Arkansawyer

As seen earlier this week on Will Shetterly’s blog:

It’s wonderful, isn’t it, to hit a piece of writing that runs right along ideas you’d just been mulling over and thinking of how to express? Not just your thoughts, different in some particulars, but right up next to yours:

Our congregational culture proves to be a barrier to many people who would otherwise love to be a part of us because they love what we love: the promise of personal and social transformation through free religion. Of what does this culture consist? From comments shared by Rosemary Bray McNatt, following on the heels of Paul Rasor’s lecture, this culture is a matter of aesthetic and lifestyle preferences: “We don’t own TVs, don’t like gospel and pop music and definitely don’t like rap, are unapologetic nature lovers, eat locally, say NO to shopping at Wal Mart, listen to NPR, love Garrison Keillor, read ahead in the hymnal to see if we agree with the words we are about to sing.” But, says Rosemary, “how does this allow us to encounter people whose experience of church is different? What’s their entry point into our congregations?”

Just for grins, how do I stack up against that accounting?

• Don’t like TV.
• Do like gospel, pop, and rap (and am left cold mostly by classical music)
• Love nature and get along well with my relatives who hunt
• Eat whatever’s cheap
• Shop at WalMart and have a Sam’s Club membership
• Listen to NPR for news and the occasional musical program
• Have gotten sick of Garrison Keillor and his small world
• Am more concerned about staying on pitch than the words I’m singing

Add that up and I’ve got about a half-unit of Ethnitarianism, maybe a little less.

I particularly take issue with lifestyle choices as a marker of enlightenment. The free market has a marvelous way of making collectively irrational, globally disastrous results out of the most rational and well-intended decisions, which is my pragmatic problem with substituting private choice for public planing. I also don’t like allocating virtue by what one can afford to pay for food. As I read recently:

When I discussed religion with Nicaraguans this past winter, we talked first theology, then social justice, then the specifics of social justice. Wow, did we have different priorities based on our cultural context. For them: things like food and stable government. For me, things like ethical eating and marriage equality.

This brought back an LA Times opinion piece:

I am black. I am a political activist who cares deeply about social justice issues. I am a lesbian. This year, I canvassed the streets of South Los Angeles and Compton, knocking on doors, talking politics to passers-by and working as I never had before to ensure a large voter turnout among African Americans. But even I wasn’t inspired to encourage black people to vote against the proposition.

Why? Because I don’t see why the right to marry should be a priority for me or other black people. Gay marriage? Please. At a time when blacks are still more likely than whites to be pulled over for no reason, more likely to be unemployed than whites, more likely to live at or below the poverty line, I was too busy trying to get black people registered to vote, period; I wasn’t about to focus my attention on what couldn’t help but feel like a secondary issue.

I’ll add it’s not just about black people’s issues. As Jasmyne Cannick goes on to say:

Does someone who is homeless or suffering from HIV but has no healthcare, or newly out of prison and unemployed, really benefit from the right to marry someone of the same sex?

That describes a good friend of mine, a gay man in the Bay Area, a skeptic toward the drive for gay marriage. He’s got no real healthcare and he’s HIV positive, with good health due to his current access to medication. Gay marriage doesn’t do him any good. For instance, it doesn’t get the people in his extended gay family the ability to intervene on his behalf in health care decisions.

Anyway, read the comments to Cammick’s piece and you’ll see a mindset working similar to that Anthony David describes:

Pathways definitely taught me that Unitarian Universalism, as it is practiced in most if not all of our congregations, is an ethnic religion with cultural norms. Violate the norms, and you are in trouble. Free religion only in mind but not where freedom most fully and truly resides: in the heart and in the body.

You can’t escape from culture (though you can pretend to, which is easy), but you can change it (which is hard). Here’s another aspect of that culture:

…the whole thing, from first to last, was so solemn, so earnest, so suggestive of … overfunctioning. I sensed behind it all a larger pattern—a troubling pattern—which I will call “the Unitarian Universalist superego.”

Historically, our UU superego can be traced back to our Boston Brahmin forbearers, though the form it takes today reflects great distance from those social movers and shakers and the transformation of many years. Now it is a moralism that combines masochism with workaholism. Every evil in the world becomes our problem—its very existence suggests some kind of collaboration on our part, unwitting if not witting. And since we are interrupted Calvinists who have rejected the guilt-discharging techniques of our ancient ancestors without replacing them with anything else, the sense of guilt just builds and builds. Can’t get away from it. Our backs ache from the accumulated weight. We have become guilt-grubbers. We look for ways to kick ourselves.

I personally witnessed this recently, visiting another Unitarian Universalist congregation. A good friend of mine was to deliver a lay-led sermon on “Obama’s Accountability and Our Responsibility for his Promises”. Now, that’s a good topic and could generate a good sermon. Instead, it became a laundry list of items, some positive, some negative, with that same workaholism under it all.

Anthony David then moves, as my thoughts have been moving, to Mark Morrison-Reed and “The Perversity of Diversity” (diversity being right up there with tolerance in my personal lexicon of dysfunctia). One excerpt from his talk is, I think, apropos right here:

Our earnestness is sabotaging this project because guilt always deals cruelly with vision. … Trepidation encourages timidity. We’ve got to lighten up, laugh at our mistakes, apologize for our gaffes, and forgive the inevitable blunders.

And there it is: Perfectionism. The desire to be simply good. The inability to act from fear of doing something wrong. The noted science fiction writer John Scalzi gave over his blog to Mary Ann Mohanraj  a few months back, or, as he puts it, “Mary Anne Mohanraj did me a mitzvah recently and did a thoughtful and very interesting guest entry on racism (two actually). She makes a two-part, nine-point argument in the first entry, and her final point there is:

You will get it wrong. This is what you should do.

And she tells you in the second part:

After all this — after your research and honest effort and cross-checking and passing the story by members of the community — odds are, you’ll still get it wrong. That’s okay.

Sure, it sucks when someone points out that that some minor character of yours feeds directly into a massive racial stereotype. God, that stings. Maybe you just weren’t aware of that stereotype at all, so it’s pure ignorance on your part. More likely, you were familiar with it on some deep unconscious level, inherited from the sea of racism we’re all swimming in, and it shaped your character-building without your even realizing it. Ouch.

But when this happens, and it will, the key is in how you respond to it…

If you, on reflection, agree with the criticism, then it’s good to note that publicly. Apologize, if you feel the need, although I’m often not sure that’s actually necessary. I’ve found that it’s generally enough to say, “Wow, I totally didn’t see that. Thanks for pointing it out.” And then move on, resolving to do better next time. You will almost certainly get better at creating character of color, with practice. You will mess up less often. (Or perhaps you will simply make different mistakes, and that’s all right too. Writing is in large part about the journey, not the destination.) Sometimes, if you work hard, with the grace of whatever gods help poor writers and fools (in Hinduism, I think that’s Ganesha), you may get everything exactly, perfectly, right.

Let me repeat the part to which I added emphasis:

And then move on, resolving to do better next time. You will almost certainly get better at creating character of color, with practice. You will mess up less often.

Why is this important? Back a couple of steps in her argument:

A lot of writers are hesitant to take race on — white writers are worried about writing people of color, and even people of color become hesitant about writing other people of color. I feel some of this too — in particular, I worry about writing black American characters. I worry about getting it wrong, being offensive, contributing to damaging cultural stereotypes, making people mad at me. I worry about this so much that I don’t think I’ve written a single black character yet. Coward. Yes.

(I find it fascinating that Mohanraj, whose fiction writing shows such control and mastery overlooked that she has written a black character in one of the stories on her site, a character who both cuts against the grain of some black male stereotypes and and with the grain of others, in an inconsistently lifelike way, a way that is integral to the story.)

If you start thinking about all the ways in which you can get things wrong, it’s easy to be paralyzed by that fear, to retreat back to only writing characters who are just like you, or so vague that they can’t possibly be mistaken for anyone real. But again — that makes for bad fiction. If you’re going to write well, you have to get past those fears. Your library of characters contains the whole human race, and you have both the right and the responsibility to portray any member of it in your work. You just do your best to get it right.

That’s as true of people in the world as it is of writers in the story. (This touches on my own personal theology, a faith in people and stories, not necessarily always in that order. I’ll make that digression some other day.) If you pick one thread to follow from this entry, Mohanraj’s pair would be of immense value to anyone accustomed to using story as a metaphor for life and interested in knowing the other.

As this blog entry spirals out of control, I think I’ll end with one more note from Anthony David:

What if, for example, this grace and this health were the focus of the opening worship at General Assembly, every year? Starting out, not by reciting an earnest litany of social evils and injustice, but by remembering and invoking the grace and the health in which we live and move and have our being? The President of the UUA, saying, “Here we all are, gathered together again, and the Spirit of Life is with us as well, within us and between us, leading us towards more strength and more healing and more peace. Let’s see where it takes us, in our time together. Let’s expect to be surprised. Let’s see where we go….”

Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

More empathy for an easy target:

When the signs started to become clear, that the boy wasn’t right, that he was too isolated, underdeveloped, imperfect - we laughed, we stared, we assumed. He was our first boyfriend before he became our crazy cousin - always family.

We didn’t see the pain, we saw the bizarre, and we are vultures for scandal…

When it became clear that the boy’s face we had loved had become the face of a man who didn’t love himself; we judged him. We tore at him and he fell apart. He was living proof of the impact of our rabid pop culture, an early sacrifice to the new mechanisms of fame which allow no privacy, no time to learn, no mistakes.

Get that: “the new mechanisms of fame”. Welcome to the machine.

It’s distressing when a right-wing figure is involved in a sexual pecadillo, just as it was with Mark Sanford.

First come the left-wing homophobes, explaining that he’s obviously a closeted gay. Next the gloating over hypocrisy, which (unlike the gay-baiting) has an ethical leg to stand on, until the glee begins to wear on me. Finally, the crowing over the usual resignation, or the indignation over staying in office, whatever, is okay when you’re making a moral stand on someone else’s failings:

Talking tough is easy when it’s other people’s evil
and you’re judging what they do or don’t believe

This morning, I stumbled onto someone who found the empathy for Mark Sanford I’ve been looking for:

He begins to feel that his life has no integrity, no meaning.  Everything seems flat and tasteless.  He endures this condition for months, then years.  He thinks he will never be vital and alive again, as he once was. There was a time when he had dreams, when life seemed full of possibility, but now he plods ahead, one foot in front of the other, one day at a time, day after day.

Then Mark Sanford meets Chapur.  They have a few drinks.  She smiles.  She listens.  She touches his hand.  Both his body and his emotions respond, and he is swept into a new world, a world where the flesh is tied to spirit, and he feels regenerated.  The life force that he thought was gone forever has returned, in spades.  He knows only that he has to be with Chapur.  Nothing else matters.

Not that it keeps him from ruin, but perhaps ruin is what he needs. Everyone suffers:

I had a dream; aw shucks, oh well
And its all fucked up, its shot to hell
yea-eah, my shit’s fucked up
It has to happen to the best of us
The rich folk suffer like the rest of us
It’ll happen to you.

And so what should Mark Sanford do?

I think he should choose life.  I’m not sure if Chapur is that new life, or just represents it, but he has been dead, and he has a taste of what it means to be alive, and he should follow that leading…

Right now Sanford is torn and confused.  He has to choose.  He may think that his choice is between two women, but this is not the case.  His choice is life, or not-life…

It’s a well-said piece, kind to Sanford but not uncaring about his family. Read the whole thing.

It’s a darned shame they don’t have this sort of technology in Iran. It would’ve made stopping those demonstrators a whole lot easier.

And those civil rights people in the south? They never would have been out of the observation of the police. The KKK would’ve had a field day, when their allies in the police force passed this information on. Why, if they’d had these tools, black people still might not be able to vote.

So don’t worry, citizen. It’s all being done for you!

(And for the well-connected towing companies:

I told them to build a bigger impound yard because we’re going to fill it up.

Cash flow city!)

Read the whole thing:

As several people have noted, in a sane world Sanford’s previous attempt to increase the misery of the poor people in South Carolina would be a much greater disability than his forgetfulness about his marriage vows.

This one, too:

Ken Starr set a rotten example, and it would be too bad if his critics now became his imitators.

As you can see from the Michael Yates post I linked to yesterday, many of us on the left are rooting for the people of Iran who went out in the streets to protest what they believed to be a stolen election.

Now, here’s a thought experiment for you: What do you think would have happened in 2000 if we here in America who believed our presidential election had been stolen had done the same thing?

In a very thorough post by Middle East expert Juan Cole, he gets around to that sort of question:

Moreover, very unfortunately, US politicians are no longer in a position to lecture other countries about their human rights. The kind of unlicensed, city-wide demonstrations being held in Tehran last week would not be allowed to be held in the United States. Senator John McCain led the charge against Obama for not having sufficiently intervened in Iran. At the Republican National Committee convention in St. Paul, 250 protesters were arrested shortly before John McCain took the podium. Most were innocent activists and even journalists. Amy Goodman and her staff were assaulted. In New York in 2004, ‘protest zones’ were assigned, and 1800 protesters were arrested, who have now been awarded civil damages by the courts. Spontaneous, city-wide demonstrations outside designated ‘protest zones’ would be illegal in New York City, apparently. In fact, the Republican National Committee has undertaken to pay for the cost of any lawsuits by wronged protesters, which many observers fear will make the police more aggressive, since they will know that their municipal authorities will not have to pay for civil damages.

The number of demonstrators arrested in Tehran on Saturday is estimated at 550 or so, which is less than those arrested by the NYPD for protesting Bush policies in 2004.

I applaud the Iranian public’s protests against a clearly fraudulent election, and deplore the jackboot tactics that the regime is using to quell them. But it is important to remember that the US itself was moved by Bush and McCain toward a ‘Homeland Security’ national security state that is intolerant of public protest and throws the word ‘terrorist’ around about dissidents. Obama and the Democrats have not addressed this creeping desecration of the Bill of Rights, and until they do, the pronouncements of self-righteous US senators and congressmen on the travesty in Tehran will be nothing more that imperialist hypocrisy of the most abject sort.

Now, does anyone want to try this trick at home?

If so, and I think you’re serious about making an unlicensed peaceful demonstration, I’ll help you organize it. If you’re in my neighborhood, I’ll be there. If you get carted off for it, I’ll get carted off with you.

We’ll need a slogan, and here’s the one I suggest:

Fair Elections and Freedom of Assembly are Human Rights, from Iran to the United States, from Tehran to <your hometown here>!

I think that’s worth getting arrested for.

Don’t forget to bring your kids. After all, civics classes aren’t what they used to be.

Michael Yates posts infrequently, and when he does, it’s meaty:

Economists never say much about work. They talk about the supply of and the demand for labor, but they have very little to say about the nature of the work we do. Like most commentators, they seem to believe that modern economies will require ever more skilled work, which will be done in clean and quiet workplaces, by educated workers, who will share in decision-making with managerial facilitators. We should disabuse ourselves of such notions. In the world today, the overwhelming majority of workers do hard and dangerous labor, risking the health of their bodies and minds every minute they toil.

Sound like empty rhetoric? Hardly. It’s followed up by example after example, some recent, some from well in the past, of people being worked to misery, exhaustion, and death.

Here’s another:

Soon after taking power, the Reutherites signed the “Treaty of Detroit,” a long-term contract with General Motors that gave the workers considerable wage gains, but conceded the management of the corporation to the bosses. What this meant, in effect, was that the union agreed to confine bargaining to the terrain of the labor market, demanding only that the companies pay a high price for the labor the workers had to sell. There were work rules, of course, and a worker who thought these were being violated by the company could file a grievance, which wold be handled by a union staff person, often with little input from the aggrieved member.. But the nature of the product, how the cars were produced, the speed of the assembly line, the prices of the automobiles, and most importantly, the nature of the work that the employees performed, were all off limits in the bargaining, the sole prerogative of the employer. So, the mechanisms of control described in the first quote above were beyond the reach of the union. Whatever human qualities the work had were stripped away to enhance managerial control, and whatever human qualities the work might have been made to have were not even considered. This not only alienated the workers along the never-ending assembly line, but it also denied them any chance to develop their capacities to run the industrial machine themselves.

And since Iran is the trendy topic of today:

What should we make of all this? First and notwithstanding the fact that millions did vote for the current president and have rallied behind him, this is indeed a popular uprising, aimed at creating a more democratic and less oppressive society. As such, it should be embraced by all radicals and progressives. No one should doubt that the United States has been trying to destabilize the Iranian government for many years and has agents inside the country to help this along. But the demonstrations have been too large and spontaneous to have been the product of CIA machinations. Second, we should abandon the argument that supporting the demonstrators gives aid and comfort to the imperialists. It may be that Mousavi would be as bad as Ahmadinejad, but it would be a mistake to believe that he would have become a stooge of the United States. This isn’t possible in Iran today. And in any event, Ahmadinejad’s anti-imperialist rhetoric has always rung a bit hollow, more for domestic consumption than a matter of principle. Plus, we must recognize that it is up to the Iranian people, not us, to decide what to do now. I used to work for the United Farm Workers union. Cesar Chavez ruled with an iron hand, brooking no dissent either from staff or rank-and-file farm workers. When workers pushed for control of their own union, Cesar crushed them. Was it wise for some who should have known better to stifle their concern about what Chavez was doing because his allies said that openly criticizing him gave aid and comfort to the growers? The internal collapse of the union tells us otherwise. Those who use a parallel argument now for Iran will be judged harshly by the Iranian people.

He’s got the left-wing case for supporting the protests in Iran nailed. It’s a good analysis, and I’m with it.

So: Michael Yates. Check him out.

This came to me through an email list Michael Yates and I are on:

A few years after our move, I suffered a bout of depression. I thought that this was because of some problems with our children and disgust with my job. It got so bad that I went into therapy. The therapist and I began to talk, and the psychiatrist prescribed Paxil. The talk helped, and so did the drug. The knot in my stomach went away, as did the anxiety. However, the side effects of the drug were soon apparent. Some were benign enough. I could drink as much coffee as I wanted without getting hyper and without stomach distress. I was able to concentrate on my work to a remarkable degree. One day when Karen took the kids on a trip, I stayed at my desk working intently for hours, until I looked up and said to myself, “something is wrong here.” Other side effects were not so harmless. Night sweats, overly vivid dreams, indifference to sex. And something very odd. I lost all interest in music. In fact, I could barely stand to hear it. And if I did, some song or other would keep running through my head, in an endless loop, for days at a time.

Read it.

Could you be a member of the lunatic fringe?

Here are some symptoms:

Are your comments longer than the article to which you respond?

Do you cut and paste huge amounts of text?

Do you write more than all other commenters combined?

Do you have these symptoms? Does someone you love? Get help now! It’s never too late to leave the lunatic fringe!