These are a few of the dozens of pieces we need to get rid of. We live in The Richmond. From L to R
TOP ROW: pastel landscape, late 60’s antiwar woodcut, antique punchcard of boat
SECOND ROW two drawings from a young Russian artist in 1991, portraying the rise of Yeltsin and fall of old Communism (includes a pig w/the letters KGB on the side) and a large poster of the the Stephansdom Cathedral in in Vienna. We have many more lovely graphics and posters. Post below if you are interested.
“Get out of my neighborhood. I have guns! If you two don’t leave right now I’m gonna go get them.”
It was the Saturday before election day and we were canvassing in Las Vegas in a sprawling cookie-cutter development – not a fancy one – with “front yards” of sand, not grass. Worn Halloween figures and flags hung on the doors; fake spider webs stuck stubbornly to doorways and bushes. My son Dan and I had just arrived and this was our first block. It was the weekend before his birthday but both of us were beyond anxious about the election and hoped that going door-to-door, even more than making calls, might ease our souls a bit; at least we were doing something.
A moment earlier we’d been joking with this same 30-something guy over the neighborhood Halloween decorations. He asked what we were doing walking along his block and Dan said “Just talking to people.” “What about,” he asked. “What are you talking to people about?” “Hillary Clinton” I said, smiling at him – (that almost always works.)
Not this time. As we moved beyond him and on up the street, he was still yelling. “Get out! Get out!” Shaken, we decided to move up a block and try the next house on our tally sheet but he and his friend were making their way toward us, his friend telling him to “do something about it” if he was going to yell anyway. We fled.
I’ve seen angry crowds before, including demonstrators and police in Chicago in 1968. I’d seen reports of scary Trump rally crowds too. But this single person, focused on us with such rage, was a different kind of scary. My heart was pounding as if I’d had way too much coffee. As that response ebbed, I just got sad. And then sadder. “This isn’t how our country is supposed to be.” I kept saying to Dan. He, wisely, was more concerned about danger than he was with analyzing the social meaning of all this. He has a two-year-old son and was unsettled more for him, and for his wife; he needed to stay safe for them.
That was wise, but for me, the cruelty and rage of these two men, who’d turned on a dime from “We all DO love our Halloween here” to “Get the fuck out of my neighborhood” was painful on so many levels.
They weren’t the only ones. At least two more times, the response to our question: “Have you voted yet?” was “I don’t do Democrats. Go away,” declared with icy affect and stone cold eyes.
Saturday afternoon, as we waited at headquarters for a new neighborhood assignment, we were visited by Gabby Giffords, and her husband Mark Kelly, as well as Lucy McBath, one of the Mothers of the Movement, a sad sisterhood of moms whose children, her son Jordan Davis among them, had been killed by police officers. The combination of the realities faced by these people and their efforts to reenforce the critical nature of every vote we could pull out of our assigned areas was a reminder of all that is at stake in our country.
Here’s the thing though:
This anger didn’t arise on its own. It’s been enabled, and not just by Mr. Trump and his allies and followers. Not all the angry people we met lived in lesser circumstances, with less education and income, than the norm but they do live differently from the people who govern them – and the people who cover them.
Listen to Columnist Sarah Smarsh in The Guardian
* Earlier this year, primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of $72,000– higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporterss.
* Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well above the national average of 33% among whites or 29% overall. . . .
These facts haven’t stopped pundits and journalists from pushing story after story about the white working class’s giddy embrace of a bloviating demagogue. . . .
* The faces journalists do train the cameras on – hateful ones screaming sexist vitriol next to Confederate flags – must receive coverage but do not speak for the communities I know well.
* One-dimensional stereotypes fester where journalism fails to tread. The last time I saw my native class receive substantial focus, before now, was over 20 years ago – not in the news but on the television show Roseanne, the fictional storylines of which remain more accurate than the musings of comfortable commentators in New York studios.
* In lieu of such coverage, media makers cast the white working class as a monolith and imply an old, treacherous story convenient to capitalism: that the poor are dangerous idiots.
Sure political passions on both sides are self-defined far differently than they’re defined from the outside. But if those who cover non-elites never go near them except to write about them; if they’re described more through sociology than personal stories, oddities instead of neighbors, the divisions we’ve experienced in this election will not ease.
We don’t go to the same schools, we don’t live in the same neighborhoods, we don’t share military/non-military histories and we don’t agree on politics. We also don’t have access to simple exchanges: in the carpool line, as room parents or scout leaders, at the supermarket or the gas station, at the playground or even at neighborhood Halloween events.
I grew up in a steel town on the Monongahela River. I was the lawyer’s daughter; when we graduated I went to an Ivy League college that almost no one in my community had even heard of. Several of the kids from my high school who went to college did so by joining the Army. Because of Viet Nam, many of them never made it home to enroll.
We all went to the same dances and football games though, and parties in each other’s homes. I know – know – that every day that I spent as a journalist I did a better job because I’d grown up among so many different kinds of kids, even though it was always clear my future was going to be different from many of theirs.
We need to be able to depend on journalists to translate a bit for us and right now that doesn’t happen enough. Of course no American should threaten another with a gun. Of course not. But we also need to be able to expect from those who deliver information to us that they’ve gone beyond their own experiences to learn how others live- and to share that understanding with the rest of us.
Congratulations Bob! I first published this on his birthday:
Bob Dylan turned 75 yesterday. Spotify and I are honoring him this morning, playing one masterpiece (When I Paint My…) after another. Just now, up came Mr. Tambourine Man*. I felt myself driving through Pittsburgh’s Liberty Tubes with the music as loud as it could get in a Corvair, singing and dreaming; hoping for a fraction of the vision and gift he offered us.
I’m five years and three days younger. He belongs to me. He spoke to me then and he still does. Then it was hope and there’s lots of that to this day. Today, though, it’s tempered with the knowledge and experience gained in the 51 years lived since the song appeared on Bringin’ It All Back Home. All the dreams and disappointment, the innocence and the learning, the love and the pain. It’s all here:
Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow
More than the brilliant political songs that became anthems for all of us, this one remains in my heart. Happy birthday Bob.
*Played 15 million times on Spotify alone…
It’s pretty damn weird that after all the build up I haven’t written a thing about my 70th birthday itself! It was so lovely that I just didn’t want to let go of it even enough to tell its stories. I just kind of hung onto it for a day. So here it is:
We all went to Santa Cruz, to the beach: sons, daughters-in-law, grandsons and Rick and me. The boys found a great house with a big open plan, perfect for people whose ages run from 70 to 19 months with an almost-five-year-old Nate in the middle.
It was just what I wanted. Toddlers Jake and Eli eating blueberries and flirting with their grandparents, grown-ups talking about everything from politics to child rearing to just-executed beach walks (of which there were many.) Goofing around. Reading stories. Cuddling on the deck. Coloring. Being gifted with three home-made birthday cards covered in crayon and glitter-glue. And with an urgently required lemon zester.
Staying up late talking – and listening to the boys talk with each other. Catching up while the kids slept. Hanging around in the early morning with the mommies and the little guys. Walking from our house to the far end of the promenade, a windy point, and then back past the house to the other end, where there’s a lighthouse. We did it in different combinations, a couple of times in the daylight and one gorgeous time in the dark, watching the lighthouse lazily send out its signal and wondering at the full moon and its bright path of light on the sea.
It was, in short, our family at its best. They gave me what I wanted most: to wake up and wander out in my PJs and find the little ones sitting on the floor giggling; to watch the sunset bundled up on the deck with Nate in my lap, and to enjoy our sons and their wives. To all be together in the same place for more than dinner.
From each of them came hugs, and humor and generosity of spirit – and lots of love. Times like these are why we celebrate being born at all.
NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I’ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today – from May 8, 2014
I seem to be living in the Way Back Machine this year. Lots of memories of 1968 and even 1963. Now as January 20, 2009 approaches, yet another looms. January 20, certainly, but in 1961.
See that crowd? Somewhere, way in the back, probably at least a block beyond, stand an almost-fifteen-year-old girl and her mother. Fresh off an overnight train from Pittsburgh, having arrived at Union Station in time to watch the Army flame-throwers melt a blizzard’s worth of snow on the streets of the inaugural route, they make their way to their parade seats: in the bleachers, way down near the Treasure Building.
I spent most of 1960 besotted with John Kennedy. And Jackie. And Caroline. And all the other Kennedys who came with them. Most of my lunch money went to bus fare as, after school, I shuttled back and forth “to town” to volunteer in the local JFK headquarters. I even had a scrapbook of clippings about Kennedy and his family.
So. My parents surprised me with these two parade tickets. My mom and I took the overnight train and arrived
around dawn Inauguration morning. We couldn’t get into the swearing-in itself, of course, so we went to a bar that served breakfast (at least that’s how I remember it) and watched the speech on their TV, then made our way along the snowy sidewalks to our seats, arriving in time to watch the new president and his wife roll by, to see his Honor Guard, the last time it would be comprised solely of white men (since Kennedy ordered their integration soon after,) in time to see the floats and the Cabinet members and the bands and the batons.
It was very cold. We had no thermos, no blankets, nothing extra, and my mom, God bless her, never insisted that we go in for a break, never complained or made me feel anything but thrilled. Which I was. As the parade drew to a close, and the light faded, we stumbled down the bleachers, half-frozen, and walked the few blocks to the White House fence. I stood there, as close to the fence as I am now to my keyboard, and watched our new president enter the White House for the first time as Commander-in-Chief.
That was half a century ago. I can’t say it feels like yesterday, but it remains a formidable and cherished memory. It was also a defining lesson on how to be a parent; it took enormous love and respect to decide to do this for me. I was such a kid – they could have treated my devotion like a rock star crush; so young, they could have decided I would “appreciate it more” next time. (Of course there was no next time.) Instead, they gave me what really was the lifetime gift of being a part of history. And showed me that my political commitment had value – enough value to merit such an adventure.
Who’s to say if I would have ended up an activist (I did)- and then a journalist (I did) – without those memories. If I would have continued to act within the system rather than try to destroy it. (I did) If I would have been the mom who took kids to Europe, brought them along on news assignments to Inaugurations and royal weddings and green room visits with the Mets (Yup, I did.) I had learned to honor the interests and dreams of my children the way my parents had honored my own. So it’s hard for me to tell parents now to stay home.
My good friend, the wise and gifted PunditMom, advises “those with little children” to skip it, and since strollers and backpacks are banned for security reasons, I’m sure she’s right. But if you’ve got a dreamer in your house, a young adult who has become a true citizen because of this election, I’d try to come. After all, he’s their guy. What he does will touch their lives far more than it will ours. Being part of this beginning may determine their willingness to accept the tough sacrifices he asks of them – at least that – and probably, also help to build their roles as citizens – as Americans – for the rest of their lives. Oh — and will tell them that, despite curfews and learner’s permits, parental limit-setting and screaming battles, their parents see them as thinking, wise and effective people who will, as our new President promised them, help to change
NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I’ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today – from May 8, 2014.
It doesn’t look at all real – I know that. But it is. It’s also a place I’ve wanted to see for as long as I can remember. And here we are. Here we are! The sweet, formidable beauty of this place is matched only by its astonishing history – as a monastery, a prison and a target, from ancient times to the carnage and suffering of D-Day.
Mt-Saint-Michel has, for more than a thousand years, stood atop the rock upon which is was built. Its timelessness is much of what attracts people, I suspect, along with its ice-castle beauty and the awesome commitment of its inhabitants: the sacrifices made by these men on the mountain top, alone, virtually silent, with nothing to do but pray and take on their assigned chores, meditate and live out their lives in as holy a way as possible
Nearby, the small town of Saint-Mère-Élgise and its museum await the summer celebration of the 70th anniversary of D-Day and its remarkable exercise in vision, courage and grit. This diorama of General Eisenhower’s last visit with the men he was sending to fight and die is a moving one. Anyone who has ever seen his 1968 conversation with Walter Cronkite knows how well the General understood that half of those he sent out on D-Day would never return.
One group of special heroes and heroines represented at the museum were the Resistance – women and men who parachuted behind enemy lines, worked with local opponents of the Reich to complicate their war and, at great personal risk. transmitted by hidden radios everything they learned about their German enemy.
Aside from their real-life-spying, they also served in special, high-risk, low profile operations, commemorated in history, in films and in novels. I often used the Resistance stories and the children running messages and doing other support work as a way to engage our sons in history when we traveled. The drama and courage, and relevance, was and still is irresistible.
What you see here another of the profoundly moving exhibit items at the museum. Look carefully; it’s a page of prayers to support young soldiers dying in the field. Breathtaking as you stand among the photos of these young men and see how wise it was to offer them this comfort, and wonder if today’s military is inclined, or allowed for that matter, to provide similar comfort.
In all, the life of the monastery and loss that surrounds the beaches of Normandy really are bookends to how we live our lives. Life and faith, war and peace, courage, sacrifice, defeat and victory. It is the greatest gift of travel when these things present themselves and we remember how fragile, and how wondrous, the privilege of being alive and aware really is.
NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I’ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today – from March 16, 2007.
One of the great gifts of an observant Jewish life is the lighting of Sabbath candles. At a prescribed time each Friday, 18 minutes before sundown, it is the obligation of the Jewish woman to light candles as a symbolic acceptance of the Sabbath upon herself. The prayer is said AFTER you light the candles because once they’re lit, the Sabbath rules – ignite no fire, do no work etc. preclude the lighting of a match.
Here’s how it works: you light the candles, move your hands above the candles three times to bring their warmth toward you, then cover your eyes and say a simple blessing. It’s in Hebrew, but it means “Blessed are You, Lord, our God, King of the Universe, who sanctifies us with his commandments, and enjoins us to light the candles of Shabbat.” Yes,the words of the prayer are plain; women say them in every corner of the earth – educated or not, every week and have been doing so for thousands of years. Many of us add prayers of our own, for those we love, for peace, for the lifting of burdens, for a better world.
I always take a very deep breath — the kind they taught us when I was quitting smoking — and exhale very slowly, releasing a lot of the stress of the week before I begin. One of my friends told me that when she was in medical school and having babies at the same time, she’d weep, every week, as she felt the burdens fall from her in the glow of the flame.
Makes sense to me. Something about this ritual is transporting. I also love the idea that this is a woman’s privilege. Much has been written about what observant Jewish women are NOT permitted to do – and much of it is true. That’s another conversation. But the impact of this particular duty is profound, beautiful and serene and I am grateful for it. So, as we move toward the close of this day and toward what I have found to be the true peace of the sabbath – I send to you, whatever your faith – a peaceful wish — Shabbat Shalom.
NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I’ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today – from October 16, 2006
I’ve never been to CBGB OMFUG. Why do I care about a punk music club whose entrance was always spattered with graffiti and most of whose musical appearances were by people I knew almost nothing about — except Bruce Springsteen [he wrote this with Patti Smith] , Patti Smith [two favorites: People Have the Power, Peaceable Kingdom], Joan Jett [I Love Rock and Roll] and a few others? (I don’t t know the lore all that well – but it always seemed to me that women really got a crack at center stage at CBGB.) I think it was just nice to see it there – waving its fist in the air. It has closed – maybe to reopen, maybe not – and I’m just kind of sad to see it losing its lease to what some have called “the suburbification of Manhattan.”
Patti Smith, whom I had the honor to meet at last year’s Media Reform conference in St. Louis, was a real CBGB heroine and I felt, meeting her, a deep connection. We’re the same age. She’s a heartbreakingly honest person who lost her husband way too soon (and wrote People Have the Power partly at his instigation) — a mom and a singular human soul. The music she made was remarkably articulate (she is a poet after all) and inspiring. I’ve linked above to two of my favorites — one of which, People Have the Power, was an anthem of the Vote for Change election tour in 2004.
So what do the final days of a gritty music club where I never went have to do with my life as an observant Jew? Believe it or not – plenty. Both of them were fascinating universes I always observed from the outside and wondered about. Both stood for making one’s own way to truth. That search has taken me, for some reason I’m still grappling with, to the Orthodox Jewish community where I’ve found a home and spirit that brings a new kind of meaning to my life.
At my last big birthday I complained to a friend about my age and her response was “but you’re completely reborn in this new life – you’re not old AT ALL!” In some ways she’s right. I certainly feel that there’s a universe I’m traveling through that’s new, moving, inspiring and mysterious. Sometimes though it’s also a pain. For the past several weeks, from Rosh Hashanah (the New Year) to the end of Simchas Torah (Ending the annual, week-by-week reading of the Torah: the five books of Moses – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy and beginning again) the holidays consumed days of time: in synagogue, inviting guests to meals and going to meals at friends, building and dismantling a sukkah and observing the prohibition on driving and work. Since this year many of these days fell on weekends it meant NO catching up on work on Sundays and no farmer’s market. (two weird examples, I admit.) Since it’s the end of tomato season that last was sad though not critical to the future of the human race or my household.
Even so, all these small requirements, which I try to follow since I’ve made this commitment, can consume time and tax serenity and spirituality. I’ve come to love the prohibition on the Sabbath and enjoy the quiet days reading, taking walks, visiting, napping and sharing ideas. But the surrender to and acceptance of all these rules is a peculiar experience and I grapple with it daily. Even so, the quest, like that of the young rebels who put CBGB on the map, is a great adventure – and the learning is exhilarating.
Go listen to People Have the Power whether this post makes sense or not. It will make you happy on a Monday – although that’s easier here today since it’s the third amazingly gorgeous fall day in a row – with leaves turning and leaf smells beginning to fill the air. Which, I just realized, takes us right back to faith and gratitude for the world’s beauty when it shows up.
This poster, portraying China’s children energetically joining the assault against the U.S., is one of the remarkable Mao-era treasures hiding in this obscure Shanghai apartment complex, home to the Shanghai Poster Art Centre.
Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the years before and after produced an enormous range of political art, clearly targeted with great care to varied segments of the population. As the Cultural Revolution’s image (and to some degree Mao’s) tarnished though, the new government ordered the posters – and their energetic messages – to be destroyed.
Thanks to this man, it didn’t all make it to the garbage bin. As the website says: A labor of love, the museum was founded by Yang Pei Ming, who grew concerned about both the poster art and the unusual history <and> started to collect posters ever since 1995 when all the government organizations deleted the propaganda materials due to the political reasons.
It was a thrilling, surprisingly moving visit; passing through so many years of cynically generated passion and ideas in just a couple of rooms added impact to every poster and its story. Here are a few; there’s not much more to say. Let the pictures tell the rest.
You can see some of the contrast here: Chinese New Year decorations over Singapore’s old Chinatown neighborhood, itself somewhat disheveled and worn down. Beyond it, the grand skyscrapers of the new, planned, tightly governed environment.
Before the city-state was refurbished and its rigid government emerged, Chinese immigrants came by the thousands to settle among “their own” and build new lives. In a cruel similarity to the sweatshops and tenements that were the lot of the wave of Jewish immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century, they lived in impossibly crowded quarters in Chinatown, huge families in one room. Their stories were further colored by the fact that many were kidnapped upon arrival and sold into slavery or made to work for almost nothing. Their average life expectancy: 35.
And that was just the men. Sex trafficking is, sadly, a timeless curse and so it was in Singapore. Women were seized and brought here to serve as sex workers from the beginning of Singapore’s rise. In the streets of the city’s Chinatown, they lived and worked and often, we learned, lost their lives early, through murder or suicide, while still in their teens.
In a peculiar set of contrasts, the tour we took tonight, “Secrets of the Red Lantern,” walked us through two eras of suffering: the Chinatown Heritage Center with its recreated tenement, similar to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and Geylang, one of Singapore’s sanctioned red light districts.
It wasn’t much fun; most of what we learned was sad. Not that there’s much unfamiliar about abused workers and sexually exploited women. Even so, both of us felt left the tour sad and heavy and angry, not only about what we heard, which wasn’t SO different from the western history we know, but that we spent one of our three nights here learning about it. This morning though, I’m glad we went.
This is one of the richest populations in the world, and like most wealthy communities, it was built on the backs of the desperate. Despite its public righteousness, Singapore legalized prostitution and established red light districts to contain it. With labor and with sex, as with so much else, things are as they have always been.