Be Your Own Hero

To what extent does our celebration of our past heroes get in the way of our being heroes or recognizing the heroes in our own time?

This question was inspired by reading somewhere the theory of ages in history (Age of Gods, Age of Heroes, Age of Men . . . As in: God = Lincoln, Hero = LBJ, Man = Obama - just to give an example that is wide-open to argument, but illustrates the point, I think).

Also, thinking about my own life and sense of impotence relative to my heroes (like my Mom).

Also, this post from Somebody's Daughter.

As a progressive/radical leftist, I might quibble with the yearning for capital and ownership of the means of production by individuals (rather than by the working-classes as a whole), but as far as integration goes, control of capital in the US is absolutely essential. If it is true that African-Americans are nary to be found in the hair-industry, then it is a sad irony that the industry itself was founded, basically, by Madame CJ Walker. I suppose it just goes to show that having heroes in the past doesn't necessarily have much meaning for the present. And I wonder if, under certain circumstances, worrying too much about celebrating past heroes (a la Black History Month) gets in the way of dealing with current issues. Is Black History Month a bourgeois scam to distract the proletariat from demanding change in their own time?

The Boston Book Festival

Ahh, books. And the authors that write them. And the ideas they have.

At the inaugural Boston Book Festival, I got a chance to hear Ken Burns (Documenting History), Cornel West (Matters of Faith) and Robert Pinskey (Poetry as Music). Crazy.

Some ideas that came up:

1) Our culture suffers from (is instrumental in creating) ADD - according to Burns, it is because we are overwhelmed by choice. According to Harvey Cox, it's technology. Mary Gordon describes a major theme of our society as: distraction. I've been thinking myself about the connection of this ADD to the glorification, commodification and capitalization of youth - children and, maybe more significantly, teens. Which is funny, because I'm also reading Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs, and just finished his essay on crap - which suggests that the crap of today is more damaging to kids than the crap of yesteryear. That today's crap suffers from the professionalized way that it is marketed to kids and the way that the adults who create the crap are stuck in their own childhood and how it prevents children from imagination and creativity because all the imagination and creativity of the crap has been placed in the crap by the adults who have created it.

2) Gordon had an interesting way of connecting two other themes in contemporary society: consumerism and fundamentalism. She described them as both "flattening" - by which she means that they replace/limit/constrict thinking. Consumerism means chasing after material goods uncritically and fundamentalism means that thought and reflection is replaced by dogmatic acceptance and obedience. I would also argue that there is a more explicit connection in that the consumer/capitalistic impulse makes a claim to fill a spiritual void that remains empty because of the inherent emptiness of material. Thus, spiritually empty, people turn to religion to fill that void. Fundamentalism appeals to a certain sector of that searching population because of its claims to legitimacy, simplicity, exclusivity, no matter how troubling and tenuous those claims may be.

3) Cornel West is freaking brilliant. Really. It's kind of pathetic, I suppose. But it kinda felt like being in the room with him you could feel the warmth from his brain, like a sun warming it's solar system. It was awe-inspiring really. It's not everyday that you can watch somebody so animated, pulling together ideas from all over the intellectual universe to make his points. Who else could/would reference Weber, Durkheim, Marx, Toni Morrison, David Hume, B. B. King, the Bible, slave spirituals, Sondheim, and Samuel Beckett, all in the space of about 25 minutes of talking (he shared the hour with two other panelists and a moderator) and not just referencing them, but quoting them (as in: "from the 25th chapter of Matthew" or "from the B-side of B. B. King's single "The Thrill is Gone"). And pulling all these ideas together to make a larger point about love and justice and religion and human nature. Favorite quote from the session: "Failing better is a major accomplishment." (I.e. - we're human so we're going to fail, but at least we can fail better . . .)

4) Finally, the Documenting History speakers made me think about the idea of documentary and really of history writing in general as exploring a moment but putting it into a context of a larger narrative (like - who are we?). Makes sense, and I'd thought about it before, but it seemed even clearer, for some reason. Also, Burns talked about the Obama election as being the beginning of Act III of the American drama. This got a lot of nods from the intellectual, bourgeois and mostly white crowd. (Act I: Declaration of Independence - Civil War; Act II: Gettysburg Address to 2009) That, combined with the other speaker (Scout Tufankjian, who photographed Obama from his days as a Senator through the inauguration) captured the hope of the campaign. But that hope seems to have largely dissipated. Obama's election was a moment of possibility, but it seems like we've mostly squandered that by assuming that all it took was one election to make things right.

On the Road in 12 hours or less

My darling wife is crazy, but in a good way.

We just finished a marathon reading of On the Road by Jack Kerouac that she organized at our humble abode. She got the idea from another crazy woman, an ex-colleague of mine in Los Angeles who organized an annual reading marathon. I still have a momento of one we attended in LA - the 13th event she had organized, in 2001, when we read 1984 by George Orwell, though the really committed nuts picked up Animal Farm as soon as they closed the cover of the first book.

The way a reading marathon works: one person begins with the first word and reads aloud for a while - a page or 2, or a sentence, or a paragraph or a chapter or whatever. Then they stop and somebody else starts reading aloud. There's no particular order, just whoever feels like reading, reads. People get up to get drinks, use the bathroom, have a cigarette. And you make your way through the entire book. We started around 5 pm, took a couple of breaks for dinner and stretching and so forth. We finished this morning at 5am, having read the whole book.

My wife made this happen. It's one of the things that I most love about her. She gets an idea to do something and she just does it, makes it happen. And so, she did. And despite my skepticism, it turned out really well. Admittedly, we only had one hardcore reader who stayed up with us, but 5 other people came in and out over the course of the night. It was cool to meet people and hang out and read together. It was even cooler to be there at the end having accomplished the goal.

On the Road was probably the perfect book for a marathon reading. It's written in a really poetic, lyrical style. I had never read it before, but found reading it aloud brought it alive in ways I wouldn't have caught otherwise. It's got a rhythm to it. Of course, given that it is a product of the Beat generation, jazz is the primary inspiration. It was funny though, we had a mix of jazz CDs playing all night in the background and so often the rhythm of the writing matched the rhythms of what we were listening to. It was a beautiful thing.

On the Road is also a book about crazy, counter-cultural, non-conformists who criss-cross the country looking for, well, God, maybe? Direction? Life? Love? Anyway, there was something of that realness in the people who participated in the marathon. People open to this crazy idea, who love literature enough to want to experience it in a different way, who see great art as a means for human connection.

I'm going to bed.

Treasure?

What is up with commentators and the more respectable newscasters (NPR, and, I think I've even heard Amy Goodman) using the term "treasure" when talking about war. It's bizarre, really. No, wait, I find it really disrespectful of the people who are actually killing and getting killed that people "above the fray" talk about the war in such euphemistic terms.

"Blood and treasure."

Like it's some kind of game.

It totally obscures the true nature of the war by invoking a knights and dragons scenario.

Why not talk about the fact that the war is doing irreparable harm to actual human beings on both sides of the conflict? Why not talk about the fact that war costs actual dollars, that American tax money is being expended in the pursuit of death and destruction?

This is such a sanitized war. It reminds me of how Americans must have perceived, say, the Spanish-American, or Mexican-American War. Except, now, the methods of sanitization are more sophisticated and the modes of communication give us the illusion of reality.

Granted, I don't watch television, so my news is coming via radio and magazine (Time), but the most powerful and real-seeming account of the current war I've come across is in book form: Dexter Filkins, The Forever War. If I recall correctly, he doesn't use the words Blood or Treasure (well, maybe blood, but certainly not in the capital-B sense of the word, and definitely not treasure, regardless of capitalization) once. But, then again, he actually went to Iraq and Afghanistan and spent time getting shot at and talking to all sorts of people. The war is a war to him, and not merely an abstraction where the US expends Blood and Treasure in the pursuit of Democracy, or Peace, or an End to Terrorism, but never has to face the fact that real human beings are being killed and maimed and scarred using real weapons that we, American taxpayers, using our collective economic strength, are paying for. (Remind me again why we can afford this war, but can't afford healthcare, education, better infrastructure, fighting climate change, etc.?)

A brief note on the economics of death in the war: In reality, the US is involved in both sides of the war. Clearly, American troops are paid and supplied using American tax money. But the insurgency in Iraq/Afghanistan is also supported by the US. Consider - American-made (buy USA!) weapons are finding their way into the hands of the insurgents. Also, because of the bribes that contractors (who receive their money from the US gov't) must pay in order to build infrastructure and basically operate in these countries, the insurgents are being paid by US dollars.

K'Naan - Wavin' Flag

Find more music like this on The Official K'NAAN Website

Check out the second song on the player above. It's my new favorite song of the moment. Perhaps I am biased by the fact that it has been selected as the official song of World Cup 2010. It reminds me of Bob Marley in tone and feel and message. K'Naan is apparently getting quite an intellectual following (recently featured on NPR), but I heard him first on Democracy Now. Really, the more I think about it, the more I think it might be the best radio/tv broadcast out there.

Manhood for Amateurs

Michael Chabon's newest book, Manhood for Amateurs just came out. He's my favorite contemporary American writer. He's just got an amazing way with words. His style is so smooth and seems so effortless, but is so perfect. It's like watching professional sports at their finest.

I got my hands on the book ASAP and read 50 pages on the train-ride home. Admittedly, I've only read 1/6th of it, but I can tell, already, that it is a-freaking-mazing. In those 50 pages I laughed out-loud 25 times (and got disturbed/disturbing looks from my fellow train-riders) and got tears in my eyes 10 times. Admittedly, there was some overlap there, but there had to have been 30 emotionally satisfying moments.

Manhood is a collection of non-fiction essays about life, society, and human nature through the eyes of Chabon as a father. My favorite moment so far:

"Every day is like a kid's drawing, offered to you with a strange mixture of ceremoniousness and offhand disregard, yours for the keeping. Some of the days are rich and complicated, others inscrutable, others little more than a stray gray mark on a ragged page. Some you manage to hang on to, though your reasons for doing so are often hard to fathom. But most of them you just ball up and throw away."

America, Thy Name is Hope

I met Larry today as I was walking out of the South Boston Education Complex.

He was standing in front of the building (for clarity's sake: the ex-South Boston High School) with tears in his eyes.

His story was that when he was 10-years old, (39 years ago) his sister attended Southie. Did I mention that this currently 49-year old was Black?

Apparently, his older brother and his friends had to fight there way into the school to rescue the sister and then fight their way out.

Larry had come to the top of Telegraph Hill, where the physical building is still located, and was staring in awe. It was a testament to the power of history. We talked briefly (mostly him, with me affirming), about how things are different now; how the school is diverse, and peacefully so. How most people in America seem to have accepted the fact that people can have different colored skin and still be human. (Although there are always those few assholes that will use any excuse to hate.) And we (he) concluded that slowly, but surely, America is becoming a better nation, a nation we might claim with true pride.

An Education Suggestion

Here's a lonely cry to the heavens . . .

I just wrote up my notes from interviewing one of my Vietnamese students about her experience in the US v. Vietnam. (Had to do if for the bullshit workshop I'm forced to take. So far, this was by far (and by far I mean lightyears) the most informative, helpful and interesting part - I'm rather grumpy over the fact that this workshop is eating up 2 of my Saturdays, more or less, in their entirety. Anyways, the point is that I, well, we, really - I'm not sure I've met a teacher who hasn't - have noticed that our immigrant (as in fresh off the plane) students tend to do better, despite the language barriers, than our homegrown. I think it's a testament to the educational systems in other countries, which, if the students have access (ie - money, which if they made it to America, they probably had something) are pretty rigorous and demanding and they, like learn stuff way earlier than we teach our students.

But, my student pointed out, here her classes push her to think deeper and more creatively. And to discuss stuff. Whereas back home, it was all pretty much rote.

And I got to thinking - maybe our problem is that we think that what is good for adolescents and adults is also good for elementary age kids. Maybe we're trying to be too creative with the young uns so that by the time they get to me (high school) they don't know their ass from their elbow, academically speaking, and trying to get them to discuss the merits of the French Revolution and political philosophy is an exercise in futility (okay - even that might be a little heavy for your average adolescent, just, like, period, but, you know what I mean).

So, maybe I'm just another high school teacher frustrated that so many of my students show up as 11th graders barely reading. And maybe it's easy to blame their teachers/schools in the lower grades. And I know that parents and a broader society that portrays schools as boring and people who like school as nerds, both play their roles, but I can't help but feeling that something is missing in those lower grades. Heck, even my parents were aghast at the education I was getting at (ahem - with snobby, elitist nose in the air) Newton Public Schools. They couldn't understand why I hadn't diagrammed a sentence until I was a Junior in high school. (I seem to remember my mum saying that she had done it in 6th grade or something.) I'm just saying that maybe we should be a little less creative when kids, for the most part, already love school, or at least aren't the jaded, apathetic, sarcastic, sophomoric specimens that they become in high school. That way, when I get them, actually getting a chance to discuss something will seem fun, or at least different, from what they've done all their lives. And, they might actually know something.

Ladies Night

". . . and, and, I, I, I was like . . . ladies get free drinks? Oooooooooooooooh, shoot . . ." - a lady

Ah, the wonderful world of cell phones. It's like you get treated to the intimate personal details of all the random people you never wanted to know more about. Is this sounding misanthropic, yet?

But it got me thinking all the way home. What struck me is that the lady's tone was as if this was the greatest thing that ever happened to her. Like she never had heard of ladies' night at the club. Imagine the eyes-wide, glassy look of the child on Xmas.

And while I fully admit my own naifishness and ignorance when it comes to the club-scene (extended digression: my understanding is that it is generally where people sometimes go to get their "freak on" and while I understand the basic nature of this term, I assuredly am oblivious to its full nuance. To extend the digression - the same goes for the related concept of the "booty call"), it seems pretty obvious to me that the object of said free drinks is not the pleasure of the ladies that imbibe said drinks.

And thus the club becomes, as far as I can tell, an object lesson in sexual exploitation.

After all, there is a reason that ladies get free drinks and gentlemen do not. The club is a business and clearly, if the ladies are getting free drinks, the club is only profiting on male-money. Why are the men there, spending money? One suspects that it is due to the ladies that are there. Why are men looking to meet (drunk) women? I would venture to say that it isn't for intellectually stimulating conversation about dialectical materialism over a cup of steaming coffee, with a warm handshake at the end. No - fearless reader - I'm guessing the guys are looking to have sex. As for the ladies . . . are they looking to score? Well, if so, why does it take "free drinks" to get them in the door?

My interpretation is that, basically, the club hopes that enough ladies will get so hammered they will end up waking up in the morning with regrets. That is what the alcohol is for, and what keeps the men coming back. Which makes this free drinks night just on this side of the line from rape.

Just something to think about on this lovely fall Friday afternoon.

The Power of Fiction

I just finished reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. I always get depressed when I finish reading a really good novel. Even when they end happy, I always want to know what else happened - what about the lives of the secondary characters? Or the tertiary characters? When I get to the last page, and close the cover, it's like I am closing a world. Like it's the end of an existence that I will never get to know more about.

I happened to be reading this 981 page (plus 50 or so pages of endnotes) tome as part of Infinite Summer. I've been keeping up with the posts at infinitesummer.org and mostly been kinda disappointed. Except for one that explored the idea of childhood and happiness. Or, conversely, adulthood and sadness. The argument was that children have an unbounded capacity for joy, whereas adults seem to have to work hard to find joy. I wonder why that is. I suppose that perhaps it has to do with the familiar axiom that ignorance is bliss. As a teacher, it also explains a lot about my students. And makes me wonder if teaching (at least as part of the institution that is public school) is really an exercise in pounding joy out of children.

Second reflection on fiction: Ralph Nader was plugging his new book on Democracy Now the other day. Now, although I voted for Nader in 2000 (relax - I didn't live in FL, my vote didn't hurt Gore) I can't say I'm a fan. But he said something that struck me: fiction allows for creative imagination. Now, this isn't an earth-shattering statement, I realize. But I've been making the argument for years that history is more important than fiction, because it is real. But, to be honest, it isn't all that hopeful. I think I'm coming around to fiction . . .