November 6th, 2008 |
It would have taken a swimming pool full of Visine to wash away all the bloodshot eyes I’ve had from watching the presidential candidates vying for votes on television over the past year-and-a-half. It’s been a strain on my eyes.
Speaking of eyes, if you voted for John McCain, you may be crying your eyes out.
If you voted for Barack Obama, you may have even shed a few tears over the election of the first African-American president.
Now that the election is over, we are now swimming in a gigantic pool of election superlatives uttered by family members, neighbors, television and radio commentators, and journalists. Talk about the West Virginia football team has been replaced by political conversation. Sales-pitch phone calls have been interrupted by friends and family members calling to talk about the election results
Rather than wear those superlatives out, I have just five little words for you, capitalized, blackened and followed by an exclamation mark! AH, HOW SWEET IT IS! And so is the fig I’m eating right here under my tree—the one with the “Yes We Can” Obama poster tacked to its trunk.
First Person Plural
Paul Bloom, writing in the November issue of The Atlantic, has some interesting things to say about human nature. The article is entitled, “First Person Plural” and has caught my attention in a helpful way when it comes to sorting out human behavior, particularly when I am trying to piece together what has taken place in this election.
Bloom describes the war that goes on inside the human brain when it comes to the search for a good and pleasurable life—you know, that pursuit of happiness thing. There isn’t one self inside that brain, he writes, but a multiplicity of selves all with different desires, all competing against one another and bargaining with one another for control. Forget the one person you think you are and see yourself as a first person plural.
Need I put flesh on this concept? That’s an easy picture to draw. You’re familiar with it. It’s the image of a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, plus a host of characters vying for attention, all telling you what to do in a given situation.
Passing Ellen’s Ice Cream parlor on Capitol Street, one voice tells me to go in and indulge in a huge chocolate sundae. That’s Two-Ton-Jimmy who wants attention. The other voice is the Health-And-Welfare voice who tells me to resist by getting on home where, I am told, I’ll get my satisfaction gnawing on a couple of carrot sticks.
It’s the old Adam and Eve story. Do we eat the apple or not? Do we cheat on the test, cheat on our taxes, cheat on our wives, or cheat on the truth? Or do we resist cheating, even killing, on the advice of that goody-angel who whispers cherublike counsel. You know—Lead-Us-Not-Into-Temptation talking back to Oh- What-The-Heck-Just-Do-It.
On top of that there are the outside voices. We heard plenty of them during the presidential campaign. Some appealed to our dark self, loving our ignorance and pandering to our fears.
Like, the voice I heard on a television set in a doctor’s office—the Fox in the hen house network. It said Obama is a socialist, a communist, a fascist, a bosom-buddy of terrorists and anarchists, a bandit who wants to take our hard-earned money away from us.
Like the voice that kept saying a black man can’t get elected in White America. And if a white person says he will vote for Obama, forget it. He’s lying.
Like the sign held by a man at a McCain/Palin rally which screamed these words: “Who Do You Want for President? A war hero or a terrorist?”
A whole platoon of selves race around in our brain, chattering night and day to the inner ear of our fears. They’ve been fed and nurtured by the families that raised us, the communities that educated us, even the religions institutions that have sought to save us.
But there’s also a brigade of other selves that inform us, counsel us and encourage us. Every time I hear their plea that I be more loving, more just, more forgiving, more empathetic, I know that the battle is on in my brain and the outcome will emerge only after a tough struggle. Yes-We-Can fights endlessly with No-You-Can’t.
But be warned. You say you don’t have that struggle because you have no racist self, no violent self, no sexist self, no greedy self, no cynical self? Beware. Pay attention. That kind of message comes from Mr-Self-Rightous and his brother, I-Thank-God-I’m-Not-Like-Those-Other- People.
The Apostle Paul, long before psychological and human behavior studies existed, knew about this battle of the selves. In his letter to Christians in Rome he wrote: “I do not understand what I do… When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind…”
During the presidential campaign much ado was made about “negative ads” and candidates “going negative.” Negative tactics, we were told, were just a part of the political game.
Here’s my take on this negativity stuff. As much as folks seem to enjoy a good mud-sling, there is another self that hates the slime—a self that seeks to be rescued from the muck. What has so often been missing in my life, and perhaps yours as well, is political leadership which appeals to our better self. It is a self capable of embodying high ideals and dreams—a self willing even to sacrifice selfish interests for the good of others.
I confess. Barack Obama has appealed to that better self in me, as he has to others as well. He won the heart of the nation at the ballot box, in a truly heroic victory.
Dancing And Laughing Instead Of Burning Our Flag
What a joy it was to see people celebrating and dancing, laughing and singing in the streets in Kenya over the Obama victory. Think of it, the Oval Office now occupied by the son of a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas.
The only glitch in the celebration was the fact that Kansas, the home of Obama’s mother, was only able to muster slightly over 41 percent of the vote for him.
Millions of people around the world gathered to cheer and rejoice over an election in a country that once held black people in slavery, lynched them and denied them access to water fountains, integrated schools and the ballot box.
What a turnaround. Since our invasion of Iraq, the torturing of people, open disdain for negotiations with enemies, and the overt violation of international law, we have seen a pathetic and tragic erosion of our relations with other nations of the world. Such behavior has made more enemies and threatened our nation’s security. The damage done with our “war on terror” has far exceeded the tragic events of 9/11. What a cruel twist of events.
How lovely it was, how encouraging, to see people celebrating around the word and not burning American flags.
It is nothing short of a political miracle that people around the world still look to America with the hope that we might live out another self, our better self.
So What Happened To West Virginia?
Just west of my home in Charleston, Ohio went for Obama. To the south and east, Maryland and Virginia turned blue for Obama. Pennsylvania, our northern border state, did likewise. So what happened to West Virginia?
We’re soul-searching about that here in West Virginia. It’s worth a comment or two as I take comfort under my fig tree—where the weather is unseasonably warm and the leaves still cling to mountainside branches. I ask myself: How did the state that supported John Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic president, fail to support Barack Obama?
I hope my readers will resist the temptation to turn off at this point because West Virginia, and Appalachia itself, may mean little to you. Because this part of the nation in which I live is so poorly understood by other Americans, and because there are so many prejudicial and mean-spirited voices that jeer and laugh at us, I beg you to read on. More importantly, read on because the people of Appalachia, ironically, are the very folks Barack Obama was elected to represent.
That said, I have to be honest and say that the Obama campaign, from my vantage point, wrote West Virginia off. Obama came to Charleston during the run-up to the primary election, but shunned us after he lost overwhelmingly to Hillary Clinton. He didn’t come back. Slow to place organizers, offices and money here, the final attention we got with a little money and visits by both Clintons and Joe Biden was too little too late.
I spent a lot of time with members of the Obama team. For the better part of six weeks I organized an effort which resulted in 41 clergy from around West Virginia signing a statement declaring publicly that we were voting for Obama because he embodied a vision capable of leading the nation into a new day. That statement of support ran in six newspapers around the state. The clergy represented a variety of traditions—Apostolic, Pentecostal, Episcopal. Lutheran, Baptist, United Methodist, Presbyterian, and various fundamentalist churches. On top of that, the clergy were African-American and white. It was a delight making these connections.
What I can say is that Appalachian West Virginia never really got to know Obama, like they did John Kennedy when he came here to walk among the people. Kennedy, like his successor, Lyndon Johnson, was inspired by Michael Harrington’s pivotal 1962 book, The Other America: Poverty in the United States. That book put a face on Appalachian poverty. For Kennedy, wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger, the book “helped crystallize his determination in 1963 to accompany the tax cut (with) a poverty program.”
When I think of how Barack Obama got tarred by the trash-talking media for being a socialist, I laugh. Harrington was a conscientious objector during the Korean War, active also in the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations concerned with labor, poverty, civil rights, and civil liberties, and a leader of the Democratic Socialist Party. Now wouldn’t Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter have had a field day with Kennedy if they’d been on the airwaves back then?
Speaking of airwaves and media coverage, West Virginia, like many parts of the country, especially in rural areas, is suffocating under the blanket of corporate media chains that pump out one-party propaganda—grossly one-sided in a neoconservative way.
One example: I tried to get an op-ed piece, favorable to Obama, in three newspapers around the state. One said only local writers were welcome. Another said they didn’t print political op-eds. The third said it stopped political endorsement pieces on October 1. I am told that Senator Byrd can’t get a piece in that paper even though he grew up in that part of the state. Lord have mercy, he’s been our senator for 50 years.
One last observation. Governor Manchin, a Democrat, was just reelected by a 70% margin. Jay Rockefeller, another Democrat, was reelected to the Senate by a 63% margin. What does it say about the Democratic leadership when Barack Obama was only able to garner 43% of the vote? With 665,234 registered Democrats, as opposed to 347,760 Republicans, what does that say about the leadership of the Democratic Party, unable to bring its constituency along behind Obama?
And couldn’t the union influence, depleted in mine workers yet still a strong presence in rural areas, turn the tide? AFL-CIO national leader, Richard Trumpka, a coal-digging Appalachian himself, gave one of the strongest and most powerful speeches directed to members about racism and the need to support Obama. Take a look, it’s worth the time. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QIGJTHdH50). Couldn’t labor turn the tide?
State Democratic Party Chairman Nick Casey, campaigning around the state, said this: “I’d rather have a black friend than a white enemy.” Having grown up Irish Catholic in Charleston, Casey stumped for Obama by following John F. Kennedy’s bus route in the 1960 Democratic primary.
There is no doubt in my mind that Obama was gaining ground in West Virginia when the bell rang closing the polls. Sure, there were some older folks (we have many here) and others who would never vote for a black man, just like there were some who could never vote for a Roman Catholic. But I believe that if Obama hadn’t written us off early-on, and had been willing to ride the bus with Nick, things could have been different.
The Prophetic Itch That Awaits President Obama
There’s a Bible story worth paying attention to now that we have a new president. If you are not a Bible-totin’ person, just accept the wisdom of the story like you would an Aesop fable or a Greek myth.
You see, Israel—back when it was a loose confederation of tribes, presided over by judges—wanted to be a country ruled by a king. Not a bad idea they thought—a king like other nations, one who would consolidate power and ward off enemies. But Samuel, a great prophet, warned them against mimicking other countries. Kings were not to be trusted. Poor old Samuel, however, lost that battle. A series of kings, David being the most predominate, followed.
But Israel’s prophets didn’t go away by any means. They popped up like an agitating itch to challenge the rulers of Israel when they got power-mad and unjust. Think what an irritating itch the prophet Amos or Jeremiah would have been to George Bush.
When George Bush is back in Crawford, Texas, cutting brush, Barack Obama will occupy the Oval Office. Oh, how I will celebrate the two-day feast in January—Dr. King’s birthday and Barack Obama’s inauguration! It’s a new moment in time—a hopeful one at that. I won’t let the cynics and the naysayers deter me from celebrating.
But here’s a warning not to be forgotten. The body politic must always come under scrutiny, no matter what political party is in control. A healthy nation is one that is slightly, even profoundly, ill-at-ease with itself. It needs gadflies, muckrakers, critics, prophetic voices, if it is to be faithful to its own promises, dreams and commitments.
I cast my vote for Barack Obama because I choose to sit on his doorstep, watching carefully to see if he is being faithful. Others will be on that doorstep, and in the Rose Garden, where the elite gather. There will be a bevy of lions ready to have him for lunch—special interests that don’t have the interest of the nation at heart. The lion I’m keeping an eye on is the one wants to drag him off to a war in Afghanistan where he will be eaten alive by a war that will increase military spending and shed more blood.
To return to a Biblical theme, Barack Hussein Obama is a modern day Daniel who will need all the grace and strength he can muster to ward off the lions.
Sitting And Walking And Flying
A quote circulating from an anonymous source, and now turning up on a tee shirt and a button, is a mighty sweet fig. It goes like this: “Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Barack could run. Barack is running so our children can fly.”
November 6th, 2008
October 17th, 2008 |
Now that we are coming down to the end of the baseball season, when folks kiss the boys of summer goodbye, perhaps it’s a good time to ponder a quote from “Red” Smith—a now deceased sports writers I used to read as a kid.
His words caught my eye as I took my morning walk the other day. They were etched on a chalkboard outside Taylor Books down on Capitol Street. I smiled when I read them.
I often smile when I see words that ring true—words I wish I had written. The author, having beaten me to the punch, I can do no more than bow gracefully before them and quietly steal them, as if they were mine.
Left behind, like a well-worn shirt in a dead man’s closet, Smith’s seventeen words—64 letters from the alphabet, spiced with an apostrophe and sealed with a period—are now mine to wear as I walk.
“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”
I’ve been writing Notes From Under the Fig Tree for over twenty-five years. Which means that I have shed enough blood, with my self-inflicted wounds, to satisfy a brigade of vampires.
My exercises in bleeding have changed since I first opened a vein. In the old days, I actually did sit down at a typewriter, chopped out words on a green sheet of waxed mulberry paper, typed over covered correction fluid to cover mistakes, and cranked out inked copies from a Gestetner mimeograph machine.
(To satisfy folks who demand full disclosure, I must say that I didn’t always do the cranking. Judy once cranked some pre-Notes copy for me while we were at seminary. Her cranking helped induce the birth of our twin daughters the very next day.)
Anyway, today I sit in front of a computer, draw from the Internet for research, use my freedom to move words and paragraphs about, and never once have to soil my hands with ink, or crank out newborn words to my readers.
I have no cat at home to brush against my legs as I write, but I share my writer’s task with an anonymous eighth century Irish monk who penned these words:
I and Pangur Ban my cat,
́Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night…
́Gainst the wall he sets his eye,
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
́Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try…
So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Ban, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.
Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.
I steal again, this time from Montaigne, who said: “I quote others only in order the better to express myself.” That said, I devote this issue of Notes to the task of swiping lines from others so that I can better open my own veins to bleed in your direction.
A Holy Restlessness In Search Of Higher Ignorance
As we approach the November election, let’s all admit the truth about Barack Obama and John McCain, in spite of our individual political opinions. Simply stated and confessed: They are both intelligent human beings.
Political campaigns are supposed to surface the intelligence of candidates—often hidden beneath the superficial clichés and canned talking point—so that voters can make a smart choice when casting a ballot. People are anxiously taking their economic temperature by looking at Wall Street numbers and IRA figures, lottery numbers for the pot at the end of a rainbow-colored ticket, and poll numbers to figure out an intelligent political candidate they can support. Folks are desperately anxious for a political leader who will lead the nation out of debt, war and a culture not at all healthy for young and old alike.
What is rarely acknowledged is the fact that no one human being has enough knowledge to save either our pitiful souls, or our angst-ridden psyches, or our wandering bodies.
Look, deep down, you and I know the truth told to us by one who penned fiction, Isaac Bashevis Singer. He wrote, “Our knowledge is a little island in a great sea of non-knowledge.”
Whether we sleep with God, a checkbook, an encyclopedia, or a man or woman we love, the depth of the sleeping arrangement will finally be determined not by what we know of the subject matter, but rather by the passion we feel when we are cuddled up with the flesh and blood mystery of the lover we embrace.
I am indebted to Pico Iyer, the writer and mystic in his own right, who reviews James P. Carse’s book The Religious Case Against Belief in the June 26 edition of The New York Review of Books, for words I choose to steal.
Iyer writes about travel, sport, film and religion in his books and book reviews. It has been said that he delights in “living between the cracks and outside fixed categories.” He describes himself this way: “I am a multinational soul on a multinational globe on which more and more countries are as polyglot and restless as airports. Taking planes seems as natural to me as picking up the phone or going to school; I fold up my self and carry it around as if it were an overnight bag.”
It’s said that he writes about “the places where mysticism and globalism converge,” and that his writing goes back and forth between the monastery and the airport… Thomas Merton on a frequent flier pass.”
No wonder he draws fresh water from Merton’s well for the liquidity of his own writing. “It is not answers that pull many people into the religious life, it is questions. The person who lives deeply and enduringly with, and within, a religion often finds that he is surrounded by ever more doubts as he goes on, not convictions. In an eloquent monk like Thomas Merton, the religious impulse is almost always fired by a kind of holy restlessness, as if each time a traveler ascends a peak, he sees nothing but the larger peaks that now confront him.” It is, in essence, a quest for “higher ignorance.”
And I would add to those stolen words—ah, yes, but no cause to throw yourself off the peak for a perilous fall, just because there is another mountain to climb. The view from your perch is glorious, and the invitation from Eve to bite from her once bitten fig is compelling, irresistible. One bite packs more energy that a piece of jerky or a bottle of Gatorade and offers enough energy to get you to the next peak.
Weary Of Musty Creedal Doctrine, Joe Sixpack And Joe The Plumber?
If life is truly more fluid and contradictory than the meanings we impose on it in order to get through the day, then the sugar water of dogmatic religion and politics will hardly quench a thirsty palate longing for a fine wine or a prize-winning beer.
And speaking of a hearty brew, all this talk from the presidential candidates about “Joe Sixpack” and “Joe the Plumber” tastes like near-beer to me. It’s a drink at the bar with very little malt, barley and hops. And, God knows there’s not enough yeast in it to raise the spirit level of me or anyone looking to imbibe in a zesty, heady, new political brew.
And, if I hear one more vow in a televised speech about how either McCain or Obama are going to protect main street as opposed to Wall Street, I’m going to put a call in to Al Qaeda and request a terrorist attack on the Suddenlink cable company. For the past 20 years I’ve walked main streets in towns all over North Carolina, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia. They’ve been full of boarded-up stores and abandoned properties for a long time, under losership from both political parties.
Pico Iyer recalls a sign he saw outside the chapel at Gethsemane, the hillside overlooking the Temple in Jerusalem where Jesus dropped sweat “like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Luke 22:44) just before his veins were opened on a cross on the peak of a hill outside of town.
The words on the sign, aimed at tour guides, could well be directed to clergy and committed lay Christians who want to wrap the message of Jesus up in a straitjacket and tie it with heavy chains. The sign reads: “PLEASE: No Explanations Inside the Church.”
I am informed by others but I speak for myself. I have grown weary of the institutional trappings of religion—in my case the Episcopal Church. I serve it faithfully but mourn so often for its loss of passion, light and fire. I sense an anorexic body beneath the vestments, smell embalming fluid rather than incense, verbiage without vitality. I hunger for what some have called the “religion of no-religion.” Perhaps that’s what Dietrich Bonhoeffer was writing about just before his own veins were opened in a Nazi concentration camp. He talked about “religionless Christianity.”
Perhaps Bonhoeffer’s departure left us with the task of figuring out what religionless Christianity is and how it might speak to people hungry for mercy and justice and tired of the diet of “true believer” doctrine and musty creedal worship.
January 19 And 20—Two Days Linked To August 4
On August 4, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered these lines from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
On January 19, the nation will celebrate Martin Luther King Day. The very next day, January 20, is Inauguration Day. At this point in the presidential campaign we might have our first African-American president. The dream that Dr. King had for his children will then be satisfied. Our nation will have lived into the dream. Color will not have mattered. Content of a person’s character will have triumphed over the racism that has poisoned the the blood stream of our nation for too long.
There are voices being raised that say people being polled may not be honest when it comes to race. They say that people will say they are voting for a black man but inside the voting booth they will not do as they said they will do. That may be partially true. Prejudices die hard with some die-hards. Sure, there are some folks who yell “kill him” at a McCain rally, and even some who would move past words and actually pull the trigger.
But here’s my thought on the matter. I think the goodness I find in so many Americans will rise above the bad-ass temperament that always seems to create a disturbance and get attention. Even though this presidential campaign has gone south to the swamp more times than enough and made appeals to the worst side of human nature, I believe the racist animus will not prevail in this election.
What gets no attention at all is that some folks who don’t want friends to know they are voting for a black man may, indeed, smile as they mark their ballot for Obama. I heard a white woman say that the other day—“You know I don’t talk to my father about how I am going to vote. He thinks I’ll vote like him. Hell no! I’m for Obama.”
Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961, just two years to the day after Dr. King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Interestingly enough, starting in the month of August, 1961, civil rights volunteers (SNCC and CORE) spread out over Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia to register black voters so that they could bring change to the racist policies that had for too long dominated politics.
That determination to right our nation’s wrongs was not without bloodshed. When Barack Obama was celebrating his third birth day, August 4, 1964, the bodies of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James E Chaney were discovered in an earthen Mississippi dam.
King, like Obama, had to deal with those who heckled and threatened. Segregationists called King “Martin Luther Coon” and “Martin Lucifer.” J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI nicknamed him “burrhead” and called him “the most notorious liar in America.” Hoover stopped informing King of plots against his life and brought FBI leaders into a meeting designed to “neutralize King as an effective leader.”
A labor leader recently told me that he had addressed a group of union women. He reminded them that West Virginia had moved beyond prejudice and became the state that put the first Roman Catholic into the White House. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if West Virginia would be a state that helped elect the first African-American president? For that he got a loud and raucous cheer from the women. I’m hoping it will be heard across our mountain state.
One more tidbit before I go on with my own dream, that being that Obama will be our forty-fourth president (there’s those fours again). Given the economic crisis we are in right now, I find a portion of King’s words that day, often neglected, terribly prophetic in an analogous way.
“It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”
On January 20, 2009, no matter where the Stock Market is, a huge debt may be paid, at least in part.
A Couple Of Quotables From Yours Truly
I am always humbled and somewhat embarrassed when someone comes up to me and quotes something I said in a talk, sermon, class or an issue of Notes. It is nice, however to know that not everything I peck or scribble goes down a sinkhole. So, for fun, here are a couple of quotables from yours truly.
• Be cautious of John McCain. He hasn’t made peace with the Vietnam War. His unfinished business could well lead us into another quagmire—like Afghanistan. Be cautious of Barack Obama. He has no war time service to make peace with. He could be tempted to add one to his résumé by leading us into another quagmire—like Afghanistan.
• Christians say that Jesus was the Word made flesh. He was love and truth embodied. Nailed to the cross, the Word opened his vein and bled his way into a transfusion for believers—one that restored love and truth in a world mesmerized by hate and lies.
• William Styron has written that books were the “rocks and boulders” he could cling to against his “onrushing sense of doom and mortality.” If you have some books in the house, like I do, for God’s sake treat them like pet rocks and hold them like a rosary made of stone.
October 17th, 2008
September 26th, 2008 |
“This class of mine, these people—the ones who smell like an ashtray in the checkout line, devour a carton of Little Debbies at a sitting, and praise Jesus for a truck with no spare tire—exist in every state in our nation. Maybe the next time we on the left encounter such seemingly self-screwing, stubborn, God-obsessed folks, we can be open to their trials, understand the complexity of their situation, even have enough solidarity to pop for a cheap retread tire out of our own pockets, simply because that would be a kind thing to do and surely would make the ghosts of Joe Hill, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mohandas Gandhi smile.”
Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War, by Joe Bageant
******
In the 1944 election, Franklin D. Roosevelt chose Harry Truman as his running-mate. Some people said: “Harry who?” He didn’t graduate from college. He ran a haberdashery in Kansas City that went bankrupt. And when President Roosevelt died he had been vice-president for only 82 days.
In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon announced that his vice presidential pick was Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew. Once again, the question: “Spiro who?” In six short years he rose from his first elected office in 1962 as Baltimore County Executive to governor of Maryland to vice president of the United States. A surprise Nixon pick, he had been governor for only two years.
In the 1984 election, George H.W. Bush picked Indiana Senator Dan Quayle for his running mate. This time people scratched their heads and said: “Dan who?” The brunt of endless jokes, he rose and fell from office faster than Icarus fell into the sea on his flight toward the sun. He’s now relegated to the whatever-became-of list.
For better or for worse, we’ve had a slew of no-name vice presidents. Now, here’s Senator John McCain choosing Sarah Palin from what some call the rough and tundra playing field of Alaska politics. And the American public, including political junkies and 24/7 media commentators have been saying: “Sarah who?”
Just who is Sarah Palin? She’s wreathed in mystic cloud, denied contact with the media hounds who lust for the touch of an interview. Sister Palin is in a class by herself, a distant Olympian figure. She’s fashioned as a woman who will dish the dirt with the rest of the girls; grind the old boys into mincemeat; and multitask a shop for lipstick, a moose hunt, an appointment at the office, and a hockey carpool.
She’s got class—working class class. At least that’s the mythic pose she’s struck.
In my July 5 issue of Notes I wrote this: Sad, but true, is the fact that neither candidate to date has been willing to use the word class, except to say that they want the working class vote—a category of workers many of whom now find themselves unemployed and on a downward path out of the middle class.
Well, just when it looked like that old Navy pilot John McCain was, like Icarus, about ready to fall from the sky, the GOP rescued him by going right after that working class vote. Not the Democrats mind you—the donkey that has prided itself for so long as the working class party—but the Grand Old Party.
The GOP has had an acronymic transformation. It’s no longer the Grand Old Party, it’s now a party that’s Gaga-Over-Palin. She’s the political right wing’s answer to community organizer Norma Rae.
People By The Name Of Pootie, Nance, Dink, Gator, Snooky, and Tumbug
Joe Bageant, the author of Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War, lives in Winchester, Virginia. He’s not afraid to call himself a redneck. He has the credentials to prove it. Schooled in a lower class family and neighborhood, he’s tended bar, served time in Vietnam in the Navy, built and lived in a cabin without electricity, and loves to talk and argue and drink beer at the Royal Lunch in Winchester with folks like Pootie, Nance, Dink, Gator, Snooky, and Tumbug. He’s a liberal who loves rednecks and hates what they have to put up with in this country of ours.
Bageant hears a lot about the middle class but believes the USA is a working class country. He doesn’t define working class in terms of income or a college degree. Class has to do with power. If the boss has it and you, as a worker, don’t have it, then you are working class and are living in the same space as at least 60 percent of America.
Working class doesn’t have anything to do with the color of your collar, or your neck, or how much money you make, or even if you own your own business. Conditioned not to think of oneself as working class, the truth is that you are indeed working class if “You do not have power over your work. You do not control when you work, how much you get paid, how fast you work, or whether you will be cut loose from your job at the first shiver on Wall Street.”
The present “shiver on Wall Street” ought to make a mess of folks who don’t carry a lunch pail or drive a truck to work question the I’m-in-the- middle-class label they’ve assigned themselves.
Nance is a 33 year old single mother raising two kids. She drives a forklift at the Rubbermaid plant in Winchester. While working, she listens to talk radio through earphones. Active in her fundamentalist Christian church, she doesn’t drink, and is antiunion and antiabortion. She votes Republican even though she doesn’t think she is one. She doesn’t know a single Democrat or liberal, except Bageant.
“Inconceivable though it may seem to urban Americans, it is easily possible,” writes Bageant, “for many working Americans not to know a person of liberal persuasion. Why? Partly because most middle-class liberals are uncomfortable around people like Nance.”
How true that is. I am amusingly and frustratingly puzzeled by liberal friends who will travel to China or India to meet people, eat the food, learn a few words, study history, visit a temple and come home enraptured by having engaged another culture. But go to a fundamentalist church up some hollow in Appalachia, and talk with people who deer hunt, stick magnetic flags on their trucks, and come right straight out of a Scots-Irish culture? No way, José, they say, and by-the-way, send all those José’s back to Mexico!
Sarah Palin—Mr. Smith Reincarnated
In January, film buffs will celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the film, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” It was released in 1939 and has achieved iconic status. Nominated for eleven Academy Awards, it is now 26 on the list of America’s 100 greatest films.
Jimmy Stewart plays Mr. Smith, a political novice appointed to a vacant Senate seat. He’s selected by the “Old Boys” as a man who will get more Washington “pork” for back-home special interests. But once in Washington, Smith takes on the powers that be—the Washington elite, cronyism and corruption. Oh, how we love Mr. Smith the underdog who takes on the powers that be. He is one of our iconic mythical figures.
A nation lives and dies by its myths. Paul Bunyan represents frontier vitality. John Henry is a symbol of strength. John Kennedy was Camelot. Washington’s encounter with a cherry tree embodies truth-telling. Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith is the little guy who takes on the big wheels that roll over people.
Sarah Palin is the female reincarnation of Mr. Smith. She is a transgendered David up against a massive Goliath. She’s Katherine Hepburn challenging a chauvinistic Spencer Tracy. She’s Rosie the Riveter, Mother Jones, Norma Rae, Sojourner Truth, Annie Oakley, Calamity Jane, and Wonder Woman all rolled up into one tough woman.
But who is she beneath all these myths? And without desecrating, denigrating, violating and mutilating her as a human being, just like the rest of us, how do we deal with her and her running mate, who at times seems grateful for her presence on the ticket, but awfully nervous when she’s delivering her message alongside of him?
If you go on line, you can get tips on race horses at sites like Back Stretch Barney, Conehead’s Red Hot Picks, Dr. Winmore, and, yes, Wired Figs. What follows are a couple of tips offered from beneath my fig tree on how to deal with this whole gaga-over-Palin phenomenon as we head toward the backstretch in the presidential race for the White House.
Seven Tips For My Liberal Friends Out Hunting Sarah Palin
1- Put a Safety Lock on Gun Talk: So, you don’t like the NRA? Right. Well neither do I but Charlton Heston is dead and we’ve got more important gun issues to deal with than whether Sarah Palin owns and shoots a gun. People in rural America grow up with guns and they are suspicious of some liberal gun control guy who doesn’t own a gun talking take-away. Get smart. Take a gun owner to lunch or, better still, get him or her to take you hunting or skeet shooting. However, don’t go with Dick Cheney. Better still, in the great debate over who will be president and vice president, make your target question be this one: “How many guns do you want to put into our kids hands to fight wars devised by lying politicians and warmongers?” Call to mind Woody, Joe Bageant’s friend, who was confined to his bedroom and died of heart attack in an ambulance that got stuck in the snow on a potholed road leading up to his house. A Korean War veteran, Woody used to say this about the war: “I like to got killed and froze several times just so’s they could keep a pin in some goddamned map in Washington.”
2- Don’t Let the Talk About God Drive You into a Frenzy: Some folks thought we should boycott the recent Olympics because of the abysmal human rights record of China. Others said that we should keep politics out of the sporting events. Anthony Lake, writer for The New Yorker said: “The attempt to keep politics out of sport is as futile as trying to keep sweat out of sex.” I say, the same for religion and politics. The attempt to keep religion out of politics is as futile as separating sweat from sex. Sure, we honor and cherish and struggle to keep church and state separate, but a person’s moral and religious beliefs are the tendons and ligaments that connect muscle and bone to action—political action. And why are my friends so exercised over the fact that people in Palin’s church speak in tongues? I am here to tell you that a dear friend—one of the first Episcopal women to be ordained and who was on the cover of Time when American women were honored as the Person of the Year—spoke in tongues and taught me that I should be humble about that gift. Worry most about the sleazy politicians who speak with forked tongues. A worthy question for Sister Sarah? Ask her if God is the real Commander in Chief for this nation and does the Chief order up wars like Iraq? Does she put some distance between her own beliefs and the constitutional integrity of the presidency—like Joe Biden does as a Roman Catholic with his protection of women seeking an abortion? Sister Palin doesn’t dig Darwin and evolution? Let’s ask her how she feels about economic survival of the fittest. You know, the GOP wolves in bull clothing on Wall Street eating up the little folks on main street. Oh, by the way, only last week the Church of England apologized for picking on Darwin and discounting evolution 126 years ago.
3- Get off the Education and Experience Train: Congratulations to Obama for his Harvard education, but that’s of little interest to me. I want to know how wise he is. Is he as wise as some of the farmers I know on the Delmarva Peninsula who didn’t go to college and yet know exactly how the educated elite bankers, CEO’s and politicians have manipulated and driven them into bankruptcy? Because Sarah Palin dropped out of a few colleges, what does that make her? My brother never went to college and he did pretty well as the head of a company. Remember it was what David Halberstam called “the best and the brightest” who led us into Vietnam and lied to keep us there. And, hey, Mr. Bush went to Yale, didn’t he? We’d have been better off, I sometimes think, if he had dropped out of Yale and driven a tractor trailer, waited tables, or shined shoes. So Palin’s handlers had her meet with Henry Kissinger. Right! Henry from Harvard and chief advisor on the Vietnam War. Remember language expert Henry Higgins who, in “My Fair Lady” tries to transform Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower girl (He calls her “so deliciously low…so horribly dirty!”), into a proper English lady. A word to Sarah: Stay clear of Henry—Kissinger that is—he’s low and dirty. Turn on these neo-con creeps who are using you keep a failed Bush legacy alive. Forget the college hype, instead question Sister Sarah on whether she’s ready to up spending so kids can go to college, and ready to fight for higher minimum wages, tax breaks and worker safety regulations for people who go to the work force without college.
4- Put the Animals in the Basement: Look, give up all the chatter about moose hunting and wolves. Recognize that hunting is a way of life with many people, just like bird watching and nature hikes turn others on. So, you don’t like the killing, you say. Then empty your freezer of the chicken and beef that’s been slaughter for your stew. Vegetarians? Figure out what pound of flesh you live off of—like the migrant workers who live on the edge of death so that you can have your arugula salad, veggie burger, and carmelized onions. You want to talk pit bulls? Forget lipstick and hockey moms. Think of sons and daughters transformed into a pack of pit bulls sent to kill and be killed on our behalf in what Bageant calls “some fly-blown nation,” there to protect Wall Street, gas prices and our 401(k)s. Ask the candidates, all of them, if they intend to call the dogs off.
5- Put an End to the Name Game: A web site is circulating on the Internet that prints a diatribe by Anne Lamott, a very fine writer. Loads of my friends think it’s wonderful. I think it’s terrible. She comes across like a sushi eating, chardonnay drinking, look-down-her-nose-in-a-hateful-way snob. She makes fun of the Palin’s children’s names (Bristol, Piper, Track, Willow, and Trig) by directing readers to a web page (Palin Baby Name Generator) where they can find out what their name would be if Sarah had been their mother. (I would be Log Justice Palin) Deep-six the name game. Obama’s kids are Malia and Sasha, and they are off limits as well. Let’s ask candidates what they intend to do with Medicaid and Medicare so that kid’s names don’t wind up on a tombstone before they are adults. Ms. Lamott might say I should lighten up. Maybe so, but perhaps she should cast off some of her elitist baggage and meet Pootie, Nance, Dink, Gator, Snooky, and Tumbug.
6- Connect the Economy to the War: The polls and the pundents say the economy is top billing in the mind of voters—the war is hardly worth a mention. That’s absurd. Connect the economy and the war. We are now dumping $700 billion into a Wall Street rescue. Hey, that’s the second dump. We have dumped over $500 billion into the Iraq War. Over $1 trilion sucked right out of taxpayers pockets, with Afghanistan as the next dump. Joe Bageant is right when he says that the Iraq War is a “distant thing that occasionally spits a coffin in our direction containing some local working-class son or daughter.” He’s on the money—dollars and cents wise—when he says the war is being fought by kids whose “high school trip is to Iraq”…most of whom “would die for or kill for America as they understand it.” The key words here, for me, are “as they understand it.”
7- Pootie, Nance, Dink, Gator, Snooky, and Tumbug Are Here For A Reason:
If you don’t have a Royal Lunch to duck into for conversation outside your zone of ignorance, pick up a copy of Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. Be introduced to Joe Bageant’s people. It’s an honest place even if it may be a disturbing place: “My people don’t cite real facts. They recite what they have absorbed from the atmosphere. Theirs is an intellectual life consisting of things that sound right, a blend of modern folk wisdom, cliché, talk radio, and Christian radio babble.” And remember, while you are reading, that the folks he’s talking about aren’t reading. They are too busy working, caring for families outside their reach, and struggling with their health and systems which make them sick. And, most of all, remember that they once had dreams of a better world, just like you an me. And while you are counting down the days until the next election, and then counting down the days to the next election, remember the 20 million of America’s 50 million fundamentalists who voted in the last two elections. When you get past the three peas in a pod—the politicians, preachers and the press, Bageant’s words will be instructive and directive. “You will find that the most conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists do not want a theocracy and are not inclined to civil war here or in the Middle East. Their intellectual and political leaders may be, but most of the congregation just wants to pursue happiness in pretty much the same way as everyone else. It’s time to get to know our neighbor.”
September 26th, 2008
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