Same Day, July 17, 1996 10:48PM: Buenos Aires, Argentina

February 10, 2012 1 Comment

For those of you who dare, this is the second chapter (the first is here, still).

This is a continuation of July 17, 1996. The scene opens in a café, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  It’s located in a Bohemian spot, Boca. It’s what we commonly call un barrio.  

One of the characters is reading El Clarín, which is a popular and central newspaper in Argentina.  And, as TWA Flight 800 is real,  Hojjatoleslam Ahmad Musavi is a real character, though highly fictionalized here so as to avoid condemnation.  Others, Gardel, Evita Perón and Maradona —  el Che — are of course real.

The rest — I’m responsible for putting you through this …

El Clarín, on the lower right hand side of its front page, in a small tight square unnoticed by most of its readers even as they licked the tips of thumb and index finger and turned to the paper’s next page, reported that an unidentified Middle Eastern man was found dead in a dingy alley near the Rocha Bend of the Riachuelo in La Boca.

Artists and laborers in red, yellow, blue-green chapa houses, built at the dawning of a nation by Italian immigrants working in nearby meatpacking plants and warehouses in Buenos Aires’ oldest neighborhood, aroused by first light, awakened to a coiled body in fetal position, throat cut from ear to ear, face down and eyes wide open submerged in coagulated gutter water and floating cigarette butts.   Winter flies gathered the spittle.

Víctima de juego sucio, reported El Clarín.

“I hope he’s not here,” said Marcelo Abendroth in a whisper, his long,  delicate hand outstretched over the story of the dead Middle Eastern man in El Clarín laying opened on a flimsy table in the dim Rincón Café in San Telmo.   He looked down at the story and stared at it for some time.  Then he carefully drew his café to the edge of his thin lips so as to avoid being stung by its heat.

He scoped the Rincón.  A gilded portrait of a young Carlos Gardel, fedora at an angle over the tangista’s upturned brow, hung side-by-side with the Madonna sagrada, Evita Perón, over the murky bar.  Abendroth grinned.  A dozen small fat candles in constant vigil beneath the portraits flickered a quiet light onto a mahogany bar and scarred it with a melancholy wax.   The bar was an altar , an homage to an imagined Argentina.  Bottles of wine and whisky and gin and absinthe from France stood without order – whisky next to wine, cognac and warm cokes and vodka.  At the end of the bar next to the television held high on a homemade wooden shelf was a signed poster of a youthful Diego Maradona in his blue and yellow of better days.  The poster was tacked into the plaster wall.

Near Plaza Dorrego, the Rincón was the local café, the nexus for life’s transitions.  On its wounded external brick wall was a spray painted caricature of a youthful Che Guevara, in his boina and scraggly beard, frozen for posterity.  And beneath the image of the Argentine doctor from Rosario, in blood red:  Until Victory Always!

Marcelo Abendroth wore a brown gabardine suit, a dark blue wool turtle neck and Italian loafers without socks.  He had taken off his jacket and draped it behind his seat.  Abendroth had skeletal shoulders and a spindly neck.  He rolled his sleeves half way up his forearm exposing fine wrists.   A Rolex dangled like a woman’s bracelet from his right wrist.

Abendroth looked down at the newspaper, again, and moved his hand to the side and glanced at the story.  He read the headline out loud: “Víctima de juego sucio.”  And raised his conditioned eyebrows to show indignation.  “Very Argentinean, the knife,” he said sternly – as stern as he could be given his demeanor.  “I hope that Abu Dokhan lives up to his name.  And vanishes.  I hope he didn’t have anything to do with this.”

Hojatoleslam Ahmad Musavi had eyes that were outsized portals as black as night.  They fell on a thick weariness that told a story of an anguished life.   Musavi’s face was round and wide.  He ran his hand over his bald head – a sign of his frustration with Abendroth’s questions about the whereabouts of the smoke-bearer, Abu Dokhan.

But Abendroth noted how Musavi brightened when he heard the name of the most wanted Lebanese.  Musavi sat up and eased his hand down his burly face and rubbed his bulbous nose as if he suddenly had an itch.  The table trembled from his weight.   Hairs protruding from his nose were like ivy entangled in a moustache that covered his upper lip.  Abendroth looked away in disgust.

“Hezbollah calls him The smoke-bearer, the Abu Dokhan.  That’s what it means, smoke-bearer.  He vanishes like smoke,” said Hojatoleslam Ahmad Musavi with pride.  “All westerners think we Arabs are related or that we know each other intimately.  Everyone knows who Hajj Radwan, the Abu Dokhan, is – that’s his real name.  Hajj Radwan.   But I.  We,” he said pointing to Abendroth and then himself. “We have nothing to do with him, my friend.  And I have nothing to do with this dead man.”

“In this country all Arabs are implicated, I’m afraid – first the Israeli Embassy is bombed, then AMIA is leveled,” said Abendroth.  “I’ve been told that the dead man had a bird stuffed in his mouth.”

“A bird?  What kind of a bird? It’s not in the paper,” said Musavi.  He spoke as if he was gargling with marbles.  He leaned towards the much smaller Abendroth.  Musavi seemed to be about to swallow him.

“They don’t want to alarm people. We Argentineans are a superstitious lot.  A canary.”

“Ah.  Someone has indeed sent a message.”

Musavi sipped his bitter black coffee, eyes on Marcelo Abendroth,  Director of the Economic Education Trust, a subsidiary of Triad Management, a consulting firm concentrated on information and influence ; it mines special interests for investors in the United States that look to expand their holdings and have some bearing on power.

“I love the coffee in your country.  It reminds me of home,” said Musavi, his thick lips expanding into a smile that made his face even wider.

“The destruction of the Israeli Embassy and AMIA are not subtle messages, Musavi.  Not at all.  What’s next?  There’s always a next.  Something.  Always more, something else,” Abendroth said leaning forward over his espresso.  But he immediately relaxed because he knew from Musavi’s blank gaze that there wasn’t going to be a response.  Abendroth was not one to push.  He smiled coquettishly, which was his way when he was nervous.   He looked down at his hands, palms down, and rubbed the tops of his finger nails with his thumb as if he was removing dust.  He admired their luster.

“Abendroth.  In German it means evening or dusk, does it not? Argentineans are always on the lookout for Germans.  It must make you self-conscious.  Nervous perhaps.  No?  The indictment in people’s eyes when they know – and suspect.  Similar to what we Arabs feel.  So you must understand that Hajj Radwan, the Abu Dokhan, is a coincidence – that’s all.”

“Coincidence.  The Israeli Embassy and the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association, the AMIA itself after the embassy.  Coincidences, Musavi?  Suddenly this dead man.  What are you hiding?  We’re always hiding something.”

“Money is truth, Mr. Abendroth,” said Musavi in his thick accent.  “The only truth.  Nothing else.  Money.  It creates democracies.  And it can create autocracies and dictatorships and whatever we need it to do.  Money can hold whoever we want in power, for as long as we want.  Money paves roads.  And sometimes, as you say, it can hide things.”

“It depends on the story, Musavi.  It has to be the right story.  Freedom has a price.  It’s a balancing act.  That’s the world we’re in.  Our world.   And you want to play in it so you must tow the line, Musavi.  With care.  Or you might not be let in.  Entrance comes at a price.”

Marcelo drew his espresso and then waved to the sleepy waiter.

“Ajenjo.  Para los dos, por favor,” he ordered.

“Ah bien.  La fée verte.  Muy bien.  Perfecto.”

Marcelo Abendroth leaned towards Musavi as if he didn’t want to be heard.  “At our first meeting in Iguazu, I remember the smoke-bearer.  He was there.  I remember.  He was with you.  In your entourage.  I can see him there plainly.  Like it was yesterday.  I saw him.  I remembered him when I read this story.  This was before the embassy.  Before any of it.  This dirty business.  What are you doing, exactly, Mr. Musavi?  What can you say to me?  If it’s learned that Hajj Radwan was with you – it’s obvious no?  People would think.  Put two and two together.”

“Anyone could have done this killing.  Someone could have been angry at this guy because he said something foul against Boca and fútbol passions ran wild and they cut his throat after too much drink.  Maybe he was a River fan.  Look where we are, Marcelo.  This is not uncommon in your country.  It could have been a woman – because of a woman.  The signs are there – the knife.  The knife is always used when a woman is involved.  It could have been the Iranians.  Who’s to know?  Or maybe it was that psycho al-Gaddafi – he has a bone to pick with your president.  Menem’s an Arab, too, after all, and word is, he crossed Gaddafi.  On the street I hear that your president reneged on a missile deal.  You can’t take ten million dollars from Gaddafi, not give him anything in return and get away with it.  Come on.  Your people should know better.  Perhaps Gaddafi is paying him back – a warning.  Maybe that’s the message.  A message from Gaddafi.  Don’t cross me Menem or next time it will be closer to home.”  Musavi paused and looked down at his black café, put his thick hands around the tiny cup and, as his large round shoulders came up around his head and he looked like a giant sea turtle, said, “And maybe it was the CIA.  You know they’re everywhere and they like it down here.  They like your country, all those Germans smuggled in – who could have imagined that American military power was built with Nazi know-how? And it came through here, your country, Marcelo.  It’s very easy here.  It’s chaotic and delightfully confusing.  Anything is possible in your country. Everything can be done here.  People are wonderfully distracted.  That’s why we all like your country.  Certain countries exist to facilitate the needs of others.  The legacy of the Cold War, I’m afraid.  We have to live with it.  Adjust.  Isn’t that how we’ve evolved?  It’s the probable course of things.  And who’s to know?  Maybe the CIA is fronting for Gaddafi or the Iranians, maybe both.  It’s all possible.  It depends on which way the story will be turned.   Isn’t’ that what you said?  We’re all in this twist now – twisted together in a coil, stories intertwining, running into each other, infecting one another.   We can’t escape it.  History, the present, the future – they’re all intertwined and confused.  No one knows the truth.  No one knows where we’re going.  We have to create new truths.  New rules.  I don’t recall Hajj Radwan there with us.  I’m sorry,  Marcelo, I don’t.  Not at all.  Maybe you’re mistaken. You westerners think we all look alike.  It’s not just.  Not just at all.  We Arabs don’t know each other. We’re not all related.  The eye is fickle, my friend.”

“And the heart is worse.”

“Perhaps.  Perhaps you’re right.  Maybe the Iranians, maybe Gaddafi.  The CIA.  We don’t know anything about this dead man.  And, yes, the embassy and AMIA are messages, indeed.  That’s all.  Messages, Marcelo.  The result of something much larger. Eventually we’ll set a good course, catch the right wind with the right force.   Perhaps Hajj Radwan has been here – perhaps not.  We will never know.  Unsavory characters know how to blend with the rest of us.  They blend and wait – and then strike.  A friend today can kill you tomorrow.  And never be found again.  Maybe getting away with a thing like that is the ultimate freedom.  An aphrodisiac – the most powerful of all.  What’s a life worth, anyway?”

Abendroth lit a cigarette and inhaled with the deep satisfaction of someone who smoked because it eased him.   Musavi leaned back in his chair and extended his arms, his hands holding the edge of the delicate table, and took in the contentment of watching Abendroth’s unease.

A bandoneon cried out Gardel.  El día que me quieras.

The bandoneon player, all in black like the night echoing through the front window behind him, was lost in the woe oozing from his fingers moving instinctually up and down the white keys that shone like the moon. El día que me quieras.

Musavi studied Abendroth.  A full silence fell between them.

“I’m not sure about all this Musavi,” Abendroth said in the semi darkness of the Rincón.  He was hesitant.

“We’re merely trying to learn to live in the world that has been created by you westerners.”

Musavi took a red pack of Dunhills from his pocket and lit a cigarette, too.  He held the cigarette between his thumb and index finger.  Inhaled.  And exhaled slowly and leaned forward and flicked the edge of his cigarette into a tin ashtray between them.

The bartender turned on the old black and white TV at the end of the bar and its radiance fell on the dim Rincón.  The bartender reached for the rabbit ears and adjusted them and a coarse picture came into view as if traveling a great distance through fog.

… A las 20:45 horas, once minutos después de despegar del Aeropuerto Internacional Kennedy, el vuelo 800 de TWA, con destino a París, Francia, se estrelló en el Océano Atlántico frente a la costa de Long Island…

Marcelo Abendroth turned towards the TV, a disturbing blue-gray eye, an unannounced brightness that pushed aside the solemn comfort that can exist among strangers, and took a drag of his cigarette.

Suddenly the TV picture was gone and a scratchy graininess shoved Gardel’s sadness, jostled it, and brought forth another.

The bandoneon player kept on, his melancholy persistent, like mourning.

“Carajo. Puta.  Qué mierda,” the bartender railed.

“Chin,” said Musavi, raising his absinthe.  “Salud.  It’s done.  The future is ours.  Let’s not cry over what’s past.  We’ve done well together – and we’ll do more.  We understand each other.  And we have a place to start.  A starting point.  We’re in deep.  And we’re going deeper.  When there are no answers to a puzzle, my friend, the only solution is to go in deeper, dig further into the maze.  It’s the only way.  There’s no turning back.  There’s only going deeper.”

Marcelo Abendroth turned away from the TV and raised his glass to Musavi’s. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “To forging ahead.  Going deeper.  Here’s to the labyrinth.  Salud.”

“Al futuro,” said Musavi.  “Nuestro futuro.”

They pulled their heads back and swallowed the warm ajenjo and slapped their short glasses on the table.   The table shook and creaked.  Musavi looked up at the black television screen.

Filed under American Literature, corruption, cultural studies, fiction, Homeland Security, men, Muslim, philosophy, politics, Pop Culture, Religion, the University, TWAS Flight 800

July 17, 1996: New York City, Upper West Side

February 8, 2012 3 Comments

These are the first pages of a story I’ve been working on for quite some time.  The larger working title is THE DOUBLE HELIX.  The first third is called BENDING. The second and third parts are titled TWISTING and COMPRESSION.

Please feel free to comment.  Your comments will definitely help me.  Where do you think it’s going?  What’s happening here?  Who are these people?  This is fiction that grows from history.   The major event, here, which happens on July 17, 1996, is true.

“Providence sometimes foreshadows the future of men in dreams, not so that they may be able to avoid the sufferings fated for them, for they can never get the better of destiny, but in order that they may bear them with the more patience when those sufferings come; for when disasters come all together and unexpectedly, they strike the spirit with so severe and sudden a blow that they overwhelm it; while if they are anticipated, the mind, by dwelling on them beforehand, is able little by little to turn the edge of sorrow.”

Achilles Tatius in The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon

 

 

PART ONE: BENDING

July 17, 1996: New York City, Upper West Side

Life’s din diminished some in that small moment when he pulled open his apartment window with such expectation that the last few inches the window flew up knew only his eagerness.

With his palms on the coarse sill, he ducked under the window’s frame and leaned into the horizon – the  Hudson River and the Jersey Palisades across the way and the George Washington bridge just north beaming a dull evening gray.

He waited all day to tilt into the serenity that arrived with the humidity and pressed him to push away his day.  He arched his back and stretched and took it in.

He panned down six stories and set his eyes on an incongruous dance of Poodles and Labradoodles and French Bulldogs and a Great Dane and a German Shepherd and a Chihuahua and a couple of Golden Retrievers held easily by a dog walker in a weathered Yankee cap, a danseur never entangled in the leashes held to one hand, then the other, the exchanges fluid and experienced.

The dogs sniffed the smells coming from a square earth and lifted their legs to trees and squatted when they recognized something.

The Great Dane and the Chihuahua and the Bulldog dumped together as if responding to some great secret.  The rest waited, and the dog walker studied them.

The young Dr. Raúl Sicard was transfixed by the scene.  What others might find inconsequential, something to pass by, intrigued him.  There was meaning in the seemingly mundane.  He was a geneticist and he liked nothing better then to lose himself in thought when he came face-to-face with an adaptation like this.  He strayed off to see if he could imagine the adaptations that drove the dog walker and his canis lupus familiaris to this moment, this place, here and now.

The city dog is so different from the country dog that roams unconstrained across a larger earth and squats without fear, he thought, never lifting his leg.  Almost nothing separates them – yet everything does.

He stretched further out his window and took a deep breath, even though the air was heavy.  Streets lamps came on. The Palisades were lit and reflected off the Hudson River.

Haitian women rushed stately blue strollers with large white wheels around the dog walker scooping up the steamy remains with a hand gloved in a baggie.

Up and down Riverside Drive and across Joan of Arc Park, in the promising glow of summer evening, went these intertwining objects – the dog walkers and the Haitian women and their stately strollers.

This is how the world moved that day, July 17, 1996, before Raúl’s eyes adjusted to the sadness that arrived when the phone rang outside everything familiar to him and stopped him from stretching as far as he could into the picture knocking at him, asking him to leave things behind for a bit.

He held the grainy sill and turned to the ring that tempted the faith he found in his routines.

He felt the weight in the room, a sadness that came out of nowhere – yet it seemed old and familiar, and lodged itself in the pit of his stomach.

Raúl leaned inside and faced the phone.  He held the sill with his right hand, not yet giving it up all the way.  Not yet.

The knots in his spine that would otherwise crack and unwind the fatigue that amassed from hours curled over a microscope deciphering the nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms tightened.

The sadness multiplied.  He had no explanation for it, dumbfounded.  He liked knowing where things came from, how they evolved, what changed them, how they appear.  How things appear even suddenly like the ring of the phone that hung in the air with the sadness.

He traced his steps for signs.  Just a few moments before the first ring he entered his apartment and dropped the keys in the bowl on the table beneath the mirror near the front door and draped his lab coat over the chair meant just for that otherwise it would be useless.  Grabbed a beer and turned on the TV for noise.   And pulled open his window.

At some point that day, the sadness must have begun to set in unnoticed.  Maybe the sadness had been there all along – that was more logical.

The phone rang again.

He could consider the ring’s origin or rather the origin of the intuition he had that came with the ring and told him that something happened and he was involved.  But that was too much, too far to go.

Something traveled the distance and found him and opened a black hole and he didn’t want to be present.  He didn’t want to be sucked in.  Know its spiral history.  That’s what humans do, he thought, run for cover – and wait and adapt slowly, hopefully.  Those that can’t adapt don’t make it, ever.

He felt bound.  In the genetics lab life laid down road signs, roots to instincts that he could quantify.  There was nothing to measure here.  Nothing at all – but an intuition.

The phone pawed at him trying to get to where the heart is.

There was no way to revise the day, see it fully in memory’s half-light.  After working in the lab he and friends sat in a sidewalk café across from Lincoln Center and had a Brooklyn Summer Ale and dreamt of things that may never come to pass.  On a  cloudless bright day, they descended into the dank and murky subway station on 161st and took the number one, Broadway – Seventh Avenue local to 72nd Street and strolled to Lincoln Center where a Guatemalteco on the corner sold dolls with bouncing heads and a Jamaican next to him hawked antique copies of Paris Match and Look and National Geographic in several languages.

A invisible woman with tattoos of crosses and peace signs on either hand and barely able to stand on the corner waited for pedestrians to push by and she’d mumble spare some change as they forgot her, a picture of an extinction, something that no one wants to see intimately, the end of an adaptation.   Soon, she would not be.

It’s all like this – the Guatamalteco, the Jamaican, the invisible end of an adaptation.  It all had to be like this, a design, an order.  Nothing spoke to him of the sadness he felt – but it had been there, he was sure of it.  Had to be.

He tried ignoring the third ring and turned to the hum of the TV.

A voice over a static map of Long Island filled the room with sadness.  That’s when the phone rang a fourth time, its red flash igniting the papers on the desk next to it and the bills waiting for another week.   An inexorable eye looking back at him.

Nothing mattered now.  Except the fifth ring.  Its sound hung in the air, hollow.  The phone and the TV.

…At 8:45P.M., eleven minutes after take-off from Kennedy International Airport, TWA flight 800, bound for Paris, France, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Long Island.  Witnesses say they saw a bright flash in the sky.  But nothing is certain.  There are no causes known at this time.  The Coast Guard responded immediately, dispatching numerous search and rescue vessels.  The New York City Police Department, the New York State Police Department, and the Suffolk County Police Department have all responded as well.  The National Transportation Safety Board has dispatched a team from New Jersey.  And we’ve been informed that numerous private vessels are also involved in this initial search and recovery effort…

“]

TWA Flight 800 [Animation

 

The phone rang again.

“Papá,” he whispered.  Raúl said it just to hear himself say it, to test its feel and the emptiness that arrives with flashes from a life lived, rattles you and tempts your faith.  “Papá,” he said again.  It filled the room.   “Papá.”  It overwhelmed everything.  The sanctity of his routine, the lab, the dog walkers and their dogs crapping and the Haitian maids and their Cadillac strollers.

He picked up the phone and staggered.

He felt him there, the ghost of his father standing beside him as still as recollections tend to be where light suddenly is as darkness and the darkness is where we are and where we will be.  Where the problems of the heart live just beyond the design, beyond the touch of order.  This sadness was new and full.

Filed under American Literature, cultural studies, fiction, Homeland Security, Media, men, politics, the University, TWAS Flight 800

Barack Obama and the Power of Style: Why the GOP Can’t Find Its Soul

February 5, 2012 2 Comments

Barry Blitt has done it again, a provocative cover for the February 6, 2012 New Yorker.

In this complex image, we find a very relaxed, smiling, from ear-to-ear, President Obama, beer in one hand (could it be a foreign beer, a Heineken?), a football in the other. He’s in a white Oxford shirt, sleeves rolled up to his forearms ( he’s yet to have to pull them all the way up and go to the hard work, perhaps — or maybe he just makes the hard work look easy?), sitting in a comfortable chair — a moment for the president to chill out and watch a GOP football game on a wide screen tv.

The Big Game by Barry Blitt

The players, in a full stadium (presumably the public watching; mediated sports, here, functioning as “a continuing tension — relationship, influence and antagonism — to the dominant culture,” as Aaron Baker tells us in “Sports and the Popular,” in Sports, Media, and the Politics of Identity), are Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.

A bulldog-faced and bruised Newt is being tackled by a flying Mitt, his face serious and determined. Helmets have flown off, noting the violence of the game — football and politics as high-stakes contact sports; both players are marked up, bruised, as is the GOP. And the football is out of their hands — a fumble, or the ongoing fumbling so much the definition of the GOP during this vicious political cycle pre-November.

Blitt is asserting an essential characteristic of Obama’s popularity that we’ve failed to see or if we’ve seen it, we’ve failed to acknowledge: Style. I’m suggesting that it is this Style that repels many white citizens — and politicians — but which will undoubtedly be an asset in his re-election.

Blitt deconstructs our “shortsightedness,” as I’ve said before, by conflating African-American style, coming into prominence through music, and mediated sports, especially America’s favorite contemporary passion, football, a game consistent with crisis management (we’re always in a crisis, in war with this or that — the Taliban, drugs, poverty), the taking of territory with power and wit, much like armies do, and restricted by time and space, the perfect metaphor for a world that has to deal with limited resources.

Everywhere we turn in football — and politics — there are constraints, limitations and crisis. And we’re always running out of time; there’s never enough. It’s now or never; there’s no long term plan. Attack, attack, attack. Leave no one standing. It’s not surprising that topping the sports news these days are concussions, the short athletic lives of football players and the compromises in later life. This is the American way of life. We can see that now. Fight, fall, endure — not much of a future in this.

But Obama offers us style as an antidote — and those that see their former lives metamorphosing into some unknown are fighting back like mad, rather then seeing the errors in the ways that have gotten us to this point. Republicans never talk about one reality, for instance (and the popular media never pursues this line): we’re living through the wonderful world left us by Bush-Cheney. The GOP has amnesia.

But where does style and the animosity towards it come from?

In the now classic Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete, William C. Rhoden, of the New York Times, in “Style: The Dilemma of Appropriation,” tells us that in the summer of 1963, he remembers watching Ron Santo, the Chicago Cubs‘ third basement, hit a deep fly ball in the gap between right and center.

Willie Mays drifted across the outfield like Charles Coles, the great tapdancer whose footwork was so sweet and smooth that they called him “Honi.” He arrived at his spot under the baseball with no apparent sweat, even though he’d had to run for what seemed like miles to get there (147).

Following the catch, “Santo kicked the ground in disgust.” But, Rhoden says, the “most memorable part of the play took place after Mays made the catch”(147). Mays “nonchalantly picked up the ball out of his glove, tossed it back to the infield, coolly walked back to center field, flicked his sunglasses back up, and waited for the next play. His body language suggested annoyance that the batter hadn’t presented a greater challenge”(147-48).

Our Mays is Obama sitting back with shirt sleeves rolled to his forearms, beer in one hand, a football on the other — nonchalance, de rigueur for Obama. It’s how he strolls to the podium; how he must play basketball. It’s how he sings Al Green. And the plastic, always scripted Mitt Romney has no style at all. And Newt is a playground bully, unlikable, menacing.

Mays came along after Jackie Robinson, who had to watch every aspect of his life; he made room for Mays. After Mays we have Muhammad Ali, Charlie Parker earlier. Miles Davis introduced Americans to “cool” and “hipster” in the late 1950′s (Rhoden, 152).

“In virtually every decade since the 1950s, black athletes have been at the core of some stylistic or structural innovation in sports”(152).

These changes, as television — and the image — begin to dominate, run parallel to political figures — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Julian Bond and Jesse Jackson, Barbara Jordan and Shirley Chisholm, and Carol Mosely Braun.

Barack Obama is now the most famous African-American; in him we see the political rise of the African-American. But we also see the manifestation of style, its rise out of R&B and Rap, out of the style so endemic of the NBA — tats and all. The power of style is that “in some ways [it] underlines the [Black athlete's] inability to define themselves in more substantive ways and find acceptance” (156).

Obama still can’t “define” himself in “substantive ways and find acceptance,” in general. With Obama’s current approval rating, the up-tick in unemployment figures and the ever present , though slow, upswing of the economy, the Republicans have little to address. Even Romney was bold enough to say that the current unemployment figures had nothing to do with Obama; however, Gingrich did say that, in the end, some credit would have to be given Obama. Which is which?

The GOP can’t coalesce around a singular message. This means that it’s going to get nastier; this means that direct attacks on Obama’s personality — his style, which for the African -American is synonymous with “soul” — will increase. The most violent and angry segments of the GOP are overtly racist, though their kids listen to Rap, wear caps with brims sideways and their boys sport baggy jeans half way down their buttocks (without knowing what this means).

The problem — and challenge — that the GOP image makers face is the “fact that black style was quickly commodified by white power, which became addicted to this other new form of black gold”(168). Style is something we require of our leaders because it shows how a candidate connects with the general public; it is powerful because it’s visceral, sensual and sexy. None of the GOP candidates are sexy. Women, minorities, the young all gravitate to “cool,” witness the rise of Apple, the wooden descriptions given Microsoft, lackluster and stiff, like its creator, Bill Gates.

America is a house divided by style. This is to argue that America is self-divided by a confusion concerning a change in the balance of power perpetuated by the rise of the black politician that, for the most part, comes with a history that’s quite different from the history experienced by the dominant (white) class of privilege. And one definitive — and powerful — characteristic of this style, as Rhoden argues, is that it’s a consequence of great suffering.

In an America that is suffering profoundly, only a leader that has suffered, personally and with his people, can lead. It’s a matter of grace, something Hemingway would argue, but which the GOP fails to see.

The GOP nominee will be Mitt Romney, but he’ll fail because he lacks the grace — and dignity — to address deeply felt suffering with style that says, I understand. We can overcome by making it look easy.

Filed under Barry Blitt, Citizenship, cultural studies, Media, NBA, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, The New Yorker Tagged with

Vero Beach, Florida and the Manufacturing of Consciousness: How the GOP Will Give Obama a Victory in 2012

January 28, 2012 Leave a Comment

At the height of the GOP primary race in South Carolina, I was in Vero Beach, Florida, and suddnely what came over me was the uncanny feeling that I was in-between worlds, a kind of vertigo, a foreboding I was not expecting since I was happily running up A1A.

In South Carolina, the reformed Catholic, Newt Gingrich, surged ahead by deploying a recognizable racist attack — Obama, the European socilaist, as food stamp president — rejecting his lobbyist self — though we know Newt was (Congress wrote the rules to ensure this kind slippage for themselves, post-Tom Delay, increasing their wealth on our backs) — and admonishing the poor for being lazy, resolving that it’s best to give poor children brooms and mops to clean schools.

(Am I the only one that’s reminded of Mussolini and Juan Perón, here — the self-righteous tauting of fundamentalism cloaked by the Church’s altar, the word of God Almighty?).

Benito Mussolini

Newt Gingrich

Juan Perón

In Vero Beach, as I went for runs, I was ovewhelmed by the illusion of reality — MacMansions by the sea (guilty: I was in one!), gated communities, vegetation that is not indigenous (all of it has been imported, except for sea graves and the St. Augustine grass,) and a constant burning of fossil fuels to maintain lavish lawns — mowers, blowers, chain saws, large trucks, off-road vehicles and yachts; the late-model luxury automobiles that are required in a place where pedestrain traffic is, as in L.A., non-existent and strip malls and golf courses that have become the new valhala.

And not a single person of color within sight — unless cleaning houses, mowing lawns and on garbage runs standing behind large trucks.

It’s not surprising that Vero has it’s own Disney Resort. The master of illusion has made Florida its own. Does this illusion follow the America psyche or does it help construct it, as do our politics, I wonder?

I was shaken by the very plastic nature of this living — and perhaps the very plastic, constructed lives we lead that scream unsustainability.

Vero Beach is the American Paradox: the extraordinary cost of creating and maintain such lavishness and the economic drain of a lifestyle that is characterized by total mechanization, as the pudgy elderly try to stave off the inevitable by walking and biking, their lives well kept by Latinos and some, very few, African Americans usually found at Publix markets, gas stations and sanitation trucks. The divide is the evolution of manifest destiny that has assumed a contemporary look and feel.

The BMW’s and Cadillacs and late model SUV’s abound. It is prosperity writ large; it is also a final sign, at the last third of someone’s life, that I’ve arrived, I’ve achieved. It’s what Mitt Romney argued in the GOP debate in Florida: this wasn’t handed to me, it was earned. This is the American way now.

But our American way has become divisive, we know that now — we can feel it. The left and the right are so distant from what we the people perceive our American mission to be, that we’ve lost any real understanding of Representative Democracy. Who is representing what and whom?

If it was only that we’re in an economic quagmire, the way out would be simple; we would collaborate and cooperate, plan and execute. But our condition is beyond being simply a bind — it’s a new construction that sprinkles old, recognizable American rhetoric over a new order that is redefining Representative Democracy: we no longer vote for people who represent us, the people; rather, we vote for representatives of multinationals and narrow special interests; we vote for extreme special interests that only comply with a very fine line defined by those holding the purse strings — or worse, with interests that comply with ultrathin social ideology, such as the complexities of marriage, civil unions and a woman’s right choose.

In an enlightening interview on the PBS News Hour, Thomas Edsall, a longtime Washington Post reporter, now a New York Times columnist and professor of journalism at Columbia University, who has written a new book, The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics, said, “Well, what’s happened, I think, in the past — really since the collapse, economic collapse, is that the country now is — has become dominated by the issue of debt and deficits.” Edsall goes on to say that, “Somebody’s going to take a hit. It’s no longer a nice and friendly game. It’s who’s going to get hurt. That makes for — we already had a polarized politics. When you add this notion that politics now is one not just of what can I get out of it, but what do I do to the people to get what I want, that makes it a much nastier and much more hostile circumstance.”

Thus our confusion. We don’t understand this bifurcation characterized by a nastiness and indifference to the well being of most Americans.

At the heart of this problem are the psychologies of liberals and conservatives, respectively, says Edsdall:

Liberals are very concerned with compassion and fairness. Conservatives have what one person describes as a broader spectrum, but not as much focus on compassion and fairness, but also on issues of sanctity, of a different kind of fairness. Their opposition to affirmative action, for example, is a different kind of fairness.

Edsall clarifies, saying, that

…the idea that conservatives are willing to inflict harm is not necessarily a criticism. If you are in a fight, and you’re fighting to protect what you have, being loyal to your own people is not necessarily a bad thing. If you and your family had to protect what your child is getting what your husband and so forth — if they face serious threats of lost goods, in effect, you’re fighting for them, and, in fact, if that meant someone else had to get hurt, it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.

This is the crux of the matter because, as Edsall says, “There is a stronger natural instinct among conservatives to see contests in zero sum terms, (witness: GOP debates AND NEWT — which is why I’m reminded of Mussolini and Perón), that there are going to be losers and winners. Therefore, I want to get into this and be sure that I am the winner and that people that are around me are winners” (parenthetical inclusion mine).

This is short term thinking, not long term planning that is creative; it takes away and does not build. It is destructive in nature since it means, by design, to push certain people away.

In “The Obama Memos: How Washington Changed the President,” by Ryan Lizza (The New Yorker, January 30, 2012), we learn from Thomas Mann, “of the bipartisan Brookings Institute,” and Norman Ornstein, “of the conservative American Enterprise Institute,” in a “forthcoming book about Washington Dysfunction, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, that,

One of our two major parties, the Republicans, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime, and scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Ultimately, this kind of hostility ensures that none of us sees clearly, least of all politicians. It’s by design. While Obama came into office with a spirit of change, trying to direct the country in new, fertile directions, Lizza tells us that the President, “was the most polarizing first-year President in history — that is, the difference between Democratic approval of him and Republican disapproval was the highest ever recorded.” Obama, we learn from Lizza, had to change in order to survive. And we also learn that, “Obama didn’t remake Washington. But his first two years stand as one of the most successful legislative periods in modern history. Among other achievements, he has saved the economy from depression, passed universal health care, and reformed Wall Street.”

It’s because of Obama’s accomplishments, I would argue, that, alongside dwindling resources, the Republican willingness to inflict harm, divide and (try) to conquer, even by waging war on voting, has become the strategy that is overwhelming this run to the 2012 elections.

What’s left, then, is a populace running towards Vero Beach, running to escape this violation of our rights, close our eyes, and enjoy what small, square plot of earth we can call our own, even though much of the American people will be left out.

Welcome to the new, uncanny presidential election cycle where we might see how inflicting pain may become the winning solution for the GOP — or it may undo them to such an extent that, perhaps, Obama’s willingness to work for change, his 2008 promise, can become something closer to the truth during a second term.

What we do know, is that the system is broken and it’s unsustainable.  This is certain.

Filed under Citizenship, Class, cultural studies, Fundamentalism, golf, Inverted Totalitarianism, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Pop Culture, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, The New Yorker Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Place of Alienation in the American Political Consciousness

December 19, 2011 4 Comments

I seem to be looking for meaning everywhere I turn. But meaning I cannot find today.

Looking for meaning ought to point to something, a thing that corresponds to it. It’s a temptation to try to find some object that we might call “the meaning.” But there is no such object. This temptation — to find the meaning – needs to be cured.

Baffled, I look and wonder about our state of affairs — why we are the way we are, today’s American — and find not a single hint of an answer anywhere. Nothing is predictable. Nothing is obvious. Perhaps, as mathematicians might suggest, the deterministic nature of our system — capitalism flag waving as democracy — does not allow for predictability.

The world is perpetually in flux, yet Americans operate as if it’s static. We speak boldly about Morality and Utility, but these extract demands from our propensity for pleasure — oral, visual, sexual (not so much sensual, which would then move us towards aesthetics and a re-engagement with philosophies concerning Beauty, which would be too much to think about, too complex).

We are very much alone and plugged in — iPads, iPhones, computers, social networks. We are solitary — the self in perpetual solitude. Our experiences, like no other time in history, are profoundly solitary. In solitude we have intense experiences and can, for a short time, transcend the very real flux, the natural course of Being, existence.

Americans are then always in contradictions — solitary experiences that momentarily transcend the flux that is always present. Ironic — we are in a constant state of Irony. The prodigal child of irony is Alienation, a ongoing theme, for instance, in our American Literature that begins with Emerson to Hawthorne and Melville to Henry James and William Faulkner and Wallace Stevens to Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy. Alienation gives us a form of rooted rootlessness, security in insecurity, an sense of alienation that has been historically a confirmation of community.

Alienation, rather then any ideology, is the construct of politics in America today. Alienation presupposes the always ongoing struggle to find the meaning that alludes us. There is no meaning — it’s the temptation we follow.

The rhetoric of politicians, keenly orchestrated to appeal to media, exploits the temptation to find the object that will give us the meaning. No one is telling the truth, though. The only truth is that our masquerading democracy seeks exploitation to survive, using Divine Providence — the false notion that we are the Chosen — to embellish our tendency for denial of what we see — or don’t see.

We signed up and followed Obama’s Change Rhetoric, only to find out that change meant more of the same: a rounding up of the Bush-era foreign and domestic policies and greater intimacy with Wall Street, passed down to us by Reagan. We’ve been lead, with our acceptance, down the wrong path. And the alternative, the crazy, Ahab-like Newt of destruction and the indifferent and the callous and blindly ambitious Romney, who made his fortune on destruction, promise a profound exploitation of resources.

In The Ship chapter of Moby-Dick, Melville tells us that, “For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.” What we chase is profoundly irrelevant, says Melville.Moby-Dick

We long for men that promise the meaning; we chase after their ambition, as poor Ishmael did when he stepped onto the Pequod and said, “this ship is for us.” But the Pequod is not a democracy; in its appeal to be considered the meaning, what we find, as a microcosm of American culture, in 1851 and 2011, is a totalitarian regime disguised as a democracy fully grounded in self-reliance. And nothing could be further form the truth, which is where we find ourselves today in America — far from any sense of truth.

In the end, now, as did Ishmael, we are orphaned, floating in a sea, only the sharks do not have “padlocks on their mouths.”

Filed under American Literature, Citizenship, cultural studies, Inverted Totalitarianism, Media, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, prostate, Socio-Economic insecurity Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Inverted Totalitarianism and OWC: Chris Hedges and Cornel Welst

November 8, 2011 Leave a Comment

A very short post for me. Chris Hedges and Cornel West say it all, OWC and the affects of Inverted Totalitarianism

Filed under Citizenship, Class, corruption, cultural studies, Inverted Totalitarianism, Obama Administration, philosophy, politics, Public Health, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity Tagged with , , ,

The Place of the Intellectual: the Future and Its Enemies

September 20, 2011 4 Comments

Academic dawn is like no other beginning.   No other daybreak like it exists.  Alumni never forget it and forever pine away for that first light of college life – the anticipation of the first day of classes in early September.  It’s filled with possibilities – new friendships, new stories, parties, homecoming, new loves, new dreams.  It has a way of giving lift to the soul because the slate is wiped clean by the certainty of the semester to come – everything has to be forgotten, left behind and erased to begin anew, to carry on for the next fifteen weeks.  A new September, every September, is an aphrodisiac.  And everything that is to come in one’s life, whether it’s been dreamt, planned and scheduled, will give way to the glorious routine of strolling to class across a genteel campus, maples and pines waving in the breeze, students perpetually smiling – de rigueur – to show how hopeful they are, how eager they are for a professor’s  lecture.  There is a finality and a logic to this ongoing cycle, a neatness, a tidy composure and a comfort that permeates everything and is instantly obvious the minute one steps into a luxurious, modern classroom – cushioned seats that rock, adjustable arm rests, desks on wheels that can be moved to form circles or be put in lines, which no one does anymore in this new age of composed dialog.   For seventy five minutes, listening and doodling and thinking and drifting and wondering while the professor strains through a lecture, there is escape, there is release.  The lecture is a momentary stay against the confusing madness beyond the consecrated ivy; it’s predictable and welcomed, it pushes aside everything  – suffering, anxiety, sadness, and even memory.  All.  It pushes aside life.  Daily, with each class, faculty and students experience the almost infinite cycle of new dawns, daylights that come in waves with each course and that call attention to existence itself – and at a distance, from the comfort of well appointed abstractions and theories and criticisms.  Oh how beautiful it is to keep the world and its filth at an intellectual distance.  Academic dawn lightens the air and it excites.  It makes everyone eager on a college campus in September. Academic dawn is a drug; with it the foreseeable, the inevitable, is forestalled – so we like to think.

What today we can’t sidestep is the place of the professor, however, particularly because s/he is being averted by our culture.  The professor is experienced more as gatekeeper, rather then an expert on a subject. The professor creates requirements, hoops students must jump through in order to find their lives in a society dominated by a harsh, vertical economic system.

The professor is essentially an abstruse theorist that uses code words to explain the obvious, we’re told;  s/he builds intellectual edifices for the elite and has absolutely no relationship with the “common man,” an acerbic criticism that likewise places into question university education because it is overpriced and overrated, say critics.

The criticisms of the professor and the elite University that houses him or her has helped usher in an age where the professor, most commonly referred to as an intellectual, is not a person to emulate and listen to. These are extraordinary anti-intellectual times in America.  And why not?  In Boston, for instance, where there are over 60 colleges and universities and one can pass a Nobel laureate on the street quite easily, there is still extensive and daunting poverty; there is racial divide and gender divide.  Eight miles from Newark, rife with socio-economic and racial problems, is Columbia University.  Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute and author of The End of Poverty, is there, yet the South Bronx, even closer then Newark, struggles with mere subsistence, as are other poor communities of color.

The divide between our problems and the intellectuals that study them is an abyss of massive proportions. This gap is implicit in every single problem we have — socio-economic, political, health and education. So it’s not surprising that America has become intensely anti-intellectual, preferring the misguided bravado of a wanna be cowboy like Rick Perry, instead of the softer reflective hand of a scholar such as President Obama.  We would rather engage destructive ideologies instead of reasoned argument framed by facts.  We have chosen a caustic path, a nihilistic path, rather then the path of deliberation based on compromise and negotiation.  We have successfully shunned the professor, the intellectual — but at what cost?  Where might we be heading?

There appears to be little respect for those individuals that quietly spend their time studying what we call life – the economy, social tensions and new developments, the media, culture(s), politics and the arts — and try to make sense of it all and speak it to us.

Power is best kept — and gained — if the citizenry has its eyes glued on  The Kardashians while ideological sound bites and name calling are squeezed in-between episodes.  Tea Party narrow minded conservatives.  Democratic big spenders.  Socialists.

So on this path to nowhere, what is the place of the intellectual in America? What are the representations of the intellectual, to use the phrasing of my own intellectual father, Edward Said?

To find the answers to these questions — and to locate myself, as well as others labeled intellectuals, I once again turned to Said’s 1993 Reith Lectures, published first in 1994, then again in 1996, by Vintage Books Edition. (The lecture can be heard here.)

In the Introduction to the print venture of the lectures, Said says that, “One task of the intellectual is the effort to break down the stereotypes and reductive categories that are so limiting to human thought and communication.”  This initial statement may be one cause for the disenfranchisement of the intellectual; in this sense, the intellectual, both a public and a private figure, is subjected to the limitations posed on him for being the one who articulates “stereotypes” and “reductive categories.”  This is critical since we are in an age where reductions of reality are how media and politicians function; or, said better, perhaps, the function of both media and politics is to reduce all pictures of reality into stereotypes — then separating these into ideologies.

In other words, says Said, “The problem for the intellectual is not so much … mass society as a whole, but rather the insiders, experts, coteries, professionals who in the modes defined earlier this century … mold public opinion, make it conformist, encourage a reliance on a superior little band of all-knowing men in power.”  This, then, automatically puts the intellectual in a challenging position since the “insiders”, the “band of all-knowing men in power” dislike criticism; it threatens their way of being, their methods.

Yet another reason why the intellectual is marginalized is that s/he relies on clever and insightful uses of language; it is the only means of expression in a culture that privileges writing above all other forms.  ”Hence,” said Said, “my characterization of the intellectual as exile and marginal, as amateur, and as the author of a language that tries to speak the truth to power.”  The intellectual is easily exiled by the art and science of his or her methodology, the tools that must be used in order to describe and critique the reductive methods utilized by the mediating forces of a culture.

Thus, the intellectual lives in “a spirit of opposition, rather than in accommodation, that grips me (Said) because the romance, the interest, the challenge of intellectual life is to be found in dissent against the status quo at a time when the struggle on behalf of underrepresented and disadvantaged groups seems so unfairly weighed against them.”  Said himself is a perfect example, as is Malcolm X.

For me, in my own case, this alienates me from many — if not most — in the academic community since the overall interest is not to stand in romantic opposition against forces that advocate for and create the means by which the status quo is maintained.  I am therefore narrativized into a secondary position — truly exiled from the academic world that has taken me years of toil to enter.  In pursuing the position of dissenter, the forces of the status quo push back harder and in subtle forms.  As Said says, the “inescapable reality” is that the intellectual “will neither make them friends in high places nor win them official honors.  It is a lonely condition, yes, but it is always a better one than a gregarious tolerance for the way things are.”

I’ve been dismissed, routinely passed over.  I live on the outer most edges of the academic community, literally and figuratively. But the experience of others pale by comparisons to my own.  And in this exile, students, hundreds of students from all walks of live, for that matter, reach out; their parents, too, on occasion send me notes of thanks or seek me out to thank me for what I say to their students.  This would seem that those outside the bastions of intellectual pursuit behind the hallow ivy know something that mediated constructions of power and reality forget or willfully leave out: the power of the intellectual as romantic dissenter that speaks truth to power is that s/he imbues others, mostly students, with different points of view that can help cast them into alternative versions of the accepted truths.

The central fact  … is … that the intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’être, is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.”

Traditionally, the academy has been experienced as an institution on the left — this could not be further from the truth. An intellectual persisting with the notion that all human beings “are entitled to expect decent standards of behavior concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards need to be testified and fought against courageously” is routinely marginalized and exiled within the academy. Thus the intellectual is exiled from the society in which he lives — and the status quo wins and suffering and injustice persist.

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Hope Springs Eternal Amidst Decline: The Bard College Model

July 29, 2011 1 Comment

Witness today: the pathetic — and uncanny — Washington circus concerning the debt and the debt ceiling crisis; the economy is still moving at a snail’s pace, now reacting even more negatively to Washington’s ideologically based idiocies; evidence of climate change is everywhere around us; wars in Iraq and Afghanistan baffle the mind, forever responding to terror and poor Western management; U.S. public education is in the toilet, put there by more controversial political brinkmanship, and continuing to ensure we live in a bifurcated society; unemployment is stagnant, as a result, and more and more people out of work or working in jobs well below their capacity; production is at a standstill, and in some places, such as Ohio, industry has left town — Main Street is emptying out; children and women, some of the most vulnerable in our society, are without health care; the gap between the riches of the privileged white and Hispanics and blacks is wider then it’s ever been in history; some of our cities — Newark for instance — are being left in the dust kicked up by the materialism of the few.

These tragic items are but the results of our manmade decline. Let me say this again: if you look around — health care, education, finance, industry, the environment, our deteriorating infrastructure, the decline of certain cities, particularly those inhabited by people of color and immigrants — every single problem we have today exists because we’ve made it so. Our educated elite have taken us down.

How can the most powerful nation in history come to this? The answer, I dare, is simple: we’ve educated the elite — politicians, lawyers, doctors, CEO’s, and so on — into beings that have long ago left their humanity at the curb, supplanted by delusions of grandeur, the avarice that so carefully destroys everything it touches. Education has become school for profit and self-gain.

As I’ve said in these pages before, what we have here is a crisis in — and about — EDUCATION, writ large (see here, too). Education has forgotten — or repressed — it’s allegiance to Humanity, its very real purpose of creating empathetic, creative citizens.

We can learn something from the models we say we follow, in this case, the Greek Stoics. The Stoics had a radical point, as Martha S. Nussbaum tells us in Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, “that we should give our first allegiance to no mere form of government, not temporal power, but to the moral community made up by the humanity of all human beings.” We’ve moved far from this goal, this reality; it’s no longer a compass point.

Of course, the failure of our EDUCATION — the educating for excellence, efficiency and production, education focused solely on the means of production and accounting, the creation of cogs on the wheel of mediocrity — is devoid of any moral posture. It is an immoral education.

When morality fails or is oppressed, ideologies spring to the rescue. In every tragic circumstance we face today, each can be said to be driven by ideologies — not rationality, not dialog, compromise and bargaining, the hallmarks of Democracy.

Ideologies give us a false sense of reality, an artificial view of the world — and ourselves. Ideologies, as we can see today in Washington, scorn knowledge; these are motivated or, better, are narrated by the corporation. Who will win, whether or not the debt ceiling is raised? Who will win if US ratings are reduced? That’s right: the banks, no matter what happens, win. They win the world. (This is, of course, the grand example, the ultimate example of inverted totalitarianism, where the corporations dictate and the witless masses, sleeping away in illusions of plentitude, are lead to slaughter.)

How did this world come about?

Ken Robinson, for instance, in Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, demonstrates how uncreative our education has been:

The rise of industrialism influenced not only the structure of mass education but also its organizational culture. Like factories, schools are special facilities with clear boundaries that separate them from the outside world. They have set hours of operation and prescribed rules of conduct. They are based on the principles of standardization and conformity.

Robinson could be describing the modern prison, instead — separate …from the outside world, prescribed rules of conduct, standardization and conformity.

What schools have done is effectively standardize and conform and therefore shut down the imagination, killed creativity, in the words of Ken Robinson. What then can grow from here? What we have, says John Ralston Saul, in The Unconscious Civilization, is a “human … reduced to a measurable value, like a machine or a piece of property. We can choose to achieve a high value and live comfortably or be dumped unceremoniously onto the heap of marginality.”

Can we change this? Can we combat this?

Yes, we can. There are examples. One primary example is Bard College. This institution is not held to a separation from the outside world; it is in the world, creatively addressing our culture’s greatest challenges.

Leo Botstein, Bard College President since 1975, is perhaps the best and, likely, the most enlightened of college presidents. He has lead this college from prescribed — and accepted — rules of conduct and carefully defined new rules of conduct that follow a moral understanding of our human responsibilities to each other. This is, indeed, for my money, the only real example, today, of a classical liberal arts education.

Bard has embarked on several endeavors: Bard High School Early College seeks to provide an alternative to the traditional high school, a “rigorous course of study that emphasizes thinking through writing, discussion, and inquiry.” Imagine if other elite liberal arts colleges learned from Bard and took up alternatives to high schools like this? What can we do? Bard has announced its collaboration with the Newark Public School System as well.

The small college is involved in the Bard Prison Initiative, creating opportunities for incarcerated men and women to earn Bard degrees. In From Ball and Chain to Cap and Gown: Getting a Degree B. A. Behind Bars, a PBS special story about the Bard Prison Initiative, we can see the essence of the liberal arts education at work.

But Bard has not stopped there.

It has a Masters of Arts in Teaching Program, too, allowing students to be certified in New York and California. It is a program focused on “both rural and urban-high needs school districts.” No one is doing this. Absolutely no one. Bard is in the vanguard.

And if this is not enough, Bard has established an Honors College in collaboration with Al-Quds — the Al-Quds – Bard Partnership, in Jerusalem. Along with St. Petersburg State University, Bard has developed “The Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences … the first Department in Russia to be founded upon the principles of liberal education. It emerged from Smolny College (officially the Program in «Arts and Humanities»), which was created in 1994 by St. Petersburg State University  in close collaboration with Bard College (USA). Bard College’s interest in curricular  innovation  and the reform of international education coincided with the interests of a group of creatively-minded scholars from St. Petersburg State University.” In other words, in the international arena, Bard is not going to the usual places, as all other schools do; rather, Bard has opted to go where there are obvious challenges — and opportunities.

How is it possible that a small school in Upstate New York can do so much? Endowments of other liberal arts institutions tower over Bard’s, approximately a mere $270 million. How is it possible to do so much with what in higher education is so little these days? It has 1800 students. A faculty of about 224 professors. The cost of attending Bard is comparable to other elite liberal arts colleges, $55, 480 — so what’s the difference? It has a beautiful campus. It has all the accoutrements we expect from these schools — the arts, wonderful grounds, athletic facilities, new technologies abound. So what gives?

Answer: imagination and will, a conviction that what we must do in education, if we’re going to contribute to the reversing of the tide of malaise, complacency, avarice and the blind pursuit of materialism is not compete, but rather, join hands and cooperate, collaborate, listen and learn by thinking critically, dialog and bargaining. Like no other institution for its size Bard is doing more for humanity than most larger — and more distinguished — universities.

Might we jump on this wagon and see where creativity can take us, rather then staying on the ideological tracks to despair?

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The Grand Illusion: Private Jets, Private Schools, Private Lives

July 26, 2011 Leave a Comment

Private jets, private schools, private lives. Private is the mote money buys. Private, in the new American economic reality, means transcendence. Transcendence, in American Philosophy, once the hallmark of reading and learning, contemplation and the labor to find the self amongst the many, self-reliance, can now be bought. Private means mobility, the ability to move through space unimpeded by the harangue of the less fortunate. Private means not having to dirty one’s hands — or soul — with the problems of the many — unemployment, hunger and poverty, ill-equipped schools, the malaise of hopelessness. Private means hope — the hope that I will gain while others lose. To live in private means that others will not.

In To Reach Simple Life of Summer Camp, Lining Up for Private Jets, Christine Haughney reports that, “Now, even as the economy limps along, more of the nation’s wealthier families are cutting out the car ride and chartering planes to fly to summer camps. One private jet broker, Todd Rome of Blue Star Jets, said his summer-camp business had jumped 30 percent over the last year.” Why hang with the rest us? Just sidestep all of the garbage. Why have long waits when it’s more efficient to simply fly over all of it — the heat, the stifling highway stops and their smelly bathrooms, wet floors, loud hand dryers, tolls and people that still can’t tell the difference between an E-Pass lane and a cash lane.

“At Sullivan County Airport in Bethel, N.Y.,” reports Haughney, “roughly 40 percent of recent flights have carried families heading to summer camp. Officials at Laconia Municipal Airport in Gilford, N.H., and Moultonborough Airport in Moultonborough, N.H., reported similar numbers.”

Are these the jets Obama is talking about? Are these the perks the Republicans don’t want to give up? Are the Republicans — and the Tea Party — fighting to ensure that  Private becomes a strong and permanent demarcation in our society, a new social order, one that travels on private jets, attends exclusive camps, followed by elite private prep schools and colleges? Sure we’ll let in a few faces that aren’t like ours, just to look as if we’re into multiculturalism, but please, private is the perfect way to travel through life hassle free.

This new Private world order is forcing us to adjust, re-evaluate, tread lightly since money is power and power can be wielded against anyone, for any reason, and if you’re one of the less fortunate, then, well, you may get screwed. “The popularity of private-plane travel is forcing many high-priced camps, where seven-week sessions can easily cost more than $10,000, to balance the habits of their parents against the ethos of simplicity the camps spend the summer promoting.”

From the budget negotiations and the drama around the debt ceiling, to the hiring of specialized tutors for prep school darlings to ensure entry into elite institutions, to tax shelters and the readily available servicing of any whim, any desire provided you have the money to pay for it — see DSK, for instance, ironically a part of the socialist party in France — what we have here is a view of the other side of the looking glass. We’ve come through, like Alice, to another world. In this world, the majority is left out; in this world, transcendence still means sweat; in this world, though, for just a few, transcendence can be purchased — as can politicians and the perks that go along with the buying of souls.

In this new world order, Private means a loss of empathy; it is the loss of a humanity. Private is synonymous with a false sense of self; it is a skewed view of the world; it is an illusion, the grandest of all. Private is the false belief that one can buy out of suffering, a moral high ground that abdicates responsibility for one’s actions. We’re in deep do-do.

Filed under america's apartheid system of education, Citizenship, Class, corruption, cultural studies, Fundamentalism, Inverted Totalitarianism, Obama Administration, philosophy, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity, travel Tagged with , , ,

Dominican – Haitians and the World Order

July 24, 2011 4 Comments

In Juno Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Oscar’s family — Beli, the mother, and Lola, Oscar’s sister — go to dinner, upon the mother’s invitation, to the Zona Colonial. We learn that “the waiters kept looking at their party askance.” Lola reacts to this in a manner consistent with (some) Dominicans, and of course consistent with notions of “zona” or zone that is aptly named “colonial,” and says, “Watch out, Mom … they probably think you’re Haitian.” Beli, the mother, replies, “La única haitiana aquí eres tú, mi amor” (The only haitian here is you, my love.). In another incident, as “Oscar Goes Native,” we learn that he sees “his first Haitians kicked off a guagua (bus) because niggers claimed they ‘smelled.’” Díaz also gives us the picture of “Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections.”

What do we see here?

It is a picture, in this case of Haitians, that is consistent with how those in need are first seduced by wages, usually much lower than those paid to a native labor force but much higher than earned by the needy of a country not quite as bountiful, and then categorically denied human rights by the dominant culture, in this case the Dominican Republic.

But this is not a problem unique to the Dominican Republic. All dominant cultures contain segments of their population for the purposes of cheap labor. This creates an unequal distribution of wealth and benefits. Economies are built — and strengthened — on the backs of those that are economically and politically weaker. This is the history of Western Civilization. Beginning with the Dutch Empire in the 17th Century, establishing outposts and plantations, skewering the fertile Guyana plains and creating the Cape Colony in South Africa, what we learn is that the modern world has been built by colonialization, the extreme exercise of violent power and control, and therefore extraordinary abuses of people.

Colonizers increase their wealth and the colonized are effectively repressed. Moving away from this history is difficult since it’s built into the DNA of such notions as progress, individualism and now even multiculturalism, as the recent, tragic events in Norway reveal. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany is having second thoughts on multiculturalism following the attacks in Oslo; President Nicolas Sarkozy of France held a nationwide debate on “national identity” and banned Muslim full-face veils, for instance.

This way, this method of addressing the ills of our societies as we all confront differences and desires that may be quite alien to some, really begins with the year 1492 and the destruction of Andalusía and the expulsion or conversion ultimatum issued to Jews by the Catholic King himself, Ferdinand of Spain. I stand with those intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky, that firmly see this dark moment of discovery and destruction, or the discovery that brought on further destruction already in progress in Spain, as the beginning of the Modern Age. If we look around, we can argue that we’ve yet to live through this period, the black plague issued from 1492 — perhaps the ultimate fukú, as defined by Díaz, “specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World.”

Now, as the historically colonized and victimized — Africans, Muslims, the disenfranchised dark people of the world — slowly move closer towards social justice — those inalienable rights we all speak about — they are further victimized by the strong roots of extreme nationalism that apparently grow unabated when the Other we’ve always kept down gains a modicum of political power. Political power leads to economic power. We know this, our history tells us this, so we fear this inescapable reality.

The case of the Haitians in the Dominican Republic, the narrative of their efforts to gain respect and a sense of worth, began on October 4, 1937. Known as the Parsley Massacre, because Dominican soldiers, holding up a sprig of parsley, would ask, “What is this?” And if they couldn’t say peregil, the Spanish word for parsley, they would be executed. (The Creole word for parsley is pési; the French word for parsley is persil.) Between 15,000 to 20,000 Haitian immigrant workers were massacred in the Dominican Republic. Most were slaughtered with bayonets and machetes by the Dominican army and some Dominican big landowners (ironically this practice was thought of as a way to keep the Dominican army from being fingered — no bullets, no trace). Infants had their heads smashed against walls. Women were speared with pitchforks. Many who were attempting to escape back to Haiti were captured at the border and killed. These murders were ordered by Dominican dictator Raphael Leonidas Trujillo, in an effort to “cleanse” the border region and expropriate small peasants or “conuqueros” so that big landowners could take over their lands.

This ethnic cleansing pogrom was part of an ideological campaign by the ruling classes to scapegoat Haitian immigrants for the plight of poor Dominicans and build a Dominican national identity through this process. This has led to an enduring entrenched anti-haitianismo pervasive in Dominican culture, reinforced throughout school and systematically used as an instrument of exploitation.

It seems as if when we exploit and colonize, we hate those we use and destroy. Could it be that this Other is so overwhelming a reminder of our brutality that it’s much easier to take the next step and simply annihilate them? Is it that in conquering we hate ourselves so we must more fully engage in the destruction of the Other to keep our sanity? Must we try to destroy their trace, a tragic irony since this is impossible, given that all our texts that justify our power — the Christian Bible, for instance, the US Constitution — are replete with memory, good and bad, peaceful and violent? The trace is just that — a stain, a drop, an instance that’s verifiable and that enables future generations to judge and adjust. Is destruction and devastation the only way we have of enjoying the treasures we’ve taken because they are so colored in blood? Do we destroy fearing the rise of the Other? Certainly the Norwegian extremist charged with killing 92 people in Oslo, Anders Behring Breivik, thinks so having developed a detailed manifesto outlining his preparations and calling for a Christian war against Muslim domination.

We’re aghast at what happened in Oslo, but given the world we live in today, the question is why doesn’t this happen more often? The answer is that it does, it does happen, only in more subtle forms; the suffering is plentiful, particularly among the people that have been pushed aside, run through with machetes. We’re heading for disaster if we don’t find ways to ask relevant questions to help us change our DNA of conquer, divide, abuse and kill off. At the heart of the current US financial crisis, for instance, is this approach — conquer (the poor who didn’t know what mortgage they were getting into), divide (government’s insistence on ensuring the golden parachutes remain in the hands of the privileged that, historically, have always aided abuses), abuse (14% detectable unemployment in the US, though it’s much higher; let’s not forget the immigration crisis, too — we want them to clean our houses but we don’t want to recognize them, not even after generations of being in the US), and kill them off (let’s take to our guns and hit the Arizona border — it’s a war!).

The latest crisis in the long history that exists between the Dominican Republic and Haiti concerns the documentation of Haitians in the Dominican Republic. Haitians — or better said: the Dominicans of Haitian descent — Dominican-Haitians — are seeking proper documentation so that they can attend schools and universities. These young people are not trying to gain anything that has not been earned by generations of their families living and working in squalor at the behest of the Dominican government. That is to say, these children are Dominican of Haitian descent — but rights are kept from them without reason. These young Dominicans don’t want handouts; they want what’s just so that they can then create a life for themselves, working hard, going to school and advancing. They see that their personal advancement would be the advancement of the nation. They are not welcomed in Haiti; they’re thought of as Dominicans. In the Dominican Republic, as we see in the hands of Juno Díaz, they are shunned, shoved off buses, ridiculed, made to live on the margins.

In Stranded: Stateless in the Dominican Republic, an Aljazeera report on a documentary by Steve Spapienza (why this tragedy is not touched by US mainstream media is yet another story, one of complicity, of course, since we have an equal crisis with immigrants we seduce with our bounty), we can fully see and understand their plight. But as we see in the featured case, that of Jean Sili and his family, the story ends tragically, as if we’re still in the bloody mess that was the Trujillo regime, the years of the brutal patriarch that ordered the massacre of thousands of Haitians (he of course killed plenty of Dominicans as well — no one was spared by El Jefe).

What’s a solution for Dominican-Haitians and, perhaps, for undocumented immigrants to the US?

A solution is being presented by Fundación 180 Grados and a unique concept, gobernabilidad, the notion or quality of governing, the art of governing that proposes as a goal economic opportunity, robust social institutions, and stability between government — the State — civil society and open markets. (Interview, in Spanish, with Guillermo Aramburo, President of Fundación, on Hoy Digital) Fundación 180 Grados aims to create education centers, places where gobernabilidad can take root in the promotion of humanity (social justice, a much maligned and overused term — and I dare say a term used by political correcteness not to addres the reality it hides: we’re talking about humanity, we’re talking about what is human, what is, after all, the normal discourse among thinking and feeling people, the blood stream in each of us that connects us all, something we readily dismiss — human rights). This can only happen if there is equal sharing of responsibilities between an organization and the people it’s trying to serve; one learns from the other, this way the underrepresented, the marginalized, can eventually take control of governance — gobernabilidad. It’s a concrete way of ensuring a fascicle and humane indoctrination into the dominant culture, and vice versa. That is to say, as Dominican – Haitians learn to govern — as they produce economies of scale for their own populations — they integrate into the larger society. In doing so, the dominant society benefits as suffering, which is costly in all shapes and forms, is reduced. The society then moves forward in humane ways, something we’ve yet to be able to do anywhere in the western world.

The light of day is in cooperation and collaboration, not competition. Competition — growth for growth’s sake and profits for few — has brought us wars and global warming, antipathies, violence and depravation. It’s time to work with people, such as the Fundación 180 Grados, that are finding creative and socially just solutions to our vast problems. We can’t learn apart from one another. We have to learn together. This will be the new world order.

In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, when Oscar is facing his assassins, Gorilla Grod and Solomon Grundy, sent by their police captain to end his life for loving Ybón, a local puta who made her way through the world as best she could, only to end up in this brutal captain’s hands, Oscar tells these formidable henchmen “that what they were doing was wrong, that they were going to take  a great love out of the world. Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.”

In the end, the very end of things, how we, as humanity, have recognized love and the magnificent power of love will be how we’re judged.  Trujillo and his legacy, Gorilla Grod and Solomon Grundy, those that carry out colonialization’s ugliness, they’re scared of love and loving; those who work only to deny human rights, likewise, are scared to death of love.  Love is powerful.  If we give it, we gain strength.

Filed under Citizenship, Class, corruption, cultural studies, Fundamentalism, Muslim, politics, Race and Ethnicity, Socio-Economic insecurity Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

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