetwork, Bob Dylan at the 2011 Grammys

Blood in the tweets

Why do recognized leaders of the GOP use gun and violence metaphors in reference to political opponents in their tweets and bites?

‘Let’s start getting Nancy [Pelosi] ready for the firing line this November.’
Michael Steele, Republican National Committee

‘He [Ohio Democrat Steve Driehaus] may be a dead man. He can't go home to the west side of Cincinnati. The Catholics will run him out of town.’
John Boehner, US House of Representatives Minority Leader

‘Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: "Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!’
Sarah Palin, Twitter

Why don’t Republican leaders condemn threats and violence carried out in the name of ‘real Americans’ the way Muslim leaders condemn terrorism carried out in the name of Islam?

‘We continue to strongly condemn all forms of extremism and dogmatism which are incompatible with Islam, a religion of moderation and peaceful coexistence.’
Dakar Declaration signed by leaders of the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference, which represents 1.5 billion Muslims across the Middle East, Africa and Asia

Conservative Radio and TV personalities fan the hate fires; some of their followers respond with shameful, bullying acts. But why are official voices of the Republican party - Steele, Boehner, Palin - pouring on the violent rhetoric? Do they expect to gain supporters by lending their stature to extremist groups? If that’s their game, are these Republican leaders prepared to share the blame for blood in the streets?

‘We've had a double-digit increase in sales of handguns and tactical rifles beginning about a week before the [2008 Presidential] election. Manufacturers can't keep up with demand and we are seeing a backlog of orders ranging from six months to two years for certain products.
Fox Keim, vice president of the Kittery Trading Post

If those of us who stand for civil discourse and honest protest do and say nothing in the face of the clamoring mob, we abandon our moral obligation to each other. In the dawning of this realization, citizens are gathering in real time, with real alternatives.

‘I pledge to conduct myself in a way that is civil, honest, and respectful toward people with whom I disagree. I value people from different cultures, I value people with different ideas, and I value and cherish the democratic process.’
Civility Pledge, Coffee Party USA

Photo Matt Fields, Sarah Palin and John Boehner

Two Emmas

In a world where Mars, Inc. spends tens of millions on cocoa research for the commercially coddled (i.e. those of us who can afford both health and sweet indulgence), let us pause to consider the lives and loves of two Emmas.

I have to confess my heart skipped a beat to think the venerable Cleveland Playhouse was bringing Howard Zinn’s play about the revolutionary anarchist Emma Goldman to the stage. How very - revolutionary - of them!

But no, the Emma coming to Cleveland this month is described in promotions as the ‘beautiful, witty, and much too mischievous Emma Woodhouse, one of Jane Austen’s most unforgettable heroines.’ Reading the script for a study group, initially I found Austen’s Emma a faint pastel compared to the Zinn character’s vibrance. What’s so unforgettable about Emma Woodhouse?

Austen’s Emma plans tea parties, country excursions and formal dances, the better to practice her matchmaking cleverness on young friends and admirers.  Zinn’s Emma is a garment worker who spends her cleverness convincing the boss to unlock the eighth story shop doors so the workers won’t perish in a typical factory fire of the late 1900s.

Austen's young women of Britain’s Regency era are fragile creatures, admonished for going to the post office in the rain (‘You sad girl, how could you do such a thing!’) and warned against being ‘extremely imprudent. Emma might catch cold from the draft.’

Meanwhile Zinn’s Emma is handing out leaflets at the crack of dawn with like minded cohorts and facing down club wielding cops at populist rallies.

I might write off Emma Woodhouse of Hartfield if she weren’t so much like me. I’m not into the social flitter flutter, but I’m fond of domesticity, the intimacy of meals and music, the intricacies of the heart. Austen’s Emma renounces marriage at one point, because she craves autonomy.

‘Oh, I will never marry. Few married women are half as much mistress of their husband’s house as I am of Hartfield... I shall have music and sewing and books and nieces and nephews.’

When she does decide to marry, she veers around the handsome charmer to choose  Knightley, an aptly named challenger to her egocentric lapses. Hearing her condescend to an elderly, less privileged neighbor, Knightley tells her,

‘If her situation was equal to yours, I would leave her silliness to itself and not quarrel with any liberties you might take in mocking it. But she is poor. She has lost most of the comforts she was born with, and if she lives to a very old age she will probably lose more. Her situation should elicit your compassion... Yet now she is laughed at, humiliated... It isn’t pleasant for me to say, Emma, but, as your friend, I have no choice but to speak the truth. It was badly done, Emma. Badly done indeed.’

After which Knightley walks away. But Emma stays, thinks it through, and in a keen blast of selfless autonomy, decides he is right.

‘How could I have been so contemptuous? Why have I sacrificed the good opinion of such a great friend?’

Her response reveals the steel of a woman who, born into other challenges and partnered with her noble accomplice, might well remind us of Emma Goldman, the heart muscle of downtrodden citizens, beating at the system with her passion for a more perfect union of power and principle.

Picture credits Morning Dress from 'Ackermann's Repository', ca. 1820 and T. Kajiwara, Emma Goldman

Planet, people and profit

Sometimes an image calls out for words. For a sculptor, a painter, a photographer, it could be the other way around.

Following the filigree of Facebook, fingers on keys like soles on a gallery floor, I come to this photo and catch myself longing. The caption offers no clues about sculptor or setting, only this:

WELCOME TO 2010

THE BEST AWAITS YOU

In caps, a declaration, mirroring the letters of the figure huddled, or healing -  or just high above the fray? The little people look up, or down, in open, yearning gestures. No one in a rush to turn away. The light, the inconceivable letters promise a perspective on the future unavailable to readers of the daily news. Good things shall prevail.

Did you notice the figure's hand? There isn't one. It stops just short of tiny, slender people, lightly burdened by the fashion of the day. The sculpture's light endows them with something you nor I could fathom on our own. Call it hope. Name it humility or candor. Disbelieve their power to persuade. Yet, here they are, handling the future with aplomb.

Why does it sound naive to say the little people, we, are the purveyors of light? Because the powerful have grabbed our expectations, cynicism loves company, sophistication struts around in bling?

Time to listen to a woman like Emily Pilloton talk about the 'triple bottom line' - planet, people and profit.

WELCOME TO 2010. THE BEST AWAITS YOU.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Emily Pilloton
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

Photo credit Christine Balland

Reagan regalia

Before I hit delete concerning
yet another email from my dad to us,
his ever loving kids,
I wonder this.

Why did pater send it?

We’ve seen, we’ve heard
the trickle down nostalgia
for the good ol’ days
with Reagan at the wheel.

Dad knows how I feel.

His ruly children nod and smile --
the rest of us have turned our nodding sideways,
our smiles turned upside down
by homeless millions leaving town.

Is he hoping for some latter day conversion?

Wasn’t there ballooning debt
and unrestrained expenditure on war
in days of yore with Reagan king?
But that was war!
And now, they say, is socialist upending to
the status of our quo
by a savior who is secretly
our foe.

Religion clouds the vision, this is true.

The banks and lobby lords
who hold the purses
masquerade as kindly nurses
on the battlefield
attending to our wounds.
Take heed before you swoon
for any mortal with a mortuary tune.

The tired, the poor, the yearning to be free
are on the street,
our recollections incomplete.

Bojangles on my feet, I hit delete.

Photo credit White House Photographic Office