It Isn't Easy Being Green

I wonder if I should begin cultivating the Depression-era eccentricities of the World War II generation, like collecting bits of string and reusing old tea bags. It probably wouldn't hurt to begin clipping coupons, but coupons are almost never for the organic and local foods I like to buy. On the other hand, eating only seasonal produce would definitely help cut down on costs. I really need to start doing that.

Okay, I'm getting off track. What I mean to be talking about is the current fiscal crisis. It's apparent that the good old days of capitalistic excess are waning, and a deep pit of debt awaits my generation and those who'll come after us (presuming humanity doesn't destroy the planet, and the Republicans don't destroy civilization, before future generations can begin repaying China). No one is saying the word "depression" yet, but with banks floundering and the job and housing markets in arrears, it's pretty clear that fewer of us are residing on Easy Street., and even fewer can anticipate doing so any time soon.

I discovered today that I make so little money as a part-time adjunct professor and full-time bookseller (note: 50-70 hours of work per week) that I actually qualify for food stamps. I won't use them, because government assistance should only be for those people who genuinely can't get on by themselves, but it's scary to know that in 21st century America a woman with two graduate degrees and a healthy work ethic isn't making much more money than a McDonald's employee. This is our position in history. Intellectuals are relegated to the societal refuse heap while corporate bimbos (male and female) climb the socioeconomic ladder; my only solace is that with the way the economy is going, we're all pretty much fucked in the end. Those bimbos probably bought houses that they can't afford with subprime mortgages. Suckas!

I know that's not nice. I'm really just bitter that I chose the path of unlimited resistance and have no idea what I'm doing with my life. According to current cultural values I'm a useless person. I'm not a Christian; I make no money; I buy very little.

I don't know why this post is about me, when I meant to write about the fall of A.I.G. and Lehman Brothers. I guess because--like everyone--I'm now trying to understand what the future will look like. Will we soon be crowding at the docks for a day of hard labor, followed by a trip to the soup kitchen? Because that's basically what I do already, except that I make my own soup. How bad will it get?

There is a silver lining to all this chaos, however. And that is that we will have to mend our ways. Me, T, everyone. We'll have to save those bits of string, and learn to cook on an even leaner budget, and stop treating ourselves so much, even to little things like a drink out or a movie. We'll have to stay at home more with our families and play games and read. Talk. There are worse things, as long as we have enough to be healthy and safe. I just hope we haven't gotten so far away from the simple pleasure of togetherness that we are unable to return when times get even harder.

T-H-I-N-K

I have my differences with Thomas Friedman, but there are a couple of issues on which we agree. One is America's need to develop alternative energy sources and gradually relinquish its reliance on oil, foreign or otherwise. The second is our preference for Barack Obama, if for no other reason than the repugnancy of the Republican alternative.

To be fair, I am biased toward the far left. I would like to see universal health care; the dismantling of the hegemonic insurance and pharmaceutical industries that simultaneously market illness and provide poor health care coverage; widespread public education reform; investment in alternative energy; less xenophobic immigration procedures; budget surpluses; less military spending; and of course, an end to our recent imperialist quest to remake the world in our image. Given the alarming evidence that America is a democracy in decline, I seriously doubt that the world would be safer from terrorism should every country adopt our model of self-government.

To be fair, I am not coming into this election season with an objective attitude toward the two parties. I already favor Obama because of his positions on foreign and domestic policy, and dislike McCain's emphasis on aggressive military engagement, Alaskan oil drilling, tax cuts, and a culture war campaign style that cultivates a politics of stupidity.

But it is this latter issue--McCain's encouragement of American intellectual laziness--that really upsets me. In last week's New York Times, columnist Bob Herbert wrote, "While watching the Sarah Palin interview with Charlie Gibson Thursday night, and the coverage of the Palin phenomenon in general, I’ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail." To support this fear, Herbert recounts TV commentators' defense of Palin's inability to explain the Bush Doctrine, during which they argued that very few hockey moms could explain what it is. Alas, they are correct: very few hockey moms could explain the Bush Doctrine. This is an indication that most Americans (for after all, the sports mom in her SUV minivan is the iconic image of the normative American family in the 21st century) don't pay enough attention to current events, even when those events are shipping their sons and daughters off to a preemptive and baseless war. Their correct appraisal of Sarah Palin's ignorance of Bush's foreign policy as the American norm is also an indication that Palin is a poor choice for second-in-command. Do we really want a leader who can't explain why we went into Iraq in the first place? How is she supposed to help end the conflict when she can't self-critically confront, assess and correct the mistaken ideas that led to anticipatory self-defense on foreign soil?

But I can't just target hockey moms and Palin for their political stupidity. The fault lies equally with the McCain campaign; the Republican base; the quasi-Democratic feminists who are so desirous to have a woman in the White House that they willingly ignore Palin's actions against female reproductive rights and other minority groups like gays and lesbians; the media, which instantaneously fostered a cult of celebrity around Palin, without noting that this cult was exactly what the McCain campaign wanted to deflect scrutiny of the presidential candidate (and could I just add that a month ago McCain was criticizing Obama's celebrity status?); and with Americans in general, who--for some reason that I have failed to find--JUST DON'T THINK.

After eight years of trite justifications for fiscal and political disasters like "we're fighting the evil-doers" (who are we, Batman?) and "America is not in a recession, just an economic slow down," you would think that Americans would want detailed answers to difficult questions. That Americans would be tired of the way someone "like us" runs the country. That we would want an "elitest" leader, with 8 years of experience teaching Constitutional Law, with 8 years as a State Senator, representing a district with more people than live in Alaska, with a Harvard law degree, and an understanding of foreign cultures, with four years as a U.S. senator, again representing more people than live in Alaska, with a reputation for erudition, critical thinking, and speaking his mind. Not to mention someone without a laundry list of ethics violations.

I don't want to idealize Obama, whose platitudes I could often do without, but point out that "elitist" is just another word for qualified. And not all Americans are qualified to lead. But we are all qualified to think. So when did we, as a society, relinquish that right? When did we start relying on other people to tell us what we think, and what our values are?

In Freedom of Thought, Voltaire notes that as long as people are uninterested in practicing their freedom, there will always be tyrants ready to seize it. Americans forget that there are tyrants among us.

Painting the Pig, or Palin in Comparison

Hark ye, take care, for a she-beast lurks these woods.

A she-beast with little rhetorical ability, less knowledge, and a frighteningly large following of people who obviously don't use the gray matter lodged between their blind eyes.

Sarah Palin makes me so mad that I don't even know where to begin!

For one, "feminist" my ass. Hillary may drive me crazy with her first-wave pantsuit feminism, but at least she thinks women should have reproductive rights. At least she knows what the Bush Doctrine is. At least she doesn't justify her social ideology with Biblical injunctions. At least she was smart enough to take on reporters and the public without having to be holed up somewhere studying lines about what it means to be vice president.

And people don't care! They don't care. They see a vagina marching towards the White House, and think, "Oh wow! A vagina! Gosh, aren't we progressive?"

These idiots don't realize that vaginas don't hold political views. (I should know. I have one. It is remarkably mute on foreign policy.) But brains have opinions, and brains, according to pop culture's militant (and let's just be honest, grossly outdated, simplistic and ultimately self-defeating, yet effective) feminism, are gender neutral. So, a brain with the intellectual and character limitations of Dubya does not make for a progressive vagina. In fact, it makes for a vagina that doesn't believe in its own right to health, safety and emotional well-being.

Or that of any other woman.

If people were to strip Palin of her sexuality, as feminism demands, they would see nothing but an ignorant honky bitch with the audacity and the narcissism to believe that all it takes to pull the U.S. out of its national and global mire is a few years as mayor of a town of 5,000 and not even one term as governor of a state with more bears than people. Her devout conviction that what this country needs is a straight-talking evangelical conservative who's "just like us" (as if we haven't tried that one before) belittles the fragile complexity of the United State's socio-economic and political condition, and soils the gorgeous ideals of democratic process written into our Constitution.

Secondly, the woman is just plain ignorant. If she was up to the task, the McCain campaign wouldn't be hiding her from the "un-deferential" press (again, who hears the dying cry of democracy in America?). They wouldn't be making her memorize canned lines about Islamic extremists. Quite frankly, if the McCain campaign was remotely confident in its ideology and its presidential candidate's ability to make persuasive arguments, they wouldn't be hiding him under the skirts of the honky bitch they have hiding from the press.

Thirdly, and I guess I should stop, because I could go on, Sarah Palin is a bad mom.
Yeah. I said it. Call my vagina sexist, but a mom who leaves her pregnant 17-year old and her newborn baby with Down Syndrome and her son in Iraq to the care of others while she plots her course for total annihilation of whatever possibility America had for political redemption is a bad mom. What she and so many anti-abortion activists forget is that motherhood is not just carrying a fetus or birthing a child. Motherhood is a life-long commitment to those beings you've flung into the world. Motherhood is working to give those beings safety, and comfort, and unconditional presence. Motherhood is staying the mother fucking course.

Don't run for vice-president as a feminist and a mom and an agent for change when you are none of those things.

Don't insult those of us who are one or two or all of those things.

Don't strip us of our bodily freedoms, and religious tolerance, and yearning for a resolution to the crises facing us, and tell us that you are just like us.

I will never be like you, Sarah Palin. You are everything I hate about America.

Crossroads

I don't know. I should go to bed now, so this will be brief. I'm getting married in a week, which is very exciting. But I lost a potential job today, which is less so. I can soothe my frustration with the knowledge that I was a finalist for the position, but once again the reasons for my not getting the job sound horribly similar to the sounds of my scampering away from a PhD, in a fruitless search for more normal pastures.

My dad says I run away from who I am, which is an "intellectual" (a curiously 18th century word, really, more applicable to those amazing female salonieres; to a time when it wasn't pretentious to self-identify as thought-full; a word allocated to Oxford men with pipes and tweeds, and not to me). I don't know. (Again.) I'm not so brilliant. I knew that at school, and so left. There were a few professors who enjoined me to stay, but I never understood why. My writing can be disorganized. I don't always speak articulately. Benjamin and Deleuze and Levinas swam in my brain, pausing for brief moments of clarity and application before getting lost again in their strokes. I am not so brilliant. But then, I am not its opposite, either. There were moments.

So what do I do? My dad says quit the menial job and dedicate myself full time to teaching. Live off my savings for a while and stop exhausting myself with these 70 hour weeks for a pittance. Doing so scares me. I don't like not making money. A big part of me just wants a "grown-up" job like my friends have, where they sit at a desk and have meetings and behave in adult and scheduled ways. But I know, deep in my gut (or maybe this time, it's my brain speaking), that I'm not like my friends. I can't sit at a desk and push (important) papers around; I'm not ultra organized; I don't know and don't care about PowerPoint presentations. I don't ever get the office jobs I apply for, and apparently I've taught "too much college" to teach high school.

Am I failure? Did I run away from the PhD because I fell in love, and because I was lonely, and because I saw brilliance in others and mediocrity in my own ideas and I grew afraid? Yes.
Yes.

I ran away, but there's nothing for me here like I thought there would be. So what do I do?

Pyotr Went to Heaven and Little Chef Went to

Ah, Pyotr.

While Chas and I were in between adolescent grappling I went to Spain, but not before winning the angelic devotion of Pyotr the Protestant. PP was gentle and sweet and afflicted with acne, which formed a sympathetic bond between us. PP was also evangelical, and a great portion of his love letters were devoted to sincerely hoping I would come to Jesus. I didn't know that evangelical Protestantism existed--actually, I still don't, outside of the Puritans--and I sure as hell didn't want to come to Jesus. But I liked being doted on, and he was funny and smart and really cute beneath his pimples.

Our relationship was primarily imaginary because I lived in Spain the entire time, promptly dumping him for Chas a few days after I returned to the States. Pyotr and I came from such different backgrounds. I remember the one and only time I visited his home--where he and his ridiculously pretty and popular, and thus repulsive sister were home-schooled--I was treated like an exotic specimen. "A Jew! Tell us, what is it like to be a Jew?" I was surrounded by a sea of friendly, eager faces, all awaiting tales of who knows what: abstaining from pork, speaking Hebrew, bloodletting little Gentile children to make the Passover matzot. I was stranded in a sea of beaming Protestants; Yentl Phone Home.

But for all the religious culture shock Pyotr and I had a lot in common. Acne, as I said. We liked Blues Traveler and doing theatre. We were both shy, and I think not passionate for each other. His family moved later that year, and I'm sorry that we didn't keep in better touch. I do run into his mother occasionally (his parents relocated), which seems to fill her with an irrational exuberance. I have to say, there's nothing quite like running into the mother of the boy you callously dumped after he wrote you love letters for months, only to have her say, LOUDLY, to her husband (who really couldn't care less): Oh look! It's Pyotr's little Jew! Remember her, honey? The little Jew!

I think we all fantasize to some extent that we leave indelible marks on our former loves, subtle lines of emotion that ride through our veins undetected, until they are recalled by a song or a smell, or someone's mother. And I think we hope that these marks contain essential, but incomplete elements our beauty, just enough to invite nostalgia and the smallest tug of longing.

To think that my mark is Judaism is odd and hilarious (does he hear the word "circumcision" and think of me?). But for Pyotr's world, defined as it was by Jesus and Mary and Joseph, I imagine it's a dark, deep and meaningful mark. A souvenir of his sojourn beyond the known world. And an irrepressible reminder that he made it home safely.

Reader: The final line is for dramatic purposes only. Pyotr is a lovely and open-minded man. And contrary to all indications, his mother is not an anti-Semite.

The Lost Boy

I was going to begin my review of men with my first serious boyfriend, but my cousin noted that it would be remiss of me to forget my first "love," Chas. Chas, also known to us as El Hijo con los Ojos Azules, had straight blond hair long enough to fall into his blue-green cat eyes, and a sly smile.

Chas was the first authentically cute boy to have a crush on me, skinny bones jones that I was. He liked me enough to come uninvited to my batmitzvah and grin at me while I carried the Torah through the sanctuary. He brought me a rose on my 14th birthday that died in his locker. He gave me my first french kiss during a game of truth or dare that, to be honest, I accepted with a mixture of disgust and relief. (I was relieved to be kissed; rather disgusted by what it entailed.) He sent me letters when I lived in Spain. The following summer Chas would be the first boy to really kiss me during an evening picnic. It didn't matter that he went on to kiss several of my girlfriends, each one with a incrementally larger bosom and proclivity for drug use. I was the first, and that carried some weight. Maybe I didn't fit his teenage beauty ideal, and I was the queen of Just Say No (I actually joined SADD in middle school), but Chas always liked me just a little bit.

The sad news is that Chas disappeared, and I'm pretty sure he's had problems with drug or alcohol addiction. I don't know if he went to college, and a Google search pulls up nothing, which is quite unusual today.

I don't think about Chas that often, certainly not like I think about the college years, which hardened my heart against hipsters and sensitive male singers. But unlike the later boys, Chas is still a kid in my head, and as such he elicits a sympathy and worry that originates deep in my gut. I want him to be okay, and to be alive, and to be happy.

For this reason I'm using his real nickname. It may trace a more definable path to my identity, but I kind of doubt it. Even less likely, but more importantly, if he ever stumbles across my blog, he can leave a message. This post is a little blinking light out at sea. A mooring for a man whose boyhood I hold dear.

The Ever Plant Yielding Seed

Behold, sayeth the Lord, I have given you ever plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth (Gen 1:29).

Party on, spoketh my student, who made the claim in his homework assignment today that laws against marijuana segregate people just as harmfully as racial segregation once did, and who used the above biblical quote to back his claim, just like MLK in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

On the one hand, I have to give him props for recognizing a successful rhetorical strategy and mimicking it in his own argument.

On the other hand, WHAT???

When I stop laughing over the phrase, "It fits right in when how segregation is unholy," and cease imagining ascetic potheads taking to the desert with only a bong and some Cheetos to protest their adherence to the five-fingered leaf god, I will find something pithy to say about the fact that my student compared access to drugs with a law that limited black people's access to human rights.

LOOK OUT: Now that my nuptials are really drawing nigh, I think it's time to revisit the Ghosts of Boyfriends Past. Coming soon, the Sensitive Ghoul of the Nascent Indie Rock Scene. He came, he sang, he...well you'll just have to read it now, won't you?