Sunday, December 30, 2012

Some good reading for the spring.

Who is Paul Robeson? Or, history is forgetting.

Imagine this, I told my students.

A man graduates valedictorian from Rutgers University while also starring as an All-American football player.  Then the NFL drafts him and he simultaneously studies at Columbia Law School while he continues to be a star on the field.  On the side, he acts: his performance of Othello is heralded as the greatest moment in Shakespearean productions in the 20th century.  Along the way he also makes considerable contributions to a major American literary movement.

Who is this man, I asked my students — we were discussing James Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Speak.

He must be like some modern-day Leonardo Da Vinci or Julius Caesar or Achilles, no?

Oh.  Did I mention —he was black?  And accomplished all this well before Brown v. Board of Education?

I should think this list of accomplishments would get you a place in history textbooks alongside the likes of W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr., Barak Obama and the like.  

But have you ever heard of Paul Robeson?




Doubtful.  No holidays.  No place in our pantheon of national heros, no sweet children's books to inspire little boys and girls to be great just like him.  As far as I know, there's a street named after him in Princeton and not much else.

Why?

Because he was a little too interested in Communism and the rights of colonies and former colonies in Africa.  Blacklisted.  Woops.  Goes to show you McCarthy didn't mess around.  That's a powerful lesson about the awesome impact of the Red Scare in the United States.

It reminds me a bit of the ideological mass delusion an organization like the NRA manages to maintain. And it's not a theory if the conspiracy is true.  Lots of conspiring going on these past few weeks, I'm sure, in between the mass orders for more guns and ammo.  Maybe people re-read or re-watched McCarthy's The Road while searching for holiday cheer and felt the need to be prepared for any contingency.

Does anyone else remember this?




Talk about tragic déjà vu.

But I'm prepared.  Fewer guns in fewer peoples hands in 2013.  And teaching about Paul Robeson.  Two resolutions for 2013.


PS: As Renan put it, "L’oubli, et je dirai même l’erreur historique, sont un facteur essentiel de la création d’une nation, et c’est ainsi que le progrès des études historiques est souvent pour la nationalité un danger."

A wonderful poem as we all awake soon into a new year.

Why I Wake Early
by Mary Oliver

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who make the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the 
miserable and the crotchety—



best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light— 
good morninggood morninggood morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

Guns Kill People, People Kill People; or, NRA leaders as accessories to murder

Dear President #BarackObama and Mayor #MikeBloomberg,

We often hear the slogan, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."

But that's wildly wrong.  Today or tomorrow or the next day when, inevitably, a four or five year old little boy or girl finds a gun and shoots his two year old sister or brother—who will have done the killing?  To my mind, no answer, logically or legally, explains this other than to say that a gun killed this innocent baby.

Yes, people do kill people, too.  Out of malice, because of mental illness, while committing a crime.  They murder police officers, fire fighters, babies, old men—bullets don't discriminate.

Even more so, people help others when they kill.  I think it's called being an accessory to murder.

To the extent that the National Rifle Association (@NRA) actively lobbies elected officials, manipulates elections and uses a tremendous amount of their resources either to put or to keep guns in the hands of those who have no right to have them, or who are wildly irresponsible with the firearms and ammunition they possess, you have a duty to charge them for the crimes they facilitiate.

Mr. President, you said you would use the full power of your office to help the people of Newtown and to protect our children and all Americans from needless gun violence.

It would be an amazingly reassuring step if you could use the law enforcement agencies of this great democracy to pursue criminal charges against the leadership of the NRA.  It would be a bright an bold step for the new year.

This is not an outrageous suggestion.  We have been deluded into thinking that what's normal is normal.  It's not. Now, twenty babies had to be massacred before we can begin to open our eyes.  Lets not have more blood on our hands as we wait for the next five or ten or fifty or a hundred to be slaughtered.

I should hope Mayor Bloomberg, with his vigilance in fighting for gun control, could also aid in such a campaign.

Sincerely,
Christopher M. Moses
New York, NY

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Bureau of Melodramatic Research.

I like this rather much. Very clever and quite telling.

Hostile Witness

A smart piece by my esteemed friend Dan Denvir.


Hostile Witness: We need meaningful gun control, not more prison time

The National Rifle Association’s bullying, funded by hysterical members and gun manufacturers fighting to maintain market share, has long blocked legislation to permanently ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and to close the gun-show loophole on background checks. 

Dementia, Whipped Cream and the Importance of Laughter


I stepped away from the dinner table innocently enough – to do something simple, to clear a few plates after dessert.

When I returned my mother had a wonderful smile on her face, cheeks puffed full of laughter just waiting for the right moment to chuckle forth.  It took me a moment to understand her bemusement: it was mid-August—on the table we had a wonderful heaping bowl of fresh berries and another of whipped cream. 

My mother had taken a very large dollop of the cream and plopped it down in the open pages of an Architectural Digest magazine.  She was beside herself.

There’s no need for confusion.  My mother was in the vast middle ground of Alzheimer’s disease, with her world blended between a spectacular imagination and somewhat shaky grasp of what we would call reality. 

The consummate hostess, she had been taken by a photograph in the magazine, a regally set dining room table, and realized that it would be nothing short of rude not to share our own rich bounty. 

I knew my mother loved the magazine and others like it, for the picture-book relief and indulgent clarity they gave to her own fragmented sense of past, present and future.  But this was the first time I realized how interactive her truth had become.

I struggle now to explain the jumble of emotions I felt in this moment: stunned with anger and sadness, a sudden elation – yearning love – fear; confusion; an utter loss for words.

So I did the only thing that came to mind.  I started laughing, laughing with her, pointing and laughing.

I whisked another sizable helping onto those already slimy pages. 

It was the only thing I could do.

Never before or since have I understood so clearly how comedy and tragedy are opposite faces of the same dramatic coin.  However widely we both smiled, I couldn’t escape the awful fact that I had just lost one more piece of my mother.

I learned a great deal more in the two years between this magazine shortcake and my mother’s death, most of which I am still trying to figure out.  Amidst a complicated legal battle with her second husband and medical emergencies that ricocheted into anguishing decisions about how best to care for the body that housed her failing mind – between this and the simple struggle to remain present, to visit, to listen to her disjointed stories that became mumblings and screams and sometimes just the thrashings of her arms and legs, I realized that I knew very, very little. 

I knew almost nothing, but I felt more than I ever imagined possible, each day more than the next.  I felt my stomach in knots, my heart racing, my legs fatigued by thought and my brain numbed by hours of running, the only thing that could occasionally bring a shred of calm.  Anxiety came and went as a flash in the pan or an elaborate, consuming, seven course meal.  The same thing with happiness: an irreverent, geeky pun that offered a chuckle all my own, or moving conversations with friends over days of splendid vacation.

It didn’t matter how many hundreds of books I had read, nor would the thousands more in my scholarly queue.  Better put: knowledge does not displace emotions, and it’s as helpful for confusing what you feel as for providing any sense of order or reason. 

When I would spend time with my mother at her care facility, I saw with piercing effect how our inner lives are created and sustained by the complex minutiae that accrues as our emotional existence.  She and the other patients acted out the joy and sadness, the bliss and spite, the empathy and jealousy and forgiveness and hatred that had combined into their being and now emerged no less intensely for its profound randomness.

However pretty the softly wallpapered walls, the colorful posters, the medical equipment hid by gentle covers and an ever kinder staff, however peaceful and serene this home strove to be—

Imagine an elderly, toothless, disheveled and entirely helpless woman hunched over in her wheelchair whimpering with endless malice: “get him.  Get that bastard.  Get him.”

Or my mother, clutching her stuffed-animal cat and staring frantically off into space while insisting that you find her lost pet, weeping at the thought of having let him go.

There were inspiring moments, too.  Couples flirting like high school sweethearts, old men bickering over a baseball game on TV, for them played simultaneously in three or four different decades:  “That’s Mo Vaughn.”  “No, you fool.  Babe Ruth.”  Or was it Sammy Sosa.  Black, white, Latino, whatever—peanuts and cracker jack, I don’t care if I ever come back.

But this isn’t purgatory.  It’s you and me.  It’s all of us right now.

For some reason we’ve come to think that growing up means getting ourselves together, smoothing out the complexities of life.  Naïve and with little to be self-conscious about, we go into that awkward abyss called puberty, and hope and pray that at some point things will start to make sense again.

Maybe.

A little less high-pitched and squeaky, perhaps.

But like it or not, it’s complexity and confusion from here on out.  Which is as wonderful as it is terrifying.

Now I can hear various pundits saying to hell with this wishy-washy, touchy-feely crap.  Toughen up.  Let men be men, earn a good living and enjoy a cold beer, and give women the teary-eyed space needed to be a caring mother.  Or any other line from the countless men are from mars, greatest generation fantasy books.

If you’ve ever looked into the eyes of a solider just returned from war, or a father holding his child for the first time, or simply those of a good friend on a hard day – if you’ve ever been honest with yourself – you know that we live our lives in constellations of feeling as vast, diverse, contradictory and nuanced as any in this universe.

To pretend otherwise, to let cynicism and petty cruelties callous your emotional being: this is an irreparable loss, a foreclosure on the liberty we have to exist as wholly human beings.  The snide remarks, the falsely righteous comfort of thinking yourself smarter, sexier, stronger, more stylish and successful than the next – even just the stolid pragmatism of adulthood: these needn’t be replaced by selflessness, humility and endless sacrifice.  Just a little bit of honest vulnerability.

Together we each possess an emotional genius that has nothing to do with our talents in calculus or our ability to master Presidential politics.

The goal isn’t to be forever childish, or to be irresponsible or to take foolish risks for the sake of thrill. 

All the same: we take ourselves way too seriously, but nowhere’s near seriously enough.

As I struggle to let myself cry, to be loved, to remain honest in pain and in pleasure, I remember that whipped cream.  And that laughter.  I hope you can hear it, too.



Habits of Mass Destruction


Pissed off.

Jimi Hendrix was pissed off and that’s putting it mildly.

So uncanny is his acoustical flag-burning we wake up and wonder why: why stretch, why bend, why torment this ballad of military might? 

Woodstock, 1969—a decade with two dead Kennedys and Martin Luther King but a year in his grave.  Bras burned, though babies did too as napalm fell across Vietnam.

Land of the free and home of the brave:  while we vilify undocumented workers, torture prisoners, and deny the rights of marriage to every couple God has brought together in love and hopefulness.

Hendrix tore through the Star Spangled Banner with his guitar because he wanted America to hear what its national anthem sounded like as a seething, spiteful cry for justice. 

Hendrix also wanted us to explore, to discover, to imagine the world in truly new ways.

Across the globe violence and struggle shaped the late sixties.  Though so did tremendous hope: just a month before Woodstock, men walked on the moon for the first time, and humanity saw itself upon this earth as it never had before.

July 4th, 1776 was also a moment of tremendous new possibility.  Late in the Enlightenment colonial Americans made a decision as bold and brilliant as it was foolish and ill-considered.  But they won.  They took ideas seriously and dared to try something new, to make mistakes, to seek a more perfect union. 

Today we imagine science and technology and medicine to offer unprecedented salvation.  Yet the greatness we celebrate this weekend was made with words.  Pen and paper and an open, inspired, considerate mind have more power than anything else in this world.

You need not write grand pronouncements: proverbs and the most pedestrian considerations make life what it is.  To say I am afraid, I am sorry, I do not know—these are the hardest things.

I am convinced that we are far more creatures of habit than of heroism.

And since founding the first modern democracy, we have developed habits of mass destruction.

Conserve, reuse, recycle.  Yet seek more: grow, gain, and multiply. Embrace equality; but don’t forget to get ahead.

While making ourselves free, we have ensnared the world with our waste and toxins and acrid exhaust.  This is not a national problem; global warming is not a joke; climate change is happening and we are responsible.  You and me, right here, right now.

Nor will only environmentalism, green engineering or buying local solve this crisis.  Flashy solutions tend to blind us to enduring problems.

We need justice.  Justice for those suffering from draught across Chad, Sudan and Somalia; for those millions threatened by rising waters in Bangladesh; for those in China breathing the filth we require to shop at everyday low prices.

We also need justice in our everyday lives.  As we have thoughtlessly objectified and commoditized our planet, so too patriarchy and our pernicious silence about how we treat women—looks before voice, body before min—and how we treat men—courage ahead of caring, conquest ahead of camaraderie—so too our silence enables discrimination, uncertainty and fear to undermine our potential for creative, beautiful fulfillment.

We can still, we must still flirt and play and find exhilaration in our lives.  But this is not the same as power ill-used— entitlement, belittling comment, crass glance, forced hand on the shoulder or worse.  We should never live in fear.  We should never cause fear.  Rather it is in the awesomeness of vulnerability that we realize the true power of love.

Gay or straight, man or woman, confident or confused: we must scrutinize and act deliberately, all the more so if you think this doesn’t apply to you.

It’s no accident we so often imagine nature as female, that to be protected, or to be ravished and left behind.

How we interact with one another, with all living species: I think we need to think small—big and boldly about the little things.  To break old habits, however hard—we can not continue with those of mass destruction.

‘You only need to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.’

Or, ‘To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,’ —as the Shaker’s have it.  ‘'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.’

Very Woodstock; very much the fun and possibility and brilliance we all possess.  This is the freedom, the independence we need today.

Imagine that awesomeness.

Live that awesomeness.

Let us imagine and live together, vulnerable, in kindness and in love.

•••
This piece was originally given as a Chapel Talk to the students and faculty at the Advanced Studies Program, St. Paul's School, summer 2010.  It spoke to questions specifically related to the Fourth of July but this version has been edited slightly to remove any confusing references.

I took the photo at a temple nearby Siem Reap, Cambodia, in January of 2010.

Friday, December 28, 2012

The new NRA

My vision for 2013, and for a new NRA: Newtown Reclaiming America.  Stop this endless, preventible, gratuitous bloodshed.  Stop the NRA as they continue to hijack common sense and prevent us from having laws that will both protect our Constitutional freedoms and keep us from getting killed.  Really, it's possible to have both.  So why are so many people murdered with guns every day?

A new year. So many ideas, so many questions

The perfect moment to get my mental blog into the digital world.