The New York Times article on the new stage of adolescence – the period that covers the twenties, approximately – is still making the rounds. Twenty-somethings graduate, but they do not go immediately into the work force. They remain in a sort of twilight adolescence, seem dependent, try on different sorts of lives. Life is longer; this is a luxury we can now afford. Strange how people are reacting as it the piece were somehow a criticism. But not at all – an observation. Things have changed. Different theories might explain it, but they don’t matter. All social change comes about through a strange nexus of events – change is very rarely good or bad or even intentional. It just is. People have protested that twenty-somethings don’t want to hang out for several years in what is essentially a state of animated suspension. They have been forced into the status by the economic climate, by the dismal job outlook. They have complained that it simply isn’t true, that young people are more pressured than ever to accomplish great things, build up their CV.
I say that none of this matters; the essential thing is that we now have yet another model for plotting out a life. The more numerous and the more flexible the options for creating a life happen to be, the greater the number of potentially satisfied people. Whatever the reason twenty-somethings happen to find themselves in an in-between place, they can now profit from the position. You take the hand life deals you and you play it. Now we have been handed one more way of making sense out of the play, another option for winning.
I rejoice. I have a lost decade, a period that I have always looked back upon with shame. Now I have the means to reclaim that time. So many horrors – too many and too deep to speak of. And then I grew. It took me a long time to break away from home, to realize that I was just reproducing my own miserable situation. Little by little I clawed my way out, started to make decisions. It took a lot of time to get educated, to see through the fog. But I did. And I want to take back those years as a victory rather than a loss. It was a time of voyage and sorrow. There were many adventures.
I have a distressing image from that time – a young woman on her knees praying in a house that was not hers. Begging God to deliver her from the prison of her life. God of course did not listen – and, indeed, there were many Gods colliding in that house. Big blown up deities making all the decisions, creating reality, brewing the very air that she breathed. Did God deliver her from that place? Of course not. It was in God’s interest that she stay there. But as round-faced, helpless, and earnest as she was, she finally developed a tiny bit of any edge. It got sharper. She began to carve her way out, cut the God stuff away, excise a life that was still animate from a clump of fat. Then she got on a plane and it was off to find a new day.
Yes, twenty-somethings! Rejoice in this new possibility! Take your time and think. Experience. Remember that it is only in the past thirty years of so that we have even been able to conceive of self-fulfillment as a serious life’s goal.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Perpetual alienation....
I imagine myself a person of limited education with one of those jobs requiring a couple of years training – that is, a job that requires a very specific knowledge but no larger sense of a system, a set of skills that is not transferable, a set of skills that creates a mini-dictator insufficiently knowledgeable to move past the little box – making, say, $40,000 a year.
I then imagine that I have lost the job.
I further imagine that I get my news from Fox; I do not read, so make no effort to keep up on serious news. I watch football while drinking enormous soft drinks on Sunday afternoons with large groups of middle-aged friends who are quite overweight, many of whom have also lost their jobs. I go to church. We joke. The weeks pass. The savings go. I panic.
I cannot distinguish between the two parties. I have no job and the Democrats don’t have any plans to get me one. I don’t know anything about the obstructionism perpetrated by the Republicans because I only watch Fox. All politicians are equally bad in my opinion. I want to throw the scoundrels out, so I start to scream with the Tea Party. I don’t know who they are or what they stand for: I just want a job. I want things to be the way they used to me.
I just want a job. I want an income. I want a job. I want an income….
The very essence of making a pact with the devil is that we don’t know that we are doing it. Faustus is an exception, or maybe a metaphor – he represents that semi-conscious striking of a bargain. But the real horror is that we don’t recognize what we have done. Living in a world created by Fox news, we agree with the Republicans that freedom exists and that it means leaving the Bush tax cuts for the rich in place. We scream about activist liberal judges, Obama’s birth certificate, and we don’t notice that we have signed onto a world divided between the wealth and moderately wealthy on the one hand, and a mass of semi-educated, massively unemployed, un- or underinsured , sometimes homeless people. We have been turned into a perpetual underclass, easily controllable through religious platitudes, pulled into friendly complicity through gay-bashing, fear of immigrants. We can no longer pay for higher education; the lines are drawn forever.
This person I imagine is the person I would have been had I been born about a generation later, had my dad been born in 1960 where I was born, myself then pushed up later. My dad comes from a farm family of eight children. He never would have gone to university, which means that he would not have worked his way up into the middle class in my generation as he did in his. He would have been a foreman or some such thing, itinerant. His success is purely aleatory, nothing that he deserves. He worked hard, but that is not a trait that is valued. He works patiently within a box, dependent on the large father up there in charge, and the large father has no interest in him, no matter what a busy bee he is. My dad could not make it in this world.
I wonder if he grasps this in some primal way, and if this is why he is so furious at the usual imaginary suspects? In his old age, guided by Rush Limbaugh, he has turned into a raging anti-intellectual, a moronic repeater of the cyclical messages of hate towards the bogeymen against which the Right’s campaigns are directed. He is undoubtedly in love with Sarah Palin; he has no more ability to pick out a charlatan than he has to fly to the moon.
If his spuming anger is a latent recognition of his own helplessness before the forces that have overtaken the country, marginalizing him and his (our) kind, I feel a little better about it. I generally find it agonizingly embarrassing that my family so eagerly colludes with the Republican demagogues in their own destruction instead of just getting an education and trying to hold back the division of the country into a permanently divided over and underclass.
On the other hand, I have moved out of the underclass and am now firmly established in the upper one. Why do I care? Why should I pull my hair out worrying about the masses who will lose their savings to greedy purveyors of health care? It isn’t my problem – I have a job, I have health care. I don’t have to leave this place. And even if I do, it will be for an admin job with good health care. Philosophically, I do not spontaneously the position of “let them eat cake.” But they have acquiesced in their own annihilation. They needed to think a little and they punted. So this is not my problem. I quit anguishing about my lack of statehood and embrace my stats as cosmopolitan.
I then imagine that I have lost the job.
I further imagine that I get my news from Fox; I do not read, so make no effort to keep up on serious news. I watch football while drinking enormous soft drinks on Sunday afternoons with large groups of middle-aged friends who are quite overweight, many of whom have also lost their jobs. I go to church. We joke. The weeks pass. The savings go. I panic.
I cannot distinguish between the two parties. I have no job and the Democrats don’t have any plans to get me one. I don’t know anything about the obstructionism perpetrated by the Republicans because I only watch Fox. All politicians are equally bad in my opinion. I want to throw the scoundrels out, so I start to scream with the Tea Party. I don’t know who they are or what they stand for: I just want a job. I want things to be the way they used to me.
I just want a job. I want an income. I want a job. I want an income….
The very essence of making a pact with the devil is that we don’t know that we are doing it. Faustus is an exception, or maybe a metaphor – he represents that semi-conscious striking of a bargain. But the real horror is that we don’t recognize what we have done. Living in a world created by Fox news, we agree with the Republicans that freedom exists and that it means leaving the Bush tax cuts for the rich in place. We scream about activist liberal judges, Obama’s birth certificate, and we don’t notice that we have signed onto a world divided between the wealth and moderately wealthy on the one hand, and a mass of semi-educated, massively unemployed, un- or underinsured , sometimes homeless people. We have been turned into a perpetual underclass, easily controllable through religious platitudes, pulled into friendly complicity through gay-bashing, fear of immigrants. We can no longer pay for higher education; the lines are drawn forever.
This person I imagine is the person I would have been had I been born about a generation later, had my dad been born in 1960 where I was born, myself then pushed up later. My dad comes from a farm family of eight children. He never would have gone to university, which means that he would not have worked his way up into the middle class in my generation as he did in his. He would have been a foreman or some such thing, itinerant. His success is purely aleatory, nothing that he deserves. He worked hard, but that is not a trait that is valued. He works patiently within a box, dependent on the large father up there in charge, and the large father has no interest in him, no matter what a busy bee he is. My dad could not make it in this world.
I wonder if he grasps this in some primal way, and if this is why he is so furious at the usual imaginary suspects? In his old age, guided by Rush Limbaugh, he has turned into a raging anti-intellectual, a moronic repeater of the cyclical messages of hate towards the bogeymen against which the Right’s campaigns are directed. He is undoubtedly in love with Sarah Palin; he has no more ability to pick out a charlatan than he has to fly to the moon.
If his spuming anger is a latent recognition of his own helplessness before the forces that have overtaken the country, marginalizing him and his (our) kind, I feel a little better about it. I generally find it agonizingly embarrassing that my family so eagerly colludes with the Republican demagogues in their own destruction instead of just getting an education and trying to hold back the division of the country into a permanently divided over and underclass.
On the other hand, I have moved out of the underclass and am now firmly established in the upper one. Why do I care? Why should I pull my hair out worrying about the masses who will lose their savings to greedy purveyors of health care? It isn’t my problem – I have a job, I have health care. I don’t have to leave this place. And even if I do, it will be for an admin job with good health care. Philosophically, I do not spontaneously the position of “let them eat cake.” But they have acquiesced in their own annihilation. They needed to think a little and they punted. So this is not my problem. I quit anguishing about my lack of statehood and embrace my stats as cosmopolitan.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Our leader
Bright as a little button, huge head perched on a wiry little girl’s body. Slightly wall-eyed. Unfailingly chipper. Can’t help but like her, want to pat her on the head.
But she is one of those kiwis enraptured with the intricacies of form. Utter indifference to substance; for her, the university is a dazzling maze of arcana, a series of secrets penetrable only by druids. To have a prosperous academic career means purely and simply to be initiated into the code. Success bears no relation to good deeds; hers is the fundamentalism of academic ideologies. One learns to decipher the kabbala, progressing through promotion not by doing promotable things but by reciting the magical words in the correct order – by getting the form filled out just so. But the catch is that one cannot know how to fill out the form. No one can know but the initiated, that is, those with access to the Faculty of Arts committees. Hence her reason for being. Whatever she suggests, we must needs follow, because only she among us knows how to utter the charms correctly. She possesses the magic. She crossed out all of my “second semester” and replaced them with “semester 2.” She diligently changed my lower case names of department (history department, politics department) to upper case. Not a single change of substance, not one. And yet my copy was black with her little changes.
Cute as a gamine. But look more closely and suddenly you realize that she is coiled up inside tight as an old fashioned alarms clock ready to snap and unwind, lightning fast, reverse reverse. If she started spinning she would never stop, but go careening into the ethersphere. She must control the crossing of every t, the dotting of every i that she touches; her hold on sanity depends upon it.
(Can you imagine her putting her feet up with a beer in her hands?)
She is the quintessential teachers’ pet, perky little brown-noser, the ultimate goody-goody, the administration’s little toady. She breathes utter submission, devotion, to her higher cause, the bright shining beacon of the Faculty of Arts. She worships at that altar. And therefore as a leader she is an embarrassment, one who cringes rather than advocates. A sad little quisling, a ludicrous little party member. She would be Hitler’s secretary, the Pope’s housekeeper, Cody Jarrett’s mother. Top of the world, Ma.
Absolutely adorable and absolutely disgraceful.
But she is one of those kiwis enraptured with the intricacies of form. Utter indifference to substance; for her, the university is a dazzling maze of arcana, a series of secrets penetrable only by druids. To have a prosperous academic career means purely and simply to be initiated into the code. Success bears no relation to good deeds; hers is the fundamentalism of academic ideologies. One learns to decipher the kabbala, progressing through promotion not by doing promotable things but by reciting the magical words in the correct order – by getting the form filled out just so. But the catch is that one cannot know how to fill out the form. No one can know but the initiated, that is, those with access to the Faculty of Arts committees. Hence her reason for being. Whatever she suggests, we must needs follow, because only she among us knows how to utter the charms correctly. She possesses the magic. She crossed out all of my “second semester” and replaced them with “semester 2.” She diligently changed my lower case names of department (history department, politics department) to upper case. Not a single change of substance, not one. And yet my copy was black with her little changes.
Cute as a gamine. But look more closely and suddenly you realize that she is coiled up inside tight as an old fashioned alarms clock ready to snap and unwind, lightning fast, reverse reverse. If she started spinning she would never stop, but go careening into the ethersphere. She must control the crossing of every t, the dotting of every i that she touches; her hold on sanity depends upon it.
(Can you imagine her putting her feet up with a beer in her hands?)
She is the quintessential teachers’ pet, perky little brown-noser, the ultimate goody-goody, the administration’s little toady. She breathes utter submission, devotion, to her higher cause, the bright shining beacon of the Faculty of Arts. She worships at that altar. And therefore as a leader she is an embarrassment, one who cringes rather than advocates. A sad little quisling, a ludicrous little party member. She would be Hitler’s secretary, the Pope’s housekeeper, Cody Jarrett’s mother. Top of the world, Ma.
Absolutely adorable and absolutely disgraceful.
Friday, July 2, 2010
It might be otherwise....
She has a fuzzy golden-brown perm, a kinky halo that she has worn since at least 1984. In her overdetermined world, a woman with straight hair must have a perm – keeping straight flat hair is not a matter of taste, but a crime against common sense. And someone told her once that a woman with a high forehead must wear a fringe. This rule too has been incorporated into her world view. There are no exceptions. She once said to me that it is a fact of nature that I must wear a fringe (actually, she called them “bangs,” our Midwestern word).
That certain things were inevitably right and others wrong was part of my life from the very beginning. I experienced this triage with desperation: I could only be good by agreeing fully and in every case. There was no agreeing to disagree. There is the seed of future sorrow and ambivalence. It is a heavy burden to live in a world wherein you can only be good by accepting without question a list of rules that are, on the face of it, so arbitrary that any person with the least amount of common sense would go, “What?” Why is chocolate cake with white frosting bad? Why are only braids, not two ponytails, called pigtails? Why does the Pope decide which movies can be watched? (Even she said sadly that it seemed unfair that Catholics could not watch “The Greatest Show on Earth,” a movie she longed to see when it came out.) Why were boys dumb and girls who liked them crazy? Why does a person who divorces and remarries go to hell?
I had a game when I was a teenager – on the rare occasion I went to a restaurant, I would sometimes order the last thing I would normally choose. So if I went to the Sirloin Stockade, I would chose a steak, a baked potato, and jello cubes for dessert. The idea, I guess, was to prove to myself that things could be otherwise. I still do the game with myself, in my head, imagining my life with no children. My children are central to my identity – they are who I am. I have always wanted them, always dreamed about them, always knew that I would have them. So the hardest leap of imagination for me is to reinvent my life without them. I force myself to do it. Because I do believe that things could be otherwise. The rules that she laid out as natural law simply are not. I do not have to wear a fringe.
Living in exile has a logic. It is proof that I did not have to live anywhere in particular. It is proof that I do not have to live according to those rules. It means that we Americans are not naturally right, but rather irrational Lockeans, that our most fundamental beliefs are grounded in easily-identifiable myths, just as are those of all cultures, and that they can be deconstructed, de-chunked, reduced to a series of primal reactions to a philosopher over-relied upon. Things could be otherwise in the US; they could be much better. We don’t even need to go back and change the reading programs of our founding fathers: we could require high school students to study political philosophers and think about what they best sort of society would be. We could force them to write essays at the age of, say, fourteen, reacting to Locke, and then ask them to read Rousseau and respond to him. We could demystify our political discourse. We could train people to think, to be responsible for their ideas. Then things would be better.
These are the complaints of one in exile: looking over there and picking out the problems. Slowly training myself for what I have now begun to realize as inevitable, that there is just too much that is toxic in that society for me to accept it in the way I used, too, with full-hearted ease and a sense of belonging, of being at home. I no longer have the urge to kiss the soil when I land at LAX. I used to be so willing to embrace the fuzzy golden-brown perm. Usually we become more tolerant of what is our own as we get older. For me the process is just the opposite, slowly approaching the point where I can begin to contemplate without grief finally letting go. Where I can hear criticisms about us and shrug them off, because I am, after all, a cosmopolitan.
Christopher Hitchens has cancer of the esophagus. If ever there was a person who manifested in his very being the proposition that it might be otherwise, it is he. He is infuriating, self-centered, vain, and smart, smart, smart and thoughtful. Half of the time I want to throw what he writes out the window; but whatever he writes is interesting. If I prayed I would pray for his recovery, even though he of course would not appreciate that. I will hope actively for his recovery.
That certain things were inevitably right and others wrong was part of my life from the very beginning. I experienced this triage with desperation: I could only be good by agreeing fully and in every case. There was no agreeing to disagree. There is the seed of future sorrow and ambivalence. It is a heavy burden to live in a world wherein you can only be good by accepting without question a list of rules that are, on the face of it, so arbitrary that any person with the least amount of common sense would go, “What?” Why is chocolate cake with white frosting bad? Why are only braids, not two ponytails, called pigtails? Why does the Pope decide which movies can be watched? (Even she said sadly that it seemed unfair that Catholics could not watch “The Greatest Show on Earth,” a movie she longed to see when it came out.) Why were boys dumb and girls who liked them crazy? Why does a person who divorces and remarries go to hell?
I had a game when I was a teenager – on the rare occasion I went to a restaurant, I would sometimes order the last thing I would normally choose. So if I went to the Sirloin Stockade, I would chose a steak, a baked potato, and jello cubes for dessert. The idea, I guess, was to prove to myself that things could be otherwise. I still do the game with myself, in my head, imagining my life with no children. My children are central to my identity – they are who I am. I have always wanted them, always dreamed about them, always knew that I would have them. So the hardest leap of imagination for me is to reinvent my life without them. I force myself to do it. Because I do believe that things could be otherwise. The rules that she laid out as natural law simply are not. I do not have to wear a fringe.
Living in exile has a logic. It is proof that I did not have to live anywhere in particular. It is proof that I do not have to live according to those rules. It means that we Americans are not naturally right, but rather irrational Lockeans, that our most fundamental beliefs are grounded in easily-identifiable myths, just as are those of all cultures, and that they can be deconstructed, de-chunked, reduced to a series of primal reactions to a philosopher over-relied upon. Things could be otherwise in the US; they could be much better. We don’t even need to go back and change the reading programs of our founding fathers: we could require high school students to study political philosophers and think about what they best sort of society would be. We could force them to write essays at the age of, say, fourteen, reacting to Locke, and then ask them to read Rousseau and respond to him. We could demystify our political discourse. We could train people to think, to be responsible for their ideas. Then things would be better.
These are the complaints of one in exile: looking over there and picking out the problems. Slowly training myself for what I have now begun to realize as inevitable, that there is just too much that is toxic in that society for me to accept it in the way I used, too, with full-hearted ease and a sense of belonging, of being at home. I no longer have the urge to kiss the soil when I land at LAX. I used to be so willing to embrace the fuzzy golden-brown perm. Usually we become more tolerant of what is our own as we get older. For me the process is just the opposite, slowly approaching the point where I can begin to contemplate without grief finally letting go. Where I can hear criticisms about us and shrug them off, because I am, after all, a cosmopolitan.
Christopher Hitchens has cancer of the esophagus. If ever there was a person who manifested in his very being the proposition that it might be otherwise, it is he. He is infuriating, self-centered, vain, and smart, smart, smart and thoughtful. Half of the time I want to throw what he writes out the window; but whatever he writes is interesting. If I prayed I would pray for his recovery, even though he of course would not appreciate that. I will hope actively for his recovery.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Approaching resignation
Approaching resignation – beginning to accept that the reality of home includes all the semi-literate haters, the obstructionists spawned by God knows how many repeats of the Andrew Jackson election back in 1828 (I still can’t move on from that book). That demographic is supposed to be dying out, but in the meantime it is still around and still really really loud.
And in the meantime they have created a world wherein in makes sense to blast Obama for not being angry enough about the oil spill. Worse, wherein in makes sense to acknowledge fully that there was nothing on earth that he could do about it (unless as Bob Scheer points out he had spoken out belligerently against drilling in the first place and routed Interior for not enforcing regulations, BEFORE the disaster – and yet of course he couldn’t because he was and is still trying to keep Republicans in the game), all the while excoriating him for not manifesting sufficient rhetorical upset. It is simply grotesque. I cannot be part of a society that has so easily given up on reality.
This does not mean that I like the benighted country in which I am exiled, only that I am beginning to accept that I truly am exiled. This is not a temporary state. I have no home. I mean, what I am supposed to do with Maureen Dowd, Emily Bazelon? People who encourage all the blither and emotion, encourage us to give vent to the worst aspects of ourselves because the atmosphere now gives us license to do that? Nothing. I have nothing to do with them. They should be speaking out against the idiocy instead of stoking it.
Another related reason to deplore my former homeland is the appalling quality of movie reviews in its major publications. I cannot live in a land where David Denby can be taken seriously as a movie critic. I have long been dismayed by what passes for reviews at home – long plot summaries with discussions of whether the characters are “realistic” or compelling. Our reviewers, never maturing beyond a third grade conception of film as an exposition of a literal reality, are blind to anything but the stupidest most fundamental meaning. Denby’s latest ridiculous review of a gorgeous Argentinian film, “El Secreto de sus ojos,” completely misses its point, the problem and importance of memory to Argentianians trying to deal with the past. Not that an analysis would have to spend much time on the political implications of memory – individual memory in that context would do the trick. But my God – the character of Morales does after all stick his wife’s murder in a little cachot in his own house for thirty years, and Denby acts as if the literal level is adequate to explain the significance. And that was in the New Yorker! What’s wrong with us?
How is our literal mindedness in the world of thought related to our privileging of emotion over fact? Manifestations of the same distaste for thinking. Who wouldn’t rather just get furious and bellow than actually think through a problem? And who wouldn’t rather just melt into a thoughtless two hours than actually grapple with a problem? But surely we could manage our natural desire not to think a little better – and at least admit that it is better to think than not to think.
And in the meantime they have created a world wherein in makes sense to blast Obama for not being angry enough about the oil spill. Worse, wherein in makes sense to acknowledge fully that there was nothing on earth that he could do about it (unless as Bob Scheer points out he had spoken out belligerently against drilling in the first place and routed Interior for not enforcing regulations, BEFORE the disaster – and yet of course he couldn’t because he was and is still trying to keep Republicans in the game), all the while excoriating him for not manifesting sufficient rhetorical upset. It is simply grotesque. I cannot be part of a society that has so easily given up on reality.
This does not mean that I like the benighted country in which I am exiled, only that I am beginning to accept that I truly am exiled. This is not a temporary state. I have no home. I mean, what I am supposed to do with Maureen Dowd, Emily Bazelon? People who encourage all the blither and emotion, encourage us to give vent to the worst aspects of ourselves because the atmosphere now gives us license to do that? Nothing. I have nothing to do with them. They should be speaking out against the idiocy instead of stoking it.
Another related reason to deplore my former homeland is the appalling quality of movie reviews in its major publications. I cannot live in a land where David Denby can be taken seriously as a movie critic. I have long been dismayed by what passes for reviews at home – long plot summaries with discussions of whether the characters are “realistic” or compelling. Our reviewers, never maturing beyond a third grade conception of film as an exposition of a literal reality, are blind to anything but the stupidest most fundamental meaning. Denby’s latest ridiculous review of a gorgeous Argentinian film, “El Secreto de sus ojos,” completely misses its point, the problem and importance of memory to Argentianians trying to deal with the past. Not that an analysis would have to spend much time on the political implications of memory – individual memory in that context would do the trick. But my God – the character of Morales does after all stick his wife’s murder in a little cachot in his own house for thirty years, and Denby acts as if the literal level is adequate to explain the significance. And that was in the New Yorker! What’s wrong with us?
How is our literal mindedness in the world of thought related to our privileging of emotion over fact? Manifestations of the same distaste for thinking. Who wouldn’t rather just get furious and bellow than actually think through a problem? And who wouldn’t rather just melt into a thoughtless two hours than actually grapple with a problem? But surely we could manage our natural desire not to think a little better – and at least admit that it is better to think than not to think.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
The Great Hatred
I had been blaming Rush Limbaugh for alienating me from country and family, and then I discovered that our great hatred actually took form already during the 1828 presidential campaign during Andrew Jackson, the source to which all that is mean and evil in America can be traced, and John Quincy Adams, avatar of European-friendly intellectualism. Our great hatred is bigger than any of us; Rush only tapped into a hideous sewer that has been roiling for a very long time. I had already discovered the nastiness of the Jefferson campaign, but that was just the newspapers. In 1828 that vicious rhetoric became part of campaigning in general. During that election the parties turned into propaganda machines completely uninterested in spreading the truth about their own candidate and focused entirely upon destroying the other.
Why is it that even when we can all read the history we are still swayed by what people say during campaigns? The lying was there in 1828 working its magic – John Quincy Adams accused of spending tax payer money to buy a billiard table. His family produced the receipts to show that he had bought it with his own money, and they said no more about it. But that wasn’t enough – the lie continued to circulate. Adams refused to “electioneer,” get out in public and defend himself. Of course he was gobbled up by the Jackson lying machine. If you didn’t respond fast and loud you lost the narrative, you lose the narrative, you will forever lose the narrative. The truth held no interest, it holds no interest, will never hold interest. Is this comforting or horrifying? Is it comforting or horrifying that that election of 1828 was, like recent elections, interested only in brandishing fake ideologies (fake because winning is the only ideology, and winning in this context is only vile because the winners use their victory to prove their masculinity), that it was the first in a genealogy that leads eventually to Lee Atwater and Karl Rove? Is it comforting or horrifying to realize that the divisions of my own family and my own exile are not my fault but that of an ancient cesspool of implacable hatred between advocates of states’ rights and advocates of centralization? We are enemies despite ourselves, victims of a fight into which we were born.
Andrew Jackson represents everything most despicable about American politics. A military general supremely indifferent to the rule of law, racist, imperialist, folksy, illiterate, choleric – but apparently radiating that aura of being able to pee long distances and spread sperm all over the rest of us, that stupid swaggering certainty that passes for virility in the backwaters of our divided country. His type is monotonously familiar, and the dregs of society continue to rise up ready to support him and his avatars, cheering him on in the half-witted language of Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin.
I am moderate by nature. I wouldn’t read a book about Andrew Jackson and spontaneously hate him under normal circumstances. I wouldn’t care – he has been dead for almost two hundred years. But exiled as I am, separated from my country and alienated from my family by this systemic divide between Republicans and Democrats, or, I guess by a deeper difference between authoritarians and people who just really don’t care what other people do, I feel am angry. I am furious at Rush for having turned my family against me and furious at Andrew Jackson and his machine, who turns out to have been responsible for the likes of Rush.
Why is it that even when we can all read the history we are still swayed by what people say during campaigns? The lying was there in 1828 working its magic – John Quincy Adams accused of spending tax payer money to buy a billiard table. His family produced the receipts to show that he had bought it with his own money, and they said no more about it. But that wasn’t enough – the lie continued to circulate. Adams refused to “electioneer,” get out in public and defend himself. Of course he was gobbled up by the Jackson lying machine. If you didn’t respond fast and loud you lost the narrative, you lose the narrative, you will forever lose the narrative. The truth held no interest, it holds no interest, will never hold interest. Is this comforting or horrifying? Is it comforting or horrifying that that election of 1828 was, like recent elections, interested only in brandishing fake ideologies (fake because winning is the only ideology, and winning in this context is only vile because the winners use their victory to prove their masculinity), that it was the first in a genealogy that leads eventually to Lee Atwater and Karl Rove? Is it comforting or horrifying to realize that the divisions of my own family and my own exile are not my fault but that of an ancient cesspool of implacable hatred between advocates of states’ rights and advocates of centralization? We are enemies despite ourselves, victims of a fight into which we were born.
Andrew Jackson represents everything most despicable about American politics. A military general supremely indifferent to the rule of law, racist, imperialist, folksy, illiterate, choleric – but apparently radiating that aura of being able to pee long distances and spread sperm all over the rest of us, that stupid swaggering certainty that passes for virility in the backwaters of our divided country. His type is monotonously familiar, and the dregs of society continue to rise up ready to support him and his avatars, cheering him on in the half-witted language of Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin.
I am moderate by nature. I wouldn’t read a book about Andrew Jackson and spontaneously hate him under normal circumstances. I wouldn’t care – he has been dead for almost two hundred years. But exiled as I am, separated from my country and alienated from my family by this systemic divide between Republicans and Democrats, or, I guess by a deeper difference between authoritarians and people who just really don’t care what other people do, I feel am angry. I am furious at Rush for having turned my family against me and furious at Andrew Jackson and his machine, who turns out to have been responsible for the likes of Rush.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Augustine's Confession and Mary Karr
Mary Karr’s Lit, it turns out, is the story of an Augustinian conversion. I was more than a little surprised when we began to move from drunken rage at life's unfairness and general rowdiness into Catholic spirituality. She notes that many of her lapsed Catholic friends were horrified when she started to turn in that direction, demanding to how such an intelligent person as she could take on Catholicism with all of its misogynistic superstition and baggage. I don’t have any trouble understanding her attraction – how can you not love the incense and the rustling of the satin as they parade down the aisle holding those great big crucifixes. But what I do want to know is why Mary Karr, a woman who at the time she begins her instruction is divorced and has no intention of remaining single forever and who is even enjoying a sex life, why she gets to waltz into Catholicism and partake of all the consolation it has to offer, while I, a person who was raised in the Church, who left the Church with the greatest imaginable sorrow because I couldn’t adhere to the fundamental law not to remarry after a divorce (a decision that took me years to final make reluctant as I was to leave the Church; indeed, for several years I imagined living like the Sebastian’s already-married sister Julia whom Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited wants to marry, but who finally refuses him because as a Catholic she cannot face the idea of remarriage after a divorce); who has not taken communion since my remarriage; who lives outside the Church because I cannot in good conscience live within it, lives excluded forever? I run around in circles like a hopeful little dog begging to be let back in and being kicked in the face, while Mary Karr just bursts right in. My first instinct is to ask myself what possible difference it could make to me that she is welcomed in – that she finds spiritual guides who teach her to pray and that God actually ANSWERS her. Her inclusion in the Church has nothing to do with my exclusion. That is always my first instinct. What’s it to me?
And yet, in this case, as I grow more distant from the book, achieve critical distance, I feel a righteous anger brewing. The positive thing is that it helps me to consolidate my own position, which is that I will not sneak through the backdoor into an institution according to whose rules, rules recently reiterated by the pedophile-friendly Pope, I am not allowed to receive the greatest gift the Church has to offer, the sacraments. I do not regret my decision. I regret the Pope’s decision. But not mine. I would rather not be Catholic than a half-assed one who really isn’t supposed to be there, who will never be accepted fully by the boys in charge. But the thing that drives me crazy it that it doesn’t bother Mary Karr that the Pope doesn't want her there, or, at least that he wouldn't if she bothered to ask. And why doesn't she ask? Because she doesn't accept the Pope as the head of the Church. What? So how in the name of sense is she Catholic? The best the rest of us would get if we rejected the Pope would be Anglican. Still, there she is typing away about her Augustinian-style conversion. Who is this woman? Why doesn't she have to lie awake at night wracked with guilt? Why does she just get to fall to her knees, have a chat with God, and then GET things from Him? This after she has gotten to be an alcoholic, squandering years of talent, self-indulgent, mean, furious, ungrateful, and self-pitying, who finally decides to be Catholic and instantly sets up direct communication with God. I want to know why. I want to know exactly what I’ve done that is so monstrous that I get banished to a desert island from God maliciously tempts me from time to time with promises of return only to throw them, cackling, back in my face. All of the praying in the world has not only not gotten me a reprieve, it’s gotten me shattering refusal after shattering refusal. After reading Lit I tried Thomas Merton, whom Karr found a sympathetic guide for her spiritual journey. I’m trying, but the distance between the sympathetic God whom Merton desires to please and the mocking God who enjoys refusing my every request and then sending bad luck on top of it is so great that I’m baffled.
On what planet does this Catholicism that she has discovered exist? This institution that comforts and accepts? I’m sure it’s easy to convert to a gorgeous ritual-based institution that offers the love of a genuinely kind God. But that Church is a figment of Mary Karr's imagination. The real Church sets a couple of bars that many of us can’t manage to clear and then cheerfully kicks us out without appeal when we don’t make it. It blithers against girls who tempt boys to lust. It publishes the names of parishioners with the sum of their yearly contributions to the Church. It holds itself up as the supreme male arbitrator over all of our silly female lives, quietly embracing pedophiles, while ignoring women. It is bursting at the seams with fathers, fathers, fathers, far as the eye can see, who can do no wrong, who can smoke in the cars with the window up, who can order the girls to clean the kitchen while they watch football and call for a beer. That’s that Church I get, anyway, and it has booted me. Where did she get hers? And why can’t I have some of it?
And yet, in this case, as I grow more distant from the book, achieve critical distance, I feel a righteous anger brewing. The positive thing is that it helps me to consolidate my own position, which is that I will not sneak through the backdoor into an institution according to whose rules, rules recently reiterated by the pedophile-friendly Pope, I am not allowed to receive the greatest gift the Church has to offer, the sacraments. I do not regret my decision. I regret the Pope’s decision. But not mine. I would rather not be Catholic than a half-assed one who really isn’t supposed to be there, who will never be accepted fully by the boys in charge. But the thing that drives me crazy it that it doesn’t bother Mary Karr that the Pope doesn't want her there, or, at least that he wouldn't if she bothered to ask. And why doesn't she ask? Because she doesn't accept the Pope as the head of the Church. What? So how in the name of sense is she Catholic? The best the rest of us would get if we rejected the Pope would be Anglican. Still, there she is typing away about her Augustinian-style conversion. Who is this woman? Why doesn't she have to lie awake at night wracked with guilt? Why does she just get to fall to her knees, have a chat with God, and then GET things from Him? This after she has gotten to be an alcoholic, squandering years of talent, self-indulgent, mean, furious, ungrateful, and self-pitying, who finally decides to be Catholic and instantly sets up direct communication with God. I want to know why. I want to know exactly what I’ve done that is so monstrous that I get banished to a desert island from God maliciously tempts me from time to time with promises of return only to throw them, cackling, back in my face. All of the praying in the world has not only not gotten me a reprieve, it’s gotten me shattering refusal after shattering refusal. After reading Lit I tried Thomas Merton, whom Karr found a sympathetic guide for her spiritual journey. I’m trying, but the distance between the sympathetic God whom Merton desires to please and the mocking God who enjoys refusing my every request and then sending bad luck on top of it is so great that I’m baffled.
On what planet does this Catholicism that she has discovered exist? This institution that comforts and accepts? I’m sure it’s easy to convert to a gorgeous ritual-based institution that offers the love of a genuinely kind God. But that Church is a figment of Mary Karr's imagination. The real Church sets a couple of bars that many of us can’t manage to clear and then cheerfully kicks us out without appeal when we don’t make it. It blithers against girls who tempt boys to lust. It publishes the names of parishioners with the sum of their yearly contributions to the Church. It holds itself up as the supreme male arbitrator over all of our silly female lives, quietly embracing pedophiles, while ignoring women. It is bursting at the seams with fathers, fathers, fathers, far as the eye can see, who can do no wrong, who can smoke in the cars with the window up, who can order the girls to clean the kitchen while they watch football and call for a beer. That’s that Church I get, anyway, and it has booted me. Where did she get hers? And why can’t I have some of it?
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