What I'm Saying

What I'm saying isn't exactly news and to say it bluntly is no big deal: once you decide to live, you have to lose. But what if you could simply refuse by claiming that life itself isn't real? What I'm saying isn't exactly news---- the Buddhist think this world, hooked on adieus, is just red dust. If that's true, why feel that having to live you also have to lose? Well, because we're bodies, bodies whose mortal bruise is time's kiss and time's seal. What I'm saying isn't exactly news. The luckiest among us live in twos. Yet love has tied them to a burning wheel once they decide to live. They have to lose because time's only tempo is the blues. It's what we're born to, what our prayers conceal. What I'm saying isn't exactly news---- once you decide to live, you have to lose. - Gregory Orr, What I'm Saying

This is the water

I've been meaning to post a link to this every since throckmorton posted about it in the summer of 2007. This is a commence speech that David Foster Wallace gave in 2005.

I think about it a lot, but today, I'm thinking about this part:

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Common American Century

I've recently run across the name Henry Luce in two different books. In his introductory essay ("What, then, is the American?") to The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture, Christopher Bigsby** writes, "When...Henry Luce declared the reality of the American Century he was merely registering the logic that had placed power, and, it has to be said, responsibility in American hands; the Project for the New American Century, by contrast, was a conscious effort to ensure that Americans remained the dominant culture." Check out the Project for the New American Century's Statement of Principles.

In Susan Faludi's Stiffed, on the other hand, Faludi argues that Luce's labeling, more than being descriptive, was an effort to steer American culture (and masculinity) towards one ethos and away from another.

"Towards the end of the war, two visions of postwar America vied for attention on the national stage in a battle over the nation's future that has long since been forgotten. One contender was [Henry] Wallace's Common Man century; the other was Henry Luce's American Century...Luce, the founder and editor of Time and Life magazines, saw America as a masculine nation whose manifest destiny was to loom like a giant on the global stage. He proposed the average man acquire a grander sense of himself by association with a nation that would dominate the world through unapologetic force. If Wallace's manly ideal was about parental care and nurturance, Luce's was all about taking control---and, even more important, displaying it."

"Luce's 'cure'---'to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit'---would prove to be a postwar prescription for aggression."

Of Wallace's Common Man, Faludi write,

"Wallace imagined an army of ordinary workingmen who, if given a shot a decent educations, jobs, and housing, could be a force on 'the new frontier' for expanded production, well-being, and democracy not only in the nation but throughout the world...Wallace saw America as 'a boy of eighteen' who could no longer 'avoid becoming a man by wearing short pants' and who could mature into a 'grown-up United States' by stoically 'shouldering our responsibility,' by contributing to the needs of the world rather than simply aspiring to dominate it. America's mission, he said, only half jokingly, should be to ensure 'that everybody in the world has the privilege of drinking a quart of milk a day.' He was guided, as historian John Morton Blum has written, 'by his belief in the possibility of brotherhood and the inherent virtue of husbandmen.'"

Ultimately Stiffed is about how changes within larger structures in our country, namely, the government, corporations, and our economy, has affected American masculinity (ie, massive layoffs have done more damage to American masculinity than the feminist movement). Reading the introduction to Stiffed and in particular Faludi's discussion of Luce's and Wallace's competing views for America's future couched in the metaphor of the "ideal American man," I remembered Barrack Obama's Father's Day Speech this past summer. At the time, I remember some people felt that Obama was unfairly criticizing African American fathers, but reading it now, through the lens Faludi creates, I'm wondering if Obama's "ideal father" is really more of a Luce/Wallace metaphor.

Obama argues that the ideal father will pass on three qualities to his children: (1) the "ethic of excellence" ("achievement, self respect, and hard work"), (2) "the value of empathy" ("We need to show our kids that you’re not strong by putting other people down – you’re strong by lifting them up."), (3) "the spirit of hope" (the "spirit inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better is waiting for us if we’re willing to work for it and fight for it. If we are willing to believe.").



Obama makes an explicit connection between father's responsibility to their children and Washington's responsibility to parents. Obama says, "[I]t’s a responsibility that also extends to Washington. Because if fathers are doing their part; if they’re taking our responsibilities seriously to be there for their children, and set high expectations for them, and instill in them a sense of excellence and empathy, then our government should meet them halfway." He then goes on to list several examples of how Washington can help parents, including reforming child support laws, expanding pre- and postnatal care to pregnant women, protecting workers through protecting maternity and paternity leave.

I hear echos of the "Common Man." I wonder what an America of excellence, empathy, and hope would look like. I hope I get to see it.


(**Incidentally, just a few paragraphs earlier, Bigsby also mentions Rick Warren. "In 2002, 59 percent of Americans believed that the apocalyptic prophesies of the Book of Revelations would come true and 39 percent believed in the literal truth of the Bible. The end, it seemed, might be night, the moment when the chosen and the damned would be separated. Among the bestsellers of the new century were The Purpose Driven Lifestyle (total sales to date, 20 million), written by Rick Warren, head of one of America's five largest mega-churches and at the heart of a global religious network.")

NPR has started a series called "American Moxie: How we get by" about how Americans are coping with the recession. It seems like there's only been one segment so far, about a farmer who is selling his cattle because as fuel prices rise and cattle prices remain stagnant, he's losing money on them.

I think it will be an interesting series, but I have some concerns about the title. I think the American Dream has often been misinterpreted to mean "if you work hard enough, you can do/be anything." I think that is a nice, but empty idea in our current system. It takes more than "moxie" to get ahead in America; often it takes inherited wealth, in the form of money from your parents or even in the connections they have made. I think the idea that the average Joe can pull himself up out of poverty has often been used by rich and powerful people to absolve themselves of either directly helping people or putting in place a system in the playing field is leveled. To me, the phrase "all men are created equal" requires us to protect and help our fellow man so that they can have the same opportunities that the rest of us do. It does not mean that we should be left on our own, out in the cold, to duke it out for ourselves.

Back to the Future: Backlash and Palin

I have been slowly working my way through Susan Faludi's book "Backlash" about the backlash against women's rights in the 1980s. Fauldi argues that during the 1980s (and during other eras of backlash against the women's rights movement) pop culture, the media, and politicians claimed that feminism had gone too far, that women's liberation was damaging to them, and that the solution was to roll back the clock and return to an era where women have less equality (sometimes classing this return to less equality as "real empowerment").

At the same time I'm reading this book, I've also been thinking a lot about the U.S. presidential race and the prominent role gender has taken. Many people have pointed out the absolute ridiculousness of assuming that people will automatically transfer their vote from Hillary Clinton to Sarah Palin. There has also been plenty of discussion about how sexist criticism of Palin is unaaceptable.

When I came across the passage in "Backlash" regarding the curious anomaly of the anti-feminist woman (ie, the woman who says women's place is in the home from her office in Washington) and the role she plays in politics in the 1980s, what Fauldi had to say spoke to me about Palin and how the Republican party is using "feminism" to advance an anti-feminist agenda,

The New Right women were, in some respects, the reverse image of their more progressive "yuppie" sisters who got trapped in the backlash eddies. While mainstream professional women were more likley to voice feminist principles while struggling internally with the self-doubts and recriminations that the backlash generated, the New Right women were voicing anti-feminist views---while internalizing the message of the women's movement and quiety incorporating its tenants of self-determination, equality and freedom of choice in their private behavior.
If the right-wing activists at Concerned Women for America seemed less anxiety ridden about the "price" of their own liberation than the average liberal career women, maybe that's because these New Right women were, ironically, facing less resistence in their world. As long as these women raised their voices only to parrot the Moral Majority line, as long as they divided up the chores so that they could have more time to fight equal rights legislation, the New Right male leaders (and their New Right husbands) were happy to applaud and encourage the women's mock "independence." The women always played by their men's rules, and for that they enjoyed their esteem and blessings of their subculture. On the other hand, working and single women in the mainstream, who were more authentically independent, had no such cheering squad to buoy their spirits; they were undermined daily by popular culture that parodied their lifestyle, heaped pity and ridicule on their choices, and berated their feminist "mistakes."
The activists of Concerned Women for America, like New Right women activists elsewhere, could report to their offices in their suits, issue press releases demainding that women return to the home, and never see a contradiction. By divorcing their personal liberation from their public stands on sexual politics, they could privately take advantage of feminism while pubicly depoloring its influence. They could indeed "have it all"---by working to prevent all other women from having that same opportunity.

To me, this passage succiently sums my problems with Sarah Palin wrapping herself in feminism's flag. She claims that she's putting another crack in the glass ceiling (see Ann's post at feministing linked above for my other problems with this line) while aligning herself with a candidate that is opposed to legislation that would ensure equal pay for equal work. She claims that Bristol's choice to keep her baby is a private matter while joining a ticket that believes the state's interest in a fetus trumps the individual women's right to make the same decision privately. (In other words, as long as the choice is the right choice and made by her daughter, it's private. If it's one Palin and McCain disagree with, it's a public matter.)

Palin has benefited from feminism's advances; that doesn't make her one.

This is water

Via Bitch PhD, I've heard that David Foster Wallace has died. I've never read Infinite Jest and haven't read very many of his essays. But about a year ago, throckmorton, linked to this amazing commencement speech Wallace gave and I've read it many times since.

Maybe will write more about this later.

Hands off my ballot

Earlier this summer, Alternet reported that McCain would be scaling back voter suppression efforts that have been used in previous elections. Via Wonkette, I came across this piece in the Michigan Messenger.

The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

This really pisses me off and I think it should piss you off as well.

Check this quote from The Right to Vote page on USInfo.State.Gov from the U.S. Department of State,

Without free and fair elections, there can be no democratic society, and without that constant accountability of government officials to the electorate, there can, in fact, be no assurance of any other rights. The right to vote, therefore, is not only an important individual liberty; it is also a foundation stone of free government.

Who shall have that right has been a persistent question in American history. A theme that runs throughout the American past is the gradual expansion of the franchise, from a ballot limited to white, male property-owners to a universal franchise for nearly everyone over the age of 18. A related theme is ensuring the full equivalency of each vote, insofar as that is possible within a federal system. But because Americans often take this right for granted, it has not always been exercised as fully as it should be. With nearly 200 million citizens eligible to vote, too many people think their individual ballot will not count. The closeness of the presidential election of 2000 has served as a reminder that every vote does count, however.

[emphasis mine]

News flash for the government: People don't think that their vote won't be counted because we have too many citizens and they've taken the right to vote for granted, they think their vote won't be counted because (1) the U.S. has a long history of limiting voting rights to classes that are already in power (white, landowning men, anyone?---read further on that Right to Vote page for more history), (2) because every year there seem to be more and more efforts to prevent people from voting successfully (please check out this page detailing some different state's requirements for voter ID laws and also the piece I previously wrote about Indiana's voter ID laws), (3) it is really difficult to trust electronic voting machines because of all the controversy around 'em, and (4) a significant portion of the population feel as though officials that they have elected ignore them once they get into office (ie, my vote might be literally counted, but does it count?).

Personally, I'm going to be stopping by my local Obama office this afternoon to ask them if they're providing literature to voters about their voting rights in Virginia. (FYI, according to The National Conference of State Legislatures [linked above, but please please check out this page], VA voters who do not have a VA voter registration card, social security card, VA driver's license, other ID issued by the VA/U.S. govt, or an employee ID card with photo, can still vote, they just have to sign a statement that says they are who they say they are. I don't want anyone telling a Virginian that they can't vote because they don't have ID.)

Supported by the GOP as necessary to protect against voter fraud, these laws have the effect of making it more difficult to vote. Under the Indiana law, for example, a voter without a photo ID either has to come back on Monday after the election with one or "execute an affidavit stating that the voter cannot obtain proof of identification, because the voter: (i) is indigent; or (ii) has a religious objection to being photographed." Even if a voter without a photo ID on November 4th is able to get one by November 10th or they fit the narrow exceptions, their vote will only be counted, if "the voter has not been challenged or required to vote a provisional ballot for any other reason."

From the Michigan Messenger piece, it's clear that the GOP is not going to stop at voter ID laws in its effort to restrict the right to vote of U.S. citizens in this year's presidential election. Imagine that you've lost your home this year. Imagine hearing that if you show up to vote, your vote might get challenged by the GOP based on the fact that you've lost your home (btw, as someone points out in the article, many people are still living in homes that have been foreclosed and therefore are still living where they registered and would be voting legally). I know what I would be thinking, "What if they challenge me publicly and tell everyone my home has been foreclosed on? That would be incredibly embarrassing [ED: I don't think there is anything shameful about not having the money to pay your mortgage, inflated or otherwise, but I can see feeling that way.]" That might prevent me from even trying to vote. And if I did go to vote, what happens to votes that get challenged? Do they only get counted if the district is really really close? (Does anyone know the answer to this?)

Possible Actions:

Ask John McCain to denounce this practice in Michigan.

Get in touch with Obama's Michigan campaign and make sure they know what's happening.

Help someone else in our state register to vote and fulfill our states voter ID requirements (and make sure local campaign offices are paying attention to voter ID requirements).

Keep writing in our own spaces about voter suppression tactics so people are aware of what's happening.

Fill out Progress Michigan's petition against this tactic.