Motown in the mail

I was going to say I’m on another Motown bender, but that would imply that I’d abstained for a bit, and I have not.

A while back I got an Amazon gift card. I’ve received many of these over the years – they’re so unimaginative that they’re perfect for people in the PR biz – but for some reason I had never used one until this month.

The book group my sisters and I do is resuming shortly after a summer hiatus. We were going to read yet another Russian novel, this one by Bulgakov. For some reason, it was in very short supply at Powell’s and cost considerably more than War and Peace, which I thought was ridiculous. Also, it was labeled “new” even though it clearly was not. I think that’s what got me clicking around on Amazon. I loathe the concept, but man was it fun, sitting here looking at all sorts of shit. It’s my Tulsa sister’s turn to pick the book, and she changed her mind about the Russians and chose instead One Hundred Years of Solitude. So I selected that book and added it to my cart.

Then I started looking at the music.

I really do strive to buy locally. While I think the management of Powell’s is deplorable, I do think that with an institution like that in town, it’s almost unforgiveable to buy books online. But when it comes to music, it was a guilt-free experience for me. In spite of how cool “the scene” is here in Portland, I’ve never had much luck at the record store. I think Music Millennium is painfully precious, and for some reason I usually walk out of Everyday Music with something that I’m not really wild about, which is, in all fairness, not the store’s fault. Basically I don’t buy much in the way of music.

Every time I hear something new – new to me – by Gladys Knight, I am pretty much floored. I have no idea how musical careers are managed or mismanaged or anything, really, about her personal story except that she’s from Georgia, but she – alone or with her Pips – embodies for me the term underrated. I’ve shared this observation with many people, and many of them have agreed, and many more have confessed that, in spite of their quiet admiration, they don’t own a single thing by Gladys Knight. I don’t either, and even though I ordered a CD of hers from Amazon, I still don’t. I ordered it for the upcoming birthday of a friend who says that he needed a week to recover after seeing her perform in Las Vegas.

I ordered some music for myself as well, of course. I keep a list of groups and individuals in the back of one of my notebooks, and I put two of them in my Amazon shopping cart before I clicked my way into the credit card part of it. When I listen to a new CD I’m always a little nervous. What if it turns out to be crap? What if the one song on it that I know turns out to be the exception? The only exception on either of the CDs I bought for myself are the last tracks on each, which are live recordings of some Motown gala.

Other than that, I hit the jackpot with both David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks. I cannot say which I prefer, nor do I feel obliged to. Eddie Kendricks does seem to have an edge in the voice department, but it must be said that David Ruffin – or his handlers, or managers, or perhaps just him – regarded the backup singers in the same way that I would if I had been the producer, and that is as anything but backup. Eddie Kendricks recalls, at moments, Marvin Gaye, while David Ruffin does not. I’m not a music critic, so I’ll spare you a song-by-song, but I did read the liner notes and learned that Eddie Kendricks is from Alabama and David Ruffin is from Mississippi. Like many others who emanate from my music collection, both took their unbearable sadness to Detroit, where they committed it to perpetuity for people like me to enjoy – if I may use that word – half a century later.

The cycles

One of the more maddening aspects of the deterioration of what I used to call the news is that the elections seem to never end. While I usually enjoy ridiculing people in specific industries who make up new terms that either hammer home the critical importance of whatever product or service it is they’re selling or that are simply bantered about to make those who use them appear more informed than the rest of us, I must admit that the news people’s coining of the phrase “election cycle” strikes me as completely appropriate. I started watching a lot of television back in the autumn of 2008, and I was stunned when the television hosts and hostesses were unable to contain themselves: Before Barak Obama even walked onto a stage in Chicago and made his victory speech, they were referencing “the midterms.” And once Michele Bachmann emerged as the punchline to that particular joke, we were – in the words of Gwen Ifill, unfortunately – “ … off to 2012.”

It’s an election cycle alright, and it never stops. I have no idea what the people on Fox have to say because I don’t have cable, and for that I am grateful. The people on PBS – who I consider a few ranks above the rest of it – are bad enough.

Every Friday night, the two columnists sit down with Jim Lehrer and analyze, vote by vote, strategy by strategy, what various elected officials are up to and cram it into the context, if you will, of the next, or current, election cycle. And then feign surprise – and often disappointment – that Washington is no longer the way it was back in the good old days when the lions sat down and drank and smoked cigars together after punching each other in the head over at the corporate headquarters – allegedly – of democracy. Why is it not like that anymore? Why has compromise become a bad word? Or, in the tone of astonishment that only Jim Lehrer can deliver, Why are they acting like that? Every week they wonder and ponder and pontificate, and every week I think to myself: You, for starters. And Facebook. And Twitter. If your next election cycle begins before you’ve made your acceptance speech for the election cycle you just endured, it seems to me that our elected leaders do what any halfway sensible person would do: They run. For election.

Gwen Ifill is one of the best journalists on television, in my opinion, and even she is deplorable when it comes to ensuring her own job security not by creating stories she can report exactly, but something along those lines. Every Friday night she sits down with a group of reporters – some of whom I think are worth listening to, many of whom I think reflect poorly on her and on PBS as a whole – and rehashes two or three major stories, sprinkling each with brilliant insights about how everything from the congressmen’s crotch shot to the situation in Libya will impact the next … election cycle.

It occurred to me on Friday night that the main effect of this new (to me) and improved way of covering the news is that it degrades electoral politics to the level of reality television. They needed someone to counter Barak Obama’s initial popularity and there, lo and behold, was Sarah Palin. Then we had to have a little conflict in that story – it was, after all, getting “down to the wire” back in 2009, a year before the midterm elections, three years before the 2012 presidential election – so suddenly a woman running for office in Delaware who had had some sort of brush with witchcraft made headlines around the world. So too did a woman in Nevada who, in spite of the fact that she was running for a seat in the United States Senate, refused to meet with reporters. And a woman in California, who in spite of her status as corporate heroine and record-breaking campaign spender, failed to even come close to her competitor even though the race was promoted – and I do mean promoted – by the television analysts as quite close, which, once the novelty of an Internet empress deciding she was meant to govern California wore off, it simply was not.

A couple of months ago, with nearly a year and a half to go (by my calendar anyhow) before the 2012 election, Gwen Ifill seemed relieved that the Republican race was “finally” taking shape. It was as if she’d been on the verge of getting worried that nobody would run.

And on Friday night, while dissecting the impending showdown between Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, Gwen Ifill and her guests had a few aw-shucks laughs over how much they “love election years.” And all I could summon by way of response was: I used to love them, too.

An afternoon with the drinkers

It is still a little strange to be in situations where drinking is the main event and not drink. Last weekend I went to a fundraiser at a tavern in my neighborhood – a beer festival – not to drink but to sit at the neighborhood association’s table, where I gave away t-shirts, answered general questions about the meetings and collected information from people who want to be on the mailing list.

It was sort of fun, actually. Saturday was the first day it’s gotten above 90 degrees in Portland this year, and the heat has been so absent this summer that it felt exotic to sit there and sweat. Since I worked the first shift, I had to set up not only the table but the elevated awning that shades it. The awning was actually easy to set up – which was a pleasant surprise – but it did take two people. So I asked the woman in the next booth, who was selling jewelry. As I was folding the shirts so that they could be arranged in a cascade pattern with only the logos showing, the woman and I struck up a conversation. She said to me, for some reason, “I am disabled!” Her fiftieth birthday is coming up, she went on, and three days before that she’s going in for her Social Security hearing. Then we started talking about her business. I am always curious when I see people selling jewelry at festivals. Is that how they earn a living? Can you earn a living doing that? I could not stop staring at her breasts, which would not be ignored.

She told me many things about the custom jewelry business. The third most interesting is that everyone has a mother, so I had no excuse to not buy something from her. The second most interesting is that she doesn’t buy her own raw materials – a friend goes out and does that for her, and she works with whatever falls out of his bag. The most interesting thing is that she makes the bulk of her income from festivals, at which she camps and that she travels to and from on her “chopper.” I was drinking ginger ale with a lot of ice that I’d had to go inside to the bar to get, and she looked at my cup and told me that she always had admired people who go straight for the good stuff. We had a moment there, the two of us.

In addition to being pretty much trashed by 1:30 in the afternoon, most of the people at the brew fest were what I’d call trashy-ish. Here’s my take on it: They are the exact opposite of “the creatives” and other assortments of hipsters that seem to think they founded Portland and, at the same time, they are exactly what “the creatives” and the others want so desperately to emulate. It’s a gloriously mind fucky thing to behold, I think.

I watched people arrive who had clearly already started drinking, and I watched them try to cover up that fact as much as possible. I saw people buy three large containers of beer at a time even though there was no line. Many people came to the neighborhood association booth for the shade, and as they stood there they rambled incoherently about the weather, their cars, the bands that were coming. Most of them looked a little unhinged, I thought, a little desperate. The people in AA, who are wrong about many things, like to say that you should never be too comfortable in your sobriety, and while I can see the logic of that to a certain extent, I cannot even begin to imagine.

My civil rights bender

For many reasons, the saga of black people in the United States has always interested me. When I was a very small child, black people lived and worked and went to school in a place and manner that was completely separate.

That separateness came to me recently as an answer – or the beginning of an answer – to a question that keeps presenting itself in what I think may be a civil rights bender. Earlier this year I started and actually finished a book called Parting the Waters, the first in a trilogy chronicling “America in the King years” by Taylor Branch. Now I’m well into the second book, Pillar of Fire, which welcomes onto the stage the enchantingly cause-and-effect character of Malcolm X. At the same time, over the past few months I watched a PBS special commemorating the 50th anniversary of the freedom rides, parts of which gave the U.S. and the world a startling view of just how skillfully the word “equality” had been parsed in places like Anniston, Alabama and Greenwood, Mississippi. Then I watched a documentary that was produced in (I believe) the 1980s called Eyes on the Prize.

And now, one dreadful episode at a time, I am watching Roots.

Roots aired for the first time when I was in grade school. In fact, it was aired shortly after the school I’d attended beginning in kindergarten was split down the middle in what must have been the result of some highly localized pulling of various strings. One half of the school remained there and the other half was sent to a new school for the sake of desegregation. The half of the school that remained were the households in a little Catholic borough called Shrewsbury. The house where I grew up was on the new-school side of the boundary, a boundary drawn up by people whose names and faces were not, to the best of my knowledge, ever made public. It was the middle of the 1970s, we were sent off to the black school, and we were terrified.

As I read these books and watch the images on the television screen, it hits me that neighborhoods were torched and people were killed and the jails were crammed way beyond capacity over what boiled down, in my opinion, to seating charts. Many people did not want the particulars of their daily routines to overlap or intersect in any way, shape or form with the routines of black people. When I went to my new grade school in fourth grade, I remember thinking that black people were from a world so separate from mine that it was foreign. They had different dogs. They drove different cars. Their music was different, and the way they talked was, while intriguing, completely baffling. I hate to criticize my parents, but I have questions about why the separateness issue wasn’t discussed and explained at our dinner table. I had no idea that people were being strung up in trees two states away because they had the audacity to think they had the right not only to go to school but to register to vote.

As my bender has progressed, I have become almost bored with the black point of view, and by that I mean it’s as clear as crystal what motivated them: For centuries black people had lived under the rule and law of terrorists and they were, accordingly, terrified. What I am curious about is the white point of view. I have a question about gay marriage as well – I am dying to ask someone who is opposed to two men or two women being married how such a contract would impact his life. I am even more curious to know what a white guy in Mississippi in the 1960s most feared losing by not being able to systematically segregate, oppress and terrify black people. Did the civil rights movement threaten to compromise what must have been seen as sacred remnants of the glorious days of slavery? Was it some sort of Tea Party-ish resistance to the federal government? Or did white people fear payback? Had I known a fraction of the story I sure would have.

I have not found an answer, of course, but I did read a quote that – to put it mildly – gave me pause. And here, in all its breathtaking callousness, from an interview with a white male in Mississippi in the 1960s, are the words:

“We killed two-month old Indian babies to take this country,” one white voter explained succinctly to the press, “and now they want us to give it away to the niggers.” [Pillar of Fire, pg. 68]

Little divisions

Every great once in a while I experience something I am tempted to call happiness but that I think of as timelessness. By that I mean that there is no time, that time ceases to matter, or to even exist. A few weekends ago that’s exactly where I found myself.

As is almost always the case, it began with the atmosphere. I do not like heat – I am terrified of it in its extremes, actually – but the summer here has been so cool and cloudy that a clear blue sky and bare feet on warmed concrete sidewalks and floorboards out on the porch and shorts and a t-shirt and that honey-colored glow that comes about only when the sunlight makes it through the front door and seeps, almost like water, across the living room floor, amplifying not only the grace of the grain but every single micro-speck of dust as well – I liked every bit of it.

I’ve been planting again. I am trying to break myself of the habit of putting plants in right beside one another and then waiting to see what happens. There is a triangle of plants in the front corner of the yard, and then around it I’ve arranged – I think – plants of various height and width and texture and color. I’m training a couple of vines on the fence, or trying to. This particular corner of the yard, as it happens, is situated a few feet from the intersection of two streets, the corner on which I live, and my goal, I suppose, is to create a wall of growing, blossoming, climbing, evolving plants.

Because my front porch, for various reasons, is public territory. I think all front porches should be to a certain extent, but in my neighborhood, on my corner, if you are looking for a place to sit and read or ponder or simply experience the elements by focusing on them, by feeling them, my front porch is not the place. Cars and trucks speed and screech through the intersection. The sound of sirens is so normal it’s almost not even noticeable. There are barking dogs and slamming doors and people with phenomenally loud voices yelling and shouting and repeating and then firing up power tools of one sort or another and throwing two-by-fours around their yards and then yelling some more because whomever it is being yelled at cannot hear what’s being yelled. I think it’s important to know your neighbors, to be known to your neighbors, to be available if needed, but there are many neighbors – there always have been, regardless of my whereabouts – who believe that if I am visible I am waiting for them to tell me something. I often want to say, This book, the one in my lap that is open, is not a prop. I am reading it.

So a few weekends ago I was sitting out on the porch on an uncommonly quiet Saturday afternoon. There were plenty of things that needed to be done, all of which I was ignoring, because I was mesmerized not only by the weather but by the most recent translation of Anna Karenina. It’s a love story with a lot of money troubles and class conflict and political posturing woven in so when the noise began it occurred to me not as an interruption of my reading but as an enhancement.

Hundreds of black people arrived within half an hour. The women wore dresses mostly covered with flowing white wraps. Some of the men wore the wraps as well, but their clothing seemed more exposed: They dressed in pants that were either black or very dark gray, and either white or pale blue shirts and solid-colored ties. The children were miniature versions of their (I presume) parents, sans the white wraps. They arrived, as they do every weekend (though usually on Sunday mornings) in larger-than-normal vehicles polished to the point of shine. As I read about some of the finer points about the difference between society in Petersburg as compared to that in Moscow, I imagined the vehicles whooshing around corners and into parking spaces as stagecoaches. Look, I thought to myself, it’s Darya Alexandrovna! Look, it’s Countess Lydia, and Kitty, and … Anna.

These people are from Africa. According to one source – dubious at best – they are Ethiopians. On this particular Saturday, rather than going to the church building to the west of my house, they went the opposite direction, one block to the east, and that was where the festivities began. There were booming drums and chanting and clapping and singing with words in a language that I may not know but that I felt I understood. And it could be because I was really enjoying my book, or because the day was so glorious, or that I was experiencing that rare sensation of feeling like I’m accomplishing more by willfully accomplishing nothing (I don’t know what to call that), but for these reasons and perhaps much more, the festive ruckus only added to the harmony I’d already established with the day.

Until, that is, I picked up a tid-bit of conversation among a group of women getting into a SUV across the street and realized that the celebration was, of all things, a wedding. And that, I’m embarrassed to say, changed everything.

This is terrible, I think, but it’s true: The first thing that came into my mind was how dare these people, who were not even born in this country, have the right to get married when I don’t? Isn’t that gross? I think so. I think it’s even more gross that it went downhill from there. I could not look into their faces – any of them, their children included – without seeing an enemy. How dare they flaunt their privileges in a neighborhood where plenty of folks live who are denied them? And so on and so forth until I reached rock bottom – my definition of it, anyhow – and that was when I realized that this is what happens when politics and religion are used to divide people into camps. What happens is that people – me included – disappear into camps and become tribal and start looking at others not as people but as enemies who must, must be conquered. If you are after my food – or I believe you are – I need to either kill you or starve to death. I was horrified by myself, honestly, but at the same time I have a whole new brand of respect for the people who orchestrate that sort of shit – Christians, usually – because I am here to tell you, based on recent personal experience, it works.

Sent from my stupidity

On Saturday afternoon I noticed that there was yet another young man wearing a vest and carrying a clipboard walking purposefully through the neighborhood. The vest-clipboard combo is not uncommon around here, and while I suppose that maybe wearing a vest to identify yourself as someone going door to door to pester people into buying new windows or new security systems might be the result of some kind of well-intentioned ordinance, I find it annoying. When there are people with vests and clipboards pacing around, I feel like I’m under inspection, and I do not like it.

I opened the door just as the young man was about to set foot on the walkway leading to my front steps. He looked up and smiled and raised his right hand, pulled into a gentle fist, and said, “Knock, knock.” He was going door to door on behalf of a big, big company famous for terrible service to let everyone know about a new special combining an Internet connection, the cell phone and the direct TV. “You guys aren’t interested in any of that?” he asked when I said no thanks. (I love the “you guys” bit, which is used by almost everyone who comes to the door). “We want less of all three of those things,” I said, “not more.” He looked shocked, but only for a moment. Soon enough he glanced at the home security sign in my yard – which is fake, of course, which I probably shouldn’t write, but oh well – and said, “You know, you can connect and manage everything. You can even turn your alarm off and on with your cell phone … no matter where you guys are.”

One of the things I started noticing earlier this summer is the proliferation of seriously sloppy e-mail that goes around. There is nothing new about this, of course, but it does seem to be getting worse. In June, for some reason, the stars aligned for me and I found myself in constant communication not with one or two or three but four people – clients, of course – who are relentlessly, outrageously, unapologetically sloppy in e-mail. Directions are vague and unclear and usually wrong. Documents that are attached to messages “for context” more often than not turn out to be – oops! – the wrong document. According to the rules of what I fear is the new normal, the sloppsters answer questions by simply forwarding a mail from someone else equally sloppy. It is because of this experience of working with four of them at once that I now have a new rule for responding to work-related e-mail: No response from me for at least an hour, because I really do not trust myself to not begin an e-mail sent moments after receiving one with, “Hey, dumb fuck, read my message, which I intentionally wrote at the third-grade level, and then, if you must, borrow a brain from someone before sending another single speck of nonsense, because my patience for your idiocy is gone.” You can’t say stuff like that when they’re paying you, I’ve learned. So I wait an hour.

One thing I did notice, though, is that a great many of the worst e-mails have a little tag line at the bottom: Sent from my Blackberry. Or: Sent from my iPhone. As a person who thinks cell phones should have the living hell regulated out of them and their usage, it won’t surprise anyone that I find this sort of half-assed behavior appalling. And that fits into place perfectly with another thing I’ve noticed over the past few years, which is that the city seems full of people reduced to a zombie state as they screw around with their walky-talkies while they’re in line for coffee, at the grocery store, waiting to board a flight, riding the bus, riding an elevator. People are doing a lot while they're on the go, including, I presume, answering work-related e-mails. They're able to do more than ever before, so we're told, and as far as I can tell they're doing none of it well.

There’s another computer issue I’ve noticed lately. I recently bought a bike and I’ve been riding around here and there quite a bit. And I’ve noticed that it is not at all uncommon to see someone else on a bike fucking around with his or her cell phone while riding. Texting? Checking e-mail? Believing, as many people in Portland still do, that it’s hip and edgy to use a cell phone in public? I have no idea, but here are a few observations. In addition to being incredibly stupid from a personal safety standpoint, and in addition to being what I consider sacrilege, it forces me to ponder a very specific scenario: If a person riding a bike and using the cell phone at the same time were to be hit and eternally confined to a wheelchair by the careless driver of an SUV, toward whom would my sympathies align? As much as I loathe and detest SUVs and those who drive them, the answer to what was once a very simple question is not clear to me.

The doors are closing

There has been so much going on lately. The mayor of Portland either decided or had it decided for him that he will not seek a second term next year. One of our congressmen, true to the spirit of Oregon, resigned after it was alleged that he’d done it with a very young daughter of one of his supporters. And the country came very close, from what I understand, to going into default. So I watched the news.

Believe it or not, the lead story the night I watched was about a woman who had gotten separated from her young son while they were riding the light rail train – or trying to – in downtown Portland. She was appalled by the lack of urgency shown by the local transit authority, called Tri Met. And the clowns who have taken over the newsroom egged her on, capturing the indignation on her face and in her voice and then putting this non-story, as they so often do, at the top of the broadcast. Because, according to the graphics, this tale constituted “breaking news.”

What happened, according to the story, is this: The woman’s son ran ahead of the woman and her other children and boarded a train before the mother, for reasons that were not made clear, was able to board with him. So, after the two (if not three) pre-recorded announcements that say, and this is a direct quote, “The doors are closing” well, the doors did in fact close. And the train pulled away and headed up the street to its next stop, three blocks away.

The mother was appalled for two main reasons. First, even though she caught the attention of the train operator, he didn’t stop the train. And second, when the boy was released from the train three blocks up the street, the Tri Met person who escorted him off the car (the train operator? – I don’t know) did not verify or prove that the man to whom he presented the child was in fact the boy’s uncle. There should have been a team of people from Tri Met there to handle the situation, the mother said. Though not at all unusual, the self-centeredness, the arrogance, the entitlement of this woman’s face and voice and tone offended me to the point of speechlessness.

But it passed. Since I still have the right to communicate both complaints and compliments, rather than e-mailing the station, which I believe is pointless, I sent an e-mail to the public affairs group at Tri Met to share a couple of thoughts. The first was that I think it’s ridiculous that our local news stations seem to jump at any and all opportunities to portray public transportation as a dangerous, seedy enterprise. And second, I thanked the officials of Tri Met for having a policy that forbids light rail operators from stopping trains once they’ve pulled away from the platform. Because I’ve watched people attempting to get on and off of trains and buses, fully abled (physically) people, and I’m here to tell you that once trains start stopping for people who are too stupid or too arrogant (or both) to follow the simplest of procedures, we will get nowhere.

But even in e-mail I censored myself. I think I’ve moved beyond this ‘it takes a village’ mentality, but for some reason I hesitate to just come right out and say what I think about it, which is that if you are not capable of caring for and managing your children you should not have them. Many people in the village, including me, are happy to help out but it seems to have become an expectation that we’re all on board with this mostly unspoken rule that people with young children exist in a weird zone of exemption when it comes to public conduct. It is not the transit authority’s responsibility to provide basic management services to people who apparently are not capable of managing themselves or their offspring, and it’s not mine either.

Efficiency

For many reasons, I was thinking about all the talk about the general inefficiency of government. There are a couple of examples that stand out in my mind. One is the legend about the amount of money the Pentagon pays for light bulbs. That one seems to date back to the 1970s. The second one is a comment a friend of mine made recently after having to wait in line at the post office longer than she thought was necessary because there was only one window open. And there was only one window open, she said, because the other clerks must have been taking their union-mandated coffee break. This particular friend of mine often plays online games during the work day with her husband, who is employed by a nearby municipal government, the same municipal government, I believe, that provides the family insurance package that I’d imagine has come in quite handy lately with the new baby and all. I’m not singling out my friend to criticize her; I am singling her out to illustrate that it is a common assumption that the public sector thrives on inefficiencies carried forth by lazy employees.

For more than a month and a half I worked on a project with a woman I’ve come to think of as Kitty – she’s the one who made the tom cats nervous – and just the other day, for some reason, it occurred to me that if you want a shining example of inefficiencies that are so deeply embedded in the processes and procedures that you can very accurately predict what will happen by identifying the way something should happen and then assuming that the exact opposite will prevail, man, this is it.

Kitty blew thru at least $500,000 – some of which is now in my checking account – so that a few documents could be posted on a corporate web drive and never looked at again. Never looked at again because they are of zero value. They don’t explain anything whatsoever, and what they allege to explain is in no way significant for anyone except a couple of handsomely compensated private sector employees, one of whom thought that writing “Theoretically, I guess you could include this data …” constitutes expert feedback.

The documents were written in a way that intentionally avoids anything definite. Since the reason for the lack of anything definitive was never stated directly, here’s my best guess: Nobody wanted to get busted for not knowing much. There were designers and industry experts and writers and brand strategists and “creatives” and so on and so forth. When Kitty was able to pull herself together enough to schedule a conference call, we all had them on our computers – live meeting, it’s called – so that we could look at documents together – the wrong version of documents more often than not. Then, a torrent of e-mail that sought to confirm that we had all correctly understood what we’d been directed to do during the conference call. Kitty usually ignored those e-mails, but when she did answer them her answers – if they can be called that – ignored or muddied the very simple questions she’d been asked and necessitated more questions. Which was a phenomenal waste of time and money.

And then there was Kitty herself, sitting on top of it all, spending hours reformatting documents in ways that not only didn’t make sense but were actually great examples of the exact opposite of sense. Then she’d go through whatever it was she’d assembled, defending the necessity of having a separate box within the table she created not for each slide but for each line within a slide “so that we can really drill down” and then talking through each of the graphic images she imported into the Word document – which required hours and made the file so huge it bogged down everyone’s e-mail – and how, when it was pointed out to her that the images didn’t match the text, would say, “you know – it’s just a thought.” The meetings held to explain things that should have never, ever been created in the first place were endless.

And this is efficiency in the private sector. Kitty is but one person. There are thousands, many thousands, at her company alone, a company that loves, interestingly enough, to point out how it’s bringing efficiency to many industries, including the public sector. And yet the myth persists. We must get government spending under control, I hear frequently. We must really be aggressive about waste in the public sector. I suppose the anthropologists would call these beliefs of ours something like a cultural truth, or maybe a societal assumption, but as Kitty and the millions like her sit in conference rooms across the land, bogging down everything they get their hands on with a level of inefficiency that’s worthy of a case study while, at the same time, make one crack after another about “the government,” a non-anthropologist like me has a simpler, less sophisticated way of describing it: Lying.

Those days are over

I am astounded, generally, by what people think and believe. The recent “budget crisis” was, of course, a bonanza of bafflement. One day the speaker of the house and president of the country staged a very carefully rehearsed blowup – or meltdown – that called for the speaker to “storm” out of a meeting with the president. The speaker was followed down a number of corridors by dozens, which created the impression, for me at least, of a fighter having just left the ring after a particularly grueling match.

And next thing you know, there’s the speaker on television, following his script and talking – yet again – about the fiscally reckless ways of Washington and how he knows – as a former small business owner or manager or whatever it was that he was – that this sort of irresponsibility would never play in the world of roll-up-your-sleeves businesses out there in the “real America,” where a dollar is worth exactly a dollar and the vast and rolling plains are populated by decent, hard-working folks who don’t rely on fancy accounting gimmicks. Then, the speaker declared with all the authenticity of a talking statue, that funny money business? That spending of cash we don’t have? In Washington, he said, those days are over.

And I thought, and I think I may have even said out loud to nobody but my television: Bullshit. The fact that John Boehner – and Barack Obama, for that matter – are on national television is all the proof I need that “those days” are anything but over. They’re part of the system, and part of the problem, and if they weren’t they wouldn’t be in office and would not, therefore, be on the television telling what’s over and when and how one “new day” or another officially begins.

My question is this. For whom are those kinds of statements intended? It reminds me of every presidential candidate I’ve ever followed declaring, with a sentimental little quiver in his voice, “America’s best days are ahead of her.” Who, who exactly, believes this? Who hears those words and thinks, that’s our man! He’s going to fix some shit! He gets it!

I find my answers – and then some – on Facebook. I think Facebook is more than a bit evil, but man, what a view it offers – which is critical, since the news is useless in that arena.

And just in case you have neither the time nor the interest in delving into the nation’s prevailing mindset by simply typing a password, I’m here to tell you, the messaging works. We balance our checkbooks at home, cried the chorus, why can’t they? Thanks to the people who control the news, this is what the entire “crisis” came down to. I pay my mortgage every month without bouncing a check, one of my “friends” wrote, and then added that she “expects the same of Washington.”

I don’t. Out here in “the real America” we elect year after year after year the same squeaky clean, sentimental candidates who will lie directly into the camera about the virtues of fiscal responsibility. They call it “speaking to our values.” And at the same time they accept donations from those individuals – and corporations – with enough money to influence how these candidates vote once they’re elected. Who do we suppose pays for those slick, hallucinogenic commercials upon which we base our voting decisions and the “strategic counsel” provided by the PR team – the kind of “consulting” without which nobody in Washington could prevail? It’s easier, I suppose, to sit back and, as long as all our needs are met, bitch and complain on Facebook about “Washington” and a term I’m pretty sure nobody, myself included, is capable of defining accurately: “A balanced budget.” Anyone who defined it correctly and actually talked about it wouldn’t make it past the most preliminary stages of a campaign. Besides being the kind of thing elitists talk about, it’s too boring to captivate our attention the same way as a congresswoman whose head was nearly blown off appearing on the floor for the first time “since Tucson” to cast her vote in support of ensuring the people with lots of money will continue to pay taxes at a lower rate than everyone I know. Now that, like all effective PR campaigns (in spite of my criticisms, they do know what they’re doing) made quite an impact.

Singing ourselves

One of the things I find most satisfying about reading history is the realization that regardless of how low we may feel we’ve fallen, human behavior and inclinations are no worse today than they were centuries ago. Conduct that is coarse and crass is backed up by history – and a lot of it. No matter how many times this simple fact leaps out at me from printed pages, it never fails to amaze.

Walt Whitman, of course, is no exception. After putting my John Irving novel where it belonged – on the donation pile – I took a book I’ve owned for more than a decade down from the shelf and immersed myself for a couple of weeks in the life and times of our country’s most infamous dirty old man. Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography by David S. Reynolds is my kind of history. It paints pictures not only of what the poet was doing and thinking and writing but it also frames those pictures with lore about other overlapping happenings. Before reading I thought the term ‘cultural biography’ was a bit grandiose, but I now believe it’s perfect.

Here, just for fun, are a few familiar themes, straight out of the mid- to late-1800s.

The country rallied around war back then, so the story goes, as we do today (allegedly). Walt Whitman considered the Civil War the heart and soul of not only his career but his entire life. And in a way that’s frightfully familiar to me, he considered Abraham Lincoln not only the president but the redeemer. The war, in Walt Whitman’s day, put all the family troubles into perspective and gave order and purpose to the general slovenliness that had taken hold in places like Manhattan and Brooklyn. Reading about it made me wonder if our current adventures in other lands were, in some sense, an answer to the cultural malaise that had set in after nearly a decade of ‘liberal’ presidential politics. We needed to clear our heads, it seems to me, of all that sleaze, all those blowjobs. I wonder at the perfect timing of certain incidents in terms of directing the country down a path of restored national glory. Most of all, I wondered about our not-new tendency to make heroes of the soldiers. Here’s a good one from one of the war hospitals: “While at Falmouth, he saw some of the war dead, including a soldier who prompted this line in draft: ‘Young man: I think this face of yours is the face of my dead Christ.’” [pg. 411] Holy shit, Uncle Walt.

Gay marriage was not a problem for the Christians back then. In fact, gay sex wasn’t a problem because it wasn’t considered. Besides, they were focused on something far more immediate: Masturbation. Known as ‘the solitary vice,’ masturbation “ … was a major concern of purity reformers … [with] 60 to 70 percent of twelve- and thirteen-year old boys [masturbating] with some going to what Graham called ‘the still more loathsome and criminal extent of an unnatural commerce with each other!’ (probably a reference to mutual masturbation).” [pg. 199] As they are today, the piously inclined were stuck – as if bounded there by steel and concrete – in other people’s underwear. I have never noticed before, but Walt Whitman’s poetry alludes – quite often – to jacking off, which was, of course, a big problem because it was killing young people “ … by the thousands.” [pg. 199]

Remember in 2008 when it was slowly coming to the surface that the nation’s bank account had been robbed by people who continued to receive bonuses that exceeded – by a long shot – the average annual household income? Remember how the word ‘populist’ was used to dismiss and ridicule anyone and everyone who asked: Who stole the goddamn money? Oh well, said the television experts, that’s just populist rhetoric. For three decades prior to 1865 political speeches – which featured poetry readings, the warm-up bands of yesteryear, if you will – were well attended and debated and discussed at length. “The driving forces behind oratory in the antebellum years were populist politics …” [pg. 167]. And, this: “Voter turnout in the presidential election of 1840 was a remarkable 83.4 percent, and the elections from 1848 to 1872 averaged a very high 75.1 percent, in contrast to the 1932-92 period, when it averaged only 56.3 percent.” [pg 167] Is it any wonder that the banking people who own the television people will not tolerate anything ‘populist’? People might start voting, I suppose.

One of the crudest spectacles of our time, for me, is the practice of throwing litter onto stadium fields after or during a game. Well, “Whitman would long remember the primitive early theaters, with their dark entrances and the stark rows of plain wooden benches where the audience sat … Food was brought along and freely eaten during performances. Working-class viewers in the upper tier regularly tossed bones and other dinner remains onto those seated below.” [pg. 157] I don’t go to plays much, but I have to admit that that particular tradition sounds like fun.

Finally, the business about whether or not Walt Whitman was gay – and, if so, how so and how much and how often – is something I found tiresome. The discussion of it is endless, with one theory and school of thought after another trotted out and beaten practically to death. It is fruitless, in my opinion, to try to hang on the erect penis any sort of academic theory. So I’ll get straight to it: Walt Whitman’s sexuality, in his own words, reminded me of many of the ads I see on the men-seeking-men section of craigslist. Here’s one, from a letter to a farmhand – he liked them a little rough around the edges – called Edward Catell, with whom he’d had a “brief but intense” relationship of some sort. He wrote: “There is nothing in it that I think I do wrong, or am ashamed of, but I wish it kept entirely between you & me - & - I shall feel very much hurt & displeased if you don’t keep the whole thing & the present letter entirely to yourself.” [pg. 526] Like many more recent homos I know – including myself – Edward Catell didn’t take kindly to the as-you-go rules of secrecy, so in spite of Walt Whitman’s directive, he didn’t keep the letter or its implications to himself, entirely or otherwise.