Fences is a modern story. Who cannot relate to it? Who cannot relate to its main character, Troy Maxson? I love Troy. He is a son of America; he is the ultimate, "maximum" son of this country, which is to say he questions the American democratic ideal. There never should have been a time, he says, too early for the realization of his or, by extension, other black's dreams. Life for him, as for Lorraine Hansberry's Walter Lee Younger, "ain't been no crystal stair" (Hughes). Troy is my father and my brother, my uncles and cousins. He is a migrant, having come up from Mobile to what was supposed to be a Promised Land--the urban North--in his case Pittsburgh, where the author himself, August Wilson, lived. Wilson knows Troy; he has met him in bars, on stoops, in smokey jazz clubs. He has captured their language and their pain is represented in that language.
The play opens on a Friday after work. How familiar this is to me. The eagle flies on Friday/Saturday I'll go out and play/The eagle flies on Friday/Saturday I'll go out and play/Sunday I'll go to church and fall down on my knees and pray. Friday is a day of relief and release for those who labor during the work week, usually in factories or on the streets of America's cities, in various capacities, for example, as sanitation workers. The jobs are hard, sometimes demeaning, but they pay oh so much better than those old jobs, picking cotton for Mr. Lubin and being cheated. Yet, Wilson suggests that, as Martin Luther King was heard to say, Michigan Avenue in Chicago is no promised land. In other words, the Negro exchanged one set of oppressive conditions in the South for a new set of oppressive conditions in the North. Troy feels fenced in. He says he "locked [himself] into a pattern" and forgot to leave something for himself. What has locked or "fenced" him in? The answer to this question depends on how large you think Wilson's critique is. The playwright once stated, in the late '80s, that black people still, by and large, had not experienced the American dream but were, rather, still in survival mode--trying to keep a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs. Did Wilson see the American Dream as an American nightmare, from which one could be freed only by death? Did Wilson reject what capitalism offers the common laborer?
I do not know the answer to this question without further study, yet the life of fictional Troy Maxson does seem a case study. Troy's life seems tragic on the one hand. His life is a series of struggles framed by a desire to move away from yet an ultimate repeating of his father's blues. His father had to get the cotton in; Troy is on the rubbish. Temporarily, the lives of the two men may have been different yet similar. His father's life would have been framed by seasons, by weather cycles, and by the processes of agricultural production; Troy's life is framed by the eight-hour, five-day work week. It is a familiar scheme that Troy accepts; he makes a deal with the devil--Mr. Rand or the furniture dealer. It is the modern proposal that most of us are offered--forty plus hours a week of our lives for a wage--for money. The weekend is a short-term cure for what ails us, and what ails us is the fact that we have traded our very lives and may have come out with the short end of the stick. This is a sad realization.
Growing up in Detroit, I observed the Friday evening or afternoon ritual. Well, I didn't observe it up close. Our fathers kept their distance from their families on Fridays. A good friend of mine, whose father worked at Chrysler, was after school on Fridays, sent directly to her grandmother's house--away from her father who drank very heavily on that day and the next and sometimes became violent as a result. But he did not drink on Sundays though he did not appear to fall down on that day onto his knees to pray. Maybe he did so in quiet, but more likely his work and his "play" were his prayer or at least his communion with God. He was so much like Troy Maxson this man.
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Magic in Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl"
Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl," a prose poem or a short story, is classified as magical realism. What this means is that the author bridges what is normally thought of as the real with what either is thought of as the unreal or as an area of uncertainty. For instance, life and death may be bridged rather than being accepted as apart.
In the case of "Girl," Kincaid bridges everyday tasks, chores, with a certain magic that may in fact be a part of black Antiguan routine. This magic exists in the poem's language and in its expression of folk culture. One could argue that the entire monologue (it is mostly one voice; the daughter hardly speaks) is a casting of a spell over the daughter if we think of a spell as usurpation of a person's will or submission of one's will. Of course, one could argue, to the contrary, that at the end of the mother's instruction, "girl," continues to ask questions and, earlier in the poem, she defends herself, which is a clear assertion of her own will. If one reads the poem in this way, then at the end of the piece, the daughter appears to have a choice.
At the same time, the mother speaks over the head of her daughter, meaning upon the head of her daughter, instructions, which are akin to incantations. She tells her precisely what to do and what not to do, and importantly, these instructions are delivered in what anthropologist Paul Stoller calls "old words." For example, "this is how you sweep a corner/this is how you sweep a whole house/this is how you sweep a yard." Kincaid walks in two realms, that of the literal and that of the metaphorical. She may be referring to literal sweeping; it would appear so, but she is also invoking sweeping as removal of stagnant or negative energy, and she instructs her daughter on how to use sweeping as an act of empowerment and influence. Here, girl is given options for the size of influence she would choose to have. To this very day, in island nations, and in America as well, there exist practitioners of this art or science. The Lucky Mojo website explains that sweeping is one of the most powerful counters to the influence of foot traffic. It argues that foot traffic and the use of powders are one way to trick someone. The counter to this trick is the sweeping away of such powders.
Indeed, the realm of real power is in the symbolic universe, which means that this poem must be read on two levels though for readers unfamiliar with the folk sayings Kincaid shares, the piece will simply seem to be about working class women's lives in twentieth-century Antigua. To the extent that the symbolic universe is hidden it remains a realm of power for those who believe in the strength of such words. This is language of an oppressed people who have survived because they have had a part of their being within this universe.
It would appear, however, that girl is unaware of the two-level meaning of her mother's instructions. As my own mother believes, having lived in a traditional South African community, power within this realm cannot reach you if you do not engage (or believe in) it. I suppose this is one power that girl has and perhaps this is the distance that scholars suggest exists between Kincaid herself and her real mother.
In the case of "Girl," Kincaid bridges everyday tasks, chores, with a certain magic that may in fact be a part of black Antiguan routine. This magic exists in the poem's language and in its expression of folk culture. One could argue that the entire monologue (it is mostly one voice; the daughter hardly speaks) is a casting of a spell over the daughter if we think of a spell as usurpation of a person's will or submission of one's will. Of course, one could argue, to the contrary, that at the end of the mother's instruction, "girl," continues to ask questions and, earlier in the poem, she defends herself, which is a clear assertion of her own will. If one reads the poem in this way, then at the end of the piece, the daughter appears to have a choice.
At the same time, the mother speaks over the head of her daughter, meaning upon the head of her daughter, instructions, which are akin to incantations. She tells her precisely what to do and what not to do, and importantly, these instructions are delivered in what anthropologist Paul Stoller calls "old words." For example, "this is how you sweep a corner/this is how you sweep a whole house/this is how you sweep a yard." Kincaid walks in two realms, that of the literal and that of the metaphorical. She may be referring to literal sweeping; it would appear so, but she is also invoking sweeping as removal of stagnant or negative energy, and she instructs her daughter on how to use sweeping as an act of empowerment and influence. Here, girl is given options for the size of influence she would choose to have. To this very day, in island nations, and in America as well, there exist practitioners of this art or science. The Lucky Mojo website explains that sweeping is one of the most powerful counters to the influence of foot traffic. It argues that foot traffic and the use of powders are one way to trick someone. The counter to this trick is the sweeping away of such powders.
Indeed, the realm of real power is in the symbolic universe, which means that this poem must be read on two levels though for readers unfamiliar with the folk sayings Kincaid shares, the piece will simply seem to be about working class women's lives in twentieth-century Antigua. To the extent that the symbolic universe is hidden it remains a realm of power for those who believe in the strength of such words. This is language of an oppressed people who have survived because they have had a part of their being within this universe.
It would appear, however, that girl is unaware of the two-level meaning of her mother's instructions. As my own mother believes, having lived in a traditional South African community, power within this realm cannot reach you if you do not engage (or believe in) it. I suppose this is one power that girl has and perhaps this is the distance that scholars suggest exists between Kincaid herself and her real mother.
Friday, November 2, 2012
Having fun with "Girl"
One of the learning outcomes for Intro to Literature is "students will learn to offer radical interpretations of literature." What can be more radical than magic, and what can be a more appropriate topic as we end the month of October and head into November? We're in full harvest mode.
Before I give my take (actually one of many takes) on Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl," I'd like to play a little with Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" and Penny Marshall's "Riding in Cars with Boys"--our other two texts. In my last post, I spoke a little about the title of Marshall's film. I am intrigued by the oversimplification of the sexual act that initiates reproduction. The film could have been called Teenagers Having Sex, but this would have been way too explicit I guess even in this time, and some would say there would be no art in that title. I disagree. This alternative title is on a scale more realistic than that which the film's producers chose, one that, perhaps appropriate to the time--the late '60s--still maybe held on to Victorian understatement. Girls (not women) got pregnant not from having sex but from riding in cars with boys. This representation of female sexuality on the surface would seem to preference the male role in the sex act to that of the female since being with boys suggests that the boys are doing something to the girls that results in pregnancy. Or, I suppose one could also argue that the girls do something to the boys. The girls are doing the riding; the boys the driving? In either case, "Riding in Cars" is partly a story about female power and women's choices, and though this title seems to cast girls as passive victims, this way of locating women in the passenger seat doesn't necessarily negate their power. Never do we see Bev literally in the driver's seat, but the question is whether--behind what appears to be--she is in fact the one in control of her life. Put another way, the question both for this film, for the "Story of an Hour," and for "Girl" is whether beyond the surface of things exists a dynamic women's space and women's power.
As one who studies temporal (time) constructions, I have enjoyed thinking about the concept of time in Chopin's short story. Time for me is not absolute or fixed but constructed (built) and regulated (measured) and mechanized. Chopin returns to her character Louise Mallard an organic time, maybe even a feminine sense of time. The story of an hour is a very brief narrative in which Mrs. Mallard transcends earthly time that has come to be controlled by man, or by men like her husband who, working in offices, govern themselves by the clock and by a temporal order that has its origin in the movement of trains. Mr. Mallard's own false death was thought to be by train accident, and it is this crisis that frees his wife from earthly time, from the life she has with him that is governed by this order. Chopin flirts maybe with the idea that he too could have been freed from regulated time, but alas he is not dead but his wife is. Clearly, the universe opens or shows itself to Mrs. Mallard, who has re-entered a celestial order in the crack in time that was the suspension of the human-regulated. This crack in temporal order is fascinating, and it suggests to me an opening to an alternative space in which those whose lives are not entirely beholden to the clock--and the life of the clock--may find their freedom and not only that but alternative ways of being. Mrs. Mallard, who becomes Louise again--is victorious because she has transcended this tyranny. What she accomplishes either through literal death of the body or through figurative death of regulated time, Bev accomplishes in becoming a real actor within her own space.
Finally, "Girl." What does its title suggest? Eternal childhood? Upon first reading, one is overwhelmed maybe by the seeming lack of power between this mother and daughter, and this would be an accurate reading given strained relations between the author and her own mother. But, on second thought, perhaps girl is a suggestion of sisterhood, an indication of unity. In other words, maybe the connotation of girl is much more messy than it seems. From the lips of the overbearing mother, it sounds spirit-killing. Is she not training her daughter to be a robot? What spirit could survive such a mechanical life in which washing of white clothes must always be done on Mondays; washing of colored clothes on Tuesdays. Mother would seem to have this routine down to a science. Many women do. Is this order organic, or imposed? Does it mimic or is it informed by some other order, for instance, that learned on a plantation, or is it "natural"? Is this a natural, women's rhythm? Or, is it influenced by both, which would mean that Mother has found her liberty in appropriating an unnatural order and mixing it with other ways?
This tight text certainly seems to leave no room for freedom either for Mother or for Girl, yet, as with our two other texts, maybe that is where power resides because it is so well hidden. The first order of business when living in a colonial state is survival; the second is discovery of one's own organic power. Deeply embedded for instance in Kincaid's short story (or prose poem) is the instruction--"this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard." Is Kincaid via Mother not telling her readers how to expand their power? And what of this act of sweeping? Is this cleaning, working, fixing? These are magical terms, in addition to being ordinary, every day terms. Kincaid indicates a relationship between the woman actor cleaning and organizing her assigned outer spaces to gaining power over her inner spaces, from corner to yard. One who sweeps at once declutters her own mind and, very actively, removes from her life those things she doesn't desire to have control over her inner life.
At the end of the story, Girl appears completely deflated. She has not learned Mother's lessons. She has not learned the power of woman which her mother has passed on so secretly, so tightly. But, we trust that she will. By all appearances, she will be controlled, but Mother knows that she will be in control--if she has listened well--of herself.
Before I give my take (actually one of many takes) on Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl," I'd like to play a little with Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" and Penny Marshall's "Riding in Cars with Boys"--our other two texts. In my last post, I spoke a little about the title of Marshall's film. I am intrigued by the oversimplification of the sexual act that initiates reproduction. The film could have been called Teenagers Having Sex, but this would have been way too explicit I guess even in this time, and some would say there would be no art in that title. I disagree. This alternative title is on a scale more realistic than that which the film's producers chose, one that, perhaps appropriate to the time--the late '60s--still maybe held on to Victorian understatement. Girls (not women) got pregnant not from having sex but from riding in cars with boys. This representation of female sexuality on the surface would seem to preference the male role in the sex act to that of the female since being with boys suggests that the boys are doing something to the girls that results in pregnancy. Or, I suppose one could also argue that the girls do something to the boys. The girls are doing the riding; the boys the driving? In either case, "Riding in Cars" is partly a story about female power and women's choices, and though this title seems to cast girls as passive victims, this way of locating women in the passenger seat doesn't necessarily negate their power. Never do we see Bev literally in the driver's seat, but the question is whether--behind what appears to be--she is in fact the one in control of her life. Put another way, the question both for this film, for the "Story of an Hour," and for "Girl" is whether beyond the surface of things exists a dynamic women's space and women's power.
As one who studies temporal (time) constructions, I have enjoyed thinking about the concept of time in Chopin's short story. Time for me is not absolute or fixed but constructed (built) and regulated (measured) and mechanized. Chopin returns to her character Louise Mallard an organic time, maybe even a feminine sense of time. The story of an hour is a very brief narrative in which Mrs. Mallard transcends earthly time that has come to be controlled by man, or by men like her husband who, working in offices, govern themselves by the clock and by a temporal order that has its origin in the movement of trains. Mr. Mallard's own false death was thought to be by train accident, and it is this crisis that frees his wife from earthly time, from the life she has with him that is governed by this order. Chopin flirts maybe with the idea that he too could have been freed from regulated time, but alas he is not dead but his wife is. Clearly, the universe opens or shows itself to Mrs. Mallard, who has re-entered a celestial order in the crack in time that was the suspension of the human-regulated. This crack in temporal order is fascinating, and it suggests to me an opening to an alternative space in which those whose lives are not entirely beholden to the clock--and the life of the clock--may find their freedom and not only that but alternative ways of being. Mrs. Mallard, who becomes Louise again--is victorious because she has transcended this tyranny. What she accomplishes either through literal death of the body or through figurative death of regulated time, Bev accomplishes in becoming a real actor within her own space.
Finally, "Girl." What does its title suggest? Eternal childhood? Upon first reading, one is overwhelmed maybe by the seeming lack of power between this mother and daughter, and this would be an accurate reading given strained relations between the author and her own mother. But, on second thought, perhaps girl is a suggestion of sisterhood, an indication of unity. In other words, maybe the connotation of girl is much more messy than it seems. From the lips of the overbearing mother, it sounds spirit-killing. Is she not training her daughter to be a robot? What spirit could survive such a mechanical life in which washing of white clothes must always be done on Mondays; washing of colored clothes on Tuesdays. Mother would seem to have this routine down to a science. Many women do. Is this order organic, or imposed? Does it mimic or is it informed by some other order, for instance, that learned on a plantation, or is it "natural"? Is this a natural, women's rhythm? Or, is it influenced by both, which would mean that Mother has found her liberty in appropriating an unnatural order and mixing it with other ways?
This tight text certainly seems to leave no room for freedom either for Mother or for Girl, yet, as with our two other texts, maybe that is where power resides because it is so well hidden. The first order of business when living in a colonial state is survival; the second is discovery of one's own organic power. Deeply embedded for instance in Kincaid's short story (or prose poem) is the instruction--"this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard." Is Kincaid via Mother not telling her readers how to expand their power? And what of this act of sweeping? Is this cleaning, working, fixing? These are magical terms, in addition to being ordinary, every day terms. Kincaid indicates a relationship between the woman actor cleaning and organizing her assigned outer spaces to gaining power over her inner spaces, from corner to yard. One who sweeps at once declutters her own mind and, very actively, removes from her life those things she doesn't desire to have control over her inner life.
At the end of the story, Girl appears completely deflated. She has not learned Mother's lessons. She has not learned the power of woman which her mother has passed on so secretly, so tightly. But, we trust that she will. By all appearances, she will be controlled, but Mother knows that she will be in control--if she has listened well--of herself.
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Riding in Cars with Boys
After viewing a film, I almost always check Rottentomatoes.com to see what the critics think, so I did not change this habit in the case of Penny Marshall's "Riding in Cars with Boys" (2001). Though I am not myself a film critic, I agree with those who think that Marshall's thumbprint is all over this movie, which is now eleven years old. I can see her input because I watched LaVerne and Shirley back when I was in elementary school. The two characters in this film remind me of the two characters in that sitcom. And this similarity is suggestive of the consensus of the critics; "Riding in Cars with Boys" tries to be serious, and yet it is cute. Some might think this a good, because realistic, combination. (Life is funny even when serious, even in the midst of a crisis.) Others may differ.
If I am not a film critic, however, I certainly am critical. I had my students watch this film actually because I couldn't get my hands on "It's Complicated." I was looking for a film about white women's lives in order to study patterns of treatment. I saw some recognizable patterns in "Riding in Cars..." Too often, films of this theme, tie up stories, end them, with a nice big bow, like the one atop the main character Bev's head on her wedding day. Seated alone in an overdecorated peacock chair, the fifteen-year-old Bev appears to be alone. Her new husband is on the other side of the room. Her family members are seated together away from her. When her father rises to offer what should have been a toast, he instead thanks the guests for supporting the family in what is for them an embarrassing moment in their lives. Bev's only real companion it seems is her best friend Faye. This much is clear. Marshall obviously likes dealing with women's bonds of friendship, and this one endures. I did almost cry when the two finally parted, Faye leaving for Arizona, Bev left in Connecticut--in her view, alone, though she had her son Jason.
The question is whether Bev is in fact truly alone. On the surface, it appears that at every critical moment, she is in fact not alone at all. Although she is left in the peacock chair early in the movie, she clearly has a whole host of supporters, both blood family and other kindred. She is not alone on a desolate island or in a run-down ghetto apartment for that matter taking care of her baby without any help. To the contrary, by the time baby Jason arrives, she has been nicely installed into some of the nicest public housing I have ever seen, a single family home on a cul-de-sac that is Rockwellian minus glowing white paint. Immediately, her home is equipped with everything she needs to make a go at motherhood at the tender age of fifteen--a husband, a stove that goes all the way up to 550, and a mother who, like Bev, would seem not to have to work outside of the home since she has time to come over to her daughter's house during the week and iron and mop for her. Clearly, the family has no intention--good for them--of letting their prodigal daughter fall too low. And Bev, throughout the film, has her mind set on rising up out of her working class life. (We never really see her in poverty--her shoes talk, yes, but she is not without a home; she does not live in a shelter despite the fact that her husband--a junkie--barely works. Marshall doesn't allow the audience to see Bev or her husband Ray applying for Food Stamps. We don't actually see Ray shooting up.)
The long and the short of it is that there is always a lifeline for Bev, and there is a community of watchers--neighbors who never speak but who are there, maybe as silent witnesses to this story of a young white girl's journey toward her American Dream. She is offered a way up and out--even by Lizard, who will pay her two hundred dollars an hour to dry weed for him in her oven. It's a crazy offer but no crazier actually than that made by the nerdy boy-turned-hunk, who invites her to bring her whole family to California. He is another observer of Bev, one who just happened to be in town and chose to stop by a twenty-year-old married woman's house for her six-year-old child's birthday party. He saunters into her living room looking very '70s sexy indeed and, then, like the stalker-observer he is, after the sun has gone down, startles Bev, as he walks from behind her house. He offers her a completely unrealistic deal--the housing of her whole family including a not-yet-discovered drug abusing Ray. Why? Is he that in love? Maybe. "You don't belong here," he tells her and advises her to do the right thing--take him up on his offer and get the heck out of the world of public housing. These are the makings of a Cinderella story (or any other damsel in distress narrative) only Bev will soon find out that she cannot go to California. She has to help Ray break his heroin habit, about which she has been for two years clueless. Is heroin usually taken intravenously? How could she not have known? The answer is that Bev is not real; she is a Hollywood made character, and more than that she is a meta-character. Or, as one critic wrote, "the rough edges of Donofrio's life are either ignored or smoothed away." Her pains are kept at a distance, from her and from viewers. There are no closeups, no sweaty faces, no hearts beating out of these characters' hearts as they try to figure out how to make rent. If this is a drama, it could have been more dramatic and without moving too far--toward melodrama. It is a comedic drama and, as such, does serious injustice to its topic of teen pregnancy, drug abuse, and poverty.
So, finally, the question becomes why America might want a film that is, on the surface, about difficulty but that won't deeply engage the difficulties. First, I think this movie is representative of the kind of bubble we lived in during the early 2000s and, second, America has reason not to want to see certain figures hit rock bottom. "Riding in Cars with Boys," a film whose very title refuses responsibility, i.e., Bev gets pregnant not because she decided to have sex (she boldly denies it to her father) but because she rode in a car with two bad boys, who, as bad as they were nevertheless did the right thing and married the girls they got pregnant. The title doesn't so much suggest complete falsehood as it does our postmodernness, an inability to come to terms with present reality because reality is always being buffered and constructed by those who mediate it. We are now living in a Recession-Depression, and we were sliding into it even as we lived in the bubble that finally burst. And yet, there are people who are now and have for a long time been alone in the world for real--many of them white women. But too many American films just hint at these realities, never getting beneath the surface or allowing us to see our desperate selves really up-close and personal. In this way, films create the buffer, which is why Marshall's film fails to rise above entertainment to a level of social critique. Even high art can offer social critique, so film doesn't have to sacrifice seriousness out of fear of compromising art.
By the way, there is, in this film about the difficulty of rising from the working class, one minority, whose name is omitted from Rotten Tomatoes' list of characters. Marshall had no problem showing this Latina in all of her desperation. Where Drew Barrymore's character always appears nicely put-together, Ray's second wife was disheveled, hair tossed, with a cigarette hanging from her mouth and her weary hands shaking. On the other hand, after all that Bev supposedly goes through, Marshall's treatment does not try to depart from the theme of creating happy endings for white women. Rather, the film ends with wayward Bev, honestly not looking a day older than she did at the start of the movie despite lots of vibrant red lipstick and a more mature haircut, reuniting with her father. And the same song that began the film ends it. "Dream, dream, dream..." She and Dad have healed their relationship and, through it, healed any doubts the audience may have had about the health of the American Dream. It seems too easy to suggest that the health of that dream depends on Hollywood continuing to nurture a psychic wellness itself dependent upon perpetuation of the message and the myth of white women's wellness, but there it is.
I asked students to look in this movie at themes of race, class, and gender. So far in our discussions they have not talked about race. Some have said they don't see race being treated. I have not yet responded to that observation. I'm waiting for them to discover that sometimes race is treated by not being treated directly. Some of the most dangerous treatments of race are those that create false worlds in which people of color are rendered invisible.
If I am not a film critic, however, I certainly am critical. I had my students watch this film actually because I couldn't get my hands on "It's Complicated." I was looking for a film about white women's lives in order to study patterns of treatment. I saw some recognizable patterns in "Riding in Cars..." Too often, films of this theme, tie up stories, end them, with a nice big bow, like the one atop the main character Bev's head on her wedding day. Seated alone in an overdecorated peacock chair, the fifteen-year-old Bev appears to be alone. Her new husband is on the other side of the room. Her family members are seated together away from her. When her father rises to offer what should have been a toast, he instead thanks the guests for supporting the family in what is for them an embarrassing moment in their lives. Bev's only real companion it seems is her best friend Faye. This much is clear. Marshall obviously likes dealing with women's bonds of friendship, and this one endures. I did almost cry when the two finally parted, Faye leaving for Arizona, Bev left in Connecticut--in her view, alone, though she had her son Jason.
The question is whether Bev is in fact truly alone. On the surface, it appears that at every critical moment, she is in fact not alone at all. Although she is left in the peacock chair early in the movie, she clearly has a whole host of supporters, both blood family and other kindred. She is not alone on a desolate island or in a run-down ghetto apartment for that matter taking care of her baby without any help. To the contrary, by the time baby Jason arrives, she has been nicely installed into some of the nicest public housing I have ever seen, a single family home on a cul-de-sac that is Rockwellian minus glowing white paint. Immediately, her home is equipped with everything she needs to make a go at motherhood at the tender age of fifteen--a husband, a stove that goes all the way up to 550, and a mother who, like Bev, would seem not to have to work outside of the home since she has time to come over to her daughter's house during the week and iron and mop for her. Clearly, the family has no intention--good for them--of letting their prodigal daughter fall too low. And Bev, throughout the film, has her mind set on rising up out of her working class life. (We never really see her in poverty--her shoes talk, yes, but she is not without a home; she does not live in a shelter despite the fact that her husband--a junkie--barely works. Marshall doesn't allow the audience to see Bev or her husband Ray applying for Food Stamps. We don't actually see Ray shooting up.)
The long and the short of it is that there is always a lifeline for Bev, and there is a community of watchers--neighbors who never speak but who are there, maybe as silent witnesses to this story of a young white girl's journey toward her American Dream. She is offered a way up and out--even by Lizard, who will pay her two hundred dollars an hour to dry weed for him in her oven. It's a crazy offer but no crazier actually than that made by the nerdy boy-turned-hunk, who invites her to bring her whole family to California. He is another observer of Bev, one who just happened to be in town and chose to stop by a twenty-year-old married woman's house for her six-year-old child's birthday party. He saunters into her living room looking very '70s sexy indeed and, then, like the stalker-observer he is, after the sun has gone down, startles Bev, as he walks from behind her house. He offers her a completely unrealistic deal--the housing of her whole family including a not-yet-discovered drug abusing Ray. Why? Is he that in love? Maybe. "You don't belong here," he tells her and advises her to do the right thing--take him up on his offer and get the heck out of the world of public housing. These are the makings of a Cinderella story (or any other damsel in distress narrative) only Bev will soon find out that she cannot go to California. She has to help Ray break his heroin habit, about which she has been for two years clueless. Is heroin usually taken intravenously? How could she not have known? The answer is that Bev is not real; she is a Hollywood made character, and more than that she is a meta-character. Or, as one critic wrote, "the rough edges of Donofrio's life are either ignored or smoothed away." Her pains are kept at a distance, from her and from viewers. There are no closeups, no sweaty faces, no hearts beating out of these characters' hearts as they try to figure out how to make rent. If this is a drama, it could have been more dramatic and without moving too far--toward melodrama. It is a comedic drama and, as such, does serious injustice to its topic of teen pregnancy, drug abuse, and poverty.
So, finally, the question becomes why America might want a film that is, on the surface, about difficulty but that won't deeply engage the difficulties. First, I think this movie is representative of the kind of bubble we lived in during the early 2000s and, second, America has reason not to want to see certain figures hit rock bottom. "Riding in Cars with Boys," a film whose very title refuses responsibility, i.e., Bev gets pregnant not because she decided to have sex (she boldly denies it to her father) but because she rode in a car with two bad boys, who, as bad as they were nevertheless did the right thing and married the girls they got pregnant. The title doesn't so much suggest complete falsehood as it does our postmodernness, an inability to come to terms with present reality because reality is always being buffered and constructed by those who mediate it. We are now living in a Recession-Depression, and we were sliding into it even as we lived in the bubble that finally burst. And yet, there are people who are now and have for a long time been alone in the world for real--many of them white women. But too many American films just hint at these realities, never getting beneath the surface or allowing us to see our desperate selves really up-close and personal. In this way, films create the buffer, which is why Marshall's film fails to rise above entertainment to a level of social critique. Even high art can offer social critique, so film doesn't have to sacrifice seriousness out of fear of compromising art.
By the way, there is, in this film about the difficulty of rising from the working class, one minority, whose name is omitted from Rotten Tomatoes' list of characters. Marshall had no problem showing this Latina in all of her desperation. Where Drew Barrymore's character always appears nicely put-together, Ray's second wife was disheveled, hair tossed, with a cigarette hanging from her mouth and her weary hands shaking. On the other hand, after all that Bev supposedly goes through, Marshall's treatment does not try to depart from the theme of creating happy endings for white women. Rather, the film ends with wayward Bev, honestly not looking a day older than she did at the start of the movie despite lots of vibrant red lipstick and a more mature haircut, reuniting with her father. And the same song that began the film ends it. "Dream, dream, dream..." She and Dad have healed their relationship and, through it, healed any doubts the audience may have had about the health of the American Dream. It seems too easy to suggest that the health of that dream depends on Hollywood continuing to nurture a psychic wellness itself dependent upon perpetuation of the message and the myth of white women's wellness, but there it is.
I asked students to look in this movie at themes of race, class, and gender. So far in our discussions they have not talked about race. Some have said they don't see race being treated. I have not yet responded to that observation. I'm waiting for them to discover that sometimes race is treated by not being treated directly. Some of the most dangerous treatments of race are those that create false worlds in which people of color are rendered invisible.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Let the Paint Peel and the Weeds Grow
I loved this quote from Laurie Essig, who writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education, the very first time I read it.
It’s time to return to the basics of educating young minds as best we can with the money we have. I say let the higher ups go find jobs in the for-profit world that they have tried to impose on academe. Let the student-life folks go work in social services outside the university. Let the weeds grow and the paint peel. And let’s make higher ed about educating young minds with the money we have and not the money they borrow.
My favorite phrase: "Let the weeds grow and the paint peel." This is my new mantra. What is Essig trying to get at? She's critiquing the bubble, the false economy and false consciousness that nearly every aspect of American society has tried to believe in since, as Thomas Frank tells us, the end of The Great Depression.
How many parents choose colleges for their children because they have been overcome by the shiny-ness of them, residence halls that look, as Essig describes, like condos? Does it take all of this to educate, or do America's colleges wish to send a message that, indeed, this is the standard of living for American grads so it might as well be the standard while they're in college? What ideas does this marketing infuse into students? A: a commitment that they should become workers so that they can get a job to, one, attain such a standard and, two, pay back student loans. Sounds like a trap, doesn't it?
But I love the image of peeling paint and weeds for implications beyond academe to the American economy as a whole. I'm so inspired by the image I've added a photo. Enjoy.
Friday, February 10, 2012
Weight Counterweight
I like to think that I am a balanced person. My body is symmetrical. My eyes, ears, hands, and feet work in partnership. Beyond my own body, the natural world provides me other things--the climate of the atmosphere, oxygen as a complement to the carbon dioxide I exhale, and gravity that accepts the force of my weight. Natural scientific realities such as these from the time I was born initiated me into the world as a physical creature so that I would learn to use by body, the physical, even as I think. Sometimes, when I'm deep in thought, I will assist my process by doing something with my hands. I love early morning walks. They usually produce a small essay. I love this advice from author Raymond Inmon: "If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man [or woman!] when he [or she] goes for a walk."
However, it seems that in the western part of the world we haven't really begun to acknowledge the role of the body in thinking and in creating. Some would even say that we are strangers to our physical selves. We create and recreate what we think of as culture from a predominance of mental activity alienated often from the physical. "I think therefore I am," according to philosopher Descartes.
If this is true, then one could find I think in studying different aspects of western cultures, this same alienation that I speak of. This week, for instance, my students read "The Gold Standard" by Thomas Frank (Harper's, July 2011). The essay basically is a cynical response to the current interest by some in investing in gold as a safety measure against an anticipated eventual collapse in the value of the dollar. The larger concern of such persons is not merely a belief that the American economy is in decline but that when America abandoned under President Franklin Roosevelt the gold standard that once served as a reference point for the dollar the nation moved toward a wholly different kind of economy, one which some believe is doomed for failure much greater than what we have seen so far.
I am no economist, but as a worker and taxpayer I certainly do participate in the economy. One of my earliest clues that the nation's economy was headed for short-term disaster was when developers first started in the early '90s tearing down small forests and plowing up fields that had just been harvested months earlier to build the three and four thousand square-foot homes that some refer to as McMansions. This obvious aspersion on the realization of many Americans' dream in truth contains an underlying criticism of an economy growing too quickly or of what has been called "an Avatar economy." In other words, from the beginning of the housing boom, people, myself included, were suspicious of whether there was really any reference, any substance beyond even the bricks and mortar of the very large houses, to substantiate or justify the growth of the real estate market. Were Americans, in the last twenty years, really doing so well that the middle class was holding steady and their standard of living was appropriately increasing?
As with most questions, I began to answer this one from my own personal experience and observations. Most people I knew were during the boom years relying heavily on credit including popular home equity loans that helped put their homes under water even before the bubble burst. Americans are still of course using and abusing credit, and so it seems that a second point of our modern economy is plastic, working in concert with fiat money, i.e. money without a material check (as in check and balance), and American consumers who place great faith in the idea that this system works constitute the third point. If the critics of the late twentieth century real estate game aptly refer to Wall Street bankers as high stakes gamblers--they gambled on tens of thousands of realistically worthless mortgages--the metaphor might be applied to us commoners as well. Investments that we made were in relative terms just as high and, in the end, just as costly.
The question now is have we come to our senses. And, for me, this question doesn't merely ask if we understand that some things the market puts before our faces are not affordable, and, if a critical mass of Americans decide not to consume, then an economy that has come to rely on spending really will be in trouble. No, a deeper question for me is if the American middle class is ready to think not just with its minds but with its bodies as well. Doing so not only might help us to avoid a whole bunch of troubles that the mind gets itself into but remembering the physical might also impact so many other aspects of our culture--for example, education.
However, it seems that in the western part of the world we haven't really begun to acknowledge the role of the body in thinking and in creating. Some would even say that we are strangers to our physical selves. We create and recreate what we think of as culture from a predominance of mental activity alienated often from the physical. "I think therefore I am," according to philosopher Descartes.
If this is true, then one could find I think in studying different aspects of western cultures, this same alienation that I speak of. This week, for instance, my students read "The Gold Standard" by Thomas Frank (Harper's, July 2011). The essay basically is a cynical response to the current interest by some in investing in gold as a safety measure against an anticipated eventual collapse in the value of the dollar. The larger concern of such persons is not merely a belief that the American economy is in decline but that when America abandoned under President Franklin Roosevelt the gold standard that once served as a reference point for the dollar the nation moved toward a wholly different kind of economy, one which some believe is doomed for failure much greater than what we have seen so far.
I am no economist, but as a worker and taxpayer I certainly do participate in the economy. One of my earliest clues that the nation's economy was headed for short-term disaster was when developers first started in the early '90s tearing down small forests and plowing up fields that had just been harvested months earlier to build the three and four thousand square-foot homes that some refer to as McMansions. This obvious aspersion on the realization of many Americans' dream in truth contains an underlying criticism of an economy growing too quickly or of what has been called "an Avatar economy." In other words, from the beginning of the housing boom, people, myself included, were suspicious of whether there was really any reference, any substance beyond even the bricks and mortar of the very large houses, to substantiate or justify the growth of the real estate market. Were Americans, in the last twenty years, really doing so well that the middle class was holding steady and their standard of living was appropriately increasing?
As with most questions, I began to answer this one from my own personal experience and observations. Most people I knew were during the boom years relying heavily on credit including popular home equity loans that helped put their homes under water even before the bubble burst. Americans are still of course using and abusing credit, and so it seems that a second point of our modern economy is plastic, working in concert with fiat money, i.e. money without a material check (as in check and balance), and American consumers who place great faith in the idea that this system works constitute the third point. If the critics of the late twentieth century real estate game aptly refer to Wall Street bankers as high stakes gamblers--they gambled on tens of thousands of realistically worthless mortgages--the metaphor might be applied to us commoners as well. Investments that we made were in relative terms just as high and, in the end, just as costly.
The question now is have we come to our senses. And, for me, this question doesn't merely ask if we understand that some things the market puts before our faces are not affordable, and, if a critical mass of Americans decide not to consume, then an economy that has come to rely on spending really will be in trouble. No, a deeper question for me is if the American middle class is ready to think not just with its minds but with its bodies as well. Doing so not only might help us to avoid a whole bunch of troubles that the mind gets itself into but remembering the physical might also impact so many other aspects of our culture--for example, education.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Minority Death Match by Naomi Klein
I'm going to keep this short since recent posts have been so long. I enjoyed this article, and to me this piece is about two things: one, the prisonhouse of rhetoric, and, two, who controls it. According to Klein, organizers of both Durban I and Durban II (Review), UN-sponsored conferences on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, strongly desired to "bring Obama's government to the table," perhaps more than any other government. Why? Well, I figure America was needed at the table not so much to legitimate the conference but because Obama at once both stands as a symbol of the possibility either that racism is not eradicated simply by electing a minority as head of state or that it is in fact so eradicated. A second reason is because of America's deep and unchanging commitment to Israel.
Klein suggests that opponents to the conference, believing that the number one purpose of the meeting was to charge Israel once and for all with racial injustice, swiftboated the gathering. She writes that in fact it matters little what the actual documents produced by the conference, namely the declaration, stated. These days if not always only perception matters, and she does seem to conclude that the opponents won the battle of perceptions and who has gotten to control them. On that basis, and of course under much pressure, Obama chose neither to attend the first conference or the second. Many people were disappointed. Late Latino activist Juan Santos referred to Obama as "a muzzled black Emperor." Is the title not appropriate? Do not even Obama's domestic politics prove this? Obama cannot talk about race here in America or abroad. Obama is a pragmatist, yet some people believe that when the time is right he is going to be able to tell certain truths. In situations like this I love to call up the words of one of my pastors: "Where are the examples of that?"
Klein suggests that opponents to the conference, believing that the number one purpose of the meeting was to charge Israel once and for all with racial injustice, swiftboated the gathering. She writes that in fact it matters little what the actual documents produced by the conference, namely the declaration, stated. These days if not always only perception matters, and she does seem to conclude that the opponents won the battle of perceptions and who has gotten to control them. On that basis, and of course under much pressure, Obama chose neither to attend the first conference or the second. Many people were disappointed. Late Latino activist Juan Santos referred to Obama as "a muzzled black Emperor." Is the title not appropriate? Do not even Obama's domestic politics prove this? Obama cannot talk about race here in America or abroad. Obama is a pragmatist, yet some people believe that when the time is right he is going to be able to tell certain truths. In situations like this I love to call up the words of one of my pastors: "Where are the examples of that?"
How the Other Half Heals
This essay by Teri Reynolds is short. I thought she could have done more with it, but her point I think is made: poor Americans do not receive adequate healthcare, and this fact leads, in many cases, to premature death.
Reynolds points out that unequal health care providers are located just a few miles apart in some cities. City and county hospitals are plagued by inadequate facilities while university hospitals or private-owned hospitals are well equipped. This should be news to no one, right? Well, it isn't any more than the idea that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is a new saying. What makes Reynold's piece timely, when it was published anyway, is that the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party were fighting for the passage of health care reform. Reynolds, we might say, was doing her part, not to encourage support of the bill--she says that she was against the compromised bill since she wanted nothing less than universal coverage--but to awaken Americans to the fact and consequences of health care disparities.
The question is why we accept these disparities, especially when we realize that the real consequence of them is shorter life spans for Americans who don't have the range of health care options open to people with health insurance. Interestingly, Reynolds ends her piece, not with the awful stories of the clients at the charity hospital but with a story of an insured patient at her new hospital. His perception was that he too, when visiting an emergency room, had to bleed in order to be seen. Isn't this an example of chickens coming home to roost? I think Reynolds is suggesting that what insured Americans do to the least of these, i.e. ignore them, will eventually be done to them.
Reynolds points out that unequal health care providers are located just a few miles apart in some cities. City and county hospitals are plagued by inadequate facilities while university hospitals or private-owned hospitals are well equipped. This should be news to no one, right? Well, it isn't any more than the idea that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is a new saying. What makes Reynold's piece timely, when it was published anyway, is that the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party were fighting for the passage of health care reform. Reynolds, we might say, was doing her part, not to encourage support of the bill--she says that she was against the compromised bill since she wanted nothing less than universal coverage--but to awaken Americans to the fact and consequences of health care disparities.
The question is why we accept these disparities, especially when we realize that the real consequence of them is shorter life spans for Americans who don't have the range of health care options open to people with health insurance. Interestingly, Reynolds ends her piece, not with the awful stories of the clients at the charity hospital but with a story of an insured patient at her new hospital. His perception was that he too, when visiting an emergency room, had to bleed in order to be seen. Isn't this an example of chickens coming home to roost? I think Reynolds is suggesting that what insured Americans do to the least of these, i.e. ignore them, will eventually be done to them.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
End of the Road
I am a proud member of Generation Y, and as someone who also grew up in Detroit, I can say that I experienced first-hand the high water mark of American labor. In other words, I experienced first-hand what good, fair wages and benefits could mean for American families. Not only did wages earned by factory workers from the late '40s through the late '70s allow families to raise their brood in homes that they would come to own, free and clear of debt, manufacturing jobs allowed families to put money away for the future and even for vacations and family outings. As quiet as it is kept, life in Detroit in the time period of my youth was good. I say this without qualification.
Ben Austen's article, "End of the Road: After Detroit: the Wreck of an American Dream" is an important one. Austen isn't just lamenting the decline of the American middle class and its short-lived standard, he gently uncovers the manner by which it happened. For me, his was a short article; it could have been a book. And there are books that do the job that Austen does not do here: Thomas Sugrue's The Origin of the Urban Crisis (1996) and Steve Babson's Working Detroit (1986). Austen deals gently with this subject I think because he knows his audience cannot understand the message of decline in any other way. As he points out, Georgetown, Kentucky was happy to get the Toyota plant; citizens of this city were undoubtedly both ecstatic that jobs were coming to their town and that they had beat out all of the other cities that had competed for this prize. After all, the late twentieth century was a time of such competition, Southerners, yes, turning their noses up at Northerners. I have a girlfriend, who lives in
Alabama, who saw the American economic landscape of the time this way: "it's our turn now." She was right, of course. It was the South's turn, just like ten years later it would be Mexico's and China's turn. But, what she didn't understand was that it was not the same turn. Labor conditions, American economy, and American culture had changed.
Alabama, who saw the American economic landscape of the time this way: "it's our turn now." She was right, of course. It was the South's turn, just like ten years later it would be Mexico's and China's turn. But, what she didn't understand was that it was not the same turn. Labor conditions, American economy, and American culture had changed.
The same towns that, in Austen's words, bloomed Camrys where they had once grown tobacco, also grew Walmarts and Targets, Starbucks and Applebees and more shopping outlets than one could ever imagine Americans needed. Former cotton plantations became subdivisions that were supposed to set apart the bourgeoise, who, looking at the new landscape, was supposed to believe that life too had started fresh. It was in fact the feeling of newness that was intoxicating. Americans suffered from a fogginess that was caused by a combination of "new thinking" (forgetting about the past, about those cotton fields) and the off-gassing of the cheap new furniture they insisted go inside of the vinyl-sided, wood-composition, brick facade homes that were going up overnight. Forgetting about those cotton plantations and the fact that they had represented a class system in which very few could ever imagine making it to the top, American workers welcomed the coming of a new class identity that felt rich if it wasn't as stable as it appeared. Perhaps companies like Toyota would be able to employ a critical mass and have enough of us driving their vehicles to believe that the American Dream had not died. What was the magic number? And the rest of Americans could dream that someone in their families could one day land a factory job, while the rest of our family members could work two jobs, one at Walmart, and maybe another elsewhere. In the meantime, second and third-shifters comforted themselves in the developing consumer economy and its offerings--an explosion of animated films, which made the line between the real and the fantastical harder and harder to distinguish, and the line between childhood and adulthood difficult to grasp as well.
The late twentieth century into the twenty-first was a feel-good era in which hardly anyone could imagine that Japanese car companies did not have the best interests of Americans at heart. American workers needed not be in union with each other for fair wages, fair working conditions, etc. Citizens of cities who won the new plants learned to be in union with the company. But as Austen writes, the honeymoon would be short-lived.
Two and a half years after publication of Austen's piece, GM supposedly is back on top. Toyota has had record losses, yet this should not be heard as good news. If GM was the twentieth-century symbol of the "old corporate model," in which workers could bargain for fairness, Toyota and Walmart, the twenty-first century symbols of cooperative relationships between management and labor are not I think going to be unseated, for how will we ever return, in a global economy, to the kind of wages that the UAW achieved? As Austen explains, what Americans should love about GM, about the UAW, and, yes, about Detroit is that the wages and rights that unionism won for auto workers set a standard for all American labor. So much for Southerners turning up their noses at the North or for people incessantly placing Detroit at the butt end of their jokes. American laborers in the late twentieth century screwed themselves though one can hardly blame them for having done so given the options.
And what are the options now? Well, Austen doesn't answer this question directly. He certainly does suggest that American workers will never have it as good as they had it during the height of Detroit, and he hints at something in his somewhat cynical look at kaizen, the Japanese concept of continuous improvement, which better translated is to be understood as not wasting time or money, i.e. getting as much out of as few workers as possible. How far and wide has that concept spread. Just ask anyone in America. All of us have seen staffs cut, the handing over of multiple tasks to fewer and fewer employees, and workdays that do not end at 5:00.
Georgetown, Kentucky can thank Toyota twice. Thank the company for giving jobs to adults and then for attempting to indoctrinate young people into the virtues of systematization and efficiency. Georgetown schools unfortunately are not the only ones in the nation that have learned to value saving money, saving time, and saving what appear to be unnecessary steps in education and in life. Sleeping may soon come to be seen as an unnecessary step and, then, maybe eating as well. But thank God at least some of the kids did not conform so easily.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Birthing Pangs from Accepting the Cataclysm
I delivered three babies in two pregnancies. The first pregnancy I gladly accepted an epidural, which resulted in my having a difficult time pushing out my twin sons. After that trauma, I decided, before the delivery of my third child, I would not again accept an epidural. However, when the pain came on in that third delivery, I quickly lost my resolve. It is surely human to seek to escape pain.
A birth analogy seems appropriate to a discussion about an America on the cusp of a new economy, especially in an age when the nation has at its fingertips any number of pain-avoiding serums or epidurals. Plain old denial is an epidural. Isn't this the option of politicians who pretend we can bring jobs back home, that we can stop the speeding train of globalism? How do you return Americans to the hourly wages of manufacturing workers of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties? American audiences welcome such promises because they are hardly ready to accept that the decline of our standard of living may be permanent. And who can blame them when such decline ironically is swaddled in a continuing proliferation of consumer goods? The machine of the consumer economy has not stopped, has it? Smart phones, I-Pads, even Kindles and Nooks are the opiate of the people, aren't they even as they are manufactured far beyond America's shores?
Last week, I watched MSNBC's "Morning Joe." The guest at the table was political theorist Zbigniew Brzezinski, who in very plain language delivered this key message: the 21st century America cannot be the 20th century America because the 21st century world is not the 20th century world. America will not necessarily have to take a back seat in world politics, but it will not be able to police the rest of the world nor should it. He in fact suggested that in this millennium there will be no superpowers. Yet, Brzezinski commented that domestic gridlock, and the kind of talk that goes along with it, that is, an out-and-out refusal for some politicians to admit that America is going to have to step back, is keeping American leaders from arriving at this new reality. Joe Scarborough and company sat with their mouths agape at this news, and I wasn't sure if their unusual silence was because they were just being kind to an old man or if there was a grand canyon between Brzezinski's consciousness and theirs. Of course. The very existence of the talking heads, employed by a hybrid television cable station and Internet entity, MSNBC, depends on the idea that more is more (Americans need 900 digital channels to choose from), and that the machine will keep churning out products, each with a very short shelf-life no matter how many more of similar vein get produced.
Which brings me more closely to the matter at hand--American housing. In his essay, "Stop Payment, a Homeowner's Revolt against the Banks," (Harper's, January 2012) Christopher Ketcham discusses what drove the housing machine, or part of what drove it. The engine was the gambling mindset we hear critiques of the housing boom (post bubble) talk about. The engine was packaged loans that became securities that people and other entities, mostly the latter, invested in. Most of us understand why the bubble burst--because Americans couldn't afford the mortgages from which the securities originated. What Americans haven't maybe known, most Americans anyway, is that in order to create the housing machine and the "Avatar (read fake) economy" that was born of it for the first time ever the two documents that throughout the country's real estate history have served as proof of mortgage ownership--deed of trust and primissory note--were separated. These items, once held by local courthouses (chanceries) , landed in very many cases with MERS (mortgage electronic registration system) in Virginia. MERS has served as intermediary, the theoretical holder of one's mortgage while it is in the process of being sold, a practice that most American homeowners recognize as all too common. Who knew? Good question. Lots of people knew, yet I guess too few people questioned the practice. According to Ketcham, the consequence of the separation of documents is that today those entities who claim to hold one's mortgage is not likely able to prove it. Ketcham shares in his report stories of several individuals who had MERS cases and in at least one the homeowner, even after being foreclosed upon, retrieved his home through the courts after arguing that the bank that had foreclosed could not prove it actually had owned his loan. In theory, the reality that was shown in this case is true of literally hundreds of thousands of other mortgages, which is why at the end of the essay Ketcham leaves the reader hanging. Another homeowner, whose case is still in the process of being litigated, may also get his home back. The attorney for the other side--the bank--has offered but one argument: the implications of the homeowner winning the case are too big to allow. The judgment, which would set a precedent, is unacceptable. Awarding hundreds of thousands of homeowners their homes free and clear of debt, even after illegitimate foreclosure, would cause a cataclysm--a failure of banks that would be so much larger than the last forestalled failure. America would have to begin again from, well, nothing. The question Ketcham leaves us with is the same one that some were asking before the bank bailout of 2008: should we not just let it (failure) happen? Is that not the purest form of capitalism?
The problem with the epidural is that one cannot feel anything down there and, yet, one does feel--I did anyway--guilt. I knew that birth pangs were actually part of what it takes to bring new life into the world. And yet this progress in medicine allowed me and many other women to avoid the natural pain. In defense of the treatment, anaesthesiolgists do implore women not to request an epidural when birth is imminent; it should only be given early in the delivery process. The question for America is how long we have been in that early delusional stage and what we will do now that the pain is on the horizon.
A birth analogy seems appropriate to a discussion about an America on the cusp of a new economy, especially in an age when the nation has at its fingertips any number of pain-avoiding serums or epidurals. Plain old denial is an epidural. Isn't this the option of politicians who pretend we can bring jobs back home, that we can stop the speeding train of globalism? How do you return Americans to the hourly wages of manufacturing workers of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties? American audiences welcome such promises because they are hardly ready to accept that the decline of our standard of living may be permanent. And who can blame them when such decline ironically is swaddled in a continuing proliferation of consumer goods? The machine of the consumer economy has not stopped, has it? Smart phones, I-Pads, even Kindles and Nooks are the opiate of the people, aren't they even as they are manufactured far beyond America's shores?
Last week, I watched MSNBC's "Morning Joe." The guest at the table was political theorist Zbigniew Brzezinski, who in very plain language delivered this key message: the 21st century America cannot be the 20th century America because the 21st century world is not the 20th century world. America will not necessarily have to take a back seat in world politics, but it will not be able to police the rest of the world nor should it. He in fact suggested that in this millennium there will be no superpowers. Yet, Brzezinski commented that domestic gridlock, and the kind of talk that goes along with it, that is, an out-and-out refusal for some politicians to admit that America is going to have to step back, is keeping American leaders from arriving at this new reality. Joe Scarborough and company sat with their mouths agape at this news, and I wasn't sure if their unusual silence was because they were just being kind to an old man or if there was a grand canyon between Brzezinski's consciousness and theirs. Of course. The very existence of the talking heads, employed by a hybrid television cable station and Internet entity, MSNBC, depends on the idea that more is more (Americans need 900 digital channels to choose from), and that the machine will keep churning out products, each with a very short shelf-life no matter how many more of similar vein get produced.
Which brings me more closely to the matter at hand--American housing. In his essay, "Stop Payment, a Homeowner's Revolt against the Banks," (Harper's, January 2012) Christopher Ketcham discusses what drove the housing machine, or part of what drove it. The engine was the gambling mindset we hear critiques of the housing boom (post bubble) talk about. The engine was packaged loans that became securities that people and other entities, mostly the latter, invested in. Most of us understand why the bubble burst--because Americans couldn't afford the mortgages from which the securities originated. What Americans haven't maybe known, most Americans anyway, is that in order to create the housing machine and the "Avatar (read fake) economy" that was born of it for the first time ever the two documents that throughout the country's real estate history have served as proof of mortgage ownership--deed of trust and primissory note--were separated. These items, once held by local courthouses (chanceries) , landed in very many cases with MERS (mortgage electronic registration system) in Virginia. MERS has served as intermediary, the theoretical holder of one's mortgage while it is in the process of being sold, a practice that most American homeowners recognize as all too common. Who knew? Good question. Lots of people knew, yet I guess too few people questioned the practice. According to Ketcham, the consequence of the separation of documents is that today those entities who claim to hold one's mortgage is not likely able to prove it. Ketcham shares in his report stories of several individuals who had MERS cases and in at least one the homeowner, even after being foreclosed upon, retrieved his home through the courts after arguing that the bank that had foreclosed could not prove it actually had owned his loan. In theory, the reality that was shown in this case is true of literally hundreds of thousands of other mortgages, which is why at the end of the essay Ketcham leaves the reader hanging. Another homeowner, whose case is still in the process of being litigated, may also get his home back. The attorney for the other side--the bank--has offered but one argument: the implications of the homeowner winning the case are too big to allow. The judgment, which would set a precedent, is unacceptable. Awarding hundreds of thousands of homeowners their homes free and clear of debt, even after illegitimate foreclosure, would cause a cataclysm--a failure of banks that would be so much larger than the last forestalled failure. America would have to begin again from, well, nothing. The question Ketcham leaves us with is the same one that some were asking before the bank bailout of 2008: should we not just let it (failure) happen? Is that not the purest form of capitalism?
The problem with the epidural is that one cannot feel anything down there and, yet, one does feel--I did anyway--guilt. I knew that birth pangs were actually part of what it takes to bring new life into the world. And yet this progress in medicine allowed me and many other women to avoid the natural pain. In defense of the treatment, anaesthesiolgists do implore women not to request an epidural when birth is imminent; it should only be given early in the delivery process. The question for America is how long we have been in that early delusional stage and what we will do now that the pain is on the horizon.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
From Where I Sit Big Government is Great
Last week, I viewed Tavis Smiley's "Reawakening America" forum with such personalities as Cornel West, Suze Orman, Michael Moore, and a man with whom I had not been familiar before the broadcast--Roger Clay of the Insight Center for Community Economic Development. Clay stood out to me from the crowd. About a third of the way through the forum, he stated that America needs a new system, and at the moment he uttered that thought I felt he had separated himself from the rest of the group. Clay was speaking outside of the box, and I believe outside of capitalism, and I couldn't help but to think that everyone else on the panel was thinking within it.
Despite Clay somewhat isolating himself philosophically, it was interesting that others seemed intrigued by his thinking--especially West, who at times has claimed to be a socialist. Near the end of the forum, it cetainly seemed very important to West to align himself with Clay. He in fact asked the man if the two of them were on the same page. It's interesting to think about why such philosophical alignment was so important to West. One of the things that has always bothered me about him is that he talks a certain talk and I think walks a different walk. Some years ago, West was interviewed by Charlie Rose, who in a seemingly innocent manner, reminded West that he had made a lot of money. I guess Rose assumed that all of the books had paid off for the philosopher, the speaking engagements, etc. As I recall, West nodded in agreement. I think the philosopher-king was taken a little by surprise, but not much, by the statement. In his usual form, West came back with a sense of victimization, claiming that he had had to pay a heavy price for his pubic life and of course for his politics. He said that he regularly receives death threats. I'm sure I believe West. Everyone on the "Reawakening America" panel has probably received death threats. It goes with the territory of public life. However, what bothered me about West's response to Rose's pointing out a possible contradiction between West's public politics and his material gain from them was that what Rose was really questioning, it seemed to me anyway, was whether a proclaimed socialist should look to "get paid." I think Rose wanted to know if West's soul was bothered by having made so much money that he had risen high above the masses for whom he claimed to fight. West could have and should have answered in that vein, but instead he skirted the issue by painting himself in the image of a victim rather than that of a wealthy man who had been making a mint off of the role of thinking for the public. Rose probably wasn't the first person to accuse West of a profit motive, and, years later, I think that the kind of money that American public intellectuals were able to make during the years of America's huge economic bubble makes their politics as questionable as anyone else's, maybe more since, at least West, is still claiming to be "down with the poor." Really? Again, I'd at least like to know if he feels on his worst days a bit of a hypocrite. In a previous Smiley forum, Julia Hare warned the audience to beware of "leading blacks" (which she distinguished from black leaders), for they often "get paid" while those they claim to lead "get played." As I recall, West slapped his leg at the jab and guffawed ridiculously. I see this earlier show as a similar reaction to that made in response to Clay. West seemed to be saying he was in agreement with Hare, but how could he have been when, without a doubt, he is one who has gotten paid?
For me, there is a larger issue that goes beyond West to African Americans in general who refuse to call money out, that is, to question whether capitalism achieves a fair society, or, less critically, if every way of making money is morally acceptable. And why aren't there more African American socialists? I don't mean among the degreed thinkers but among the masses? Do we fall for the same anti-socialist rhetoric as everyone else? How could we when we've always caught more hell than anyone else? How on earth do you trust capitalism when it had its origin in slavery? It doesn't make sense, does it? And if we overwhelmingly support a party that can still be said to be more for government than the other party, then why don't more of us regularly question the capitalist system itself that is both parties' religion, an economic system which inherently leads to inequality rather than parity? Have we not noticed this? Clay stated, "most people think they are going to be rich. For that reason, they protect the rich." Is this too the mindset of working class African Americans? Do we protect the rich not only by not pointing to their participation in an inherently corrupt system but also by secretly or not-so-secretly worshiping them? Do we admire capitalism that much? Why on earth? The answer to these questions certainly seems to be yes whenever anyone goes to criticize Oprah or Tyler Perry. Have they risen to the ranks of capitalists? People defend Oprah because she gives so much back. She does, and she should give more, much more, for she possesses nothing that the system we fail to criticize hasn't allowed her. In other words, she is rich because we live in a system that makes a few people so. She is not a genius but a benefactor of an unfair system that the rest of us patronize. Have we any righteous indignation that the capitalists, who have gotten filthy rich again, are not creating jobs for us? Not a handful of jobs or new cars for all in the Harpo Studios audience, but millions of jobs for the masses? Have we silenced ourselves because we have failed to articulate an alternative politics and relied instead on the likes of West and Smiley, who are so well housed within the sytem, to speak for us?
I know that plenty of African Americans are part of The Occupy Movement, and I am not, but I do wonder if some blacks who are a part of that movement just want things to return to the way they were during the bubble or whether they want revolution--in Clay's words, "a whole new system."
One of the underlying thoughts in Thomas Frank's piece "More Government, Please" (Harper's, Dec. 2011) is that many Americans--The Tea Party especially--defend "the job creators" in their refusal to create jobs. As Frank sees it, the rich have been escalated to a position in which they are not held accountable or responsible to society; The Tea Party lets them off the hook; they are, with their Republican friends, mad about anticipated taxation and regulation. The obvious question is why masses of barely middle class people would align themselves with big money rather than with big government. But together, these friends hate big government. What Frank doesn't say is that plenty of other Americans seem to give the rich a pass as well, not the relatively few blacks who have taken to the streets or those who have gone to Washington to fight for jobs but the masses of us who just sit by waiting for either the Democrats or the Republicans to win the philosophical and political battle. How have we come to be so lethargic? Why is there no workers movement on the level of the civil rights movement? Why don't we in fact see labor rights as a civil right? My guess is that it is because we too are recovering from the excesses of the bubble, false affluence that many of us in our own ways participated (and may still be participating in some way) in. We were as mesmerized by the appearance of growth as everyone else. I think it is ironic that many of the Occupiers were not railing about poverty during the golden days when the McMansions that Frank says need to be deconstructed now were first being built. We were in awe, and some of us thought those times would last forever. Some of us may believe also that those times will come back just as soon as someone makes the case well enough that outsourced jobs must return. I do not believe. The job creators are not on strike, but, as Frank concludes, they are unwilling to compromise and accept a greater tax burden and regulation of runaway capitalism. Their refusual is tantamount to saying the good old days of the middle class are gone, gone if its revitalization depends on workers making $20 an hour to start and having affordable health benefits and a pension. The job creators are waiting for us to accept a new standard--$13 an hour tops, unaffordable heath care, and definitely no pension.
Like Clay, I want a new system altogether. I love big government. Whenever I hear it being rejected, I think of all of the CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) workers, mere teenagers among them, who donned their red t-shirts in the summer in my city and held their free bus tickets as they walked to the end of the block to join gangs of young people employed by money from the federal government; they had government jobs that took them all over the city to work. That sea of government-supported jobs was one of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen. I'm not old enough to have benefitted directly from WPA or CWA jobs, but CETA had the same or similar philosophical underpinning. The '70s was not so long ago. I suppose such a government-sponsored jobs program might in the end, if we don't overthrow the whole sytem, be only a temporary fix, but I know that in my city it forestalled the economy that replaced it--the drug economy.
Despite Clay somewhat isolating himself philosophically, it was interesting that others seemed intrigued by his thinking--especially West, who at times has claimed to be a socialist. Near the end of the forum, it cetainly seemed very important to West to align himself with Clay. He in fact asked the man if the two of them were on the same page. It's interesting to think about why such philosophical alignment was so important to West. One of the things that has always bothered me about him is that he talks a certain talk and I think walks a different walk. Some years ago, West was interviewed by Charlie Rose, who in a seemingly innocent manner, reminded West that he had made a lot of money. I guess Rose assumed that all of the books had paid off for the philosopher, the speaking engagements, etc. As I recall, West nodded in agreement. I think the philosopher-king was taken a little by surprise, but not much, by the statement. In his usual form, West came back with a sense of victimization, claiming that he had had to pay a heavy price for his pubic life and of course for his politics. He said that he regularly receives death threats. I'm sure I believe West. Everyone on the "Reawakening America" panel has probably received death threats. It goes with the territory of public life. However, what bothered me about West's response to Rose's pointing out a possible contradiction between West's public politics and his material gain from them was that what Rose was really questioning, it seemed to me anyway, was whether a proclaimed socialist should look to "get paid." I think Rose wanted to know if West's soul was bothered by having made so much money that he had risen high above the masses for whom he claimed to fight. West could have and should have answered in that vein, but instead he skirted the issue by painting himself in the image of a victim rather than that of a wealthy man who had been making a mint off of the role of thinking for the public. Rose probably wasn't the first person to accuse West of a profit motive, and, years later, I think that the kind of money that American public intellectuals were able to make during the years of America's huge economic bubble makes their politics as questionable as anyone else's, maybe more since, at least West, is still claiming to be "down with the poor." Really? Again, I'd at least like to know if he feels on his worst days a bit of a hypocrite. In a previous Smiley forum, Julia Hare warned the audience to beware of "leading blacks" (which she distinguished from black leaders), for they often "get paid" while those they claim to lead "get played." As I recall, West slapped his leg at the jab and guffawed ridiculously. I see this earlier show as a similar reaction to that made in response to Clay. West seemed to be saying he was in agreement with Hare, but how could he have been when, without a doubt, he is one who has gotten paid?
For me, there is a larger issue that goes beyond West to African Americans in general who refuse to call money out, that is, to question whether capitalism achieves a fair society, or, less critically, if every way of making money is morally acceptable. And why aren't there more African American socialists? I don't mean among the degreed thinkers but among the masses? Do we fall for the same anti-socialist rhetoric as everyone else? How could we when we've always caught more hell than anyone else? How on earth do you trust capitalism when it had its origin in slavery? It doesn't make sense, does it? And if we overwhelmingly support a party that can still be said to be more for government than the other party, then why don't more of us regularly question the capitalist system itself that is both parties' religion, an economic system which inherently leads to inequality rather than parity? Have we not noticed this? Clay stated, "most people think they are going to be rich. For that reason, they protect the rich." Is this too the mindset of working class African Americans? Do we protect the rich not only by not pointing to their participation in an inherently corrupt system but also by secretly or not-so-secretly worshiping them? Do we admire capitalism that much? Why on earth? The answer to these questions certainly seems to be yes whenever anyone goes to criticize Oprah or Tyler Perry. Have they risen to the ranks of capitalists? People defend Oprah because she gives so much back. She does, and she should give more, much more, for she possesses nothing that the system we fail to criticize hasn't allowed her. In other words, she is rich because we live in a system that makes a few people so. She is not a genius but a benefactor of an unfair system that the rest of us patronize. Have we any righteous indignation that the capitalists, who have gotten filthy rich again, are not creating jobs for us? Not a handful of jobs or new cars for all in the Harpo Studios audience, but millions of jobs for the masses? Have we silenced ourselves because we have failed to articulate an alternative politics and relied instead on the likes of West and Smiley, who are so well housed within the sytem, to speak for us?
I know that plenty of African Americans are part of The Occupy Movement, and I am not, but I do wonder if some blacks who are a part of that movement just want things to return to the way they were during the bubble or whether they want revolution--in Clay's words, "a whole new system."
One of the underlying thoughts in Thomas Frank's piece "More Government, Please" (Harper's, Dec. 2011) is that many Americans--The Tea Party especially--defend "the job creators" in their refusal to create jobs. As Frank sees it, the rich have been escalated to a position in which they are not held accountable or responsible to society; The Tea Party lets them off the hook; they are, with their Republican friends, mad about anticipated taxation and regulation. The obvious question is why masses of barely middle class people would align themselves with big money rather than with big government. But together, these friends hate big government. What Frank doesn't say is that plenty of other Americans seem to give the rich a pass as well, not the relatively few blacks who have taken to the streets or those who have gone to Washington to fight for jobs but the masses of us who just sit by waiting for either the Democrats or the Republicans to win the philosophical and political battle. How have we come to be so lethargic? Why is there no workers movement on the level of the civil rights movement? Why don't we in fact see labor rights as a civil right? My guess is that it is because we too are recovering from the excesses of the bubble, false affluence that many of us in our own ways participated (and may still be participating in some way) in. We were as mesmerized by the appearance of growth as everyone else. I think it is ironic that many of the Occupiers were not railing about poverty during the golden days when the McMansions that Frank says need to be deconstructed now were first being built. We were in awe, and some of us thought those times would last forever. Some of us may believe also that those times will come back just as soon as someone makes the case well enough that outsourced jobs must return. I do not believe. The job creators are not on strike, but, as Frank concludes, they are unwilling to compromise and accept a greater tax burden and regulation of runaway capitalism. Their refusual is tantamount to saying the good old days of the middle class are gone, gone if its revitalization depends on workers making $20 an hour to start and having affordable health benefits and a pension. The job creators are waiting for us to accept a new standard--$13 an hour tops, unaffordable heath care, and definitely no pension.
Like Clay, I want a new system altogether. I love big government. Whenever I hear it being rejected, I think of all of the CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) workers, mere teenagers among them, who donned their red t-shirts in the summer in my city and held their free bus tickets as they walked to the end of the block to join gangs of young people employed by money from the federal government; they had government jobs that took them all over the city to work. That sea of government-supported jobs was one of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen. I'm not old enough to have benefitted directly from WPA or CWA jobs, but CETA had the same or similar philosophical underpinning. The '70s was not so long ago. I suppose such a government-sponsored jobs program might in the end, if we don't overthrow the whole sytem, be only a temporary fix, but I know that in my city it forestalled the economy that replaced it--the drug economy.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Visible Man?
Singer gives us so much food for thought. I want to jump in with something unexpected. I'd like to chat about his title: Visible Man. This is of course a reversal of the so often used title and concept of invisibility (Invisible Man). Still, I wonder if this generic phrase, generic in the sense that it's supposed to represent men's and women's visbility, can actually cover (pun intended I guess) both. Are the lives of men and women, now and in the past, equally visible? Is privacy enjoyed equally, or are the lives of one group more open?
Also, we might ask a similar question about adults vs. children. The use of photography in the article is interesting, the blurring of the faces. Was this done to suggest privacy even while the piece is about loss of privacy? I'd like to give a great deal of thought to just how unprivate the lives of youth have become in the age of Facebook. What do youth gain from disclosing so much, especially images of themselves, and what do they lose?
Doesn't Facebook, in its very conception and in its naming, encourage an explosion of shared visual images? I wonder if the plastering of celebrities across our computer screens and even the near nudity of pregnant women (I think Demi Moore was the first) on magazine covers make it seem, as Singer said, that the more people give up privacy the less risky it will become. Are we fools to believe this?
Also, we might ask a similar question about adults vs. children. The use of photography in the article is interesting, the blurring of the faces. Was this done to suggest privacy even while the piece is about loss of privacy? I'd like to give a great deal of thought to just how unprivate the lives of youth have become in the age of Facebook. What do youth gain from disclosing so much, especially images of themselves, and what do they lose?
Doesn't Facebook, in its very conception and in its naming, encourage an explosion of shared visual images? I wonder if the plastering of celebrities across our computer screens and even the near nudity of pregnant women (I think Demi Moore was the first) on magazine covers make it seem, as Singer said, that the more people give up privacy the less risky it will become. Are we fools to believe this?
Getting Started
Okay, we're off. Let's make this meaningful, okay? First up: "Visible Man: Ethics in a World Without Secrets" by Peter Seger, (Harper's, August 2011). What say you all?
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