I find that when one is unemployed, after some time the days just seem to meld one into the other, where Tuesdays become Thursdays and Saturdays Mondays, where time can come to a crawl if you stare long enough at a clock or speed past you unnoticed as you doze lazily in your reading chair, on and off throughout the sunny workday afternoons.

Just the other day, in fact, my wife was reminding me that it’s been a month and half since my contract as a software developer was terminated. My termination couldn’t have been nicer, though. The CIO of the small Pittsburgh software company I worked for called me himself (I was able to telecommute from the comfort of my home office and so rarely did I need to actually go into the office). Although he said my work was exemplary, commendable, a model for all software engineers to follow (well, perhaps he didn’t use so many words … and maybe they weren’t actually these particular words), my services were simply no longer needed. Cut to my face and imagine a look of sheer astonishment. What? Was it something I said? No. Was it something I did or didn’t do? Um, no. What, was it that joke at the company picnic that I cracked about your wife? Silence. Well, I guess you can’t win ‘em all.

This is the third time in three years that I’ve been unemployed. My new-found nonchalance has been upsetting my wife, but it has been affording me a lot of needed reading time what with several hundred books in various locales about my study awaiting my attention. I’ve also been sitting back in quiet contemplation (my wife just calls this pure laziness) and pondering my future, wondering if, in this “present climate,” where jobs such as mine seem to be flocking eastward toward the rising sun, I’ll find anything. So far, “the pickins have been slim.”

The first time I was laid off, however, I was working as a full-time, permanent, salaried employee. The entire company, to the surprise of the entire company save the CEO, of course, went under, and my wife, myself and our bird, Sammie, all went into a panic. I’d never filed for unemployment before, didn’t even know how to go about it, and wasn’t sure that I’d qualify. Then there was the daunting prospect of contacting headhunters, building relationships, polishing the resume, sending them out with cover letters by snail mail and email, and checking if the only suit and dress shoes I owned still actually fit me. I suppose we just expected, after buying our humongous house, that I’d forever be making those boatloads of cash that once seemed to flow so freely from the pockets of employers. We assumed that, despite 9/11, our small company would persevere, ride out the depressing, crushing waves of uncertainty, doubt and the streams of perspiration pouring from the brows of upper management.

Well, like a lot of businesses that were going belly-up at that time, we weren’t spared. In thinking about it, there seemed to be this cascade effect going on, like business dominoes of a sort. Investors stopped investing, larger companies began laying off and cutting out critical projects, thus smaller companies in partnership were affected which caused them to either cut back or close shop, etc., on down the line all the way to the small fish, such as the company I worked for.

The second time I was laid off, a year ago now, things were simpler. Although it was more of a shock to me than the first time (the story of which would take an entire blog entry in itself), going about making arrangements for unemployment and contacting headhunters, friends and acquaintances was much easier and less stressful, especially on my wife and the bird. This third time, however, which seems like it was going to be old hat, is beginning to have its stressful effect on the family.

In terms of software development jobs, Pittsburgh seems to be drying up — it seems like we’re under some sort of business drought, or perhaps it’s all the offshore outsourcing. Most of the people I worked with at recruitment firms are no longer there; all of my friends and acquaintances seem to be happily employed at places that are filled to capacity, and the telephone, which used to ring off the hook when word was out that I was looking for work, now rarely rings at all, and when it does it’s usually some wily telemarketer who has somehow figured out how to bypass the system here in Pennsylvania in order to save me money on my long distance or to sell me light bulbs, or my mother, whose first words to me are “Have you found a job yet?”

This time, although I can feel the subtle waves of stress wash over me and through my abode, I’ve decided to put a lot more thought into my next job, sit back and take in the fresh air of my country dwelling, and try not to make any rash decisions. Who knows? Maybe this is a kick in the butt telling me to get out of the standard nine to five, make-someone-else-rich kind of job, and to just do for myself, make my own way, start a new company, become an artist, or get my Ph.D. in ancient languages and philosophy. I don’t rightly know, but I do know this: It’s mid afternoon, the sun is out, the breeze is flowing, and I hear birds chirping and kids playing, so I think it’s time I get out of the house, sit out on the porch with an iced tea and a book, and ponder my next move.

Thomas J. Clancy

“i am sick and tired of cooking food for the homeless with witless frickin yuppies and watching suburbanite housewives bring salmon and lattes for only their favorite seniors during monday night bingo. oh the humanity! if i have to peel potatoes with one more marketing assistant or bag clothing with one more real estate developer in search of a tax break, well i don’t even want to imagine the consequences.”

“not that i want these people to go away, every lil bit helps. heck, i’m even ok with ralph lauren pimping volunteerism to denim-clad youth. but it would be nice to meet up with interesting people i might actually want to hang out with through volunteer work. people who don’t think they will be raped and pillaged every time they step into my neighborhood, people who respect that all old people — regardless of race, creed, or personal affection — deserve a latte or prune juice, whatever their preference and digestional ability.”

These are the musings of a 27-year-old Chicago woman from the bulletin board on the social networking web site Friendster. I kept the lower case to try and preserve the spirit of her original post. ITF’s blog postings tend to err on the side of well-thought-out cultural observations. Not such a horrible pit to fall into, I suppose, unless the lingua franca of the land is an off-the-cuff dialect shot through with socio-economic preconceptions.

Sometimes it pays to give an ear to some good old-fashioned ranting in its raw form. Instead of quarantining speech for perpetuating stereotypes or sketching an insightful history of power imbalance, what happens when we bite our tongues, strap ourselves to the mast and do our best to take something on its own terms?

Now, if I wanted to critique the above musings I’d go right for the jugular. The post’s basic fallacy is that while it chastises yuppies, suburbanite housewives, marketing assistants and real estate developers for being less than magnanimous in their volunteerism, our poster reveals a desire to use volunteering as a means towards socializing; surely not the classless, raceless, ageless, geographyless realm of pure volunteerism she seems to imagine.

Ok, that’s my knee-jerk reaction to idealistic, suburb-hating, 20-something hipsters. But what happens when I keep the knee under control and try not to be a jerk? When I listen to the hypocrisy embedded in her post, it says something rather clearly; as a result of its contradiction, not in spite of it. “I need no reward for my acts of goodness,” it seems to say, “but why does everybody else need to incentivize their volunteerism?” Perhaps the moral of the story is that we are blind to our own ideological structures and have 20/20 vision when it comes to the motivations of other groups? Perhaps there’s value, especially in the philanthropic community, of preserving that untarnished sense of benevolence.  

Benjamin Helphand

While watching television yesterday evening, I saw a commercial — perhaps you’ve seen it as well — in which a young man offers an elderly woman a hand as she crosses the street and then asks if she’d like to go out sometime. Shortly before the viewer learns what the commercial is for, the man hollers to the woman as she continues on her way, “Hey, wait! I didn’t get your phone number!”

And then it becomes evident that this is an advertisement for a Snickers bar, as the picture of the candy bar on the voice-over says something along the lines of “Snickers — the answer to impaired judgment.”

Which begs the question of what it was about this guy’s judgment that the advertisers think is impaired. Is it that a young man could be attracted to a (much) older woman? Is it that this older woman is a tad bit wrinkled and walks rather slowly? And is she unattractive — even undesirable — as a result of this?

That was certainly what I sensed advertisers were trying to say. I can’t honestly say as a 25-year-old woman that I could imagine myself being attracted to an elderly man. But the commercial’s characterization of this elderly woman as “undesirable” — except for those with “impaired” judgment — seems to degrade the value of older people in our society. In the capitalist culture informing such commericals, this seems to make sense. After all, unlike many cultures, which revere their elders, the desire for innovation, constant turnover, newness, and shiny objects is the driving force behind our capitalist culture. In other words, a culture that deems wrinkles, gray hair, and difficulty walking unattractive — and undesirable.

Consider, for instance, an episode of Sex and the City in which Samantha discovered that she had a gray pubic hair. Desperate to maintain the interest of her hot 20-something boyfriend, she shaved off all of her pubic hair. Perhaps the situation would’ve been different if Smith had been closer to her age or if the two of them had been together for 20 years. But if her attraction to him was based largely on his youth, how could she expect him to embrace her aging body? And Samantha was only in her 40s. Imagine what it’s like for older women who have more far more gray hair (or no hair at all).

I’ll admit that at the time I saw this episode of Sex and the City, Samantha’s response seemed a bit neurotic (okay, admittedly, almost every response of the show’s characters could be termed neurotic). But the link between ageism and desirability in our culture made more sense to me after seeing a documentary entitled Still Doing It: The Intimate Lives of Women Over 65, for an article I was writing for The Independent, a film magazine, during the South-by-Southwest film festival here in Austin this past March.

In this, her debut feature film, director Dierdre Fischel critiques the Western “rules” of attraction that discriminate against women over a certain age. It is, in a sense, a coming-of-age story about nine women between 60 and 87 who became wives and mothers during the 1950s, when gender roles were strict and sex was expected to be confined to the married heterosexual couple, primarily for reproductive purposes.

But as the women in the film remind us, they also lived through – and are now extending – the sexual revolution of the ‘60s. Disproving popular belief in the first couple of minutes of the film, the words “80 perecnt of women experience mild or no menopausal symptoms” appear on the screen in bold font. As one interviewee asks, “Why would I be feeling [these sexual desires] if my body was too old?” Another woman reminds viewers that sex is a basic human need. While not all nine women featured in Fischel’s film have partners, each of them still has desires. Many of the women even act on these desires in places as unlikely as their nursing home rooms and on the Internet.

And as women continue outliving men, many women have grown more open to the idea of experimenting with sexual arrangements that would’ve been considered taboo during their youth. For instance, Betty, a woman in her late 60s has taken a 26-year-old lover, whom she met online. As her lover reflects, “She’s such a wonderful woman, and I’m lucky to have this time with her before she’s gone.” Some women have taken their experiments one step further. Once married to men, for instance, two women have since chosen each other as life partners. With their days numbered, they no longer care what others think and cherish intimacy and true love.

Are these women anomalies? Yes and no. While the nine women Fischel interviewed were the only nine women who responded to her advertisements seeking subjects for her film, keep in mind that they are part of a generation for which sex — and particularly homosexuality — was long considered taboo. And they continue to live in a culture where frank discussions about sex and sexuality continue to be considered taboo in many circles, particularly among women. Thanks to a culture that raised them to be passive, most of these women’s contemporaries have allowed themselves to become invisible. Fischel doubts, however, that babyboomers will remain silent when they pass the senior citizen threshold.

But as Still Doing It suggests, ageism, particularly with regard to attraction and desirability, is pervasive in the United States. Consequently, it will be extremely difficult for even the loudest babyboomers to command respect — much less desirability — in a culture that privileges new over old, attractive over unappealing. In fact, even though I tried to keep an open mind while viewing Still Doing It, I was extremely unsettled for hours after the film ended. I didn’t want to think about older people having sex in a nursing home. I didn’t want to think about one of my contemporaries being intimately involved with a woman 40 years our senior.

And I’m sure many others felt the same way. In fact, I would even guess that the advertisers for Snickers who put together that advertisement about impaired judgment thought their advertisement would go over well since, well, in our culture, most people think you must have impaired judgment to be attracted to someone who is elderly, particularly when you’re young. But given that the Snickers commercial’s portrayal of this woman as undesirable made me think twice, perhaps Fischel’s film is serving its purpose by challenging viewers to question the basis for their discomfort — and the Western rules of attraction which facilitate this discomfort and ageism.

Laura Nathan-Garner

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On Sunday, April 25, I marched across the National Mall in Washington, D.C., amidst a sea of 1,150,000 pro-choice women, men, and children. It was dusty and muggy, but the weather and dirt didn’t deter our intent to send a message to legislators: that a woman’s right to make choices about her reproductive health care is hers, and hers alone.

“Whose choice? Our Choice!”

The March for Women’s Lives was orchestrated by a coalition of seven liberal advocacy groups.  Designed to raise visibility for reproductive rights as the presidential campaigns heat up, it was the largest such march in more than a decade. Speakers ranged from Hillary Clinton to Susan Sarandon, and while the march was billed as non-partisan, the speakers took a decidedly anti-Bush tone.

“President Bush is a sexist; Send that bastard back to Texas!”

The current administration’s opposition to abortion and family planning (save for funding abstinence education) has been evident since President Bush cut funding for international family planning services on his second day in office. President Bush has held firm to his position that while he does not believe in abortion, except in cases of incest, rape, or lethality risk, the country is not ready for the Roe v. Wade decision to be overturned. This position infuriates Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America:

My friends — make no mistake. There is a war on choice. We didn’t start it, but we are going to win it! They’re not just after abortion rights. This is a full-throttle war on your very health — on your access to real sex education, birth control, medical privacy, and life-saving research.

The administration responded to the masses gathered on the mall with the following statement:

The president believes we should work to build a culture of life in America. And regardless of where one stands on the issue of abortion, we can all work together to reduce the number of abortions through promotion of abstinence education programs, support for parental notification laws, and support for the ban on partial-birth abortions.

“Pro-life, that’s a lie! You don’t care if women die!”

While pro-life groups such as Operation Witness had a permit to counter protest along Pennsylvania Avenue, their presence was far less disturbing than the homogeneity of the crowd.  There was significant diversity with respect to age — multiple generations marched together carrying banners stating, “We are the result of family planning!” — and speakers emphasized the need to pass the torch to the next generation. The emphasis placed on the movement’s youth was refreshing, since there has often been friction between second and third wavers in the past. But despite this, I found myself growing increasingly uncomfortable. The crowd of 1,150,000 was predominantly Caucasian.  

The Black Women’s Health Imperative and the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Rights were among the organizers of the March, and other leaders in the fight, such as Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice, have recently begun women of color initiatives. Nonetheless, the reproductive rights movement remains largely a middle-class white woman’s cause. That’s disturbing because this isn’t a fight any of us can win single-handedly. If the key to motivating legislators to action is voting, then no group of women can be ignored in the fight to preserve a woman’s right to choose. In order to succeed, we must examine our lack of diversity with open eyes, and not merely focus on the fight.

llouison

Demonstrating the power of film as a vehicle of political dissent, an initially banned film titled Marmoulak, which portrays a convicted criminal who masquerades as and eventually becomes a Muslim cleric, has been released in Iran. Marmoulak, which means “the lizard,” is a satirical stab at the privileged status of Muslim clerics in Iran’s Islamic republic. The clerics were not amused and demanded that the film be banned; film critics find it hysterical, and in Iran, the film is an enormous commercial success.  

Having Kamal Tabrizi’s Marmoulak released in Iran is no small victory. The press enjoys relative freedom in Iran, but the conservative judiciary certainly frowns upon the notion of an unfettered media. The satellite dish — wildly popular and often available in the Middle East despite various governments’ restrictions — is available in Iran, and over 80 percent of Iran’s population watches television.  

While America and the Coalition Provisional Authority is busy shutting down legitimate venues of political discourse and political dissent, such as al-Hawzah, a weekly newspaper run by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric in Iraq, others are continuing to use popular media and specifically film as an avenue of social, institutional, and political criticism. Earlier this year, the Turkish minister of culture and tourism permitted Ararat, a 2002 film by Armenian-Canadian director Atom Egoyan, to be screened in Turkey. Ararat, which depicts the events of 1915 in which droves of Armenians were expelled from modern-day eastern Turkey, is arguably virulently anti-Turkish. In blunt terms, it accuses Turkey of state-sponsored genocide of the Armenians living in Anatolia.

The version of Marmoulak currently being screened is not the pure voice of unconstrained political and institutional critique — the original version of the film has been edited to make it, presumably, less offensive to both individuals and to members of the religious establishment. It is, however, a legitimate, widely available, and hugely successful forum for political expression in the Islamic republic of Iran; and that’s more than can be said of America’s approach to the issue of political dialogue and dissent in Iraq.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Speaking to the wildly divergent cultural perspectives held by Japan and the United States regarding the three Japanese hostages who were recently held and released in Iraq, The New York Times published a piece that highlights the crippling shame that these newly released hostages face at home in Japan.

Lauding the three hostages for their courage, Colin Powell cheerfully and bullyingly declared: Well, everybody should understand the risk they are taking by going into dangerous areas … But if nobody was willing to take a risk, then we would never move forward. We would never move our world forward.”

In Japan, however, the situation is neither as transparently jingoistic nor as simplistically reassuring. As Norimitsu Onishi reports in The New York Times, these released hostages — Nahoko Takato, 34, a member of a non-profit organization; Soichiro Koriyama, 32, a freelance photographer; and Noriaki Imai, 18, a freelance writer — face scrutiny and confront a deep and abiding shame now that they have returned home.  

Mr. Onishi’s cultural analysis is that these hostages, in flouting the Japanese government’s travel advisory to steer clear of Iraq, defied “what people call here ‘okami,’ or, literally, ‘what is higher.’” In Mr. Onishi’s analysis, these civilians “acted selfishly.” Mr. Onishi accurately captures the frustrated indignation of a certain segment of the Japanese population and quotes Yuriko Koike, the environment minister, who lambasted the hostages for being “reckless.”

Mr. Onishi’s analysis is certainly cogent, but he fails to mention the phenomenon of “meiwaku,” a Japanese term loosely translated as “nuisance.” Not only was the hostages’ belligerent — if well-intentioned and generous — defiance of the Japanese travel advisory condemned by the government and some citizens, but there is also a strong horror in Japan of creating a nuisance of oneself, and this is precisely what these hostages can be seen to have done. At a time when a large number of Japanese are appalled by the nation’s remilitarization and its deployment of troops to what is very arguably a war zone — something that is still prohibited by the Japanese constitution — these citizens traveled to Iraq, had the great misfortune of being kidnapped, and subsequently whipped the nation into a state of worried frenzy. In the crudest terms, these well-intentioned citizens can be accused of creating a colossal and national nuisance.

“You got what you deserve!” and “You are Japan’s shame,” were among the comments that these hostages encountered when they returned home to Japan.  

Tabling the debate of whether the actions of these civilians were responsible, appropriate, or praiseworthy, the harsh condemnation and Japanese perspective on the incident should at least give Mr. Powell pause before he launches into official pronouncements of delighted praise. Mr. Powell and members of the coalition should certainly offer their support to these hostages for the horror they have had to endure. However, given that these hostages have claimed they have had to battle greater stress upon their return to Japan than they faced as hostages in Iraq, threatened with knives and the prospect of being burned alive, Mr. Powell must — particularly at such a politically, socially, and emotionally charged moment in Japan — be sensitive to the cultural and social perspectives that he happily and arrogantly tramples upon.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Is it better to burn out or to fade away? So the question goes. Is there another choice?

I recently attended a reading celebrating the life of Michael Kelly, the award-winning reporter, war correspondent, columnist, and editor killed in Iraq last spring. Kelly’s colleagues and friends — William Langewiesche, Samantha Power, P.J. O’Rourke, Tom Ashbrook, and Mark Bowden — came together in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to commemorate his life and a new compilation of his writings, Things Worth Fighting For.  

The Michael Kelly described by the readers jumped to life in the imagination: dedicated reporter motivated by boundless curiosity; sidesplitting raconteur; devoted husband, father, and friend; a man who appeared, miraculously, to share everyone’s interests. The readers, momentarily lost in the memories they related, seemed bemused by Kelly’s death, by the death of anyone so full of life and liveliness, a flame whose after-image quivers on the inside of one’s eyelids long after it has been reduced to smoke. Even I, who knew of him but never met him, half expected the wide white doors of the church to swing open and an enhaloed figure to stride up to the podium and deliver one last war story.

They believed that he had died, of course, these diverse men and woman, they accepted it — Kelly would become no Elvis to be glimpsed in the flesh, sliding through parted glass doors, only to dissolve into sunlight. But true reporters’ faith in the power of the written word can be eclipsed only by their need to witness, to see the scene played out before their own eyes. And death, for the reporter, is the ultimate velvet rope beyond which they cannot pass, at least not to return with the scoop.

Kelly’s death, like that of so many others who meet at the crossroads of war, was indiscriminate, even more so because he came to report and not to fight. The distinction, however, between soldier and journalist must have dimmed over time — if it were ever universally acknowledged in the first place. Even the title of Kelly’s book, Things Worth Fighting For, casts into shadow the once illuminated figure of the journalist: citizens of the world empowered by their profession to step outside the borders of their own identities, pushing through the curtains of nationality, class, and gender to hear and tell the stories of all whom they encountered, to look at the world through God’s eyes.  

But this dream did not need Michael Kelly’s death to awaken. This dream had lain awake sleepless ever since the Pakistani police confirmed the murder and dismemberment of The Wall Street Journal correspondent Danny Pearl on February 21, 2002. Struggling to uncover the story behind “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and the network of militant extremists out of which he emerged, Pearl caught the attention of Omar Saeed Sheik, a terrorist with a predilection for abductions. His killers would later claim that they believed Pearl to have been a spy for the CIA or Indian intelligence. Sheik and his helpers stalked Pearl, lured him, trapped him, then beheaded him on-camera — a journalist, or anyone, who seeks to “witness” Pearl’s death need only turn to Google to see his filmed execution.

The tragedy of Pearl’s death needs little explanation. When he died, he was only 38 years old and his first child had not yet been born. His one opportunity to say good-bye to his wife, family, and friends came on a home video that no mother would ever want to watch. But the meaning of Pearl’s death reaches beyond the suffering of those who knew and loved him to the reporters who walk in his footsteps and the readers who depend on them to seek out and bring back stories from the other side — everyone, in other words.

But what if there is no other side? Or what if it is unreachable, unrecordable, unimaginable? Coverage of ongoing fighting in Afghanistan has slid from the front page to the back, if it appears at all, and coverage of the Iraqi war too often resembles a skewed picture snapped by a reporter peering over the shoulder of a Marine. It seems unnecessary to even mention those events that receive little or no coverage in American media or whose coverage fails to illuminate the event in a way that can be grasped, in context, by readers — genocide in Sudan, civil war in Algeria, unrest in Haiti.

The title of Michael Kelly’s first book may be even more telling than that of the second: Martyr’s Day. Is that what journalists will have to be willing to become? Christ figures who, in order to bear witness to the sufferers, must join their ranks? Pedestrians run over at tricky intersections, their legacy a long-requested stop sign or traffic light? I can see it now, The Martyr’s Handbook: “Carry a tape recorder with you wherever you go. You never know when you’ll have a chance to record those last words and even a car crash may provide some usable ambient sound for radio.” But no. Kelly’s and Pearl’s true legacies leave little room for cynicism. The ominous implications of their deaths have not extinguished the enduring force of their lives. They will neither burn out nor fade away. We need them too much.

Sierra Prasada Millman

By now you know that Bob Dylan, the original voice of the counterculture, is appearing in Victoria’s Secret TV ads. And by now you’re probably over it — if you even cared in the first place. There’s been a lot of reaction to Dylan’s latest career move, ranging from dismay to bewilderment to denial. But at the bottom of most of the public reaction is resignation to the idea that hawking unmentionables is part of celebrity.

Isn’t it absurd, even, to think that a pop star wouldn’t appear in commercials?

Deflated fans should “lighten up,” The Boston Globe suggested in an editorial last Wednesday, April 14. “It’s only underwear.”  

Acoustic troubadour, amplified rocker, countercultural icon, born-again Christian, Old Testament prophet, wizened folk archivist — Dylan’s career has been the essence of versatility …

A ladies’ underwear ad cannot possibly define this cultural chameleon. And if one looks closely at the well-lined face staring into the camera, there seems to be just the hint of a smirk at the whole silly sell. Dylan’s public should share the laugh, and the music, with a satisfied mind.

For troubled fans trying to reconcile their idea of Dylan with the dirty old man they saw cavorting with model Adriana Lima (the commercial premiered earlier this month during American Idol), it’s comforting to think that Bobby might just be joking. As a couple of recent articles point out, when Dylan was asked in 1965 what he’d consider selling out for, he responded, “ladies undergarments.” But considering that he licensed “The Times They are a-Changing” to the Bank of Montreal in 1996 and played a gig for Applied Materials (“the world’s largest supplier of products and services to the global semiconductor industry”), it seems unlikely that he’s just goofin’ around.

(Of course, the best explanation is that it’s springtime and Dylan wanted to hang out with beautiful women in Vienna (where the commercial was shot). Let’s be honest — it would be a tough invitation to turn down. For a chicken-legged 62-year-old with creepy facial hair, even more so).

We’ll never know what he was thinking when he accepted that invitation, but it doesn’t really matter. Whether he did it for money or as a joke, for Dylan fans, this latest transgression isn’t funny, it’s sad.

If there was any doubt that he’d abandoned whatever he was trying to do in the 60s and 70s, that things had changed, his 2000 single, Things Have Changed, should have been a hint:

This place ain’t doing me any good
I’m in the wrong town, I should be in Hollywood
***
Only a fool in here would think he’s got anything to prove.
Lot of water under the bridge, lot of other stuff too
***
People are crazy, times are strange
***
I used to care, but things have changed

It’s too bad, but you can’t really blame Dylan for not wanting to be the voice of the counterculture anymore. If selling underwear is where he’s at right now, what can you do?

What’s distressing is that there’s no one to replace him. Selling out has become something to be pursued, rather than something to be avoided at the cost of one’s soul. Now that we’ve lost Dylan, who’s gonna stick it to the man? Worse, is there still such a thing as the counterculture?

henrypb

I first came across Chris Offutt’s work when I was deciding whether to follow my lover Melissa to Lexington, Kentucky in the summer of 2001 (I moved there the following summer). As a Californian unfamiliar with the area, I wanted to read a Kentucky author. Browsing through Joseph Beth’s bookstore, I came across The Good Brother. The book caught my attention because I was planning a course on “gender and terror” at Illinois State University.  

I later included the novel in my course for the spring of 2002. The class, Interdisciplinary 128: Gender and Terror in Contemporary American Culture, had taken on an increased relevance because of the 9/11 attacks. My classroom was full and the students were eager to learn about terror. Offutt’s novel became the centerpiece of a unit (including Joseph Rodriguez’s photo-documentary East Side Stories, the film American History X, the Media Education Foundation’s documentary film Tough Guise, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and the contradictory narratives of the fictional Boys Don’t Cry and the documentary The Brandon Teena Story) that explored the terror resulting from the construction of a masculinity centered around violence as a solution to problems.

“The Good Brother” brought into play so many different contexts for understanding this problem. Through discussions of the novel, we brought up issues of gender, class, regional identity, militia politics, and societal pressures. What kept my Illinois students fascinated the most though was Virgil Caudill’s love of his Kentucky environment and his magical descriptions of his homeplace. The students developed a keen awareness of how fitting into a place and feeling comfortable in an environment (at many levels) was a key to human satisfaction.  

This insight also helped us to understand the later texts in this section: to confront the violence of gang members in “East Side Stories” and “American History X” without dismissing the experiences that led to their actions, to explore the alienation of Jack Gladney from his environment in “White Noise,” and to attempt to address the narrative differences of the two film versions of Brandon Teena’s murder. The issues of place, the problems of community, and the human desire to belong, once raised by Offutt, took on an extreme importance in the course and would not be denied. It still affects me in my teaching and research.

Now I’m at the University of Kentucky, where I’m teaching writing-courses centered around the concepts of Place, Identity, and Community. We have developed this new program as an attempt to bridge students’ everyday experiences and academic knowledge. We hope that through discussion and writing about our sense of self, place, and community, we can develop a new awareness of the possibilities of writing/thinking as a form of civic engagement and hopefully, in the process, provide a helping hand to at-risk students. Naive, perhaps, idealistic, definitely — but what else can I do — this is what matters to me!  

Offutt’s writing powerfully speaks to the experience of inhabiting a place, but even more importantly, what it means to lose or leave a beloved place. As a nomadic academic, I ache for the home I left and, perhaps, am fearful of possibly losing the connections to that community. At the same time, there is a feeling of guilt for leaving and a sense of loss for the place that I can never again experience (even when I return, because it is a fantasy of a nostalgic memory). Offutt’s experiences and writings speak to this reality, his words resonate with a more personal terror, the loss of “place.”

thivai

It’s no secret that Jews and Arabs in Israel — indeed throughout the world — struggle to live side-by-side peacefully. Part of the problem may stem from each community’s failure to understand the other. Diplomats have been trying to offer up solutions for decades, and only time — a significant amount of it — will tell whether they succeed or merely fuel the flames further.

In the meantime, Israeli jouralists have come up with their own solution to bridge the gap between Jews and Arabs: Start a magazine that corrects each community’s stereotypes of the other by featuring writers of both Arab and Jewish backgrounds. Launched last spring, Duet has a circulation of 170,000 in a country with a population of 6.1 million people. Not bad for a fledgling magazine. But then again, one has to wonder who those 170,000 readers are. I suspect that most of them are individuals who weren’t resolved in their hatred of the opposing community when they first picked up a copy of Duet. But what about those Israelis — particularly influential politicians and leaders — who perhaps need to read the magazine most and yet potentially lack the open-mindednesshave necessary to do so? How will Duet’s publishers ensure that the magazine makes it into the hands that wield the most influence (and who perhaps need to embrace equality and tolerance the most)?

Perhaps the magazine’s best marketing strategy comes from its pool of writers. Given that Duet relies on volunteer journalists from across the country — instead of a staff of writers — maybe some magic can be worked. As those journalists return to work at their respective media outlets after writing for Duet, perhaps they’ll slowly influence the ways in which the Jews and Arabs are represented in the mainstream media and, in turn, alter the way that the public at-large — even politicians — understands the other community. Smart. Very smart.

Laura Nathan-Garner

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Many historians have alleged that Adolf Hitler had a Jewish grandparent. His self-hatred toward that aspect of identity might begin to explain why he masterminded the deaths of six million Jews. But what about the other six million people that died in Nazi Germany?

Tonight, Cinemax is airing The Hidden Fuhrer: Debating the Enigma of Hitler’s Sexuality, which suggests that Hitler was a closet queer and that he put sexual “misfits” to death as a response to his self-loathing homophobia.

The facts, however, seem to be sketchy at best. Whether Hitler was actually a closet queer is something we’ll probably never know. This, however, begs the question of why this documentary is being aired. Is it to raise questions and encourage people to question why Hitler masterminded the Holocaust? To figure out what drives tyrants to prevent these types of scenarios from happening again? Or so that historians have something to study and debate about?

What should we take from this? There are those who keep telling us to remember to never forget and to never forget to remember the Holocaust. Is this just another means of doing so? Perhaps. There is, after all, a tendency to privilege discussion of the Holocaust over discussions of other genocides. Some even go so far as to say that referring to mass killings such as those that befell Native Americans or Rwandans as “genocide” trivializes the Holocaust. But most of the people who say that are referring to the six million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust — not the other six million people.

But there is something unique about The Hidden Fuhrer. It begins to try to explain those other six million deaths. The suggestion that Hitler was a closet queer may not have the facts to back it up, but it raises questions about the persecution of other groups, which Holocaust studies and museums given little attention to.

Laura Nathan-Garner

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:

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