Category: old ramblers

I’m missing New Ramblers Nos. 21-23. If you have any of them, could you please e-mail them to me? lauracrossett @ hailmail.net (don’t forget to remove the spaces). Thanks!

Awhile ago my friend gave me a copy of an essay from The Georgia Review (summer 1994, by Mark A.R. Facknitz, if you want to look it up), which begins like this: “I am an elitist and I accept this condition.”

This particular line, which my friend had quoted to us on the way to the School of the Americas protest in Georgia became the motto of our car (full of three loud women writers) for the trip, because we spent a fair amount of time discussing how much better the whole caravan would have gone if we had been in charge of planning it (none of this stopping every two hours for thirty minutes and eating at Cheddars business, nosiree). I am an elitist and I accept this condition: it is a satisfying line. But some more of the beginning of this essay is worth quoting here.

I am an elitist and I accept this condition. The origin of the process that led to my superiority was my accidental escape from Cucamonga, California, and its intellectual geography. That elitism isolates me, of course, as surely as does what I have seen, done, and read. I draw no satisfaction from this, and indeed I belong to no elite for which there is a diploma, certificate, title, or icon such as a Jaguar or an air-conditioned mansion in Potomac or New Canaan. I’m merely an associate professor of English with a tiny but private office. I work at a state university where the children of unspeakable prosperity have the ignorance and audacity to assume I am merely doing a routine for their amusement when I suggest that they are lazy, complacent, naïve, and as politically competent as cockroaches. I am to them what an English professor ought to be: flaky, intense, given to tirade–in short, one scene in the show they’re paying for.

Possibly this is not the best essay to be rereading the night before I go back to teaching–I don’t even have a private office. I have a former AV storage closet with no windows which now serves as an office for four T.A.s. One of them never uses it because he is in the Writer’s Workshop and is far too cool to hold office hours in a dingy room in a mausoleum constructed in 1970 in which they only open the vents that let in fresh air twice a year. Instead he holds office hours at the overpriced coffee shop, downing $3 lattes, which is maybe something I should bring up the next time I try to get him to join the union, which he says he supports but cannot afford (dues are $12.70/month, conveniently deducted by payroll, and you get free beer once a month, and at least some feeling that you might be helping to preserve things like health insurance and cost-of-living pay increases and so on).

I digress. (“Digression! Digression!” I can hear some kid yelling from Pencey Prep, circa 1945).

The Facknitz essay is actually mostly about the author’s childhood, split between southern California and India, and about class, and about the intransmutability of experience or understanding, though none of these are what I set out to write about at all. We all write about the intransmutability of understanding, though, in that we all fail to find words that are as exact as the experience or idea that we want to transmit–or we find them, but of course they don’t mean to another exactly what they meant to us. It’s all very distressing. (I am aware, incidentally, that I am using “we” quite liberally, especially given that I’m only twenty-six years old. Some of my colleagues would say that one should never use the term at all; that it smacks of pretension, of knowing the unknowable, of believing in some mystical universal truth to which only we writers have access, which we then stoop to sharing with the rest of the world. But I still believe in that; I still believe that that is part of why we write: to discover things and share them with the rest of the world. That the rest of the world may not care, or may have figured this all out long since, should not really be of concern. I am an elitist. . . .).

I actually sat down tonight to write about Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrated today. (This is a different, more indiscriminate we I speak of here: the post office was closed, the President made a proclamation. It was that sort of a we.) Classes were also not held here at the U of I: I signed one of the petitions which asked, back in the early ’90s, that this be made into a University holiday, and I went to some of the wonderful programs that the Black Student Union used to put on in the student union in honor of the day, and in protest that it was not recognized by the UI. Now there is an entire Martin Luther King Jr. Human Rights Week here, with speakers and performances and panels and big posters everywhere with the scehdule and a picture of Dr. King and some salient words of his picked out for the occasion. Last year Angela Davis spoke about the election (remember that one?) and past elections and the state of civil death, about the “possible felons” whose names were removed from voting rolls, and about racial disparity in incarcerations in the US (a pertinent topic in Iowa, which I believe ranks first, or close to first, in the nation in the percentage of its Black people we lock up–particularly appalling since African-Americans make up only 2% of the population here to begin with). This year Felix Justice and Danny Glover, who spoke here when I was in high school, will be back, and Dennis Halliday, who used to work high up in the UN until he got too distressed about the numbers of Iraqi children who were dying as a result of UN sanctions, will speak, and a bunch of other stuff. And the lecture halls will be filled, and there will be some celebration, and the children of unspeakable wealth and privilege who attend this school will attend the lectures that their professors and T.A.s require of them, and they will hear well-meaning and earnest people speaking with great passion about topics of grave importance, and mostly they will yawn and think, guilt guilt guilt, who needs it?

I am perhaps being a little cynical.

In a way, King’s birthday was better here before it was officially celebrated: it was a cause, it was something to get behind, it was something people understood. Only racists were not celebrating King’s birthday: did we want to be in the same class as that idiot governor of Arizona? Now the holiday is a smorgasbord of causes, the kind of act everyone wants to be in on. It’s like a human rights feeding frenzy: who can get the best slots in the best spaces on the best nights. Who can get the biggest audience, the most new recruits. Who can give the most wrenching presentation about political prisoners or starving children or AIDS in Africa or sweatshop labor (not that SAS is doing anything; we’re too dysfunctional/nonexistent) or what have you.

Again, my cynicism seems to be winning. I was going to talk at some length about how it upsets me that every year I see King celebrated for civil rights, and every year I hear the last, famous part of “I have a dream” quoted, and every year the celebration never seems to include his Poor Peoples’ Campaign, or his support of labor, or his opposition to the war in Vietnam. The summer after this one–August 2003–will mark the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and JusticeFreedom, which is kind of sad when you think about how little of either have been meted out in the past decades.
And yet. . . and yet. I very much want to celebrate King’s birthday. I want to be glad that enough people signed enough petitions and wrote enough letters and held enough sit-ins and generally raised enough of a hullabaloo that this country does stop–as much as it ever stops–to remember someone I truly want to remember, someone who probably makes me gladder for the invention of recorded sound than any music in the world, someone whose vision from the mountaintop still keeps me going. I want to celebrate, but I also don’t want to forget that there is still, as the reds would say, a world to win.

Civilian casualties in the U.S. air war on Afghanistan: 3767 (est). More info at http://www.cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm

We must fight in America not to make the world safe for democracy but to make democracy safe for the world. –Chuck McDew, circa 1964

Recently I had workshopped a draft of an essay about being a radical, an essay in which I attempted, at one point, to describe something of the world my friends and I live in:

In this world. . . black men get shot on the streets every day, and other black men are put in prison for crimes they did not commit, and the white police officers who fired the bullets are sent out again with a slap on the wrist and a bigger gun.

(It is probably worth noting that I wrote these words several weeks before the acquittal of a white police officer in Cincinnati, who shot a young, unarmed black man to death. The workshop took place a few days after the decision.) The overwhelming reaction of the workshop members to this particular passage was that this was not a radical position and that, in fact, “most Americans believed this” and “prominent people spoke about it.” I was rather stunned. Of course, I remembered, it was true that a hundred or so upper middle class white students at my high school walked out of school on the day of the Rodney King verdict (I did not, nor, interestingly, did any of the other people in Ruth Greenwald’s Geometry Honors class which met that afternoon. We asked Miss Greenwald to tell us about student protests from back when; but I think we all felt, oddly, that protest on that day was futile, and knew, somehow, that Miss Greenwald had something left to teach us–and I think that she did). And it is true that hundreds of people marched in New York after the shooting of Amadou Diallou, and Susan Sarandon and some other “prominent people” got arrested. All this is true, and would seem to indicate that my colleagues were right, that the majority of people share this view of the world that I’d presented. And I think that it is true; I think that a lot of people out there feel that racial profiling exists, that police brutality exists, that the legal systems set up to deal with this are inadequate. But I maintain that there is a difference–not a difference, necessarily, in commitment, or even in effectiveness (for who knows what is truly effective?), but a difference in view.

When I fed the poor they called me a saint. When I asked why they were poor, they called me a communist. –Archbishop Hedler Chamoa Hèlder Câmara I saw that in someone’s signature recently; I don’t know who Archbishop Chamoa Câmara is or when this was said, but it represents, albeit somewhat blatantly, at least part of the difference I’m trying to get at. [There’s no way to talk about this without creating an us/them dichotomy. I apologize–the limits of our language are the limits of our world (I think Wittgenstein said something along those lines, but never actually having read him, I’m a little out of line in attributing–or using–the exact quotation. But the idea is one I’ve had myself.)]

The world I live in is one in which these things happen every day and no one notices. We all know that the majority of rapes go unreported and that many crimes go uncaught. Yet many seem to believe that these undetected, unpunished crimes are only those of the vandals–the petty thieves, the minor arsonists. The idea that undetected, unpunished crimes could be carried out by those in uniforms–whether they be military, police, judicial, Wall Street, G-8, what have you–is one that, for many, is harder to accept. And when they do accept it, it is seen as an aberration, one which will be rectified by witness, by spontaneous demonstration, perhaps by a few celebrity arrests. That these crimes are committed daily, routinely, and that they must be questioned and stopped from their roots, and that that questioning and stopping may well have to take the form of “radical” action, is something this supposed majority seems unable or unwilling to admit.

There was something hopeful in the fact that, after all, four of the twelve members of the silent majority believed us. But four of twelve in the Gallup polls believed in unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam as well. They are willing enough to register their opinions but too defeated to live them. Fascism will come to America by compromise: not through the strength of reaction but through the weakness of the good people.
—Tom Hayden, Trial, 1970

A week or so ago I heard a politician–probably Rudy Giuliani, but it might
have been someone else–giving a speech at some sort of memorial service for victims of S11. (We activist types write all dates that way since A16, the
first major protests against the IMF/World Bank in DC on 16 April 2000).

“When were kids,” the speaker said, “and people asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, what did we say? ‘A policeman.’ ‘A fireman.’ Well, we
grew up and we didn’t do that. But today I tell you, when we are asked what
we want to be, we say again, ‘A policeman! A fireman!'”

It was a damn good speech, one you could tell was bringing tears and shivers to the eyes and spines of everyone in the audience. Geo. Bush ought to hire that speech writer, though he might have to work a little on his delivery. But it got me thinking again of something that occurred to me some time ago.

Think back, if you can, to a Fischer-Price village. I had one (actually,
two, I think) as a kid, and they sometimes had them at preschools and
doctor’s offices, at least in my white upper middle class existence.
Fischer-Price villages are little miniature cities, complete with houses and
stores and hospitals and police stations and fire stations, and little
people who work and live and shop in all these places. And the amazing
thing about all these little people (aside from the fact that they all smile
all the time) is that they are all absolutely equal in stature–equally
clean, equally well-equipped, equally important in the functioning of this
little city. And when you’re a kid, especially a kid young enough to be
playing with these things still, that’s the way you think the world is.
Being a policeman or a garbage collector or a window washer is no different
from being a doctor or a lawyer or a banker in the world of Fischer-Price,
in the world we are taught to believe in as children.

And not only is everyone’s job equally important, but everyone’s job is also
equally real. There are no systems analysts or customer (guest, if you work
at Target) service assistants or departmental executive officers. The
worldview of children may be the closest thing to Marxism ever to have
existed–no one is alienated from the product or meaning of her work,
everyone works according to his abilities and receives according to his
needs. (For those of you who may have difficulties with Marx, you could
also think of this as Christianity in its purest form–there a number of
passages in the Bible Marx could well have been cribbing from.)

But of course that’s not the world we grow up and live in, and it’s not the
world most of us think of every day. After the age of twelve or so, nobody
I knew was saying they wanted to be a policeman or a fireman or even a
pilot, at least not in front of grownups. We were going to become
journalists, mathematicians, scientists, diplomats, doctors, lawyers,
bankers, architects, professors. A few people said they were going to
become musicians (classical) or artists (but they would teach, too). The
world, it seemed, could function with just those professions filled. That
there were people who mopped the floors, drove the buses, built the
buildings, we knew, but somehow these people were not us. We were not
responsible for their livelihood or well-being. Obviously, if they really
wanted to, they could become doctors and lawyers and bankers, too. Wasn’t
that the story of every biography we read?

The world is disturbing to me these days, as it is to many people. But the
world has been disturbing to me for a long, long time, and I suspect it will
continue to be so long after we’ve forgotten that we want to be volunteers,
that we want to help out, that we want to be heroes, long after we’ve
returned the illusion of peace, which, as another famous Marxist noted, is
“nothing but a period of truce between wars.”

Martin Luther King defined true peace as not merely the absence of tension
but also the presence of justice. I used to believe that, too–but that was
back before the acquittal of a police officer in Cincinnati, before the
deletion of the names of “possible felons” from the voting rolls in Florida,
before Madeleine Albright ever said the price was worth it, before I stopped
wanting to play with my Fischer-Price village, even–back when I believed in
that piece of graffiti some ruffian carved above the Supreme Court: Equal
Justice Under Law.

Shalom,
Laura

Gentle Readers,

The pieces I’m sending out now were written in the last couple of days, based on thoughts I’d been having now for weeks, or months, or years. As I write this preface now, I’m listening to NPR tell me that military strikes have begun against Afghanistan. I’m listening to a White House correspondent report that George Bush has noted, again, that these attacks are only one aspect of a multifaceted military strategy, and that some aspects of this strategy will, by necessity, be covert, and we will never know about them. I would like you, for a moment–particularly those of you who are older than I am, who have memories more direct than the accounts I have received from books–about the covert, secret military actions you know about. (Sometimes, I believe, these were called “police actions.”) I would like you to think about wars in the past, in which, theoretically, strikes were made only against military targets, and I would like you to think about collateral damage. I would like you to think about how you wage a war against an enemy you cannot see, whose whereabouts you do not know, and whom you have represented consistently not as a person or even a group of people but as a concept, an -ism. I would like you, if you can, to think of the number of American casualties in any recent war, and then I would like you to think if you can remember, or even find, the number of casualties on the other side. I have noted to many of you on many occasions that I do not really believe in moral progress. It seems to me that the aggregate level of human suffering has remained the same across the centuries. I still believe that. But I also believe that we are obliged to try, and I believe, more now than ever, that peace can never be achieved or kept through strength. Einstein, whom I believe said that first, concluded by noting that this peace “can only be achieved through understanding.” I think grass roots organizing promotes understanding, that reading promotes understanding, that singing promotes understanding, that loving–family and friend and neighbor and stranger alike–promotes understanding. I encourage you to continue with it all, and to preserve, for yourselves and those around you, those things which are good about civilization.

Shalom,
Laura

Some of you have been complaining that there hasn’t been a New Rambler in awhile. Honestly. One would think you were, I don’t know, paying subscribers or something. (An explanation of why I write this and why it’s free and how this is supposed to prevent that dread thing known as selling out will follow at a later date, probably). Anyway, as they say, you pays your money and you takes your choice, except that of course in this case, you don’t pay money, so I get to make the choice. Hey, I may be poor, but at least I’m satisified.

So. En garde.

Earlier this afternoon I was sitting in lovely downtown Iowa City with my oldest friend, just about, and her baby, being lazy and having occasional brief conversations with passersby. (Another old friend of mine used to refer to downtown as the Zoo Parade, but I’ll refrain from comment).

One such guy that we talked to was strolling back and forth, tapping his way along with what appeared to be the handle of a toilet plunger, with a bedroll and a small bag strapped to his back and held in place by a skateboard. He was explaining that he had a job now but was otherwise still homeless. “But that’s okay with me,” he said, “because there’s no way I would pay rent in this town in the summer. I slept up on top of Prairie Lights last night, and it was great.” Then he strolled on.

Although I rarely lived here for any length of time during college, I was usually in town during August, and I would usually spend at least part of my day downtown, holding conversations much like the one above with the smattering of people I know down there. Then I’d go back to Vassar and listen to people talking about their yatchs. I am still somewhat astounded that I did not completely lose it while at college, but going to that school (and, I would imagine, a number of others) trained one very well in living with numerous contradictions. The guy doing coke down the hall from you was probably going to be ignored or, at the very worst, put on housing probation if discovered. The guy half a mile away, though, doing exactly the same thing, was going to get busted and thrown in jail, or shot. It was really Ecclesiastical (supposing that’s an adjective), actually–all that to everything a time and season business. Some people are meant to be investment bankers and some people are meant to be derelicts. And some of us, of course, are meant to flee back to Iowa (methamphetamine capital of the world!)

But this was not actually intended to be about crime or drug addiction or even skateboarding (for the record, still not a crime), or about the homeless, or at least not exactly. I myself am sort of homeless at the moment, in that I am between leases and currently housesitting and all my stuff is packed up in boxes and I have no idea where anything is except for my computer (thank God for laptops). This is, of course, in no way shape or form like sleeping on benches or train-hopping or even camping and moving your tent 20 feet every two weeks or whatever it is that the national park system requires these days. It’s just mildly inconvenient–except that I find it enormously disconcerting.

I’ve lived in something like nine different houses and apartments (plus an assortment of dorm rooms and cabins), and I can only imagine that, if the paperwork ever actually reaches a human being at the Student Loan Corporation, that person is just sitting there sighing and thinking, My God, is this girl ever going to settle down (and start paying her bills on time, for that matter)? and I am about to move into the tenth. But after that, if everything goes according to plan (and yes, I can hear God laughing even as I write), I’m going to buy a house.

And I am going to buy that house here in Iowa.

A number of you, I know, wonder why I would choose to live here. I sometimes wonder myself. The Midwest is not really a nice place. The weather is mostly terrible (cold in winter, hot and muggy in summer, prone to rain the rest of the time). There is no ocean (unless, of course, some enterprising soul finally carries out Donald Kaul’s plan to turn Des Moines into a seaport, which I would heavily endorse). You can really only get fresh produce in the summer. Farms are failing daily; what development there is is haphazard and profoundly ugly; the demographics are, to the minds of many, unutterably depressing (lots of old white people, not much of anything else). Outside of a few select cities, there is not much of what is called culture. And, I have recently learned, Iowa ranks pretty low in air quality (and don’t even get me started on the water). But almost nobody wants to live here.

I have been to New York and I have been to California, and I love both, but I don’t like what I would have to do, or who I would have to become, in order to live there.

Most of the homeless people (though by no means all) I’ve met are homeless by choice, homeless because the idea of a house, an apartment, even a mattress on a floor in a basement and a place to hang their hat is, for whatever reason, unappealing to them. I don’t really understand that–I am one of the most materialistic people I know, and I am passionately attached to my stuff (though its value to anyone but me is questionable). But I think in a way I am like those street kids that I know, because I too live where I do out of choice. I wasn’t always sure of that–there have been times in the last two years when I have doubted greatly the wisdom of moving back here, when I have felt trapped because I was broke and seemed unemployable and felt doomed to live in my mother’s house or do temp work for the rest of my life. And I would panic, and go on a trip, or at least an imaginary trip, to some alabaster city where I imagined my life would be better. Yet even in the midst of this, there has always been something to catch me up–something I haven’t yet found a way to describe and never will–but something that makes me come back, turn back, “choosing,” as Wendell Berry writes, “again what I chose before.”

Thanks for reading.