Editor’s note: Last month InTheFray featured a visual essay entitled A good day for Grant,” which illuminated how seven-year-old Grant Lanham copes with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Since Sun-A Kim photographed Lanham and interviewed his parents and teachers, another chapter has been added to his story. Recently diagnosed with Asperger’s Disorder (Educational Autism), Grant, his parents, teachers, and classmates can now better explain his behavior, which often couldn’t be easily explained in terms of ADHD symptoms or alleviated with ADHD medication.

Geoff Lanham, Grant’s father and the coordinator for Project LIFE, shares his story, which was originally published in The GUIDE newsletter (Project LIFE, Columbia, Missouri, Autumn 2004).

The diagnosis didn’t match the behavior.

For a long time, I knew in my head and in my heart that there was something different about my youngest son, Grant. While the symptoms of ADHD were present, there were other behaviors that often alarmed me.

Grant began reading at the age of three. He was fascinated with dinosaurs and could tell you all about the diplodocus and triceratops. Grant often asked me for definitions of words that I had to look up in the dictionary. He was able to compute math problems that most six-year-old children couldn’t touch. Grant’s teachers always complimented him on his intelligence.

His conduct at home wasn’t really worrisome. Grant never got into much trouble. Although he always needed prompting to eat or to bathe, or do common household chores, he wasn’t much different than my other children.

Then why was there a problem?

At first I thought it was the divorce and new home — changes that would account for any six-year-old child’s behavioral problems. We also changed Grant’s ADHD medication — that itself was a living hell. When the dust settled from the divorce and the move, however, he was still acting out at school. On occasion, Grant had trouble with adults, but most of the aggression was directed toward his classmates. This behavior was unacceptable — to me and to his teachers.

When Grant was suspended from school for a lunchroom incident, I had the opportunity to discuss his problems with the vice-principal. After a long talk, we agreed that he needed further psychological testing. She recommended referral to the public school autism specialist.

Once again, we faced the arduous task of filling out paperwork. Both his mother and I answered questionnaires. For over two hours, we were questioned by the autism specialist. His teachers were questioned. No stone was left unturned.

Finally the day arrived. We found out why Grant behaved the way he did: He was diagnosed with Asperger’s Disorder (Educational Autism).

Having read about this disorder when my nephew was diagnosed with autism, I recognized many of the characteristics in my son. Back then, I hated to put another label on Grant, and discarded the notion that he might have autism.

Now I know better.

New labels, new solutions

Although Grant has another label attached to his resume, this one has been a relief. With insight into Asperger’s Disorder, we can help my son by anticipating problematic situations. Grant’s troubles seemed to happen in very noisy circumstances — in the gym or during recess — places where the decibel level makes the hardest of hearing plug their ears. The lunchroom was always difficult. Not only was noise bothersome, but certain smells also set him off. Grant would push or shove or throw things at fellow students. When I asked him why he did these things, Grant just said, “I don’t know Dad; I really don’t know.”

Now I know, and it’s getting easier to adapt his environment or to anticipate a challenge. For instance, children with Asperger’s Disorder are very sensitive to sound. Grant will cover his ears and get in the fetal position if a fire engine is within a couple of blocks — even when I can barely hear the fire engine. I cannot run the vacuum cleaner when Grant is in the house because he acts as if someone is running fingers on a chalkboard, and he screams as if in pain.

Certain smells set Grant off as well. Garlic, for instance.

Grant eats only particular foods. Try as I might to introduce new food, he always prefers the same old standby — hot dogs, yogurt, and chocolate milk. For a while, all he would eat for breakfast was chocolate chipped muffins. So I made them every morning. I’ve learned to choose my battles, and as long as Grant is eating, it’s better than fixing a meal that will sit on the dinner table, get cold, and end up in the garbage.

My son has discovered the wonderful world of Nintendo Gameboy. While it provides countless hours of entertainment (and a respite for me), I am weaning him from the toy. Grant loves to read, and we try to read whenever possible.

I play a game with him called “Let’s see who can stare the other down the longest.”  Children with Asperger’s have a difficult time maintaining eye contact; their eyes wander back and forth. With a lot of effort — the “stare down” game — we are making progress.

Children with Asperger’s often take things literally. If you say it is “raining cats and dogs,” don’t be surprised if a child looks at you in a puzzled manner. To him, it is just raining; there are no cats and dogs falling from the sky!

At school, we’ve adapted Grant’s routine. For instance, he has lunch in the assistant principal’s office. He has one recess instead of two. He is given advance warning of a fire drill. These simple steps improve Grant’s ability to get along with his peers.

As parents, we need to follow our instincts. We know what makes our children tick. I know that my son will struggle in the classroom. I know that he will shine as well. Grant has been fortunate. His teachers perceived his strengths and always encouraged him to be the best student possible. They knew in their hearts and minds that something was different about him. Together, we finally figured it out.

To quote Brenda Smith Miles, “Life is my son’s classroom and there is no summer break.”

STORY INDEX>

TOPICS> ASPERGER’S DISORDER >

Learn more about Asperger’s Disorder
URL: http://www.aspergers.com

URL: http://www.baltimorepsych.com/aspergers.htm

“

In The Fray Contributor

(Illustration by Joe Sun)

Obscenity alert! Somebody call the Family Research Council! Dial up the Eagle Forum. Somebody step up to the plate on the side of decency. I thought when Virgin Atlantic Airways introduced the company’s newest VIP perk, urinals shaped like women’s open mouths, great numbers of organizations would be offended. But only the National Organization for Women stepped up.

Offended doesn’t even come close to describing what I felt when presented with the idea of young boys following their fathers into the men’s room to take a leak in a woman’s mouth. And it started me thinking about how often I’ve heard the theory that women’s rights advocates are ruining the country’s boys: the Feminization of Freddy, that sort of thing. Yet it took a feminist organization, NOW, to keep our sons and grandsons from being subjected to participatory misogynistic perversion.

Both my son, Adam Cox, and my son-in-law, Jake Nath, were disgusted by the Virgin Atlantic urinal. Both young men were raised by feminists, and it got me thinking about feminists and their sons.

I am from a continuum of feminists, the fifth of five daughters raised by a Southwest Kansas farmer and a teacher who were both avid women’s rights advocates. My mother came by her feminism naturally, and it was in part her strong political views that so attracted my father. My maternal grandmother worked for suffrage as a young woman, after moving west by covered wagon in 1891.

In 1912, when my grandmother was a 33 year-old, the Kansas legislature made their state the eighth to approve full women’s suffrage. My mother was only six years old on that day, but she remembered it well. The feeling in her farm home was less celebratory than resolved when grandfather brought news of the way Kansas legislators voted. “Well, of course, they did,” my mother recalled her mother announcing.

Frontier theorists would no doubt say that the rural West pioneered in women’s rights as a practical matter, a natural distancing from English society and the beginnings of America defining herself. I, too, see feminism as a practical matter — a meat and potatoes issue. I fear we live in a time when some are putting great effort, time and money behind redefining this country and what made it great, strong women included.

My grandmother raised nine children: teachers, merchants, farmers and soldiers. One of her sons flew 85 missions over enemy territory during World War II. Another son, also a pilot, didn’t make it home. Oh that my God-fearing suffragette grandmother, Sylvia Cave Johnson, was still alive and available for cable television. Woe be unto the self-righteous, Stepford-shill, who accused her of being incapable of raising sons.

In the past several years we’ve seen a glut of magazine articles, talk shows and books like The War on Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Boys  and The Decline of Males demonizing a simple term: feminism. How silly. Feminists are people who believe women deserve the same opportunities and compensation as men.

The anti-feminist deluge seemed to fall even harder in the wake of the Littleton High School tragedy, where on April 20, 1999, two teenagers committed the largest mass school killing in U.S. history. Everyone agreed that something was going wrong with today’s society, and many pundits placed blame squarely at feminists’ doors. Time after time I watched, listened or read that we activists were to blame for a breakdown in family values in general, and for the dehumanization of American boys in particular. Nevermind that none of the young men involved in school shootings, so-called “wildings” or other violent acts so widely publicized seemed to have been raised by feminists.

I contend it is just the opposite, that feminists gave their children strong values. My parents not only encouraged but also expected their daughters to see themselves as equal with men, to work to their potential and to facilitate others to do the same. And I believe the great majority of women’s rights activists of my generation, the meat and potatoes feminists, single or married, have done a spectacular job of raising their sons, sons who view the world far differently than those raised in strictly patriarchal households.  

There are lessons I believe we imparted both in word and action that will affect great change in society as our sons take their places in today’s workforce. We taught our daughters the same values, but we always knew that any significant change required males also working against prejudice and intolerance.

I believe feminists by their very nature imparted questioning minds to their sons, encouraging them to question stereotypes including those existing within our school system: jocks, nerds, freaks and snobs. They learned from us that name-calling is a critical part of alienation. We taught them to appreciate differences, not disdain them, to neither be nor seek victims.

We taught them to be discerning, to carefully evaluate influences, ranging from peer pressure to media input.

For feminists active in the business and political community, sons learned to interact with a myriad of individuals, from the powerful to the disenfranchised. They carried those experiences with them, and, I believe, profited as adults. I also think we imparted a sense of purpose in our sons, the knowledge that every life is part of something bigger and does make a difference.

Children of feminists know that every stand they take may not be popular. They may be subjected to ridicule or contempt as a result of their beliefs. But through the examples of their mothers, they know a worthy stand is worth the price.  

I can’t even imagine what my feminist grandmother would have thought had she lived to see a picture of a urinal shaped like a woman’s open mouth. But she wouldn’t have been surprised that it was feminists who got the project flushed.

STORY INDEX>

ORGANIZATIONS >

National Organization of Women
URL: http://www.now.org

Family Research Council
URL: http://www.frc.org

Eagle Forum
URL: http://www.eagleforum.org

Patsi Cox

Click here to enter the visual essay.

For over 100 years, Brazil’s cowboys have earned a living and shaped a culture with their bare hands and sweat. The life of a cowboy in Brazil is not for the timid. It is an intense existence filled with hard work on long, hot days. To herd cattle in the midwest of Brazil is to live.  

Brazilian cowboys  lead simple lives. Most had a father or relative who was one. They do not regret passing by other opportunities, because their life is handed to them at a young age. Cowboys, or peoes as they are known in Portuguese, begin training very young. They accompany their elders until the day comes when  they start the ride to herd beef cattle with other peoes.

Most cowboys live their entire lives on the same ranch. As part of their pay, housing on the grounds is provided at least that’s how it works on the many ranches of renowned Porto Murtinho Fazendeiro, Nelson Cintra.

On Nelson’s ranches, cowboys like Rivalino receive a monthly salary based on skill and performance. They also receive housing in general living quarters, or in a small two-room house if they have a family. When they need medical care, all they need to do is ask, and the boss will normally pay.

This is not a bad life, considering the economic situation in Brazil. A small and wealthy elite still controls most of the land and resources, and much of the population continues to live in poverty. In rural areas there is no middle class. Most of the simple shacks of rural laborers lack water supply, sewerage, and electricity, unless they are lucky enough to live on a ranch.

Brazilian society displays vast inequities between rich and poor, leaving a huge economic barrier. Despite economic progress, the situation in Brazil is that of a profound schism between the haves and the have-nots. Those who become cowboys in Brazil live a simple existence but are grateful for whatever little they have. They work hard during the day and play hard at rodeos at night, an occasional respite. However, much of the rural population — especially cowboys and their families living on ranches — lack access to educational, social, and financial resources which could dramatically improve their position in life.

Being a Brazilian cowboy is not a revered profession. It’s not envied or sought after by many. There is even a stigma attached to it by some  who see cowboys as uneducated, illiterate, and socially inept. It may be true that most don’t receive an education past elementary school, if at all. And they rarely leave the ranch for excursions to the city. You can almost count on never seeing a cowboy visiting a museum.

But when we look at the beef surrounding us in supermarkets and restaurants, we can begin to appreciate these cowboys for dedicating themselves to their profession, day in and day out.

In The Fray Contributor

My social worker tells me that it is hard to grow up with a chronically ill parent. She says it’s okay to feel neglected. Angry, frustrated, robbed, dysfunctional. She’s talking about my childhood. But as I put a hand on my burgeoning belly to quell the kicking, tears come to my eyes.

Before I was even born, my father felt numbness in his hands. It was right before he got engaged to my mother. The doctors called it stress. And whenever it occurred, my father would laugh and say, “I must be under a lot of stress.”

When I was in fourth grade, we went to get glasses together. I was becoming nearsighted; he was having trouble focusing. The doctor gave him exercises instead of glasses. It wasn’t until eight years later that the doctors began to mumble, “M.S.” — Multiple Sclerosis.

At my college graduation, my father was walking with two metal, arm-brace style crutches. He wore polished dress shoes and a lime green leisure suit, which he was proud to announce had cost him only $16 due to a computer error. Other fathers wore khakis, colorful polo shirts, and well-worn boat shoes.  I have a picture of him smiling a toothy grin. To me, he was a burden and I wished he would walk faster — without falling.

M.S. winds its spectral ways through my life, and in and out of my heart and my brain. But before you have an image of me in a wheelchair, let me say, aside from residual tingling in my hands and legs that ever so rarely abates totally, I am currently symptom free.

Though I was haunted before I was even cognizant of it, my first memory is of early elementary school, first or second grade. The M.S. Society was sponsoring a read-a-thon and sent an accompanying film. I watched the film. In fact, I can still see the images when I close my eyes; it terrified me so completely. In the film, a man is getting married and while leaving the church he’s pelted by rice and experiences a moment of double vision. He rubs his eyes. Later, we see the same man on the beach throwing a ball. The ball rolls off his fingertips and he has to scramble to pick it up. He laughs. The next scene shows the same man, now with a beard, in a wheelchair looking out at the world with a vacant stare.

I took the read-a-thon to heart — I read many books — maybe 100 — and signed up many neighbors as sponsors. I felt that anyone could drop a ball or get rice in their eyes and see double images for a few seconds. Perhaps if I read enough books, raised enough money, I would be immune.

M.S. was all around me in so many ways. Right after college, my roommate went through the same thing with her father, diagnosed with strokes that no one noticed, then M.S.

A friend who always came for Thanksgiving was diagnosed. She faded quickly.

In the early 1990s, I belonged to a women’s salon. We were 20-somethings who got together once a month to drink red wine and discuss Anita Hill, Susan Faludi, and Camille Paglia. There was a member whose mother had M,S. My new friend drove a station wagon for the express purpose of taking her mother to the mall with her scooter. In contrast, my own mother didn’t even want handicapped plates.

My new friend was terrified of getting M.S. I became petrified. M.S. is not hereditary, we learned, but it does cluster in families. At that time, the statistics said that she had a 3 percent chance of getting it as the daughter of an afflicted mother. I had a 1 percent chance of a father/daughter connection. A 99 percent chance of escaping the apparition’s clutches, crutches. The statistics gave me false hope.

While I was working at an association and writing the company newsletter, the husband of a co-worker became very sick with M.S. He could still draw cartoons, which I published. He died when his lungs gave up.

My mother put my father in a home because she became afraid that he would burn the house down.

When I married, we had a separate ceremony in my mother’s living room for my father. I didn’t want to get married in a nursing home with the prevailing odor of urine in the air. Also, my father couldn’t handle crowds. So we paid for a van and a nurse to bring him to my mother’s home in Philadelphia. My mother bought him a silk, midnight blue paisley
robe to wear over his hospital pajamas. He was happy; I have pictures of him grinning toothlessly, but I don’t think he had a clue who I was or what was going on. I wore my mother’s wedding dress, which he didn’t recognize. I exhaled when they took him back.

We held a second ceremony in Washington two days later with lots of guests in a beautiful place, so that I could still have my dream wedding.

In May 1997, I had been married for almost a year. One morning after painting a door in my basement, I woke up with slight numbness in my fingertips, like I had been in the bath too long. I thought it was from being careless cleaning up the paint, messing with the paint thinner, but deep down I had a feeling.

In August, I was teaching a fiction workshop in rural Garrett County, Maryland when I woke up with hands and feet that felt like they were asleep. I panicked.

I knew. I was stuck in the woods, but I knew. I tried to think of something else.

When I returned home, I saw five doctors. They diagnosed me with carpal tunnel, Reynaud’s phenomenon, hyperventilating, water retention, and depression. But I knew. When I went to visit my father, I struggled not to say, “It’s starting.”

In the fall, my father’s nursing home doctor called me. I was working at a university and there was a line of advisees standing at my door. The doctor told me that my father had septicemia, a blood infection, from a rash they couldn’t control and asked my permission to let him go. I couldn’t decide what to do. My father was 64, could not walk and was incontinent. He couldn’t read or understand television. He used to believe that my mother made him sick, had poisoned him. Now he believed that it was the work of the nursing home. He didn’t know who my mother was and briefly had a relationship of sorts with another woman who would harass us when we came for visits. He was very unhappy. He hated the psychiatric ward in the Veterans Hospital, but it was the only place that would take him once he started biting. And when he bit, he drew blood, from nurses who tried to help.

He was more like an advanced Alzheimer’s patient than what most people envision M.S. patients to be like. He didn’t recognize me. He had no quality of life. So I asked what measures they wanted me to withhold. When I found out that the medication I would be withholding was intravenous antibiotics, I told the doctors to go ahead, move him to the hospital wing. Hook up the I.V. Save him. Antibiotics didn’t sound so heroic to me. That was early September. The doctors grudgingly complied.

About a month later, on October 25, with no warning at all, I woke up numb from the waist down. I had gone to sleep fine, and woke up without feeling. I could walk, simply because I could remember how, not because I felt my legs or the floor under my feet. I took a hot bath and massaged my legs. I tried to tell my husband. I went to the mall and bought a pair of comfortable, supportive shoes. And a colorful chenille scarf. And Polartec gloves. And new makeup, lipstick and mascara. Two large shopping bags of stuff. On Sunday, in the frigid, pouring rain, I went to the Major League Soccer championship game and my team won. I sat there wondering if I would ever be able to dance again. Feel sex again.

Monday, I called my doctor. We tried to get me in to see a neurologist. We failed. No one had openings for weeks. He sent me to the emergency room, and said he would have a neurologist meet me there. No one met me there. I received a basic neurological exam from an intern.

“Press down on my hands,” she said.

I pressed.

“Walk in a straight line,” she said.

I walked: heel, toe, heel, toe. I looked at her blunt page-boy hair style and wondered where she went to medical school.

“Close your eyes and touch your nose.”

She seemed nervous and unsure of herself. I snooped into my chart after she left. Positive for Bambino’s Reflex. Everything else was normal. When they tried to send me home after half a day of waiting, I screamed at the attending physician. His name was Dr. Love.

I saw a neurologist the next day. I had claustrophobia-inducing M.R.I.s, painful evoked responses and blood work. Nothing was conclusive, no tests showed any abnormality that added up to any diagnosis. My brain M.R.I. was clean. They had no answers. The feeling started coming back. I went back to work. Then I went to Jamaica.

In early December, I got another call from my father’s doctor. The infection was back. He had never recovered the first time. This time they strongly recommended against heroics. And this time, I took a deep breath and agreed to not medicate, nervously tapping a numb foot against the underside of my desk. My nails dug in to the bottom of my desk. His life as my father flashed across my brain — singing songs, cracking
jokes, tickling me until I screamed.

Now he was mostly a vegetable, his only reaction to stimuli was to bite. Whose fate had I sealed? I went to see him and said goodbye. He was no longer conscious. He was frail, bald, toothless, and sunken, and covered in oozing sores. He was wrapped tightly in a white sheet, as if it were all ready over. The fact that the nurse put on latex gloves made me afraid to touch him.

My mother handed me gloves from the box on the cart. I stroked his arm, his forehead. His only response when we were there was to try to bite the nurse when she adjusted his oxygen. He was dead from kidney failure a few days later.

We held a memorial service a week later on the winter solstice, the longest night. The rabbi who performed the service kept talking about how lucky my father was to get out of Germany in 1938. The crowd at the funeral home remembered my father best as the life of the party, a champion downhill skier, and an energetic businessman — not as the animal caught in a trap that he was at the end. So they were was aghast at the notion of my father being “lucky.”

After the service, I struggled with telling my mother that she wasn’t done with M.S. yet. Her only child was doing better, but I still couldn’t walk more than a block. My father had his first symptom at 30. I was 31. He was dead at 64, after a long struggle.

I thought of a friend from graduate school who had broken up with a long-time musician girlfriend. During a weeklong flicker of a dying flame, her hearing problems were diagnosed as M.S. He worried that leaving her now was evil. He didn’t want to pull a “Newt Gingrich.”

In June, I had a miscarriage. I was pregnant, just barely, and I knew something was wrong because my period was eight days late, but the home tests were still negative. I was very tired. I felt dizzy. When I finally got a very faint positive, I ran to the doctor. She called me with blood results the next day.

“You are what we call ‘a little pregnant,’ she said.” “You will miscarry any time now.”

As I put the phone down, the right side of my whole body started to go numb. From my ears and scalp to my breasts and stomach on down to my toes.

My neurologist implied that this was it. This would mean definite diagnosis. Multiple incidents, separated in time and space. I sat in the car for 45 minutes and cried.

The next day I woke up with double vision. It lasted four days. I couldn’t drive, watch television, read, use the computer. Well, I could, but only if I shut one eye. So after a day, I drove to work and just kept one eye shut. And on the fifth day, I woke up and I could see normally. I never thought about the future. I couldn’t.

After the pregnancy loss and a short cruise, I had another set of M.R.I.s that showed the bright spots of brain activity. The only hopeful thing the doctor could say was that the severity of my father’s illness didn’t have a bearing on the progression of my situation. Not very reassuring. He wanted to start drugs, but I wanted a baby, so it was put off. He
told me that he didn’t recommend breast-feeding, so that I could start medication right away after the birth.

I clung to a memory from a seventh grade slumber party. Six girls draped in flannel nightgowns were lounging around on the shag family room carpet chomping ruffled potato chips with French onion dip while Space Invaders cast an eerie green shadow around the room. Someone turned off the volume. The mother of the party-thrower told us about her diagnosis with M.S. when she was in her 20s. She was working a job that she hated. She went blind, completely sightless, for six months. She quit her job and never had another exacerbation.

I decided to look for a new job.

Another adviser at my school was diagnosed with M.S. She had two preschoolers, one who was fed through a shunt in his stomach. The wife of a man in the college’s marketing department was diagnosed. They had four children. After I left, the woman who got my old office started having M.R.I.s.

I got pregnant again in November. In January, I had another exacerbation. I couldn’t use my hands. I couldn’t type; I couldn’t write. I couldn’t dial the phone or chop dinner. I cried that I wouldn’t be able to hold my baby or change her diaper. I stayed in bed for a day with the blankets over my head. What had I done? I had a fearless friend who let me practice holding her bouncing six month-old boy during the meditative silence of a Quaker meeting. I was surrounded by people who were holding me in the light. I cried. I almost dropped him. But I didn’t.

I got a new neurologist. He was very reassuring. He knew I’d be okay in week or two because in the second trimester of pregnancy, hormonal changes would kick in and reduce my symptoms. And I was okay. I got my hands back and that was the end of that.

I breast fed my daughter for over a year. I’ve changed more diapers than I’d like to think about. Now I hope the odds favor my daughter not getting M.S. She has a 97 percent chance of not experiencing the phantasm of feeling first hand.

And while questions about the future flash across my mind from time to time like subliminal advertising, the apparition has been at bay for over six years.

Except six months after my daughter was born, I was back teaching just a course or two and very sleep deprived. I teach a course about violence and I chose a combination of essays from the textbook to teach the concept of “analysis.” The first essay in the text was a newspaper report of a man who took a hostage and then committed suicide.

During class, I was horrified to realize that the man took the hostage because he was despondent about having been diagnosed with M.S. And even worse, the psychology text explained “learned helplessness.” The students were to draw the conclusion that the man took the hostage, had the stand off with police and committed suicide because of the unpredictability of M.S. I couldn’t believe that I had assigned this reading. I couldn’t believe that in my brief perusal, I hadn’t realized that M.S. had followed me into my textbook and set up housekeeping.

Some nights, I have trouble falling asleep, because of what I might be robbed of by morning. Will I be able to see when I wake, will I be lame, or worse, stupid? Some nights I get up and watch television, just because I can. The images that dance across the screen make sense to me, for now. And maybe forever. Maybe.

My students are now haunted. I remember their faces that fall 1997 morning when I showed up for class tripping over my own numb feet and using a cane. All of a sudden. One day. And while my students were analyzing learned helplessness, did I learn anything? Yes.

After I lost the use of my hands, I had a new respect for Bob Dole. As a straight party Democrat, this is saying something. But Dole’s war injury left him so he can’t use his hand. He most likely can’t buckle his jeans, tie his tie, or cut his food without assistance. His courage, I think, goes largely unrecognized.

I learned about ramps and what it’s like to be left-handed in a right-handed world.  I learned that men use only one hand to just dump shampoo directly onto their head and women need two to pour it into their hand first. I learned that if you send checks that look like a five-year-old wrote them and then sign them with your other hand, they don’t come back.

It’s fascinating to lose the use of something and get it back. It’s such a gift. I danced all over the house on the first day I could again. Like a wild woman. With abandon.

I never take holding my daughter or feeling the softness of her hair for granted. I cherish it. I cherish so much.

So while my mind does get perturbed by the phantom from time to time and my husband insists we live in a house that has only one floor, the apparition is keeping its distance right now. The specter of M.S. visits my family, my friends, my students, and my classmates in our imaginations — but not in my myelin.

M.S. scares us, makes us appreciate, and takes away and, sometimes, gives back.

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

Evoked responses
URL: http://www.nationalmssociety.org/sourcebook-evoked.asp

Exacerbation
URL: http://www.nationalmssociety.org/Sourcebook-Exacerbation.asp

Myelin
URL: http://www.nationalmssociety.org/sourcebook-myelin.asp

hblock

The Corsaires’ defense tightens up against the Meteores and wins the game by two touchdowns. The author is in the center, wearing #50.

I’d only been in Paris for a couple of weeks last September when I started feeling the lonely sting of an expat with no connections to the local culture and a tenuous grasp of the language. By then, I’d seen the Louvre, strolled through the Luxembourg Gardens and sat in cafés eating steak frites and drinking carafes of wine.

The weak dollar threatened to put a premature end to my bohemian lifestyle. I canvassed the Left Bank on foot, gazing into the Café Select (where a destitute Hemingway still found enough money to drink every night of the week in the 1920s), and marveling at Les Deux Magots (where an anguished Sartre spent the German Occupation hashing out existentialism). Both places were now overpriced tourist traps patrolled by surly waiters. Running out of money and feeling slightly disillusioned with life in Paris, I resolved to make a change.

I wanted to meet actual Parisians and practice my French. So, when one day, while sitting on a park bench eating an overly salty egg and cheese crêpe, I came across an ad in an English-language magazine that read: “You wanna play some ball? Contact Cyril of the Corsaires,” I acted.

I wasn’t sure what kind of “ball” was being advertised, and just hoped it wasn’t soccer, since I was slow, uncoordinated, and past my athletic prime.

“We play American football,” Cyril told me in English, with a heavy French accent. “With helmets and pads and tackling, you know?”

Cyril, a brawny 30-something with a receding hairline, was the president of the Évry Corsaires, a semi-professional football team in Paris. He picked me up at a Métro stop on the Périphérique, where Paris officially ends and the dreary suburbs begin. We drove out to Évry, one of the grittier outlying suburbs populated mostly by North African immigrants, to play flag football on a Friday evening. Flag was just for fun, Cyril said. The Corsaires’ real game was full-speed, bone-crunching football américain.

“Oh, that’s serious,” I said.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“I grew up in Oklahoma,” I replied. “The heart of football country, in other words.”

“Sure, yes, but my favorite team is zee Packers, from Green Bay. I’m sure you can play with us. Offense and defense, maybe.”

Cyril went on to explain that France supports a fledging network of approximately 16 semi-pro teams that compete each year for the “Casque d’Or,” or Golden Helmet. The Corsaires played in the second division of the Fédération Française de Football Américain (F.F.F.A.), but could move up to the first division if they won the title that year. If this happened, teams from N.F.L. Europe would start offering Corsaire players professional contracts. To this end, the team had recruited Xavier, a back-up quarterback from the French national team, and Cyril was scouting American talent.

Teams in the French leagues are organized as private clubs that function as community centers, like the Rotary Club or Lions’ Club. The players, ranging in age from 18 to 45, do charity work and put on local exhibitions demonstrating the complex rules of the game to skeptical onlookers, often immigrants from Algeria or Senegal. Some clubs even pay players and coaches, and have cheerleaders and private sponsors. Still, the whole thing seemed quaint and innocent, like a 1950’s-Beaver Cleaver version of football, light years away from the sex, drugs and sleaze of the sport’s current U.S. incarnation. Players in France wear letterman jackets emblazoned with their positions and nicknames — “Warrior” or “Screwdriver” or “The Cramp.”

The first time I suited up for a Corsaires practice last September, I was overcome with emotion. Jogging around the field in full pads was, for me, the equivalent of Proust’s madeleine: suppressed memories from my Oklahoma youth came rushing over me. The smell of freshly cut grass, musty shoulder pads, and the first hints of autumn weather sent me into a reverie.

“Knock that man’s dick in the dirt!”

Until I was 14, my only goal in life was to play football for as long as it was physically possible. For me — as for most of my friends — this meant (ideally) high school and college ball in Oklahoma and pro ball with the Dallas Cowboys or Houston Oilers. I matured early and by eighth grade was a relatively bulky six-foot-tall starting middle linebacker. (I haven’t grown since.) By age 13, I was being recruited to play for a small Catholic high school and was told that I might even have a shot at a Division I scholarship for college. All of this, of course, depended on my dedication to football.

At this young age, football was life — not only for me, but for most of the adults in the community. The Oklahoma oil patch had gone bust in 1986, the local economy was in tatters, but these were the glory years of Barry Switzer, the legendary coach of the Oklahoma Sooners. In a dead-end town on the Bible Belt at the end of the Cold War, high school football provided a reason for hope, and everyone wanted to be a part of it.

My junior high team, the Edison Eagles, for example, supported a phalanx of unpaid assistant coaches who ran us into the ground twice a day during August: one practice at 7:30 a.m., followed by another after school. The coaches pushed us until someone vomited or suffered heat exhaustion. Water and bathroom breaks occurred rarely — usually only once a practice. If someone didn’t sacrifice his barely pubescent body on a tackle, one of the coaches would be in his face immediately.

“Knock that man’s dick in the dirt!” Coach Carl liked to scream, making the adolescent boys blush.

Kids — even academically successful ones — were encouraged to repeat eighth grade to gain an extra year of “maturity” before moving on to high school ball, where the stakes were even higher. Despite it all, I loved the game.

It was only at the Catholic high school’s varsity level that things went too far. Priests visited the locker room to bless our team before games, and to assure us that we were morally — and physically — superior to our opponents. At the same time, the starting linebacker and fullback terrorized the younger players with frat-like pranks usually involving threats of anal penetration. All of this was tolerated, and even encouraged by school authorities, as a rite of passage. The hypocrisy, the stupidity, the homophobia — it was all too much for me and I quit halfway through my sophomore year.

I put all this history aside for my season in the French leagues. At that first practice in Évry, Cyril put me in the end zone to return a kickoff. I felt a surge of adrenaline as I waited near the goal line for the whistle. Suddenly, I saw the pigskin hanging in the air above my head, secured it in my hands and sprinted up-field, breaking arm tackles and jogging triumphantly the last 20 yards into the opposite end zone. And this was just the first practice!  

As I trotted those last few yards, I imagined my redemption as a football player in this foreign land. “You will be a good linebacker,” Cyril had said prophetically. “And you will be called ‘Mad Dog.’”

Who needed a state championship in Oklahoma when I could have a Golden Helmet in France? I thought about the letterman’s jacket I never had in high school, with the words “chien fou” stitched across the breast.

The author with a broken left finger after a game in Chateauroux, France.

For the team

Practices started in early autumn — a glorious time in Paris — and we were expected to report every Tuesday and Thursday from 8:00 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. for the next five months. My initial feelings of imminent redemption gave way to confusion as the defensive coordinator, Jean-Pierre, gave me a weighty playbook to memorize. It had blitz packages and coverage schemes, audibles, zone and man defenses.

“You will play my way, or you won’t play at all,” he told me. “And you must learn it in French.”

The physical training proved difficult as well. There was no weight room, so we used random objects — and each other — to increase strength. My legs buckled as I tried to squat Arnaud, a 200-pound running back, on my shoulders. We had orange cones for agility drills, but I tripped over them. We had sleds for blocking and tackling practice, but I couldn’t move them. My helmet never fit properly and gave me headaches. I had to relearn how to tackle with my head up, lest I spear someone and break my neck. When I tried to cover wide receivers in man-to-man defense, another linebacker joked that I ran like a crab. The name stuck, and for a while I wasn’t “chien fou” but “le crabe.”

The weather turned cold and rainy around the end of October and I routinely left the practice field feeling cold, sore and exhausted. On these evenings, I usually headed to the team bar next to the practice field where the team ate olives and cheese, accompanied by wine and beer. When our de facto cheerleaders — the wives, sisters and girlfriends of my teammates — showed up, someone would put on Barry White’s greatest hits, and the bar would go crazy as people danced around our dirty clubhouse. Sometimes a player would bring a videotape of a recent N.F.L. game, and it always seemed so foreign, like watching a game of cricket in Texas.

I told some of the players that this whole routine was unique, very French.

“In the States, football is a spectator sport, a passive leisure activity, or an excuse for beer and BBQ,” I explained.

“You mean you would not put on the pads and play in your own leagues?” a linebacker called Dub asked me.

“Of course not,” I said. There would be fights, injuries, lawsuits, hurt feelings. It would be anarchy and bloodshed. We leave the game to the professionals.

“In France, we are the professionals,” someone else chimed in.

Each football team in the F.F.F.A. is allowed only three American players, and taxes of about $300 per player are levied on teams that employ American ringers. Many of these are former college players not skilled enough to make it professionally in the States or N.F.L. Europe, but still starved for the game they grew up on. Some are paid, but most do it for the love of football. Some come from major university programs, where the game is big business; others have never even played before.

The only other American on my team had never played a down of football in the United States but was now the star receiver on the Corsaires. In fact, Daniel didn’t even follow the game back home. One day, on the commuter train out to practice, I tried to engage him in a discussion about the N.F.L., but he only shrugged his shoulders.

“I follow soccer here,” he said. “I didn’t even watch the Super Bowl this year.”

I asked him why he played such a dangerous sport that he didn’t even follow. “You can be a star in France,” he replied. “In the States, you’d be nobody. So why not?”

The rest of the players came from every imaginable socio-economic and ethnic background. There were immigrants from West Africa, Vietnam, and Algeria. There were poor guys from the neighborhood who’d started playing out of curiosity. There were well-to-do French white guys who had studied at elite universities in the States and had picked up a passion for football there.

Then there were guys like Buko, who looked imposing and burly, like an American football player should look. He stood about 6’3’’, ran like a gazelle, and wore shiny blue leggings in lieu of socks. Buko spoke perfect black English without ever having set foot in an English-speaking country.

One day I asked him how he spoke English so well.

“I watch a lot of movies and shit,” he said. One of his favorites was the feel-good Disney picture, Remember the Titans.

In the film, Denzel Washington plays an African American coach for a football team in the South. The team has just been integrated and the racial strife that plagues the region is magnified among the individual players. Eventually, Coach Denzel brings everyone together and the integrated team wins a state championship. It is a happy ending that stresses team solidarity above individual difference, equality of opportunity above birthright. These are the values, incidentally, of the French Republic: Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité.

French football, much more than its American counterpart, seemed to embody these Enlightenment values. Despite the ethnic and class differences on the team, everyone seemed to get along.

Buko was the spiritual leader, and I couldn’t help but get emotional when he led a team chant that he had lifted from Remember the Titans:  “Everywhere we go/ People want to know/ Who we are/ So well tell them …We are the Corsaires/ The mighty mighty Corsaires!”

We chanted this as we jogged around the field before our first game, intimidating our opponent, Les Templiers, from another Paris suburb.

It worked — we won the game by two touchdowns. Our quarterback, Xavier, threw pinpoint strikes to Buko, the tight end, and Daniel, the wide receiver. They ran over the diminutive cornerbacks and safeties, guys who had plenty of speed but no knowledge of tackling. Our running back, a 34-year-old bald guy with no neck, and thighs like tree trunks, dragged their linebackers 10, 15 yards a carry and steamrolled their defensive backs.

Our defense wasn’t such an unstoppable force. The defensive backs didn’t seem to understand the concept of pass interference, and allowed the other team to move up and down the field on penalties. As a linebacker, my first assignment was to stop the run game, and this proved frustrating. I could see plays develop in the backfield, but just as I was about to tackle the running back, I found myself knocked backward by an offensive lineman. My highlight came when, dropping back into zone coverage on a pass, I deflected a pass to the tight end. Jean-Pierre, the defensive coordinator was livid and pulled me out of the game.

“On 53 punch, you are supposed to blitz the QB. Like I said — if you don’t respect my play-calling, you don’t play at all!”

A crowd of about 100 spectators braved the miserable rain to watch the Corsaires destroy the Templeriers on their home turf. For the most part, the spectators looked confused or disinterested, and even some of our own players had trouble deciphering the penalties. I explained to a second-string tackle that the team kicking the ball off can recover it only after it travels 10 yards. I watched the line judges consistently forget to change the down marker and move the chains. No one seemed too excited about anything. As a football fan, the experience was maddening.

When too much Fraternité is a bad thing

As autumn gave way to winter and our gridiron turned into a mud pit, the practices became miserable, boot-camp-like affairs. The dreary month of December brought a cold, steady rain to Paris and I began to realize that I was hopelessly undersized to play defense. The low point came shortly before Christmas, when an offensive tackle named Bob knocked me to the ground and then sat on me in the chilly mud.

In addition to my on-the-field frustrations, off-the-field festivities became increasingly ugly. The problem on the Corsaires, as it turned out, was not Liberty or Equality, but Fraternity.

Quite literally, this was fraternity of the Animal House variety, even though most of the players were well into their 30s, many players supporting families. They were grown men with responsibilities and serious jobs, not the kind of people you would imagine behaving like frat boys at a keg party. Some of them were intellectuals, capable of passing time on long bus rides by discussing world affairs; perhaps that’s why their dissolution into American-style meatheads surprised me.

Things came to a head the day that the starting quarterback, Xavier, lectured me about the fragility of the world’s oil supply.

“I don’t understand how you Americans can drive these huge cars, these SUV things,” he said. “Do you know that if you continue to consume oil at the current rate, the world’s supply will run out in twenty years? How can you, in good conscience, drive a car like that?”

I was stumped. This was not the kind of post-game talk I expected to hear.

“You know, it’s not that the French hate Americans,” he continued. “It’s this Manichean, dualistic view of the world your president has.”

By this time, Xavier was turned around and addressing the whole bus. A journalist from a Parisian daily was riding with us, and watched the Americans’ response closely.

I tried to be conscientious, I said. I rode my bike whenever possible. I recycled (sort of).
I recognized that the world wasn’t divided into good and evil, or black and white. I felt I had to say something conciliatory, something diplomatic to make up for all the bad blood caused by the Bush administration.  

Just then, a chant came up from the back of the bus. “Xavier! Xavier!” the crowd intoned.
The unsuspecting quarterback was being dragged to the back of the bus where a group of the largest Frenchmen I have ever seen waited for him. Whatever was happening didn’t look like the logical continuation of our discussion of American foreign policy.

A veteran lineman explained: “It is the bizoutage that all new players — including yourself — get when you join the Corsaires.”

Daniel translated for me: bizoutage meant hazing.

The back of the bus erupted in laughter as Xavier screamed, “No! Not the tape!” The ritual involved a lot of Ben Gay in the groin area and athletic tape below the belt. A hirsute man, the quarterback cried out in pain. So much for the pacifistic French you hear about on The O’Reilly Factor: these guys were sadists!

But the mob couldn’t be quelled by just one hazing. “The American! The American!” the crowd began to chant. I recalled my final decision to quit high school football after a frighteningly similar scene.

“Uh, I’m injured,” I said. “I can’t because of my finger. You see, it’s broken. I need ice and rest. Please. I’ll let you guys do the bizoutage next week.”

Part of my plea was true. I had actually broken my finger in the game, despite my limited playing time. At the middle joint, the finger bent into a bizarre 45-degree angle. It was red and purple and swollen. The next part, however, was a lie:  there would be no next week for me. My football career was over, again.

I found myself in the Luxembourg Gardens a few weeks later, noticing the meticulous attention that the groundskeepers paid to every sculpture, every plant, every tree, even in the dead of winter. No one dared to step on the grass that the gardeners in their lime-green suits had dutifully maintained. This part of Paris felt a world away from Évry and the Corsaires. It was quiet and civilized.

Some things, I decided, were best left to the professionals.

STORY INDEX

BOOKS >
Purchase these books through Powells.com and a portion of the proceeds benefit InTheFray

TOPICS > CLASSIC FOOTBALL LITERATURE

Friday Night Lights
by H.G. Bissinger
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0306809907

Paper Lion
by George Plimpton
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=1592280153

North Dallas Forty
by Peter Gent
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=1894963024

TOPICS> AMERICANS IN PARIS

Paris to the Moon
by Adam Gopnik
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0375758232

A Moveable Feast
by Ernest Hemingway
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=068482499x

Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0802131786

“

Russell Cobb

Jason enjoys a light moment after finishing chemo on January 22, 2004. (Photo by Marley Seaman)

Jason kept quiet when he learned he had cancer.

He told his roommate and a few close friends, but didn’t want everyone to know yet. He didn’t want the good wishes and the condolences and pats on the back and the awkwardness that came with the attention. Steeling himself for a long battle and getting well were enough to worry about. But when the school year resumed, Jason wasn’t there. The news spread quickly.

It was late October when we saw Jason next. He was gaunt and practically bald, but smiling and, like a good theatre major, he held dozens of us captive with his story: the shock of finding out, his fear of dying, and his ultimate optimism. Jason called himself “lucky” to have Hodgkin’s disease because it was so treatable. His visit felt celebratory.

In January, he returned to school, taking classes and trying to live a normal life between chemotherapy treatments. A few weeks into the semester, I accompanied him to his chemo session to take pictures. I learned that the struggle was far from over. Jason was going to live, but the cancer would fight him every step of the way.

It began as a routine visit. I met Jason and a family friend named Susie at the medical center. His health was good, and his sense of humor intact. He kidded that only he could gain weight while battling cancer.

Jason and the nurse, a pretty Asian woman named Tess, narrated for our benefit as they prepared Jason’s arm for the array of chemicals. Tess slathered his arm in iodine and began a saline drip.

Then the tube in Jason’s arm started bubbling. It was a bad sign. They tried two more veins, but neither was useable. Months of powerful chemicals flowing through his veins had caused them to collapse. There would be no treatment today.

Jason was stunned. It was so difficult for him to gear himself up for these grueling treatments. Each one sapped him of energy for four days. The only relief was that with each completed treatment, he came a step closer to finishing. He knew he would not take that step today, and he began to cry. His dark brown eyes full of pain, he blocked his face with his hand as he sniffled. In a few minutes, he’d pulled himself back together, ready to struggle on.

Tess explained that he needed to go to a hospital in Chicago to get a catheter inserted into his arm, bypassing his fragile veins. Jason didn’t seem to care about the details — none of it mattered as along as he could get another session behind him immediately. As we left the medical center, Jason called his mother and relayed the news. He stayed calm, focusing on the procedure and tomorrow’s treatment.

Back in his dorm room, Jason’s fury burst out. He kicked the walls and complained to his roommate about “My fucking veins,” and how they were damaged like those of a heroin addict.

The anger revealed his feelings before he’d gathered his optimism. He couldn’t hide it now. Most dominant was the frustration: In his voice were hundreds of hours spent wondering why this had to happen to him.

The five-year survival rate for Hodgkin’s patients was 95 percent. At age 20, he’d had to contemplate being in that other 5 percent. What he had told us about luck was true, and he meant it. But he cannot have felt lucky back then, hearing about the cancer spreading through his lymphatic system and about the side effects of chemotherapy.

By winter, his eyebrows, mustache and goatee, like the hair on his head, had turned to wisps. As the treatments progressed, he felt worse. The recovery periods following the chemo got longer and longer. Weekends were a distant memory; it took nearly a week to fully bounce back from treatments, which left him seven days until the next treatment. The chemicals began to make him throw up one week, and that pattern would continue.

Jason’s buoyant nature made us overlook the difficulties he faced. He did not deceive us, but we saw mainly the optimism — not the arduous process by which he had reached it. We took it for granted.

The day after the failed chemotherapy attempt, Jason and Susan were late for his next treatment session. When he got there, he had a bandage on his left arm. A wire now ran from just above his elbow into his heart. The catheter extruding from his sore arm was a mix of clear tubing and blue and white plastic, a small monstrosity he would cover with a slice of a cotton sock. The cancer within his body now had an obvious external marker. He said he would have it removed the day after his last session, but it stayed in his arm for weeks after that.

Jason apologized again and again that the treatment was boring. Compared to the ordeal the previous day, this session was a gift. The doctor and nurses came back on schedule to make conversation and change the I.V. medication drips. Jason complained bitterly about Adriamycin, the powerful chemical that made him vomit the previous week.

Adriamycin was a radioactive, candy red color. It looked strange vanishing into the veins of a human being — it would have been more in place attached to a car in a body shop. Its taste permeated Jason’s mouth from when the second the drip started until it was unhooked. He screwed up his face and sipped on a soda to counteract it. The treatment passed comfortably.

We walked home, and he collapsed for the weekend.

Jason allowed me to tag along for his chemo session two weeks later. It, too, was uneventful, and he slept for its last hour. Two weeks later, parents, stepparents, and friends flew into town for his last treatment. His girlfriend decorated his doorway and hall with banners.

“Last treatment ever!”  

“NO more weeks!”  

There was even a cake that read “Fuck Cancer.”

The story isn’t over, but the news is all good. The radiation therapy, sunburns aside, did not cause Jason much trouble. In the spring, he continued taking classes and directed a production of Taming of the Shrew.

He will need regular checkups for the next few years, and though he cannot overlook it, the chances of his cancer recurring are very low.

He is 21 and healthy, and much the same person he was before, though having his life so far out of his hands has made him a little more patient with situations he can’t control.

Even if he doesn’t know it, through his illness he has found a real strength — the kind found by plumbing the depths of one’s own weakness — that will never leave him.

STORY INDEX

TOPICS > HODGKIN’S DISEASE

How Hodgkin’s disease is diagnosed
URL: http://www.cancer.org/docroot/cri/content/cri_2_2_3x_how_is_hodgkins_disease_found_20.asp

Information on Hodgkin’s disease
URL: http://www.cancer.gov/cancerinfo/wyntk/hodgkins

Treatment of Hodgkin’s disease in adults
URL: http://www.cancer.gov/cancerinfo/pdq/treatment/adulthodgkins/patient/

In The Fray Contributor

When it comes to the Democratic Party, I try not to get my hopes up. Like the Red Sox, they have a knack for disappointment. But I had high hopes for the Democratic National Convention.

When I decided to stay in Boston for graduate school two years ago, I liked the idea of being in my beloved hometown to cover the nomination of the man who might beat Bush. As a journalist, I had grand delusions about stumbling onto a big scoop. As a concerned voter, I hoped John Kerry would convince me that he is more than just the lesser of two evils. If nothing else, I wanted to be on the floor of the convention for the quarter-million dollar balloon drop. But leave it to the Democratic Party — they couldn’t even get that right.

On the first day of the convention, it became clear that there was nothing really to report. Not only did I not uncover a big scoop, but none of the other 15,000 attending media members did, either. The thing that used to make conventions newsworthy — the nomination — had been a settled issue for months. Even the fact that there was nothing to write about was written about so much, it ceased to be a story by Tuesday afternoon. So the mainstream press reported on the bloggers, and the bloggers reported on how it felt to be reported on by the mainstream press.

But the disappointment I felt as a journalist was nothing compared to what I felt as a likely but unconvinced Kerry voter. In hindsight, it was grossly naïve, but I hoped to be inspired. I wanted Kerry and the Democrats to give me reason to be enthusiastic not just about this campaign, but about our country’s future.

One of the Democrats’ biggest problems is that their biggest stars are either already out of office or otherwise incapable of becoming president. The DNC organizers did at least one thing right: They put as much space possible between Clinton and Kerry’s speeches. Clinton was charismatic, self-deprecating, and full of candor. Kerry was his usual plodding, pompous self.

Other than Clinton, crowd favorites included Reverend Al and Howard “I have a scream” Dean, both of whose core followers have only begrudgingly supported Kerry. The star of the week wasn’t the nominee, or even Andre 3000, but Illinois Senate Candidate Barack Obama, about whom the only regret was that he isn’t ready to run this year. This year, John Kerry is the best the Democrats have to offer.

The final night of the convention was Kerry’s opportunity to inspire a country in need of something to be enthusiastic about. Instead, we got an infomercial. The product? The result of too many campaign strategists and focus groups: an ass-kicking, life-saving, hamster-kissing war hero.

After Vanessa Kerry’s improbable story about her dad giving CPR to a water-logged rodent, she was supposed to introduce him (her father, not the rodent). But what followed was a twenty-minute made-for-TV biopic produced by Steven Spielberg and narrated by Morgan Freeman. His war-hero past was retold with all the grace and subtlety of a sledgehammer.

The film was tough to watch at times, but nothing matched the pure discomfort and embarrassment that shot through the crowd when Kerry himself came out to speak. He stepped to the podium, saluted the audience, and said, “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty.” Uggh. The whole evening was so slickly produced and carefully scripted, it felt more like the academy awards than a political convention.

By the final night, I had long since abandoned the naïve hope that Kerry might prove to be more than just another politician, that he would treat the American public more like people than consumers. That week, the DNC wasn’t introducing its candidate; it was launching a new product.

What neither Kerry nor the Democrats understand is that most Americans don’t care if you’ve got three purple hearts or you’re a simple-minded rich kid. They just want someone who isn’t completely full of shit. In 2000, Florida votes aside, Al Gore lost because voters perceived him as more full of shit than Bush. If Kerry loses in November, he will have lost for the same reason.

At the end of his speech, Kerry said, “Never has there been a more urgent moment for Americans to step up and define ourselves.” For Kerry, time is running out.

henrypb

As the 2004 Democratic National Convention descended into Boston, so did a major affront to democracy. Although a free speech zone was erected to keep the peace amongst various interest groups and concerned citizens vying to have their voices heard, this space proved to be anything but democratic. Epitomizing the stringent security measures have become the norm in our post-9/11 world, authorities stifled the voices of groups competing for space to express their opinions on matters of significance to them.

But the predictability of this censorship didn’t assuage my concern. A Canadian with a long-standing interest in American politics, I was elated at the prospect of covering the Democratic National Convention. After all, political conventions are where history is made, where a party’s image and ideals are showcased to the world, and where people begin to think more deeply about a nation’s state of affairs. The potential for change becomes tangible and one can feel hope in the air with impassioned and inspirational speakers like Illinois Senatorial hopeful Barrack Obama, who eloquently spoke of reviving a proud and patriotic nation where the American dream of opportunity and prosperity could become attainable for all people.

As songs like Sister Sledge’s 1979 smash hit “We are Family” blasted through the loudspeakers, people jostled back and forth clapped their hands and swayed from side to side. It was in these moments that a sense of unity prevailed. But as I walked around the Fleet Center where the convention was held, I realized that what was occurring outside in the free speech zone was equally as important as what was happening inside, even if it was antithetical to the spirit of the convention.

Naturally, there was no shortage of cameras and media representatives inside the Fleet Center. The convention walls were adorned with CNN banners, ABC signs, and the names of other major media outlets. But despite the wealth of media coverage of the convention, the mainstream media showed no interest in what was occurring in the so-called “free speech” zone, save for the chaos that ensued when four protesters were arrested for disobedience on Thursday afternoon.

Considering the ease with which one could get in and out of the convention without even seeing the demonstrators and hearing what they had to say, I decided to engage these silenced voices of dissent.

Welcome to the terror dome

Along with several delegates and convention attendees, I snaked around a hidden entrance to the Fleet Center where we could catch wind of the protesters‚ messages. Greeting us was a blaring loudspeaker announcement mocking the security checks we would soon encounter. As a man dressed in a bear costume with makeshift plastic buttocks dangling from his rear, who identified himself only as 47-year-old Boston-based Vermin Supreme, bellowed, “Please prepare yourself for a full-body cavity rectal search. Remember,” he cautioned, “It is in the name of national security, and it will make you safer; much like the Patriot Act which John Kerry voted for. Smile. Have a nice day,” he jeered. Hearing this as they filed inside, even delegates and other convention attendees couldn’t help but muster a grin or laugh outwardly.

Ari Maller, a 29-year-old Boston area representative from Rock the Vote, was competing for a space to be heard. Because he believes that youth have the power to influence and affect positive change collectively, he’s passionate about engaging youth in the electoral process. “This is about empowering youth to vote. Only 33 percent of people under the age of 24 voted in the last election (2000),” he explained. “A lot of issues are important to youth, such as education, jobs and war. We‚re just making sure that they have the information they need to make a difference.”

Protesters chanted, “If you‚re trying to bring democracy to Iraq, think of us too!” And with abortion surfacing as a divisive issue along the campaign trail, a group of female demonstrators yelled, “Choice for women. Protect our right to choose.”

Bob McLane, 43, who traveled from Texas to attend the convention, was selling bumper stickers that boldly read: “George Bush, Jr. couldn’t run a laundromat.” Selling these stickers for $1 each, McLane boasts that he sells about 100-150 per day, which helps supplement the travel and lodging expenses he incurs from traveling across the nation. “When someone sticks one of these on their car,” he roared, as he beckoned towards the stack of bumper stickers in his hand, “they’re not going to vote for Bush if they’re an undecided voter. This is about competence. This man is way under qualified to be a spokesperson for our country, much less to try and run it. I’m from Texas, and I’ve been around George a long time, and I’ve seen what an idiot he is,” he hollered. “New Yorkers are my best customers, because they know what a dummy Bush is.”

Carrying a sign that read, “Troops out of Iraq,” Jeff Knudsen, 44 and from the Boston area, explained why he chose to be in the free speech zone on the final day of the convention. “I’m not a Democrat, and although I often vote Democratic, I really wish the Dems would go back to their roots and become a People’s party once again — to be pro-peace, pro-working class, pro-women’s rights, and pro-minority rights. They need to increase social justice spending and to increase money for schools, job training, welfare and social security.”

As the crowd began to disperse on the last night of the convention, 54-year-old Bostonian Michael Schwartz, articulated a sentiment that was increasingly palpable throughout the four days of lockdown in the “free speech zone”: “The police have conflated dissent and terrorism, so to dissent is to be a terrorist. They‚re allowing the two separate issues to become one in the public eye, which is completely irrational. There‚s been an overwhelming police presence here. It’s provocative and it’s overkill.”

Troubled times

With civil liberties being drastically curtailed in the wake of 9/11, protesters are increasingly faced with difficulties as they attempt to organize demonstrations that seek to subvert conventional wisdom and to challenge those in power who serve to stifle the emergence of meaningful debate and dialogue on the array of issues facing the world’s lone superpower.

Such demonstrators, regardless of their motivation, demand a stake in the decision-making process. They seek to permeate the public’s conscience with their messages of hope, anger, disillusion, and a healthy dose of sardonic humor, epitomized by Vermin Supreme’s wry warning of “a full-body cavity rectal search.”

It was a sad four days for democracy in a nation that extols the virtues of such ideals and continues to use the issue of democracy to justify — at least in part — its disastrous invasion of Iraq. At the DNC, American hypocrisy was on full display for the world to see. I spent much of the four days of the convention holed up in the so-called “free speech zone,” where it often seemed as if there were more police in riot gear, citing “security” concerns to justify their excessive presence, than protesters, who symbolically placed duct tape over their mouths as a sign of the times. That is, times where to speak one’s mind and where to waver from conventional wisdom is tantamount to treason. The Patriot Act only serves to confirm this widespread sentiment.

Over the course of the convention, it became increasingly apparent that John Kerry’s Democrats could have used the convention’s glimmering spotlight to prove to Americans that this party is truly a people’s party. That they’re serious about fostering meaningful debate on the complex issues facing a divided nation.

Essentially, Kerry and the law enforcement officials could have succeeded in doing this by welcoming the protesters onto the convention’s premises, where they could be heard and where they could be visible and not on the outskirts of the site, down a dingy alley littered with Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, cigarette butts, and discarded pizza boxes.

Voters may now be inclined to think that Kerry won’t be the “man for all people” after all “that the image of inclusion and tolerance that he and his vice-presidential running mate, John Edwards, have projected is nothing more than a façade aimed at deceiving the American populace.

With three months before the much-anticipated election takes place, Kerry will have to do a massive overhaul if he hopes to garner much-needed votes from the disillusioned people who have seen no indication that he’ll be open to diverging viewpoints thus far.

STORY INDEX

Commentary >

“John Kerry’s Waffles” by Michael Grunwald
URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2096540/

Legislation >

The Patriot Act
URL:
http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html

In The Fray Contributor

(Photo by Dustin Ross)

The hopeful optimism of delegates at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston was unmistakable. At the heart of this optimism lies a paradox. Democrats are more impassioned and energized than they have been in some time, yet the various wings of the party are united to an unprecedented degree.

Ordinarily, political passion is associated with an energized party base and squabbles pitting it against party moderates, as Howard Dean’s remarkable primary campaign suggested. But a pervasive anybody-but-Bush sentiment among Democrats — a sentiment that propelled John Kerry to a seemingly unexpected victory in this year’s primaries — has become the dominant feature of the election. Sure, primary voters flirted heavily with Dean and later Edwards.But in the end they voted for the (unsexy) candidate they believed had the best chance of sending Bush packing.

Even though convention delegates tend to be less moderate than other voters, this pragmatic approach to the 2004 election was everywhere you looked among Democrats in Boston. Michigan delegate Cheryl Hadsall, for instance, is concerned with jobs and health care. But her first priority is much more basic: “We need to take back the White House.”  

Similarly, California delegate Judith Katzberg, a nurse who volunteers in a clinic serving the poor and an advocate of universal healthcare coverage and abortion rights, is well aware that the Democratic nominee’s proposal would fall far short of universal coverage. She is also aware that Kerry believes that life begins at conception. Yet she’s willing to make concessions this year, emphasizing that “you have to be pragmatic” first and then “always try to get more.”

Katzberg is hardly alone in this sentiment. Standing in solidarity with the anybody-but-Bush pragmatists, many single-issue interest groups have united under the moniker “America Votes” in an unprecedented campaign to increase voter turnout and boost the electoral prospects of Democratic candidates around the country. Howard Dean, once the beacon of “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” played nice as he stood before delegates at the convention, declaring, “We’re all here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.” Even hardcore lefties like Michael Moore are urging their supporters not to vote for Ralph Nader to ensure Bush’s defeat.

Biding their time

But because this anti-Bush consensus conceals important rifts within the party, it seems destined to yield to further intra-party battles beyond the election. Should John Kerry and John Edwards triumph in November, progressives who misinterpret the outcome as a mandate for their agenda, rather than a referendum against Bush, run the risk of setting back the party — and the progressive agenda — in the long run.

There are ample signs that party unity will fail to hold after the election.  Despite Representative and former presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich’s proclamation that “Out of many, we Democrats are one,” he waited until the eve of the convention to release his delegates to vote for Kerry. A unanimous nomination eluded Kerry because a number of the delegates voted for Kucinich anyway.      

Andrew Stern, the liberal president of the liberal Service Employees International Union (SEIU), professed his belief early in the week that a Kerry Administration would be bad for the Democratic Party and bad for unions. By his Marxian reasoning, a Kerry victory would delay the progressive change needed to transform the party, while a second Bush term would naturally produce a leftward lurch.

And a group called Progressive Democrats of America was launched at the end of convention week with an eye toward post-November organizing. As Field Director Kevin Spidel explained, “Our goal is to win back the presidency from the Republicans, and also to wrest the Democratic Party from the free-trading-Iraq-invading-Patriot-Act-supporting leadership it has now.” Needless to say, this perspective is notably at odds with the Kerry-Edwards agenda and the party platform.

While the impulse behind these strategies is often noble, they reflect a misunderstanding of the electoral constraints impeding a more progressive agenda. The 2000 election was essentially a tie, with Al Gore winning 48.4 percent of the popular vote and Bush garnering 47.9 percent.

Still a 50-50 nation

Four years later, little has changed. Despite problems in Iraq and a lackluster economy at home, the current presidential race is remarkably close. A Time magazine poll the week before the convention indicated that when registered voters were asked to choose between Kerry, Bush, and Nader, 46 percent said they would vote for Kerry while 44 percent said they’d vote for Bush. Democrats have reason for optimism in that the 5 percent who say they will vote for Nader may yet adopt the pragmatism of other Bush opponents. And conventional wisdom states that voters who are undecided this late in the election vote against the incumbent, so the 4 percent of voters who are undecided may also ultimately vote for Kerry. According to a poll conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, one in five voters potentially could vote for either major candidate.

Not surprisingly, the Democratic National Convention — which emphasized military strength and family values — sought to win over these undecided voters. And should the Kerry/Edwards ticket prevail in November, the new administration will need to tend to these voters to ensure that the Democrats’ return to the White House isn’t short-lived and give the Democrats a chance of regaining control of Congress in the future. These are the imperatives of enacting progressive change, and those who profess to be progressives must confront this reality more so than they have done previously.

Why? According to the nationally representative General Social Survey (GSS), 14 percent of voters in the 2000 election considered themselves “liberal” or “extremely liberal.” But 20 percent considered themselves “conservative” or ”extremely conservative.” Not only do progressives constitute a small minority of the voting population, but they are outnumbered on the right. Furthermore, 60 percent of Democrats identified themselves as centrist or right of center, while just 40 percent of Republicans identified as centrist or left of center. So even among party loyalists, Democrats are more moderate than Republicans. When Republican voters and conservative voters are combined, this group outnumbers Democrats who are not conservative by a factor of five. Republicans and conservatives outnumber non-conservative Democrats and Independents three-to-one. Progressives’ idea of the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party constitutes a tiny fraction of the electorate.

Progressives like to argue that Democrats should increase voter registration and turnout rather than focusing on winning the swing vote. Moore, in particular, pushed this argument all over town last week, decrying polls’ shortsighted fixation on likely voters. Although such arguments are rarely accompanied by evidence, the available data refutes the idea that non-voters are more progressive than voters.  

According to the GSS, non-voters tend to be more moderate than voting adults. While 38 percent of voters identify as conservative, only 30 percent of non-voters do. But non-voters are also less likely than voters to call themselves liberal (25 percent versus 27 percent). In fact, according to the GSS, even if every eligible adult had voted in 2000, the popular vote would have remained unchanged. Thanks to the Iraq War, the outcome could be different this year. But in the absence of hard data, one can only speculate.

Potentially, Democrats could (and should) out-perform Republicans in registering new partisans to vote and getting disaffected partisan voters to the polling booth. But to the extent that this strategy succeeds, Republicans will presumably follow suit. The end result? Greater extremism on both sides of the aisle and more gridlock. Not exactly a promising strategy for achieving progressive ends.

The 2000 election demonstrates there is a great deal of room for the U.S. President to move beyond the center. Had Al Gore been installed as president instead of Bush, a much smaller tax cut would have likely been signed into law, freeing up money for other priorities. Perhaps there would have been more spending on health care or education. Maybe there would be a stronger safety net for workers who lose their jobs.  

With this in mind, many progressives argue that Democrats need to be as willing as Republicans to move beyond the center. This line of reasoning ignores or dismisses policy advances made by Democrats in recent years that involved real political risk. (Bill Clinton’s education tax credits, for instance, amounted to a larger program in spending terms than the G.I. Bill.) Similarly, the argument also dismisses that Republicans respond to centrist pressure, though Bush felt compelled to campaign on “compassionate conservatism” and has dramatically increased spending on education and health care for the elderly. It also ignores the extent to which voters punished Gingrich Republicans — and may punish Bush for his departure from bipartisanship.  

But perhaps most importantly, the argument ignores the fact that the average voter falls to the right of center. Consequently, Democrats have less freedom to appease their base than Republicans do. Additionally, the aforementioned figures neither account for the disproportionate weight attached to the votes of small-state residents (often Red-Staters), who have a greater voice than other voters in the Electoral College and the Senate, nor consider the gerrymandering that is currently helping the Republicans maintain control over the House.  

Pragmatism beyond 2004

If progressives impede efforts by a Kerry/Edwards administration — or future Democratic administrations — to build a politically sustainable coalition, they’ll end up ceding power to those who are openly hostile to progressive ideals. The 2004 election, though dominated by the Iraq war’s saliency, is really a particular case of the general problem facing progressives. In his memorable formulation, the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck declared politics the “art of the possible.” There is a reason Bill Clinton attempted to move the party to the center and why pragmatism in 2004 is necessary. It is the same reason why pragmatism will be necessary beyond 2004. The alternative is unacceptable. Progressives who don’t like Bismarck’s perspective may be more sympathetic to that of the American economist and diplomat John Kenneth Galbraith: “Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”

At a forum sponsored by the liberal Campaign for America’s Future last week, Dean wrapped up his fiery speech on what was intended as an optimistic note. Insisting that progressives could win over southern voters, he thundered, “There are 105,000 kids without health insurance in South Carolina. I don’t know why they’d ever vote for another Republican.” But they will vote for more Republicans, and progressives must address this reality if they want to advance their agenda in the next four years and beyond.

STORY INDEX

ARTICLES >

Dean, Kucinich quotes from convention
URL: http://www.dems2004.org/site/apps/nl/newsletter3.asp?c=luI2LaPYG&b=131063

Michael Moore on Nader
URL: http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=503232,

Kucinich and his delegates
URL:  http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-naliberals31jul31,1,4291214.story?coll=la-home-nation

Stern and SEIU
URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16387-2004Jul26.html

Progressive Democrats of America
URL: http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/0720-06.htm

Polls >

2000 popular vote
URL: http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/2000presgeresults.htm

Time magazine poll
URL: http://www.pollingreport.com/wh04gen.htm

Pew poll
URL: http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=217

In The Fray Contributor

Hold on to your PBS tote bags, folks, this may come as a shock: According to Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, a new “guerilla documentary” produced and directed by Robert Greenwald, Fox News Channel isn’t the paragon of journalistic balance and integrity we’ve all been told it was.

Funded by Greenwald, MoveOn.org, and the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, Outfoxed exposes Fox News channel as not just conservative, according to Greenwald, but — gasp — downright Republican!

“Fox is not a conservative channel — it’s a Bush-Republican party channel.” Greenwald told the Baltimore Sun. “Fox News sells this line that it’s ‘fair and balanced’ and they’re reporting news on all sides. That’s not the case.”

If you are at all surprised by this breaking news, you probably don’t have cable (and you’re probably not aware that today’s terror level is “3: Elevated”).  If this revelation has you stuffing that tote bag with pita crisps and red pepper hummus and heading off to the nearest MoveOn.org house party (the movie won’t be shown in theatres), let me save you the trouble.

Greenwald and his team spent four months and $300,000 (a tight documentary budget even by guerilla standards) to “reveal” what anybody with a TV and a predisposition for political sadomasochism could tell you after a night of primetime viewing: Fox News Channel isn’t a news channel at all, but a 24-hour right-wing circle-jerk with five times more red-faced bluster than so-called “news.”

In any 24-hour period on Fox, there’s 20 hours of angry old Republican commentators berating their guests and steamrolling over their pathetic liberal-lite sidekicks. (Alan Colmes and Mort Kondracke, I’m looking at you.)

The actual “news” on Fox News — commercial-length spots shoe-horned in the top and bottom of every hour — is delivered by throaty blond automatons programmed to inject every story with the appropriate dose of either snickering condescension (when the story is about a “liberal”) or worshipful deference (when the story is about the Bush administration). Of course, when there is a breaking story, like a Peterson trial update or a low-speed police pursuit through the suburbs of Los Angeles, editors will occasionally interrupt the scheduled lineup.

The bombshell of Outfoxed, if you can call it that, is the revelation that John Moody, Fox News’ senior vice president for news, gives the staff daily directives on how the stories of the day are to be covered. Here’s one of the most damning of the 30 or so internal Fox memos released by Greenwald’s team:

From: John Moody
Date: 4/4/2004
MONDAY UPDATE: Into Fallujah: It’s called Operation Vigilant Resolve and it began Monday morning (NY time) with the US and Iraqi military surrounding Fallujah. We will cover this hour by hour today, explaining repeatedly why it is happening. It won’t be long before some people start to decry the use of “excessive force.” We won’t be among that group.
The continuing carnage in Iraq — mostly the deaths of seven U.S. troops in Sadr City — is leaving the American military little choice but to punish perpetrators. When this happens, we should be ready to put in context the events that led to it. More than 600 U.S. military dead, attacks on the U.N. headquarters last year, assassination of Iraqi officials who work with the coalition, the deaths of Spanish troops last fall, the outrage in Fallujah: Whatever happens, it is richly deserved.

It may be gratifying confirmation to hear that Fox’s Republican slant comes from the top of the organization, but is it really surprising? Brit Hume, Fox’s managing editor and chief Washington, D.C., correspondent, has his own commentary show with four Republican guests and one liberal straw man. It’s all you really need to see to understand Fox’s commitment to balance.

So the question shouldn’t be, “Is Fox News really ‘Fair and Balanced?’” — since only a fool could answer with an unqualified “yes” — but rather, “what has Greenwald accomplished beyond restating what’s patently obvious?”

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I haven’t seen the movie. But why should I? I watch Fox News every day.

henrypb

I clench my gloved palms around the cold serrated steel bar, at either end of which sit several rubberized 5, 10, and 20 kilogram plates. My knees bent, I attempt to deadlift the weight by pulling the bar over my knees and straightening my back. As I prepare for lift-off, I try to ignore the gawking observers to my left. I suppose lifting over 80 kilograms (176 pounds), for a girl weighing less than two-thirds of that, is generally considered no small feat in China or elsewhere. But the fact that I am in Shanghai makes weightlifting a uniquely challenging experience.

When I joined the First (phonetically translated into Fei Si Te) Fitness Center near my apartment in Shanghai’s Yangpu District, I was not quite prepared for the adjustment process I would have to undergo: an abrupt introduction to the cultural gaps between Chinese and Western concepts of exercise and personal space.

My initiation into the Fei Si Te community brought me the dubious privilege of celebrity status, me being 1) a small-framed Chinese-American female, and 2) an avid weightlifter with an admittedly odd penchant for lifting dumbbells and barbells that are about as big as I am. Thus, not only was I upsetting conventional notions of femininity, but I was also doing so in a booming post-Communist metropolis whose youth culture is hovering precariously somewhere between Maoist puritanism and Britney Spears. So I guess I shouldn’t feel surprised that I attracted stares of fascination mixed with horror and fear as I squatted close to twice my body weight. Not that my weightlifting didn’t draw surprise from male bystanders back in the United States, but at Fei Si Te , the blatant shock plainly smeared on the faces of exercisers was a Shanghai specialty, and months would pass until they began gradually to accept me as simply a grotesque fixture at the gym.

Alone in the crowd

To complicate matters, Fei Si Te, like many new enterprises in Shanghai, is hopelessly over-invested and over-staffed. Though it is nice having an entire gym all to oneself in the afternoon, it is slightly unnerving to be the only other animate object in the cavernous space besides three trainers and the custodian, all uniformed in pert warm-up suits.

On busier days, the five of us are joined by several 30-something ladies who maniacally monopolize every sit-up bench. As I push around the freeweights, the custodian meticulously wipes clean all the cheaply manufactured equipment with pleather trimmings that manage to peel despite hardly being used, and the trainers idle in the 10-foot radius around the air-conditioner, or do a few random chin-ups. They often have nothing to do but watch the exercisers. Though they sometimes offer me advice on good form, which I appreciate, they are more eager to engage the American in conversation about powerlifting techniques, protein powders, bodybuilding contests, and other aspects of fitness culture in the United States of which Chinese are just beginning to catch on and be mass marketed to.

On occasion, a trainer or a bold male bystander has been known to reaffirm his masculinity by jumping in between sets and attempting to throw my barbell around with strenuously displayed ease. I try to warn people against jumping under heavy weights if they have no previous lifting experience, but for some reason, seeing me lift has prompted some to “test” their strength by attempting to imitate my movement immediately after I finish with a weight or a machine. (I do admit it’s gratifying to see a grown man grab and instantly drop in bewilderment the barbell I just lifted, but I’d hate to be responsible for someone’s injury.)

During some memorable lifting sessions, I have been approached every ten minutes with some sort of question about how I picked up such an odd hobby or a comment about my being lihai (powerful) or how I should keep my elbows closer to my side when doing tricep pushdowns. “Are you planning on entering a bodybuilding competition?” asked one trainer. “You must be familiar with that guy,” said another, gesturing to the pair of posters (front and back) of Mr. Olympia flexing his steroidal physique in briefs.  

The body as temple, or high mass?

If I were only more culturally resilient, I might do as my fellow Chinese gym-goers do and chat happily with the trainers from the warm-up to cool-down. For Westerners, though, a workout is either a functional task (sometimes a chore) or a chance to isolate oneself from the hectic stimuli of work and household and focus on simple physical cultivation. In China, the idea of “working out” is still novel enough that the exercise is not so much practical as it is exhilarating, not an escape hatch from the pressures of Shanghai city life but a chance to participate further in modern consumer culture. Though Shanghai’s blitzkrieg of economic development has enabled the city to import the trappings of a cosmopolitan metropolis, recreational activities that seem mundane in developed nations, like “going to the gym,” still hold a spectacular quality for many of its wealthier residents.

In contrast to other parts of China, years of capitalist transition have acclimated Shanghai to the presence of lao wai (foreigners), Western pop music, and European brand names. Yet more personal aspects of the Western lifestyle — from dimly lit cafes to sweat-pumping aerobics classes — still dazzle even Shanghai’s rising elite, representing sophistication accessible only to the moneyed class.

Some cultural intangibles, however, just can’t be bought. Privacy, for instance. China is not only a mass society, but a society of spectators as well, which might explain why at my gym, people seem much more adept at watching others exercise than doing it themselves.

During a one-day promotional event, visitors were allowed a free trial of the equipment, and the usually empty gym was for an hour or so overrun with young men and women in trousers and dress shoes, positioning themselves backwards on the leg curl machine, yanking various limbs and cables back and forth, and nearly running the wheels off of an exercise bike in a frenzy of freshly discovered aerobic energy — all to the tune of techno and mandopop blasting in the background.

A group of gaunt Chinese men in their twenties made no attempt at subtlety when watching me do a few sets of deadlifts from about 10 feet away.

“Do you have to watch me like that?” I said in my best Chinese approximation of my surly New Yorker tone.

“We just think you’re lihai,” said one.

I tried to explain that it was uncomfortable to be observed this way, particularly when I was trying to focus my energy on dragging an obscenely heavy weight up from the floor. I realized that in China, Western amenities are designed for display, and the idea of private activity, within a seemingly “public” space such as a weight room, remains a foreign concept.

The men ambled off soon after I began glaring at them. I complained about the incident to another American gym patron who was also lifting weights. “Different concept of personal space here,” I remarked.

“Yeah,” he said disdainfully. “None.”

But this culture clash perhaps has a deeper significance than personal annoyance. My watchers considered a stare a complement, my subjection to their scrutiny a testament to my “lihai.” Nonetheless, as an American city girl who doesn’t always appreciate being put on the spot, my flattery is dwarfed by unease. Shanghai’s great irony is that its size and bustle afford both the anonymity of a global metropolis and the claustrophobia of vintage urban China. The surveillance I encounter as a fitness novelty reveals that here, what seems like a personal quest for muscular achievement can quickly turn into a spectator sport.

Click here to read Part One of the series.

STORY INDEX

TOPICS >

THE CHINESE FITNESS TREND >

”Global Fitness Chain to Build First Gyms in Beijing, Shanghai”, published by People’s Daily on March 22, 2002.
URL: http://china.org.cn/english/investment/29295.htm

”China’s Wellness Revolution” by Mark Godfrey, published by China Today. June 22, 2004.
URL: http://china.org.cn/english/2004/Jun/98896.htm

GENDER POLITICS AND POWERLIFTING >

”The Bodybuilding Grotesque: The Female Bodybuilder, Gender Transgression, and Designations of Deviance” by muscle-bound scholar Krista Scott-Dixon of Stumptuous.com.
URL: http://www.stumptuous.com/grotesque.html

“

Michelle Chen

Hours after seeing Fahrenheit 9/11, I did what hundreds of thousands of other viewers probably did. I picked up the telephone to urge others to see the movie.

My first call went to my sister, a self-described “Yellow Dog Democrat,” teacher, and activist. I didn’t have to tell her to see the film; I know she’d go as soon as the movie came to her town. But I urged her to take my niece and nephews.

There was something in the film they need to see.

It isn’t filmmaker Michael Moore’s theories about the connections between the Bush family and the Saudi royal family. It isn’t the scenes in the second half, when Marine Corps recruiters try to lure young, under-employed African American males into enlisting.

I want my niece and nephews to see a scene at the beginning of the movie, before the credits, when Moore shows the U.S. Senate certifying the election of President George W. Bush.

One by one, African American members of Congress and their allies stood before the senators to oppose the certification of Bush’s election. They presented written petitions noting how Bush’s victory lay on the disenfranchisement of African American voters. When Vice President Al Gore, who was serving as president of the Senate, asked if any senator supported his or her petitions, each member of the House of Representatives gave the same answer.

“No.”

Why should the young people in my family see such a defeat? My sister thought the scene would teach the importance of electing black officials.

Maybe, but I am hoping for a larger lesson; I want my niece and nephews and their peers see what race consciousness really is.

True race consciousness means recognizing your responsibility to stand up for those who have less than you: less education, less access, even less understanding of the machinations that keep the elite in place.

True race consciousness means recognizing your responsibility to stand up to oppression, even though your resistance might be futile.

True race consciousness demands speaking truth to power.

Sadly, I think younger blacks don’t often see this kind of moral leadership.

Older black leaders, like Jesse Jackson, have failed them by not practicing what they preach in an age when one’s indiscretions can appear on a website — and the national news — in an instant.

Then there’s Bill Cosby, who castigates the younger generation, as well as the underclass, with vile and stereotypical language.

Their peers, the new class of young celebrities, concentrate on “bling-bling.” I’ll admit the term is probably outdated. But the lyrics to hip-hop I hear still gleefully celebrate sex, flash, and cash. So young people look up to folks touting P. Diddy race consciousness: folks who think they advance the race by showing others how to live fast, glittering lives.

Where were they when the Republicans stole black votes to put their boy in the White House? Sampling beats?

Who where they talking to? Each other?

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California, and the others confronted the white, predominately male senators who sat comfortably on their behinds and approved an election that they knew was illegitimate. These were people who hid their cowardice and cynicism behind rules of order.

It would have only taken one senator to sign a petition that could have stopped the process that made Bush the president of the United States.

Not one came forward.

And the representatives knew that before they came to deliver their petitions. But they came anyway.

They welded the power they had even though they knew the final outcome.

And that’s what I want my niece and nephews to see, so that when their turn comes to speak out —and it will — they will not hesitate.

They will remember those who went before them, and stand strong.

STORY INDEX

FILMS >

Fahrenheit 9/11
URL: http://www.fahrenheit911.com

ORGANIZATIONS >

The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation
URL: http://www.cbcfinc.org

“

Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs