See How We Are

SEE HOW WE ARE

A Sermon Delivered to Pathways Unitarian 

Universalist Church in Hurst, TX, June 4, 2023

Some of you can do this and some of you will have to imagine it, but I want to take you back a moment to 1987, when the band X released its penultimate album See How We Are. We’re in the final dying throes of what Mark Green would call Ronald Reagan’s Reign of Error, whose cultivated meanness of spirit and deeds we thought we’d never experience again.

          Into this miasma waded songwriters John Doe and ex-wife Exene Cervenka, whose punk group X had achieved some success with their 83 release, Los Angeles, eventually one of Rolling Stones’ Top 100 albums, The title song swiftly became an anthem for the disaffected punk of the times. What was punk? If you watched American TV at that time, programs like Phil Donahue and Quincy and even CPO Sharkey convinced you punk music was music about nihilism and what you hate. On CHiPs its lead punk was portrayed by Donny Most, an actor better known for Ralph Malph on Happy Days. It may have been an accurate portrayal of Donny Most but not of punk.

Punk, rather than being rooted in hate, is rooted in love. You don’t bother singing about what you don’t like. Just for fun I typed “punk rock wedding songs” and received at least one list with nearly 100 options. Admittedly, many of them were about wedding-type love rather than agape. But while Chuck D famously called hip hop and rap “the CNN of the ghetto” and rock historian Greil Marcus wrote “the goal of every rock n roll band is to make everyone listen;” I would argue the goal of every punk song is to make everyone aware what needs to change. Natalie, a young woman in Manchester, England, has said, “’punk’ isn’t just a mohawk and leather jacket, it's about being true to yourself and not being afraid of who you are, being brave and bold and strong.” You can’t change what you don’t love.

        *I cut this section in the sermon for time but it does explain why I call this what I do.  [By the way, what I’ve identified as Punk Spirituality I’ve named that because when I was beginning to articulate my beliefs I was listening to a lot of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, numbered by Marcus among the “cult prophets” of the late 60s and early 70s like Captain Beefheart, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, and the New York Dolls and made up early punk playlists. At a different time and in a different mind I would identify my spirituality, as Donald Miller does, with jazz, or like Moya Harris with the hip hop of Lauryn Hill. And while both of them root their revelations in Christianity, my life has had greater spiritual experiences with non-Christians, so my spirirtuality is, I think, faster and noisier.] 

What needed to change in 1987? According to John Doe and Exene Cervenka, crowded jails, women “knowing their place”, dividing ourselves physically and emotionally, the capitalist emphasis on commodification of wants while ignoring kids going without basic needs. An emphasis too on “what can I get out of you, what can you do for me while I give nothing in return?” What little you have is what someone else wants so we’ll push you another rung down, addict you, poison you, literally displace you if necessary to take it. In the ensuing 35 years, how much has changed? A major element of punk is Do-it-yourself, exemplified by the probably apocryphal comment by Brian Eno that the Velvet Underground didn’t sell many records but everyone who bought one started their own band. You’re responsible to change what you don’t like, even in music. To paraphrase Toni Morrison, If you can’t find the life you want to live, make it yourself.

There is something in us that wants to be better than we were. A part of our makeup that tries to improve, even if briefly, that gets us up in the morning and puts us to sleep at night. Leaving us unfulfilled if, throughout the day, we haven’t moved otherwise. I’m not talking about ambition. I mean an urge to do, even if it’s “just” thinking or eating, so that we ruminate, if nothing else.

Maybe that’s what theists mean when they say we’re made in the image of God. Taking them at their word, God made everything in God’s image. It might be for this reason they also say, and I agree, that you can’t meet anyone or anything God doesn’t love. Yes, even mosquitoes. Yes, even Donald Trump.

We laugh but let me give you a literary example. Unitarian Universalist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, in his play Happy Birthday, Wanda June, includes a character who was a Nazi in life. He describes heaven to us. No one in heaven is singled out for punishment or exhortation. Everyone, even Jesus, even Hitler, spends eternity basking in the sun. Hitler, he tells us, is just another guy playing shuffleboard.

I’m going to leave you with another video. I’m not going to read the lyrics to you, because the lyrics, by Iggy Pop and David Bowie, won’t make much sense to you unless you’re familiar with William Burroughs’ novel The Ticket that Exploded. The song, “Lust for Life”, was released in 1979, somewhat at the height of US punk music but this video is from a concert this past April. Despite its esoteric lyrics, the song quickly became an anthem of punk for its energy. “Got a lust for life”. To add a little extra oomph, the guitarist and percussionist on his recording, who later went on with David Bowie and Reeves Gabrels to form the group Tin Machine, were Hunt and Tony Sales, sons of Soupy Sales. Iggy has famously performed shirtless since at least 1980. You might be familiar with the song if you saw the movie Trainspotting, based on the Irvine Welsch novel about Glasgow heroin addicts. If you saw the trailer for that film you’d have seen a couple dozen men and boys “dressed” like Iggy, all of them flaunting their huge bellies or their chicken wings or their sunken chests. 

In the absence of the lyrics what do I want you to notice? This is a cut-down version of an 8 minute video [the video played during service was necessarily short] and what I want you to pay attention to at first is Iggy. Notice that he’s limping and not trying to hide that he’s tired. The man is 74 years old. His belly is sagging, he’s developing moobs, and his scraggly beard is gray. He rests against a stool before he starts singing. But he has no trouble demanding of his audience that they come up there and dance with him. And they do.

And look at those kids! Fewer than a third of the people who jump up there with him were even alive when the song was released, and certainly not the age to have attended one of his shows. The vast majority of his companion dancers are celebrating and singing along to music released 45 years ago. At best, it’s their parents or their grandparent’s music.

This is what it means to be at one with God or the universe or reality. To  see ourselves as we really are, warts, moobs, and all, the way the universe or God sees us and nonetheless to celebrate our own and God’s lust for life. You’ve heard the phrase “dance like nobody can see you”. My friend’s daughter improved on it: “Dance like everyone wants to see you dance.”

Free at Last!

FREE AT LAST! 
A Sermon Delivered to the
Dakota Unitarian Universalist Church
January 20, 2013

Events have occurred since I announced the title of this sermon that make me wonder if I should have used a question mark instead of an exclamation point. The title itself, of course, is a direct quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous 1963 March on Washington Speech also known as the “I Have a Dream” speech. And tomorrow many of us have the day off in celebration of King’s birth. It will be a perfect day for watching the televised second inauguration of President Barack Obama who will take his second oath of office on Bibles previously owned by Abraham Lincoln and Dr. King.

What makes me wonder if, indeed, there’s a reason to ask if freedom is questionable is that yesterday was a different celebration. You may not have heard about this one or you may have heard about it but paid little attention to it. It was Gun Appreciation Day, the first nationally set-aside day to “rally support against anti-gun legislation and to show America that gun owners aren't 'radical crazies.'”

I know a lot of gun owners—my wife’s entire family is composed of hunters and she has explained to me that when her dad dies she will inherit the rifle he taught her to shoot with which she wants to display, which will be the first time I’ll have ever had a gun in my home—and many of us, if we don’t hunt ourselves, rely on family or friends who do to provide us with meat. Some of us served in the military where we learned to handle a weapon and use it in the way it’s meant to be, as a killing device, and took away from our service an appreciation for the power and use of guns. There are many former and current military members of my extended family and I have a friend who’s a gun rights advocate with whom I argue often about gun control, but who I also love and respect. I don’t think of any of them as either radical or crazy.

But the designers of this new-fashioned Gun Appreciation Day—or GAD as it’s called on friendly websites (and it may not be entirely coincidental how easy it is to slip from “GAD” to “God”)—while they may not be radical crazies, are at least tone deaf to the mood of most of the country, including the mood of many gun owners.

Gun Appreciation Day is the brainchild of Larry Ward, president of Political Media, Inc., a D.C. PR firm. In his announcement, Ward solemnly warns, “If the American people don't fight back now, Obama will do to the Second Amendment what he has already done to the First with Obamacare; gut it without a moment's thought to our basic constitutional rights.” How exactly a Gun Appreciation Day will accomplish that is no more explained than how the President, and the Congress and Senate and Supreme Court, all of which either voted in favor of or endorsed the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, did anything to, let alone gut, the First Amendment, but we’ll let that slide for now. The tone deafness comes from the choice of January 19th for this day, two days before both the President’s second inauguration—this president who has been the target of more death threats and animosity than any other in more than a century—and our celebration of Dr. King’s birthday—this man who was cut down by an assassin’s bullet—and a month and five days after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

I don’t think I need to remind you of what happened that day or of what you felt. But I may need to remind you of how the rest of the country felt. Most of us were decimated. That a young man could get hold of a semi-automatic gun and use it to kill, in seconds, dozens of children and adults was the stuff of nightmare. For many of us, it was the culmination of the fear we had always had.

I say “for many” and not “for all” because for some people, the idea was too fantastic, too outside how they see reality, to have happened so easily, and so has been ripe for conspiracy theories ranging from suspicions the massacre was carried out, not by Adam Lanza alone, but with help from professional snipers or Israeli commandoes in order to hasten the Obama administration’s invoking the massacre to confiscate all weapons, to the conviction that no one actually died at the scene but that it was all staged by actors who got up and walked away, and in one case supposedly even sat on the President’s lap during his appearance consoling many of the victim’s families, again with the intent of providing an excuse for confiscating guns. Is it naïve of me to point out that, if confiscation were the rationale, it would have happened by now? One similarity all these events—the Sandy Hook shooting, the shooting of Dr. King, and the President’s inauguration—have is that each has been the subject of multiple conspiracies. Perhaps then it should not be a surprise that Ward feels more comfortable suggesting the President is fomenting a clandestine shredding of the Second Amendment and not, say, recognizing his own efforts to exacerbate a poor decision about timing into a tragically demented one.

Yesterday’s Gun Appreciation Day included at least three separate incidents of what are called negligent discharge—what the rest of us would call accidental shootings—in three states. Fortunately, no one was killed. (This is, of course, not including others who were victims of gun violence.) Unfortunately, the last time I spoke here for MLK Day, two years ago, I was also talking about another recent shooting, this one Jared Laughner’s assault on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords that resulted in six deaths, among them 9 year old Christina Taylor-Green. La plus ca change…

Unlike Gun Appreciation Day the celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday has a long history. I remember the battles that were played out over the choice to give MLK a holiday that involved giving working people another day off. It’s always been interesting to me that it was Ronald Reagan, a president I would never associate with progressive causes, who signed the bill into law making the third Monday of each January the day we pay honor to Dr. King. King’s actual birthday, you may know, is the 15th. But by 1983, the year Reagan signed the bill, the push to honor Dr. King, which had been building since his assassination in 1968, had reached a crescendo that simply was impossible to ignore.

Perhaps it’s a function of the “only Nixon could go to China” concept, that Reagan, a stalwart conservative Republican, would sign a bill honoring Martin Luther King. Reagan would reference that commitment to and success preaching nonviolence when he said, “Abraham Lincoln freed the black man. In many ways, Dr. King freed the white man…Where others - white and black - preached hatred, he taught the principles of love…”—and we could make a point here that, with so much involving Republicans even when they get the idea right, the focus was not on King’s accomplishments for black people but what he did for white people; but let’s let that lie—but as Lou Cannon in his magisterial President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime writes:

[Reagan] spoke movingly about King’s contributions at an observance of his birthday on January 15, 1987, urging American youth “to accept nothing less than making yours a generation free of bigotry, intolerance and discrimination.” And he took other symbolic steps…When the Washington Post reported that a suburban black family had been harassed, Reagan visited the family. He twice visited a black high school in Chicago and paid tribute to black scientists, businessmen and military heroes in a commencement address at Tuskegee University in 1987. But blacks, the most conspicuous dissenters in the “Morning Again” landslide of 1984, never gave Reagan high marks. And the skepticism about Reagan’s commitment to civil rights was not limited to blacks alone. Reagan was simply reluctant to use federal authority in the cause of punishing discrimination of any sort.

This is neither to condemn blacks as being ungrateful for his signing of the MLK bill or any of his other symbolic gestures, nor to condemn Reagan for relying simply on those symbolic gestures. When you think about it, symbolism is often a president’s only effective tool. What he focuses his attention and energies on becomes important, not only politically but culturally. For a negative version also involving Reagan, consider his response or lack of response to AIDS.

Be that as it may, the bill, which had first been introduced by Democratic congressman John Conyers and Republican senator Edward Brooke in 1968, brought to the floor of the House of Representatives in 1979, and finally passed both houses in 1983, was signed by Reagan. But that was not the end of the struggle. From the outset, there was tremendous blowback against the new holiday, primarily from Republicans (ironic, in hindsight, given the attempts by the Republican Party in the last two elections to reclaim King as one of their own).

Reluctance was spearheaded by Jesse Helms of North Carolina who insisted, based on privately obtained FBI documents, that King had been a Communist. Reagan himself, citing costs, had rejected the bill for most of his term, until it won a veto-proof majority. Most famously, Arizona’s governor, Evan Meacham, and later a 76% majority of state voters, refused to honor Dr. King but recanted after losing its place as the 1993 home to the Super Bowl. Interestingly, it wasn’t Arizona that was the last state to recognize MLK Day but New Hampshire, which had ignored the holiday throughout the 80s and created a Civil Rights Day in 1991 that it reconfigured as MLK Day in 1999. Perhaps fittingly, it wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that all fifty states celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. 2000 was also the first year all fifty states recognized it as a paid holiday for all state workers.

What do we celebrate when we celebrate a holiday? We recently celebrated New Year’s Eve, a time when the clocks and the calendars take on an added importance because we have made another complete circuit around the sun. We’ll soon celebrate Presidents’ Day which is the combined honoring of two important American leaders, Washington and Lincoln, for what they accomplished—in the first case by leading the country in a war for independence and in the second for leading a war for reunion. Then we’ll start celebrating a while slew of secular holidays honoring the Irish (St. Patrick’s Day), Mexicans (Cinco de Mayo), Italians (Columbus Day), and veterans (Memorial Day). There are also what we might call holidays of the state like the Fourth of July and Flag Day and Labor Day and Thanksgiving. There are holidays devoted to the seasons like the vernal and autumnal equinoxes and winter and summer solstices and to a lesser extent Halloween, Arbor Day and Earth Day. Then there are multiple religious holidays ranging from Eid al Fitr to Yom Kippur to Diwali to Samhain to Easter and Christmas.

There are as well many days given over to celebrating specific individuals, days devoted to remembering Rosa Parks and Malcolm X and Susan B. Anthony and Father Damien. But Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is different. It is a day when we are given national time off to celebrate—what, exactly? Well, MLK’s birthday of course and the things he stood for. But what exactly is that? What are we celebrating when we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day?

One of the protestations against honoring Dr. King’s birth as a national holiday is that he was a private citizen. He never held office. He did not make legislation. His birth was unremarkable and while his death was a tragedy neither is the basis for a religion or a national day of mourning. He was by all accounts a great man but he was also by many accounts a troubled man. He was instrumental in helping society see certain other people in a new and better way but he didn’t do that by anything other than the force of his speaking voice and his writing and his personality. And he didn’t do it alone. He’s a minister but he isn’t a religious figure. While he was a force for change he didn’t bring change about by himself or even introduce method for making change. He didn’t even have the standing to have brought civil rights legislation to a state government. As a citizen, he could suggest changes he thought the United States needed, but only on the local level. At most, he should have been a person who made an impassioned speech at a city ordinance meeting, perhaps that black city workers should have been paid on par with white city workers.

But he did something, something ineffable, something more than that. He led a movement—and by led I don’t mean to suggest he created the movement or gathered its people together—but he led a movement that made a major change in the ways Americans treat one another and love one another. The difference between a Gun Appreciation Day and MLK Day is that the former is a day intended to react against misplaced fears and concerns—that individual’s guns will be confiscated, that access to guns will be made more difficult—while the latter is a true appreciation to the influence an individual can have. His influence was not in having legislated treating one another well but helping us to recognize when we fail to.

god is nancy lanza

this is a short essay that appeared a few days ago on one of the websites I visit daily--in fact, since I've started cutting much of the stress out of my life, the only political website I visit daily--and I thought it was very good.  What fascinated me, however, is the number of vicious comments posted responding to it.

I suppose I'm wrong in conceiving that, whatever guilt might ultimately be hers, we could join together in wishing Nancy Lanza a peaceful afterlife (whatever that might be), but the comments suggest I am not only wrong about that assumption, but I damn the children and adults killed by wishing it.  Maybe it's only religious people--and by that I mean people who study religion and not people who call themselves religious, although the 2 groups are often joined--who can conceive of people who do evil things but are nonetheless forgiveable, especially on their deaths.  I don't want to seem glib about that; I am myself unforgiving toward Ronald Reagan for the evil he perpetrated while president, so I'm not making myself a whitehat in this situation. 

But as I said a week ago, God is Adam Lanza.  God is also his mother Nancy.  We still know painfully little about why Lanza committed the act he did and we haven't any further clue why his first victim was his mother.  Equally, we don't know what she hoped to accomplish by teaching him how to fire automatic weapons or how avidly she followed the "prepper" subculture she joined.  All we have are fantasies of her involvement and her guilt and those can't be substituted for unknowns.  We do not only Lanza's victims, but Adam and Nancy Lanza themselves, and ultimately God and reality itself, a disservice by parceling out blame like porridge.  All we know is that Adam Lanza killed his mother with her own guns and then killed other people and children and finally himself.  We may never know anything more than that and to speculate about his mother's invovlement in his act is wrong.  It's to try to tie a vivesected animal back together with a pretty bow and so pretend this is how the original product looked.

teach naked

I haven't done this before but this blog entry from mock, paper, scissors is worth posting a link to. it's a pretty accurate and unsentimental reflection of what a lot of us who have been turned out by states where anti-government starve-the-beast policies have gained sway are experiencing. similarly, I'm also feeling the loneliness of the 1st day of school with nowhere to go...

is anyone to blame?

because I have failed to see these quotes from the actual s&p report in most news media--with the exception of thom hartmann, rachel maddow, and susie madrak at crooks & liars--I think it's important to keep a record of them. the report lays out, quite explicitly, why s&p downgraded the nation's credit rating and the parties it feels are responsible. the emphases are mine. the full report is here.

"We lowered our long-term rating on the U.S. because we believe that the prolonged controversy over raising the statutory debt ceiling and the related fiscal policy debate indicate that further near-term progress containing the growth in public spending, especially on entitlements, or on reaching an agreement on raising revenues is less likely than we previously assumed and will remain a contentious and fitful process...

"Our lowering of the rating was prompted by our view on the rising public
debt burden and our perception of greater policymaking uncertainty, consistent
with our criteria...Nevertheless, we view the U.S. federal government's other economic, external, and monetary credit attributes, which form the basis for the sovereign rating, as broadly unchanged...

"The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America's governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy. Despite this year's wide-ranging debate, in our view, the differences between political parties have proven to be extraordinarily difficult to bridge, and, as we see it, the resulting agreement fell well short of the comprehensive fiscal consolidation program that some proponents had envisaged until quite recently...

"Our opinion is that elected officials remain wary of tackling the structural issues required to effectively address the rising U.S. public debt burden in a manner consistent with a 'AAA' rating and with 'AAA' rated sovereign peers...In our view, the difficulty in framing a consensus on fiscal policy weakens the government's ability to manage public finances and diverts attention from the debate over how to achieve more balanced and dynamic economic growth in an era of fiscal stringency and private-sector deleveraging...A new political consensus might (or might not) emerge after the 2012 elections, but we believe that by then, the government debt burden will likely be higher, the needed medium-term fiscal adjustment potentially greater, and the inflection point on the U.S. population's demographics and other age-related spending drivers closer at hand...

"The [2011 budget control] act [amendment] calls for as much as $2.4 trillion of reductions in expenditure growth over the 10 years through 2021. These cuts will be implemented in two steps: the $917 billion agreed to initially, followed by an additional $1.5 trillion that the newly formed Congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction is supposed to recommend by November 2011. The act contains no measures to raise taxes or otherwise enhance revenues, though the committee could recommend them...

"We view the act's measures as a step toward fiscal consolidation. However, ...[even]
assuming that at least $2.1 trillion of the spending reductions the act envisages are implemented, we maintain our view that the U.S. net general government debt burden (all levels of government combined, excluding liquid financial assets) will likely continue to grow. Under our revised base case fiscal scenario--which we consider to be consistent with a 'AA+' long-term rating and a negative outlook--we now project that net general government debt would rise from an estimated 74% of GDP by the end of 2011 to 79% in 2015 and 85% by 2021. Even the projected 2015 ratio of sovereign indebtedness is high in relation to those of peer credits and, as noted, would continue to rise under the act's revised policy settings...

"Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now
assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012,
remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority
of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise
revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act..."

also, as a notatall academic exercise, compare this map of nations which retain s&p's aaa+ rating with this map of nations with universal healthcare.

unions make us strong

"Workers can't pay rent, pay the mortgage, get a credit card, find a job, buy clothes or schoolbooks for their kids or retire. They face increased divorce rates as family tensions rise, and they have lost their sense of dignity. They don't care about labor law reform, and they don't care about unions (at least in their current form). They are in despair, and unanswered despair quickly becomes either fertilizer for the fearmongers or the reason to not bother showing up at the polls.,,

"Rather than posting links to the websites of housing groups, how about starting direct worker-to-worker conversations about occupying mortgage company headquarters across the country until the banks stop foreclosing on their members' homes? Rather than suddenly calling for members to picket banks or take seemingly random militant actions, how about sitting down with union members and talking about what actions everyone can take to force solutions to the housing crisis—solutions such as making banks revalue mortgages to the actual value of homes and creating lines of credit so workers can move to places where they might find a job?

"Unions need to start connecting with workers face-to-face through house parties and worksite and home visits to ask what's keeping them up at night. Then unions should plan direct actions with workers that respond to the issues facing them. How about taking over the offices of big credit-rating agencies and occupying them 24/7 by the thousands until they agree to erase all the bad credit heaped on anyone who has made a late mortgage payment because they lost their job or their hours were cut back? The housing crisis ties directly to the wage crisis, which ties directly to the jobs crisis. People in this country are screaming for a fight, but the only people offering one have been from the right wing. All these issues have been staring labor in the face for several years. Why hasn't any union turned the crisis facing workers into a crisis for capital and the political elite?"

--from "making unions matter again" by jane mcalevey in the december 20, 2010 issue of the nation

why not? excellent question and I think I have a part of the answer. I've asked students, who you would think would be most interested in making tomorrow better and making a revolution in the workplace that could do nothing but benefit them, variations on this question for years. and the answer has come back every time: things are too good. things at work might be bad, they may be making less money than their parents--indeed, they may be the 1st generation since wwii to do poorer than previous generations--but so long as their life outside work remains relatively attainable (television, games, alcohol, gas, entertainment) to the majority of them, they will do nothing to upset the applecart. in fact, many of them have an outright disdain of unions, especially government unions, for being able to wring concessions in the past that they themselves are unable to get. (as I explain to them, for not having joined a union; their response to that is usually that they don't want to pay dues or be beholden to some shop rep, thereby ensuring things will never improve at their worksite.) most haven't a clue about the employment laws already guarenteed them--10 minute breaks and separate lunch spaces and automatic overtime and not needing to find their own sickday replacements--and their employers certainly aren't about to make them aware of them.

johnny thunders died for your sins!

"there is, too, a connection between the era bret easton ellis attempts to satirize in [1991's american psycho], the greed-is-good '80s, and the time of [john] lennon's murder, one month after the election of ronald reagan, the man who would make that era possible. in lennon's rolling stone obituary, greil marcus was the first person to note that 'nothing like lennon's killing has happened before.' while marcus was careful to say that reagan's election did not inspire mark david chapman--any more than [j.d.] salinger did--he did note the confluence of chapman's actiions with the 'secret message' of reagan's election: 'some people belong in this country, and some people don't; that some people are worthy, and some are worthless; that certain opinions are sanctified, and some are evil.' he went on, 'such a message, which tells people they are innocent and others are to blame, can attach a private madness to its public justification.'

"in 1980 john lennon was far from the canonized figure he has become. the people who grew up with the beatles had not yet moved into controlling positions in the media. in his time cover story, jay cocks was talking about himself and his contemporaries when he wrote that some people 'wondered what all the fuss was about and could not quite understand why some of the junior staff at the office would suddenly break into tears in the middle of the day.' it's easy to dismiss cock's piece for its openness of feeling. for all the things that cocks had to do, and did exquisitely, in that piece--it was a news story, an obituary, a career restrospective--what still comes through strongest is shellshock, his disbelief that he is writing the story. which is why it was a risk, and essential, for him to insist that the shooting was an assassination. putting lennon's killing in the company of the killings that had preceded it in the previous decades is not, though, a contradiction of marcus's claim that this had never happened before. it had--but not to a popular artist. what both cocks and marcus understood was that lennon's murder was a symbolic murder of what he represented. chapman was disturbed by the denunciations that ended [lennon's song] 'god,' lennon's brutal elaboration of [bob] dylan's line 'don't follow leaders.' but the beatles, for all the adoration they inspired, stood for a vision in which people, as marcus wrote, did not lose their identity but found it.

"a vision that tells you it's possible to live a good life and to live it your own way holds out possibilities that other visions--reagan's or salinger's--deny. those visions judge who belongs and who doesn't, who shuns contact with the wrong kind of people, chooses to withdraw from or tries to control the world rather than embrace it."

--from "the ballad of john and j.d." by charles taylor in the february 14, 2011, issue of the nation

reading at the goat

my wife had a meeting with her denomination's discernment committee about her status as a student preacher this afternoon, and as I had nothing else going on, I went along for moral support. the meeting was further out on the rim in eau claire, and I asked her to drop me off in town so I could find a hangout while she was meetifying. I had a book with me and a checkcard and my comfy shoes.

I ended up at a place called the goat or variously the dancing goat, a coffee shop on water street. they were very nice to me there: when I asked ron the baristo (is that a male barista?) what I might like he suggested a big steaming cup of guatemalen freshbrew. he said they only offer it 2ce a week and this was one of the days. for a little less than $2 I got a heaping cup the size of some washbasins that I could fill again and a chocolate chip cookie and a cozy spot on a couch near the open window that looked out on people.

I'm kneedeep in alex cockburn's corruptions of empire again after spending much of the past couple weeks reading fiction and the coffee and couch were an inspired addition. there really isn't much to report about this experience; I had no epiphanies or incredible conversations with anyone or saw anything interesting or even came across a wonderful bit of writing. all it was was just a middleaged man sitting quietly for a couple hours on a comfy couch with a mug of beanbrew listening to other people's conversations and reading his book. I could live my life this way.

on reading lousy novels

on the advice of my chiropractor I've stopped reading while walking so I'm not reading as much as I used to. (like most people, I read with my head at an angle, which elongates my neck and puts extra pressure on my spine and the muscles under my scapula.) I'm pitifully behind in my new yorker, atlantic and harper's reading; but I decided yesterday to take a day for reading nothing but something junky, and I had just the thing.

the corpse in oozak's pond by charlotte macleod is not a bad novel but it is obviously quickly written and not edited much. it may have had a cursory revision after being accepted for publication as most words are spelled right. but I was around and reading mystery novels in 1987, the corpse's publication date, and don't remember anyone in my hearing using ejaculations like "gad!" or elisions like "m'well" or phrases like "how the flaming perdition do I know!"

there's not much point to complaining about it since it's a tea cozy and follows the dictates of the usual cozies: eccentric investigator--dr peter shandy here, veteran of other mysteries--eccentric suspects--the whole extended buggins clan whose pater familias founded the rural vermont agricultural college shandy teaches at--barely competent although sometimes surprising local police--ottermole who's often shandy's watson--and an eccentrically introduced murder victim which conveniently floats to the top of the swiftly thawing titular pond during the local version of groundhog's day. also, people often talk in expostion.

recently I had a diatribe against the tendency of campus novels to bear no relation to real student or faculty experiences and any hopes I may have had that an agricultural college might resemble a tech school were dashed by the following. you must keep in mind this description starts on page 104 of a 214 page novel and constitutes the only mention in the book of anyone actually being in a classroom:

"shandy had classes the next morning...he found his students restive, as students often were, but not usually in professor shandy's classes. while he endeavored to alert them to the secret, evil work of the nematode, they demanded to hear about the secret, evil work of the fiend who'd dumped a corpse into the midst of their groundhog days revels, and was it true the demised had been wearing balaclava buggins's sunday suit?

"professor shandy assured them that the sacred relic was safe in its glass case in the buggins room and that if they expected to pass his course, they'd better keep their minds on the nematode. thenceforth they tried, but it was uphill work for them--and for him...

"gripped by the sophoclean implications of swope's bronchitic epiphany, professor shandy was able to put such pathos into his delivery that he at last succeeded in capturing his students' full and undivided attention. sweeping them on from spider mites to cutworms, he soared to dramatic heights that had every student scribbling in his or her notebook with the concentrated zeal of a locust attacking a turnip green. they left his classroom shaken and trembling but uplifted and fired with a new dedication to the biological control of insect pests. shandy mopped his brow and asked himself, 'where do I go from here?'"

note also the tendency of books like this to have characters with cutesy names like "balaclava buggins"and his distant descendents marietta woozle and grace porble. is it any wonder we allowed ronald reagan to be reelected, AIDS to run rampent, iran-contra to be brought to our attention and then dropped like a hot potato, and responsibility for the exxon valdez spill to just ooze away when this was the type of thing we were reading and writing?

"dear rest-of-america..."

I'm a fan of the village voice from the early 70s when it cost 60c and that seemed pretty dear. I've got several books written about its history from both outsiders and insiders (the long-hoped for upclose history by norman mailer never appeared, and we have to be content with the interviews he gives in other books) and I'm especially fond of the political and arts coverage in the 80s, what alex cockburn and james ridgeway used to write about in the "annals of the age of reagan."

when I was living in new paltz in 86-7 I had a subscription--by then the cover price had gone to $1.50 but for subs it came out to a little less than a buck an issue--and it came every saturday in the mail (the week after the week it covered--it was the 80s, nothing was perfect). I'd settle in for the afternoon with a beer or 2, flipping through each huge 150+ page issue to get a feel for what was covered, and then parcel out my stories for the next week, reading every single page if not every word. the smell of stale ink and paper was intoxicating and tho I knew better I imagined the paper wafted to me from one of manhattan's still-operating manned kiosks after all the early editions had gone out, and I could smell the fingers of every person I imagined riffled its pages, bagel in 1 hand, greek-style coffee cup in the other. when I was sports editor of my college newspaper and called before one of the deans and asked "whereever did you get your ideas about how to cover sports?" I said, "the village voice."

the voice remains one of my daily reads now that it's nearly a daily with its blogs and immediate content. I especially love the "runnin' scared" daily blog (particularly roy edroso's "exploring the right wing blogosphere" appearing at midnight sunday and alan scherstuhl's "studies in crap" on thursday mornings) and I'm a supporter of the return of "press clips." there's a certain voice to the voice and that is nowhere more evident than in its coverage of the so-called "ground zero mosque" controversy. here, typos aside, is an excellent riposte to the creative fears of newt gingrich and pam geller and others. the final sentences--"Now: Fuck you. Fuck you and shut up, you assholes. Shut up and leave New York alone"--could be the coda to every story the voice has ever printed.

crazy in the thick

I'm on my way to see my sister and her family in monroe, new york, and to get there I've traveled about 150 miles through the thick before deciding that the scenery was simply not worth the sacrifice of driving 45 mph behind horse trailers. route 6 through the thick is full of ruined houses and barns, homes with doors that open onto the interstate, and grand, majestic buildings that probably once had panoramic sweeps of all the master owned but are now a mere driveway away from the abandoned trailer someone simply left by the side of the highway. it is full too of towns that appear suddenly in your windshield and hang for too long in your rear view mirror.

I've been thinking of things that have happened in and around austin since I arrived a week and a half ago that put the lie to everything one assumes--or at least that I do--about the dullness of a town in the thick. some local boy turned 21 and when the local bar refused to serve him, saying he was already too drunk, he drove down the street and backed his car into the town's cola machine, knocking it through one of the few unbroken plate glass windows of which austin could boast; this same boy led the local cop on a chase down multiple roads until he happened to misremember one was a dead-end, so if he was going he decided he was going big and switched back around to ram the cop head-on. apparently no one was injured. another boy, a 2-year, was air-lifted to the emergency rooms of one of the closer big cities, probably scranton, after being kicked in the head by a horse. my father says he remembers when such things didn't involve hospital visits. I came across a tabloid called the sovereign while in olean, an odd amalgamation of classic libertarian/right-wing paranoia and far-left resistence hackery that, for $4, promised to tell me what was Really Going On. I had more time than money so I sat in a comfy chair and read it cover to cover. there was not a single thing in there I hadn't read a hundred times and 20 years before only with the addition of "9/11" and "obama" where I remember "bilderberg" and "reagan." if I seem less than enthralled with the material, it was probably the comfortable chair that put me off. I might have appreciated it better if I'd been sitting in a straightback cane chair with my top collar button fastened. to get the full effect of how I'd put it if I could, as always, listen to james.

wake up, it's MLK day!

I remember waking up on that first day in 1986. the radio came on and it was tuned to WDST out of woodstock and eric ericson, the overnight dj who made everything right, was saying, "wake up, wake up, welcome to the first MLK day!" it was an astonishing thing in those days to have a day devoted to a secular saint who hadn't been a president. martin's life was as messy and controversial as anyone could wish, and it's a further testament to the messiness life is that the president who signed the law proclaiming the existence of an MLK day should be ronald reagan. I'm a sucker for this sort of day: 24 years on, I still watch the televised concerts and readings and the parades and programs. I never tire of "I have a dream," it still sends chills along my back. the man may have cheated on his wife, may have been a plagiarist, may have knocked down little kids and taken their candy, his voice and what he inspired are the legacies to which the rest of us can only aspire. am I a member of the cult of personality that's grown around martin? yes I am, and proudly so. he was a man like any other and overcame his own pettiness and became someone admirable. you have to believe in something or someone bigger than yourself or you go crazy.