Inundated by images, stories, and people reminding us that love and sex are basic human needs, few of us can avoid working to satiate these essentials. From reality dating shows like The Bachelor to the proliferation of online dating services to President Bush’s billion-dollar initiative to promote healthy marriages, singles are being encouraged to find love — or at least sex — in the most unlikely of places. But these schemes don’t necessarily pose equal opportunities for all bachelors and bachelorettes.

So some singles head down the ominous self-help aisle at the bookstore, or better yet, straight to the Internet, where they can purchase books such as John Fate’s Make Every Girl Want You and The Nice Guys’ Guide to Getting Girls without ever having to look a cashier in the eye as if to say, “Yes, I really am buying this book. What’s it to you?”

What consumers of these books are purchasing, however, is not merely advice for self-improvement. Perhaps unwittingly, readers of The Nice Guys’ Guide to Getting Girls and other similar relationship guides also partake in the circulation of certain stereotypes about the male and female genders and the billion-dollar dating industry that helps keep them intact. If gender norms are at least partially socially constructed, then relationship self-help guides have the potential to drastically influence the ways in which we act out our genders.

When men purchase Fate’s book, they look to him for advice and assume that his wisdom can send them down the road to romantic bliss. This expectation, of course, is in no small part the consequence of considerable self-promotion — and the promise that readers, too, can become genuine Nice Guys simply by taking advice from the pros. According to The Nice Guys’ website, Fate and The Nice Guys™ “were quickly crowned as the leading experts in the fields of meeting and dating women, as they pertain to both casual & serious relationships. They have since shared their expertise on NBC’s The Other Half, have gone toe to toe with Bill O’Reilly on The O’Reilly Factor, and have served as experts on The Ricki Lake Show, MTV’s Urban Myth Show, & many others.”

A tale of two genders

As the female editor of this guide to “getting girls,” I had a little Being John Malkovich — or rather, Being John Fate — experience of my own. By most standards, I qualify as a progressive woman. Prior to editing this book, I had done significant coursework in literature and advocacy work concerning gender, sex, and sexuality. Quite frankly, I never envisioned myself partaking in the crafting of a dating manual for men. But alas, hell just may have frozen over.

Why did I agree to edit this book if the subject matter and genre weren’t really my cup of tea? It certainly wasn’t the monetary reward, since I passed the age where $50 seemed like a generous paycheck long ago. Part of it stemmed from my desire to gain experience and get my foot in the elusive door of the publishing industry. I also thought that editing the book posed a unique opportunity to improve the lot of womankind by ensuring that men treat us better. Although I once naively believed I would never date or associate with a guy who didn’t respect women, I have learned that it is impossible to go through life without interacting with (and, unfortunately, even dating) such men. I have had enough experience with such guys to want to help other women avoid having everything from their brains to their beauty degraded by the men they associate with.

In retrospect, my expectations were somewhat shortsighted from the beginning. I assumed that this book, which was written for so-called nice guys by men from the Nice Guys Institute, might characterize women — and relationships between men and women — in fairly progressive terms given the day and age in which the text was written. To the extent that the book contains no offensive pick-up lines, I suppose it is relatively progressive for its genre. But based on what the text explicitly says, Fate and his book remain intimately tied to the romance industry that helps define and propagate gender stereotypes.

I am sure that Fate doesn’t think he is sexist. He did, after all, choose to have a woman edit his book and quotes several female friends in The Nice Guys’ Guide. But as demonstrated by my interactions with Fate and his characterization of relationships (sexual, romantic, economic, or otherwise), even Nice Guys can embody, contribute to, and circulate sexist and heterosexist stereotypes.

The color of money

It has often been said that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. And thanks to my fateful editorial experience, I am beginning to understand how this gender gap is maintained with the help of Fate’s “expertise.” Fate might call himself an expert on women, but he is no certified love doctor. Educated as an engineer, Fate’s knowledge about women derives from his friend Oscar’s observations and accounts from Fate’s friends. Friends, in my experience, tend to be a relatively self-selected group of people who are not representative of the population as a whole.

In constructing a community of men who fashion their behavior based on his so-called “expertise,” Fate seeks to maintain a monopoly on the knowledge about gender relations that he circulates. Literally minutes after I put several DVD’s and books — including the copy of Make Every Girl Want You that Fate had given me for reference — up for sale in the Amazon.com marketplace, I received an email sent by The Nice Guys. The text of the email simply read: “Selling the book I gave you on Amazon, Laura? Shame on you.”

While Fate could only afford to pay me $50, he makes plenty of money off of selling these books directly from his website for $15 a pop, teaching courses, appearing on talk shows, and giving  “emergency advice” to men in the midst of “relationship crises.” And yet he has the nerve to reprimand me for making money off of a book that I obviously had no use for once I finished editing The Nice Guys’ Guide. Nice, guy.  

I suppose that Fate likes to see how his books are faring and who is selling them. But this interaction was nothing short of creepy. Not only was my personal email address hidden from public view on Amazon, but I had also used an alias when I put the items up for sale. Maybe my location gave me away, though it seems highly unlikely that I was the sole person in Austin who possessed Fate’s book. Was he tracking my ISP number? I don’t want to know. Either way, his email only confirmed that the economics of the Nice Guys only flow one way — Fate’s way — as he tries to ensure that he remains the master of the knowledge he circulates and that only he reaps the benefits.

What lies beneath

Little does he know, I might have gotten the last laugh. While I struggled to reconcile the tension between my personal opinions of Fate’s work and my responsibility toward a book that I was asked to copyedit and make more enjoyable to read, I waged a little behind-the-scenes sabotage. Making a mockery of Fate’s characterization of women, I threw around a few stereotypes of men, partially in hopes that readers would get annoyed and pick up on what I was doing. Capitalizing on my sarcastic wit when I grew bored and annoyed with the triteness of Fate’s content, I found myself mocking the writer and his audience for writing and reading this book in order to entertain myself. For instance, Fate wrote:

This book is really intended to be a sequel to Make Every Girl Want You™, the book that I co-authored with my good friend Steve Reil. Steve and I used to be pathetic. Back in college, we were absolutely pathetic. We were so bad that not only wouldn’t women sleep with us, and not only wouldn’t women date us, but women would not give us the time of day!

Oh, sure, if I were sitting next to a girl in class, and she didn’t understand something the professor said, she may turn to me and ask for clarification. I may even have been able to chat with her for a few minutes in class. But if I saw her out at a bar or frat party later that night, I couldn’t get more than a 30-second conversation out of her.

Underscoring my sentiment that Fate was a bit pathetic for penning this book in the first place, I edited this section to read:

This book is intended to be a sequel to Make Every Girl Want You™, the book that I co-authored with my good friend Steve Reil. We wrote that book — and this one — not because we were natural-born ladies’ men looking to teach some old dogs new tricks, but because we know firsthand what it’s like to go for months or even years without a date. Back in college, there was a good chance that if you looked up the word “pathetic” in the dictionary, you would find the definition followed by, “See also: Steve Reil and John Fate.” In those days, Steve and I didn’t just fail miserably at wooing women to sleep with us — much less date us! — but we couldn’t get women to give us the time of day if our lives depended on it. It often felt as if every woman on Earth had signed a pact and agreed not to acknowledge our very existence.

Oh, sure, if the girl sitting next to me in class didn’t understand something, she might ask me for clarification. I might have even chatted with her briefly during class. But if I saw her at a bar or a frat party later that night, I would be lucky if I got more than a 30-second conversation out of her. Truth be told, I was never actually that lucky.

Later in the manuscript Fate explained:

One great way to convey interest in a conversation is by facing the woman. I’ve observed a lot of guys who will turn and talk to a woman with their face, but their bodies face a different direction. When you turn and face someone with your body, it sends the signal, “Hey, I’m interested in talking to you.”

I was certain that readers would fall asleep (and probably ask for a refund of the $15 that Fate charges for the book) thanks to the mind-numbing and banal nature of his advice. Accentuating male stereotypes in hopes of giving readers a wake-up call, I edited this paragraph to read:

I’ve observed a lot of guys who will turn and talk to a woman with their face, but their bodies face a different direction. Unfortunately, this isn’t going to cut it. Just as your TV would think that you didn’t care about the football game on the screen if you kept looking out the window and up at the ceiling (like that would ever happen!), a woman is going to assume that you’re not interested in what she has to say if you’re not facing her. In order to convey interest in a conversation, then, it’s important to face the woman. When you turn and face someone with your body, it sends the signal, “Hey, I’m interested in talking to you.”

But given the overwhelmingly positive reviews of The Nice Guys’ Guide on Amazon.com, I don’t think Fate and his readers picked up on the behind-the-scenes ridicule waged by the editor. Then again, his self-selected audience is probably too concerned with “getting girls” to think critically about literary conventions, so perhaps this was to be expected.

For the love of the game

What exactly Fate’s audience might have enjoyed unnerves me, however. Was it the title, which I would have encouraged Fate to change to The Nice Guys’ Guide to Meeting Women, had I been aware of it before publication? Fate’s phrase of choice —”getting girls” — suggests, after all, that women are merely a form of booty  (plenty of pun intended). Sure, women are often the objects of male pursuit. But this particular phrase implies that women are passive in relation to men, the aggressors who must pursue the chase. In fact, as Fate tells readers in his discussion of online dating, “Like offline dating, the male plays the pursuer while the woman waits to be pursued.” While the idea of being treated like royalty might seem alluring in the abstract, most women are not sitting around waiting for their knight in shining armor to show up. From what I hear, women talk, speak, and even make the first move sometimes.

Although many people — regardless of their gender — manage to botch things up when approached by an attractive stranger, Fate never so much as mentions what a man should do if a woman approaches him first. Worse yet, Fate focuses almost solely on how to initiate a conversation with women and get their phone numbers, offering scant advice on how to behave on a first date, make the transition from casual dating to exclusivity, and conduct a relationship. Yet, because these areas often produce the greatest conflicts and leave many people — regardless of gender — needing or wanting a little guidance, things do not bode well for Fate’s readers. Perhaps Fate should have more aptly titled his book The Nice Guys’ Guide to Getting Women’s Phone Numbers or The Nice Guys’ Guide to Scoring a One Night Stand to avoid misleading his audience.

Fate advises readers not to think of their interactions with women in terms of picking them up, but given his advice, how can it be anything else? With Fate suggesting that readers get to the airport five hours early to meet women, wait until a woman gets up to go to the bar or the restroom to approach her (to avoid seeming like a stalker, paradoxically), or shoot pool near the restroom at a bar in order to meet women, it seems difficult to imagine that his readers would do these things without thinking about picking up women (particularly getting to the airport five hours early!). Similarly, Fate advises readers to find out where women are from when meeting them at the airport in order to determine whether “it is worth pursuing.” But why worry about whether it is worth continuing a conversation unless, of course, you have a particular goal in mind, say, seducing the woman?

W.W.O.D.? (What would Oscar do?)

Consider the way in which Fate’s book takes guys who repeatedly fail with women and creates a new community of men — Nice Guys who suddenly have all the luck. What exactly distinguishes a nice guy from a Nice Guy, you ask? As Fate explains, “Nice guys . . . need their own approach” since typically, the only guys who succeed with women are “rich, famous, or good-looking.”

Modeled after Oscar, whom Fate mimicked after noticing his knack for dating, Nice Guys have their own terminology, including CCR (compliments, compassion, and reassurance) and know that airports, cruises, gyms, bars with a particular type of layout, and even the Internet are the most optimal places for meeting women.

For each of these locales, Fate provides a “step-by-step guide to meeting women.” While some of Fate’s advice is useful for teaching readers a little tact (i.e. not talking about oneself constantly), his guidelines amount to a one-size-fits-all formula for interacting with women. Typically rife with complications, dating is suddenly the easiest of LSAT logic problems in Fate’s book: “If you are male and see a ‘beautiful woman,’ do X, Y, and Z, and you will have her phone number within ten minutes.”  

Yes, Fate actually contends that “ten minutes is just long enough to get any woman’s contact information.” (Incidentally, he also instructs readers to speak with every woman in the room at a bar or a party for ten minutes to increase their odds of landing a date). The problem with Fate’s logic, of course, is that aside from biological characteristics, there are not any personality traits that intrinsic to all women — or men, for that matter. What works on one woman may backfire with the next.

Fate’s target audience may be fairly self-selected, but it is troublesome nevertheless that many of his assumptions are necessarily universal in reality. For instance, he writes that “Oscar epitomizes what every guy wants to be — a truly nice guy who women love,” and the slogan of the Nice Guys’ Institute is “Dedicated to helping nice guys make themselves more attractive to women.” But does everyone with a penis want to be “truly nice,” much less desired by women? And are all women attracted to so-called Nice Guys? Ever heard of the “bad boy syndrome” or James Dean? Or better yet, lesbians?

Since Fate fails to tell readers what to do when they discover that not every woman can be wooed by a Nice Guy — no matter how nice he is — their reactions to these women might end up offending the objects of their pursuit. In fact, Fate’s attempt to prescribe our responses to the sex we desire based upon gender differences risks bolstering many of the misunderstandings between men and women that he seeks to remedy.

In the book’s afterword, Fate writes, “When you have patience . . . women will be amazed and shocked.” While some women may be impressed with a guy who gives them the time of day and isn’t excessively pushy, it is foolish to suggest that many people do not expect this as a common courtesy from men and women alike. Sure, it might be exciting to meet someone who is exceptionally nice, but in this day and age, women are not so naïve as to be “amazed and shocked” by a friendly, mellow guy. I would even venture to say that some of us expect that.

Bodies that matter — and personalities that don’t

Many of us even expect — or at least hope — that people would outgrow some of the age-old stereotypes about the female body. But alas, this is easier said than done. For instance, in a chapter Fate saved for the sequel to The Nice Guys’ Guide, he discusses how men are inevitably faced with what to do and say when women ask their significant others if they are fat. Many women are in fact insecure, and body image concerns certainly haunt many of us. But body image insecurity is hardly a universal characteristic of all, or even most, women. Moreover, this problem isn’t restricted to women. Men of all sexual orientations also struggle with body image concerns. But by attempting to displace these insecurities onto women’s bodies, Fate reinforces the fallacy that a woman’s identity is defined largely through her body — and that a certain female body type is more desirable than others.

Fate’s recurring reference to “beautiful women,” a phrase he uses more often than the solo term “women,” is also rife with problems. It is unclear what Fate means by “beautiful women,” though I get the impression that it is a stereotypical, Cindy Crawfordesque notion of beauty defined primarily by a woman’s physical features. After all, Fate implies that one can meet beautiful women without knowing anything about them beforehand. Peculiarly, Fate never once uses “cute,” “cool,” “smart,” or “funny” to describe women one might pursue. Perhaps beauty encompasses all of these features for Fate, but if this is the case, why not diversify his choice of adjectives to describe what types of women one should pursue?

When Fate tells readers that he can point them in the direction of “these [beautiful] women” and warns them, “I’m not telling you to chase after ugly or below-average women now,” his double-standard for men and women becomes evident. While Fate complains that he always had trouble with women because he was not rich, famous, or good-looking, he does not hesitate to single out women who are “ugly or below-average.”

By encouraging readers to pursue women who appear desirable at first glance, Fate also lends credence to the stereotype that men are shallow. For Fate and the Nice Guys, it seems, individuality and differences — those ominous characteristics that make us unique and which make us attractive to some people and not to others — can be overlooked (unless, of course, we are talking about “beautiful” versus “average or below-average women”), making any “beautiful woman” the appropriate object of a Nice Guy’s pursuit. As Justin Marks, spokesman for the Nice Guys, said, “We don’t care what comes out of a woman’s mouth when we meet her. As long as she’s attractive, we want to go out with her.” Quite the charmer, eh? Perhaps someone should write a self-help book targeted at the Nice Guys.

The irony of the Nice Guys’ focus on “getting beautiful women,” of course, is that Fate tells readers that he had no luck with women initially because he was not rich, famous, or good-looking. Yet, while Fate gears his book toward “average guys,” he still gives an advantage to guys who can afford to pay — and seeks to improve his own standing through his money-making schemes.

Not only can men get Fate’s advice from his books, classes, and talk show appearances, but they can also email “The Nice Guys” with their questions during their times of need. Whereas men who pay a whopping $25 are guaranteed a response within 48 hours, those who do not pay should not expect to receive a reply. In order to determine which women are worthy of pursuit, I had a male friend email Fate and ask him to qualify what he means by “beautiful women.” Needless to say, the Nice Guys never replied. Perhaps they would have if he had paid the $25.

But alas, money talks. And these days, the dating industry is trying to convince us that wealth and beauty still determine one’s dating success. It appears, then, that even if money can’t buy men love, it just might buy them guidance on the coveted “Woman Question” — and some good old-fashioned gender stereotypes.

STORY INDEX

MARKETPLACE >
(order from Powells.com and a portion of each sale goes to InTheFray)

Against Love: A Polemic
By Laura Kipnis. Published by Pantheon Books. 2003.
Purchase this book from Amazon or Powells

PUBLICATIONS >

”Bush Leaves No Bride Behind”
By Arianna Huffington. Published by AlterNet, January 21, 2004.
URL: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17624

‘Nice Guys’ Do Finish Last With Their Misguided Advice Book”
By Justin Dickerson. Published by The Hoya, February 20, 2004.
URL: http://www.thehoya.com/guide/022004/guide15.cfm

“Nice Guys still finish toward end of pack”
By Mike Forgey and Katie Silver.
URL: http://press.creighton.edu/021304/thescene.html

TOPICS > THE NICE GUYS >

The Nice Guys’ Guide
website of The Nice Guys’ Institute
URL: http://www.theniceguysguide.com

TOPICS > IDENTITY >

Quirkyalone
“The home of the quirkyalone movement.” “Quirkyalones are romantics who resist the tyranny of coupledom.”
URL: http://quirkyalone.net/qa/

Judith Butler/Gender Trouble
An introduction to Judith Butler and the arguments put forward in her 1990 book Gender Trouble
URL: http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-butl.htm

“

Laura Nathan-Garner

John Kerry calls Al Gore:

Al: Hi John.

John: Hey Al.

Al: Congratulations on the nomination.

John: Thanks, Al. How are you?

Al: Things are good.

John: How’s Tipper?

Al: She’s well. She’s right here in bed next to me.

John: Oh, tell her I say hello. What a wonderful woman she is.

Al: Yes, I’m lucky to have her.

John: So she’s there next to you?

Al: Yes John, she is.

John: That’s wonderful. It must be nice to sleep with your wife.

Al: I beg your pardon?

John: Oh Al, lighten up. I didn’t mean it like that. I mean that Teresa and I haven’t slept in the same bed in years.

Al: Oh.

John: So how’s everything else?

Al: Good. Fine.

John: How’s that stoner son of yours?

Al: Stoned, I’m guessing.

John: Well it’s nothing to be ashamed of. You know I’d legalize pot in a minute if I could.

Al: Yes, I know.

John: But I can’t say that out loud.

Al: Of course not.

John: I’d never get elected. Bill Maher would love me, but I’d lose 45 states.

Al: Maybe more.

John: It’s like gay marriage. What do I care if they want to get married? You think I care? Of course I don’t care. I say, let them get married and be miserable.

Al: I know. But you can’t say that.

John: No, Al, I can’t. And why? Because we live in a country with a lot of stupid people.

Al: I know. You’re preaching to the choir here.

John: Sometimes I wonder if I even want these people to like me. You know what I mean?

Al: Yes, I do.

John: Because, in a way, if moronic people like me, what does that really say about me?

Al: It’s a valid question.

John: But Al, enough about that. I’ve been meaning to ask you a question.

Al: Sure. Go ahead.

John: It’s about the Dean endorsement.

Al: Yes, I figured it might be about that.

John: Were you on crack?

Al: John, I don’t do crack.

John: It’s a figure of speech, Al. You really do need to lighten up.

Al: Okay.

John: So what were you thinking?

Al: Off the record?

John: Al, of course. We’re friends.

Al: No, we’re not.

John: Sure we are.

Al: Anyway, it was Tipper’s idea.

John: Tipper?

Al: Yeah, she loves him. She still does. Thinks he’s great.

John: But he’s fucking nuts.

Al: Yes, but I didn’t know that then.

John: So Tipper told you to endorse him?

Al: Yes, she did. And he seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. You know, before the scream.

John: Yes, the scream. That scream won me the nomination.

Al: Yes, it did.

John: Loved the scream!

Al: Thought you might.

John: The scream heard around the world!

Al: Okay John. Looking back, endorsing Dean wasn’t the best decision I ever made. I’ll give you that.

John: No shit. Kind of like picking Lieberman.

Al: Yes, I know.

John: Al, you should have picked me.

Al: You were a finalist. But coming off Clinton, I couldn’t pick you. I needed someone squeaky-clean.

John: I’m not squeaky-clean?

Al: No John, you’re not.

John: So sue me, I like women. But Lieberman? I mean, who picks a Jew in a national election?

Al: He’s more annoying than Jewish.

John: Was he Tipper’s idea, too?

Al: Well, it doesn’t matter anymore.

John: Okay, fine. So why didn’t you endorse me?

Al: Honestly?

John: Of course.

Al: Tipper said you’re too stiff, too aloof, too long-winded. She said you wouldn’t resonate with voters.

John: I’m stiff?

Al: Yes.

John: Al, no offense, but you’re the fucking king of stiff.

Al: She said you were stiffer. And she said you come off as patronizing.

John: She said that about me?

Al: Yes.

John: Who the fuck is she?

Al: She’s my wife.

John: And what kind of moron takes political advice from someone named Tipper?

Al: John, if you’re going to insult my wife …

John: Al, I think you should endorse me now.

Al: I can’t do that.

John: Why not?

Al: You’re too waffly on the issues.

John: But Al, we’re in this fight together.

Al: Don’t use that word.

John: What word?

Al: Fight. You use it too much. It didn’t work for me. I used it every other sentence, and I lost.

John: You won.

Al: Well yes, but you know what I mean.

John: The word’s fine.

Al: I’m telling you John, the word’s jinxed. Keep using it, and you’re going to lose.

John: I’m not going to lose. The economy’s tanking.

Al: Yes, that is good news.

John: It’s fantastic news.

Al: But I can’t endorse you.

John: Fine, I don’t want you anyway.

Al: See what I mean about waffling?

John: You know Al, they’re already comparing me to you.

Al: Yes, I’ve heard.

John: One day I’m Dukakis, the next I’m you.

Al: I know.

John: I’m not sure which comparison is worse.

Al: Well, I’m a bit biased on the question.

John: Al, people don’t think very highly of you.

Al: I know.

John: Personally, I’ve always liked you. But the Republican smear machine really did a number.

Al: Yes, I know. But John, that was a long time ago. I’ve moved on.

John: Have you Al?

Al: Yes John, I have.

John: Saying you invented the Internet was pretty stupid.

Al: I didn’t say I invented the Internet.

John: And the eye rolling? Who rolls their eyes during debates?

Al: I could have done better there, yes.

John: In some ways, Al, it looked like you were trying to lose. I mean, the stiffness? You really are the king of stiff.

Al: John, I really should be getting to bed now.

John: Alright, alright. So a definite no on the endorsement?

Al: Yes.

John: Does that mean yes, a definite no, or yes, it’s not a definite no?

Al: John, I need to go.

John: Okay, okay.

Al: We’ll talk soon.

John: Fine. Oh, and Al, be sure to tell Tipper something for me.

Al: Yes John.

John: Tell Tipper that once I’m elected, I’ll let bygones be bygones, and she can come and spend the night at the White House anytime she wants.

Al: Okay, I’ll tell her.

John: In my bed.

Al: No John, not in your bed.

John: Because we’re in this fight together. We’re fighting for an America we can be proud of.

Al: I’m telling you not to use that word.

John: Al, with all due respect, you’re no brilliant campaign strategist.

Al: Okay John.

John: You going to sleep now?

Al: In a few minutes. Tipper and I need to make love first.

John: That’s hot.

Al: Yes, on a good day it is.

John: Tipper’s aged quite well.

Al: Okay John, I really do need to let you go now.

John: Fine.

Al: Goodnight, John.

John: So a definite no on the endorsement?

Al: Goodbye, John.

John: We’re in this fight together?

Al: John, go to bed.

John: Al, did I ever tell you my Vietnam war stories?

Al: Yes John, you did.

John: I’ve got some great ones.

Al: And they might just win you the election. But now I have to go.

John: Tipper’s champing at the bit, huh?

Al: John.

John: Yeah Al?

Al: Go to bed.

In The Fray Contributor

Park by Hudson River along empty stretch of road. Low, sandy, no-man’s land. Mountain behind us. Odd to find riverfront undeveloped this close to New York City.

Walking along road shoulder, discover why. Line of scrub opens to reveal two giant concrete domes. Indian Point 2 and 3 nuclear power plants. No sign of people or activity over there. Stillness like a monument.

Roadway littered with usual plastic trash/broken bottles. Also, 100 or more spent highway flares: white plastic caps, few inches around. Major accident? Or prank? Kids want to take some home. “Maybe later.”

Start hike just past old sand quarry. Low willows and swamp maple, tangle of blackberry, leaves with that dusty, side-of-the-road look. In undergrowth, sections of carpet, rusted machinery, a bedspring. Kids delighted. This is better than nature.

As trail heads up, forest starts. Oak and birch, exposed gray granite. Then, suddenly, set of moss-covered stone steps. Kids sprint up, whooping. Discover tunnel –  twenty-foot long tunnel – in middle of woods. Goes nowhere, connects nothing. Inside, not quite dark. Man-sized sandstone blocks let light seep in. Spray-paint everywhere: “Fuck,” “Jesus Saves”; lots of names/dates. Like a cemetery. Or a news flash. “I was here. I was here. I was here.”

Outside again, check guidebook. Tunnel is from proposed Spiral Railway. 1889. Visitors meant to dock by river at hotel/restaurant (near sand quarry), then ride train to top of mountain. Two big steam generators – one halfway up, one at peak – to haul trains by cable over this tunnel, 900 feet to top. Ten minute trip. At peak, another hotel with observation tower/gardens.

“Visitors will be startled and awed by the sublimity of the views on every hand. Near and far they will behold a panorama of scenic grandeur that can be equaled nowhere on the globe … Elevations of thought and impulse, as well as bodily vigor.”

Elevations of thought and impulse!

But real pay-off to follow: trip down via gravity. Nine-mile spiral, three switch-backs, swerves, swoops, zoom through tunnel to starting point by river. Whole mountain transformed to thrill ride! Estimated train speed: fifty m.p.h. Estimated visitors: 2,000 per day. Site only thirty-five-mile boat trip from NYC.

“The toiling millions of people who take an outing once or often during the summer in search of strengthening, invigorating, life-giving oxygen of a pure air, and the healthful stimulant of a radical change from the monotony of their daily toil. …”

Life-giving oxygen of a pure air.

Ruins more obvious higher up. Old packed gravel rail bed, scars from dynamite, boulders stacked to side. Out through treetops: bits of blue river, houses on hillsides, green lawns. Routes 9 and 9-West follow curve of Hudson. Off in distance: Bear Mountain Bridge, traffic circle. Path gets steeper. Adults short of breath, kids looking for shade. Buzz of insects amongst oak, maple, pine. Then, boom!, woods gone.

Whole region hit by forest fires this summer. Newspaper pictures of men in smoke masks. Here, groundcover burnt black; big trees on ground, tops still green. Like pick-up sticks, or giant safety matches. Standing oaks have blue jelly residue around trunks: flame retardant. Kids’ sneakers gray with ash. Orange plastic “EMERGENCY” ribbons. Discussion of causes: global warming, natural cycle, bad forestry, God.

In spring 1890, crew of 200 worked here. (Italian immigrants?) No trees then: forest all clear-cut for lumber. “… A vast track of inhospitable mountain and rock. ….” Deer next-to-extinct. Workcamp down by road in flats. Big canvas tents, cookfires, streams of pack mules climbing barren switchback trail.

Eight months later: “[Progress is] considerably impeded at present by some trouble between the contractors and the company.” Grading two-thirds finished, huge steam generators ordered. National economy booming, but major strikes in Homestead, Pennsylvania; Coeur D’Alenes, Idaho. Wall Street panic on the way. Newspapers predict the full force of men will go back to work [on Spiral Railway] after the first of January.” Never happens.

Past fire site, kids find another tunnel. This one dug straight into mountain. Dank air at rubble entrance, walls cold. As eyes adjust, floor littered with soda cans, trash. Too dark (high?) to see ceiling. This to be sudden shrieking entrance into chill passage, then back out into roller-coaster sunshine. Never completed. Pick marks still in rock, drill holes waiting for dynamite. Not a tunnel, after all — a cave.

Outside, sit on cliff edge, feet dangling. “Panorama of scenic grandeur.” Tiny cars on tiny roads, no sound. Keen of marsh hawk riding thermals. Dark river cutting green hills, making pine islands: how many thousand years? Glimpses of suburban houses. Pop. more than 17,000 within two miles; 75,000 within five miles; 250,000 within ten. But hidden by trees. On opposite bank, almost small enough to forget, concrete domes.

2:31 p.m.: Snack on pepperoni and cheese. Below, sensor in Indian Point 2 shows temperature problem. Workers assume false alarm (similar incident four days earlier). But reactor automatically shuts down; emergency generators kick in. Management decides routine glitch: good chance to catch up on regular maintenance.

3 p.m.: Start back down. Circuit breaker pops in back-up generator. Calculated odds of this malfunction: once in 1.4 million years. Later explanation: “Auxiliary transformer load tap changer” left in manual position by mistake. Emergency generator no longer feeding batteries. Water pumps/emergency core-cooling equipment not receiving enough power. Potential result: inability to cool reactor, meltdown.

No sirens, no sign of disturbance.

3:45 p.m.: Reach bottom after climbing over railbed, past scene of forest fire, through lower tunnel, down stone steps. Kids told to leave old highway flares alone. Car safe where parked, hot from sun. In case of “risk significant event,” escape plan calls for mass evacuation along this two-lane road.

4:35 p.m.: Slow drive home. Radio playing pop tunes, sports talk. Stop for ice cream.

8:30 p.m.: After dinner, kids to bed early. Tired from climb. Sweet snoring within minutes. Adults watch TV: nothing on. No news flash.

9:55 p.m.: Back-up batteries providing electricity to plant fail altogether. 75% of control room instrument panel goes dark. Start of official “Unusual Event,” level one. (Three Mile Island, 1979 = level four.) Public still not notified. Per owners of reactor, “operated in the red region of risk” but only one-in-500 chance of damage to nuclear core.

One-in-500.

10:30 p.m.: Adult bedtime. Management of Indian Point 2 makes first call to notify local authorities that plant “continually deteriorating” and on “Hot Standby.”

3:43 a.m.: Everyone sleeping. Reactor enters “Normal Hot Shutdown.” Plant exits “Unusual Event.” No story in next day’s paper. Six months later, when pipe in steam generator leaks, Second Level Emergency declared. Radiation escape. Again, no sirens.

6:21 a.m. Sunrise. Mountain in silence. Vegetation growing over Spiral Railway. Marsh hawk?

Daniel Wolff

Two soliders await a helicopter in Long Khanh Province to evacuate their fallen comrade. (Pfc. L. Paul Epley, 1966)

Sometimes wars are not between people, but between countries. Sometimes people just get in the way of wars between governments, like pawns in a chess game. Expendable, inconsequential, beside the point. Not involved, yet present — and in present danger. Individuals in a hostile country simultaneously serve as victim and perpetrator, refugee and criminal, innocent and guilty.

I think that message might have been hidden in President George W. Bush’s October 7, 2001 presidential address to the nation: “The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies.” According to our president, we were at war with the Afghani government but not with the Afghani people.

I am not sure what his statement means. I hope the soldiers knew what Bush meant as they dropped the bombs, the bombs that were dropped by people and fell on people. People who were Afghani, who hated the Taliban, who loved their country, who were enlisted in armies, who feared for their lives and safety. Nationalities and loyalties, homeland and security, can get all mixed up in the process.

During 1991’s Operation Desert Storm, when we began bombing Iraq, starving the Iraqi people, and interrupting their water supply, I worked in Washington, D.C., at a scientific society. I watched two of my Iraqi coworkers — father and daughter — come to work with heavy hearts. They didn’t support Saddam Hussein, but they had family and friends who were still in Iraq. They knew children who were living under the fear of bombs. The footage on CNN every night was not abstract to them. And yet, each day they came to work, and their taxes were taken out of their paychecks. And those same taxes went to fund the bombing campaign.

As the war in Iraq lingers again, I find myself thinking of them. The daughter worked for me, as a temp, doing some filing. She had been evacuated in the dead of night from her Peace Corps posting because of an uprising in a small African country. She was to start law school in the fall, but at the time she was straightening out the membership files for the society and trying to heal because she never got a chance to say goodbye to the folks she left behind so suddenly. The twenty-three-year old loved punk music and hid a tattoo on her wrist by wearing a watch. Growing up in the D.C. suburbs, she was as American as you or I.

Her father, a director of the association, was leading an Iraqi peace-through-understanding movement in his spare time. He was frightened by talk of internment camps in the United States for Iraqi Americans. The father had a heavy accent; there was no mistaking that he was from the Middle East. Yet, he had seized the American dream. He had risen to a good management position and understood how citizens could create change.

His was a familiar story to me — being taxed to fight the homeland and the confusion of loyalties. Even though my grandfather and my father were Jewish Holocaust survivors who immigrated to the United States, they were still German. This concept eludes many people in this time of consciousness about the Nazi concentration camps of the 1930s and 40s.

An American soldier wounded in France during World War II. (1944)

My family was German and spoke German. They loved German things. Instead of hotdogs, we ate knockwurst and bockwurst with sauerkraut flecked with caraway seeds and coarse spicy mustard. While other families made potato salad with mayonnaise, we used bacon and vinegar. I grew up loving sliced tongue, pickled herring and landjaegers, while my classmates ate ham, bologna and American cheese. We grew German raspberries in our garden, sweeter and brighter than what everyone else knew as raspberries (I see them now in markets as “wineberries”). When my mother bought a bright yellow 1972 VW Beetle, my grandfather yelled and screamed, but truth be known, he loved riding in it. Even though he didn’t smoke, he had a sterling silver cigarette case from Mercedes until the day he died. It was a gift for having a perfect driving record for twenty-five years. He loved German cars, even though he wouldn’t buy one. He collected German postage stamps. My grandparents insisted on living amongst other “refugees,” but they would only socialize with the German ones. They wanted nothing to do with the Eastern European Jews, who were, in their minds, “dirty.”

About ten years ago, when I was about twenty-five years old, I was dating a man whose mother, as a teen, had come from Germany with her family in the 1950s. His parents and mine led parallel lives, living in Philadelphia, attending the University of Pennsylvania, traveling in the same circles, having nearly identical small weddings a year apart, having their first born in 1966. Our grandmothers said “miserable” with the same accent — “me-sir-rah-bell.” I loved the story of his mother making pickled herring every New Year’s Eve, using beets and sour cream even though no one would touch the pink gooey mess. It never occurred to me, when I traveled to his parents’ home in Tennessee, that he didn’t tell them my family was also from Germany. That I was Jewish. Nor would I have thought that he might, I guess. We’d been friends for years. I was a name and some stories to him, not a religion to be announced and worn like an arm-band.

We were sitting at the dinner table with his parents when his mother made an off-handed comment about a cousin who perished during World War II in France. I blanched. I was sitting at a table with a woman whose first cousin was killed in Paris during the occupation. He was just sixteen at the time. I lost my appetite. I was stuck in this house in Tennessee for several more days. I confronted my friend after dinner. I’m not sure what I said, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t, “Gee, you never told me your mother was a Nazi sympathizer.” Sure, I knew that she had to have been in Germany during the Holocaust. Sure, I knew they weren’t Jewish. But I had this image of them being fearful and hating the government — not fighting for it. I felt that hating the German government was a moral imperative. At the time I thought there was no other sensible way to feel. I don’t remember what I said to my friend about my feelings, but I remember his response: “There are tragedies on both sides of any war.”

I try to think of this sixteen year-old boy who was drafted and killed as a tragedy. This Nazi, this boy, this enemy, this murdered child. I remember helping the mother clean up the kitchen later, telling her my father was from Stuttgart, but not having the courage to mention something innocuous like Hanukkah or Passover to see her reaction, which I’m sure would have been a politically correct one. His parents were educators and liberals. I’m sure it would have been fine to mention my bat mitzvah, but something stopped me from bringing it up. I was a guest in their house, and my flight home was still several days off. In some ways, I wasn’t comfortable with bringing it up, making an accusation, starting a conflict. The topic was surely too sensitive for both of us.

In light of my friend’s child-soldier cousin, I have to remember that my grandfather, a Jewish refugee but also a German, was gassed twice by the Allies as he fought side-by-side with Germans, with the likes of Erich Maria Remarque in the trenches during World War I. Twice he lay in the hospital, his lungs filling with blood. Fighting for the country whose Final Solution, less than twenty years later, was to see him dead.Being gassed by the country that would welcome him to its safe haven in 1938, when he fled for his life with his family.

I have a box of pictures from his time fighting in the war. Him sitting with fellow soldiers drinking beer, smiling, laughing. Standing near monuments. He was having the time of his life.

All the while, the chemical weapons that would be used against him were being developed at my alma mater, American University, in the very building where my office is now. Perhaps the very place where, now as a professor, I meet with my students. My grandfather survived, but many other Jews who fought as Germans during World War I went on to die in concentration camps. I have proof of this, a rare German book that was put together as pro-Jewish propaganda — a list of Jewish men who died or were wounded during the Great War.

Burial at sea for the officers and men of the USS Intrepid (CV-11) who lost their lives when the carrier was hit by Japanese bombs during operations in the Philippines. (Lt. Barrett Gallagher, 1944)

Tragedies on both sides, sides on both sides

The chemicals that the Army developed during World War I to gas the German soldiers were carelessly buried all around American University. The leaking canisters are causing cancer clusters to this day from the high levels of arsenic. Instead of the Axis powers, the Allies are today gassing the wealthy residents of Spring Valley. The Army Corps of Engineers is still scrambling to end this final battle of a war that most believe to have ended nearly one hundred years ago.

My grandfather, after being naturalized as a U.S. citizen, adopted a young German so that he could enlist near the end of World War II. The young man never returned from the war. A Jewish refugee who had lost his entire family, he wanted nothing more than to go back and fight against the country of his birth. He died turning against the country that turned against him first.

My father was a member of the U.S. Army military intelligence force in 1950s Germany. Though this was during the Korean conflict, my father had been tapped to return to Germany because of his language skills. There, he was driving a Jeep through a pre-wall West Berlin. He was getting shot at as he acted as a Cold War era decoy — real spy, cloak, and dagger stuff — wearing a tan U.S. Army uniform and carrying a brief case stenciled with the words “Top Secret” lying in plain sight on the seat next to him. A German-American, spying on Germans — East Germans perhaps, but Germans nonetheless — and being set-up by Americans.

And now, America wages another quick war with Iraq. A country we supported — a regime we supported, armed against Iran — against the theocracy we thought was evil in 1979 when they held Americans hostage. After decades, Saddam Hussein’s Stalinesque tactics became too much to bear. We fought one war, then another. Ten years ago, we dropped our Patriot missiles and smart bombs. We instituted economic sanctions. Iraqis starved. When that didn’t work, we attacked again.

Just like my family — Germans in America — Iranians and Iraqis in America keep paying taxes and hope for an end. They watch the news and vote. They’re glad a tyrant is gone, but they’re confused by the suggestions, by the ever-shifting policies and alliances. They wonder if it isn’t the punch line to some macabre joke when Bush asked Iraq to look to Iran for a model Muslim government.

A neighbor who emigrated from Iran in 1979 looked aghast when I asked him how he felt about the Iraqis fashioning their government after Iran’s. Had it gotten better? He couldn’t even speak. He’d gone back for a visit just a few years back. “No,” he said. “It’s still much the same.” His two toddlers frolicked in the yard. He looked down and continued to rake the fall leaves — hurrying to get them all to the curb before the arrival of the county leaf collector.

Iranians and Iraqis, like most U.S. citizens, are confused by the possible lies our government tells about Hussein’s weapons, about the pretense for war. Yet, ever still, they’re Americans. They’re hopeful for the promised enduring peace. Not only for their adopted homelands, but for their motherlands, friends, neighbors, and family as well.

STORY INDEX

SPEECHES >

President George W. Bush
Oct. 7, 2001 address to the nation
URL: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011007-8.html

FOOD >

Landjaegers
Photo of the traditional German food
URL: http://www.sacredrock.com/Nowicki’s%20Landjaeger%20in%20smokehouse.jpg

ORGANIZATIONS >

Army Corp of Engineers
Spring Valley cleanup project
URL: http://www.nab.usace.army.mil/projects/WashingtonDC/springvalley/overview.htm

PEOPLE > REMARQUE, ERICH MARIA >

Biography
URL: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/remarque.htm

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Despite being born in New York and raised in Tennessee, I can say that for most of my life I haven’t felt like an American. My citizenship couldn’t overcome my race. I’m black, a member of the group that has been the quintessential “other” in this country.

Just the names we embraced illustrated our position outside the mainstream. The first Africans came to this country as slaves, who could in some extraordinary cases buy their freedom. Within two generations, though, black skin and bondage had become so intertwined that the word “slave” became a synonym for “black person” by the end of the 17th century. After Emancipation, former slaves and their progeny wore and discarded a host of names: colored, Negro, black. The word American didn’t become part of that designation until the late 1980s, when black leaders lobbied for the term “African American.” Their justification made sense: We could claim both halves of our identity, grabbing hold of the present without rejecting the heritage of the past.

But being something is different from talking about it. I was and am more comfortable with the word black than I am with African American. I like the way the one-syllable word explodes from my lips. At 49, I’m old enough to remember when calling someone black meant a whipping — not a spanking — for a child and a sure enough fight for an adult. I enjoyed the transformation from insult to compliment.

Besides, I just didn’t feel like an American before. However, that’s beginning to change. Although I’m still black (and will be until I die unless something miraculous happens to change my skin color), I am now constantly struck by how American I really am. It’s not because American society has become more accepting of black folks. Something more mundane is motivating my revelation.

I’m shopping, more and more, at ethnic grocery stores.

Nowadays I live in Cleveland, Ohio, one of the old, Midwestern cities that is fighting economic decay. This was a manufacturing town, and that past has left it completely unprepared for a world where factories in Asia make everything so cheaply no American company can compete.

When folks think of Cleveland, they don’t think about diversity. In its heyday — from the early 1900s until the bottom fell out of the manufacturing era in the 1970s — people came from all over the country and the world to work in this region’s factories. Cleveland became a city of Eastern and Western Europeans, Southern blacks and whites, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Chinese, and Lebanese. Everyone came and set up churches, clubs – and stores. One can eat his or her way around the world without leaving the seven counties that make up the greater Cleveland metropolitan area.

Within a fifteen-minute drive from my house, I can buy palm oil at the Ghanaian market, or cardamom coffee at the Lebanese store. I can stop at the Korean place for a bottle of that extra-hot Vietnamese pepper sauce that my African friends adore. The Indian store sells the brand of loose tea that has replaced those Lipton teabags I bought at chain stores like Tops and Giant Eagle. And the Russian deli sells the chocolate candy I give to kids in the neighborhood.

I shop at these places because they are nearby and they have the things I want. But running into the Indian store isn’t the same as a quick trip to the twenty-four-hour supermarket. In fact, I can’t really run into the Indian market; I walk in slowly. I browse and ponder. The minute I enter one of these little markets I realize I’m an American. While the stores are in America, they are not American places. They are enclaves, a little bit of home for the people who shop there, and a reminder, to me, of where I come from.

These are places to buy hair oil that smells like sandalwood, not like citrus. The chocolate drink on the shelf is Ovaltine, not Nestlé’s Quik.

These are places that carry the frozen goat meat and instant fufu flour that makes home cooking taste authentic, not desperately patched together from substitutions. These are the places where, on the most basic level, the regulars speak the same language: the language of food and life and experiences. When I walk in the door, it’s obvious I don’t belong, but the reason I don’t belong isn’t because I’m black. It’s because I’m American.

Even though I go to the Ghanaian market for a container of palm oil for my peanut butter stew, I unconsciously expect to see bottles of Mazola and cans of Crisco. I know that the Indian store carries jars of ghee, not sticks of butter. Still I habitually walk to the refrigerated food section, not the shelf. These little assumptions and habits betray my identity in a way I can’t control. Yes, I’m black, but I’m a black American. I look at the world the way an American does, craving wide, open spaces and places to expand.

Perhaps that’s why the stores look so tiny to me. We shop at “big-box stores” and “mega-markets” where goods come in cartons and you can buy enough toilet paper to last a year. We want shelves that rise from the floor to the ceiling. We want to choose between ten kinds of whatever we buy because more is better and we want access to as much as we can.

At the ethnic markets, the shelves are sometimes fully stocked and sometimes they aren’t. Sons and daughters tend the cash register; friends stop in to chat with the owner. The stores resemble the corner stores of my youth: intimate places that disappeared when Americans sprawled farther into the suburbs.

But while these stores are quaint to me, they’re more of an excursion than a place to run errands. How can a family-owned shop fight against a superstore that can crush its competitors by staying open twenty-four hours per day, selling food at low prices and marketing to diversity by including an aisle of “ethnic” groceries?

Perhaps the small ethnic shops could market what has been for me an unintended consequence of multiculturalism: They’ve shown me how much I belong, however uneasily, to the mainstream.

And all for the price of a box of tea.

Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs

It is hardly likely that twentieth-century man is called upon to discover truth that has never been discovered before.
—E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful

Outside my home, somewhere in the cedar trees, summer insects are piping away, with no idea of whether they are the first, the billionth, or the last to do what they are doing. Unlike them, I worry about my place in the progression of time. A baby boomer, a modern man, someone living in a time of global crisis — I not only see myself in time, but I sometimes view myself as being at a privileged position — which is at the summit and culmination of history.

Having a sense of time and place is one of the interesting things about being human. But our awareness becomes a problem when we start to believe that our particular moment is the most important moment, that our insights are the best of all time so far, that our generation stands on a mountaintop soaring above history’s hills and valleys. And I think this is especially a problem — even a trap — for those of us who are working for social justice.

I think that the idea that insights, problems, and programs are “new” is driven largely by those — mainstream politicians, or corporate brand marketers, or discoverers — who feel a need to claim that they are pioneers of a brave new world. Then, of course, there are academics and inventors and funders and folks applying for grants — people who are competing for time-limited resources. Throughout the twentieth century, the worlds of music and art have also been tangled up with time-based competition, as artists get praised and rewarded for being “contemporary” or “modern.” In each case, we are urged to forget all the losers in the past, and simply glory in the wonderfulness of the present, where someone finally did it right. Whatever “it” is.

In reality, most of what we know, do, smell and think has been with us for a while. Some of our ancestors were as smart and sophisticated as anyone is now, and we are pretty much in their footsteps on a long march, much of which keeps coming around to the same places.  The accomplishments of those who lived thirty or even ninety years ago are little different than the accomplishments of this generation.

The more things change …

At the age of fifty-three, I’ve seen more than a few things cycle around and become trendy in activist circles again. Recently, I came across two books that reminded me of this. One of them is Neighborhood Centers Today: Action Programs for a Rapidly Changing World, written by Arthur Hillman and published in 1960, when I was a child. One article in the book talks about “planning for inclusiveness.” It emphasizes that activists shouldn’t follow a “melting pot” approach, but should recognize that diversity among groups is real and valuable. Not only the sentiments, but the actual phrases, are those we hear every day from folks who think they are way up to date. Another article chronicles a process of “leadership development” in neighborhoods. Another talks about ways of dealing with aging. A lot of the material could very easily be recycled for social workers, organizers, and researchers writing today.

The Power Elite, by C. Wright Mills, was first published in 1956. When I was a young radical, this was a book that all the older radicals, the twenty-five- and twenty-six-year-olds, had on their shelves. And like Neighborhood Centers Today, it anticipates some of the “modern” wisdom of our day. See if these words don’t give you a shiver of familiarity: “a small group of political primitives … have exploited the new American jitters, emptied domestic politics of rational content, and decisively lowered the level of public sensibility.” Or how about this: “The elite of corporation, army, and state have benefited politically and economically and militarily by the antics of the petty right, who have become, often unwittingly, their political shocktroops.”

Doesn’t this pretty much describe where we are in 2003?

Obviously, some progress has been made over the past several decades. There is no mention of LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered) issues in either of the books I mentioned, let alone any sense of an LGBT movement, though it certainly had begun back then. Apartheid in housing was still legal in the United States in 1960, instead of just an informal reality as it is today. And I’ve heard rumors that there have been some changes in communications technology since 1956.

But we progressives have also lost ground in a lot of areas. Income inequality has grown. The labor movement has become weaker. Fundamentalist and media-based churches have grown at the expense of more tolerant, congregation-based, and progressive mainstream churches. The United States is a more frightening military power than it has ever been.

Overall, the basic facts have not changed. Some people seize every opportunity to exploit others, and defend every vestige of privilege and dominance over other people that they can get away with. Other people give their lives, or many years of their lives, for justice. And most of us just live our lives, trying to do the right thing to the extent that we can cut through the fog of media messages.

In other words, in 1956 as in 2003, we are pretty much the same kind of people playing out the same drama. That doesn’t mean the drama is somehow bogus or unimportant, or some kind of cruel joke. It means that the social struggle is part of life. Breathing is also a repetitive process. So is housework. A lot of tasks that are vital to our very existence are never completed, never fundamentally resolved in one unique moment. There is no Mount Everest of social justice waiting for us to climb it and plant a flag once and for all.

Nevertheless, there continue to be people who look down on the rest of us for following an approach from the eighties, or the sixties, or the thirties. They don’t know that most of what we do has been done before — and they don’t learn from that experience. They have a notion in their heads that the present historical moment is unique. And they believe, with all earnestness, that they are the ones with the solutions for society’s problems, that they alone have the smart ideas that really will work — unlike all those annoying, lame efforts in the past. Usually, the new “something” they are going to do is a way to win without organizing and talking to people — or a way to avoid taking the risk of going to jail or being targeted for violence. Then, of course, there are the folks who are going to be more militant than anyone ever was before, or who are going to have a more brilliant analysis than anyone ever did before.

It’s lonely at the top

I don’t mean to merely be a tendentious lecturer and wet blanket. There are some big-time benefits to realizing we are not at the summit of time. For one thing, it gives us a lot more comrades in our struggle, and a lot bigger sense of what is possible.

We no longer have to travel to connect to the great social movements of the past. Wherever we live, we already live on ground hallowed by struggle. For example, I just moved to a mostly white, rural county in Virginia that goes Republican in every election. Why I did that is a long story. But it definitely helps that John Kagi grew up several miles from here. A few miles farther away is Harper’s Ferry, where Kagi fought with the radical abolitionist John Brown against slavery. The longer I live here, the more I’m inspired by the local history: the farmers who organized, the unions that struggled, the indigenous people who resisted.

Of course, many of these stories from the past are not happy ones. It is unpleasant to be reminded that some of our struggles will also fail, that some of us will also suffer unjustly. But at least we know we are not alone. This is important, because the exploiters often do a good job of embarrassing us activists into feeling that we are strange — overly sensitive, “politically correct,” obsessive. But history tells us that in every hierarchical human society there are people who rise up for justice. Sometimes, they even win.

It’s also important to remember that whatever we activists are trying to do, someone has done it — or something a lot like it — before, under way tougher conditions. That doesn’t guarantee our success, but it does mean that we can succeed if things go right.

These days, I often think of the abolitionists who fought slavery in the early 1800s. They lived through a time when it looked like slavery would be swept away in the egalitarian fervor of the American Revolution. That didn’t happen. The system of slavery, in fact, got stronger: Churches that had been racially integrated in the late 1700s became rigidly segregated; laws were passed preventing slaves from learning how to read and requiring them to travel with passes. But even in these bleak times, activists struggled valiantly. Gabriel Prosser still organized a rebellion in Richmond. Benjamin Lundy still traveled around the nation preaching the evils of slavery. Lundy, in fact, managed to inspire a few people before he died in the 1840s — among them, William Lloyd Garrison, the great anti-slavery crusader who helped convince Lincoln to set black slaves free during the Civil War.

It’s not hard to see why Gabriel Prosser and Benjamin Lundy were considered fringe fanatics in their day. Slavery wasn’t going to go away in 1800 or 1840. No smart young man eager to influence policy would have done what they did.  But without their struggles, slavery might not have gone away in the 1860s. These two people really mattered — in some ways, more than the men who were presidents during their time.

It’s hard for activists to have this kind of long-term perspective. I recently got an email from someone on a progressive email list I am on that said, “Let’s make sure that Bush is the last Republican president.” I am sure it won’t be the last time I hear this kind of apocalyptic rhetoric between now and the 2004 election.

If you have any sense of history, you know that wish could come true. Political parties come and go, and in 1856 nobody really thought the Whigs were going to vanish from the American political scene. Some Republican president will be the last one. It could be this one. But you also know, if you study history, that it ain’t about Republicans — it’s about systems and egos and opportunities to exploit people. Bush is not going to be the last human being to sit on a pile of concentrated power and abuse it for the interests of his class/race/gender/gang.

In fact, every presidential election is a reminder of how presumptuous we activists can be, to think we stand at some special historical moment. Millions of dollars are spent to mobilize people around the idea that 1960 or 1984 or 2004 is some kind of Armageddon. And thousands of intelligent people get caught up in the illusion. Anyone who questions the importance of a presidential race gets accused of cynicism.

Perhaps the most decisive U.S. presidential election was the 1932 race, in which the Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt beat the Republican incumbent, Herbert Hoover. Many scholars argue that this electoral victory led to the modern liberal state, and possibly prevented a socialist or fascist government from coming to power in this country. But what really happened in 1932? A former governor of New York from a wealthy family was elected on a platform to make massive cuts in the federal budget. If the people hadn’t been in the streets, before and after the election, there would have been no New Deal. The election of Roosevelt may have been a necessary condition for the New Deal, but it was not a sufficient condition.

At any given moment, the government we have largely reflects the existing balance of power among various classes, ethnic groups, and communities. And that balance of power is the result of long-term efforts and trends, as well as purely random events. It is the result, in other words, of what millions of people — some long since dead — have done. The Roosevelts and Lincolns, and even the Gandhis and Guevaras, can do no more than the complex set of preexisting conditions allows. You and I help to create those conditions — sometimes much more than we know.

We may very well live through an event — perhaps the impeachment of George W. Bush, or the resignation of Dick Cheney? — that will become a defining moment for our generation. But we have no way of knowing for sure if or when those moments will come. Each of us is merely one more human being doing her or his best to find justice.

In 1956, C. Wright Mills wrote that the United States “now appears before the world a naked and arbitrary power.” Its leaders were, “in the name of realism,” imposing “their often crackpot deliberations upon world reality,” Mills argued. He offered these views with no prescription for what could be done. He envisioned no movement that could use his insights. He simply felt it was wrong to “relax the effort to understand the facts of power and the ways of the powerful.”

Last winter, millions marched around the world, in the first truly global mass movement against a planned act of war — the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Their actions were a resounding vindication, half a century later, of Mills’ criticisms of “naked and arbitrary power.” Today, other thinkers are following Mills’ lead in writing analyses that will someday pulse through the world — once people build a movement around them.

After my time as an activist is done, I hope someone else will breathe as I have breathed, be concerned as I have been concerned, and take a few risks for justice as I have. Or, even better, as Emma Goldman did, or Sojourner Truth, or the unknown person who first had the idea of a labor union, or who first insisted that the widows and orphans deserved a share of the year’s harvest. With each generation, the same song is sung. But it never comes without effort, and never without desire. And the song is no less beautiful or vital because it has been heard before many times and will be heard many times again.

STORY INDEX

MARKETPLACE >
(Order from Powells.com and a portion of each sale goes to InTheFray)

Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0060916303

The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0195133544>

PEOPLE > BROWN, JOHN >

“John Brown and the Valley of the Shadow”
Information about John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry.
URL: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/jbrown/master.html

PEOPLE > KAGI, JOHN HENRY >

Biography
Brief description of John Kagi, a follower of the abolitionist John Brown.
URL: http://www.plainandsimple.org/kagi.html

PEOPLE > PROSSER, GABRIEL >

“Historical Background of the Gabriel Prosser Slave Revolt”
Excerpt from American Negro Slave Revolts, by Herbert Aptheker. Published by International Publishers. 1974.
URL: http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/spl/gabrielrevolt.html

“

In The Fray Contributor

I don’t remember where I was when the Bowers v. Hardwick decision was handed down in 1986. I had not come out yet, but I do recall seeing protests on the news from my family’s living room in Wilmington, North Carolina. It would take me a few years to realize the significance of the decision on every aspect of gay life. By upholding a Georgia statute that outlawed consensual sodomy, the Supreme Court denied gays and lesbians any constitutional right to privacy in even the most intimate matters. Put into historical context–in the midst of the Reagan era and the full force of anti-AIDS homophobia–the opinion was hardly surprising.

On the morning of June 26, I woke to the sound of my radio alarm and the voice of an NPR news announcer, who said that Bowers v. Hardwick was no longer the law of the land. The Supreme Court had reversed itself in a sweeping decision, Lawrence v. Texas, that stunned court watchers across the country.

The Court could have taken the easy way out. In her concurring opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor called for striking down the offending law–a Texas anti-sodomy statute–because it violated the equal protection rights of homosexuals (as acknowledged in the Evans decision back in 1995). But Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion went much farther, reviving the court’s dying concern for personal privacy and handing queers a monumental legal and political victory.

I applaud the Court for having the courage to correct its own mistake. The Lawrence decision is worthy of celebration, especially by those who have fought for the last seventeen years to overturn Bowers. Yet what disquiets me is the lack of debate about what the decision means for the queer community, culturally speaking. To read most of the queer press, you would get the impression that the Lawrence decision will have no negative consequences at all and it is up, up, up from here.

One thing is for certain: The Lawrence decision firmly establishes our place in the firmament of protected classes and sets the stage for the scuttling of laws against gay adoption, military service, and perhaps even marriage. We can leave behind our sequins and sexual liberation, and say begone to our urban, childless existence. Soon we can be as clueless about art and activism as Joe Sixpack and Sally Housecoat.

The danger of backsliding is real. Lawrence may mean the acceleration of what has become the gay community’s steady, incontrovertible course since the 1980s: assimilation. That assimilation is the primary goal of gay liberation is, for the most part, unquestioned. Those who agitate against it–like the group Gay Shame in San Francisco–are painted as fringe wackos who only want to spoil our gay old time.  

In the 1980s, AIDS and a conservative political climate created a schism in the queer community between the more radical approach of AIDS activists and the more sedate political activities of gay groups trying desperately to advance gay rights legislation in spite of AIDS. Queer Nation attempted to take the radical tactics of AIDS activists and use them to advance the visibility of queers and queer issues. But the nineties saw the decline of AIDS activism and Queer Nation and the rise of more mainstream and conservative gay groups, such as Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and the Log Cabin Republicans, and the ascent of assimilation-related issues–for instance, military service and marriage–to the top of the gay political agenda.  

Once Bill Clinton mentioned us in a political speech during his first run for president, the process of de-revolution” was complete: The gay community had become a player in mainstream politics. Gay conservative writer Bruce Bawer got his place at the table and gays were just happy with any political crumbs that were tossed their way.

With assimilation as our goal, we became a victim of our own success. Each victory created a more comfortable, accepting atmosphere for all to come out, finally resulting in a mass exodus by the last group to leave the closet: political conservatives. By moving the community to the right, we experienced a further loss of activist fervor and less support for issues like environmentalism, feminism, racial equality, and labor. While coming out is still a revolutionary act, for many it is the only one they will ever commit.

An examination of exit poll data over the last decade further illustrates our political drift to the right. According to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, a quarter of queer voters supported Republican congressional candidates in 1992; in 1998, that support had risen to one-third. The Log Cabin Republicans celebrated the fact that 25 percent of gay voters cast a ballot for George W. Bush in 2000, the highest percentage for a GOP presidential candidate ever. And the actual conservative numbers are probably much higher considering that most gay conservatives are less likely to feel comfortable admitting their homosexuality to exit pollsters.

Some would argue that the decrease in political fervor is only natural, now that we have gotten much of what we wanted, and there are few fights left to fight. But even if you think environmental, feminist, class, and racial issues are outside the purview of queer politics, internationally the queer rights movement is just beginning. After all, gays and lesbians in many countries are still subject to the death penalty for merely existing.

But if the queer community in the United States does recognize that a world exists outside our borders, you can’t tell it by our actions. Except for the admirable work of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), which gets no attention in the mainstream gay press, little is being done to change the situation abroad.

Our community’s growing desire to assimilate affects not just our politics, but also our culture. Even as we gays and lesbians have influenced the culture of the larger society, mainstream American culture has had a diluting effect on us. Gay culture has been replaced with gay consumer culture.

Now that being gay will not lead to mainstream rejection per se, gay and lesbian artists can now be openly gay and pander to the mainstream–but at what price? In our consumer-oriented society, we abandon the queer aesthetic to increase sales. The music of Sylvester, Bronski Beat, and the in-your-face homosexuality of Pansy Division has given way to George Michael, Melissa Etheridge, and the almost apologetic homosexuality of Elton John. AIDS was once an important political issue for queer artists–embodied in the work of Keith Haring, Marlon Riggs, Tony Kushner, and Larry Kramer–but nowadays that and other kinds of politically infused queer art are on the decline. AIDS reinforced the role of gay men as cultural outsiders and was celebrated by gay men (and lesbians) in theater, visual arts, performance art, and literature. Imagine Keith Haring’s provocative work being used to sell Volkswagens back in 1985. Imagine Keith Haring allowing it.  

Today, politically charged art is the exception in the gay community rather than the rule. For every Laramie Project (a play about the murder of Matthew Shepard), you have ten plays where the story seems merely an excuse for male nudity. Nudity as a means of making a socio-political statement about gender has been replaced with naked boys for the sake of naked boys, a neoconservative celebration of sexual attraction within the context of good-old-fashioned, atavistic objectification: sex not as political statement but as consumer activity.  

Surveying the current queer political and artistic landscape is most disheartening because it is unlikely to change for the better. The last few decades have seen a growing anti-intellectualism in this country, resulting in an American society that does not like to be challenged or think critically, especially about itself. And this is one pernicious characteristic that the queer community has adopted. I have friends who refuse to question any decisions made by local queer leaders. This “we-must-support-the-troops” mentality is no prettier to gaze upon among gays than it is in the larger society. If objective, critical thinking is a crucial aspect of good art, then it is no small wonder that American culture, and by extension queer culture, is experiencing an artistic famine.

Perhaps queer culture is merely a transient state of being–a roadstop on the way from historically denied existence to complete mainstream cultural absorption. But there is no reason that members of an oppressed group cannot work to eradicate barriers to their full participation in the larger society while refusing to surrender their cultural identity. There is no reason that we in the gay community should exchange our hard-won political awareness for something we should have had all along: freedom.

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >
  
  

  International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission
  An organization that lobbies around the world on behalf of gay rights.
  URL: http://www.iglhrc.org            
    
  National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
  Washington-based organization working for the civil rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.
  URL: http://www.ngltf.org
  

“

In The Fray Contributor

It might not seem like the sexiest story, but the Federal Communications Commission’s decision last week to loosen restrictions on media consolidation and monopoly is arguably one of the most important developments of our day. It is a major blow for those who want diverse viewpoints represented on our airwaves, in our newspapers, and throughout our ‘Net. The decision guts consumer protections put in place between 1945 and 1975 to foster competition and prevent monopoly control of the media. Under the new rules, a single company can keep buying TV stations until it reaches 45 percent of American households; previously, the cap was set at 35 percent. The decision also weakens two important regulations that prevented monopolies in local media markets. One banned the ownership of multiple TV stations in a single market (in the largest cities, a company is now allowed to own up to three TV stations). The other prevented a company from owning a broadcast station and a newspaper in a single city (under the new rules, only in markets with three or fewer TV stations would this “cross-ownership” ban still be in effect).

What does all this mean? Thanks to the rule changes, media giants like News Corp., Viacom, and Gannett will be able to control even more TV stations, newspapers, and radio stations across the country. “We are moving to a world where in larger markets one owner can combine the cable system, three television stations, eight radio stations, the dominant newspaper, and the leading Internet provider, not to mention cable networks, magazine publishers and programming studios which could produce the vast bulk of the programming available to those outlets”, said dissenting FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps, in a statement released last week. “In my view, it is no exaggeration to say the rules now permit the emergence of a Twenty-First Century Citizen Kane on the local level, with perhaps a handful of Citizen Kanes on the national level.”

What made the decision so extraordinary was that it was made even as a broad coalition of citizens groups–conservative and liberal–rallied against it. Groups from the National Organization of Women to the National Rifle Association said that more consolidation would keep their opinions off the air and put too much power in the hands of a few already bloated corporations. Consumer advocates joined with small broadcasters, civil rights organizations joined with religious groups–denouncing as a chorus the relaxation of restrictions on “cross-ownership”, which they said would discourage news organizations from monitoring each other’s reporting and narrow the range of opinions presented for public consumption.

Conservative columnist William Safire went so far a to call the decision a “power grab” by the rich and powerful. “The concentration of power–political, corporate, media, cultural–should be anathema to conservatives”, he wrote last month in The New York Times. “Why do we have more channels but fewer real choices today? Because the ownership of our means of communication is shrinking. Moguls glory in amalgamation, but more individuals than they realize resent the loss of local control and community identity.”

Safire and others also complained that the FCC failed to take seriously the public’s opinion about whether to loosen the existing regulations. As it turned out, the FCC received a record number of comments from the public–almost three quarters of a million. “Nearly all oppose increased media consolidation–over 99.9 percent,” said Copps in his statement last week. “The spirit underlying the ‘notice and comment’ procedure of independent agencies is that important proposed changes need to be seen and vetted before they are voted. We haven’t been true to that spirit. Today we vote before we vet.”

Media conglomerates like Walt Disney Co. (owner of ABC) and News Corp. (owner of the Fox News Channel and Fox TV network) argued that the changes were needed because the dramatic growth of cable television, the Internet, and satellite TV had dramatically changed the industry. The free programming that networks like ABC and CBS have offered for decades could be in jeopardy, they argued, if these companies were not provided with more flexibility to make profits.

FCC Chairperson Powell, the son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, also pointed out that changing the rules was the only way to save them. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit had in recent years shot down several of the agency’s ownership rules, saying they were unjustified under present law. In fact, the 35-percent cap on TV station ownership that consumer advocates wanted kept in place had been unenforceable since 2001, when it was remanded by the court. “Keeping the rules exactly as they are, as some so stridently suggest, was not a viable option,” Powell said in a statement last week announcing the new rules.

But even if it’s true that reform was necessary, it does not follow that the FCC needed to stage a corporate coup d’etat of the likes of last week’s decision. For one thing, the arguments by large media companies that they need more flexibility to make profits is simply ludicrous. TV stations boast annual profit margins in the range of 20 to 50 percent, an astounding figure even in an industry as profitable as media. Just last month, a record $9.4 billion in upfront sales was purchased for the next season of network advertising, up 13 percent from the previous year.

Then there is the more troubling question of how relaxing regulations on media ownership in this day and age actually serves the public interest. After all, the changes that the FCC put in place last week threaten the two things that are crucial for healthy public debate: localism and diversity.

“I think we put into jeopardy a system that is reliant on local views and divergent thought,” Ben Turner, president of Fisher Broadcasting, told The Washington Post. Based in Seattle and broadcasting throughout the Pacific Northwest, Fisher Broadcasting is a medium-sized media company. Though the FCC insisted that the rule changes would encourage competition and help small broadcasters, Turner believes that the opposite is true. Local coverage will suffer, he says, as large companies buy up local TV stations and slash programming budgets. “The more power you give a few companies, the less opportunity you are going to have for a lot of divergent thought at the local level as a countercheck to network programming.”

Supporters of the relaxed regulations say that an open, unregulated market leads to a diversity of viewpoints. They point to the explosion of cable TV channels in recent years as evidence for this. But there’s reason to be suspicious of the claim. Remember that song by Bruce Springsteen, “57 Channels (And Nothing On)”? Having lots of options means little if the “options” are all the same. And as it turns out, almost all the top cable channels are owned by the same corporations that own the TV networks and cable systems. As for the programming that fills these airwaves and cable streams, the networks have substantially increased the amount that they own over the last decade–thanks to the absence of any restrictions on who owns programming. And so we’re left with hundreds of channels, thousands of media outlets–and the same mindless, formulaic shows. “A person can always add more electrical outlets throughout their home, but that doesn’t mean they will get their electricity from new sources. The same goes for media outlets,” said FCC Commissioner Jonathan S. Adelstein, who also voted against last week’s rule changes.

Perhaps we should look at what happened after a similar attempt to “encourage competition” in 1996, when Congress and the FCC decided to roll back regulations on the radio industry. What followed was a frenzy of corporate consolidation. “We saw a 34 percent reduction in the number of radio station owners,” Copps says. “Diversity of programming suffered. Homogenized music and standardized programming crowded out local and regional talent. Creative local artists found it evermore difficult to obtain play time.” And instead of encouraging a variety of viewpoints, the rapid consolidation of the radio industry has further “polarized” editorial opinion, Copps says. Consider the recent political activities of the country’s largest radio conglomerate, Clear Channel Communications. In 1995, it owned 43 radio stations; today it owns more than 1,200. Critics of the radio giant allege that it has used its clout to further its own political causes–promoting pro-war rallies during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and keeping critics of the war, like the Dixie Chicks, off of its play lists.

The FCC’s new rules endanger diversity in another way. Those individuals who usually have the most difficulty getting their point of view out into the public arena–people of color, rural Americans, gays and lesbians–will find their task even harder. In a further deregulated marketplace, the (few) small media companies that aren’t interested in selling their stations will quickly be pushed out of business by the media giants. Since minorities tend to be at the helm of these smaller media companies, this effectively means they will be shut out of media ownership.

As it is now, less than four percent of radio and television owners are people of color. According to the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters, the number of minority owners of broadcast facilities has dropped by 14 percent since 1997. Fearing that the FCC’s revised regulations would make this grim picture even worse, the Congressional Black, Hispanic, and Asian Pacific American caucuses on Capitol Hill all came out against last week’s decision.

For those who believed that the ‘Net might be the salvation of diversity in American media, think again: Almost a decade after the online revolution began, the top news sources are controlled by the same media giants who dominate radio, TV, newspapers, and cable. The new FCC regulations do little to stop the consolidation going on in our last bastion of media democracy–a consolidation that the agency has, in fact, encouraged over the past year. For instance, the FCC earlier this year gave regional phone companies the power to deny other companies access to their high-speed data pipelines. “This basically mirrored earlier policies allowing the cable companies, which also created networks by getting government-granted monopolies, to refuse to share access to their lines,” writes tech columnist Dan Gillmor in the San Jose Mercury News. “In other words, U.S. high-speed data access will soon be under the thumb of two of the most anti-competitive industries around.”

Fortunately, last week’s decision has not ended the public debate over how to regulate the media industry. The remarkable coalition of conservative and liberal groups that tried in vain to win over Powell’s commission is now putting pressure on lawmakers in Congress. So far, they’ve had some luck in the Senate, where Democrats and quite a few Republicans (including Mississippi Senator Trent Lott) have taken up the cause. Last week, Democratic Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts said he would file a “resolution of disapproval” to block the FCC’s rule changes, and Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska introduced a bill to return the ownership cap to 35 percent. Even if it passes the Senate, however, the legislation will still need to pass muster in the House, where Republicans have an even heftier majority and the leadership has taken a more hostile attitude toward any additional regulations.

Much hangs in the balance. Mass media has always been the fabric of our sprawling democracy, allowing for public debate across a vast nation and making possible the very idea of government “by the people.” But now that control over the media is falling into the hands of a few, that debate–and that democracy–are in jeopardy.

If we do nothing to stop the federal government’s mad dash away from the public interest, the future that lies before us is grim indeed. At best, we will be served up ever larger helpings of the processed, formulaic, and focused-grouped content that we’ve grown to abhor on our evening news and prime-time TV; at worst, we will witness the corruption of our democracy, as media conglomerates silence local voices and limit the boundaries of public debate. At a time when the media already shapes so many of our perceptions of the world beyond our living rooms, the nightmare scenario might as well as be something out of The Matrix: a  “virtual” reality where everything we know, everything we think, has been packaged for our consumption by a few multinational corporations. Impossible, you say? I hope you’ll prove me wrong, and raise your voice before it’s drowned out.”

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

No one could have been more relieved than I was to see George W. Bush make nice with French President Jacques Chirac. The olive branch he extended during last week’s G-8 summit in Evian, France–though frail–appears to have improved relations. Hopefully it’ll make it easier to have a French last name and to respect my home state again.

When freedom became the name of battered toast and fried pieces of potato, I expected Louisiana to be above the anti-French movement. After all, French culture is more prevalent here than in just about any other state. This has been the case ever since 1682, when Frenchman Rene’-Robert Cavalier arrived in the Mississippi River valley and declared it the territory of France (naming it “Louisiane” in honor of Louis XIV). Louisiana was sold to the Americans in 1803, but the French influence on its way of life has persisted. In fact, in my hometown of New Orleans, the city’s Francophile ways have become the cornerstone of its most important industry, tourism: Every year, revelers from around the world are drawn to the city by its distinct blend of French culture served up with American attitude.

But when French President Chirac openly opposed the U.S.-led effort to invade Iraq last spring, all things French suddenly became suspect. Bottles of French wine bled into sewers; French flags burned. The backlash reached its peak in mid-March, when Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives decided to stage their own culinary coup–purging the menus in their cafeterias of French-named foods and putting “freedom fries” and “freedom toast” in their place.

Given its close ties to France, I was optimistic that the same thing would not happen in Louisiana. A state that packaged and sold its French influence like its seafood would be more mindful of stirring the waters of French denunciation, I thought.

I was wrong. Rather than trying to soothe the tensions brewing on both sides of the Atlantic, Louisianans quickly went on the attack–against France. Politicians condemned the French in ringing tones, even as they continued to market their Mardi Gras events and old-fashioned French ways to tourists. The lowest blow came when Republican state representative A.G. Crowe drafted a resolution to strip Chirac of his invitation to attend the state’s bicentennial celebration of the Louisiana Purchase, which will be held in New Orleans this December (Bush and King Juan Carlos of Spain were also invited). “Through his unwillingness to support the United States and President Bush at this crucial time, Mr. Chirac has appeared to be ungrateful for the tremendous help and genuine friendship that the United States has given to France for many years, including during both World War I and World War II,” Crowe’s resolution read.

Even Louisiana’s governor, Mike Foster, came out in support of the resolution. The Republican repeatedly savaged France in public statements throughout the spring. “People are really fed up with France,” he said last March on his radio show. “We have good relationships with the French people. They must have slipped up and elected somebody who doesn’t like us.”

Slipped up? Chirac’s approval ratings in France exceeded 90 percent at the end of March, when the French leader was sharply criticizing the United States for invading Iraq. Does that mean the French do not like us? If that is true, then we Americans have a much bigger problem on our hands: Other countries that did not support the war must not like us, either.

Now I have my own opinions about the war, but I see no reason to single out France for condemnation. It is one of many countries that opposed the Iraq invasion. And regardless of whether I agree with the French government, I respect the right of others to make up their own minds. Isn’t such freedom of opinion at the heart of our First Amendment?

What our state’s politicians never realized as they were railing against France was that Louisianans were the ones who were going to suffer most from any transatlantic boycott. Louisianan culture is French culture. Should we stop speaking French on the bayou? Stop offering cafe’ au lait and beignets? Burn down New Orleans’ French Quarter–or just rename it the Freedom Quarter? Better yet, cancel Mardi Gras–that’ll really show France!

In a state struggling with high poverty rates and a stagnant economy, perhaps it would have made sense to stay in good standing with a country that employs 10,000 Louisianans and every year sends tens of thousands of tourists to our state–a country that before the war had been showing interest in investing in New Orleans. But some Louisianan politicians were too patriotic to carefully craft their sound bites on France.

Maybe now, though, things will get better. Maybe this recent meeting between Bush and Chirac will bring Louisiana’s politicians to their senses, so that they can concentrate on promoting our state’s economic development rather than crippling our international relationships. And now that some of the wartime emotions have subsided, maybe we Louisianans can start treating other people’s opinions with a little more understanding and respect.

After all, don’t people–even French people–have the freedom to think what they want? Or is freedom reserved for fried potatoes?”

Judith Malveaux

The war was only a week old, and a friend was already complaining about the protestors. Not the anti-war ones. The people on the other side of the street–the ones protesting the idea of protest. Men and women decked in red, white, and blue, angry and solemn and proud, waving their flags like weapons. Perhaps they didn’t reflect the majority of Americans who supported this war, but they were the faces he saw whenever he turned on the TV. The most patriotic of patriots.

My friend was against the war when it started, largely because he felt it would bring about more terrorism. But he did not march in any of the demonstrations. He isn’t an activist. He’s the son of Korean immigrants, who worked the counters of a convenience store for years so that their two children could go to college. My friend was born in the United States, and has never stepped foot outside of it.
  
And yet something turned him off about the pro-war protestors. They represented the America that has shunned him, he told me. Shunned him? He has a good job, a college education, a comfortable lifestyle. America has been good to him, he is the first to admit. But he watched the people wave their flags and say, I am an American. This is America.” And they were almost all white. And the things they were saying reminded him of the co-workers and acquaintances and strangers who have uttered ignorant, even racist, things in his presence–about African Americans or Arab Americans when they think he’s on their side, about “Orientals” when they forget. He does not feel a part of their America. And yet he is just like them: an American by birth.
  
Nothing brings out patriotism more than war. A public that was initially skeptical of war in Iraq rallied in support of it, once American soldiers were fighting, and dying, abroad. Significant dissent emerged, but it fought a holding action against the tide of patriotism that swept up everyone–journalists, union workers, soccer moms, and Wall Street bankers alike. Now that the fighting seems to be ending, and coalition forces have apparently succeeded in toppling Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, that sense of pride has only swelled. Even some longtime critics of the war have changed their tune. They watch TV images of Iraqis celebrating as U.S. soldiers tear down statues of the deposed tyrant, and they, too, love America and the freedom it has brought the world.
  
Is this surge in patriotism a good thing? Of course it is, friends tell me. I receive patriotic emails expressing support for America and its soldiers; as always, the flags are there, fluttering in a gentle HTML breeze. They may lack solemnity, but in the symbol itself they express the same sentiment as those gracing the steps of marble monuments, those draped over soldiers’ coffins: Liberty was won with the blood of Americans. Your freedom to speak, to criticize, to live as a minority amid a majority–was bought with that blood.
  
But patriotism has a darker side, one that has become quite clear in the last few weeks of war. Now might be the time to consider whether we Americans or Britons really should consider ourselves patriots, or whether defending our ideals and supporting our soldiers can be undertaken in the name of a higher cause.
  
It’s true that patriotism–love and devotion for one’s nation–gives people a shared identity. In the United States, for instance, settlers from all over Europe gradually came to see themselves as a single, distinct group of people. Though their nation was built, at first, on the exclusion and genocide of indigenous tribes and black slaves, today even many Native Americans and African Americans proudly declare their American-ness.

Patriotism may be necessary to build a nation, but sometimes it grows too quickly, becoming cancerous. The example always mentioned is Nazi Germany. Suffering amid a massive economic depression, hungry for their former glory, the German people turned to a charismatic leader who promised prosperity, power, and revenge–first against the Jews, and then against all of the nation’s “enemies.” Adolf Hitler brought his country to ruin, but he could not have emerged without the obsessive patriotism of ordinary Germans, whose love of country reached such a feverish pitch that they began to value German ways over all other ways, German life over all other life.

The United States has not reached that level of love-turned-hate, but it has come close. Today, things are looking grim once again. Patriotism of a rather pernicious kind is enshrined in the U.S. PATRIOT Act, legislation that has stripped away many of the protections that U.S. citizens once had from the power of big government. It also appears in the protect-America-at-all-costs policy of detaining foreign prisoners of war in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba–without charge, without trial, and far from any eyes who could judge whether they’re being treated fairly. At the root of these policies are two disturbing beliefs. One is that love of America demands giving up the very thing that America is supposed to be about–liberty. The other is that people elsewhere in the world do not deserve the rights or respect that Americans do. It’s the same sentiment that in the past allowed Americans in the majority to enslave African Americans, drive indigenous people from their lands, persecute union workers or put Japanese Americans in camps: They are not “American,” and so they are not worthy of the same treatment as we are.

Since the war in Iraq began, the uglier face of patriotism has been popping up on a daily basis. Consider the recent behavior of our fearless public watchdog, the mainstream news media. Throughout this war, public reaction–or just fear of public reaction–has prompted many news outlets to silence their own dissenting voices. This is obvious in American news channels like CNN, FOX, and MSNBC, where the coverage has been dramatically more partisan than what you find on the BBC–or even CNN International. Those who have tried to buck the trend have been punished outright: At MSNBC, liberal talk show host Phil Donahue was canned after news executives complained in an internal memo that his show could become “a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”

Supporters of patriotism say that Americans must suffer the rollback of civil liberties and the censorship of dissenting voices now so that they can enjoy their freedom once the fighting is over. But it is not clear what freedom we will have left to enjoy, if the present course of government action continues.
  
More importantly, it’s not clear that Americans will make themselves any safer by alienating the rest of the world with a belligerent self-love. I should be clear here: There were many good reasons for the United States and Britain to overthrow a murderous tyrant like Saddam Hussein. The problem with the present war is that the United States entered it in violation of international law, with the public support of only a single Arab government, and without the backing of the United Nations. This kind of arrogance has radicalized Muslims around the world, who see the war as a war against Islam, and will likely cause more grief for the United States in the years to come. Meanwhile, America continues to lose the real “war against terrorism”–the battle over the hearts and minds of people in other countries, especially Muslim countries.

To win that war, we will need more than tanks and cruise missiles. We will need a sustained effort to change how other people in the world see the United States. The first step is for people here to understand why people in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Indonesia think the way they do about America. Sadly, many otherwise decent and patriotic Americans cannot put themselves in the shoes of people who are enraged by the U.S. government’s policies. They insist that their country is the world’s savior, because only it has the will to fight tyranny abroad (as the case of Iraq proves). But elsewhere in the world, many people see George W. Bush as a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein.
  
Some people look at this resentment abroad and conclude that foreigners are simply jealous of American power. Even if this has some truth to it, many Americans don’t realize how many good reasons people in other countries have to be suspicious of the U.S. government. We seem to be the only people in the world who do not appreciate the fact that the U.S. government’s rhetoric of “liberation” too often masks cold self-interest. Just look at the history of U.S. interventions in Panama, Guatemala, Nicaragua, South Vietnam, East Timor, and Laos, or the support that the U.S. government has given to authoritarian and brutal regimes in the Middle East (Saddam’s included, up until his invasion of Kuwait).
  
Americans are rightfully proud when their soldiers step in to end atrocities in war-ravaged places like Bosnia, but we don’t realize that the United States is the only one fighting wars these days because it is the only one allowed to do so (the U.S. government has explicitly stated that it will allow no country to rival it militarily). Likewise, many Americans talk about how their military defends the rights of people elsewhere in the world, but we don’t appreciate the animosity our armies and military bases create in places like South Korean and Saudi Arabia, where many people despise the presence of foreign soldiers on their land.
  
What makes people in other countries so upset is the assumption behind these policies: America knows what is best for the rest of the world. Some say that this assumption is at the heart of all patriotism. “Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate,” said Emma Goldman. “Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others.”
  
Some liberals argue that, properly understood, patriotism encourages dissent. In their view, patriotism is not about doing whatever the government tells you to do, but using your free speech to uphold the ideals of liberty and equality that America was founded upon. Clearly many anti-war protestors believe in this approach. It is surely better than patriotism-as-unquestioning-loyalty, but it is still flawed, Robert Jensen tells us. “Why are human characteristics being labeled as American,” he asks, “if there is nothing distinctly American about them? … At its worst, patriotism can lead easily to support for barbarism. At its best, it is self-indulgent and arrogant in its assumptions about the uniqueness of U.S. culture.”
  
Patriotism has served the United States well in making it a global power, and clearly it was necessary in the beginnings of the republic, to create unity out of a hodgepodge of former British subjects. But nowadays patriotism is past its prime. The United States is no longer a small republic on the shores of the Atlantic; it is the most multinational of nations. It is linked to the rest of the world economically (by the flow of import and export goods) and culturally (by the flow of immigrants, students, and workers). Today, to an ever-increasing extent, whatever helps the rest of the world helps the United States.
  
For this reason, world leaders like the Dalai Lama have called for an end to our old notions of nation vs. nation, “us” vs. “them.” In the past, when countries were independent of one another, “there was a relevance to violence and war,” the Dalai Lama writes. But today, “one-sided victory is no longer relevant. We must work to resolve conflicts in a spirit of reconciliation and always keep in mind the interests of others. We cannot destroy our neighbors! We cannot ignore their interests! Doing so would ultimately cause us to suffer.”
  
Perhaps it is time, then, to move beyond patriotism. Without losing our love for the people, places, and ideals of our unique country, we can begin to see ourselves as citizens of something larger than this. In places around the world, people are already making this journey: as Italians, Spaniards, and Germans increasingly see themselves as part of a unified Europe; as the number of individuals with multiple citizenships multiplies; as more people realize that in a world where everyone’s fates are tied together, love and loyalties can be shared.
  
Becoming a “citizen of the world” does not lessen the sacrifice of the men and women who have fought on behalf of the American flag, to defend American liberties. It extends the blessings of that liberty to new lands; it honors America’s heroes by honoring all of humanity, without prejudice or pettiness. And it preserves the nation, by preserving the world. “We must say goodbye to patriotism,” Jensen writes, “because the world cannot survive indefinitely the patriotism of Americans.”
  
My friend was tortured by his dislike of the pro-war protestors, because he truly wanted to do what was best for his country, the only country he has known. But there are many ways to serve one’s country, and in the end, what might save America is something other than patriotism–something more than patriotism.

Oddly enough, acting in ways that aren’t seen as patriotic may be the best way to help America out of its current international crisis. After all, part of the reason that terrorists are so willing to kill civilians is that they see them as representatives of their hated governments. Dissent reminds the rest of the world that not all Americans agree with the U.S. government’s foreign policy. It says that dislike of America should be directed at specific government policies, not at Americans themselves. It also improves the way that the American people are perceived elsewhere in the world, providing evidence that, yes, Americans are capable of critical thought and concern for the lives of people in other countries.
  
Ultimately, dissent may lead to something even more valuable: a new vision of American power. As the world’s only remaining superpower, America has the privilege to be a leader upon the global stage. Good leaders are not blinded by self-love, nor driven by self-interest. They identify with the group they lead. They see any loss on the part of the group as a loss to their own self. They lead with courage and strength, but also understanding and humility.
  
America’s future–and its future security–is tied to its ability to be that kind of leader. It will have to do a better job of showing other countries that it seeks what is best for the world, even at its own expense. It will need a new kind of patriotism–yes, a love for the people, land, and ideals of America, but an equally deep love and respect for other countries, too. Those who love America and want what is best for it will accept the great task, and the great responsibility, laid before it. Until Americans can accept criticism of their country’s actions abroad, until they can value the lives of Iraqis and Afghans as much as they do Americans, then there will be little hope of a more peaceful and just world.
“

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

I awakened to death one morning in my life as an intern. I awoke and found myself standing next to my call bed in the hospital: an A code was called over the intercom and I reacted like reflex.  Where was it? I ran to the room and two residents had already arrived. The intern was giving chest compressions to a dying patient. The man was so brittle with his illness that his ribs broke with the first compression. I took over for the tiring intern, and as I pushed rhythmically, the patient passively vomited blood from his ruptured esophagus. The blood spilled from his mouth, onto the pillow, bed sheets, and floor. I noticed these details as though in a dream: what was real was my counting of the compressions, keeping the rhythm. Soon he was pronounced dead by the senior resident. I stopped pushing the broken chest, took off my gloves, and saw it was time to start rounds on the living patients. He was not one of mine, and in the rush of events, I did not catch his name. I put on my white coat over my scrubs to go and face the living.

Little did I understand, when I first received this physician’s costume, how it would usher me down to the underworld, onto a stage where sickness and death are main actors in the play. What I found within me during the descent was my mother-guilt. With the white coat comes an influence that presses you to provide good care to your patients. I call it mother-guilt,” for it is innate like one’s “mother-wit,” or common sense. It feels inherited, passed on through many generations, like the remembrance of my father in the features of my face.

I became a physician one day in May when, with all my classmates, I recited an ancient Greek oath by Hippocrates “to first do no harm” to my patients. On that sunny day, I did not feel the weight of the mother-guilt that grew heavier when in June I put on the long white coat at Yale-New Haven Hospital. The mother-guilt fears the harm done to patients in your care, even if not done by your hand. The death or decline of my patients began to feel my fault until proven otherwise–no American justice system at work here, but something akin to an ancient indictment for a crime long-forgotten.

My fellow interns have confessed to me this guilt in corners of hallways, when a patient under their care suffers complications. Sometimes it hits you first thing in the morning when you walk onto the floors. The nurse tells you that the patient was transferred to the intensive care unit overnight.  I have to remind myself that it was not due to my care, but because their body is failing them. I have to reason with myself, try talking away the guilt, but it lingers, whispers from hallway corners that you don’t know what you are doing, and are to blame.

The making of a medicine man

The pressure of guilt makes me as aggressive about my patients’ welfare as I’d be if my conscience, my livelihood were in the balance. In such a manner, the professional caregiver is driven to care. The days begin to merge and blur as I work the eighth hour, which becomes the fourteenth hour, which becomes the twenty-sixth hour, which becomes the thirty-fourth. Solace is found in the restroom for a few minutes, or writing patient notes, speaking with a fellow worn intern, or in an empty cafeteria. The distinction between this ancient guilt and the care of my patients–a haze of sleepless work, immersion in the infinity of details, the endless checking of doses and vital signs, and the constant moving of hands over the body–this distinction blurs into a near identification of their body with mine.

From one perspective, this approach is good medicine, for I am not only intellectually processing that the intravenous potassium I order for Mr. Baxter will burn his veins if given too quickly; I also feel my veins burning, and tell the nurse to administer the potassium slowly. Perhaps that is an empathy provoked by guilt and fear, but not sustained by it. It must be sustained by a greater motivation, otherwise short is my stay in medicine.

Certainly I am not alone in this guilt-induced empathy. I’ve had colleagues come to me in nausea, almost in tears, at the decline of their patients, or due to some small oversight.  They do not know how to contain their feelings; meanwhile the needs of other patients call to them.  Once during morning rounds, a patient passed by on a stretcher. A fellow resident clutched her throat. “I feel like my body mimics what my patients have,” she said. “You better not go into oncology,” I replied.

This guilt-empathy, like a fear of perdition, motivates you to get things done for the drug users, the alcoholics, the obstinate, the gluttonous, and the lascivious whose desires have brought on hepatitis, HIV, poorly managed diabetes, morbid obesity, and other consequences of bodily neglect.  That does not matter when they are your patients. You stay the extra hour, draw the blood, and check the chest X-ray before you sign their care over to another resident and leave the floors, satiating the flames that keep you in the hospital.

A story from within and release

Catherine was a heroine addict, prostitute, and a regular on the HIV wards. Rumor was, she’d told a fellow patient that she would milk this admission for all the time that she could. As the weeks passed, she lay in bed in a dark room save for when she would go outside for a smoke. I noticed her growing thinner in the early morning light when I examined her each day. We searched for the cause of her diffuse pains but found none.  Her T-cell count was low enough that something could be brewing, but during her second week we became convinced that she was using her hospital stay to evade the police. Then one morning I looked into her mouth and saw thick white yeast coating her throat. “It hurts to swallow so much I want to jump out of the window,” she whispered to me. In addition to the yeast infection, endoscopic examination diagnosed a herpes flare extending down her throat. We gave her medicated lollipops to suck on as she shambled along the hallway. The next time I took blood from her veins, my attitude was not of doubt or double- guessing. My intent was to get her better, her past be damned.

I emerge from the hospital and squint at the setting sun, and it seems foreign, this sunlight, for I have become accustomed to fluorescence. The last I saw the sun, it was rising on a Thursday, and now Friday is coming to an end. I walk out to my car, and on some days I am at peace. On others, I am swallowing all the small terrors and frustrations of the past ten or fourteen or thirty hours.  I want to sleep, but I also want to release the distillation of black bile collected under my rib cage; otherwise it comes up my throat and tastes metallic, like acid. I have smelled the iodine and the vomit, the shit and the latex gloves, the scent of the sick and the putrescence of infection. I feel deprived of the regeneration found in sitting at Rudy’s, my hole-in-a-wall second home, with a glass of Guinness and much talk around me.

Headed north, I pass East Rock, that traprock rise overlooking the city, and I spy its red heights, green crown, and the memorial tower. I breathe: my ribcage expands, loosening its anxious hold on the black bile in me. The seagulls circle near the sublime East Rock, and in that circling comes a gratefulness and freedom from this mother-guilt for a while–a rest, a simplicity in returning to a quiet home.”

In The Fray Contributor