Caking Out in Rome

Tip of the Hat: -The produce guy on Midvale Ave., who suggested, based on my purchase, combining cream of broccoli soup and cream of mushroom soup in a single cream of vegetable soup. He eats that sort of thing a lot, being a produce guy.

-Christian Lambert, whose Stuff White People Like will allow me to demonstrate to my writing students that they have to take the identities they're writing about apart even if they're writing about something they LOVE, rather than Celebrate How Awesome The Internet Is. How will I show them this? I will do it to myself. E.g., in the past couple weeks, I have: 

                  -ordered more books by and about Jacques Lacan and Slavoj
                   Žižek for my Ph.D. exams (#81 Graduate School) 

                   -used plastic bags from the grocery store as trashbags for the 
                    small cans in my apartment (#64 Recycling: No, that is not
                    me in the photo)

                   -posted articles about politics on facebook and signed a few 
                    petitions online (#18 Awareness)

-The woman who works at Barnes and Noble in Chester Springs, who not only helped me find a book by Celine for my research assistantship on translation, but has read Journey to the End of the Night in French (B.A. in French, but no #81).  She was middle-aged and I hope she hasn't been working there long.  Working at Borders the summer before I started grad school was the best crappy service job I've ever had, but boy do they not pay well. 


Wag of the Finger: -The woman sitting on the stone wall outside the Falls of Schuylkill Library who offered me a copy of The Watchtower: the Jehovah's Witness magazine, not a Jimi Hendrix CD.

-The Gideon handing out tiny Bibles in a tweed jacket outside Anderson Hall at Temple this afternoon.  I was able to tell him honestly that I already had one since they got me a few semesters ago when I was on my way to a presentation I had sort of half prepared for.  I related the Gideons to African American literature for the other half, so it all worked out.

Tip of the Hat: That first Gideon.

(apologies for YouTube user's awful photo montage in abovelinked video but just listen)

5:45 p.m.

I see the spires of St. Bridget's and the Falls Library sticking out of the row homes and trees across the river, just down the hill from my apartment.  It has taken me over an hour to move a hundred yards to the other side of the Schuylkill as the crow flies. 

Still holding out for my heliport.

As soon as I stepped outside my apartment this morning a woman with a mustache handed me a tract about the end of the world.  It was raining; I had the wheely suitcase full of books.

"Going on vacation?"
"No, no, the library."
She and her door-to-door partner laugh.

[Trying to keep the mood light, apologetically?] "You see, I've just written an article."

They understand I have to catch the train and it's raining.  They'll come back some other time.

What a swell day!

Last Tuesday morning rain was trickling down the cracks in Terrace Street.  A few robins bobbed their heads as it ran over their feet.  An unkempt maple tree protruded over the sidewalk.

Further downtown, past Convenient Mart and the kids yelling fuck you asshole at each other, the one-legged man who sold me a lobster tail out of a bag last summer swung across the street on crutches. 

It was delicious.  My mom found out from the seafood manager where I used to work that there had been a considerable seafood theft that day.

P.S. He is the self-proclaimed king of Carbondale my brother tells me.

The street next to City Hall is now Gen. O'Malley way.  A bronze[d?] statue of the general stands in Memorial Park, behind the farmers' market.



I'm teaching a class to seven Spanish students at Trinity Episcopal Church, and after Father Schaible locked up I drove a few of them to the Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour and Museum in McDade Park.  The new gift shop has giant photos of mules and breaker boys on the walls. 

People love to drive around in Scranton.  Yes indeed.




Buildings spring up from the ground on Keyser Ave.  The dome of an orthodox church mushroomed in blue and purple several yards after another squat brown restaurant.  Then more gas stations and houses. 

In Carbondale they get sucked back down.  A patch of rubble sprawls next to Sacred Heart High School, open since the nineteenth century, now for sale. 



I don't remember who used to be in the lot, but now there's a guy texting while he drives a bulldozer.

Further down the street, turning left onto Memorial Park, flying over the benches, the soldier on the Civil War monument, and General O'Malley, we land across from the Carbondale Public Library in another rubble patch, where I used to buy baseball cards.  Back up Main Street there's another one next to McDonnell's restaurant.  This one has some dump trucks parked on it, perhaps a good sign.



Across the street, past Domenick's Pizza, whose window advertises a 12" pizza for 4.99, and Dunkin Donuts, where the 1.99 egg and cheese wrap gets you "Breakfast Not Brokefast," the lot where Pinky's restaurant was before it burned down is now fenced in and adorned by a small for sale sign.  You could get breakfast there for 2.99.



Further down Main, left on Eight Avenue, up the hill and right down Park Street, the old woman's house whose lawn I used to mow is also gone.  She used to give me a Diet Dr. Pepper and a Philadelphia Cream Cheese cookie after I was finished.  I figured she was dead but found out she's in the Carbondale Nursing Home, along with my grandma and the woman I used to shovel snow for.  My next door neighbor used to live there too, but now she is dead.

Grandma is doing better.  Not as good as she was last Christmas, when she was holding forth about her cousin Kenny's laundromat, but better all the same. 


  The aforesaid holding forth occurred in the chair on the left,
  in which she leaned back and folded her hands behind her head.

Speaking of Christmas, it was immensely practical.  Nothing lying around taking up space.  An electric toothbrush, a sweatshirt I wear often, etc.  Also some books I haven't read and some DVDs I haven't watched with Christmas money:

 
Number opened: 2.  Number completed: 0.  Total from
Anthology Books, new used bookstore in Scranton with metal
bistro tables, weekly readings and yoga classes: $54. 
Price of slice of pizza the cashier at the jewelry store downstairs gave
me: $0.  Level, on a scale of one to ten, of scarf-clad owner's friendliness: 
8.8.  Amount of tip left in jar: $1.

Back on Park Street, I couldn't tell if the pine trees still stood in the backyard because our other next door neighbor's son is building a big garage where the house used to be.  His father also built a garage, this one in the vacant lot on the corner of my block, where my siblings and I used to play in the winter.  But this was over fifteen years ago.

They are garage builders, those neighbors. 

In my backyard, the spruce tree my grandpa planted is double my height; the maple I planted when I was seven, quadruple.  The forsythia bush sits behind the rows of beans, zucchini and herbs in the garden my brother and my dad have been working on, and our black cockapoo trundles through the grass, sniffing the ground.

Cut to her romping with my mom in Merly Sarnosky Park last May, along the edges of the soccer field where my sister and I are trying to score a goal against my brother.  Jeremy and I race to recover the ball from the woods on the sidelines and he reaches it before I do.

Cut to a nine-year-old toddling down a path in McDade Park holding my sister's hand.  She is autistic and has pigtails and has just given me a hug. 

My Dad and I are walking down Seventh Avenue having our usual political discussion.  NAFTA, we will agree several days later, has got to go.  The sun is setting behind the stone steeple of the Presbyterian church.



An old man wearing a trucker hat and a plaid shirt sits on his front steps with his arms crossed over his knees.  He recalls when Carbondale was crowded and cars whizzed up the hill, and the tomatoes and onions growing in the yard of the Italian woman who took him in when he was running from the Germans, and how much his paycheck for the month was, and that he gave her half, and that she called him a millionaire.  He remembers the five-story Anthracite Hotel, and the mine fires under people's houses after the war.  Names and dates escape him sometimes, but after we leave he continues to slouch over and ruminate. 

The quad path that runs behind Russell Park is wider now.  The woods have been scaled back and the rusty VW Beetle is gone.  The slag heaps at the end of the path are now shotgun-shell-free, but a few pieces of what looks like a giant German war helmet are scattered on the ground.  More like the head of a black planarian worm, when you get closer.



Water used to lie on the ground back there in big puddles when it rained.  My brother tells me that he and his friends ran through a mile of pipes before they buried them.  Now that the path is more level maybe it doesn't anymore.   

When I'm running up one of the culm mounds and it's getting dark, sometimes it's like I'm back in eighth grade reading J.R.R. Tolkien, and a black rider is about to crest the hil to my left. 



Then I get to the other side and hear frogs chirping in the cemetery, and the incipient ringwraith attack is over for the time being. 

Was out running as the evening was turning from dusk to dark and discovered that east falls has fireflies.  Also, the goslings were foraging underneath the Strawberry Mansion bridge.  One was so close to the path that I could have brushed my fingers over it as I was running by, but I'd imagine its parents would switch to attack mode. 

Plus who knows how other geese would take to a gosling that smells like a human.

...in favor of Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Murray sits on the bench outside the casting office. He droops.

Man, that Philip Seymour Hoffman guy. Fuck. I mean, he has to talk to convey emotion. I don't even have to move my fucking eyebrow to evoke the varying degrees of ambivalence that come with the aging process. An older man coming to terms with his lackluster but ultimately the best you can hope for in this vale of tears family life as he reflects upon the women he's fucked over the years? Fucking shit. I'm evoking that shit right now just by sitting here.

Murray emits a barely audible sigh and may or may not adjust his right shoulder. It's hard to tell.

Well, I guess it's time to go do a cameo in an NYU film student's avant-garde project in order to appear magnanimous or some shit. Fuck.

Murray continues to droop.

 

Me: I don't know, I have mixed feelings about it.  Definitely Charlie Kaufman's most nihilistic film.  Both nihilistic and affirmative, in a way, or maybe affirmative by negation.
A: Your beard smells like corn.
Me: Hm, weird.  I haven't eaten corn in a long time.
A: That's gross

Several minutes later

A: That movie put me in a funk.
Me: Yeah, I think it was supposed to.  What did you think of the extended speechifying at the end?
A: Eh.
Me: Yeah, it was kind of an extended treatment of "death is the great equalizer."  I'm not sure whether I agree with its message, that people are basically interchangeable, that our memories might as well be someone else's.  I thought it was interesting that the room was indifferent.  It basically said that ultimately people are the same.
A: You're the only person I know whose beard smells like corn.

My roommate has been saying for a while now that Iran will become less hostile once its young people start moving into influential positions, but given the violence the government is visiting on the supporters of Moussavi, the candidate in the disputed presidential election who supports greater compromise in international affairs and more women’s rights, who knew that the shift would be this precipitous? The New York Times calls the marches protesting the alleged election fraud “the largest antigovernment demonstration [in Iran] since the 1979 revolution,”   

 I hope that the student supporters of Moussavi have their day, because many of them study Hafez, the most revered Persian poet and the most widely read in Iran. “Postgraduate students in Iranian universities often spend a full year just studying Hafez under professors specially trained in exegesis of his verse,” says Leonard Lewisohn, one of the translators of the thirty poems that make up The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door (2008). They’re called ghazals, a closed form in which each stanza begins a new thought. Theologically, Lewisohn sees Hafez as a fourteenth-century William Blake, with a distrust of orthodoxy and a desire to reunite spiritual and erotic love, qualities which are inseparable in nearly every stanza I’ve read so far, such as these two from “Say Good-Bye. It Will Soon Be Over”: 

The breath of the holy musk will drift toward us

On the dawn wind once more; everything will begin to move.

The decrepit old world will be young once more.

 

The Judas tree with its ruddy blossoms will offer

Wine to the jasmine, and the eye of the narcissus

Will turn its loving gaze on the red peony.

Understanding the levels of symbolism in Hafez’s poetry, “as heavily laden with bales of references as a camel,” requires a thorough training in the Qur’an and many forms of Islamic mysticism; Lewisohn and his co-translator, the American poet Robert Bly, spent days translating each poem, and fourteen years of research on all thirty. But even without this background, the imagery continues to arrest: 

No one has ever seen your face, and yet a thousand

Doorkeepers have arrived. You are a rose still closed,

And yet a hundred nightingales have arrived.

I’m going to drop this stuff on my Spanish students at the end of this month because I can, but the point here is that it’s a shame that Khamenei and crew force such a rigid version of Islamic law on the descendents of Hafez, who says in the poem I quoted above,

In this matter of love, let’s not put the Sufi gathering house

In this spot and the tavern in another; in every spot of the universe

Light shines out from the face of the Friend.

And all we get of Persian culture in the US is Ahmadinejad yammering away that there are no homosexuals in Iran. Hopefully the Hafez readers will triumph, or at least get their text messaging turned back on. Khamenei, a former poet himself, had it shut down because people were spreading “rumors.” Says Lewisohn: “[Hafez] expresses revulsion for the ascetic abstinence (zuhd) and piety (taqwa) of the ascetics, preferring the infamy of the honest drunkard to the false façade of those ungracious mullahs, who, recking not their own rede, to paraphrase Shakespeare, pretend that the primrose path of dalliance they tread is the steep and thorny path to heaven. In verse after verse, he takes refuge from their pedantic self-righteousness in the sweet unreason of love.” 
 

Thank you, Mr. Scott, for informing us that the mainstream American sex comedy traffics in male narcissism. Who knew? He's less reviewing it than using the arts page of the New York Times to snipe at the whole genre. There are aspects of it that are clearly problematic, but Scott is in the wrong cultural position to point them out. I mean, look at the guy. Maybe he was angry at being given the assignment and taking it out on an imagined pack of vapid drones who go see movies these days, and I share his Frankfurt School doom and gloom to some extent, but come on. He almost made me want to go to academic confession or something ('Bless me, Father Scott, for I have sinned...'), but then I realized, No, within the convetions of the genre, the movie was quite good, with lots of laconic editing and punchy screenwriting. It smacked of self-awareness and seemed to parody the raunch comedy even as it fulfilled all its characteristics as if it were going down a checklist.

I like A.O. Scott. It's refreshing to see a critic willing to trash an arthouse film and respect it enough to pull it apart and examine what's wrong with it. (Plus he realizes how beautifully shot 28 Days Later is). For example, I've been looking forward to seeing Away We Go, despite the sneaking suspicion that it's made with exactly my demographic in mind, from casting the guy who plays Jim in The Office in one of the lead roles (with a beard and glasses, no less) to the soundtrack by Alexi Murdoch, who sounds like the latest iteration of Nick Drake in the trailer. But with precision and verve, Scott skewers it:

"Far from being screw-ups, Veronica and Burt, played with passive-aggressive winsomeness by Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski, are manifestly superior to everyone else in the movie and, by implication, the world. And even though they express themselves with a measure of diffidence, they are acutely, at times painfully, aware of their special status as uniquely sensitive, caring, smart and cool beings on a planet full of cretins and failures . . . Really, 'Away We Go' is about the flight from adulthood, from engagement, from responsibility, even as it cleverly disguises itself as a search for all those things. But the dream of being left alone in a world of your own making, far from anything sad or icky or difficult, is a child’s fantasy. Not an unattractive or uncommon one, it must be said, and for that reason it is tempting to follow Burt and Veronica into the precious, hermetic paradise that awaits them at the end of the road. You know they will be happy there. But you should also understand that you are not welcome. Does it sound as if I hate this movie? Don’t be silly. But don’t be fooled. This movie does not like you."

Wonderful. I will probably still see it, but now I'll beware of the sanctimoniousness and enjoy the movie without worrying about it. This is one of the great things about a nuanced film review: it takes away the burden of nitpicking movies to death so you can enjoy them.

And yet, the same "smug self-regard" Scott condemns in Away We Go is present in his review of The Hanogover. Squashing a fly by dropping an analytical freight train on it is unnecessary.

Last Sunday we were walking on the far side of the Schuylkill, away from Kelly Drive, and we discovered where the rest of the Canada geese have been keeping themselves.  The ones on the wall on the other side are just a small remnant of the phalanx on the much quieter side of the river.

And they are a phalanx; they have goslings to protect.  They look like little dinosaurs covered in gray feathers, awkwardly stalking their way across the land as they nibble at creatures in the grass.  When we got close enough, the head of one of the adults rose into the air, and the necks of all the others snapped into straight lines, simultaneously.  The geese waddling along the side of the path transformed into absurd search towers and stared at us over their implacable bills, as if the first one had released kill pheromones into the air and the rest were about to begin their march toward doom.  We gave them some space before they started hissing at us and found a potential picnic spot further down the river.

What a dream!  Come on, Rendell.  I'm sure you and Biden can do some of that weird Pennsylvania buddy-buddy masculinity stuff and pull this off. 

The White House's declaration of June as LGBT Pride Month helps.  Andrew Sullivan doesn't buy it.  As he points out, pride is all well and good, but people are still being fired from the military based on their sexual orientation.  I'm doing research on JFK and the civil rights movement for my ESL class, and Obama's gestures of goodwill toward the gay community, with more substantive policy initiatives perhaps hamstrung by factions elsewhere in government and his hope for reelection, sounds much like Kennedy's professions of support to Martin Luther King.  Kennedy ostensibly didn't push the Civil Rights Act earlier in his term because of opposition from southerners in Congress and his need for southern support in the 1963 campaign.  If we keep going with this analogy, then hopefully Obama's Lyndon B. Johnson will be Obama.

Whether or not his joke about protesters outside yesterday's DNC Los Angeles fundraiser was as big a slap in the face to the LGBT community as some claim, Obama's unwillingness to engage in more forceful (i.e., any) rhetoric in support of basic gay rights, even an employment non-discrimination act, is a disappointment at best.  With as large a majority as he achieved in the election, and the rising support for gay rights among the young voters who campaigned for him, I see no plausible political excuse for his silence in this area.  It's especially disheartening that the man who achieved one of the late milestones of the civil rights movement refuses actively to continue it. 

I've been convinced for some time now that Obama's conciliatory tone is a kind of ruthlessly centrist rhetoric intended to encourage the attrition of moderates from the Republican Party, and that strategy seems to have worked here in Pennsylvania, where enough Republicans switched parties to vote in the Democratic presidential primary to shrink the state GOP and move it substantially rightward, thus prompting Arlen Specter's recent ship-jumping in the face of threats from ideologues within his own party.  Perhaps David Axelrod et al are discussing the prospect of further Democratic incursions into the South, the last bastion of what is increasingly becoming the party of older white people.  But I hope the Dems don't get greedy at the expense of a key element of their base, who get smacked around enough as it is without the symbolic slights.

In terms of power games, it's almost like watching the Bush administration hem and haw about restricting abortion rights after the 2004 election.  It must have been difficult for them to imagine social conservatives running into the arms of the Democrats, so they made it as clear as they could without shouting it that No, it was never about "values," but always about tax cuts.  And perhaps for the Dems it's really about the grilled organic chicken.  We certainly love feeling virtuous in ways that don't require much effort.  It gives us cheap Democrat erections, like an ethics peep show.  Pay yer extra $1.62 for cage-free eggs and feel good about yourself.

Obama seems to be treating the socially progressive members of his base with the same casual disregard as Bush treated "values voters"; I doubt that many Democratic strategists see the ranks of the Log Cabin Republicans growing anytime soon.  Yet the constituents in question in this case are not reactionary, but on the right side of history, and the months after the 2011 campaign are simply too late to begin speaking out in favor of the equal application of the rule of law to sexual minorities.

This morning the Canada geese had crossed the stone wall next to the Schuylkill and were foraging in the grass around a bench.  My girlfriend pointed out that the way they padded along and their long necks bobbed was not unlike a white guy trying to dance.  The feathers on their necks rippled. 


                         A considerably more dignified goose

Geese braving the other side of the wall is a common enough sight at the river in the morning.  All the bikers standing on the wall to photograph the sea of crew boats last week was an anomaly; the geese would have been there otherwise. 


   This is a hat, not a goose.
This photo is my girlfriend's.
I hope she doesn't mind that I put it here.

But the rest of the river was hopping as well.  A bright silhouette rose up from the bottom and a scaly back broke the weeds on the surface, then another, then another until arcs of scales and bursting silhouettes flickered among the weeds on the riverbank.  We didn't know what they were at first except that they were enormous.  As we walked toward the fish silhouette identifier board further down the path we ran into two guys fishing who told us that they were carp and that they were going to catch one when we stopped to tell them about the frenzy further up the river.  But there was one beneath them too.  I thought trout and my girlfriend thought catfish but trout don't get that big and these fish didn't have catfish whiskers.  The fishing guys were using trout as bait for these things.  Maybe they'll catch one.  They said Thanks brother when I told them about the group a few benches up.  

I keep having the feeling that East Falls is too nice a neighborhood for me to actually live in, but then I go outside and there it is again.  For example, last weekend after we went to a graduate English happy hour at Triumph (I drank several beers!  And transitioned from the semester to socializing in a beer and a half or so), shopped in Roxborough, and cooked a big Italian meal for my sister and her boyfriend, my girlfriend convinced me that No, we didn't have to rush off to the Philadelphia Art Museum for pay-what-you-will day, and that No, Blistering Work Schedule did not have to be replaced by Excruciating Itinerary of Fun Cultural Activities!.  So we watched cooking shows on TV for a little while, one that featured a chef with long gray hair from a Las Vegas restaurant.  His age was indeterminate and he had one of those unplaceable continental European accents.  Reminded me of the surfing instructor who casually sleeps with Ben Stiller's wife in Along Came Polly, which I saw the beginning of at some point.  Polly is Jennifer Aniston but the way it seems is that the European guy has sex with her almost by accident or something.

Ha ha, those Europeans.  They sure are lascivious.  Gotta watch out for 'em.

So the guy's making these ambitious veggie burgers, with mushrooms, two kinds of rice, potato flakes, soy beans, curry powder, and I'm thinking we will make these veggie burgers, but then he puts... pumpkin paste in them.  ...........Wha?

We went for a walk among the stone and brick houses a few blocks away and there are so many leaves climbing up the tree trunks in front of them and over the front garden patches.  Sunlight was blooming from the bricks and the leaves were radiating green.  It smelled green too.  The homes around here are so quaint that it almost seems like a theme park of quaintness, and I guess it kind of is, since the houses on Queen Lane were built in the seventies to look like they were much older.  But I will buy a ticket any day.


Ahhhh so much quaintness!  Everyone has a trellis and shit!  No, seriously, it's fantastic.

I was out running today after a busy semester and when I got to the Schuylkill a few crew boats were floating in the river next to the Falls Bridge.  There are often a few crew teams practicing but I kept running and tangles of tree branches and vines blocked my view before thinning out to reveal more boats five minutes further down the path, white lines broken up by flat wet green stuff.  Must have been twenty, no, thirty of them.  Then the trees gave way to the Strawberry Mansion Bridge and the boats opened out with the river, like a flotilla on its way to a navy battle or the pale arrow-shaped leaves in the creek above Torc Waterfall in Ireland.  Then there were at least a hundred, maybe more, interspersed with men standing on paddleboats giving the rowers directions on megaphones.  By the time I headed back home the boats had separated into lines on either side of the river and I noticed they were rowed by prep school kids, one of whom had a mohawk.  There was no freight train crossing the river but some Spanish-speaking guys were taking a break from building something on the bank eating breakfast out of styrofoam containers.

Photo: Karim Kadim/Associated Press

Muntader al-Zaidi

Over a month after he threw his shoes at George W. Bush in Baghdad, Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi remains in prison and is currenlty requesting political asylum in Switzerland.  Alternatively, he could remain in prison for fifteen years, or, possible but not likely, be assassinated.  He'll probably never surface in American news media again unless there's controversy surrounding a European country that accepts him: i.e., if France were to welcome him with open arms.  He's had his fifteen minutes of fame, and it's over.

However, his highly public insult will be come up in an arguably more important place: history books.  In most accounts of Bush's presidency or of the Iraq war of any length, Zaidi's flying shoes will be mentioned, putting an extra stamp of public outrage on Bush's already abysmal approval ratings, and maybe even prompting the hypothetical historian to mention 2008 estimates of the Iraqi death toll.  In its visibility and its execution, Zaidi's gesture functioned as a perfect symbol.  And we still care about symbols in America - but only if they almost hit someone in the face.

Let's watch that clip again, shall we? 

                                            (It's about thirty seconds in.)

Here's why it's a big deal: George W. Bush, international symbol of the military might, hubris, and policy ineptitude of the United States, was reduced to a physical body dodging a shoe.  After the incident, commentators were talking about his quick reflexes, as if we were reading sports, not political news.  He had passed from one realm into another.  For a brief moment, the image of George Bush, resented by frustrated millions around the world, was incarnated out of the world of symbols and into physical reality.  He's only human, after all.  And all this on his last appearance in Iraq as president.  Zaidi couldn't have timed it better.  The very slippage between assault and insult that has Zaidi in such murky legal waters is also that which makes his gesture such an effective one.

Now, any lit crit people reading this may see where this is going.  As Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek points out, media consumers in the West don't particularly care about pure symbols anymore.  We're entirely too anaesthetized for them to affect us in a substantive way.  Most of us only pay attention when our cherished symbols are ground into the mud of everyday physical experience: photos of a celebrity gaining weight in a sadistic supermarket magazine to titillate a [perhaps obese him/herself] middle-aged person, a president or a governor brought down by sexual scandal.  'They're just like us,' is the message these stories send. 'The fact that these people, and not us, are in these positions of fame and power is arbitrary.  Since they've been revealed to be just like us,' so the sentiment goes, 'Perhaps we can be like them without all that much effort.'  Hence the popularity of American Idol and all the other campy parodies of the tired old American Dream story.  The fantasy of the easy interchangeability of the "average man" with a celebrity or a political leader not only keeps millions of struggling Americans relatively satsified, but it also fuels our pervasive anti-intellectualism and allows politicians to evade much of the outrage over bad policy decisions that they would experience in other countries, like Britain.  I.e., 'Oh well.  Political decisions are hard.  I certainly couldn't figure it out, with all that pressure.  They were just trying to protect our freedom, in Abu Ghraib.  So, they may have been a little excessive.'  And we on the left get red-faced about it and play into the boring narrative of cultural controversy, and nothing is done.

Žižek makes his point about the inefficacy of pure symbols with an example from the buildup to the Iraq war:

"The big demonstrations in London and Washington against the US attack on Iraq a few years ago offer an exemplary case of this strange symbiotic relationship between power and resistance. Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protesters saved their beautiful souls: they made it clear that they don’t agree with the government’s policy on Iraq. Those in power calmly accepted it, even profited from it: not only did the protests in no way prevent the already-made decision to attack Iraq; they also served to legitimise it. Thus George Bush’s reaction to mass demonstrations protesting his visit to London, in effect: ‘You see, this is what we are fighting for, so that what people are doing here – protesting against their government policy – will be possible also in Iraq!’"

I remember participating in a few of these protests in 2003, holding a little candle on Main Street in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, and feeling good about myself while people driving by gave us the finger and did that jacking off in the air gesture.  But the war went on, and such protests mean nothing if they stop at symbolic distancing and don't somehow lead to genuinely political action. 

Bush employed the same strategy that Žižek points to, in miniature, to shrug off the significance of the Zaidi incident.  "That's what people do in free countries, they call attention to themselves," he said in a press conference.  While Bush smiles and tells a joke about Zaidi's shoe size, you can hear his screams in the background as he's being beaten.

What a perfect symbol for the Democrats' (until the election of Barack Obama) tepid response to the Iraq war.  We all sat around and stewed about it, and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi played chicken with George Bush about cutting off funds for it but ultimately balked.  But at least they tried, right?

Wrong.

The point is not our integrity.  The point is all the dead Iraqis and Americans.  A genuine political response to violence of this magnitude must have as its ultimate aim the preservation of material stuff.  

We can argue all we want about spirituality, identity, where consciousness arises from, human rights, etc. etc., but I'm pretty sure that it's all moot when you splatter someone's cranial matter across a shopping thoroughfare.  

Most Americans, I'd imagine, focused on Zaidi's first comment: "This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!"  It allows stereotypes about Arabs to be preserved and gives the whole incident the same titillating quality as a scandal in a supermarket tabloid.  'What a kooky Arab!  George Bush almost got hit with a shoe!'  Perhaps most of them stopped there.  But it's Zaidi's second comment that makes him a hero to aspire to, not a celebrity to be torn down for our amusement: "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!".  This, we don't want to think about.  Zaidi's integrity would shame us.   


Rick Warren


        AP Photo/Hector Mata

There are lessons here for how to respond to the [vast] implications of another symbolic event, Obama's choice of Rick Warren to give the benediction at his inauguration tomorrow.  Beneath all the rhetoric about community, it's a fundamental leftist (or at least anti-laissez-faire) gambit that many people need to be rescued from the consequences of their own political opinions, influenced as they are by various ideologies.  "Individual liberty" is not an immediate end, but rather a possible means toward social formations that are better suited to human needs (or, if you have post-humanist leanings, the conditions necessary for the biosphere to function healthily with some level of thought occurring in it) [6/21/09 Update: In retrospect, this sounds very Brave New World of me.  Of course individual liberty should be an end in itself, just not the only one.  My socialist histrionics here were a reaction against right-wing overemphasis on a severely circumscribed notion of free will that pays little attention to the material constraints in which that will is exercised, rather than the result of clear deliberation.  See also protest masculinity.  Vicki Mahaffey puts it well when she writes of Virginia Woolf's fiction, "When we privilege the separateness of a person by isolating that person from the people who shaped his or her individual development, the result is a trick, a distortion, a lie."  The conception of the human agent underpinning laissez-faire economic policies seems to privilege such a distortion.]

However, beneath much conservative religious resentment of the left/secularism is a conviction that it wants to take individual volition away.  To them, individual volition, not socialized healthcare, is necessary for moral rectitude.  If the American government embraces more socialistic policies, it will take one more responsibility away from churches, that of caring for the sick.  In societies with lower amounts of the destitute, if I understand the logic, people will have less opportunities to exercise their free will for moral ends.

Now, this fetishization of free will is a bit silly, of course, when we have all this threatened stuff to protect.  "Creation care," Rick Warren calls it: human bodies, the rising climate, the rest of the biosphere.  But until we have a globalized view of human need, we will simply perpetuate the culture wars by defending conflicting identities.  Short story writer George Saunders puts it well in his essay, "Manifesto: A Press Release from PRKA":

"Last Thursday, my organization, People Reluctant to Kill For An Abstraction (PRKA), orchestrated an overwhelming show of force around the globe.  At precisely nine in the morning, working with focus and stealth, our entire membership succeeded in simultaneously beheading no one.  At nine thirty, we embarked upon Phase II, during which our entire membership simultaneously did not force a single man to simulate sex with another man.  At ten, Phase III began, during which not a single one of us blew himself/herself up in a crowded public place.  No civilians were literally turned inside out via our powerful explosives.  No previously funny person was reduced to a baggy pile of bloody leaking flesh, by us, during this Phase of our operation."

This notion of the ridiculous fragility of human beings should always be at the back of our minds when we participate in political debate.  Our ideas and identities as such ultimately depend upon these frail flesh casings that are necessary for any of the former to arise at all.

Ergo, with this end in mind, for real political progress to occur, the left must make inroads with religious people, as the Obama campaign has.  Those of us with secular leanings may not find the idea of cozying up to people who claim, as the Creation Care people linked to above do, that "environmental problems are sin problems," but we must ask ourselves: Do we or do we not actually care about the environment?  Do we care about it more than feeling good about ourselves for caring about the environment rather than things like "sin"?  I hope so, because the latter option is petulant and useless.

There is no effective American left without a religous left.  Howard Dean, whose brilliance as a political strategist is clear now, spoke at Temple a few months ago and mentioned how Democratic appeals to young evangelicals were seeing success because of the Dems' focus on the top three issues of evangelical Christians under thirty-five, as reported in a recent survey: global poverty, the environment, and Darfur.  "These are Democratic issues," Dean said.  He's quite dynamic, in person.  

A very large percentage of Americans are religious, and that's not going to change anytime soon.  As sociologist Peter L. Berger puts it, 

"The religious impulse, the quest for meaning that transcends the restricted space of empirical existence in the world, has been a perennial feature of humanity.  (This is not a theological statement but an anthropological one - an agnostic or even an atheist philosopher may well agree with it.)  It would require something close to a mutation of the species to extinguish this impulse for good.  The more radical thinkers of the Enlightenment and their more recent intellectual descendants hoped for something like this, of course.  So far it has not happened, and as I have argued, it is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future.  The critique of secularity common to all the resurgent movements is that human existence bereft of transcendence is an impoverished and finally untenable position."  

I apologize for the extended quotation from Berger, but it's quite a zinger:

"There is no reason to think that the world of the twenty-first century will be any less religious than the world is today.  A minority of sociologists of religion have been trying to salvage the old secularization theory by what I would call the last-ditch thesis: Modernization does secularize, and movements like the Islamic and Evangelical ones represent last-ditch defenses by religion that cannot last; eventually, secularity will triumph - or, to put it less respectfully, eventually Iranian mullahs, Pentecostal preachers, and Tibetan lamas will all think and act like professors of literature at American universities.  I find this thesis singularly unpersuasive."

In purely diagnostic terms, people who admire Rick Warren are not a fringe element; people who read literary fiction are.  Warren's Christian self-help book, The Purpose Driven Life, has sold over 30 million copies.  It's written on a sixth-grade level.  You can read the first seven chapters here.  I haven't.  But from the perspective of someone interested in American culture, I should.  It's safe to say that it's a much, much more influential cultural force than the latest Man Booker-prize-winning novel.  Granted, I hope to spend my career convincing as many people as possible that engaging with such novels is a better use of their time than reading religious self-help books, but I think it's healthy that we on the left abandon the idea that Americans will adopt this sensibility en masse, even as we do all we can to support greater literacy, empathy, etc.

These are statistics, and while they can be manipulated, I like them very much because of their relationship to material reality.  Paradoxically, materialist rhetoric alone is not enough to accomplish materialist aims.  It's necessary to talk about things like transcendent values and other totalizing ideas that we bandy around in order to make political progress.

Boring, perhaps, but that's the way of it.  I prefer irony, but I'm in a very, very small minority.  

Now, the major roadblock here is Warren's support of Proposition 8, which stripped gay couples in California of the right to marry.  (The other potential roadblock, Warren's pro-life position, is practically moot with the election of Obama.  It's now pretty safe to say that Roe v. Wade isn't going anywhere.  Provided he gets the opportunity to appoint Supreme Court justices, attempts to overturn it are largely dead in the water at this point.)  This is intolerable.  For this reason, those who are angry at Obama's choice of Warren, myself among them - I initially compared his choice to resurrecting racist senator Jesse Helms from the dead and inviting him to the inauguration - are entirely justified in their ire.  But that doesn't mean that it will get us any closer to the legalization of gay marriage in as many states as possible.  

The true long-term political brilliance of Obama's move is to defang the new religious right of its resentment.  Warren is the new face of evangelical Christianity, and Obama's invitation makes it difficult to sustain the feelings of marginilization and minority-under-threat that keep the religious right a reliable voting bloc for Republicans.  It's an attempt to dissolve them as a monolithic political force by thrusting them more squarely into the limelight and encouraging their move toward the center.  If Obama is as calculating a political thinker as I believe him to be, he has the long-term interests of leftist causes at heart here: softening the religious right and encouraging their increasing emphasis on fighting AIDS, global poverty, and the destruction of the environment.  As religion writer Steven Waldman puts it, "Obama opted for spiritual bipartisanship. The move helps to depoliticize prayer -- which, of course, is very politically shrewd."

But damn, does it hurt.  In some cases, identity is incredibly important, and the LGBT community does not have the political capital to get symbolically thrown under the bus like this.  Yes, it is significant that Warren has recanted his statment equating gay marriage with pedophilia, incest, bestiality, etc. (See his December 22 video).  I know that most everyone reading this blog is on such a different register from this kind of hatred that it may not seem like much of a step up, but Warren is listened to by enough Americans that yes, it is.  And it's great that he and gay singer Melissa Etheridge seem to have struck up a friendship.  But Proposition 8 hurt a lot of people in an area of fundamental human need, that of love and companionship, and that's hard to stomach.  

Overall, there's a great deal of insight to realizing that there may be some distance between Obama's rhetorical moves and his policy committments.  Ross Douthat of The Atlantic makes an excellent point in this regard:

"A 'non-ideological' liberalism, in our era as in the earlier liberal ascendancy, requires an ideological Left as its foil. In practice, this means that Obama will probably often end up defining himself against progressivism, rhetorically, even when he’s embracing progressive ideas. (See his campaign’s extremely effective health-care ads for an example of how this works in practice.) The President-elect’s ability to hold his coalition together, then, may depend in no small part on whether the Democratic Party’s left wing feels that it’s getting enough out of his Presidency in practice to justify playing the bad guy in the narrative Obama will be selling to the country as a whole, in which post-partisan “whatever works” pragmatism triumphs over ideologues of the left and right alike." 

I'm fine with the idea of symbolic political masochism.  It's subtle, it's nuanced, and it just might work.  It signals a potential way out of the stagnation of the culture wars.  But Obama needs to find a rhetorical whipping boy other than the LGBT community, and he needs to champion substantive policy initiatives that support LBGT rights, ideally in his first 100 days in office.  If he can cast those rights in the rhetoric of inclusion, and even religious values like charity and love, so much the better.  His vocal and public support of ballot initiatives or court decisions legalizing gay marriage or civil unions in individual states would be a great start.  These rights, as well as a major American political figure as rhetorically gifted, intelligent, and (I believe) compassionate as Obama, are too important to be ignored.

So who should get thrown under the rhetorical bus instead?  That's a tough one.  But the Democrats' rhetoric about finding ways to limit the number of abortions (i.e., More funding for childcare and adoption programs, greater emphasis on education about birth control) while keeping them legal is a sound strategy that hurts no one.  The rhetoric of values and personal responsibility can be shifted fairly easily to include the environment and the poor abroad.  Plus, not only do these issues provide fodder for people's need to feel like responsible moral agents, but they also actually need to be addressed.  The Irish poet and senator W.B. Yeats wrote that "Active virtue as distinguished from the passive acceptance of a current code is . . . theatrical, consciously dramatic, the wearing of a mask."  So swallow your pride, confrontationally secularist Democrats, and put them on.

An American left combining the fervor, numbers, and organization of religious people with the progressive values of its more traditional base is a coalition tough to hold together but also difficult to defeat.  Let's hope (or pray, even, if that suits you) that it will coalesce.  



Soon to come: the big holiday retrospective

  

 

 

A waifish kid with rainbow hair and an anarcho-punk t-shirt was walking up the stairs in the gym today.

He looked furtive.

* * *

A lanky security guard stands in an office building at Temple University.  She wears a navy blue blazer that's too big for her and talks to her larger seated companion.

Security guard: Those Newport regulars burn my lip.  [Laughs.]   When I smoke them, my lip gets burnt.

* * *

I bought some cereal at Tilden Market yesterday morning.  They were two for six dollars.  The owner explained how he gets them wholesale and showed me a circular.

Photo by Robert Stolarik, New York Times

This is the first holiday season in a long time that I haven’t worked a retail job, so I can finally see the thing from the outside.  Working at Borders next to City Hall in December 2007 wasn’t a bad gig, because the confused parents looking for anime DVD box sets that their children just had to have, and we, the employees helping them find the said box sets, had a sense of solidarity with each other.  We all knew that none of us really wanted to participate in the retail charade, so customers were patient as we stalked across the third story of the store to see if we had another copy of the Planet Earth box set in the back room, or up and down the escalators to help people find borderline chauvinistic books on the power of the holy spirit from obscure publishers (God wants you to be the man of the house and make smart investments so you can be rich!).  A sense of bemused detachment floated over the proceedings, as if all of us were cast in a bad church Christmas play but wanted to make the choir director happy so we could get it over with.

 

This year I managed to avoid all that, or so I thought.  I was only in the King of Prussia mall once, and I bought the rest of my Christmas presents from a craft fair in Fishtown, where I bought homemade soap, earrings my roommate made, photos of the statue garden on South Street from another friend, and an elaborate cloth monster named Zzingio!, which is now in my office at Temple.  He has striped horns, four tentacles, a lip ring and a stomach that pooches out slightly. 

 

Beware, students, beware.

 

But holiday madness, I found out two days ago, is not to be avoided so easily.  Our economy requires that we participate.  We are all to work very hard to “enjoy ourselves.”  But there’s only so much enjoying yourself you can do before it starts to feel like eating too much candy, so it was time to get back to really enjoying myself by doing more work.  I had a deadline to submit a conference paper, so “Freddie Montgomery Among Three German Philosophers: Failure of the Sublime, Romantic Irony, and the Rejection of Being in The Book of Evidence” got renamed to the more serviceable “Vision and Historical Consciousness in John Banville’s The Book of Evidence.”  The title had been cleaned up, but I had to beat my fifteen pages into a more lean ten, and I needed a place to do it that wasn’t my apartment.

 

I had been cleaning the place most of the day, and it’s really cold in there right now because of a broken window my landlord is dragging his feet about fixing, so somewhere else had to be found.

 

The problem was, the Falls of Schuylkill Library, usually open until 8:00 on Mondays, was closed for New Year’s Day.  But it was 5:00 at this point, so I’m sure everyone had plenty of time to sleep off their hangovers.  The coffee shop in East Falls has been closed since my roommates and I moved in last summer, and I couldn’t walk into the sushi restaurant with a straight face and ask to sit someplace where I could plug in my laptop.  The Pour House bar on Ridge usually blasts sports, so that was a no go also.  So off to center city I went.  After missing the train (Sunday schedules on holidays, whoops) and waiting for the bus in the cold to no avail, I bought some groceries from Major Wing Lee and generally dillydallied until the next train arrived an hour later.

 

East Falls lacks a public place where you can just sit down at night, except for the library on Mondays and Wednesdays, without buying anything that costs over $2.00 or having to listen to loud music or TVs.  In fact, I thought as I was sitting on the train, this tends to be a larger problem with Philadelphia in general.  It gets exacerbated by white people moving to special white people enclaves in response, and Lord knows how useless that is.

 

So the train gets to suburban station in center city and the first thing I notice is the clumps of homeless people standing around, many more than normal.  But it is colder than it’s been at any time since I moved to Philadelphia in June 2007.  I walk past them and give a few people directions near City Hall, one of them drunk, and when I get to Broad Street there’s garbage scattered all over the sidewalks: champagne bottles, beer cans, streamers, bags of potato chips.  More drunk people wander around in a euphoric daze, along with the occasional homeless person who hasn’t made it to the train station yet.

 

I get to Starbucks on 16th and Walnut and sit down for a few hours to whittle down my paper and I realize, I like editing my writing, I enjoy helping other people edit theirs.  Not under crazy deadlines like during the semester, or despite them at best, but the fact remains.  

 

But this is sacrilege, of course, to enjoy your work.  The way it’s supposed to work, with our labor/leisure, public/private split, is that you go to your job that you hate, then you come back and are allowed to “enjoy yourself” by letting loose somehow.  Hence all the bottles and cans blowing all over Broad Street.  Now, don’t get me wrong, who doesn’t drink on New Year’s Eve, but my roommates and I cleaned up the next day.

 

The most extreme example of Philadelphians getting out of control of late is when the Phillies won the World Series, and some fans responded by breaking windows and otherwise making a mess of center city.  This is the work of people who feel as if they are never allowed to enjoy themselves, goddammit, because their team, which has been provided to them as release from the aforementioned hated and complained about work, hasn’t won in a very long time.  And it’s emasculating when other regions’ leisure-providing devices trump yours.

 

Now, all resentment aside (theirs ostensible, mine clear), this is a fine enough setup.  If we have to have a system where the vast majority of people hate their jobs, which we probably must, then thank God we have some leisure.  And the political pragmatist in me wonders whether the massive amount of money necessary to fund graduate students who enjoy writing papers on obscure subjects wouldn’t be better spent on, say, wind farms instead.

 

But then again, it would be better for the biosphere as a whole if we all stopped moving from place to place altogether, and that’s not going to happen, so we might as well keep going to literature conferences and at least buy some CFL light bulbs or something.

Baseball’s a great game, and I used to like watching it before I started running in a hamster wheel.  But when you like it so much that you start smashing windows, something’s off.

 

So I’m sitting on a stool working at Starbucks, occasionally looking out of one of the big plate glass windows.  It’s nice when someone walks by and looks at you in this setting.  There’s a certain rawness in seeing the face of a passerby out the window, like when you get on a train at around 6:00 pm and stop thinking about what you have to do for the rest of the day long enough to see the faces of all the beautiful tired people just sitting there, in full view of anyone with a train pass.  Just floating there, lined up next to each other.  It’s really something.

 

But the girl with the long plastic noisemaker who walked up to the window and started blowing it was another thing altogether.  It was funny for maybe four seconds, but irritating thereafter.  Then she and some of her fellow revelers walked into the coffee shop and stood there blowing their red and green trumpets like dumb medieval heralds, and the employees had to yell at them and threaten to call the police before they left.  Then one of the employees apologized, to me.  Apologized, to me.  I wanted to tell him I was sorry he had to put up with that kind of crap at 8:30 on New Year’s Day.

 

After I shortened the last sentence, I walked back to suburban station to find it filled with cops.  Eight of them, by my count.  And the homeless people (black) were getting herded out, while the regional rail users (white) sat clustered together on benches in the middle.  One of them walked up behind a homeless man doing laps around the station and said, Sir, what train you catching?  The homeless man mumbles something and the cop says, You heading out?  He heads out.

 

Then the police officer goes up to the rest of the police and is incredulous that some of the homeless people said, “This is not fair, you can’t treat me like this.”

 

I’m glad the police were there, but their presence would have allowed the regional rail users and homeless people to coexist, had they stayed around.  Maybe they weren’t allowed to, because the Philadelphia Police Department is underfunded and they had other places to be. 

 

But I was out jogging earlier that day, and while I had something like eight layers on my chest, my sweatpants-clad legs were stinging by the end of it.  There were Canada geese flying over the Schuylkill, whereas I usually see them standing on a rock in the water.  When they’re swimming they look like wooden ducks, but when they fly you can see their supple goose bodies.  I saw a crushed bird with white spots on the way back up Midvale that had its head turned to the side and its beak open in a way that made it look cartoonish. 

 

It was cold outside while moving at a decent clip during the day, so I can’t imagine what it would be like to sleep outside that night.  Best case scenario, the homeless man will keep doing laps outside, and the police will let them all come back after the last train leaves.  But many of the homeless seem confused, so they might not get it.

 

 

Soon to come: Some of the stuff I liked about my holiday in northeastern PA, and exactly why Muntadhar al-Zaidi (the Iraqi reporter who threw his shoes at Bush) is a hero.

 

I think that God’s Awful Warnings to a Giddy, Careless World: Being Particularly of the Present Time, the Present War, and the Prophecy Now Fulfilling (Year of the World 5913): A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times Book the First [and Second]. Wrote Under the Direction of the Lord God. and Published by His Sacred Command: It Being the First Sign or Warning, for the Benefit of all Nations. Containing, with Other Great and Remarkable Things, Not Revealed to Any Other Person on Earth. the Restoration of the Hebrews, to Jerusalem, by the Year 1798, under Their Revealed Prince and Prophet, Richard Brothers is a very good title for a book by Richard Brothers.

Evening. Inside Major Wing Lee Grocery Market, on the corner of Ridge and Midvale Aves, East Falls, Philadelphia. The cash register area is somewhat haphazardly lined with boxes of candy, but not messily so.

Oomphy lady at the cash register: I like your shopping bag! Nice color!

-Oh yeah? My girlfriend's mom gave it to me. I don't know though: it's really orange.

-Oh, but I like it! Orange is my favorite color.

-(skeptically) Mmm. It's a bold orange.

-Well, I'm a bold person! Have a nice day!

-Thanks, you too.

Inside Shan Chuan restaurant, next door. A man with spiky black hair and prominent teeth leans on the counter in front of the cash register, which is on his right. He notices the shopping bag.

The man: They don't really have much of a selection over there, do they?

-Nope. It's not the best.

-What we need here is a market. Not a supermarket, even, but just someplace with good produce, some canned stuff. (Knowingly) All the college students want canned stuff.

-How's that East Falls Market? 

The man takes a twenty and punches the price of shrimp with broccoli into the cash register.

-(Muffled) It's all crap.

-It's all crafts?

-The broccoli's wilted, and it's all too expensive. We need a grocery store, with some nice produce, even if it's a little pricy.

He hands change and a brown paper bag over the cash register.

-(With affected camaraderie) Yeah, well, we'd better get through this recession first, huh? I hear it's a tough time for people in food service, and restauranteering.

-Yeah, but it'll be fine. These things happen every ten or fifteen years or so.

-Yeah, sure. (Awkwardly) Good luck!

Another man comes in and asks for his vegetable shumai and mock chicken.

The following morning. Temple University. A professor's office filled with books and academic conference posters. The professor picks up the phone.

-Hi, Belinda? This is Barack Obama. (He laughs) Oh, you recognize my voice. Hey, can you tell me when grades are due?

Later that day. East Falls train station. Two men with eastern European accents walk away from the station. They talk animatedly.

-I've had major surgeries before, but never a blood transfusion.

-Yeah man, well, feel better, okay?

They walk further down the street, continuing to talk about surgery, and laugh.  On the left is an inclined street lined with modest family houses, one of which has a new roof. 


The End


I like my neighborhood.