Volume 53

NOVEMBER 2008

 

54. 6: GIVING THANKS FOR HOMELAND SECURITY 11.27.2008

                           

                                                                                                               YouTube and UrbisMedia

As we gather round our turkeys—and have a chuckle at the video of Sarah Palin blathering her nonsense oblivious to a farmhand gruesomely dispatching turkeys in the background—those of us inclined to find an urge to gratitude might give thanks that recent events have testified to the security of our democracy, and some might also be thankful for the unverifiable results of the efforts of the Department of Homeland Security. Oh, and thank you John McCain.

A few postings back I introduced you to a person I referred to (to borrow from Mike Myers) as “Fat Bastard.” I had met him on a ship I was sailing in and he regaled me with his Republicanism (large R), which included that he had just purchased large home in a “gated adult community” near Pensacola, Florida. [give link] I try not to think of this guy very often, but he came to mind the other day when I was watching the news about the possible appointment of the new head of “Homeland Security” under the Obama administration. Forgive the delight in anticipating the departure of “the screaming skull,” Mr. Chertoff, a man possessed of the uncanny ability to determine when there might be a terrorist attack with his own intestines (he would say “gut feeling”). But I am going in a different direction with this.

“Homeland Security” has always reminded me of terms like “The Fatherland,” throughout history a call for the defense of the local soil, or, just as often, a justification for what the Nazis called lebensraum, a grasping need to annex the other guy’s fatherland. You know what I am referring to—the proprietary idea of a territory that belongs to a people by right, by conquest, by divine beneficence, or by the fact that they have the military might to possess it. It is a term of blurred meaning when we consider places such as Alsace-Lorraine, the Sudetenland, Tibet, or the West Bank, among numerous others. Somehow, the idea of an obese lawyer from Minnesota adding a gated piece of Florida to his personal “fatherland” is . . . what? Inspirational, I guess.

Well, that’s the question, both for gated communities and the “homeland.” But, first, since I am an urbanist, we must consider that a form of gated community has a long history in the development of the city. For several thousand years villages, towns and cities were typically enclosed within a wall of some sort. For a long time social organization was based on clan and blood relationships, local gods, and suspicion of outsiders. The “homeland” was intra muros and a city, as an old Scots proverb says, was a safe a place as the willingness of its residents to ma its walls.

That all changed with ballistics; once artillery developed to the pint where it could reach well beyond city walls it became necessary to change homeland security tactics. The walls came down, many becoming boulevards (from bulwarks, another name for walls) and it became necessary to have forces that could quickly deploy to meet the enemy well into the field and the “homeland” now extended well into the hinterlands of a city. As time passed, first the airplane, then the ICBM, made the very centers of cities, what had once been the safest place to be, the crosshairs of the most terrible weapons in human creation.

911 changed the concept of homeland even further; suddenly it was no longer a redoubt, no longer an invincible acropolis, but vulnerable. The xenophobic warnings of Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s poem seemed prophetic:

Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
And through them press a wild, a motley throng—
Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes,
Fearless figures of the Hoang-Ho,
Malayan, Sythian, Teuton, Kelt and Slav,
Flying the Old World’s poverty and scorn;
These bringing with them unknown gods and rites,
Those tiger passions here to stretch their claws.
In street and alley what strange tongues are these,
Accents of menace alien to our air . . .

Strange that Aldrich mentions nobody from the Arabian and Baja peninsulas; well it was the 19th Century, before the oil was discovered. Our new xenophobia is reserved for the sons of Allah and the heirs of Montezuma, the former desirous of winning their martyrdom by destroying our temples of commerce, the others would usurp our happy occupations of backbreaking and low-paid stoop labor.

And so, the new Gated Adult Homeland Community (GAHC) becomes our contemporary acropolis against all that is the “motley throng” (Mexican gardeners and he pool boy who looks vaguely Middle-eastern, are vetted and admitted exceptions). And yes, the GAHC also repels the young as well, they being memento mori to a cohort of codgers who are one-square dance step, or one shrimp cocktail away from the “forever homeland.”

The “homeland” is not only a mental construct, it is a mentality. But it has long been irrelevant. It is laughable that the millions of travelers taking their shoes off and putting their four-ounce bottles of whatever in plastic bins, has anything to do with homeland security. The walls of the homeland are easily breach thousands of times each day by air travelers and those who find a way through, around and over our border fences. Each day, I watch from my deck as container ships with less than ten percent of their cargo inspected pass within a few hundred yards of the U.S. Navy nuclear submarine base and two aircraft carriers.

There is not homeland security because there is, in reality, no homeland and no security. To hold the idea that either is a valid, operational concept, is dangerously silly. To even have had a debate in which a candidate for president was excoriated as a capitulator and a defeatist for being willing to talk with an adversary is an indication that the fiction of homeland security remains active in the minds of blind bullies.

In a world obsessed with its “homelands” we miss entirely the point that we have come to share a global destiny. Homelands will not insulate their citizens from the pollution and over fishing of the oceans and seas, global warming will not respect the boundaries of the fatherland, the economic crisis has already shown the wages of global investment schemes—who knows where their pension is vested. The “homeland” is like an atomic bomb shelter from the 1950s, an ante-room to an urgent fate of death by radiation sickness.

As to the security of the  GHAC? Well, it hardly matters. Each day they “ring out the dead” and the survivors gather to discuss the most pressing concern of their day—their bowel movements.    So much for their ersatz secure homelands; it is in some respects a redundancy—Fat Bastard is already dead—he just doesn’t know it.
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© 2008, James A. Clapp

 

53. 5:        SAVING CHRISTMAS       11.21.2008

                          

                                                                                           UrbisMedia

Listening to the heads of the major American automobile companies whine before Congress today was enough to make me puke. Can you believe this—they each flew to Washington to beg for a handout in their corporate jets. It confirmed to me that there will be no justice, no reckoning, no pay-up for the screw-ups who have taken this country to the brink. To have General Motors, the company that once bragged that is was America, play a hostage game by insisting that if we don’t cough up the money to save them from losing the “market economy, capitalistic competition” game they worshipped, then we will no longer be the America we once knew, the America that built cars. Haven’t these jerks seen people driving around in Toyotas? Somebody tell Phil Graham that we have found the real American whiners. These guys need to go bankrupt; they will only squander whatever handout we give them on Escalades, Hummers, and trucks for guys with penis problems.

A little sidebar here. NPR ran an interview with a recently retired carpenter for GM that said he lived in a nice house by a lake “buyout” of $62,000. This is on top of his pension and medical benefits. When he retired he was making over $100,000 (with overtime). He’s worried that GM won’t get bailed out. So, this guy who had a job you barely have to go to high school for, but made six figures, wants to get bailed out by people who go to universities for years to prepare for professional occupations, have student loans to pay off, and often don’t make as much money as he did. I also got the impression that the guy was (is) a Republican, an irony given the fact that it’s the congressional Republicans who are opposing he auto company bailout. Goo for them; I think they might have this one right (though likely for ideological reasons.) But the weepy carpenter also emphasizes that there are many in the country who are plainly in some delusional zone of denial about where we are and how we got here. They have swallowed uncritically so much Republican BS and lies all the way back to Reagan’s mythical “morning in America” that they just don’t have much of a grip on reality. They like the myth too much. When they started being foreclosed on their homes and losing their jobs and pensions, they realized they needed to make a change. Many may have voted for Obama, but I am not sure they get the reality if their circumstances if they expect the substitution of one political subterfuge for the one they were living on. That’s what the Republicans are counting on, because they are talking about “getting back to their core values.”

The delusional American mind also confirms that there will probably be nothing done about the crimes—and I mean the word literally—of the Bush administration. Obama has a lot on his plate and there is a good argument for not dealing (at least by way of justice) with the past, although I think he is going to have days when he would like to see Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others rotting in a gibbet from the White House gate. No, we are, as they say, “a Christian nation,” and that means forgiveness (or at least forgetfulness), well selective forgiveness. Jesus, they already forgave Judas Joe Lieberman! At least in the Bible Judas has to hang himself. Jerry Ford forgave Nixon for lying about Watergate and a few years later Reagan is violating the Constitution with the Iran-Contra deal. Americans just want to forget and get on with making the same mistake again. So Bush, a guy who could run a lemonade stand into the red on a hot day, will probably walk away from it all convinced that history will eventually recognize him as a great leader and orator, and Cheney will go out clutching his chest at some Halliburton stockholders meeting wearing that signature sneer on his face.

There will be no justice in my Christmas stocking. There will be none for some poor bastard that was scoped up in Bush’s rendition programs and chained like a dog to the floor in Guantanamo for months without cause; nor justice for some dead Iraqi family in Haditha that were taken out and gunned down by “a few good men” American Marines who have walked away from it; or for some poor sap of an American soldier, who, maybe on his third deployment, was sent back to his family with a lot of missing parts. Much of the world breathes a big sigh of relief at the election of Barack Obama, but we must not forget that there have been years of the building of hatred for Americans thanks to the policies of the Bush administration. There are still dozens of American military bases in the Middle East and Americans will become even more desirable targets for those whose grievances transcend the Obama presidency. If we are seen to exact no justice for those in the administration who have acted as war criminals, others will feel justified to take retribution into their own hands, abroad or in America itself.

There has been one tough-sounding refrain from our president-elect, one that he sounded with rather consistent specificity throughout his campaign—that he would do his best to find and kill Osama bin Laden. This might have had something to do with needing to sound bellicose and with countering the negative of his own Muslim-sounding middle name. But, whether it is, or was, cant or not, it should not distract is from the fact that much of the problem of America is of its own making. Killing bin Laden might have some minor effect upon Al Qaeda, but probably no more real effect than hanging Saddam Hussein. We have made thousands of bin Ladins in the years since 911. It has been astonishing to observe the revision in world opinion about America over the election of Mr. Obama, an almost miraculous reaffirmation of our democratic system in the ability of it to affect a political “revolution” in the period of one revolution of the earth.

I don’t believe any of the Christmas mythology—the manger, the star, the wise men, the gold, frankincense and myrrh, Santa—the whole baby Jesus’s birthday thing. But, the fundamental Christian idea—the part that I subscribe to, wherever it might have come from, but gets expressed for the “first” time in the West in the words and acts of Yeshua bar Yusef, rebellious rabbi of Judea in the First Century, is that individuality matters, and people are created equal and that avaricious bastards aren’t ordained to be rich by God. I rather like Jesus for that, but that certainly wasn’t any idea either the Romans or the Jewish religious hierarchy were going to countenance.

So I really don’t give a rat’s ass about Christmas as we know it now, but I don’t want to throw baby Jesus out with the gift-wrappings either, because of what he symbolizes. This has nothing at all, of course to do with the whole subsequent apparatus of hypocritical bullshit that was built by St. Paul, the Roman Catholic Church, the Prods, and all the rest if it. It’s all about power, lording it over people, keeping them scared and coughing up the cash and voting for politicians who hanker for alliance with religious power. Nothing in the essential original true Christian message has anything to do with that. So all this crap from religious types that there is some conspiracy to “get rid of Christmas” is just that—crap. Their idea of Christmas already got rid of Christmas. Christmas is about peace on earth and good will to one another, but they’re worried we won’t go out and buy those Escalades and Hummers.
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© 2008, James A. Clapp

 

53. 4:      NOW WHAT? SPARE THE OLIVE BRANCH    11. 15.2008

                        

                                                                ©2008, UrbisMedia

An old friend wrote to me about the election of Barack Obama to the presidency wondering what I was going to “rant about” in these pages now that George W. Bush’s days are numbered (but signing de-regulating drilling and mining leases for his friends in sort of a frantic “scorched earth” retreat) until he can go back to being a fake cowboy again. I object to my moderate words as “rants,” but then I don’t think he agreed with much of what I had to say. But I also too the implication of his remark to be tat perhaps I should “move on” past the Bush era, even perhaps extend an olive branch in gracious victory to the fascisti who ruled and ruined us this past eight years.

He is mistaken on a couple of counts. One is that I have no intention, for reasons I shall elaborate below, in letting go of my contempt for Bush and his cabal. Second, is that he mistakes me for a doctrinaire Democrat, a mirror opposite of the Limbaugh ditto-heads, Fox News lamebrains and Joe the Plumber Palinistas who blindly and uncritically follow the manipulations of the Right Wing noise machine. I’m not. I’m too bitchy for that. What calls ranting is the way I interact with the political process., and that process is fluid, not doctrinaire. I contributed, argued, wrote and voted for Obama, and, of course, a pleased with his victory. I trust he will be a man of his word; but there are ways in which the exigencies and perverseness politics can make that difficult. Getting power, and having it can be two different things. So now what?

Not just America, but the whole world has a lot of expectations for Obama, a huge pressure for a man inheriting a monstrous mess made by the most colossal failure in the history of American politics. So, we shouldn’t jump on him precipitously. But he ran on change, and I took that to be substantive and procedural change in the conduct of American politics. So I will express concerns, not rant (yet).

There will be a new debate between whether policy should be a cast with in a rational;-comprehensive framework or contin ue to meader in a disjointed, serial-incremental (we already see this is treasure Sec Paulsen’s inabilbity to figure out what the hell to do with the bailout.

“Forgive and forget” and “get on with it” are phrases that practically makes me puke— especially “reaching across the aisle.” There are already some indications hat the Obama administration might be a little mushy on this (but it’s early). He’s meeting with McCain supposedly to bring him in some way. Maybe it’s neutralizations, but McCain is a chimerical dork who likes war. Obama owes him nothing. And, were I in the Senate and could reach across the aisle at Joe Lieberman and his ilk they would be singing soprano in the Republican choir. Politics isn’t a sport; it’s war, culture war. They would only see rapprochement as a sign of weakness. The bromides are all out there: “let the healing begin” and such. What healing? I saw a doc on Sundance the other night about a young Iraq vet in a wheel chair for the rest of his life—one of thousands. He’s is pain till the end of his days after being shot like a fish in a barrel in an open truck in Iraq. Bush would call him a “hero,” but he was there only five days and never fired a shot of his own and he has to battle for his VA benefits. Now he’s an anti-war protester. No healing for this guy. His marriage is over and now his mother has to put in his catheter every day. For what? For oil, and Cheney’s Haliburton dividends.

Nor am I in a frame of mind to extend the hand of reconciliation to the right wingers who gladly supported the Bush cabal. I was put in mind of a guy I met on a ship cruising up the Amazon earlier this year. I was stuck sitting next to him at a dinner table. I don’t remember his name, but I called him “Fat Bastard” (the name of an equally disgusting character in a Mike Myers film). This “Fat Bastard” (FB) was a lobbyist lawyer for a beer company who thought he was an economist. He blabbered the standard Reagan “trickle-down” crap for about five minutes before I jumped all over him. He was one of those types that said he usually takes a “higher quality” ship and had recently bought a “vacation home in Pensacola in a gated community.” I felt like tossing this tub of putrid guts over the side, along with his Stepford wife, who, unbelievably, had allowed him to twice impregnate her. I never returned to that table for fear of committing homicide. FB is my role model for the Republican creeps who put that kid in a wheel chair and messed up the economy and now want to “reach across he aisle.” If there is any justice I hope FB has lost his “vacation house” in all of this. I didn’t think that his house of trickle-down cards built on the mound of Chinese debt we owe would crumble this soon, but it had to happen.

Justice, not reaching and healing is what we need, now. Yes, Obama needs to get right to work putting eight years of Bush’s disastrous ruination of this country behind us. But if we don’t get some of these greedy, self-interested Republicans they will be back with a vengeance (and are already positioning to do so), and FB will be right there along with them. It worries me some that Barack Obama is appearing rather conciliatory. But we don’t need a “truth and reconciliation” commission, we need a truth and justice (complete with indictments and trials) system. Sorry Bishop Tutu, but for us to allow ourselves to be distracted entirely to the problem of the economic meltdown will put the Obama administration immediately into a defensive posture, as some conservative commentators are already referring to it as the “Obama recession” and will employ the rhetoric that “raising taxes” and “rising socialism” will be the result. The rhetorical political war for the 2010 midterms is already underway, and the Democrats must keep the stake that they have driven into those Republican vampirical hearts deep and twisting. Obama can remain above all this, but he must have minions who perform this necessary strategy.

So I’m not going to forget about George W. Bush, and neither should the rest of us. I want people to remember how close we came to fascism in this country and how quickly a country can be dissipated and nearly brought to ruin by an incompetent, immoral idiot and his cabal of manipulators and sycophants. Is the suggestion that we should now breathe a sigh of relief and forgive and forget a number of indictable transgressions? Should we allow the wimpy Mrs. Pelosi decide to recount all the “wonderful” and feckless things she accomplished while all this was going one?” In think not. We need some justice! We need some indictments. Should we sit around and wait for George W. Bush to get out his list of last minute pardons?

Bacack Obama recently visited George W. Bush in the Oval Office and I couldn’t help getting the image of him visiting Adolph Hitler in the Reich’s Bunker during those last days of the Reich when the least popular man in the world was getting ready do chomp down on his cyanide capsule. What a meeting it must have been—however the niceties and civilities exercised were conducted—between a man who drew over 200 thousand admirers in Berlin and hundreds of thousands on the night of his election, and a creepy guy who has approval ratings lower than Joe the Plumber, whose own arty can barely mention his name, who was asked by nobody to come a give a stump speech.

Never before in American history has a cabal of morally and politically corrupt so-called “leaders” take us further from our ideals and true course as a nation putatively founded on human rights and dignity. Through the use of fear, intimidation of the media, the formation of political divisions by the semantics of “good “ and “evil” with obvious religious undertones, secrecy, deceit and political assassination, they engaged in preemptive war, exploitation of the military, the movement of enormous amounts of wealth into the hand of the few and favored, the ruination of the American reputation abroad, and the disastrous de-regulation of the American financial system to its recessionistic domestic and foreign consequences. It took the American people—at least a political majority of them—to finally get it; they had put an incompetent, cowardly fool in office (well, sort of), for eight years. Well, the legacy of his Reich will haunt us for perhaps decades. Why stop ranting.

On Veteran’s Day the spectral Mr. Cheney emerged to gave a little speech about those of have put themselves in harm’s way to protect our liberty. This from the serial draft deferer, the evil genius behind the Texas Air National Guard duty shirker, both hypocrites who can mouth their “pride” in the troops while extending and repeating their deployments, returning their bodies in secrecy and cutting their VA medical benefits, so that they could have their war while the rest of the country went shopping.

I had written earlier in their tenure of what I regarded as the shute to fascism that this cabal had greased with regular scare tactics from 911. Even at the end of the death squads, the usage of uncontrolled mercenaries, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the re-definition of torture, the dismissal of the Geneva Conventions, and other disgusting practices that should have—but didn’t—bring millions into the streets to object to the debasement of everything that our warriors of previous generations were ostensibly fighting to protect. What a perverse irony can be fashioned in a atmosphere! How truly frightening it was that we could come close to worst authoritarian regimes of this century. Amazing that our Constitution could be shredded by the likes of scumbags like Alberto Gonsalez and John Yoo, and that Bush could treat Congress like some superfluous gaggle of fools by attaching “signing statements” to nearly every piece of Congressional legislation that was passed, in effect announcing that he had no intention of following the new laws if he so desired. How creeps like Phil Graham snuck in poisonous and self-serving deregulations like the Commodity Futures Modernization Act practically in the middle of he night that we are now paying a huge economic price for.

This was only part of an on-going process too arrogate to the Executive power that constitutionally the founders set with the Congress. Amazing, that an incompetent fool could pull off such a coup d’etat in that country that calls itself the greatest country in history. Bullshit!

To ignore this past history—despite the aftermath that will linger for years—is foolishness. The Republican Party is a shambles just now. They ran their election on the worst of their values—just listen to any Palin stump speech. They showed the world what they had become, handing microphones to idiots like Joe the Plumber an artery-bursting codger who thought he was Howard Beale in Network, and a demented Limbaugh-dittohead woman who insisted Obama is an Arab. This turned out t be their “base”—uneducated bigots and boneheads. Right now, this is their political party. And it is in the best interest of the country to keep it that way. The “base” has shrunken down to a bunch of red-necked cretins with fewer teeth than brain cells, full of hatred and un-recognized self-loathing.

You see, I have no interest in a detent with Fat Bastard, Joe the Plumber, or a concordat with the sleazy Mr. Leiberman, or the graspy Mr. Paulsen and the sibilant sliminess of Robert Gates. They are not “evil” (that’s their religious-based term), but they are really bad people, bad for my country, the country I now feel I might have a stake in again. So screw them! They did their best to screw this country and enrich themselves. We could use a little blood in the cobbles of the Place de la Concorde(?).

And I’m also not very hot on the idea of Hillary for Secretary of State, either.
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© 2008, James A. Clapp

 

53. 3:    90 MINUTES IN HEAVEN, by Don Piper 2004       BR 11.7.2008

                    

Heaven, I’m in heaven

And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak

And I seem to find the happiness I seek

When were out together dancing cheek to cheek

Normally, I would never bother with a book like this. But the author was interviewed by some reporter on NPR, so I checked Amazon.com and there was a used copy available for all of $0.01. Why not. After all, it was rather propitious; I was writing a section of a book that dealt with the subject of “heaven,” and here was a guy who claims that he had actually been there. The subtitle calls it a “true story of death and life.” A first-person account.

Don Piper is a Protestant pastor who was in a terrible auto accident in 1989. The EMT’s thought he was dead—Piper claims that he was indeed dead—but a friend came along to “pray over” Piper and noticed that he was stirring under the plastic they had covered him with. They called for the “Jaws of Life,” cut him out and got him to a hospital where he spent 105 perilous and agonizing days with a badly mangled leg and a broken arm. His recovery has been long, painful and incomplete. It is a story of “resurrection.”

But it’s that 90 minutes when he was supposedly dead that Piper’s book is supposedly about. Unfortunately, it isn’t. I had a lot of questions about heaven, but Piper doesn’t answer any of them. For all of his hour and a half visit he has about two paragraphs of celestial memoir. And what he provides is pure el snoro. Most of the book is about his hospital stay and convalescence, about the depression, dependency and pain, especially from a device attached to his leg called a fixator, that has to be cranked to promote bone growth and is excruciating. In that regard it is, save for the frequent references that he would not mind returning to heaven, a conventional story of a recovery from a near-fatal accident.

Here might be several neurological and psychological explanations for—and this is giving him the benefit of the doubt—Piper’s “visit” to “heaven.” The shock of the accident to his system, the pouring of adrenalin, the rush of endorphins, at least were likely to affect his imagination and the state of his cognition and consciousness. So what does Piper’s heave turn out to be? It’s a pastiche of tired biblical and, frankly, tired and silly clichés. After heading down a “tunnel” toward a brilliant light he is met by predeceased family members and friends. Rather than discussing “heaven” we get mini-bios on these beloved ones who welcome Piper warmly. They were the ages they were when they died, but “more radiant and joyful than they had ever been on earth.” He claims that “age has no meaning in heaven.” He uses the word “perfect” a lot. “when they gazed at me, I knew (emphasis his) what the Bible means by perfect love.” What does the Bible mean by perfect love. And there is a lot of very bright light in “heaven” (so bring your sunglasses).

Piper does not claim to meeting up with God, Jesus, or the Holy Ghost. He doesn’t even claim to seeing angels, although he says that “My most vivid memory of heaven is what I heard. I can only describe it as a holy swoosh of wings.” He could also hear music and a lot of praising of God (in English, of course). Do you remember those stories about the “pearly gates?” Piper was looking for the gates, and found them, but they are not quite made of pearls, but they were “pearlescent—perhaps iridescent (emphasis his) . . . To me, it looked as if someone had spread pearl icing on a cake. The gate glowed and shimmered.”  Wow, Im', glad that's cleard up.

Piper didn’t get to go in, but he got a glimpse of what’s inside. “I paused just outside the gate, and I could see it was a city with paved streets. To my amazement, they had been constructed of literal gold. If you imagine a street paved with gold bricks, that’s as close as I can come to describing what lay inside the gate.” (pp. 34-5)

That’s it—heaven. The sort of place that might be imagined by some six-year-old in a Sunday school class, a family reunion outside a pearlescent gate to a golden city. Wow! Now where have we heard that stuff before? Sounds like some sort of Biblical theme park they might build outside of Orlando (there actually is a Holy Land theme park there, complete with daily crucifixion re-enactments).

Piper has returned to his pastoral activities, although for years he told no one about his heavenly visit. He has counseled several people who have had terrible injuries like his own, and that is commendable. But none, as he describes them, have experience death, heaven and resurrection. Piper writes that he is ready, even eager, to go back to heaven. He’s dead certain that, next time, he will pass through the pearly—oops!—make that “pearlescent” gates.

Heaven, I’m in heaven

And the cares that hung around me through the week

Seem to vanish like a gamblers lucky streak

When were out together dancing cheek to cheek. (Irving Berlin)
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© 2008, James A. Clapp

 

53. 2:   MEN WALK ON MOON; BLACK MAN OCCUPIES WHITE HOUSE    11.5.2008

                    Some random thoughts on a remarkable occurance

                    

There a milestone moments in our lives, events which tell us that something has changed. Barack Obama ran his campaign on change, but most of us interpreted that word to mean ending the war, restoring our economy, taking care of the health of the planet and the health of our people, and such. But now we see that the change is much more fundamental, deeper, transformative, a meta-change. The very tectonics of the American political landscape has been subducted. Things feel different. I sent out a “yes we did!” email to all the “subscribers” to DCJ last evening. Suddenly my in box was full of emails from France, three from Germany, two from Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, PR China, and, of course, the good ole US of A—foreign friends wishing us the best, cheering us on, and expats and homeys suddenly feeling like they can hold their heads up again.

You could see it in the way the world reacted. But you could also see it on the face of Barack Obama. He stood the last moments before leaving the stage last night with an expression that I call a Gethsemene moment—the weight of what he had committed himself to fell upon him, and almost messianic weight. Now don't get me wrong, I am not equating Obama with Christ, and I do not mean the Gethsemene moment to convey in any way an imminent dire result; I mean it to refer to an existential instance, in which one is no longer quite the same as before, and the knowledge of its epiphanic realization is almost concussive. I thought I saw that on Obama’s face. He did not smile, his step was a bit less graceful. The exotic-named new president is replacing the most dis-liked and vilified political figure since Adolph Hitler and a messianic mantel has fallen upon him. He transcends his own country. The hopes of billions have been placed upon him. He can look in the mirror and see himself as the “other” that circumstances have made him. If I believed in prayer I would pray for him.

McCain will go to one of his houses to lick his wounds. This aspiration is no more for him. Sarah Palin, the momentary queen of the dregs of the vanquished drooling, hate-spewing, bible-thumping Republican wing, will return to the arctic and relative obscurity. By the time of the next election she will have been dealt with by the party apparatchiks because she turned out to be the poison pill that McCain foolishly swallowed on the advice of the neo-cons (were they out to kill the “maverick” off?). Joe the Plumber probably won’t even get a Letterman-Leno shot and go from commodity to commode. He was too stupid to understand Obama’s tax plan was good for him, and  even to get the joke he had become. They were, and are, of the past; the warrior-politician; the hockey-mom “outsider” who wants in; the useful buffoon. McCain showed some grace at the end, but I am glad to see him go. I have not written kindly of him in these pages. He parlayed getting shot down and a P.O.W sentence into high political office, a rich wife and a bunch of houses. But there is nothing intrinsically special about this guy. He was not the man of the hour and the peop[le seemed to sense it.

Obama is change, just by his victory, just by being what he has made of himself. He has changed the pedigree for the presidency to an American-ness that is more like what we are, but against all the odds of what we were putatively allowed to be. His victory transcends race but, for my part, I was thrilled to see the joy and relief on the faces of descendents of those who were dragged to these shores to be treated as less than human. They have a new champion, who is also xi champion, who is also much of the world’s champion—not because he is Black (not in spite of it either), but because he is capable, eloquent, intelligent, determined, and cool.

I recall that many years ago a poll was taken of the most recognizable American name around the world. One would expect it to be the President, whoever that was. It wasn’t; it was Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight champion of the world. Ali, as we know, transcended his sport. He became a symbol, an icon and, in some sense, a “messiah” for many African-Americans.

When he was Cassius Clay of Louisville, the light-heavyweight Olympic champion who subsequently tossed his gold medal (he says) into a river, he was brash, loud, confident, and the polar opposite of Steppin’ Fetchit. At first, I didn’t like him much, although I admired his ring skills. I think this is because I was brought up not to like wise guys with big mouths. I even pulled for Liston to quiet him down with those huge, heavy fists of his. But Clay vanquished Liston twice.

Then Clay became Muhammad Ali—in the days before we had demonized Islam—but still, he had shucked his “slave name.” That gave me pause, too. But then, he gave up his heavyweight championship because he refused to go and kill Vietnamese people who had done no harm to him or his country. In spite of all my social “programming” Muhammad Ali became my champion. He had transcended his sport, and his race. No man would be his “Massa,” not even the president of the United States.

Now, some four decades later, an African-American has the power to bring to an end another war our country is waging against a country that never attacked us. Barack Obama ran his campaign without playing the “race card.” He was open with his racial background (one that seems to be regarded by many as completely African-American), but he used it neither to petition, not to demand any special consideration, even when the opposition fashioned fear-mongering oblique references to it. At first, there was a question whether he had the “experience” for the leadership necessary to function in the Bush-screwed-up world. Then, as the campaign—and the length of the primaries and presidential campaign favored getting to know him—wore on, his coolness, the steadiness of policy positions, his intelligence and eloquence, drew greater contrasts with the ill-focused McCain and his bizarre choice of running mate. By election day, only die-hard Republicans, and the loony fringe who felt Obama was everything from Karl Marx to the Anti-Christ could not see that he had the better character, policies and the charisma.

He has yet to govern as chief executive for a day, but already, there is the feeling I had like the day men walked on the moon, some new territory of human experience has been opened, a new era has dawned and, eight years late, it feels like the 21st century has officially begun. Now I can show my passport with pride. Now I can even wave the flag. Who knows, I might even be able to speak with some old friends, again.
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© 2008, James A. Clapp

 

53. 1: YOU ARE WHAT YOU DO 11.2.2008

Thoughts on Joe the Plumber and Who We Are

                      
                                                        ©2008, UrbisMedia

There is something downright anachronistic about “Joe, the Plumber.” The Republicans jumped on Joe and made him an icon for the troubled working (white) guy. Despite the fact Obama’s tax policies would benefit Joe, he was too dumb to figure that out—exactly the unintelligent, unreflective white guy they were looking for. Republicans like people who are too dumb to figure out what is in their own best interest.

Sarah Palin, speaking to her salivating mob of social bottom-feeders, has expanded the theme, calling out the likes of Ramon, the Fruit Picker, Lai Nguyen, the Manicurist, Chen, the Laundryman, Bobby Bob, the Klansman, Clyde, the Accountant, and Sherman, the Greedy Wall Street Trader. Everybody is not identified by what they do. It helps ground our stereotypes; allows us to become sound bites. And ever so subtly, it recognizes our secret class system. In the Republican world people “know their place”; Black people do not get the crazy idea in their heads that they can be president, Gays do not mess with the sacredness of American “marriage,” and the “lower classes” wait patiently and uncomplainingly for the fruits of their labors to “trickle down” over the skimmers in Wall Street and K Street.

Joe, the Plumber wears his occupational appellation proudly. He is working class cum lower middle class with aspirations, they say, to someday own a fleet of “Joe, the Plumber” service trucks riding around neighborhoods of foreclosed houses. That is, if his country music album flops, or McCain Palin never get to create a cabinet post of Secretary of Unclogging Republican Feculent Brains.

But let me desist in my partisan ramble, because I find the subject opened by the “Joe, the Plumber” phenomenon rather sociologically interesting in the questions it raises about occupation and personal identity. “Joe, the Plumber” actually brings up identity matters that one encounters at a picnic or a cocktail party. The first question you might be asked of a stranger is, “what’s your name? The second is likely to me “what do you do?”

Sometimes you are introduced to others with “This is Joe. Joe’s a plumber.”

Stranger: “Oh, how interesting. A plumber! A lot of people must see your, ah, you know . . .”.

Joe: “Yeah, butt crack. I get that a lot.”

In the beginning of human existence occupational identities were quite limited. Imagine the Classified Ads in the Paleolithic Times-Chronicle, July 27, 90,000B.C.:

Wanted: Hunter, Class I. Certified for mastodon, bears, and saber-toothed tigers. At least five years experience in individual hunting, and two in team hunting. Must bring own spear. Salary: first cuts of meat after hunting party leader. Benefits: you must be kidding.

Wanted: Experienced Gatherer. All fruits and vegetables, including tubers and insects. Must have at least 3 yrs. upper tree experience. Two- liter baskets supplied by employer. Salary commensurate with productivity. Benefits: poison berry burial. Must have Green Card.

Just imagine page after page of ads like this—for only two kinds of work, hunting, or gathering. That was the way of it for hundreds of thousands of years before the emergence of Neolithic villages, when “farmer” and “herdsman” were added to the classified pages. You can be assured there was yet to be a “Joe the Plumber” since people were still pooping in the woods and keeping a sharp eye while doing it; people were more prey than predator in those days and many a pre-historic person did not return from doing “their business” in the woods. Only with the emergence of cities (and chamber pots) did many different kinds of work come into being, and then not that many until the Industrial Revolution.

But one thing was common to all these ages—people were identified mostly by what they did. One’s work was one’s identity. In the old days you didn’t need to ask people their names and what kind of work they did because people were often named for what they did. Surnames like Sawyer, Cooper, Hunter, Fisher, Forrester, and Finstermacher (just though I’d toss that one in there as a little test) and many others, identified the person by what they did for work. People were just like then sign that one might see over a shop; if it showed a loaf of bread, it was a bakery, and owner might well be named “Joe, the Baker.”

That all changed, of course, as the city made more jobs available, guilds gave way to corporations, and children didn’t necessarily follow in te occupational footsteps of their parents. I used to ask students in my classes how many of them were studying for the same occupation as practiced by one of their parents. Rarely would a hand go up. So these days a Hunter might be an accountant, and a Farmer might be and engineer, and a Finstermacher might be a psychiatrist. Joe the Plumber’a name is actually Joe Wurzelbacher (German for “Turd Brain”). People no longer have surnames that tells us what they really do, so it is rather a throwback—and perhaps a wishful one—to long ago times to return to referring rto people by their occupations.

What we prefer to be called has a lot to do with our identity. In the neighborhood where I grew up I remember that people were referred to by my family by their ethnic identities if we did not know their occupations. There was the “Polish lady” who lived a couple doors away, the skinny “Irishman” who staggered home drunk every Saturday night, and the “Negro family” at the end of the street. Those who we didn’t know by ethnicity or race might be called “the Widow” or the “Limping man.” It was and urban neighborhood, but conducted itself quite like a small town in this respect, maybe because the Italians who dominated the neighborhood came mostly from small towns in Italy and Sicily.

If the sort of work that we do is so important to our identity, then a good society, one that would enhance the opportunity and access to the sorts of work that we choose, that are not dictated by constraints and circumstances not of our making, is the sort of society we should construct. The U.S. Army co-opted a slogan—“be all that you can be"—ironically, for an institution that appeals mostly to people who have no, or few, other occupational choices. But being all that we can be is an apt desideratum for a society that optimizes the opportunities for personal growth and development. “Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.” said Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle in the 18 th Century. He might have emphasized that he meant “chosen” work; for most of human history the work that most men and women have done was whatever needed, or could be done just to survive.

It should be obvious that the essential pre-condition for such a notion is the quality of the educational institution that a society creates. As the world has become more urbanized traditional “property” in the form of land, territory, herds, and other physical property have given way to “intellectual” property (degrees and training, typically for what is called “services”).

It has been the great good fortune of America that its emergence and history have coincided with the great expansion of occupations. That, and the Enlightenment ideals of equality that it has struggled to meet, have, with notable periods of national shame, resulted in a nation that, 146 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, has produced a man of mixed race, who has broken the bonds of America’s secret class system and could be called “Barack, the Community Organizer, Professor of Constitutional Law, U.S. Senator” and might become “President Obama.” What a shame—and what a perverse irony—it would be if some thoughtless fool who calls himself "Joe the Plumber" and his like keep this country from finding its true course.
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© 2008, Jim the Professor