Timothy Tyson's Blood Done Sign My Name (2004) has been well recognized among American historians and was well reviewed, but I hadn't heard of it til my daughter Anya gave it to me for Christmas. I finished it tonight.
One of the extraordinary things about this book is the voice in which Tyson chose to write it, which makes me want to speak more personally than I normally would in even an informal review; but first--
his book is a personal history, a family history, a community history (of Oxford, NC, in 1970,disclosing the antecedents and consequences of a racial murder), a state history (esp. 1898-1980), and a reflection on national history as it has been shaped by slavery and white supremacy. It is powerful conceptually, thematically, linguistically, and philosophically; and it is unpretentious to boot. It's both original and brave--professionally speaking it would have been safer to write in a more orthodox mode. But its personal voice is both appealing and, I finally saw, indispensable. In that way it reminds me of Kenji Yoshino's Covering, another remarkable work that most people would have done a different way (and so would have been unable to do).
The book begins with a day in 1970 when Tyson, then ten, is told by a neighbor that his (the neighbor's) father and brothers have just killed a ... black man. (The other boy uses the inevitable, dehumanizing term in the context; Tyson uses real names throughout.) The book unravels the story factually and emblematically.
When I was a graduate student at Cornell in this period (1967-1970), no one was murdered on campus, but there were guns whose relevance was racial, as a famous Newsweek cover photo showed (in one light). It's been a long time, but Tyson's book has stirred the memories. I'll see if I can write about them (separately). Whether or not I can do that, I gratefully salute Timothy Tyson.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Female Sports Violence
Female Sports Violence: Choosing a Context
The furor over Elizabeth Lambert's rough play in her Mountain West Conference women's soccer semifinal has so far been mostly about gender roles. It offers a chance for a second conversation, one about the ethics of sports--individual sports and sports as a whole. Both conversations also have a bearing on many other professional workplaces. If you haven't seen what Lambert did and would like to have that as background, here is a three-minute clip: newsy.com
Different sports (and other professions) have different cultures. Some but not all of these differences are about violence. Others are about cheating.
In contact sports what levels of roughness are acceptable or even desirable are a matter of continuous debate and adjustment, as in the relatively new rules designed to protect football quarterbacks. When refs may penalize players (and thus teams) for "unnecessary roughness" or "flagrant fouls," they make judgment calls. Where these sports--basketball, soccer, others--include women, conceptions of gender may well be involved. (Conceptions of maleness may be involved even in the absence of women.) That conversation is worthwhile.
But there is a broader conversation that the country generally avoids, a conversation about the idea and not just the rules of sports. In football and baseball, players often seek to deceive referees and umpires about whether they have actually caught a pass just above the ground or a foul ball that the player has chased into the first rows of spectators. Modern television technology provides something of a reality check, but the culture of the sport usually endorses the attempted trickery. Suppose a professional player admitted--on the field, in the moment of decision-- to having only trapped a pass or caught the baseball on a bounce off a seat. Does anyone think he would be celebrated by his teammates for his sportsmanship?
At the other end of the ethical spectrum is golf, where players call penalties on themselves, sometimes in situations where they would be unlikely to be caught or would at least have a plausible defense. These penalties may cost them tens of thousands of dollars in prize money. Golf is usually an individual sport, so the players are not typically up against the potential mockery or anger of teammates. But given the generous way players usually talk about their opponents, and the way they habitually respect the game itself, it seems likely that their behavior would be the same--and would not be faulted--even in a team context. It is a sport whose culture does not change when one shifts from the amateur to the professional level. If anything, its ethics become more formal, more distinct, and more deeply consensual.
Tennis--admittedly, another non-contact sport--is an interesting case of a sport where standards of behavior are visibly up for grabs. After a period in which verbal abuse of umpires was routinely tolerated, there are now fines, though not always significant ones. The New York Times ran an op-ed this summer whose writer, an economist, urged players to exploit the new challenge rules in bad faith for competitive advantage. (He did not urge them to break the rules.) In a televised match a few weeks before, Nowak Djokovic essentially conceded a key point to Andy Roddick because Djokovic knew the call, which had gone against Roddick, had been in error. Roddick won the point, the game, and the match. Was Djokovic a fool, or was he someone who wants to play a game in which victory and money are not the only values? Can you imagine Rafa Nadal cheating, or abusing his opponent?
These two sets of issues--levels of roughness and respect for the meaning and function of rules--are not unrelated. Both involve continuous choices in situations where a player may not be able to simultaneously maximize both the chance of victory and his--or her--loyalty to the sport itself. The people--men and women--now engaged in assessing Elizabeth Lambert's rough play would serve the country well if they broadened the discussion. So would bankers and investment professionals.
The furor over Elizabeth Lambert's rough play in her Mountain West Conference women's soccer semifinal has so far been mostly about gender roles. It offers a chance for a second conversation, one about the ethics of sports--individual sports and sports as a whole. Both conversations also have a bearing on many other professional workplaces. If you haven't seen what Lambert did and would like to have that as background, here is a three-minute clip: newsy.com
Different sports (and other professions) have different cultures. Some but not all of these differences are about violence. Others are about cheating.
In contact sports what levels of roughness are acceptable or even desirable are a matter of continuous debate and adjustment, as in the relatively new rules designed to protect football quarterbacks. When refs may penalize players (and thus teams) for "unnecessary roughness" or "flagrant fouls," they make judgment calls. Where these sports--basketball, soccer, others--include women, conceptions of gender may well be involved. (Conceptions of maleness may be involved even in the absence of women.) That conversation is worthwhile.
But there is a broader conversation that the country generally avoids, a conversation about the idea and not just the rules of sports. In football and baseball, players often seek to deceive referees and umpires about whether they have actually caught a pass just above the ground or a foul ball that the player has chased into the first rows of spectators. Modern television technology provides something of a reality check, but the culture of the sport usually endorses the attempted trickery. Suppose a professional player admitted--on the field, in the moment of decision-- to having only trapped a pass or caught the baseball on a bounce off a seat. Does anyone think he would be celebrated by his teammates for his sportsmanship?
At the other end of the ethical spectrum is golf, where players call penalties on themselves, sometimes in situations where they would be unlikely to be caught or would at least have a plausible defense. These penalties may cost them tens of thousands of dollars in prize money. Golf is usually an individual sport, so the players are not typically up against the potential mockery or anger of teammates. But given the generous way players usually talk about their opponents, and the way they habitually respect the game itself, it seems likely that their behavior would be the same--and would not be faulted--even in a team context. It is a sport whose culture does not change when one shifts from the amateur to the professional level. If anything, its ethics become more formal, more distinct, and more deeply consensual.
Tennis--admittedly, another non-contact sport--is an interesting case of a sport where standards of behavior are visibly up for grabs. After a period in which verbal abuse of umpires was routinely tolerated, there are now fines, though not always significant ones. The New York Times ran an op-ed this summer whose writer, an economist, urged players to exploit the new challenge rules in bad faith for competitive advantage. (He did not urge them to break the rules.) In a televised match a few weeks before, Nowak Djokovic essentially conceded a key point to Andy Roddick because Djokovic knew the call, which had gone against Roddick, had been in error. Roddick won the point, the game, and the match. Was Djokovic a fool, or was he someone who wants to play a game in which victory and money are not the only values? Can you imagine Rafa Nadal cheating, or abusing his opponent?
These two sets of issues--levels of roughness and respect for the meaning and function of rules--are not unrelated. Both involve continuous choices in situations where a player may not be able to simultaneously maximize both the chance of victory and his--or her--loyalty to the sport itself. The people--men and women--now engaged in assessing Elizabeth Lambert's rough play would serve the country well if they broadened the discussion. So would bankers and investment professionals.
Monday, November 2, 2009
movie journal: An Education (third draft)
A teacher myself, and someone of a certain age, I found myself more interested in this film by a minor character, Jenny's English teacher Miss Stubbs, than by its young protagonist (Jenny herself). I don't think that this was all about age.
For its first hour and more, "An Education" is a fable of romantic rebellion against loving but conventional parents, who see their daughter's striking academic talents only as a means by which she can enter Oxford in search of an economically promising husband. Jenny herself wants a wider space for passion, for life; in her revulsion against her parents' utilitarian aspirations she thinks she has found a glorious mentor in a handsome and charming man, David, who, as she soon knows, obtains money fraudulently and who, as at first she doesn't know, already has a wife and child and a history of affairs with pretty innocents. The sexual initiation he provides her on her seventeenth birthday is gentle but, apparently (the scene is discreet, all but skipped over), mechanical and short-lived. But she remains dazzled by his other gifts--art auctions, trips to Paris, a veneer of chic fashion and the trappings of culture. When she sacrifices her school work to pursue this affair, she is expelled; and suddenly she has to contemplate Oxford as likely to be unreachable rather than as a vague invitation to social advancement. When it seems to be gone, she begins to understand what else it might be.
Her changed perspective is close to arriving too late. Her headmistress is scornful and unforgiving. But Jenny has the wit and the honesty to submit herself to the authority of Miss Stubbs, an unmarried, thirty-something exemplar of intellectual independence and personal integrity. In the full early glow of her infatuation with David, Jenny has rejected Miss Stubbs, to her beautiful face, as 'dead,' when the teacher tried to call her to something more substantial than seduction. But now, and especially once she has seen Miss Stubbs' modest but stylish apartment, full of real books, Jenny is quick to see how uncomprehending she herself has been. When she asks for help, Miss Stubbs is relieved rather than reproachful, and apparently she also has practical abilities and resources, since the scene soon shifts to Oxford.
It is there that in a voiceover Jenny allows us and herself to see that deep ambiguities remain. While her idea of an education has grown and deepened, she has acquired a certain ruthlessness in her pursuit of it. She tells an undergraduate suitor that she would be thrilled to discover Paris in his company, lying to him in order to encourage his advances and advance the trip. (By this time though she sees things through such new eyes that her words are not far from the truth.) One wonders whether Miss Stubbs, when younger, had to work through similar temptations, and whether her solitary life expresses the cost of her decision, her choices, as well as being the form she has found for her freedom, depth, and authenticity. What sort of liberation will Jenny choose? It will in any case be clear-eyed, and it will be an adult choice. But there is no guarantee that it will be one that will make her a soul-mate of Miss Stubbs. The film ends before we can know; we can only hope for Jenny that a university education will have given her enough of a grounding in the contemporary world and the world of ideas to let her choose an authentic future that matches her vibrancy and openness to growth.
Both characters have some real complexity, but I was moved most deeply by Miss Stubbs's willingness to serve Jenny without hesitation or reproach--indeed with relief, even joy--despite having been savaged by her earlier in the film. Part of the scene's power for me stemmed from Olivia Williams' entirely natural representation of Miss Stubbs, her ability not to overshadow Jenny (whose story it is) or insist in any way on her own virtue. Miss Stubbs becomes an emblem of vocation, not just profession. It's not about her. My gratitude for this moment will stay with me long after the rest of the film, good as it is, has faded.
For its first hour and more, "An Education" is a fable of romantic rebellion against loving but conventional parents, who see their daughter's striking academic talents only as a means by which she can enter Oxford in search of an economically promising husband. Jenny herself wants a wider space for passion, for life; in her revulsion against her parents' utilitarian aspirations she thinks she has found a glorious mentor in a handsome and charming man, David, who, as she soon knows, obtains money fraudulently and who, as at first she doesn't know, already has a wife and child and a history of affairs with pretty innocents. The sexual initiation he provides her on her seventeenth birthday is gentle but, apparently (the scene is discreet, all but skipped over), mechanical and short-lived. But she remains dazzled by his other gifts--art auctions, trips to Paris, a veneer of chic fashion and the trappings of culture. When she sacrifices her school work to pursue this affair, she is expelled; and suddenly she has to contemplate Oxford as likely to be unreachable rather than as a vague invitation to social advancement. When it seems to be gone, she begins to understand what else it might be.
Her changed perspective is close to arriving too late. Her headmistress is scornful and unforgiving. But Jenny has the wit and the honesty to submit herself to the authority of Miss Stubbs, an unmarried, thirty-something exemplar of intellectual independence and personal integrity. In the full early glow of her infatuation with David, Jenny has rejected Miss Stubbs, to her beautiful face, as 'dead,' when the teacher tried to call her to something more substantial than seduction. But now, and especially once she has seen Miss Stubbs' modest but stylish apartment, full of real books, Jenny is quick to see how uncomprehending she herself has been. When she asks for help, Miss Stubbs is relieved rather than reproachful, and apparently she also has practical abilities and resources, since the scene soon shifts to Oxford.
It is there that in a voiceover Jenny allows us and herself to see that deep ambiguities remain. While her idea of an education has grown and deepened, she has acquired a certain ruthlessness in her pursuit of it. She tells an undergraduate suitor that she would be thrilled to discover Paris in his company, lying to him in order to encourage his advances and advance the trip. (By this time though she sees things through such new eyes that her words are not far from the truth.) One wonders whether Miss Stubbs, when younger, had to work through similar temptations, and whether her solitary life expresses the cost of her decision, her choices, as well as being the form she has found for her freedom, depth, and authenticity. What sort of liberation will Jenny choose? It will in any case be clear-eyed, and it will be an adult choice. But there is no guarantee that it will be one that will make her a soul-mate of Miss Stubbs. The film ends before we can know; we can only hope for Jenny that a university education will have given her enough of a grounding in the contemporary world and the world of ideas to let her choose an authentic future that matches her vibrancy and openness to growth.
Both characters have some real complexity, but I was moved most deeply by Miss Stubbs's willingness to serve Jenny without hesitation or reproach--indeed with relief, even joy--despite having been savaged by her earlier in the film. Part of the scene's power for me stemmed from Olivia Williams' entirely natural representation of Miss Stubbs, her ability not to overshadow Jenny (whose story it is) or insist in any way on her own virtue. Miss Stubbs becomes an emblem of vocation, not just profession. It's not about her. My gratitude for this moment will stay with me long after the rest of the film, good as it is, has faded.
Monday, October 19, 2009
The Ego's Two Voices
Dr. Hatchet and Mr. Kind: The Two Voices of the Ego (under revision)(26' without the Chinese temple scene)[see Buddhist teaching from Amy Schwartz's teacher at end]
In an intramural touch football game in, ah, 1964, I caught a pass for a touchdown. The ball was well away from my body and below my knees; I took it from the air with hands that until that moment had helped me mostly to run without losing my balance. I was slender and bookish, on the edge of being a nerd, and I drank in my fraternity teammates' applause like nourishment, like a tonic.
A touchdown in an informal pick-up game between two college fraternities carries zero currency, none, in the way of adult bragging rights. And yet this moment was for me an experience of healing. It changed my relationship with my body and contributed to the formation of a more enterprising public self. It was somehow more encouraging than my having set a school record in track at my high school a few years before.
Still, the value of this chance, inconsequential acclaim has long been overshadowed by the continuing vitality of demons I share with millions or billions of others: these bad advisors murmur softly but insidiously and ceaselessly. Among their many unsettling concerns are professional achievement; social status; economic class; and age, or what I think of as perceived distance from death. They say things like, "Imply something uncomplimentary about a colleague whom students are drawn to." "Earn more money so you can do whatever and display more upscale stuff." These ugly songs are hard to ignore but are also hard to catch in the act, let alone to silence.
No matter how improbably and absurdly, the catch and touchdown helped me listen to those harsh strains less attentively, to feel less inadequate, to feel approximately as manly as classmates who were physically stronger, more confidently virile. In this way it reduced my predictable and embarrassing need at the time to see varsity football players, say, as intellectually undernourished. It peeled a layer from the set of self-protective lenses through which I viewed the world. Other layers, of course, remained.
In my second or third year here, now almost forty years ago, I was living in Wentworth and wondering how we were going to help a new Lower who seemed almost beside himself with anxiety, especially in dealing with adults. Finally the dorm head, Don Schultz, and I decided we would have a friendly chat with the student in which we would play not good cop/bad cop but good guy/good guy and change his perception of authority figures from Old Testament God to Barney. Mr. Schultz was a kindly person, compassionate and humorous, though the students sometimes called him "The Butcher" because on occasion he could be cheerfully hardline about things like being late for check-in.
When the conversation took place, everything seemed to go well. We sat in comfortable chairs in Don's apartment. He and I told endearing stories and explained our benign philosophy. The student was, if not relaxed, then at least polite and calm. Afterwards Don and I congratulated ourselves and exchanged hopes for a successful outcome.
Later that evening there was a knock on my door. It was Cary Staller, one of our proctors. He was very direct. "What did you do to [the new Lower]?" he asked. "The guy is sitting in his room, trembling."
I still recognize this as a substantial failure, but I no longer feel too guilty about it. Still this experience showed me how the ego can color almost everything one does. On that night my investment in a vision of myself as a person of good will kept me from seeing what the student was experiencing. I think--I hope–-I learned something from this experience about listening, but it remains a work in progress, a discipline for which the occasion never expires.
So I have been thinking about the contradictory claims of the ego, a puzzle that has engaged people for centuries, one that seems to be built into the nature of human experience at a pretty deep level. It was posed a couple of millennia ago by Hillel the Elder: "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And when I am for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?"
The ego--a durable sense of self, necessary for love and art and meaningful service--gives us Whitman and Emerson; it is a chamber in the heart of all those with the courage to face down tyranny, whether political or cultural: Bishop Gene Robinson, Wangari Maatthai in Kenya, Rigoberta Menchu in Guatemala, martyred Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickramatunga, Nelson Mandela.
And yet the ego--the precarious sense of self that is inclined to see difference from itself as threatening or loathsome--tries to lead many of us down dark back alleys, where we can avoid or stealthily attack the Other (with a capital O). This version or part of the ego is driven to compare, endlessly, and then to congratulate itself if the comparison is flattering, and to hiss and throw tomatoes, or worse, if it isn't. For most of us freedom from this need and its well disguised or denied meanness is a lifelong challenge.
The ego in this second sense is mercurial, volatile, and insatiable. Unconsciously we try, often ruthlessly, to shore up its defenses--for instance, through projection, the defense mechanism in which we attribute to someone else what we least like or most fear about ourselves. These defenses are irrational and intrinsically flimsy, but we keep returning to them. Without them we would have to reconstruct our sense of who we are--that is, to change and grow.
A friend of mine, a writer, said once, "To know what one truly feels is a lifetime's learning." Part of that learning, that work, really, is coming to know what the self-protective lenses are and how they distort one's perceptions.
These are themes that have been searchingly explored in literature. In William Carlos Williams' unforgettable autobiographical story "The Use of Force," Williams, a physician, uses a large metal spoon and excessive force to obtain a throat culture from a child whose life is threatened by diphtheria. The story is about the ways in which the ego dresses up behavior that is socially justifiable but morally unsettling. In "The Outstation," by Somerset Maugham, one of the great stories in the language, two Englishmen serving their country's empire in the far East become trapped in a war of egos. Each calls or rather conceptualizes the other as the Other, while the story ironically shows us the core commonality between them, the defense of the fragile self that has invested so naturally and so rashly and in this case so fatally in its disguises. One sees the other as a moneyed prig; the other views him as a lower-class boor, an unmannerly slob. Both are lonely and vulnerable. At the end one is dead, and the ego of the survivor enjoys a festival of self-congratulation.
I recognized an opposing example of the ego's reach--a case where it is generous rather than perverse--in an English film I saw in October, "An Education." Near the end of that film the protagonist, Jenny, who is shamefacedly recovering from a heedless affair with a handsome, charming, and deeply dishonest older man, needs help, since by this time she has been expelled from school and seems to have lost her way, certainly her way to Oxford. She goes to see her former English teacher, Miss Stubbs, a woman whom earlier Jenny called (to her face) 'dead' when the teacher tried to get Jenny to discipline herself and become a real student. Now when Jenny asks for Miss Stubbs' help, it is freely given, without a trace of resentment or reproach or hesitation. Miss Stubbs becomes an emblem not only of someone with a profession and its attendant expectations and ethics, but of vocation, of a true calling. She understands, and acts--joyfully--on the understanding, that the moment is about Jenny, not about her. As a physician said years ago on accepting the John Phillips Award, "We are privileged to serve."
I find that my ability to take off and set aside my own defensive lenses is enlarged by experiences that nourish my ego in a healthy way, as my touchdown catch paradoxically did. Perhaps the most important strengthening influence on me, certainly a fundamental one, was my mother, who did not put such lenses on, a claim I would make for very few people. My mother had her limitations, God knows, but defensive nastiness wasn't one of them. For instance: she and my father were divorced when I was five, but I never heard her speak ill of him, only sorrowfully or respectfully, even though she never regretted the divorce. When she wanted to push someone's buttons, especially her own father's or her Republican brother's, she did so not with anger but with a sort of anarchic humor, a certain impish joy. Here is a short piece I wrote about her recently. She died four years ago in her mid-nineties.
Legacy
I sit in Washington Square Park, where the southwest corner belongs to chess and has built-in tables, all hosting games of some intensity. Men and men, men and boys take each other on. One pair relishes the constraints of a small but noisy clock, peremptory as an egg-timer. A local master humbles two opponents at a time. Across the park a group of rappers performs for a substantial crowd. Everywhere in between surges kaleidoscopic heterogeneity[color and variety]: skaters, professors, lovers, musicians, children with observant parents and ice cream. Not to mention the comic miscellany of the dogs pulling on their leashes to reach the run or some improbable acquaintance. My mother would have loved this: the exuberant abundance of the ordinary.
In some ways she preferred the Depression to what came afterwards: she loved its huge community of shared not-having. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. She worked, helped others to work, married my father. She became a candidate for Justice of the Peace; her cheap Socialist Party campaign card from the 30s, with its dour, almost thuggish passport shot--the worst picture I have of her--honors my desk.
The mother I knew first-hand still worked for the State to match job seekers with openings, and she volunteered endlessly: for liberal candidates, at a soup kitchen, on committees at the Unitarian church. The descendant of white people who settled New Haven in the seventeenth century, she was an officer in the Danbury, CT, chapter of the NAACP. At forty she liked it when the kids at my bithday party were white, black, affluent, not. So her dreams remained catholic (with a small c).
All people are equal, she said, and lived by the words, with friends of myriad ethnicities and economic circumstances, a crowd as protean [irreducibly diverse] as the one I see in the Park. New York was her lodestar: she rejoiced in the city's manic variousness, its standing challenge to its own claims of money and class. A letter from a friend longs for universal human flourishing, giving me a language for her deepest wish.
. . . . . . . .
When Ilo and I became parents, we hoped for our child, Anya, that she would be honest and fair and also that she would like herself without needing to draw her self-love from the putting down of others. An early sign of success, sort of, came when she was about four. This is a brief journal entry I wrote at that time:
Ilo tried to give Anya a moral lesson today. Anya had been repeatedly nasty to her friend and neighbor Jay, and Ilo was looking for a winning mix of criticism and encouragement. "You'll feel a lot better about yourself when you do what you should be doing," she suggested. But Anya's prompt response showed what a queenly serenity her fledgling conscience is up against: "Mom, I always feel good about myself, when I'm doing right and when I'm doing wrong."
As one gets older, the ego has to enlarge its skill set. Over time we learn, often by hurting others or by being hurt ourselves, how to avoid giving offense and how to create the win-win strategies that 'non sibi' implies. But we need to be wary about which groups and goals we invest in. It's often hard to tell whether a particular goal is speaking to the ego that gives you kindness or the one that at bottom gives you only ruthless vanity. Winning things--cross-country championships, admission to college, even tenure here--, e.g.: Are such concrete, pleasant achievements fundamental to the self? Or are they just clever seductions that clothe narcissism in stylish garments? The question is in no way rhetorical.
These riddles apply not to just to the ego in isolation but to group identities as well. When we join or remain in a group, the ego, or both egos, have a stake in the decision. Say we join a church. Even the great faith traditions, which should encourage us in the growth of empathy, often seem to focus their benevolence quite inwardly rather than universally, to promote self-identification within what Erik Erickson called 'the pseudo-species.' Southern Baptists and Catholics, for instance, have been known to have trouble with extending equal respect to non-believers; and so, if the truth be faced, have members of liberal churches, who often define religious conservatives as the Other (with a capital O). Can we distinguish between collective identities that are simply affirmative and those that seem to thrive on devaluing someone else?
Occasionally a great spirit will share a vision of absolute inclusiveness, which invites us to give up the part of the ego that wants the confining but seductive safety of a tribe. Archbishop Desmond Tutu says that the most radical theme of Christianity is found in Jesus' embrace of "all, all, all, all, all, all."
Tutu reminds us that the most obvious resolution of the riddle of the ego, its capacity for both generosity and exclusion, is love. Certainly it is better by far to make commitments of love within a family, a group of friends, a team, a dorm, a school, a faith community than not at all. When we are driven, or carried, by love, we are likelier to be outside the small box of the self. Sometimes the box itself seems to be becoming larger.
Most of the time love is the deepest transcendence I can reach, transcendence of the anxieties, frustrations, and self-declared triumphs of the self. But once in a while I glimpse something beyond even love. It does not nullify or trivialize love, but it contains it. For me this larger reality seems to be located most often in nature and in art. Last spring Ilo and I and two close friends went to see The Alvin Ailey Dance Company's 50th anniversary performance in Boston. They did their signature piece, Revelations, in which color, form, the music of spirituals, and the unimaginable athleticism and grace of the dancers reenact survival and joy in the context of African-American history. Whenever I watch that brilliant company perform that great piece, or when I listen to Schubert's string quintet, or when I look at some of the paintings of Velasquez or Rembrandt, or when I attend a great play, for the moment my human self, its best version as well as its hobbled ones, is left behind.
There are other routes as well. In my rudimentary understanding of Buddhism we are all urged to seek detachment from desire as a route to enlightenment; but once when I stood in a Buddhist monastery in Szechuan, China, I watched my grown daughter, then a Peace Corps volunteer, kneel and bow three times before an eight-foot human figure of mercy, a boddhisatva, a spiritually advanced person understood to have set aside enlightenment in order to be able to retain a role of consolation within the human framework. After each bow a monk struck a gong, and at the end he struck it a fourth time, for closure.
Anya's friend Kang-Le and I had walked on that oppressively hot July day for perhaps a mile along a muddy riverbank and then had taken an ancient ferry across to the monastery, a small one. Later, after the bows to the boddhisatva, in a nearby, deeply shaded enclosure a couple of young monks asked us to sit with them at some lovely stone tables a few feet away.
When they asked about our relationships, Anya said that I was her father, Kang-Le her friend. 'We are all friends,' one of the monks said, not in correction but as a sign of our part in a universal friendship. When Kang-Le asked them whether they practiced any of the martial arts, the monk said, again gently, 'Sitting here is a martial art'--that is, he embraced every detail of life as a spiritual discipline. Soon Anya, mindful of a date for supper at which we would be guests, observed that it was five o'clock and we would have to go, and one of the monks said, 'You live so fast.'
I do not breathe air of such purity very often, but this past summer I stood on Horsethief Butte, overlooking the Columbia River in Oregon. A friend and I had driven for ninety miles, first through a densely forested gorge with a series of distinctive waterfalls and then on into high desert, where the basaltic [ck. this] rock formations and the upland vineyards, orchards, and ranches replace the dark forests that seem both eternal and fertile. From the top of Horsethief Butte you can see miles of the river in both directions and also Mt. Hood, which rises thousands of feet above the treeline into glacier and snow and which reminded me of the spiritual promise of a Mt. Fujiyama or Kilimanjaro, great presences I have known only through photographs and paintings.
In the desert as elsewhere in the northwest we saw astonishingly varied plants and flowers, many of these with tiny blossoms of white or pink. The plant life was sparser here than in the side gorges of the varied and dramatic waterfalls downstream but in a way felt more precious, appearing as it did in places that seemed, in their dryness and absence of topsoil, designed to stymie the impulse toward growth and organic diversity. Even the rocks themselves did not seem barren, partly because they stand so near the lifegiving river and partly because the height and mass of the rock formations suggest a mysterious presence both watchful and detached--not unfeeling, exactly, but an embodiment of a very long and comprehensive perspective.
This idea (that spirit is immanent [pervasively present] in the rock formations) is in me, not provably in the rocks, but standing in their shadows and gazing up at their massive but subtly textured fronts, one gets some idea of the experience of native peoples for whom such places were sacred in the way of cathedrals or, rather, Olympus, since the variations of shape and form suggest a plurality of spirits rather than a single one. Are these neighboring spirits all of the same mind? But they share a common remoteness and transcendence, and in their physical presence the noise of the ego--of both its voices--faded for a time into perfect silence.
[from Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel]
When we take our experience to heart it really works against the ego because the ego doesn’t want to be touched by life basically. The ego wants to hold everything at bay. All the ego wants from life is to get what it wants, and get rid of what it doesn’t want, and use everything to cherish, and protect itself. The ego is brilliant at keeping life at a distance. And blame is the perfect way of doing this, keeping life at a distance. It’s not “your” life. Somebody’s doing something “to” you. Life is unfair “to you”. When we do it like this we don’t have to change at all. We could just stay the same. We don’t have to self-reflect. We don’t have to let the world touch us, and change us. Even though this is a really painful way to live, we’re comfortable living this way, and we’re very habituated at times to living this way.
In an intramural touch football game in, ah, 1964, I caught a pass for a touchdown. The ball was well away from my body and below my knees; I took it from the air with hands that until that moment had helped me mostly to run without losing my balance. I was slender and bookish, on the edge of being a nerd, and I drank in my fraternity teammates' applause like nourishment, like a tonic.
A touchdown in an informal pick-up game between two college fraternities carries zero currency, none, in the way of adult bragging rights. And yet this moment was for me an experience of healing. It changed my relationship with my body and contributed to the formation of a more enterprising public self. It was somehow more encouraging than my having set a school record in track at my high school a few years before.
Still, the value of this chance, inconsequential acclaim has long been overshadowed by the continuing vitality of demons I share with millions or billions of others: these bad advisors murmur softly but insidiously and ceaselessly. Among their many unsettling concerns are professional achievement; social status; economic class; and age, or what I think of as perceived distance from death. They say things like, "Imply something uncomplimentary about a colleague whom students are drawn to." "Earn more money so you can do whatever and display more upscale stuff." These ugly songs are hard to ignore but are also hard to catch in the act, let alone to silence.
No matter how improbably and absurdly, the catch and touchdown helped me listen to those harsh strains less attentively, to feel less inadequate, to feel approximately as manly as classmates who were physically stronger, more confidently virile. In this way it reduced my predictable and embarrassing need at the time to see varsity football players, say, as intellectually undernourished. It peeled a layer from the set of self-protective lenses through which I viewed the world. Other layers, of course, remained.
In my second or third year here, now almost forty years ago, I was living in Wentworth and wondering how we were going to help a new Lower who seemed almost beside himself with anxiety, especially in dealing with adults. Finally the dorm head, Don Schultz, and I decided we would have a friendly chat with the student in which we would play not good cop/bad cop but good guy/good guy and change his perception of authority figures from Old Testament God to Barney. Mr. Schultz was a kindly person, compassionate and humorous, though the students sometimes called him "The Butcher" because on occasion he could be cheerfully hardline about things like being late for check-in.
When the conversation took place, everything seemed to go well. We sat in comfortable chairs in Don's apartment. He and I told endearing stories and explained our benign philosophy. The student was, if not relaxed, then at least polite and calm. Afterwards Don and I congratulated ourselves and exchanged hopes for a successful outcome.
Later that evening there was a knock on my door. It was Cary Staller, one of our proctors. He was very direct. "What did you do to [the new Lower]?" he asked. "The guy is sitting in his room, trembling."
I still recognize this as a substantial failure, but I no longer feel too guilty about it. Still this experience showed me how the ego can color almost everything one does. On that night my investment in a vision of myself as a person of good will kept me from seeing what the student was experiencing. I think--I hope–-I learned something from this experience about listening, but it remains a work in progress, a discipline for which the occasion never expires.
So I have been thinking about the contradictory claims of the ego, a puzzle that has engaged people for centuries, one that seems to be built into the nature of human experience at a pretty deep level. It was posed a couple of millennia ago by Hillel the Elder: "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And when I am for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?"
The ego--a durable sense of self, necessary for love and art and meaningful service--gives us Whitman and Emerson; it is a chamber in the heart of all those with the courage to face down tyranny, whether political or cultural: Bishop Gene Robinson, Wangari Maatthai in Kenya, Rigoberta Menchu in Guatemala, martyred Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickramatunga, Nelson Mandela.
And yet the ego--the precarious sense of self that is inclined to see difference from itself as threatening or loathsome--tries to lead many of us down dark back alleys, where we can avoid or stealthily attack the Other (with a capital O). This version or part of the ego is driven to compare, endlessly, and then to congratulate itself if the comparison is flattering, and to hiss and throw tomatoes, or worse, if it isn't. For most of us freedom from this need and its well disguised or denied meanness is a lifelong challenge.
The ego in this second sense is mercurial, volatile, and insatiable. Unconsciously we try, often ruthlessly, to shore up its defenses--for instance, through projection, the defense mechanism in which we attribute to someone else what we least like or most fear about ourselves. These defenses are irrational and intrinsically flimsy, but we keep returning to them. Without them we would have to reconstruct our sense of who we are--that is, to change and grow.
A friend of mine, a writer, said once, "To know what one truly feels is a lifetime's learning." Part of that learning, that work, really, is coming to know what the self-protective lenses are and how they distort one's perceptions.
These are themes that have been searchingly explored in literature. In William Carlos Williams' unforgettable autobiographical story "The Use of Force," Williams, a physician, uses a large metal spoon and excessive force to obtain a throat culture from a child whose life is threatened by diphtheria. The story is about the ways in which the ego dresses up behavior that is socially justifiable but morally unsettling. In "The Outstation," by Somerset Maugham, one of the great stories in the language, two Englishmen serving their country's empire in the far East become trapped in a war of egos. Each calls or rather conceptualizes the other as the Other, while the story ironically shows us the core commonality between them, the defense of the fragile self that has invested so naturally and so rashly and in this case so fatally in its disguises. One sees the other as a moneyed prig; the other views him as a lower-class boor, an unmannerly slob. Both are lonely and vulnerable. At the end one is dead, and the ego of the survivor enjoys a festival of self-congratulation.
I recognized an opposing example of the ego's reach--a case where it is generous rather than perverse--in an English film I saw in October, "An Education." Near the end of that film the protagonist, Jenny, who is shamefacedly recovering from a heedless affair with a handsome, charming, and deeply dishonest older man, needs help, since by this time she has been expelled from school and seems to have lost her way, certainly her way to Oxford. She goes to see her former English teacher, Miss Stubbs, a woman whom earlier Jenny called (to her face) 'dead' when the teacher tried to get Jenny to discipline herself and become a real student. Now when Jenny asks for Miss Stubbs' help, it is freely given, without a trace of resentment or reproach or hesitation. Miss Stubbs becomes an emblem not only of someone with a profession and its attendant expectations and ethics, but of vocation, of a true calling. She understands, and acts--joyfully--on the understanding, that the moment is about Jenny, not about her. As a physician said years ago on accepting the John Phillips Award, "We are privileged to serve."
I find that my ability to take off and set aside my own defensive lenses is enlarged by experiences that nourish my ego in a healthy way, as my touchdown catch paradoxically did. Perhaps the most important strengthening influence on me, certainly a fundamental one, was my mother, who did not put such lenses on, a claim I would make for very few people. My mother had her limitations, God knows, but defensive nastiness wasn't one of them. For instance: she and my father were divorced when I was five, but I never heard her speak ill of him, only sorrowfully or respectfully, even though she never regretted the divorce. When she wanted to push someone's buttons, especially her own father's or her Republican brother's, she did so not with anger but with a sort of anarchic humor, a certain impish joy. Here is a short piece I wrote about her recently. She died four years ago in her mid-nineties.
Legacy
I sit in Washington Square Park, where the southwest corner belongs to chess and has built-in tables, all hosting games of some intensity. Men and men, men and boys take each other on. One pair relishes the constraints of a small but noisy clock, peremptory as an egg-timer. A local master humbles two opponents at a time. Across the park a group of rappers performs for a substantial crowd. Everywhere in between surges kaleidoscopic heterogeneity[color and variety]: skaters, professors, lovers, musicians, children with observant parents and ice cream. Not to mention the comic miscellany of the dogs pulling on their leashes to reach the run or some improbable acquaintance. My mother would have loved this: the exuberant abundance of the ordinary.
In some ways she preferred the Depression to what came afterwards: she loved its huge community of shared not-having. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. She worked, helped others to work, married my father. She became a candidate for Justice of the Peace; her cheap Socialist Party campaign card from the 30s, with its dour, almost thuggish passport shot--the worst picture I have of her--honors my desk.
The mother I knew first-hand still worked for the State to match job seekers with openings, and she volunteered endlessly: for liberal candidates, at a soup kitchen, on committees at the Unitarian church. The descendant of white people who settled New Haven in the seventeenth century, she was an officer in the Danbury, CT, chapter of the NAACP. At forty she liked it when the kids at my bithday party were white, black, affluent, not. So her dreams remained catholic (with a small c).
All people are equal, she said, and lived by the words, with friends of myriad ethnicities and economic circumstances, a crowd as protean [irreducibly diverse] as the one I see in the Park. New York was her lodestar: she rejoiced in the city's manic variousness, its standing challenge to its own claims of money and class. A letter from a friend longs for universal human flourishing, giving me a language for her deepest wish.
. . . . . . . .
When Ilo and I became parents, we hoped for our child, Anya, that she would be honest and fair and also that she would like herself without needing to draw her self-love from the putting down of others. An early sign of success, sort of, came when she was about four. This is a brief journal entry I wrote at that time:
Ilo tried to give Anya a moral lesson today. Anya had been repeatedly nasty to her friend and neighbor Jay, and Ilo was looking for a winning mix of criticism and encouragement. "You'll feel a lot better about yourself when you do what you should be doing," she suggested. But Anya's prompt response showed what a queenly serenity her fledgling conscience is up against: "Mom, I always feel good about myself, when I'm doing right and when I'm doing wrong."
As one gets older, the ego has to enlarge its skill set. Over time we learn, often by hurting others or by being hurt ourselves, how to avoid giving offense and how to create the win-win strategies that 'non sibi' implies. But we need to be wary about which groups and goals we invest in. It's often hard to tell whether a particular goal is speaking to the ego that gives you kindness or the one that at bottom gives you only ruthless vanity. Winning things--cross-country championships, admission to college, even tenure here--, e.g.: Are such concrete, pleasant achievements fundamental to the self? Or are they just clever seductions that clothe narcissism in stylish garments? The question is in no way rhetorical.
These riddles apply not to just to the ego in isolation but to group identities as well. When we join or remain in a group, the ego, or both egos, have a stake in the decision. Say we join a church. Even the great faith traditions, which should encourage us in the growth of empathy, often seem to focus their benevolence quite inwardly rather than universally, to promote self-identification within what Erik Erickson called 'the pseudo-species.' Southern Baptists and Catholics, for instance, have been known to have trouble with extending equal respect to non-believers; and so, if the truth be faced, have members of liberal churches, who often define religious conservatives as the Other (with a capital O). Can we distinguish between collective identities that are simply affirmative and those that seem to thrive on devaluing someone else?
Occasionally a great spirit will share a vision of absolute inclusiveness, which invites us to give up the part of the ego that wants the confining but seductive safety of a tribe. Archbishop Desmond Tutu says that the most radical theme of Christianity is found in Jesus' embrace of "all, all, all, all, all, all."
Tutu reminds us that the most obvious resolution of the riddle of the ego, its capacity for both generosity and exclusion, is love. Certainly it is better by far to make commitments of love within a family, a group of friends, a team, a dorm, a school, a faith community than not at all. When we are driven, or carried, by love, we are likelier to be outside the small box of the self. Sometimes the box itself seems to be becoming larger.
Most of the time love is the deepest transcendence I can reach, transcendence of the anxieties, frustrations, and self-declared triumphs of the self. But once in a while I glimpse something beyond even love. It does not nullify or trivialize love, but it contains it. For me this larger reality seems to be located most often in nature and in art. Last spring Ilo and I and two close friends went to see The Alvin Ailey Dance Company's 50th anniversary performance in Boston. They did their signature piece, Revelations, in which color, form, the music of spirituals, and the unimaginable athleticism and grace of the dancers reenact survival and joy in the context of African-American history. Whenever I watch that brilliant company perform that great piece, or when I listen to Schubert's string quintet, or when I look at some of the paintings of Velasquez or Rembrandt, or when I attend a great play, for the moment my human self, its best version as well as its hobbled ones, is left behind.
There are other routes as well. In my rudimentary understanding of Buddhism we are all urged to seek detachment from desire as a route to enlightenment; but once when I stood in a Buddhist monastery in Szechuan, China, I watched my grown daughter, then a Peace Corps volunteer, kneel and bow three times before an eight-foot human figure of mercy, a boddhisatva, a spiritually advanced person understood to have set aside enlightenment in order to be able to retain a role of consolation within the human framework. After each bow a monk struck a gong, and at the end he struck it a fourth time, for closure.
Anya's friend Kang-Le and I had walked on that oppressively hot July day for perhaps a mile along a muddy riverbank and then had taken an ancient ferry across to the monastery, a small one. Later, after the bows to the boddhisatva, in a nearby, deeply shaded enclosure a couple of young monks asked us to sit with them at some lovely stone tables a few feet away.
When they asked about our relationships, Anya said that I was her father, Kang-Le her friend. 'We are all friends,' one of the monks said, not in correction but as a sign of our part in a universal friendship. When Kang-Le asked them whether they practiced any of the martial arts, the monk said, again gently, 'Sitting here is a martial art'--that is, he embraced every detail of life as a spiritual discipline. Soon Anya, mindful of a date for supper at which we would be guests, observed that it was five o'clock and we would have to go, and one of the monks said, 'You live so fast.'
I do not breathe air of such purity very often, but this past summer I stood on Horsethief Butte, overlooking the Columbia River in Oregon. A friend and I had driven for ninety miles, first through a densely forested gorge with a series of distinctive waterfalls and then on into high desert, where the basaltic [ck. this] rock formations and the upland vineyards, orchards, and ranches replace the dark forests that seem both eternal and fertile. From the top of Horsethief Butte you can see miles of the river in both directions and also Mt. Hood, which rises thousands of feet above the treeline into glacier and snow and which reminded me of the spiritual promise of a Mt. Fujiyama or Kilimanjaro, great presences I have known only through photographs and paintings.
In the desert as elsewhere in the northwest we saw astonishingly varied plants and flowers, many of these with tiny blossoms of white or pink. The plant life was sparser here than in the side gorges of the varied and dramatic waterfalls downstream but in a way felt more precious, appearing as it did in places that seemed, in their dryness and absence of topsoil, designed to stymie the impulse toward growth and organic diversity. Even the rocks themselves did not seem barren, partly because they stand so near the lifegiving river and partly because the height and mass of the rock formations suggest a mysterious presence both watchful and detached--not unfeeling, exactly, but an embodiment of a very long and comprehensive perspective.
This idea (that spirit is immanent [pervasively present] in the rock formations) is in me, not provably in the rocks, but standing in their shadows and gazing up at their massive but subtly textured fronts, one gets some idea of the experience of native peoples for whom such places were sacred in the way of cathedrals or, rather, Olympus, since the variations of shape and form suggest a plurality of spirits rather than a single one. Are these neighboring spirits all of the same mind? But they share a common remoteness and transcendence, and in their physical presence the noise of the ego--of both its voices--faded for a time into perfect silence.
[from Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel]
When we take our experience to heart it really works against the ego because the ego doesn’t want to be touched by life basically. The ego wants to hold everything at bay. All the ego wants from life is to get what it wants, and get rid of what it doesn’t want, and use everything to cherish, and protect itself. The ego is brilliant at keeping life at a distance. And blame is the perfect way of doing this, keeping life at a distance. It’s not “your” life. Somebody’s doing something “to” you. Life is unfair “to you”. When we do it like this we don’t have to change at all. We could just stay the same. We don’t have to self-reflect. We don’t have to let the world touch us, and change us. Even though this is a really painful way to live, we’re comfortable living this way, and we’re very habituated at times to living this way.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
on gay marriage and NH legislation
statement prepared for a service at the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Exeter (FUUSE):
I grew up at a time when there were supposed to be only a relative handful of gay people in existence, more or less equally divided between Greenwich Village and San Francisco and more or less all fulfilling the demeaning stereotypes of the period. No one was out at my high school, and in college, a much larger place, I was aware only of a few bohemian types whose being gay was rumored. It was many years before I learned that one of my closest high school friends had moved to SF, worked there on the public policy side of AIDS response, and died of AIDS in 1995; it was 2005 before I learned that one of my first cousins is gay. By that time though I had begun to wise up and get involved, through the GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) at PEA, the Welcoming Congregation Committee at FUUSE, and being on the board of NH Freedom to Marry. I made these commitments not on a philosophical or religious basis but because of individuals I had come to know in the years between. One, Rick Spalding, now chaplain at Williams College, preached at FUUSE a few years ago. In the years between his being my student at the Academy in 1972 and perhaps fifteen years after that, he had became a sort of wisdom figure for me. Another led the GSA, did a Master's degree at Harvard Divinity School, and now teaches at an independent school in Indiana. As an Exeter senior she wrote a poem that she spoke aloud to the entire school. It was a statement of gratitude for having been able to attend high school in a place that accepted her whole self, and it ended: "Nothing between me/ and the way God made me/ ever again." If this were a longer talk I could add many more names to this list of gay persons who are not only not disordered but are everything I can wish a person to be.
But even if they weren't the principled, compassionate, loving, occasionally mischievous people they are, they would still, like everyone else, deserve equal rights.
Earlier this month [Feb. 2009] I attended Judiciary Committee hearings in Concord on one bill that would repeal civil unions, replacing them with a return to discrimination, and on another bill that would open the law to civil marriage for same-sex couples. The testimony from those who continue to see gay identity as a violation of divine order has changed a little over the years. This time there were no cries of 'pedophilia' or 'bestiality.' Now the opponents of gay equality speak of "sexual complementarity" (if they are Catholic) or raise the specter of a slippery slope that leads straight to polygamy and marriage between brothers or sisters (if the arguer is fundamentalist). One asked the Committee if its members realized that to pass an equal marriage bill was to guarantee judgment and punishment from God.
At this point I had to choose between rolling my eyes and being a good UU. My visceral self wanted to stand up in the hearing room and say, "Where does your authoritative relationship with God come from? Christian doctrine has defended slavery; it has defended apartheid; it was the faith of many agents of the Third Reich. Now there are many Christians who read the same Bible you do and conclude that the Gospel doctrines of love and compassion take precedence over whatever verses record their time's recoil from same-sex relationships." When the opposing witness is secular (very few were), my anger says, Is the history of heterosexuality so glorious that it justifies us in demeaning another sexuality, even when it is monogamous, stable, respectful, and loving?
But if I am to keep my UUism with me on these occasions, I need to do better than that. I need to defeat the temptation to generalize about evangelical Christians; I need to extend to the opponents of same-sex marriage the same respect that we seek to preserve for all human beings. I need to remember my own failings (that shouldn't be difficult) and to ground my advocacy in affirmation, not anger. I will work at this, and I will do it better for being a member here. But the advocacy itself will continue until the law, at least, if not the entire culture, reaches the enactment of its own professed values. I hope I will see that day, and I wish it had not been so long delayed for Rick and my teacher friend and millions of others.
I grew up at a time when there were supposed to be only a relative handful of gay people in existence, more or less equally divided between Greenwich Village and San Francisco and more or less all fulfilling the demeaning stereotypes of the period. No one was out at my high school, and in college, a much larger place, I was aware only of a few bohemian types whose being gay was rumored. It was many years before I learned that one of my closest high school friends had moved to SF, worked there on the public policy side of AIDS response, and died of AIDS in 1995; it was 2005 before I learned that one of my first cousins is gay. By that time though I had begun to wise up and get involved, through the GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) at PEA, the Welcoming Congregation Committee at FUUSE, and being on the board of NH Freedom to Marry. I made these commitments not on a philosophical or religious basis but because of individuals I had come to know in the years between. One, Rick Spalding, now chaplain at Williams College, preached at FUUSE a few years ago. In the years between his being my student at the Academy in 1972 and perhaps fifteen years after that, he had became a sort of wisdom figure for me. Another led the GSA, did a Master's degree at Harvard Divinity School, and now teaches at an independent school in Indiana. As an Exeter senior she wrote a poem that she spoke aloud to the entire school. It was a statement of gratitude for having been able to attend high school in a place that accepted her whole self, and it ended: "Nothing between me/ and the way God made me/ ever again." If this were a longer talk I could add many more names to this list of gay persons who are not only not disordered but are everything I can wish a person to be.
But even if they weren't the principled, compassionate, loving, occasionally mischievous people they are, they would still, like everyone else, deserve equal rights.
Earlier this month [Feb. 2009] I attended Judiciary Committee hearings in Concord on one bill that would repeal civil unions, replacing them with a return to discrimination, and on another bill that would open the law to civil marriage for same-sex couples. The testimony from those who continue to see gay identity as a violation of divine order has changed a little over the years. This time there were no cries of 'pedophilia' or 'bestiality.' Now the opponents of gay equality speak of "sexual complementarity" (if they are Catholic) or raise the specter of a slippery slope that leads straight to polygamy and marriage between brothers or sisters (if the arguer is fundamentalist). One asked the Committee if its members realized that to pass an equal marriage bill was to guarantee judgment and punishment from God.
At this point I had to choose between rolling my eyes and being a good UU. My visceral self wanted to stand up in the hearing room and say, "Where does your authoritative relationship with God come from? Christian doctrine has defended slavery; it has defended apartheid; it was the faith of many agents of the Third Reich. Now there are many Christians who read the same Bible you do and conclude that the Gospel doctrines of love and compassion take precedence over whatever verses record their time's recoil from same-sex relationships." When the opposing witness is secular (very few were), my anger says, Is the history of heterosexuality so glorious that it justifies us in demeaning another sexuality, even when it is monogamous, stable, respectful, and loving?
But if I am to keep my UUism with me on these occasions, I need to do better than that. I need to defeat the temptation to generalize about evangelical Christians; I need to extend to the opponents of same-sex marriage the same respect that we seek to preserve for all human beings. I need to remember my own failings (that shouldn't be difficult) and to ground my advocacy in affirmation, not anger. I will work at this, and I will do it better for being a member here. But the advocacy itself will continue until the law, at least, if not the entire culture, reaches the enactment of its own professed values. I hope I will see that day, and I wish it had not been so long delayed for Rick and my teacher friend and millions of others.
Compromise or Capitulation? (abortion & health care)
Compromise or Capitulation? (unpublished op-ed)
See also Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker 11-23-2009.
See also NYT editorial: Abortion and Health Care
At first glance, Congressional negotiations over the health-care reform bill's approach to abortion seem too technical to matter very much to very many people. Nevertheless, small differences in wording will have large consequences for millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people.
The push by anti-abortionists to ban the use of federal subsidies for private or state health plans that cover abortion would, if successful, have two or more predictable consequences. 1) It would soothe the consciences of those who believe abortion to be murder, by further separating all taxpayer funding from the performance of any abortion except when the life of the pregnant woman is directly threatened (or, in some versions, when the pregnancy stems from incest or rape). 2) It would also separate women who seek an elective abortion from funding that could help them, perhaps even enable them, to obtain the procedure, in cases where the pregnancy resulted from incest or rape as well as in other cases. And there is a third, more speculative and more momentous consequence: it might contribute to the 'unsettling' of Roe v. Wade.
American history contains several models for the resolution of conflicts between individual conscience and the law. One of these is the "C.O. (conscientious objector) model," in which an individual, usually a pacifist, has been legally exempted from having to comply with a law, usually the military draft, when doing so would deeply violate the citizen's core beliefs. Another model is the "direct action model," in which citizens appalled by a law (like the one that forced return of escaped slaves from the north to the south) sought to nullify the law's effects on the ground--to turn it into a dead letter.
Earlier in the negotiations it was well accepted that the 2009 bills would be "abortion-neutral." That is, they would not touch Roe v. Wade, and they would not change the federal guideline on funding, which since 1982 has tended more and more to allow federal reimbursements only for abortions in which the pregnant woman's life could be saved by the procedure. This approach would have protected the "C.O. model" without adopting the "direct action model." But some of the current drafts go farther.
They do so by trying to limit not only the conscientious abortion opponent's involvement in abortion, even where that involvement has been indirect, but also to reduce the access of all women, including impoverished ones, to funding for a procedure which the Supreme Court has found to be a matter of right.
Since opponents of abortion are already not required either to undergo the procedure or to participate directly in its funding, the only logic which supports the extension of restrictions is the one that seeks to overturn the core idea of Roe v. Wade.
The anti-abortion negotiators are not presenting the issue in these terms. And some of the proposals, by allowing for "riders" through which women could obtain discretionary (non-subsidized) coverage, do not clearly mount an attack on a constitutional level. But the ones that close the door altogether do carry that implication, and it is a gorilla that weighs more than 800 pounds.
See also Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker 11-23-2009.
See also NYT editorial: Abortion and Health Care
At first glance, Congressional negotiations over the health-care reform bill's approach to abortion seem too technical to matter very much to very many people. Nevertheless, small differences in wording will have large consequences for millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people.
The push by anti-abortionists to ban the use of federal subsidies for private or state health plans that cover abortion would, if successful, have two or more predictable consequences. 1) It would soothe the consciences of those who believe abortion to be murder, by further separating all taxpayer funding from the performance of any abortion except when the life of the pregnant woman is directly threatened (or, in some versions, when the pregnancy stems from incest or rape). 2) It would also separate women who seek an elective abortion from funding that could help them, perhaps even enable them, to obtain the procedure, in cases where the pregnancy resulted from incest or rape as well as in other cases. And there is a third, more speculative and more momentous consequence: it might contribute to the 'unsettling' of Roe v. Wade.
American history contains several models for the resolution of conflicts between individual conscience and the law. One of these is the "C.O. (conscientious objector) model," in which an individual, usually a pacifist, has been legally exempted from having to comply with a law, usually the military draft, when doing so would deeply violate the citizen's core beliefs. Another model is the "direct action model," in which citizens appalled by a law (like the one that forced return of escaped slaves from the north to the south) sought to nullify the law's effects on the ground--to turn it into a dead letter.
Earlier in the negotiations it was well accepted that the 2009 bills would be "abortion-neutral." That is, they would not touch Roe v. Wade, and they would not change the federal guideline on funding, which since 1982 has tended more and more to allow federal reimbursements only for abortions in which the pregnant woman's life could be saved by the procedure. This approach would have protected the "C.O. model" without adopting the "direct action model." But some of the current drafts go farther.
They do so by trying to limit not only the conscientious abortion opponent's involvement in abortion, even where that involvement has been indirect, but also to reduce the access of all women, including impoverished ones, to funding for a procedure which the Supreme Court has found to be a matter of right.
Since opponents of abortion are already not required either to undergo the procedure or to participate directly in its funding, the only logic which supports the extension of restrictions is the one that seeks to overturn the core idea of Roe v. Wade.
The anti-abortion negotiators are not presenting the issue in these terms. And some of the proposals, by allowing for "riders" through which women could obtain discretionary (non-subsidized) coverage, do not clearly mount an attack on a constitutional level. But the ones that close the door altogether do carry that implication, and it is a gorilla that weighs more than 800 pounds.
Monday, October 5, 2009
tennis and other ethics part 3
(unpublished op-ed)
The Culture of Tennis
In recent years tennis has gone some distance toward recovering sportsmanship and civility as elements of its culture. At least now an outburst like Serena Williams' draws a fine. Several of the leading players (Rafa Nadal, Juan Martin del Potro, and Kim Clijsters, e.g.) bring not only conventional courtesy but something much rarer: humility and grace.
The relatively new system of "challenges" often reinforces this welcome development by increasing the presumption that the official judge, not the player, is the more reliable line judge. However, it also shows that judges, trying to gauge the landing point of balls going over 100 m.p.h. within a fraction of an inch, are not infallible--and it provides instant correction when necessary. So far so good. This system generally allows matches to proceed with increased integrity and efficiency, as compared with the pre-challenge system, when players' outbursts both delayed the game and soured its atmosphere.
However there is room for a little fine tuning. One of Roger Federer's frustrations on Monday was a delay of several seconds before del Potro appealed one call. This has become common practice--a player decides whether or not to "spend" one of his allotted appeals only after (illegal) visual consultation with his supporters in the stands. Under the rules the challenge is supposed to be immediate, so Federer's irritation was well founded, if not appropriately expressed. Some other rules are also enforced with spacious discretion, like the one that the player receiving serve is supposed to play to the chosen rhythm of the server.
These are hard things to get right: ruthless enforcement would lead to many needless intrusions of officiating into the game. But too lax enforcement allows players to game the system.
There is a lot at stake in all this. With leadership from players like Nadal and Clijsters, the sport has a chance to consolidate a culture more like golf's, in which courtesy and sportsmanship not only prevail but extend to the willingness of most players to call penalties on themselves when they see that they have broken a rule, even inadvertently. The sport itself is understood to be larger and more fundamental than the outcome of a particular match or tournament, even with so much money at stake. It is unrealistic to expect tennis players to act against their self-interest, but they can be expected not to act dishonestly.
Earlier in the summer Novak Djokovic upheld a still higher standard, when he practically overruled an 'out' call that had gone against his opponent Andy Roddick. Roddick was up a set, but Djokovic had game point to remain up a break in the second set--in other words, it was a key, possibly even a pivotal point. Djokovic thought the ball had hit the line, so he gestured to Roddick that a challenge would be worthwhile. The challenge was upheld; the point and eventually the game went to Roddick, who also won the match.
It's not the outcome that shows the meaning of Djokovic's gesture. He acted instinctively, ethically, and for the most part counter-culturally. Many fans will fault him, even patronize him for jeopardizing and losing a game and probably a set that he could have won. Baseball and football players routinely try to trick umpires and refs into believing that they have caught balls that were only trapped (or worse). If a replay showed a player indicating to an official that a call had wrongly gone for his team, one can imagine the response in the clubhouse after the game. (Of course, a team outcome is at stake in those sports, whereas Djokovic was risking only his own advancement.)
It is not unrealistic to expect tennis to carry out a thoughtful study of the still relatively new system of challenges. Since the challenges themselves are entertaining, perhaps the rule could be amended to grant an additional one or two per set but officials could be stricter about requiring the challenges to be quick. Perhaps the coaches should not be seated so close to the court or should be fined or excluded if they collaborate in evading the rules.
Tennis doesn't need to undermine the good with a stretch for the perfect, but it would benefit from a higher level of consensus and from willing obedience to its own rules. In too many sports the no-brainer commitment to victory not only over the opponent but at the expense of the sport itself (as embodied in its rules and the spirit of its rules) is a poignant aspect of our culture. Tennis can help to push back against this impoverished norm. It is time for the players' representatives and the officials to talk these issues through and see whether they can come to and codify a less contentious protocol.
The Culture of Tennis
In recent years tennis has gone some distance toward recovering sportsmanship and civility as elements of its culture. At least now an outburst like Serena Williams' draws a fine. Several of the leading players (Rafa Nadal, Juan Martin del Potro, and Kim Clijsters, e.g.) bring not only conventional courtesy but something much rarer: humility and grace.
The relatively new system of "challenges" often reinforces this welcome development by increasing the presumption that the official judge, not the player, is the more reliable line judge. However, it also shows that judges, trying to gauge the landing point of balls going over 100 m.p.h. within a fraction of an inch, are not infallible--and it provides instant correction when necessary. So far so good. This system generally allows matches to proceed with increased integrity and efficiency, as compared with the pre-challenge system, when players' outbursts both delayed the game and soured its atmosphere.
However there is room for a little fine tuning. One of Roger Federer's frustrations on Monday was a delay of several seconds before del Potro appealed one call. This has become common practice--a player decides whether or not to "spend" one of his allotted appeals only after (illegal) visual consultation with his supporters in the stands. Under the rules the challenge is supposed to be immediate, so Federer's irritation was well founded, if not appropriately expressed. Some other rules are also enforced with spacious discretion, like the one that the player receiving serve is supposed to play to the chosen rhythm of the server.
These are hard things to get right: ruthless enforcement would lead to many needless intrusions of officiating into the game. But too lax enforcement allows players to game the system.
There is a lot at stake in all this. With leadership from players like Nadal and Clijsters, the sport has a chance to consolidate a culture more like golf's, in which courtesy and sportsmanship not only prevail but extend to the willingness of most players to call penalties on themselves when they see that they have broken a rule, even inadvertently. The sport itself is understood to be larger and more fundamental than the outcome of a particular match or tournament, even with so much money at stake. It is unrealistic to expect tennis players to act against their self-interest, but they can be expected not to act dishonestly.
Earlier in the summer Novak Djokovic upheld a still higher standard, when he practically overruled an 'out' call that had gone against his opponent Andy Roddick. Roddick was up a set, but Djokovic had game point to remain up a break in the second set--in other words, it was a key, possibly even a pivotal point. Djokovic thought the ball had hit the line, so he gestured to Roddick that a challenge would be worthwhile. The challenge was upheld; the point and eventually the game went to Roddick, who also won the match.
It's not the outcome that shows the meaning of Djokovic's gesture. He acted instinctively, ethically, and for the most part counter-culturally. Many fans will fault him, even patronize him for jeopardizing and losing a game and probably a set that he could have won. Baseball and football players routinely try to trick umpires and refs into believing that they have caught balls that were only trapped (or worse). If a replay showed a player indicating to an official that a call had wrongly gone for his team, one can imagine the response in the clubhouse after the game. (Of course, a team outcome is at stake in those sports, whereas Djokovic was risking only his own advancement.)
It is not unrealistic to expect tennis to carry out a thoughtful study of the still relatively new system of challenges. Since the challenges themselves are entertaining, perhaps the rule could be amended to grant an additional one or two per set but officials could be stricter about requiring the challenges to be quick. Perhaps the coaches should not be seated so close to the court or should be fined or excluded if they collaborate in evading the rules.
Tennis doesn't need to undermine the good with a stretch for the perfect, but it would benefit from a higher level of consensus and from willing obedience to its own rules. In too many sports the no-brainer commitment to victory not only over the opponent but at the expense of the sport itself (as embodied in its rules and the spirit of its rules) is a poignant aspect of our culture. Tennis can help to push back against this impoverished norm. It is time for the players' representatives and the officials to talk these issues through and see whether they can come to and codify a less contentious protocol.
Tennis Ethics part 2
(unpublished letter to editor of NYT)
To the Editor: Paul Kedrosky's
"Challenge, Anyone?" (Sept. 21) is wrong-headed on two counts. First, he exaggerates the error rate of the linesmen. That challenges are wrong more than two-thirds of the time and that there is no occasion for a challenge even on most close calls, means that the calls are preponderantly right. The challenge system is the helpful backup it was meant to be, a concession to the impossibility of getting every call right when one is trying to gauge within a millimeter or two the exact landing point of a ball traveling over a hundred miles an hour. Second, worse, he holds up a player like Francisco Verdasco, who sees the ball well and does not abuse the system, for not challenging more often. Kedrosky views this as a missed opportunity not only to gain a conjectural additional key point per match but to disrupt the opponent's rhythm or "take a short breather," one disallowed by the rules. In urging players to see challenges as an opportunity for bad faith, he puts gamesmanship ahead of the game and undermines the recovering culture of tennis.
To the Editor: Paul Kedrosky's
"Challenge, Anyone?" (Sept. 21) is wrong-headed on two counts. First, he exaggerates the error rate of the linesmen. That challenges are wrong more than two-thirds of the time and that there is no occasion for a challenge even on most close calls, means that the calls are preponderantly right. The challenge system is the helpful backup it was meant to be, a concession to the impossibility of getting every call right when one is trying to gauge within a millimeter or two the exact landing point of a ball traveling over a hundred miles an hour. Second, worse, he holds up a player like Francisco Verdasco, who sees the ball well and does not abuse the system, for not challenging more often. Kedrosky views this as a missed opportunity not only to gain a conjectural additional key point per match but to disrupt the opponent's rhythm or "take a short breather," one disallowed by the rules. In urging players to see challenges as an opportunity for bad faith, he puts gamesmanship ahead of the game and undermines the recovering culture of tennis.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
New Hampshire Dreaming (prose poem)
New Hampshire Dreaming, 3 AM
I was walking with a friend at night in high coniferous
woods. We looked up in very little light to see occasional
large butterflies whose colors revealed themselves only
at a particular angle and only when they rested briefly,
perhaps twenty feet up, on the trunks of very tall but
slender pines. One in silhouette seemed somehow
shaped like a broad corkscrew; then, as my own position
shifted, it glowed a deep gold like a monarch in sunlight,
just for a second before it flew off. Another was a deep
blue, almost cobalt, its rich color improbably distinct
in the semi-darkness.
As we walked further, calling each other's attention
to unusual plants or to mysterious glimmering on
the trees' bark, two jets, fighters, flew over at a couple of
hundred feet, slow as canoes resting in a moderate current.
We wondered whether they were looking for us, but after
a few moments they accelerated to a boomless supersonic
speed and raced almost vertically into the sky.
Somewhere in this dream was a thought of my
strict grandmother, now dead for more than forty years, the
grandmother who called me out in childhood for general
laziness one hot morning when I malingered in the upstairs
bathroom to avoid my assigned weeding in her garden. In
the dream her death felt recent, and we wondered who would
live in her room at the farm now that she was gone.
The woods we walked in were a mere strip, a hundred feet
wide, flanked by indistinct open land that might have been
clearcut; and then there were the planes, and our having
reached this path not on a long hike but in a Volvo station
wagon, parked nearby, its power and comfort a badge
of our complicity.
I was walking with a friend at night in high coniferous
woods. We looked up in very little light to see occasional
large butterflies whose colors revealed themselves only
at a particular angle and only when they rested briefly,
perhaps twenty feet up, on the trunks of very tall but
slender pines. One in silhouette seemed somehow
shaped like a broad corkscrew; then, as my own position
shifted, it glowed a deep gold like a monarch in sunlight,
just for a second before it flew off. Another was a deep
blue, almost cobalt, its rich color improbably distinct
in the semi-darkness.
As we walked further, calling each other's attention
to unusual plants or to mysterious glimmering on
the trees' bark, two jets, fighters, flew over at a couple of
hundred feet, slow as canoes resting in a moderate current.
We wondered whether they were looking for us, but after
a few moments they accelerated to a boomless supersonic
speed and raced almost vertically into the sky.
Somewhere in this dream was a thought of my
strict grandmother, now dead for more than forty years, the
grandmother who called me out in childhood for general
laziness one hot morning when I malingered in the upstairs
bathroom to avoid my assigned weeding in her garden. In
the dream her death felt recent, and we wondered who would
live in her room at the farm now that she was gone.
The woods we walked in were a mere strip, a hundred feet
wide, flanked by indistinct open land that might have been
clearcut; and then there were the planes, and our having
reached this path not on a long hike but in a Volvo station
wagon, parked nearby, its power and comfort a badge
of our complicity.
Dream #3: an invitation from my mother
I encountered my mother and an equally elderly but much heavier friend on a town street. My mother smiled with her usual radiance and said, "Do you want to play golf with us? We're going to play golf on the moon." I saw no clubs, no cart. My mother had never hit a shot. But she had a way of stating ideas both decisively and with ambiguous commitment. Was she delusional, or kidding?
What is this one about? My sense of her opaqueness to me? Though I derived my sense of life and my primary values more from her than from any other source, still in some ways I hardly knew her. Did her life make sense to her? At the core did she feel gratitude, or futility? Am I myself playing golf on the moon?
What is this one about? My sense of her opaqueness to me? Though I derived my sense of life and my primary values more from her than from any other source, still in some ways I hardly knew her. Did her life make sense to her? At the core did she feel gratitude, or futility? Am I myself playing golf on the moon?
Friday, September 18, 2009
Dream #2: The Whipping
In a dream I found myself in conflict with my maternal grandfather, a stoic, kind, consistent, and entirely responsible person for the twenty-five years I knew him. On this anomalous occasion he had spilled his morning cereal all over the kitchen floor and decided it was my fault. He took me down to the basement and ordered me to drop my pants and bend over, so that he could exact the retribution of corporal punishment, something that he never did, approached doing, or, as far as I know, even imagined during his actual lifetime. He used a broad belt and inflicted twenty-four lashes. He also required my dream-friend Luke (unknown to me outside the dream; like me in the dream, apparently about eighteen) to remain present as a witness, despite Luke's embarrassment and constraint. After the whipping I told my mother that I would never voluntarily speak with Grandad again. Soon after that but at least twenty years older, I was in conversation with a colleague, stating emphatically that writing was very difficult. I was trying to identify the elements of the poem that I wanted to extract from this strange experience. Luke, my grandfather, and my mother had all disappeared.
Almost as soon as I awoke I found myself thinking of Robert Hayden's poem, "Winter Sundays," which suggests that I understood the dream's unfairness as soon as I was released from it. I'm sure it was about me, not about my grandfather: I miss my mother and wanted to talk with her while she was still in her fifties; I fear my own aging and wanted to separate myself from it, from my mother's long, gradual decline, and from my grandfather's imagined loss of rationality, of being himself. The lashes were not painful, but since my mother, now four years dead, is unavailable, and since aging comes on no matter one's abhorrence of it, I think it's fair to call this a nightmare.
Almost as soon as I awoke I found myself thinking of Robert Hayden's poem, "Winter Sundays," which suggests that I understood the dream's unfairness as soon as I was released from it. I'm sure it was about me, not about my grandfather: I miss my mother and wanted to talk with her while she was still in her fifties; I fear my own aging and wanted to separate myself from it, from my mother's long, gradual decline, and from my grandfather's imagined loss of rationality, of being himself. The lashes were not painful, but since my mother, now four years dead, is unavailable, and since aging comes on no matter one's abhorrence of it, I think it's fair to call this a nightmare.
The Ego as Wide Receiver
The Ego as Wide Receiver
In an intramural touch football game forty-five years ago I caught a pass for a touchdown. The ball was well away from my body and below my knees; I took it from the air with hands that until that moment had helped me mostly to run cross-country without losing my balance. I was slender and bookish, on the edge of being a nerd, and I drank in my teammates' applause like nourishment, like a tonic.
A play in an informal pick-up game, no matter how agile, carries zero currency, none, in the way of adult bragging rights. And yet this moment changed my relationship with my body and contributed to the formation of a more enterprising public self. However improbably and absurdly, it helped me feel less inadequate, feel as manly as classmates who were physically stronger, more confidently virile. In this way it reduced my need to make jokes at the expense of better athletes, my need to see varsity football players, say, as intellectually undernourished. It peeled a layer from the self-protective lens through which I viewed the world. Others remained.
In an intramural touch football game forty-five years ago I caught a pass for a touchdown. The ball was well away from my body and below my knees; I took it from the air with hands that until that moment had helped me mostly to run cross-country without losing my balance. I was slender and bookish, on the edge of being a nerd, and I drank in my teammates' applause like nourishment, like a tonic.
A play in an informal pick-up game, no matter how agile, carries zero currency, none, in the way of adult bragging rights. And yet this moment changed my relationship with my body and contributed to the formation of a more enterprising public self. However improbably and absurdly, it helped me feel less inadequate, feel as manly as classmates who were physically stronger, more confidently virile. In this way it reduced my need to make jokes at the expense of better athletes, my need to see varsity football players, say, as intellectually undernourished. It peeled a layer from the self-protective lens through which I viewed the world. Others remained.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Columbia River gorge (journal entry)
On Wednesday [July 15] Eleanor Ritter and I drove ninety miles along the Columbia River, through a densely forested gorge and then on into high desert, where the basaltic rock formations and the upland vineyards, orchards, and ranches replace the dark forests that seem both eternal and fertile. From the top of Horsethief Butte you can see miles of the river in both directions and also Mt. Hood, which rises thousands of feet above the treeline into glacier and snow and which reminded me of the spiritual promise of a Mt. Fujiyama or Kilimanjaro.
In the desert as elsewhere in the northwest one sees astonishingly varied plants and flowers, many with tiny blossoms of white or pink. This plant life is sparser here than in the side gorges of the varied and dramatic waterfalls downstream but in a way seems more precious, a bolder assertion of 'the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world' (Thoreau) in places that seem, in their dryness and absence of topsoil, designed to stymie the impulse toward growth and organic diversity. Even the rocks themselves do not seem barren, partly because they stand so near the lifegiving river and partly because the height and mass of the rock formations suggests a mysterious presence both watchful and detached--not unfeeling, exactly, but an embodiment of a very long and comprehensive perspective.
This idea (that spirit is immanent in the rock formations) is in me, not provably in the rocks, but standing in their shadows and gazing up at their massive but subtly textured fronts, one gets some idea of the experience of native peoples for whom such places were sacred in the way of cathedrals or, rather, Olympus. The variations of shape and form suggest a plurality of spirits rather than a single one--are these presences all of the same mind? But they share a common remoteness and transcendence.
In the desert as elsewhere in the northwest one sees astonishingly varied plants and flowers, many with tiny blossoms of white or pink. This plant life is sparser here than in the side gorges of the varied and dramatic waterfalls downstream but in a way seems more precious, a bolder assertion of 'the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world' (Thoreau) in places that seem, in their dryness and absence of topsoil, designed to stymie the impulse toward growth and organic diversity. Even the rocks themselves do not seem barren, partly because they stand so near the lifegiving river and partly because the height and mass of the rock formations suggests a mysterious presence both watchful and detached--not unfeeling, exactly, but an embodiment of a very long and comprehensive perspective.
This idea (that spirit is immanent in the rock formations) is in me, not provably in the rocks, but standing in their shadows and gazing up at their massive but subtly textured fronts, one gets some idea of the experience of native peoples for whom such places were sacred in the way of cathedrals or, rather, Olympus. The variations of shape and form suggest a plurality of spirits rather than a single one--are these presences all of the same mind? But they share a common remoteness and transcendence.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
The Politics of the People
[in Seacoast Sunday (Portsmouth Herald) as an op-ed under their different title ("Voters have power to clean up political process") and in slightly different form: 9-6-09]
The Politics of the People
Most of the people I know love this country but hate its political style: the seemingly endless yelling, manipulation, misrepresentation, lying, malice, domination by money, and frequent placing of party ahead of the national interest. In a democracy, one writer said, you get the government you deserve. I'm not sure about that, but we do get the political culture we deserve, because we help to create that culture by tolerating it, even if we do not directly add to the noise. We can deserve better.
The ideas that follow do not touch the content of specific political issues like health care, energy, environmental degradation, criminal justice, or marriage. What they touch is the way the political professionals, the media, and the people carry on the conversation that shapes elections, which in turn determine legislation. My hope is that these ideas might appeal to conservatives, liberals, and libertarians, or even Republicans and Democrats. If we agreed on these principles, we would improve the political world itself. The alternative is continually increased misinformation and cynicism, which should be unacceptably bitter fruit for a free society.
A lot of what I'm talking about is political advertising and campaigning, but I'm also thinking about the sources of news and political analysis. MSNBC, Fox News and many bloggers and talk show hosts are often as adversarial as the national parties; they are like opposing lawyers. CNN (except for Lou Dobbs), CBS, NBC, ABC, and the newspapers--and eventually the voters--are a sort of jury. But in the months before the elections, before we vote, we the people are the presiding judge. It is our court. It's time to issue some instructions to the jury, some reminders to ourselves, and some contempt-of-court rulings.
For me the most disappointing and alarming moment in the 2008 campaign occurred when candidate Obama ducked this whole issue during the Presidential debate moderated by Bob Schieffer of CBS. The campaign as a whole had fallen to a dismal level. PolitiFact.com, a non-partisan, Pulitzer Prize-winning reality check on candidates' and partisans' claims, had judged at least one of the Obama ads as "Pants on Fire"--that is, even below the level of False, which lay below Barely True and Half-true (as well as Mostly True and True). Eighteen of his campaign's claims had been rated as False. Schieffer asked the candidates to comment on the level of nastiness that had become pervasive in the campaign. Obama said, "We expect Presidential campaigns to be tough." That is, he essentially accepted the nastiness as inevitable and ignored the falsehoods. In other words, just about anything goes. What disappears first under this banner is the truth, which means the integrity of our processes and ultimately of our elections. Is our democracy indifferent to that?
The McCain campaign was worse, far worse. It "won" many more "Pants on Fire" awards; at one point in the final weeks before the vote, 40% of the McCain campaign's claims had been rated as either False or Pants on Fire. (However in McCain's best moment he unambiguously rejected a supporter's wild claim that Obama was personally traitorous.)
Why should the electorate accept such a miserable standard in the first place? This issue is fundamental to our ability to ground policy choices in reality. To deal with it by saying that campaigns are tough is to throw in the towel, to treat truth and responsibility in campaigning as an impossible ideal. We do not do that with truth in advertising. Even though we depend on corporations economically, we hold them to a standard of honesty in the claims they make as they seek our dollars. Why should we be less insistent that seekers of our votes must meet at least a minimal standard as well?
The practical answer is, ironically enough, the First Amendment. It is all but impossible to separate freedom of speech from the freedom to spin, or even to lie--if one is talking about laws or regulation. But with one exception I am not talking about laws or regulation. I am talking about pushing back against unscrupulousness and cynicism--pushing back through every form of self-expression our society offers, creating a different and more empowering kind of argument, so that the next time a candidate is challenged on his or her campaign's falsehoods or other distortions, he or she will have to respond in a serious way.
The exception, one place where law and regulation do have a constitutionally feasible role, was demonstrated recently in a chilling prelude to the 2010 campaigns, which are already beginning. One of the industry-sponsored players in the debate over clean energy legislation distributed fake letters allegedly from grass-roots organizations--organizations that did not actually support the coal industry's position. The level of concreteness as well as bad faith in such dirty tricks should be recognized in the criminal code, just as slander, libel, and defamation of character--other abuses of free speech--are. Such gross perversions of our politics should be treated at least as severely as deliberate falsehood in advertising is. But whether or not we can bring more such flagrant abuses of democracy into the courtroom, we can at least bring them and other false and irrational claims into a steadier light and hold the perpetrators accountable. Otherwise honesty, accuracy, and good faith will be increasingly endangered species. We need to protest, not acquiesce, when surrogates and candidates--even our own candidates--demonize or offer cartoon versions of their opponents or their opponents' positions. The public needs to pay more attention to the trustworthy truth squads like PolitiFact and thus to give them more leverage on the campaigns. If we do not do better at this than we did in 2008, the corruption of our political process will accelerate, and we will have only ourselves to blame.
The Politics of the People
Most of the people I know love this country but hate its political style: the seemingly endless yelling, manipulation, misrepresentation, lying, malice, domination by money, and frequent placing of party ahead of the national interest. In a democracy, one writer said, you get the government you deserve. I'm not sure about that, but we do get the political culture we deserve, because we help to create that culture by tolerating it, even if we do not directly add to the noise. We can deserve better.
The ideas that follow do not touch the content of specific political issues like health care, energy, environmental degradation, criminal justice, or marriage. What they touch is the way the political professionals, the media, and the people carry on the conversation that shapes elections, which in turn determine legislation. My hope is that these ideas might appeal to conservatives, liberals, and libertarians, or even Republicans and Democrats. If we agreed on these principles, we would improve the political world itself. The alternative is continually increased misinformation and cynicism, which should be unacceptably bitter fruit for a free society.
A lot of what I'm talking about is political advertising and campaigning, but I'm also thinking about the sources of news and political analysis. MSNBC, Fox News and many bloggers and talk show hosts are often as adversarial as the national parties; they are like opposing lawyers. CNN (except for Lou Dobbs), CBS, NBC, ABC, and the newspapers--and eventually the voters--are a sort of jury. But in the months before the elections, before we vote, we the people are the presiding judge. It is our court. It's time to issue some instructions to the jury, some reminders to ourselves, and some contempt-of-court rulings.
For me the most disappointing and alarming moment in the 2008 campaign occurred when candidate Obama ducked this whole issue during the Presidential debate moderated by Bob Schieffer of CBS. The campaign as a whole had fallen to a dismal level. PolitiFact.com, a non-partisan, Pulitzer Prize-winning reality check on candidates' and partisans' claims, had judged at least one of the Obama ads as "Pants on Fire"--that is, even below the level of False, which lay below Barely True and Half-true (as well as Mostly True and True). Eighteen of his campaign's claims had been rated as False. Schieffer asked the candidates to comment on the level of nastiness that had become pervasive in the campaign. Obama said, "We expect Presidential campaigns to be tough." That is, he essentially accepted the nastiness as inevitable and ignored the falsehoods. In other words, just about anything goes. What disappears first under this banner is the truth, which means the integrity of our processes and ultimately of our elections. Is our democracy indifferent to that?
The McCain campaign was worse, far worse. It "won" many more "Pants on Fire" awards; at one point in the final weeks before the vote, 40% of the McCain campaign's claims had been rated as either False or Pants on Fire. (However in McCain's best moment he unambiguously rejected a supporter's wild claim that Obama was personally traitorous.)
Why should the electorate accept such a miserable standard in the first place? This issue is fundamental to our ability to ground policy choices in reality. To deal with it by saying that campaigns are tough is to throw in the towel, to treat truth and responsibility in campaigning as an impossible ideal. We do not do that with truth in advertising. Even though we depend on corporations economically, we hold them to a standard of honesty in the claims they make as they seek our dollars. Why should we be less insistent that seekers of our votes must meet at least a minimal standard as well?
The practical answer is, ironically enough, the First Amendment. It is all but impossible to separate freedom of speech from the freedom to spin, or even to lie--if one is talking about laws or regulation. But with one exception I am not talking about laws or regulation. I am talking about pushing back against unscrupulousness and cynicism--pushing back through every form of self-expression our society offers, creating a different and more empowering kind of argument, so that the next time a candidate is challenged on his or her campaign's falsehoods or other distortions, he or she will have to respond in a serious way.
The exception, one place where law and regulation do have a constitutionally feasible role, was demonstrated recently in a chilling prelude to the 2010 campaigns, which are already beginning. One of the industry-sponsored players in the debate over clean energy legislation distributed fake letters allegedly from grass-roots organizations--organizations that did not actually support the coal industry's position. The level of concreteness as well as bad faith in such dirty tricks should be recognized in the criminal code, just as slander, libel, and defamation of character--other abuses of free speech--are. Such gross perversions of our politics should be treated at least as severely as deliberate falsehood in advertising is. But whether or not we can bring more such flagrant abuses of democracy into the courtroom, we can at least bring them and other false and irrational claims into a steadier light and hold the perpetrators accountable. Otherwise honesty, accuracy, and good faith will be increasingly endangered species. We need to protest, not acquiesce, when surrogates and candidates--even our own candidates--demonize or offer cartoon versions of their opponents or their opponents' positions. The public needs to pay more attention to the trustworthy truth squads like PolitiFact and thus to give them more leverage on the campaigns. If we do not do better at this than we did in 2008, the corruption of our political process will accelerate, and we will have only ourselves to blame.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
journal 8 15 09 -- tennis ethics
Yesterday I saw two emblematic moments on sports TV. First Novak Djokovic practically overruled an 'out' call that had gone against his opponent Andy Roddick. Roddick was up a set, but Djokovic had game point to remain up a break in the second set--in other words, it was a key, possibly even a pivotal point. Djokovic thought the ball had hit the line, so he gestured to Roddick that a challenge would be worthwhile. The challenge was upheld; the point and eventually the game went to Roddick, who also won the match.
It's not the outcome that shows the meaning of Djokovic's gesture. He acted instinctively, ethically, and for the most part counter-culturally. Many fans will fault him, even patronize him for jeopardizing and losing a game and probably a set that he could have won. Baseball and football players routinely try to trick umpires and refs into believing that they have caught balls that were only trapped (or worse). If a replay showed a player indicating to an official that a call had wrongly gone for his team, one can imagine the response in the clubhouse after the game. (Of course, a team outcome is at stake in those sports, whereas Djokovic was risking only his own advancement.)
To me the no-brainer commitment to victory over the sport itself (as embodied in its rules and the spirit of its rules) is a poignant aspect of our culture. It's one reason why (after growing up as a baseball, football, and basketball fan) I now watch only tennis, golf, and track. Duping officials is the sports equivalent of plagiarism.
In golf players call penalties on themselves, sometimes in cases where the infraction was so marginal that they would probably have gotten away with it. The sport itself is understood to be larger and more fundamental than the outcome of a particular match or tournament. But yesterday's second moment, which was in a golf program, was of a more philosophical sort. Padraig Harrington was playing a round with a reporter who was also quite a good golfer. As they went around the course, Harrington explained how he saw his various options for how to play each shot. At one point he had missed a fairway, and there two quite different kinds of rough very close together in the area where his ball had come to rest. Before he hit his next shot, he explained the difference, not just in terms of its consequence for shot selection but as an instance of how chance plays such a powerful role in golf, since one kind of rough posed a much more difficult challenge than the other. "Golf isn't about being just," he said. He observed that most modern course design and course preparation and maintenance are calculated to make things as fair as possible. His point was that such efforts, while well intentioned, contradict the nature of the game. One player may hit a great shot that ends up in a divot; his opponent of the moment may flub a shot and watch it bounce off a tree into the heart of the green. Harrington said that for him one of the central aspects of golf as an experience was that it required you to accept and deal with whatever chance, no matter how seemingly malevolent, sends your way. While he felt some pride that his success owes a lot to his ability to maintain his equilibrium, and to sustain his pleasure in the game, no matter how the day's breaks are going, there was also a deep humility in his recognition that important things were not in his--or anyone else's--control. It's true that he saw such acceptance as a competitive advantage, just as confidence is. Each sport has a psychology as well as an objective discipline. But he also seemed to be saying that it was a pleasure and privilege to accept golf on its own terms and that those terms were the context within which he played.
These are things that are hard to talk about without sounding moralistic. To make matters worse, I will quote Thoreau, who was something of an absolutist (single quotes because this isn't verbatim): 'If you are in deep water after a shipwreck and have wrested a floating plank from another survivor, you must return it to him though you drown yourself.' The stakes in sports cheating (or its repudiation) aren't so dire, but such choices are shaped prior to the game itself, and they define it, and the player.
It's not the outcome that shows the meaning of Djokovic's gesture. He acted instinctively, ethically, and for the most part counter-culturally. Many fans will fault him, even patronize him for jeopardizing and losing a game and probably a set that he could have won. Baseball and football players routinely try to trick umpires and refs into believing that they have caught balls that were only trapped (or worse). If a replay showed a player indicating to an official that a call had wrongly gone for his team, one can imagine the response in the clubhouse after the game. (Of course, a team outcome is at stake in those sports, whereas Djokovic was risking only his own advancement.)
To me the no-brainer commitment to victory over the sport itself (as embodied in its rules and the spirit of its rules) is a poignant aspect of our culture. It's one reason why (after growing up as a baseball, football, and basketball fan) I now watch only tennis, golf, and track. Duping officials is the sports equivalent of plagiarism.
In golf players call penalties on themselves, sometimes in cases where the infraction was so marginal that they would probably have gotten away with it. The sport itself is understood to be larger and more fundamental than the outcome of a particular match or tournament. But yesterday's second moment, which was in a golf program, was of a more philosophical sort. Padraig Harrington was playing a round with a reporter who was also quite a good golfer. As they went around the course, Harrington explained how he saw his various options for how to play each shot. At one point he had missed a fairway, and there two quite different kinds of rough very close together in the area where his ball had come to rest. Before he hit his next shot, he explained the difference, not just in terms of its consequence for shot selection but as an instance of how chance plays such a powerful role in golf, since one kind of rough posed a much more difficult challenge than the other. "Golf isn't about being just," he said. He observed that most modern course design and course preparation and maintenance are calculated to make things as fair as possible. His point was that such efforts, while well intentioned, contradict the nature of the game. One player may hit a great shot that ends up in a divot; his opponent of the moment may flub a shot and watch it bounce off a tree into the heart of the green. Harrington said that for him one of the central aspects of golf as an experience was that it required you to accept and deal with whatever chance, no matter how seemingly malevolent, sends your way. While he felt some pride that his success owes a lot to his ability to maintain his equilibrium, and to sustain his pleasure in the game, no matter how the day's breaks are going, there was also a deep humility in his recognition that important things were not in his--or anyone else's--control. It's true that he saw such acceptance as a competitive advantage, just as confidence is. Each sport has a psychology as well as an objective discipline. But he also seemed to be saying that it was a pleasure and privilege to accept golf on its own terms and that those terms were the context within which he played.
These are things that are hard to talk about without sounding moralistic. To make matters worse, I will quote Thoreau, who was something of an absolutist (single quotes because this isn't verbatim): 'If you are in deep water after a shipwreck and have wrested a floating plank from another survivor, you must return it to him though you drown yourself.' The stakes in sports cheating (or its repudiation) aren't so dire, but such choices are shaped prior to the game itself, and they define it, and the player.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
good pieces on the Gates-Crowley conflict
I was struck by Bob Herbert's op-ed in the Times today (Sat. 8/1). His characteristic voice is thoughtful and analytical; he is perceptive and responsible. I'm not saying that his furious piece today necessarily violates any of those values, but it's in a different voice. Like Eugene Robinson's tv appearance last week and Anna Deveare Smith's piece on the Huffington Post, it expands one's sense of where Professor Gates was coming from in his confrontation with Sgt. Crowley. I want to see what happens with the policeman who wrote the racist and misogynistic stuff to the Globe reporter. I hope the union and the general politics of Boston don't force the mayor to back down. I respect unions' determination to make wrongful dismissal as difficult as possible, but in pursuing that goal they sometimes achieve wrongful reinstatement. Frank Rich's piece (Huffington Post 8/2) seems spot on to me.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
recommended books
I've been reading more books since I retired. I got to know a couple of the following titles earlier, but they fit here, and most of the following are ones I've read in the past year. Please see the note at the end about two books that are important to me but are not mentioned here (except in that p.s.).
Fiction: David Grossman, Someone to Run With. A hair-raising but hopeful story of how a relationship between young people from different communities might play out. It also has a dog who is a major character. I should read it again and write at more length and in more detail; I am making it sound kooky. I think it's a great book.
Helen Humphreys, Afterimage and The Lost Garden. HH lives in Canada but was born in the UK, where both of these novels are set, one in the early twentieth century and the other during WWII. I haven't often read two novels by the same writer unless I was reading for school. I'll read at least one of them again.
C.E. Morgan, All the Living. A first novel, published (by FSG) this year, by a Kentuckian with a degree from Harvard Divinity School. It is very original and frequently very compelling in its style and is also exceptionally interesting in the way it treats its characters, whom it respects but holds accountable for their substantial limitations and failings. The two main characters live together and eventually marry. One of the most striking things to me was the way Morgan places sexual explicitness within her larger concerns. That is, she isn't coy or evasive, but her main interest is in the way Aloma experiences her and Orren's lovemaking, if that's the word, in the context of their relationship and her emotional needs. Each of the two main characters is unable to recognize and honor the needs of the other until they have been through a time of violation and hurt. Then something better becomes possible. But first Morgan gives to characters she cares for a large license to experience and express self-pity, blind anger, and other products of isolation and grief. But summary distorts this book, slim as it is. It has a remarkable voice, a challenging logic, and a series of moments that would be worth reading it for even if the book weren't as strong overall as it is. I haven't even mentioned the minister who may be its most interesting character.
Laura Moriarty, The Center of Everything. This original, affecting story has a very young narrator, who is giving us her experience from when she is ten to her last year of high school. The narrator's voice is completely convincing. She has a lot of hard things to deal with, but her evolution into a promising adult is natural and unforced. There is quite a lot of humor, much of which the narrator seems unaware of, though it's hard to tell because she's smart and she works at being funny when she is with her friends. The humor is important to the tone of the novel, and it put me in mind of Moriarty's unimaginably wonderful 2001 non-fiction story in volume two of A Book of Meditations (Phillips Exeter Academy Press, 2005), since in that piece too she finds a healing humor in very difficult experiences without being sentimental or contrived. She's a terrific writer whose second novel has also been published; I look forward to reading it.
Also Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose and, even more, Crossing to Safety.
Non-fiction: Peter Hessler's two books on China, Rivertown and Oracle Bones. Either would have been a worthy recipient of major national prizes. A Peace Corps volunteer who stayed on to learn more and to report for the New Yorker and other publications, he is a wonderful observer, thinker, reporter, adventurer, student, and writer. He wouldn't claim to have inherited the mantle of his teacher and friend John McPhee, but his work has many of the same strengths, which are rare ones.
The more I read of Oracle Bones, the more dazzled I am. Among Hessler's many strengths, and many kinds of strengths, is an eye for irony that is both subtle and acute but that doesn't carry him toward the laziness of cynicism. He is a devotee of the concrete (as I am, or try to be) and I think he would view cynicism as an abstraction or even an ideology. For me one of the many pleasures of reading his work is that it never goes there (to cynicism), either as a tone or as an idea. But he doesn't go to sentimentality or naivete either. One curious effect on me of Oracle Bones is that it is nudging me back to de Tocqueville. I want to test my hypothesis that that is where you would have to go to see something this good in the way of cultural analysis written by a foreign national.
Irene Pepperberg, Alex and Me. An account of the learning, structured (in a lab) and otherwise, of a clever and opinionated African grey parrot. The bird is amazing, but apparently not atypical. Color me insensitive, but I found Alex's story more absorbing than the author's.
Stacey O'Brien, Wesley the Owl. The author claims not just intelligence for her bird but personal attachment, wisdom, and even something approaching spirituality. You'll see why. There is also a wonderful chapter on the culture of the community of research biologists at Cal Tech. The writing in the book as a whole is somewhat unsophisticated, but there are substantial strengths including one memorable scene where O'Brien is challenged in an isolated spot during the wee hours by an unpromising group of young people who seem perhaps ready to give her a hard time but are won over by her interest in Wesley.
Jonathan Rosen, The Life of the Skies. Part birder's autobiography, part history, part meditation on the relationship between our species and the natural world as a whole, as seen through the history of exploitation and attempts at preservation. Rosen's own birding is mostly in Central Park and the mid-East, especially Israel. There are chapters on Audubon, Thoreau, Darwin, and Teddy Roosevelt. This is an original, thoughtful, convincing book, not least in its take on the debate over the possible survival of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
Mark Doty, Dog Years. Like Rosen's, a book I will read again. It is part eulogy--not just to his two glorious dogs--, part celebration of dogs as human companions, and part meditation on mortality as seen through this lens. Doty is both a wonderful poet (see "New Dog" in Atlantis, e.g.) and a very strong prose writer; I think this is his fourth such volume, and I swear he writes beautifully and movingly about many things besides dogs.
P.S. I haven't said anything here about Kenji Yoshino's Covering or Joan Wickersham's The Suicide Index. I reviewed both in print, in the Phillips Exeter Academy Bulletin, Covering I think in 2006 and The Suicide Index last year. Both are finding readers, I'm glad to say: Covering is required reading for incoming students at at least five colleges; and The Suicide Index was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Fiction: David Grossman, Someone to Run With. A hair-raising but hopeful story of how a relationship between young people from different communities might play out. It also has a dog who is a major character. I should read it again and write at more length and in more detail; I am making it sound kooky. I think it's a great book.
Helen Humphreys, Afterimage and The Lost Garden. HH lives in Canada but was born in the UK, where both of these novels are set, one in the early twentieth century and the other during WWII. I haven't often read two novels by the same writer unless I was reading for school. I'll read at least one of them again.
C.E. Morgan, All the Living. A first novel, published (by FSG) this year, by a Kentuckian with a degree from Harvard Divinity School. It is very original and frequently very compelling in its style and is also exceptionally interesting in the way it treats its characters, whom it respects but holds accountable for their substantial limitations and failings. The two main characters live together and eventually marry. One of the most striking things to me was the way Morgan places sexual explicitness within her larger concerns. That is, she isn't coy or evasive, but her main interest is in the way Aloma experiences her and Orren's lovemaking, if that's the word, in the context of their relationship and her emotional needs. Each of the two main characters is unable to recognize and honor the needs of the other until they have been through a time of violation and hurt. Then something better becomes possible. But first Morgan gives to characters she cares for a large license to experience and express self-pity, blind anger, and other products of isolation and grief. But summary distorts this book, slim as it is. It has a remarkable voice, a challenging logic, and a series of moments that would be worth reading it for even if the book weren't as strong overall as it is. I haven't even mentioned the minister who may be its most interesting character.
Laura Moriarty, The Center of Everything. This original, affecting story has a very young narrator, who is giving us her experience from when she is ten to her last year of high school. The narrator's voice is completely convincing. She has a lot of hard things to deal with, but her evolution into a promising adult is natural and unforced. There is quite a lot of humor, much of which the narrator seems unaware of, though it's hard to tell because she's smart and she works at being funny when she is with her friends. The humor is important to the tone of the novel, and it put me in mind of Moriarty's unimaginably wonderful 2001 non-fiction story in volume two of A Book of Meditations (Phillips Exeter Academy Press, 2005), since in that piece too she finds a healing humor in very difficult experiences without being sentimental or contrived. She's a terrific writer whose second novel has also been published; I look forward to reading it.
Also Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose and, even more, Crossing to Safety.
Non-fiction: Peter Hessler's two books on China, Rivertown and Oracle Bones. Either would have been a worthy recipient of major national prizes. A Peace Corps volunteer who stayed on to learn more and to report for the New Yorker and other publications, he is a wonderful observer, thinker, reporter, adventurer, student, and writer. He wouldn't claim to have inherited the mantle of his teacher and friend John McPhee, but his work has many of the same strengths, which are rare ones.
The more I read of Oracle Bones, the more dazzled I am. Among Hessler's many strengths, and many kinds of strengths, is an eye for irony that is both subtle and acute but that doesn't carry him toward the laziness of cynicism. He is a devotee of the concrete (as I am, or try to be) and I think he would view cynicism as an abstraction or even an ideology. For me one of the many pleasures of reading his work is that it never goes there (to cynicism), either as a tone or as an idea. But he doesn't go to sentimentality or naivete either. One curious effect on me of Oracle Bones is that it is nudging me back to de Tocqueville. I want to test my hypothesis that that is where you would have to go to see something this good in the way of cultural analysis written by a foreign national.
Irene Pepperberg, Alex and Me. An account of the learning, structured (in a lab) and otherwise, of a clever and opinionated African grey parrot. The bird is amazing, but apparently not atypical. Color me insensitive, but I found Alex's story more absorbing than the author's.
Stacey O'Brien, Wesley the Owl. The author claims not just intelligence for her bird but personal attachment, wisdom, and even something approaching spirituality. You'll see why. There is also a wonderful chapter on the culture of the community of research biologists at Cal Tech. The writing in the book as a whole is somewhat unsophisticated, but there are substantial strengths including one memorable scene where O'Brien is challenged in an isolated spot during the wee hours by an unpromising group of young people who seem perhaps ready to give her a hard time but are won over by her interest in Wesley.
Jonathan Rosen, The Life of the Skies. Part birder's autobiography, part history, part meditation on the relationship between our species and the natural world as a whole, as seen through the history of exploitation and attempts at preservation. Rosen's own birding is mostly in Central Park and the mid-East, especially Israel. There are chapters on Audubon, Thoreau, Darwin, and Teddy Roosevelt. This is an original, thoughtful, convincing book, not least in its take on the debate over the possible survival of the ivory-billed woodpecker.
Mark Doty, Dog Years. Like Rosen's, a book I will read again. It is part eulogy--not just to his two glorious dogs--, part celebration of dogs as human companions, and part meditation on mortality as seen through this lens. Doty is both a wonderful poet (see "New Dog" in Atlantis, e.g.) and a very strong prose writer; I think this is his fourth such volume, and I swear he writes beautifully and movingly about many things besides dogs.
P.S. I haven't said anything here about Kenji Yoshino's Covering or Joan Wickersham's The Suicide Index. I reviewed both in print, in the Phillips Exeter Academy Bulletin, Covering I think in 2006 and The Suicide Index last year. Both are finding readers, I'm glad to say: Covering is required reading for incoming students at at least five colleges; and The Suicide Index was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Legacy
Legacy
I sit in Washington Square Park, where the southwest corner belongs to chess; it has built-in tables, all hosting games of some intensity. Men and men, men and boys take each other on. One pair relishes the constraints of a small but noisy clock, peremptory as an egg-timer. A local master humbles two opponents at a time. Across the park a group of rappers performs for a substantial crowd. Everywhere in between surges kaleidoscopic heterogeneity: skaters, professors, lovers, musicians, children with observant parents and ice cream. Not to mention the comic miscellany of the dogs pulling on their leashes to reach the run or some improbable acquaintance. My mother would have loved this: the exuberant abundance of the ordinary.
In some ways she preferred the Depression to what came afterwards: she loved its huge community of shared not-having. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. She worked, helped others to work, married my father. Her cheap Socialist Party campaign card from the 30s, with its dour, almost thuggish passport shot--the worst picture I have of her--honors my desk, though it did not make her Justice of the Peace.
The mother I knew first-hand still worked for the State to match job seekers with openings, and she volunteered endlessly: for liberal candidates, at a soup kitchen, on committees at the Unitarian church. At forty she liked it when the kids at my bithday party were white, black, affluent, not. Sometimes she married constant purpose to episodic eccentricity. At sixty, long widowed, she would walk in a field near the house, looking for flowers she could place on the table where everyone else was already eating her serviceable cooking. She objected to the timely departure of trains she had only narrowly missed. For years she watched herons stalking goldfish or frogs and wanted them all to be well. Also crows foraging in the snow; the ocean and trees and rivers; another generation of people in search of work.
I sit in Washington Square Park, where the southwest corner belongs to chess; it has built-in tables, all hosting games of some intensity. Men and men, men and boys take each other on. One pair relishes the constraints of a small but noisy clock, peremptory as an egg-timer. A local master humbles two opponents at a time. Across the park a group of rappers performs for a substantial crowd. Everywhere in between surges kaleidoscopic heterogeneity: skaters, professors, lovers, musicians, children with observant parents and ice cream. Not to mention the comic miscellany of the dogs pulling on their leashes to reach the run or some improbable acquaintance. My mother would have loved this: the exuberant abundance of the ordinary.
In some ways she preferred the Depression to what came afterwards: she loved its huge community of shared not-having. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. She worked, helped others to work, married my father. Her cheap Socialist Party campaign card from the 30s, with its dour, almost thuggish passport shot--the worst picture I have of her--honors my desk, though it did not make her Justice of the Peace.
The mother I knew first-hand still worked for the State to match job seekers with openings, and she volunteered endlessly: for liberal candidates, at a soup kitchen, on committees at the Unitarian church. At forty she liked it when the kids at my bithday party were white, black, affluent, not. Sometimes she married constant purpose to episodic eccentricity. At sixty, long widowed, she would walk in a field near the house, looking for flowers she could place on the table where everyone else was already eating her serviceable cooking. She objected to the timely departure of trains she had only narrowly missed. For years she watched herons stalking goldfish or frogs and wanted them all to be well. Also crows foraging in the snow; the ocean and trees and rivers; another generation of people in search of work.
So her dreams remained catholic with a very small c. As she aged and yielded independence, she tracked them through television news and also looked beyond. She rejoiced in every ride we took to the coast, breathed her delight when the sea came into view, even when it was gray--the ocean's multi-colored openness, its changing hues following the light, its freshening wind on her own changing face. In her nineties she looked into the mirror and chuckled ruefully at her ubiquitous lines and wrinkles.
All people are equal, she said, and lived by the words, with friends of myriad economies and ethnicities, a crowd as protean as the one I see in the Park. New York was her lodestar: the city's manic variousness, its standing challenge to its own claims of money and class. A letter from a friend longs for universal human flourishing, giving me a language for her deepest wish.
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