Karma

There were many things that charmed me about Portland when I arrived here in 1994. I believed my brother was a decent human being for one thing. I loved the coffee shops and the thrift stores. I loved the bagels at a placed called Big Bear Bagels on Southeast Hawthorne and the museum-quality cloudscapes that were on display more days than not. I loved the oranges and the bridges and, perhaps most of all, I loved downtown.

In most U.S. cities I am familiar with, the downtown core is a sore spot, one that’s been haphazardly neglected and then rescued and “improved” in various ways and according to various plans. In Saint Louis, for example, efforts to “revitalize” downtown have been underway under various logos for as long as I’ve been alive. I just turned 45, and downtown Saint Louis remains a cluster of office towers shadowed by the Arch and surrounded by blight. It’s occupied by day, but at 5:00 sharp each evening, it’s car-by-car exodus time.

Portland was quite different. In 1994, it struck me as kind of New York-ish in that downtown was a place where people lived and worked. I used to work for a law firm in one of the bank towers downtown, and every now and then a group of us would go out for drinks after work, and I remember being shocked, when the time came to get on my bike and ride home, at the sight of people on the streets and sidewalks long after closing time at the offices.

There were bars and restaurants and cafes and bookstores and record stores. There was a shopping mall that managed somehow to not look or feel quite like a mall. There were department stores and a public square where people sat on the brick steps and smoked cigarettes and watched the youngsters play hacky sack. There were light-rail trains and buses and cars and lots and lots of people on bikes. People were forever coming and going, as I recall. The sun would head down for the day, the sky would turn a serious shade of deep blue and the evenings would gradually, respectfully take up where the afternoon had left off. At all hours of the day and night, heading either into or out of downtown Portland, I rode my bicycle across the Hawthorne Bridge – which was the color of copper back then – sharing the narrow strip of concrete, in the days before designated bike paths, with people on skateboards and on foot and other bicyclists, with downtown always in the foreground or the background, and I remember, clearly, thinking: Man, this is the place to live.

I think it’s kind of shitty down there these days, but I cannot decide if my perception is based on actual shifts and changes or if it’s just that I’m older now and nostalgic for my own history.

But there are other factors. Businesses – ignoring the brutally honest example of places like Saint Louis – have moved to hideous office parks in the suburbs. The like-moneyed have set up their own city in a place called the Pearl District that, in my opinion, gives the hideousness of the suburbs a run for its money. There are empty storefronts and empty sidewalks. One thing I’ve noticed is that it’s not unusual for a space formerly occupied by a local merchant to have been transformed into a store where you buy not cell phones but cell phone plans. Liquor stores used to be considered the harbinger of urban blight. Have they been replaced in the lore of urban planning by the purveyors of cell phone plans?

Not surprisingly, the people are different as well. I remember people downtown being friendly, smiling and nodding and saying hello as we passed each other on the sidewalks. I remember people waiting for the Walk signal even if there weren’t any cars coming. I remember people waiting to reach a corner before crossing the street. I remember buses within downtown being free. And I remember people paying attention not to their cell phones and their iPods but, it seems to me, to where they were, to those who were there with them and to where they were going. If this doesn’t sound like something an old person would say I don’t know what does, but it seems to me that there was more courtesy in 1994 than there is today, more civility.

But here’s what I really set out to write about: The clipboard activists. While I appreciate the fact that they are earning a living just like the rest of us and while I am respectful of the mission, their tactics make me almost sympathetic to the constantly connected crowd, which takes some doing. The fundraisers make earplugs seem like a good idea. They stand on corners, at a distance from public entrances that are set forth by the city (talk about a bad sign) with their clipboards and game-show smiles and bug the living shit out anyone and everyone – including me – who ventures into their sphere.

And, as you cross the street and approach the side of the street that they’re on – again, as mandated by the city – the attack begins like this: “Hey man, that’s a really nice shirt you’re wearing …” I fell for this the first few times, but after the first few hundred times, I began behaving in a way I’ve always found offensive in others: I glared at them with as much hostility as I could muster. Most people I know don’t answer their phone unless they recognize the digits that pop up on their caller ID. Most people I know don’t answer the door unless they’re expecting someone. Most people I know spend the majority of the time they spend in their e-mail programs not sending or receiving but deleting.

Most people I know are not open to exchanging pleasantries with strangers on downtown sidewalks. And most people has come to include me, because I am not willing to have the time I spend downtown be dominated by fundraising tricks. So when someone compliments the shirt I’m wearing, I glare and keep going. And lately they’ve taken to muttering “karma!” as I pass. Which strikes me as an odd thing to say, given the fact that they’re chipping away, one aborted interaction at a time, at the foundation of one human’s natural inclination to engage in pleasantries with others.

Getting my head around it all

I am completely powerless over my stomach’s reaction to people from A Certain Company. After working with these people in various capacities for more than 10 years now, I have finally made peace with that fact, and here’s how.

Since September, I have been on a bit of a hiatus from A Certain Company because I’ve been doing a project for A Certain Other Company. Because I think any group of people is bound to be dysfunctional sooner or later – particularly when the purpose of that group is to market technology – it’s hard for me to really believe this, but working for A Certain Company and A Certain Other Company are two completely different experiences.

Though she is not without her challenges, since September, the woman who is my client at A Certain Other Company has yet to send me an e-mail with a red exclamation mark beside it. Since the week before last, when the project with A Certain Company began – or tried to begin anyhow – the majority of the e-mails I have received have been sent with high importance. Though I know better, I respond to those exclamation marks with anxiety. As I believe it’s intended to be, my reaction is automatic.

My job, allegedly, is to write documents based on a messaging framework, an overwrought, endlessly verbose rambling that purports to explain why making a certain purchase is the best thing you’ll ever do. The documents are to be geared toward people and companies in specific industries. So, given the fact that neither the messaging nor the industries to be targeted has been finalized, why are any of the e-mails relating to this project deemed worthy of clicking on “High Importance!” before sending? To take logic a step further, if the information I’m basing these documents on hasn’t even been finalized, why are e-mails being sent at all?

Pardon my language, but fuck if I know.

I sometimes have dreams in which I am rushing to catch a flight even though I haven’t even started packing. The emotional foundation of those dreams is this weird sense of dread that must be the aftermath of going back and forth between “There’s no way in hell I’m going to get out of here on time” and “There’s no way I’m not going to be on that plane when the door closes.” Working with A Certain Company is almost always like that. As I write this there is a torrent of e-mails going back and forth about “ETAs” and “the workback” in spite of the fact – again – that the messaging has not been finalized. To me, that makes about as much sense as demanding to know when your meal will be ready before you’ve picked out the food. Which is to say, none.

I am prone to oversimplification, but here’s my attempt at an explanation. People who work at A Certain Company, and the thousands of people like me who work with them as vendors, make everything as complex as possible because if we didn’t, well, we’d just be ordinary folk doing ordinary things for which we’d be paid very ordinary wages.

My own shortcoming in this situation is that I am neither bold nor brave enough to make it known that I’d rather not be considered for projects with A Certain Company. In asking myself why, there are a couple of possible answers. The first is that the money is good and that I’m familiar with the drill. The second, which is more disturbing to me, is that on some level I equate taking a permanent pass on projects from A Certain Company with admitting that I’m not capable. So, rather than delving more deeply into those questions, I’ve decided to do a little experiment. I’m going to stop trying to boil messaging frameworks and talking points and all the rest down to their simplest form. Instead, I’m going to try going along with the complexity junkies. My first task is to utter, as if in awe, the following line during the next project meeting: “Wow, there’s really a lot here to get your head around.” While I doubt my ability to say that convincingly, I am rehearsing.

Freedom writers

More than two decades ago, I started reading Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, which is the first of three volumes concerning the history of the civil rights movement as told by Taylor Branch. My first attempt stalled because my boss fired me. I aborted my second attempt to read the book when my boyfriend dumped me for a guy who was the guitarist for a grunge band. The book sat on my shelves for years and, since it’s hard to miss, I’d look at it from time to time and think, I really should give this another try. But it ended up in one of the many boxes of books I donated and I didn’t think about it until I saw it – again, it is hard to miss – on the three for $5 cart down at the library. Maybe this book is cursed, I thought. Maybe it has the power to usher forth disasters – disasters that turned out to be blessings in both cases, but still, disasters. But maybe the third time really is the charm. So I bought it.

The thing about Flannery O’Connor’s short stories is their simplicity: In very few pages, and using very few “big” words and even fewer plot tricks, they strike me as winding trails of nuance, one on which you cannot avoid finding something new each and every time. Which is what I’ve been experiencing with “The Geranium,” her first published work. The story can be read as a series of beautifully crafted sentences. It can be read as an account of moving from one environment into another. It can be read as a commentary on family dynamics both rejected and embraced from one generation to the next. It can be read simply as a story about missing home.

And it can be read, of course, as an analysis of how people organize their thoughts and instincts – or not – along the lines of color and race. Last week, PBS aired an American Experience documentary commemorating the 50th anniversary of the summer that some very brave young people boarded buses for a little ride through the South. I could not help but be inspired by the group that has been indexed into our history under the name Freedom Riders.

Technically speaking, desegregation had been outlawed by the time the riders boarded their buses a mere five years before my birth and an easy day’s drive from where my birth took place. But thanks to politicians whose mindsets allowed them, phenomenally, I think, to use words like “freedom” and “equality” while at the same time refusing to appear in public with a black person, it was not only not safe for black people to travel in certain states, it was not safe for black people to sit next to white people while travelling through certain states, or while stopping at bus depots in certain states. It’s an understatement, I think, to call places like Anniston, Ala., Birmingham and Jackson, Miss. war zones. That term was so apt, in fact, that many of the people on the buses drew up their wills before joining the crusade. And they referred to themselves as soldiers.

One of the risks of reading history, I’m learning, is that it’s not unlike discovering that your parents really did enjoy oral sex quite a bit: In history, the myths implode, and in reading Taylor Branch’s account of the early 1960s in this country, disappointment waits on almost every page. The Kennedys? I’ve never been a big fan, and I’m less of one now. Inspiring speeches about hope and change, I suppose, but in terms of addressing the fact that millions of U.S. citizens couldn’t vote without endangering not only their own lives but the lives of their families and friends as well, well, publically addressing the civil rights of black people was considered “belittling” to the president, who was more interested in the space program. The supreme court – which I consider a national disgrace to begin with – didn’t help: It set a horrid precedent by letting a southern man of the law walk free after beating a black man to death because it could not be proven, specifically, that the officer intended to deprive his victim of his civil rights. The lawman’s name was Screws, which would have been a stretch in the symbolism department even for Flannery O’Connor’s fiction.

Unfortunately, the black people in the story of the civil rights movement are not exactly free of blemishes. And that’s the wall I keep running into. Is it acceptable to dismiss the movement’s leaders because their bigotry toward the gays was drawn from the same well as the bigotry that drove white people in the south to resort to terrorist tactics – there’s no other way to phrase that, in my opinion – at the mere thought of being seated beside a black person at a diner? Is it okay to dismiss the actions of individuals for the sake of what the cause achieved overall? Martin Luther King kicked a man named Bayard Rustin out of the club because of an indirect threat from Adam Clayton Powell – a black U.S. congressman from Harlem – who promised to fire up the rumor mill in order to link King and Rustin “in a homosexual affair” unless King dismissed Rustin from organizing efforts. Ultimately, King did not dismiss Rustin, who had dedicated years of his life to the movement, who had stood beside King through some of his most difficult times and who was not only black and gay but a communist as well: He had someone else do it for him.

Although they clearly have no qualms about tossing the gays right off the bridge, I think Barack Obama and Bill Clinton give amazing speeches, but neither of them, in my opinion, are quite as artistic as Martin Luther King when it comes to sheer oratory octane. Which brings me to another wall: The church. The civil rights struggle in this country took root in “the black church,” which, like all churches I’ve found thus far, is where people go to absorb the finer points of division. Even when it’s preaching to millions of systematically disenfranchised souls, a Christian church will find a scapegoat, so is taking note that blatant homophobia was at play as buses full of principled young people roared across Alabama in 1961 an overreaction on my part?

I cannot decide. On the one hand, I don’t think it’s fair to hold it against the people who put their lives on the line to make it happen the fact that churches were the foundation of the civil rights movement: Black people, after all, were not exactly welcome at the city hall, or the department store or the departure lounge at the Greyhound bus terminal. On the other hand, it’s hard for me to consider the ability to splice and dice the word “equality” as anything other than a character defect – and a pretty major one at that. The ease with which Barack Obama can sell the gays to the highest bidder is inexcusable. As for Bill Clinton, I guess I do sort of make excuses for him by sympathizing with him because of the fact that there is no number of Ivy League degrees and million-dollar wedding ceremonies that will ever liberate him from his hillbilly inclinations and instincts. But Martin Luther King?

For me, the best way to read Flanner O’Connor’s story is as a configuration of three men. The main character, Old Dudley, Rabie, a black man back home in a small Southern town and another black man, one who lives in the apartment next door to Old Dudley’s daughter in New York City and who remains nameless. Old Dudley, who has left his home to go live with his daughter, is appalled that she lives in the same building with a black person, so much so that he initially assumes the next door neighbor is a servant. His mere presence is an affront not only to the order of the world but to Old Dudley’s child-rearing skills. It’s all as bad as it sounds, until it gets worse. Old Dudley clearly considers Rabie a friend – he longs for his presence, actually – but there are conditions, of course. While he’s offended by having a black person in the apartment next door, living beneath the same roof as people whose skin color is different than his own does not represent a new frontier for Old Dudley. Back home, Rabie and he lived in the same building, but it was a boarding house, and Rabie, who was more or less the maintenance man, didn’t live right next door but in a location that fit more smoothly into Old Dudley’s scheme of things: in the basement.

Accountability

There is a type of person who gets off on being brought in to either restore or impose a new level of order upon things, and I have endured the onslaught of this type of person in many settings. Of all the nonprofit organizations and “community efforts” I’ve volunteered for there has not been one that has not, sooner or later, been subjected to a savior, usually someone who (though white) really “gets” one ethnic group or another and is here to raise a little awareness among the Caucasians. In my family, one of my brothers engineered and executed a hostile takeover after our father died, claiming all along that he was acting in “everyone’s best interests.” And at the PR agency where I used to work, even though I had the good fortune to leave before being able to type on Facebook and Twitter became more valued than fluency in a language other than English, every eight months or so someone would be introduced who was really, really going guide us all down a new path that would lead to a new level of glory – one we’d never even imagined. We’d never imagined it because, as it turned out each and every time, it didn’t exist, and that was always the theme of the after-work gatherings organized for the sole purpose of celebrating the quiet termination of the once rising star’s employment.

In my experience there is only one thing at which these people truly excel, and that is damage.

I recently read an article by the former chancellor of the public schools in New York City. Not long ago he resigned and went to work for some corporation, which warranted an interview on the PBS Newshour, which didn’t make much of an impression on me one way or the other. What the article promised, though, was an insider’s view of what’s wrong with public education in this country, so I was interested. After many years at the helm, he left the schools pretty much as he found them, which is to say not good. It had nothing to do with his leadership, though. The biggest problem crippling the public schools in New York? The teachers, of course, and their damn union. The whining in the article was kind of funny, actually. Those union people got together and caused someone they didn’t like to lose an election. Sometimes they met with legislators to influence votes on specific bills. When they sensed that someone like the former chancellor was trying to undermine them one concession at a time, they refused to budge. Worst of all, they expected their seniority to be factored into their salary. The nerve, I thought.

While I believe education (not training) is as important as healthcare and a livable environment, I do not worship at the altar of teacherhood. I don’t know many teachers, but I wouldn’t trust either of the two I do know to correctly sign the pets in for their annual checkups down at the veterinary clinic, never mind run a classroom. I also think I’ve had the “it’s for the children!” card thrown in my face a few times too many by our friends at the Portland Public Schools. At the same time, the louder the anti-union drum beats in this country, and the more often it’s recited in any number of venues as a matter of fact, the more I doubt it. You do not have to take in too many pages from the history books to realize that we do not like it when people who earn working class wages organize. And thanks to some amazing marketing campaigns, even people who earn working class wages don’t like it when people who earn working class wages organize.

So, now that we’ve shipped millions of jobs to countries that do not have unions, even though corporate profits are soaring – and soaring they are, in spite of the recession - our main focus is government employees. And there is no group of public employees we seem to enjoy bashing and blaming more than teachers. For those who prefer easy targets over substance, public school teachers are a bonanza: They’re lazy. They cannot get a real job. They get the summers off. And they have pensions.

It’s the pensions, of course. Isn’t it funny how a pension used to be a pretty much standard part of job, kind of like health insurance and paid holidays? It an amazing testament to the power of marketing, it’s not just the pensions that have disappeared; logical conversations about them have disappeared as well as people who do have pensions have been cast as borderline criminals. Why? Because the rest of us allowed ourselves to be spoken for by people who were either too gullible or greedy (or both) to acknowledge that handing the country’s retirement affairs over to the stock market was and is a profoundly bad idea. If we think pensions are expensive, just wait until people my age start retiring on funds long gone in the name of extending shareholder value.

And it’s all the union’s fault, of course. The former chancellor has such a low opinion of unions, in fact, that he prefaced a quote from a member by saying it was “… surprisingly enough the best case for greater accountability …” There were two words that caught my attention, the first being “surprisingly.” Because the union folks are stupid? Because they’re hiding something? Because union people aren’t capable, usually, of making a “best case”?

On my scorecard, that’s zero points for the former chancellor and two points for the teachers and their union, the first for having the sense and stamina to fight the horrifically short-sighted idea of abolishing pensions, the second for perceiving and receiving the former chancellor as exactly what he is: a condescending, confrontational bully. Like my brother who was shocked when one of my sisters retaliated after he said he was “very surprised” that she knew the answer to a trivia question about the largest country in Africa, the former chancellor, in spite of the fact that he basically called the teachers and the union not quite a bright as himself, seemed surprised that relations between them and him weren’t so great. The fact that many people do not respond positively to authoritarian condescension seems to be a challenging concept for aspiring saviors.

The second word is accountability. In addition to accountability, his article was laced with enough corporate non-language language to banish a person not only from the position of chancellor but from ever setting foot in a classroom. There was talk about measurement and metrics, teacher value-add, standards (lots of standards, a term so vague and prone to distortion that new sheriffs cannot help falling in love with it), test data, evaluation criteria and so on and so forth. There was also a ton of boilerplate rhetoric that appears in nearly every one of these articles where someone – anyone, really, including billionaire software tycoons – tries to position himself as having the secret combination to unlock “education reform”: Our schools are failing! Our students are falling behind! Our students will not be able to compete in an increasingly global economy!

Just for the hell of it, here’s my boilerplate rhetoric: Throw the standardized testing bullshit into the fire pit. Teach the little ones the parts of speech and use the classics to teach them to read and write. Force the youngsters to master Latin. Terminate, immediately and irrevocably, the employment of anyone who uses words like “metrics” and “measurement” in buildings leased, owned or otherwise occupied by a public school district or entity. I know there’s no way to cancel the option to major in education (it’s too late for that) but I think that rather than hiring a person with an education degree to teach math, a mathematics major would be a better bet. Get as many brutal, middle-aged women in front of the classrooms as possible, and reward them for scaring the living hell out of the children as often as possible. Though not popular, fear works.

But that’s just my opinion, so back to the former chancellor. He went in to save the schools from themselves and the evil forces undermining them, namely the teachers union. For eight years he was a glorified bat boy, working for those who think it’s a good idea to teach youngsters not to think critically but to pass tests, for those who make sure the national focus remains on teachers’ pensions rather than the fact that enormous corporations do not pay their fair share of taxes, and even at the rank of bat boy this guy failed. I suppose his quitting to take a corporate job where he doesn’t have to endure the horrors of employees organized in order to protect themselves from him is a form of accountability. But why does he get a few thousand words in The Atlantic to blame everyone else for his failure?

I can't get a connection

One of the projects I’m working on currently is to write blog posts for a very, very large company. While it is not my job to look around for topics that are relevant to the target audience and then recommend them to the alcoholic, narcissistic client and her magnificently inept PR team, I must say that it’s the most enjoyable part of the project.

I do most of my trolling in the sites that are online editions of national business magazines, and man, the shit people write about, and the shit people get paid to write about. (You could say the same of me, and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but at least I have the humility – or so I tell myself – to seek out projects that are “authored” by someone else, “authoring” and “writing” being, for those of you who are unaware, two very different designations).

Recently I ended up in a blog post written by some social media pioneer who, according to his bio, is a total rock star when it comes to infusing global brands with a personal, local level of experience. How could I not read what he had to say?

Before I go on I have to digress. I recently realized something after watching Dancing with the Stars: If I like the dance being performed, I automatically believe that the dancers performing it are dancing well. If I don’t like the dance being performed, if I am unable to notice any obvious missteps, I just go ahead and imagine a few.

So I’ve been trying to keep that in mind before I read something, and it’s a bit jarring. Another blog I recently read chastised – beautifully, for the most part – people who will not shut up about how busy and stressed out they are. The only problem was that the writing was terrible. On the other hand, our social media rock star, I hate to admit, writes quite well.

But his story – his “content” – is objectionable, I think: Coffee shops that don’t bend over backwards for the laptop militia deserve to go out of business. His blog was inspired by a barista who, when the author had problems getting a wireless connection, did not respond with sufficient “urgency.” (Urgency, by the way, is a big thing with the PR people – particularly those who are passionate about social media – and in addition to the fact that in more than a decade in the field I have yet to experience anything, directly or indirectly, that constitutes “urgency,” I’m here to tell you that the more trivial the matter, the more frequently the word is used.) I resisted the urge to post a comment on his blog along the lines of “What’s the name and address and operating hours of the coffee shop in Portland that doesn’t bend over backwards for the laptoppers?” I’d go out of my way to patronize such a business. Because I am so tired of coffee shops where one of the main visual characteristics is an illuminated approximation of an apple. I miss the artwork of yesteryear, displays that were rotated in and out once a month or so.

But I started thinking about it, and I think I’m being self-centered. I go to coffee shops – to one in particular, which happens to be in my neighborhood – to get away from computers. My addiction to caffeine predates e-mail, texting, wireless connections, laptops, cell phones – all the little innovations that have come along that seem to me little more than increasingly fancy and increasingly tiny renditions of what was once called the ball and chain. I remember, vaguely, going to coffee shops to meet people, to hear music, to read. I remember going to coffee shops, in fact, simply for a good cup of coffee.

These days, I go down the street to get away from my office and my job, both of which I adamantly confine to one room in my house, one with a door that is shut when the work day ends. I have never taken my laptop with me, nor do I plan to. What’s odd to me is that I often leave the coffee shop carrying a tension that I didn’t have when I arrived. It’s a sea of laptops in there, presided over by blank, vaguely dead looking faces, made even more ghoulish by the glow from their screens. It’s quite territorial, I think, even up front at the group table, where unfriendly faces belonging to unfriendly people glare up at anyone who dares to take a seat, as if that table is a campground and the spots have been reserved and paid for.

There are power outlets along one of the walls, and it’s sort of fun to watch those who couldn’t snag a seat beside one get a bit twitchy as – I presume – their batteries wear down. They stare at the tables along the wall, anxiously, a bit desperately, trying to calculate if anyone is getting ready to leave and, if so, how quickly. It’s like watching an addict on the verge of withdrawal.

And then there are the cell phones. In an era gone by, as I understand it, protocol dictated that when you went into a saloon you placed your pistol on the table or the bar for all to see. Whether that was meant to be a concession or a threat I cannot say, but at the coffee shop in my neighborhood the tradition lives on: There is a cell phone of one sort or another sitting on nearly every table. Sometimes I make a point of glaring at people who are braying into their devices, usually about whether or not an e-mail message has been sent or received, or whether a program or application is working properly or not, or a painfully detailed accounting of who the cell phone caller has spoken to thus far, who hasn’t returned calls, who has left messages and what the messages said, what time the caller arrived at the coffee shop, what time the caller plans to leave, where the caller is planning to go next. My glaring, like everything that falls outside the wireless network, is completely and utterly irrelevant.

That’s where I ended up: I’m not even objectionable to the constantly connected crowd. I’m simply irrelevant. Although the urgency appears to have taken over almost every coffee shop in Portland like the sickness that I believe it is, I still like sitting in well-lit places with good coffee and reading books and magazines that are printed on real paper, and I really enjoy having the freedom to write a blog post of my own (at home) applauding anyone unfortunate enough to earn a living accommodating the graceless who has the balls to respond to the social media rock star’s urgency in the most appropriate manner possible, which is to ignore it.

Decisive

On Sunday night I could not help myself: I sat down with my bowl of roasted chicken and black beans and watched all 40 minutes or so of Sixty Minutes, which was devoted, exclusively, to our newly decisive president, who said that anyone who does not agree that justice was served with the killing of Osama bin Laden needs to have their head examined.

So here, for examination, is my head.

Declaring that any murder – including those brought about by the death penalty – is a manifestation of justice is a task best left to God, or to those decisive enough to be one of his or her delegates. In other words, not me. Osama bin Laden, our president declared, deserved to be killed because he was directly responsible for thousands of deaths on American soil. I cannot say one way or the other if I agree with that because I have too many questions, beginning – and ending – with this: If that’s the measure of justice, how broadly, or narrowly, is it applied?

So leaving behind the question of whether or not I agree with the president, I’m assuming that my refusal to take his word on the justice issue means that I need to get in line for an examination.

I thought the president’s performance on Sixty Minutes was deplorable. I thought it was cynical, I thought it reached down and stroked the lowest chords of blind nationalism and I thought it was embarrassing.

One of the most troubling parts of watching our president transition from “nuanced” to “decisive” is that the theme of the entire performance (and by performance I do not mean Sixty Minutes but the presidency itself) comes across as painfully macho. I wish I would have counted the number of times the president used the word “guys.” Those guys and these guys and our guys and on and on it went. Most importantly, the president said not with words but with a truly sickening sneer on his face and in his voice and his churlish laughter, was that our guys, who really are awesome, as they were banging around in the dark and kicking down walls managed to “retrieve” a lot of very valuable paperwork. Had John Wayne been tuned in on Sunday evening he would have had to change his undies. The president was that good.

In case anyone missed the male angle, the show included clips of the president actually speaking directly to the guys, lots of them, at military bases. “Job well done!” he bellowed, swerving a bit into that good old Negro dialect. And then, again, “Job! Well! Done!”

Running a close second on the offensiveness scorecard was the reference to Geronimo. The president, being decisive and all, let that one out as if it were a silky, odorless fart: It didn’t stink and he didn’t flinch. Was that his way of currying favor with those who dismissed the reaction to referring to Osama bin Laden with the code name Geronimo as “political correctness”? Hell if I know. What I do know is that a black male born and raised in the United States who thinks it’s okay to legalize discrimination against gay people has no bottom line, so exploiting a fairly easy target for the sake of political gain is to be expected, but Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden? Did neither of them object to the code name or are both of them also … decisive?

Then, as a way of acknowledging the importance of Mother’s Day I suppose, the president said that not letting the officials in Pahki-stahn know about the mission wasn’t a particularly difficult decision. That’s because he didn’t even tell his family. So, if we are to take the president at his word, a major factor of some pretty significant diplomacy issues and tactics and strategies is whether or not the president’s wife and his daughters have been apprised of the action plan? I wonder how people in Pahki-stahn – a U.S. ally, from what I hear – feel about that. Not good, would be my guess.

In spite of his new decisiveness, the president did, as always, provide a bit of ammo for the Republicans. The delivery of justice to Osama bin Laden, the president said, was a project that began last August. So, to “get” one guy took nine months? (For the sake of comparison it took only 14 months – assuming he began the project on his very first day in office – to get what he called healthcare reform through the U.S. House of Representatives.) Those nine months must have been riddled by lots of nuance, lots of cerebral elitism put forth by the guy formerly known as the professor in chief. I can just hear a Republican hopeful or two declaring that not only does the nine months it took to complete the mission not speak well for government efficiency or national security, it’s hardly decisive.

Mother's Day

Last weekend the man who has become the face of modern terrorism was shot to death in retaliation for a series of acts carried out almost a decade ago. The president had barely finished making his announcement last Sunday evening before the celebrations began. As is often the case when the fans honor the winning team, there were herds of people shouting slogans, waving flags and hoisting hastily made signs high into the air for all the world to see. We’d been waiting for this for 10 long, war-torn years and it was, at long last, party time.

But not at my house. I don’t think I can honestly use the word depressed to describe what I felt last week, but it was close. Despair, perhaps, or despondent. I apologize for being a party pooper, but when huge crowds start rejoicing in victory over some dark and evil force out there in the world, I get scared. I think that crowds of people united by a common mission – especially when it involves an enemy – are horrifying. It’s at the heart of my aversion to college football, and it’s at the heart of my reaction to almost anything that includes uniforms and weapons.

For the most part I avoided the news for a few days. I heard snippets of lust for the Navy Seals on talk radio, and that was all that was required to switch to the jazz station. By the middle of the week, though, I tuned in, and there was one of the country’s most visible PR executives broadcasting from a prime piece of real estate where two enormous office towers once stood. The president, I learned, had flown to New York to lay a wreath before a tree. He met with a group of firefighters. He hugged a few children whose mothers or fathers – though mostly fathers – had died right there on that plot of American soil. There was a boy who was in kindergarten back in 2001. Some children lost a father that day, Katie Couric explained, but this boy, who is now a teenager, his mother knew the firefighters: He lost several fathers that day. And he’s made a movie about it. Katie Couric spoke with the boy’s kindergarten teacher, who, with tear-glazed eyes, confessed that he felt like he’d failed the boy because he’d had no idea how deeply impacted the child had been.

In many ways PBS was more disappointing. Charlie Rose was away so Brian Williams from NBC filled in for him, which struck me as odd but perfect, and hosted a presidential historian, a writer for the New Yorker magazine and a reporter from Time. The historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin, was welcomed not as a scholar but as the proud mother of a U.S. veteran. How will the mission in Pakistan help or hurt the president? Oh, she said, if anyone had any doubt that he’s the man for the job of president, this mission has made it obvious that he is indeed the one. And it will be good for his place in history. Taking military risks, she explained, always helps define a president when history is being drafted. Just look at what it did for Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.

Yes, I thought, just look.

But how did she feel, asked Brian Williams, as a mother? Quite proud, she said. Her son, right after graduating from Harvard, signed up to serve the country, and while it scared the hell out of her, he came back a leader. A leader of what or of whom she didn’t say, but a leader all the same.

I suppose the writer from the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik, was on to provide us all with a New York perspective, for this is, when all is said and done, a celebration by, for and about New York. Swooping into Pakistan in the dead of night to kill the terrorist is a good thing, the writer explained, because there is a liberal kind of violence, and that’s necessary. That certainly got me thinking: Liberal violence.

On the PBS Newshour the consensus of opinion was that the killing of Osama bin Laden represents a shift from having a president known for nuance and being “too cerebral” to a president who is more decisive. The “professor in chief,” the commentators gloated, is a thing of the past.

My problem with this – the root of my despair, if you will – isn’t necessarily that the country seemed to have seamlessly shifted into pep rally mode last week. It’s the absence of any perspective other than that put forth by those who come across not as journalists and historians but as cheerleaders.

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s son came home a leader. Good for him, and good for her, but what about the mothers and fathers whose sons and daughters not only didn’t come home as leaders but didn’t come home at all? How did they respond to our newly decisive president? And in terms of violence of a liberal persuasion, it’s one thing for a New Yorker writer to smugly proclaim the okay-ness of that while sitting in a television studio. But what about people in the neighborhoods in places like Iraq and Afghanistan whose homes and hospitals and schools have been blasted and burned and bulldozed? As they bury their dead children – who are not leaders, and never will be – do they remind themselves that the violence that killed the youngsters was a liberal kind of violence? Or do they wonder if it was more along conservative lines?

The world is connected in ways it never has been before, so I am really curious to know why the spectrum of voices and faces and stories on the television doesn’t include more colors. I know – trust me, I know – that nuance is not in favor these days, but I’d like a little of myself. Does anyone have any questions? Or concerns?

On Sunday, on Mother’s Day of all days, I finally finished A People’s History of the United States, and it was Howard Zinn – not Katie Couric, or Brian Williams or even Jim Leher – who answered my question: I didn’t hear tales taken from other narratives last week because I’m not meant to hear them, and I’m not meant to hear them because acknowledging another point of view would jeopardize the storyline, and in a country whose economy is based on military might fueled by nationalistic fervor, the storyline is important.

And here is how Howard Zinn helped me out of my funk. Just as we were led to believe last week that the country was on the verge of celebratory delirium, so too were we led to believe more than 30 years ago that Ronald Reagan was elected president “by a landslide.” Which, if you look beyond the criminally simplified storyline put forth by Katie Couric’s predecessors, is complete and utter bullshit. Barely half of the voting-age population took part in that election, and of those votes cast barely half voted for Reagan. So that’s 27 percent, and if that constitutes a landslide, we’re on seriously shaky ground. The statistics from 1994 are almost identical: Two years into Clinton’s first term, the Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, attained a majority in the U.S. House of representatives, which was branded “a revolution.” After being reminded of these falsehoods, in the chapter titled “The Unreported Resistance,” I felt better. I don’t think the majority of the people in this country went berserk last week because “we got ‘em!” I think what happened was that those who did were fast tracked onto the evening news. Furthermore, I don’t believe that those of us who have serious doubts and the serious questions to go along with them are some sort of strange minority. We’re just off message because we have not yet erased the word “justice” and replaced it with the word “revenge.” So we’re off the air.

As joyful as that realization was, I was sort of ashamed of myself, it being Mother’s Day and all. That’s because my own mother was one of the most cynical, jaded people I’ve ever known. I remember her folding the newspaper and then setting it aside or turning off the television and saying, to no one in particular, “What a bunch of malarkey.” And I allow myself to slip into a bit of decline because of what’s on the network news? Did I learn nothing from her?

Weedscaping

On Tuesday morning, I officially surrendered any and all hope of achieving legitimacy among Portland’s gardening class. I bought a lawn mower, which I plan to use to impose just a little bit of order on the lawn that insists on growing on my little plot of earth here. Most of it is weeds, and while I once entertained fantasies about having one of those painfully perfect corner lots, the kind where each plant has a story, the kind that attracts birds and butterflies and parents with young children and old ladies, the kind that’s a conversation starter, I have given up not just the battle but the entire war.

Part of my shift toward weedscaping, of course, is pure laziness. I can fill the yard debris barrel in less than 10 minutes. Then it sits in my yard for two weeks, when it’s picked up by Waste Management and hauled off to be dumped somewhere else, temporarily dormant seed pods and all. By that time whatever I’ve tried to remove has come back twice as strong, and so I start again. Others can have my share of that glory. I’m tired of it.

In addition to the laziness, though, I have started to wonder about the nuts and bolts of the gardening craze. Plants are pretty pricy, for starters. Good luck finding anything under $20 at Portland Nursery, which is to gardening what Powell’s is to reading, including the piousness.

Then come the varieties. I don’t think I’m alone in this sentiment, but I am one of the few people I know who will admit that I don’t like endless options. I’d like fewer of them, in fact. I have a tree with red leaves in my yard, a Japanese Maple, I believe it’s called. It’s beautiful, I think, and I’d like a couple more for the side yard. So last weekend, when the sun was out and the temperature was very close to 70 degrees, a friend of mine and I went to Portland Nursery and had a look. And sure enough, there were more varieties than I cared to count. “I just want a goddamn maple tree with red leaves,” I told my friend. He said, “You have to be more specific than that.”

Which reminded me of a question I’ve been toying around with for a while now. Why are we coming up with new incarnations of plants at all? There aren’t enough growing here already? Does crafting a new variety compromise those that already exist? Is there an ecological reason for coming up with new plants each year or is it simply marketing? I’ve heard a thing or two about how companies like Monsanto play good with seeds and such, and it’s scary. Or do we just really enjoy imposing our will on a process that nature is obviously more qualified to manage?

And then there are the chemicals. For such an organic, sustainable town, there sure are a lot of commercials for weed killer and fertilizer on the Portland airwaves. Another thing that’s odd about Portland is that for all our talk about food equality and addressing food deserts and fresh and local food for everyone, freshly prepared and local, it seems to me that most of what’s grown and sold and hyped around here is strictly for show.

Speaking of show, another strange thing I’ve noticed over the past eight years is this. Though it might seem reasonable, assuming that a plant for sale at a nursery in Portland is one that will thrive in the zone that Portland is in, don’t count on it. Why do people grow plants here that require daily watering and elaborate wrappings during the fall and winter followed by mulching and fertilizing? I have no idea.

Anyhow, my lawn mower is pretty nice. It’s fairly small and very quiet. I mowed down part of the yard on Wednesday afternoon, and when it stops raining I’m going to do some more, operating – literally and figuratively – under the belief that if a plant resists pulling and digging and cutting and can, in many cases, grow right through the tiniest of cracks in concrete, there’s a pretty good chance that it belongs there.

Unity

In a way that is as horrifying as it is exhilarating, the experience of reading a book and then hearing, seeing and reading the themes from the book all over the news is not a rare one. In January I finished the chapter from A People’s History of the United States concerning the degradation and disempowerment of organized workers, and I had barely put the book back on the coffee table when the governor of Wisconsin decided that it should be illegal for state employees to peacefully assemble for the sake of contract negotiations.

I try to not have multiple books going simultaneously, but a few months back I put a book on hold at the library – Death of the Liberal Class, by Chris Hedges, which argues in a mostly compelling way that the left-leaning territory has been ceded to corporate conservatism not by right wingers like Ronald Reagan but by the liberal establishment itself, which sought to cozy up to the power and the money and, in the process, kicked the socialists, the communists, the collectivists and all of the poor straight out to that proverbial curb. When I got the e-mail last week telling me that the book was waiting for me, I got it, and on Sunday night, believe it or not, I was reading about the erosion of our ability to engage in thoughtful, meaningful dialogue – not to mention the complete absence of grace – thanks to the hyper-masculine underpinnings of a society wired, it would seem, for war. It’s a form of porn, says the author, an infusion of violence into the once-sacred realms of love, compassion and empathy.

Though his work was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, Chris Hedges was fired from the New York Times for refusing to assume a posture of “objectivity” when it came to our war on terror. So it’s only fair to say that he’s probably a little bitter that Tom Friedman, who also reports for the New York Times, has created a niche for himself, traipsing from one talk show to the next to weigh in with his wisdom. It’s also fair to say that I, on the other hand, have never met Tom Friedman, worked for the New York Times or won a Pulitzer, but I’ve seen Tom Friedman on Charlie Rose several times, shamelessly stroking whomever happens to appear to be on the side that will eventually win, and if this guy represents the liberal point of view, we are in trouble. Don’t take my word for it, though. Here, speaking of porn, from May 30, 2003, is a bit from one of Tom Friedman’s many visits to Charlie Rose’s studio:

What Islamic extremists needed to see, Friedman told Rose, “was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think, you know we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna let it grow? Well, suck on this.’ That, Charlie, is what this war is about.” [Death of the Liberal Class, page 156]

My first problem with the breaking news that interrupted my reading on Sunday night was the president’s referencing the weather in New York City on the morning Sept. 11, 2001. Though it was but a warm up for the onslaught of much more, the president went on to crank out a few notes on the national violin with yet more greeting card sentiments about how some people will never see their dad again, and others will be forever haunted by the empty place at the kitchen table, places once graced by sons and daughters lost on that terrible day that we’ll never, ever forget.

It got worse, as it often does. We got him, the president said, and while we should resist the temptation to think of this as the end of terrorism, we should all join hands and hearts in unity … like we did in the days following Sept. 11, 2001. Monday, the president continued along those lines, referencing not only the Big Day but also the shooting of the congresswoman in Tucson and the tornadoes in Alabama. I cannot speak to the shooting and the weather, but massaging a terrorist attack into something that brought us all together is so distasteful to me that the word “offensive” doesn’t begin to convey it. If waving flags and bellowing crude platitudes at “flash mob rallies” and barfing thoughtlessness like “We got the bastard!” and “NAVY.SEALS.ROCK!” all over Facebook in celebration not only of killing someone but, even more astoundingly, to ring in the dawning of a safer era in the U.S., I need not only a new dictionary but a new language to go along with it.

But back to the president’s announcement on Sunday night. I have always enjoyed the way Barack Obama says certain words. Pakistan, for example. I the way I say it is pack-is-tan, with the emphasis on pack. Obama says pah-kee-stahn. When he gets going on religion, as he often does, he says the word Muslim as if it begins with the word moose: mooselum. To which I can only think, every time he says it, Jesus Christ. And my favorite is Taliban. I say it with a soft a and an equally soft i. Our president, on the other hand, says the beginning of the word Taliban with the word tally: Tally-ban. As in, numbers and scores.

On Monday, for the sheer hell of it, I decided to look up some numbers. I wanted to know how many employees of the U.S. military were killed. Via the Washington Post, which maintains a tally, here’s what I found. As of Feb. 20, 2011, 1,461 U.S. soldiers have died in Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan). For Operation Iraqi Freedom, the total number of fatalities for U.S. military personnel is 4,424. So if history repeats itself, as it almost always does, it will not be long before people like Thomas Friedman and his bud Charlie Rose and many of their friends begin silencing anyone who dares to put the operation under the return-on-investment microscope, which would require that the cost of the operation be measured against its value. So while the flags are still being waved and while the rallies are still going strong, I’d like to throw a preemptive strike, if you will. In the nearly decade-long pursuit of one individual – if that is indeed what the mission has been – the lives of 5,885 U.S. citizens were extinguished. Join hands with me, friends and neighbors, because apparently that’s what we call victory.

Nobody new

Even before the “red-letter moment” Sunday night, here is a little something from my Sunday morning reading material:

… Petraeus should not have been chatting with Katie Couric about policy, or trying to convince the American public of anything. The absence of so much as a raised eyebrow among journalists showed how much the boundary between strategic policy, which is supposed to be the realm of the civilian commander in chief and his advisors, and military tactics, which are the province of the armed forces, had already eroded. (Harper’s Magazine, May 2011, page 34)

Something is clearly wrong with our relationship with the military, and the problem runs deeper than arch missives to the troops, presumptuous TV-interview banter, or the propriety of combat-unit questionnaires. Our generals are getting bolder … The military isn’t trying to ramp up spending. It’s interjecting its voice into the sphere of statecraft as it never has before. (Harper’s Magazine, May 2011, page 35)

I learned to appreciate the sheer power of verbs from a professor whose classes I took at Portland State University. Verbs, he told us, move the story forward. I agree. And operating with that definition, last week was quite a verb.

Tornadoes wiped parts of Alabama right off the map. A couple of unremarkable youngsters stood before billions of viewers in a ceremony that cost millions of dollars and did at least their fair share of the heavy lifting toward ensuring that the storybook continues for many more chapters. A big blastoff into outer space was scheduled and then, suddenly, cancelled. I was relieved that the launch was postponed because I had, for no good reason, a horrible feeling about it. There was, of course, a lot of hoopla over the president’s birth certificate, and while I think almost anything Donald Trump says is absurd, I cannot help but wonder why the president waited until last week to come forward with it. To me it seems like a pretty simple thing to do.

Instead, Barack Obama did what he does better than anyone else in the business: Speaking in the voice of the national disciplinarian, he played the role of the man on the stage holding the hat, the hat itself and the rabbit that emerged from the hat without a single misstep. He dismissed the entire issue of his birth certificate as nothing more than a distraction staged by his opponents to … what? What’s the verb there?

It seems to me that Obama was the chief beneficiary of last week’s distraction, because lost in the fog and the fuzz left behind by Queen Elizabeth and Mother Nature and Congresswoman Crosshairs’ heroic husband – the astronaut – hid the not-so-sexy story about the sinister (in my opinion) merging and blending and mixing up of two entities that should, again, in my opinion, be completely separate: national defense and national intelligence.

I suppose you could argue that the mostly quiet shuffle that took place last week is a smart move on Obama’s part. Maybe putting a general in charge of the country’s premiere intelligence agency while making the former chief intelligence bureaucrat the new secretary of defense is a savvy way of “streamlining” what we know and what we do.

I’d argue that it’s yet another sign that the verb that drives our national narrative forward is a word that is not a verb at all but perhaps should be: war.

Katie Couric, thank God, will soon leave her post at the helm of the CBS Evening News, which she’s done her best to transform into the PM version of Today, but last week, while she was still in charge, she was dumbing down the national conversation by interviewing the royal family’s event planner and awarding, on the air, special seating to a family that, in spite of the fact that it appeared to not have a pot to piss in, had scraped together the cash – or the credit – to travel to London for the wedding.

And as she was doing that, Jim Lehrer, who has not – again, thank God – announced his retirement, made the rearranging of the defense-intelligence seating chart the second story on The Newshour – the first being the tornadoes. In an admirable attempt to analyze the news, he had three guests seated there at his table. There was a man from the army, a woman from some foundation or another and a third man whose affiliation I did not catch.

Each of the three guests was given a minute or two to offer observations about the reshuffling, and the fawning put forth by each made me wonder if the guests had gotten a little mixed up, a little confused, and imagined for a moment or two that they were not on with Jim Lehrer but with Charlie Rose. The president could not have made better choices, said the guests. These guys are so talented, so smart. Man oh man, the current secretary of defense, now there’s a tough act to follow, but Obama really came through on this one. Wow, wow, wow!

To which Jim Lehrer said: Really? None of you have any concerns about any of these appointments? Silence. None at all?

It was at this point that the guests probably realized they were not on with Charlie Rose, because Jim Lehrer – whose expression says more than an entire presidential speech – unleashed his glance, which I think should be trademarked if not patented. It’s like a smile, only it’s not. It’s kind of upside down, but it shifts and transforms in mere seconds. It is not a look of endearment or tenderness. Last week, slowly, reluctantly, the guests began to waver, cracking a bit – as sycophants tend to do when they sense that the tables are about to turn against them. Well maybe, one said. Followed by: You know, my one area of even the slightest concern … And so on and so forth.

I don’t mind admitting that I didn’t really pay attention to what the guest experts said beyond that point, and here’s why. They had to be scolded by Jim Lehrer to offer up even the most paltry bit of critical analysis. Which says to me that their commentary is more about self-preservation and self-promotion than anything else.

And that’s fine, because the reason I tune into The PBS Newshour is not usually for the guests but for Jim Lehrer and Gwen Ifill. Jim Lehrer delivered in his usual, simple manner, with a single observation that to me explained everything: There’s nobody new in this story.