After that it goes into syndication and becomes part of the endless merry-go-round of pop culture foam. 

I went to a May Day party about a month ago.  Not the dancing-around-the-maypole kind of party.  But a full-on “It’s time for your inner Communist to Partaaayyy!” party. 

It was, as might be predicted, in the Mission.  Upon entering the apartment, each guest was served a slice of apple and a shot of vodka.   They were then escorted to the HUAC room. 

There they were deposed by yours truly, as well as by a woman who shares a patronymic with a certain senator from Wisconsin. 

What made people acutely uncomfortable — besides the lamp we shone in their faces — was that I had them swear on a Bible to tell the truth.  It turns out that there’s nothing that gives improv a real edge like real blasphemy.* 

What the guests did not discover until they were cleared by the committee is that their testimony was being simulcast (on Skype) to the rest of the party.  

The rest of the apartment was split into three areas:

- Russia, where the drinks were,

- Cuba, where the food was, and

- China, where there was nothing. 

Broadcast onto the wall of the Cuba room was “Soy Cuba,” a three-hour epic of the revolution.   That it was narrated in the second-person voice only made the propaganda more disturbing.

The booze consisted of something like 12 different kinds of vodka.

I haven’t drunk hard liquor like that since I was in grad school.  I had forgotten just how crazy people get on the high-proof shit.  That party didn’t wind down until 4 in the morning. 

What should not have surprised me in the least, this being a commie-themed party in San Francisco, was that everyone brought their family relics.  One guy came with “Diary of Lei Feng” posters he’d gathered as a kid when his mom had a temporary academic position in the PRC.   One woman did up her hair in a Ukrainian corona, then wore a trench coat and hawked razor blades and TP the whole night.  I brought an autographed UFW flag.  Another fellow brought the lyrics to “There once was a Union Maid” and “Solidarity Forever.”

We did, in fact, sing all the verses to “Solidarity Forever.”  That is one fuck-all long song, by the way. 

There is a lesson in all this, I believe.  Something about the guilt of liberalism, and it goes sort of like this:

All of us there that night grew up in the baroque last act of the Cold War, graduating high school and entering college just when the whole rotten superstructure of Russian Communism finally came crashing down.   And we were seduced, just a little bit, by the lure of Marxism.  By the sophomoric logical pieties of a utopian alternative to the crass meanness of Reaganite conservatism. By the promise of a fix. 

And so what did we do with our lives? 

We became non-profit entrepreneurs.  And professors.  And dutifully composting labor lawyers.  And urban planners. 

We chose to the path of amelioration, in other words.  And it brought us comfort within the gnashing maw of capitalism. 

Because we who graduated high school in 1991 knew better than anyone that Communism was a mirage.  

And so we turned our ideals into exactly the kind of soft-pedal secular WWJDism that we (properly) mocked when we had heard it preached without irony in after-school specials.

We chose compromise.  And knowing we were therefore compromised, what else is there to do but celebrate the farce?

This is why, perhaps, I was told to put away my tattered UFW flag.  Because it was too real.  Too much an actual relic of something wholly good done to improve the world.

*One guest absolutely refused to take the oath on a false Bible.  By which she meant, in her lilting Caribbean accent, anything other than the King James.  I had only the NRSV, borrowed from my host’s collection of mandatory freshman core readings.  God love Stanford, sneaking in religious education through the back door of the ”structured” liberal arts.

2 Reactie’s »

With all due apologies to William Shakespeare…

“Oh that we now had here a hundred thousand donors to do the work to come. 

That’s what political consultants say.   But no, my friends — if we are marked for the ballot box, we are enough to make all Californians proud; and if to sue, or testify, or just to live our own sweet lives, then the fewer we are the greater share of honour. 

It’s true: I wish not one couple more were married back last summer.  I do not covet money, nor do I care what fancy firms sign up to make our radio ads.  I do not quite care what silly TV spots may say — such stupidity is all beside the point.   No; our own words and deeds are all the armor, all the message that we need.  If it be bad policy to think that door-knocks and postcards are the fairest way to win, then I am the worst politician alive. 

In faith, my friends, wish not we had one more consultant on our side.  I would not lose so great an honor as to be part of your company, would not share it with one blessed couple more.  Instead proclaim it, friends, in every way you can, that those who have no stomach for for this fight, let them depart.  Sit by the sidelines.  Watch TV.  Wait for the lawyers to do our work in federal courts. 

I would not die to be in such a company as that.  Such as fear to cast their fellowship in sweaty grassroots politics.  This decision came on Memorial Day — know you what this feast day celebrates?  It  celebrates all who died to unshackle slaves; all who fell that we might be free, my friends. 

You who outlive this day, and come safe home to make a marriage, will stand a tip-toe when this day is named in times to come.  You will rouse your fellows at the name of Proposition 8.   You who outlive this day and make a marriage will yearly on the vigil feast your neighbors and say “tomorrow is Memorial Day.”  Then will we stretch out our hands and show our rings and say “This is what I won on Memorial Day.”

Old men will die, and some will forget; but we will remember the rights we won and the feats we did to win our marriages.  Then shall all our names, those that knocked on doors, or wrote a letter, be in our flowing cups sweetly remembered. 

This story will we teach our children.  And Memorial Day shall never go by, from this day to the ending of the age, but we in it shall be remembered. 

We few, we 18,000, we band of married couples.  For all today who walk with us shall be our friends.  Be they straight or gay, and all that’s in between, but this day shall queer all conditions; and gentlemen asleep tonight in Fresno or Anaheim will weep with shame, and curse themselves they were not here; holding their values cheap while any speaks that walked with us upon Memorial Day.”

Okay, yeah, it’s cheesy.  I guess I just needed to get that out of my system.  But God I wish somebody had given if not that speech, than something equivalent.

Geen reactie’s, je kan de eerste zijn »

The Southerner will say some version of: “What’s the use of educating black people?  They just hold it against you.”

The Westerner will make the following argument: that gun control is a bourgeois plot to enslave the proletariat.

For the record, the Westerner had a halfway-decent argument, one that earned something in the (ahem) high B range.

Geen reactie’s, je kan de eerste zijn »

When did they go totally corporate?

And why didn’t I make the same connection when they showed up at the Harvard Coop, back in like 2000? 

This has something, I’m sure, to do with the seductive power of branding.  Or perhaps with my naivete.  Which amounts to the same thing, of course.

1 Reactie »

Really?  Sacramento makes the front page of the New York Times two days running?  

On a slightly related note: when did the writing in that rag get so, well, dirty?  

“Is this what a bottom looks like?”

And — curse the editors!* — “Mrs. Astor answered that she would “rather have Boysie and Girlsie,” her dachshunds, than her son and his wife, whom she described as a bitch.”

*In an earlier version of the article, I swear to G*d the sentence read “whom she described with a word that might be used to refer to Girlsie.”  What, after 5 p.m. NSFW becomes okay for the general public?

Geen reactie’s, je kan de eerste zijn »

God love Marilynne Robinson for that delightful phrase.

This occured to me as I was reading Sontag; that what I enjoy most about California is the civilization.  That for all that people from elsewhere make fun of us for our empty-headedness, we are civil.  We engage in dialogue.  We read.  We pay attention. 

More than anything else, what ground away the shape and lustre and fiber of my soul with every passing day in Texas, was the total lack intellectual exchange.  More than the racism, more than the patriarchy, and way, way more than the homophobia.

Well now I can go to a bookstore, and ask for a book of essays by Sontag.  And they have it.  And then I can read, say, “AIDS and its Metaphors” and reflect upon the following passage (pp. 164-65):

“One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow.  Do what you want.  Amuse yourselves.  The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherised in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.  The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty — of the indefinite expansion of possibility.”

Ah, that I could write that well.  That’s a beautiful phrase: “connoisseurs of liberty,” all the more beautiful for what it metaphorizes.  Not “partisans of liberty,” such as we were taught to believe our founding fathers were, and which betokens effort, will, contest and believe.  Nor even “heirs to liberty;” a more problematic concept, as it might unconsciously evoke Buddenbrooks, but which has the virtue of at least signalling the need for husbandry.  But connoisseurship — observational, objectivizing, externalizing, taking that which is aesthetic and emotional and turning it to the use of some imposed system.  Fine work, Ms. Sontag.  Fine work that is all the more relevant in the light of today’s economic crash.

Or like the following (pp. 177):

“Being able to estimate how matters will evolve into the future is an inevitable byproduct of a more sophisticated (quantifiable, testable) understanding of process, social as well as scientific.  The ability to project events with some accuracy into the future engaged what power consisted of, because it was a vast new source of instructions about how to deal with the present.” 

This is…troubling to someone whose present full-time job is currently dedicated to writing a “process report.”  Especially given the sentences with which she immediately follows these.

Geen reactie’s, je kan de eerste zijn »

Lesson #1: that the scale of human drama is real, and it is personal.

One learns these lessons when the type of excuse offered by students for an absence, or missing homework, is not (as at my former institution) “I have to prepare for my debutante” or “the vice-president shot my grandfather in the face” nor even (as at the institution before that) “my daddy is having legal trouble.  You may have heard about it in the papers,” but rather such heartbreakers as: “I need to stay home because my brother’s gotten real bad into drugs,” or “I couldn’t make it to class last week because I’m living out of my car at the moment.  But don’t worry, my brother said I could crash on his couch for a couple of days.”

A couple of days?   These are the little bits where you suspect that people aren’t, in fact, making it all up.

Lesson #2: irony is alive and well in the Golden State.

The closest my mother ever came to corporal punishment was when I once referred to someone as a “spaz.”  She carefully explained to me that this was an offensively derogatory term for someone with cerebral palsy, and I should never use it again.  What, then, am I to make of the email address from one of my students that involves precisely that word?   Oh, and the answer is “yes,” in case you were wondering.

Geen reactie’s, je kan de eerste zijn »