Stadium ghosts

Whenever people start talking and shouting and carrying on about their sports teams, I roll my eyes and make remarks that are as snide as possible and then I run along. And then the Saint Louis Cardinals make it into the World Series, and my sports snobbery goes right out the window. I am not sure if it’s because I know the particulars of the skyline when it appears on the television, or if it’s that the players are consistently hot, or if the fact that the team has been swinging bats in the same city for more than a century does actually give it an edge in the vibe department.

There’s something really elegant about baseball, I think. I think the beauty of fielding in particular is on par with ballet, or can be. I’m impressed by the combination of speed and accuracy required to throw a baseball with such force that it clocks in at 89 miles per hour as it blasts through a very small, very precise box of space. And the men who throw those balls with such speed and precision. I watched one of the league championship games broadcast from Milwaukee a couple of weekends ago, and the sight of the pitcher holding forth out there on the mound, winding up and letting it rip was something else again. Then my sister e-mailed me a three-word message on the morning of the second World Series game: Jaime’s up tonight. So I went across the street to my neighbors’ house and watched, and besides Jaime Garcia’s beautiful, beautiful mouth, I saw very little baseball.

Measured against the nation’s clock, Saint Louis is an old, old city, and in a way that I’ve never seen quite pulled off elsewhere, it’s a place that manages to accommodate itself to the times and, at the same time, refuses to. For two centuries, a lot of people have moved there and a lot of people have left there, and there have been a lot of people born in that city and a lot of people who have died there as well, and what I think I saw watching those baseball games recently, more clearly than anything else, was the ghosts.

There are parts of it that are intact. If you go to Saint Louis during the summer – which I do not recommend – you can still stand in line on Chippewa Street or South Grand and, as long as you don’t collapse – it happens – order a frozen custard concoction known as “a concrete.” They’re so cold they’ll make your brains sore for a minute or two, and they are good. You can still order brain sandwiches in certain neighborhoods. At nearly every grocery store, regardless of neighborhood, you can get a cut of pork that for some reason has yet to arrive on the other side of the Rockies. You can still see cemeteries at a rate that would be alarming if they weren’t such spectacular manifestations of the deep, almost festive reverence Saint Louis bestows upon her dead. The recipe at Imo’s hasn’t changed as far as anyone can tell. Although it was moved for a number of years to Chesterfield, the Strassenfest has returned to its original neighborhood in South City, which is where my brother and sister and I once witnessed, in fascinated horror, a very rotund woman who simply leaned out of an arched brick doorway and puked with a propulsion I’ve yet to see equaled. The river remains mighty and the sight of the art museum in that normally elusive period between sunset and darkness still has its own vocabulary and the first 10 to 12 minutes of the local news is still a quick run-through of the homicides and, if it’s a slow day, the investigations of them. The Arch is still there, and it’s still called, amazingly enough, The Arch.

But people in Saint Louis now work for Boeing, and most of the airport is vacant. Jack Buck and Jack Carney are long gone, replaced from what I hear by Rush Limbaugh, who is from Missouri and now cheapens the airwaves of KMOX, which is a travesty. Styx Baer & Fuller is history, as is Bettendorf’s. Channel 2 is now a Fox affiliate. The Globe Democrat folded – literally – long ago and for years I have not been able to find, even on thoroughfares such as Choteau or Vandeventer, a single copy of The Evening Whirl, a black paper with news stories that were once upon a time, even though rap music had yet to come along, written in rap pentameter. And, as a result of one of the most bizarre and contentious real estate transactions I’ve ever witnessed, as a result of the most indisputable indications that one phase of life has ended and another begun, my sister now presides over the house where we grew up.

And that’s the wall of ghosts I crash into, recklessly, at high speeds and without air bags, at the mere sight of the Saint Louis Cardinals on national television in the month of October, playing against a backdrop of stage-lit courthouse domes and cathedrals and a very tall stainless steel sculpture that is a monument to leaving town.

Which might be the point of sports, professional and otherwise. At their worst I think they encourage a lot of herd behavior, but at the other end of the reaction spectrum, maybe one of the purposes they serve is to remind us of ourselves, to divide the passing of time into chunks that are for the most part manageable. A couple of weeks ago and a couple thousand miles west of my childhood, I was reminded of an autumn afternoon in 1982 when the last, make-it-or-break it game of the playoffs was played down at what is now called, in memoriam, the old Busch Stadium. The high school I went to didn’t shut down early, not officially anyhow, not in a way that was discussed or announced: Everyone just left early. It was a warm afternoon, one defined in my memory by the almost blinding contrast between the golden leaves and the brilliant blue sky behind and above them and by the voice of Jack Buck on KMOX, seeping as sure as cigar smoke through screen doors and open windows as I walked along Big Bend Boulevard. Shortly after I got home that afternoon, the Cardinals won.

An honorable pact with solitude

Although we’ve been interrupted by the World Series and one of my nieces checking herself into rehab, my sisters and I are progressing on our reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I told a friend of mine this recently and she replied that the man she lives with read it a few years back and that the experience ruined for him every other book. I am not there just yet, but I’m close enough that I’ve caught a few glimpses of how different the world, after this book, might look.

At the heart of the tale is the Buendia family whose patriarch founded the town of Macondo. I am only about halfway through the book, and already I have conceded any hope of summarizing the twists and the turns – some of them feasible, others, based on my standards anyhow, completely surreal – encountered by the family, or, as Ursula, the matriarch, calls it, “the line.” On any page you are likely to encounter gypsies and alchemists and babies born with a century’s worth of memory and young men who fall in love with their aunts and the remains of parents contained in a bag that hums and jostles and many, many characters who are named Aureliano, Arcadio, Jose or some combination thereof.

The way my sisters and I tackle books is to read a pre-determined number of pages per week. So, since I tend to get ahead of our schedule, I read each section twice. The story is hard to follow, so a second read is helpful, but the main reason I’ve read each page twice thus far is that I’ve permitted myself the luxury of dedicating the first reading to simply enjoying the sensation that follows the intake of a truly exquisite sentence. They’re infused with personal history, swerving, often with nothing more than a comma, from one generation to the next, or a couple back. They are thrust forward by action, by movement, by a masterful use of the verb.

In the sentences of One Hundred Years of Solitude, time comes home to roost with the most prudent use of language I’ve ever read. Here, just for fun, are two of my favorites thus far.

Looking at the sketch that Aureliano Triste drew on the table and that was a direct descendant of the plans with which Jose Arcadio Buendia had illustrated his project for solar warfare, Ursula confirmed her impression that time was going in a circle. [221]

Which explains, among other things, not the plot of the novel, or its theme, but the writing, because time is indeed going in a circle, one that expands and contracts many times on a single page, often within a single sentence. Jose Arcadio Beundia is Ursula’s husband, long gone but eternally present, the founder of Macando. Aureliano Triste is one of her 17 grandsons who bear the name Aureliano, each of whom was born of a different mother during the war years. He shows up in Macondo one day with the rest of them – it is quite a gathering – and is one of the two Aurelianos to take up permanent residence there. The other Aureliano to remain in Macondo – Aureliano Cantes – picks up the family’s multi-generational fascination with the making of ice, drawing from a childhood memory that is not his own but his father’s, who is Colonel Auereliano Buendia.

I am not certain about this but the main character of the book is either the colonel – the original Aureliano Buendias – or his mother, Ursula. Thus far, I believe it is the colonel. For me, he seems the most likely embodiment of the theme, which seems to me to be pitfalls of becoming a part of the world::

Colonel Aureliano Buendia could understand only that the secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude. [199]

Super responsive

I was talking with a woman recently whose work is similar to mine. We get together regularly and we bitch. A lot. She was explaining to me that one of the things she does to keep things as organized as possible is to draw a circle on a piece of paper, divide it into quadrants and then fill those quadrants with the things she needs to do according to their urgency. The top two quadrants are important, one more so than the other. The two quadrants at the bottom of the circle are not.

Lists really are not my thing. Until recently, the last serious list I made was to prioritize the things that needed to be done with this house. The top portion of the list was for things that needed to be done “this year,” which was 2002. The bottom portion of the list was for those tasks I figured could wait until “next year.” A year or two ago, I happened across that list as I was searching for something else, and it is completely and utterly comical.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to give list making another go. The reason for this is that over the past several months I have felt like my work projects are slowly but surely becoming unmanageable. I feel like I’m racing from one thing to another without ever truly focusing on any one specific thing. I’m making mistakes that should not be made, and there is less breathing room between the time I finish something and the time at which it is due, which cuts into my ability to carefully read through documents before I send them. I usually shut my office down sometime between 5 and 5:30 in the afternoon, and I noticed that more often than not the experience of watching my computer screen go black had ceased to be a relief and was becoming, instead, another source of anxiety. I wasn’t thinking of the things I’d accomplished during the day. I was thinking of what I’d missed.

So one Wednesday night, on the back of an envelope in which a credit card offer had been mailed to me, I wrote down the four things I wanted to accomplish the following day. My list was deliriously simple. I needed to write a blog post about how to transfer the contents of one PC to another, write the final section of an article about developing applications for mobile devices, rewrite the tips and tricks section of an article I’d written about professional networking in continuing education classes and write two of the five executive biographies for a client that’s a local technology reseller and customizer. On paper, I don’t have that much to do. I don’t have an overwhelming volume of what the cool people call “deliverables.” In fact, it’s almost embarrassing how little I have going on at any one time.

What was most beneficial about the list was that it served to turn the work portion of my day completely off when it was over. There are many things I like to do in the evening, and I am absolutely intolerant and inflexible about interruptions, especially work-related interruptions, even if they’re only in the form of wondering if I did this or that or having a little spell of panic as I contemplate what needs to be accomplished the following day.

Contrary to what has evidently become the standard way of doing business, I refuse to check mail during my off hours. I don’t synch the shit to my cell phone because (a) I do not have a cell phone and (b) that sort of blind flinging of things far and wide and letting them land where they may, with or without a clear purpose, breeds inefficiency. It took me nearly a decade to draw these lines in permanent ink, and I am sticking to them. First and foremost, sending mail around in the middle of the night and from airports and while driving to the coast gives those to whom they’re being sent the impression – rightly so – that you’re available around the clock. And from there the logical conclusion is never far behind: If you’re available around the clock, everyone should be. Number two, it’s the mark of a person with zero capacity to differentiate and prioritize one thing from another: When everything is deemed urgent, the result is that nothing truly is. And number three, it demonstrates that you either are incapable of completing what’s expected of you during business hours or completely disorganized. Either way, people who consistently send things back and forth at 10:47 p.m. either need to hire someone to help out or find a new job.

The least beneficial part of the list is that I discovered – by making check marks beside an item on the list each time I needed to tend to it – that there is always one thing that derails the day. And it’s usually the smallest, or seemingly smallest, item on the list. And we return to it over and over and over again because each time we craft and send responses and edits and one thing and another at the speed of lightening, we do so, alas, in a way that’s more mistake than solution. To my horror, the PR people I work with and with whom I’ve discussed this call it being “super responsive.” I call it super sloppy.

Musings on empathy

Twenty summers ago I was glued to a radio in a windowless office in Madison, Wisconsin. I shared that office with a brash older woman called Beryl who was one of the most interesting people I’ve ever encountered, and she and I, like millions of others, sat there and listened – speechless, for the most part – to a young woman from Oklahoma testify before a committee of white guys about pubic hairs on Coke cans and long dong something or another. In what remains for me the second best reason to reject any and all moral authority assumed by the supreme court (W’s selection being the first), Clarence Thomas, after claiming he’d been lynched (lynched!) was given a robe and sworn in. And there he sits, two decades later, interpreting.

Last week I went downtown to hear Anita Hill speak to a group of women lawyers. I was surprised in many ways. Most of the ways I was surprised have more to do with me than with her.

At the back of the ballroom where she spoke there were long tables covered in starchy white cloths. There were bowls of fruit and pyramids of coffee mugs and there were coffee urns and two varieties of cookies and, in bowls full of square ice cubes, there were little green glass bottles of Perrier. And cans of Coke. Without meaning to I sort of blurted out a little laugh and made split-second eye contact with a couple of the servers, a young man and a young woman, who looked at me with expressions of what I thought was concern but may have been mere curiosity. It occurred to me that the two servers were probably still in diapers the morning Anita Hill took the witness stand. I went back to my seat, quickly.

The talk itself was disappointing. Anita Hill was organized and informed, certainly, and she made her points more clearly than most who speak into microphones. The problem, for me, is that she spoke like a lawyer. She kept returning to the concept of empathy and how it was bandied about during the hearings for the two most recent supreme court nominee hearings. When people say empathy, do they mean this? Or do they mean that? What about the legal philosophy? What about the judicial underpinnings of one thing and another and its impact? Are they perhaps using the term empathy to talk about anything that falls outside the realm of their own specific perspective? What about so-and-so’s published response to this issue that wasn’t really, technically speaking, a response but that was, in fact, a response?

Here’s my question: What about announcing – without hiding behind the perversion of language known as legalese – the fact that Congress is run by a lot of misogynistic heterosexual white guys who were sulking 20 years ago and are sulking still because the girls are no longer there, allegedly, to put cream in their coffee and sharpen their pencils? A couple of years ago it was revealed that Sonya Sotomayor had used the words “wise” and “Latina” in the same sentence, and the uproar over that couldn’t have been more deafening had she arrived at the U.S. Capitol for her confirmation hearing on the back of a mule. And more recently I heard almost zero griping – except in the “alternative” press – about the fact that when a group of 10 lawmakers was assembled to come up with a plan to slash billions from the federal budget, a whopping 10 percent of that group – or one – was female.

I know this sounds anti-intellectual, but seriously, enough about philosophy and theory and approach and so on and so forth. Here’s what I’d like to hear someone with both a microphone and a place in history as a genuine hell raiser say: Vote the fuckers out.

I don’t necessarily fault Anita Hill, though. She was speaking to a group of people who, as women, are at best second-in-line to their male counterparts. But like Anita Hill herself, like many of those who sit on committees to grill supreme court nominees, in fact, almost everyone in the audience was a lawyer, and for me that’s a slippery slope. It’s a slope so slippery that I was appalled to sit in a room where most of the people who were not white were opening bottled water and clearing away cups and saucers and hear the word “struggle” used in reference to the difference in income between male attorneys and female attorneys when, as best I can tell, there are far too many attorneys in the first place and all of them I’ve ever met earn considerably more than people in professions I think are far more critical. It’s a slippery slope because of the sense of entitlement that goes along with earning a law degree, an accomplishment that apparently – based on the alarming percentage of elected and appointed officials who have one on their resume – qualifies a person to run things, to manage things, to interpret what should be clear as crystal in such a convoluted, confused and contrived manner that millions of dollars and immeasurable anguish are spent trying to straighten out the aftermath. Most of all, though, it’s a slippery slope for me because of the language, a language that at once says nothing at all and anything you need it to, a topsy-turvy language of procedure and process and precedent – or not – that leads to some truly weird shit, like Clarence Thomas holding a sanctioned gavel in his hand while I laugh at Coke cans in the ballroom of a hotel in downtown Portland, Oregon, waiting for a woman I heard on the radio when I was 25 years old take the stage and talk in circles about legal philosophy.

More cars

I have a friend who works for the state of Oregon, and one of the benefits she’s enjoyed over the years is the ability to purchase a Tri Met pass that allows her to ride the buses and light rail at a significantly reduced cost. The cost is further reduced by the ability state workers have been granted to purchase these passes with income before it is taxed. A few weeks ago, my friend told me that this benefit has been eliminated as part of the current campaign to tighten budgets by cutting costs.

The conversation I had with my friend brought to mind a local talk show, the hostess of which threw grenades at the city’s mayor a couple of years ago because – according to her logic – he hates cars. He wants to spend millions and millions of dollars on bike paths and streetcars and light rail tracks and stations. His agenda, said she, is to force public transportation on as many people as possible whether they want it or not. Like our then-newly elected president, our mayor is a Socialist, she proclaimed. He’s a Marxist. Everything the mayor does and says is linked in ways large and small to his deep-seeded hatred of cars. He wants to model Portland after Amsterdam. On and on she went.

Because he’s a public official, the mayor must have felt pressure to participate in the third-grade level of discourse (as so many left-leaning politicians do) by denying, repeatedly, that he hates cars. He said that he simply believes there are many other modes of transit – buses, bikes, skateboards – and that he thought it would behoove the city of Portland, and the region as a whole, to accommodate as many of them as possible.

Since I am not running for public office and do not plan to ever do so, I will say what the mayor perhaps felt he could not: I suppose that technically I don’t hate cars, but I do hate what they represent. We’ve built our economy around them. We’ve subsidized them and their operating costs for well over half a century now. For their sake, we have sacrificed what was perhaps one of our few shots at national redemption – our oldest, grandest cities – and replaced them what I think is our most noxious innovation: Almost every city in the U.S. is surrounded by mile after mile of pure shit suburban construction accessible mainly – and in many cases exclusively – by obscene stripes of pavement that stretch out until they disappear beneath the horizon. Along with the cities, we’ve let the rail system deteriorate into a severely broken calamity. Like riding a bike or a bus, traveling by train has been blasted by the conservatives as a European thing to do, and to their way of thinking – which I fail, absolutely, to comprehend – that means it’s undesirable.

What I really hate about cars, though, can likely be attributed to the marketing team. It seems to me that at some point it was discovered, or observed, that more people were spending more and more time in their cars. According to my logic, the best solution at that point would have been to work toward reducing that time by investing in the cities and the transit infrastructure. Instead, the cars started getting bigger, and, like many of the people who sit in them, they’ve been growing steadily for many years now. It is no longer even noteworthy when a vehicle roars past my house that is bigger than my kitchen. I guess what the marketing team set out to do was not to not reduce the hours people spend stranded behind the wheel but to make the vehicles feel less like a car and more like home and, as usual, the marketing team succeeded. So, to make it possible for drivers to tend to other business while they’re driving, some of the best engineering minds around are hard at work not on coming up with new ways to consume resources more wisely or to reduce the volume of toxins belched into the air we are all going to breathe sooner or later, but on state-of-the-art air bags. If you hit someone head on, don’t worry: You’re safe. And so are your children. And your hound dogs.

But those are just my opinions, and while I happen to think I’m right, I don’t expect anyone to agree with me. In terms of axing the Tri Met pass from the benefits package for state employees, on the other hand, there are a couple of facts that hold their own against the right wingers’ tantrums about Amsterdam.

The first is that by eliminating a benefit that can be taken advantage of on a pre-tax basis, the disparity between one end of the income scale and the other expands. Number two: There is a parking garage close to the building where my friend works. The monthly fee for parking there and the monthly fee that state employees will now pay for a Tri Met pass are similar enough that there is no longer much financial incentive to use public transportation, so my guess – and it is only a guess – is that two conditions will change. First, there will be less money in the checking accounts of state employees who work in the Portland area. And second, there will be more of them driving their cars to and from work.

Which brings me back to the radio hostess. In addition to taking pot shots at the mayor, she loves to attack public employees and their lavish benefits packages and she loves to blame public transportation for pretty much every problem in the area. At the same time, she loves her SUV, and she loves to complain about how backwards the prevailing mindset in Portland is because the roads on which she drives her SUV have not been widened to the extent that she thinks they should be. And now, thanks to the fervor against public institutions and those who operate them – a fervor for which she is one of the most ardent cheerleaders – she can now share the streets and highways of Portland with even more vehicles. Even though having more cars on the road will only impede her “right” to burn as much fuel as she can afford as she blasts across the suburbs of Portland, I guess she and her compatriots really showed the public employees on this one.

The gangs

I can think of very few things that cannot be taken to an extreme that’s ridiculous. And I sometimes think Portland – particularly the part of it that’s east of the Willamette River – is world headquarters of ridiculousness. All of our elected and appointed officials are on the take. The television and newspaper let the powerful and wealthy get away with all sorts of no good because half of them having affairs with those on whom they’re paid to report. The attempt to recall the mayor failed to gather enough signatures because many people – by that I mean, oh, 200,000 or so – are afraid he’ll come after them. The schools, under the directives of the almighty teachers union, let water heaters and furnaces break down so they’ll have something riveting the next time they’re on the ballot. And when it comes to black people, here’s what the police do: Shoot now, ask questions later. It’s practically in the training manual, say some.

A woman who was once an Oregon state legislator now rails on the radio every Thursday morning, more often than not about how quickly the police label black males as gang members. While I don’t doubt that there are assumption issues at the police department, prior to a few days ago, every time I heard this woman start in, my reaction was not aimed at the issue but at her. People are armed. People are violent. If that rage is organized in the form of a gang, what’s wrong with saying so? I don’t think the subject of violent crime should be thrown off stage for the sake of a discussion about language.

A friend of mine with whom I’ve been talking politics for more than 20 years now recently came to visit, and that’s the example I shared with him when we started talking about how quickly liberal people enter the realm of the absurd. And not an hour later we were driving along East Burnside and my friend – who has listened to a fair amount of grousing from me over the years about my neighborhood – commented that the area didn’t look that bad to him. And then we turned on to my street, and down at the intersection where I live there was such a spectacular display of lights – red, blue and white – that it appeared Christmas had arrived a few months early.

In stark contrast to the collective preference for YouTube videos over actual local news shown by each of the four major television stations in Portland, each of those stations had a van, a camera crew and a reporter on my block by 9 a.m. on Saturday. By Monday, the Oregonian – our ever-shrinking daily newspaper – had run not one, not two, but three stories on the incident in the Metro section. On Monday afternoon – three days after the incident – I looked down my street toward Glisan and saw an antennae shooting up into the sky, which was attached, I noticed as I walked down the block, to a van emblazoned with the KGW logo. I wandered down and asked the reporter, the same one who had gone door to door on Saturday morning with his camera guy, if any suspects had been caught. Nothing new, he told me. I must have given him a look that asked him why, if there was nothing new, he and his crew were getting ready to broadcast live from my block, because he added, This is an update story. As I was walking away I noticed dozens of switches and levers on a control panel on the side of the van. What fun it would have been to just start pushing and pulling and flipping. By Tuesday morning, when I turned my computer on for the first time since early Friday afternoon, there were dozens of e-mails sent out via the neighborhood listserv – a mixed blessing, to be sure – and it was the content of those messages, along with the headlines written by the Oregonian and the drive-by reporting, if it can be called that, on our local network affiliates, that caused me to reconsider the conversation I’d had three days earlier about ridiculousness.

By the time I pulled up to the corner where I live on Friday night, the entire block was marked off with yellow crime scene tape. It was attached to my fence and a strand of it had been wrapped around one of the columns on my front porch. My friend and I ducked beneath the tape strung across the front walk and came inside and enjoyed the lights of the two police cars parked not 20 feet from the living room window.

What happened on Friday night is that 40 bullets, or 40 rounds of bullets, or 40 rounds of gunfire were exchanged from one side of Glisan Street to the other. Two people were shot at a place called People’s Bar and Grill and taken to the hospital. Many reported seeing young men fleeing the scene on foot and in cars immediately after the sound of gunfire. I’ve heard that there were three men, and I’ve heard there were 20 men and I’ve heard pretty much every numerical combo between the two.

What happened very shortly after daybreak on Saturday morning was that the word “gang” began to feel like little nails hammered into my ear drums. The police issued a statement saying that the city’s gang task force was looking into the incident. “Gang” was the first word in the headlines in the Oregonian. The television people used the word “gang” in almost every sentence of their reports. The use of the word “gang” was the least offensive aspect of the wisdom issued forth by the listserv warriors, who shared endless tales of the “gang bangers” that, according to the mostly unsigned writers of the e-mails, have always hung out at that particular establishment and the “no questions asked” leasing protocol for the apartments above it, about how scary it is around here, about how someone – maybe someone’s child! – could have been seriously injured, about one element and another moving in and out, about weird looks exchanged by someone or another a couple of years ago, about the concerns of “gang-related violence” expressed by a business owner who asked not to be identified, and so on and so forth.

I started pondering the term itself. When someone says “gang” in Portland, it means a group of three or more black or Latino males who are adolescents or older and who are prone to violence. There’s a slightly different nomenclature for Asian gangs. Describing them requires two words rather than one: Asian gangs. For some reason, I started wondering if there are any Native American gangs. I’ve never heard that term, but if they exist I’d be curious to know more. And I’m not sure what a group of white males who dig violence would be called. The police department, perhaps. Or KGW.

I expect the worst from the media outlets and the Internet, but I found the misinformed, generalized, half-assed, accusatory hysteria vocalized up and down my block a lot more disturbing. I do not mean to make light of lots of bullets exchanged in a way that would do the magistrates of the Wild West proud, but I don’t think it’s as alarming as forging a link between that incident and the black woman who lives across the street and has a lot of visitors, or the influx of newly homeless who were supposed to arrive in Portland after Hurricane Katrina (but never did) or “them Mexicans” who came to Oregon, according to local legend, from the barrios of Los Angeles, or the black people who scattered throughout Portland during the rebuilding of Columbia Villa a few years ago. All of this insight – and so much more – by Tuesday afternoon.

Which brings me to the ridiculousness issue. I’ve asked many people how it is that they’re so certain that the shooting was in any way related to or caused by a gang, and the most common answer thus far is that sureness up and down our lane here is based on the fact that the two guys who were injured are, according to the Oregonian, refusing to cooperate, from their hospital beds, with the police. Given the swiftness and certainty with which they were labeled “gang bangers” not just by the media but by the court of the neighborhood, I don’t blame them for not cooperating. Nor do I plan to continue thinking of a former state legislator – who is a black woman – becoming agitated over the use of the word “gang” as an overreaction. I think the correct word is response.

Signals through the snow

I recently interviewed a guy for a project I’m working on, the topic of which is mobile computing and how important it is for those who develop gadgets and applications and services to be well versed on mobility. In spite of my general disdain for technology, I do seriously enjoy interviewing the engineers. Unlike the marketing people, they generally seem to know what they’re talking about. And very few of them, in my experience, use lingo or jargon as a way to pave over that which they do not know. Nor do they giggle or throw the word “right” into two out of three sentences or mindlessly repeat really stupid shit like “ … at the end of the day.”

This guy was no exception. What I thought was particularly interesting about him is that he is not an engineer by education. The two degrees he’s earned could not be less technical. He’s also set up and volunteered for a couple of non-profits that extend technical capabilities to those who would not be able to afford them otherwise, not to show them the wonders of Facebook or Netflix but in an admirable attempt (I think) to even the playing field for people who are looking for a job. He “picked up coding” along the way, he told me. I cannot even imagine.

He shared an interesting story about a motorcycle accident, and how, for him, the ability to remain connected regardless of location became, one afternoon, a matter of life or death. And then we started talking about phones. He was used to being able to see the person he’s talking to, he said, so it was odd that he couldn’t see me. And it was equally strange that our discussion wasn’t integrated with one thing and another – documents? profiles? preferences? I have no idea. That led to the discussion of the smart phones. You start a new job, he explained, and your new employer hands you a smart phone on your first day because everyone knows how to use one. So I asked him, naturally, about what happens when someone doesn’t. I did not identify myself as the someone. He paused for a moment and then said, “I feel badly for them. I feel sorry for them. They’re sad.”

I got together recently with a woman I met at the coffee shop a few blocks from my house. Like many coffee shops on the east side of Portland, it is typically as unfriendly as it is connected, which is to say quite. So imagine my surprise when a complete stranger struck up a conversation with me because she’d noticed that I was reading a book that she’d once read as well. A few months passed, a few e-mails were exchanged, and on Saturday we were sitting down there talking about many things, including smart phones. She told me that her phone is not particularly smart, and that since it wasn’t designed with the structure of the human face in mind, she pulls it back and forth between her ear and her mouth. It what has come to feel like a confession, I acknowledged that I do not own one, and that I do not want to own one.

We also talked about Motown music, which she loves and which I love as well, and I told her that I am completely unable to articulate what it is exactly that I love about it, and she told me a little story. Growing up in New Jersey, she told me that on nights when it was snowing, if she sat in a certain spot in her bedroom and held her little radio at just the right angle, the signals came all the way from Detroit and brought the music with them. I know it’s a bad idea to mix and match conversations that happen in different spheres for very different purposes, particularly when one of those spheres involves earning a living, and I know it’s pointless to compare the magic of 1960s radio on snowy evenings to the wonders of being connected to the entire world by a plastic contraption smaller than a walky-talky, but I did it anyhow.

The occupation

For the last few years, I’ve been perplexed over the country’s money situation. It’s an old, old story: The masses lose most of what little they have while those who have way too much to begin with somehow acquire more. And merrily merrily we go, down our stream. Where’s the rage? I’ve wondered. Where’s the anger? Where are the protests and marches and rallies and sit-ins? In a weird way it reminds me of a couple of my brothers. As if answering to the same calendar as Wall Street, as the money trouble came into full view in the fall of 2008, so too did the fact that two of my brothers appear to have no bottom line when it comes to accepting and distributing one thing and another, including cash. Recently it hit me that the financial crisis and the family crisis have some similarities, chief among them that fighting either situation is crippled before the first swing by one simple question: Where exactly would you start?

I haven’t figured out what a good starting point for decommissioning my brothers would be, but in terms of the country’s financial troubles, it seems to be on Wall Street, or close to it. When the protests actually got started a few weeks ago, you’d think I would have been elated. I was not. I am ashamed to say that the only thing I heard in the scant coverage of the protests was that they were using a lot of social media technology. Thanks to my job and my personality in general, I am so sick of hearing about Facebook and Twitter and all the rest of it that any time I hear words related to any and all of those inventions, I tune out the rest. Unless, of course, it’s in another country. Then I think, man, what would that have been like without Facebook? Closer to home, though, I am weary of those who appear to be dependent in a life-or-death sort of way on their connections and their devices, devices that as best I can tell are welcome in any venue, devices that, in my opinion, seem to have the power, quite ironically, to really make a good dent in the ability humans have to communicate … with one another.

Then, as the number of protesters grew, the heavy hitters of television started covering it, which I guess they sort of had to since the protesters were just a few blocks from the network studios. And the condescension in that reporting, from PBS to NBC and everywhere in between, was all it took to turn my ass around on the whole thing.

For some reason, the protestors were not allowed to protest on Wall Street proper, which I think is questionable. So, they set up shop in a park, where many of them also camped. And when one reporter showed up one morning to poke around, he was shocked to discover – are you ready for this? – that some of them had not woken up yet. These protestors are sleeping late! There was an interview with one young woman who was listing off a number of issues that concerned her, including global warming, modified food, the treatment of women in various countries, budgets for schools that shrink as budgets for military adventures get bigger. The reporter paused, looking into the camera, as if to say, can you believe this? And the dweeb in the anchor chair commented that there didn’t seem to be much focus. One guy set up a radio station, but it doesn’t transmit any further than the park where they were camping. An interview with one young man got botched because his mouth was covered with duct tape. My guess is that the duct tape was a representation of voicelessness, but the reporter struggled with it.

One of the remarks I heard repeated most was that this group has no leader. As I’ve said before, I have issues with the words leader and leadership. I speak only of my experience in a corporate setting and in volunteer activities I’ve done over the years for community efforts, and in those two realms, those who toss those two terms around may as well announce that they’re full of bullshit. So I overreact to them almost more automatically and more adamantly as I do to the use of the term “community” when the discussion is about computers. But, in this case, I thought the tossing around of the leadership nonsense was particularly inappropriate, because to me it’s clear as crystal that a protest against the stranglehold in which those with hold those without is, almost by definition, a protest against the abuses of leadership. Another comment made by many reporters that’s equally nonsensical, I think, is that the protestors had no message. Aren’t messages the current that carried us to this point?

One morning I heard that the protesters had been forbidden from using microphones. The next morning I heard that not only were more people showing up in New York but that people were protesting in other cities as well. In Portland, the media’s primary concern seemed to be whether or not the protestors and the participants in the Portland Marathon would clash. What if there was a conflict? What if they were planning to occupy – pardon me – the same public space at the same time? What would happen then? What would the police do? What would the protestors do? And the runners? Are you scared? Hell, I am. Terrified.

One woman traveled to New Yrok from Denver to join the protestors because, as she had to explain to the reporter twice, she had protested at the Democratic convention in 1968 in Chicago – another leaderless, message-free gathering, I suppose – and she thought a little generational continuity was in order.

It took listening to her to clarify for me what I think of the whole thing: The protests near Wall Street and beyond mark yet another arrival of a new generation of citizens who have enough faith in our system to question it. And they brought their computers with them. One of the weirdest little bits of reporting I heard was the declaration, in a slightly shocked tone, that many of the protestors don’t have jobs. This was echoed on one Portland radio station (one that can always be counted on to up the ante when it comes to dumbing it down) who declared the protestors “lazy, unemployed spoiled brats.” And I thought, that’s kind of the point, is it not? They don’t have jobs because, well, in spite of the good times in the board room and on the quarterly earnings conference calls, there don’t seem to be many available these days. They do, however, have Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and all sorts of other outlets that probably haven’t even been named yet. Good for them.

Justice has been served

I am regularly appalled by people who connect personally to events and people they’re familiar with only through media. So imagine my surprise when I came very close to throwing up three times on the night the state of Georgia killed Troy Davis. Throughout most of the six-hour live broadcast on Democracy Now, which I’d tuned in to on the radio quite unintentionally, my body and all of its cells responded in a way I’ve never experienced before and hope to never again. My pits were drenched. My skin was hot. My stomach felt like a wash cloth being wrung of water long evaporated.

I have always been opposed to the death penalty. I have hundreds of reasons, none of which are original, all of which feed neatly into my main reason, and that is that I think it’s wrong to kill people. I think it’s wrong to kill people during a war. I think it’s wrong to kill people during arguments or robberies or traffic stops. I think it’s wrong to kill people in public facilities. That’s my filter, and I’m a fundamentalist about it.

Something happened a few minutes before the killing was supposed to take place and the crowd erupted in cheers and in song. A woman who spoke with Amy Goodman – who deserves an award for the coverage, I think – said she was very grateful for the stay of execution granted by the U.S. supreme court. And then it was revealed that it wasn’t a stay at all but a little pause. The court was reviewing, or reconsidering, or something that for reasons I don’t understand caused the grizzly proceedings to stall, which seemed to me to make it only more grizzly. Hang on a second, I heard the voice of a judge say, but only in my head, let’s make sure one more time that we’ve got this right before we off this guy.

During the delay, there were several mentions of Clarence Thomas, who is not only black but from the same part of Georgia as Troy Davis. This was discussed by many in a tentatively hopeful way that I found ominous. Excerpts of Amy Goodman’s earlier conversations with Troy Davis’s two sisters and his nephew were played. One hour went by and then two. Every passing minute, said many, constituted a miracle. One of the most harrowing parts of the broadcast, for me, was the scream of sirens. “That cannot be a good sign,” someone said the first time the sirens wailed en masse. There were leaders of this and leaders of that – the NAACP, Amnesty International – and there were people who had traveled to the prison for the vigil and there were, of course, those who were personally involved, gathered across the street from the prison entrance. The sirens apparently were nothing more than an intimidation tactic, and even from a distance of 3,000 miles and the relative manageability of a radio, they worked. Those gathered held their candles and sang. Amy Goodman continued striking up conversations with people until the moment she said, in a voice that sounded barely her own, that the court had, with no dissent and in a single sentence, declined the invitation to intervene.

And man, the rest of it was quick.

To be fair, I don’t think there is a single fact that could dissuade me from my belief that the case against Troy Davis was so cracked with questions that I think the carrying out of the death warrant – the execution of it, if you will – is cause for serious alarm. Also in the spirit of fairness, I am not talking about whether or not he was guilty of murdering a man in Savannah in 1989. To me – and this should explain why it’s a good thing I am not an attorney – Troy Davis’ guilt or innocence is practically beside the point.

For the past many months I have been reading and listening and watching the tales of black people and white people in the south and the weird dance between the hundreds of mockeries made of fairness and equality in those states and the federal government in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. I am not an expert by a long shot. I am just disturbed by what little I know. In the year of my birth, 1966, white people in Georgia kept black people in line by murdering them, raping them and inflicting terror on them in many other ways, and in the state of Georgia they carried their deeds out with the full support of many governmental institutions whose purpose, on paper, was and is to ensure that the concept of liberty and justice for all does not languish on the printed page. There is no shortage of documented cases where a group of black people was met with the fists and pistols and clubs of a group of white people infected with a brand of racism that I think can only be described as pathological. These encounters took place in settings ranging from dark country roads to the front steps of the courthouse. And then, when the police arrived – the ones in uniform – it was the black people who were charged, fined and jailed for disturbing the peace.

A mere 45 years later, regardless of its racial composition, trusting a commission or panel of citizens elected or appointed in a place such as Georgia to not be influenced by skin color when deciding if a person lives or dies strikes me as dangerously naïve. I don’t trust the citizens of our southern states to be responsible and ethical stewards of the law when the crime in question involves a black person and a white person for one simple reason: They are not trustworthy.

Why did the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Savannah Morning News refer to Troy Davis – as far back as 1992 – as ‘convicted cop killer’? Wouldn’t a simple ‘convicted killer’ have sufficed? In legal matters, I don’t think hundreds of thousands of signatures on petitions should determine the outcome, but it’s curious to me that Jimmy Carter, the pope, archbishop Tutu and the many former federal officials of various political inclinations – including a former director of the FBI – were ignored. It’s even more curious to me that our president – who would blend in effortlessly on death row in nearly every state that has one – said absolutely nothing. Why were there so many questions about the witnesses recanting their testimony? I read a lot about witness intimidation. I read a lot about the lack of physical evidence. I read a lot about most of the case being built on a foundation of eyewitness accounts, which, according to any expert I’ve ever heard or read, is about as solid as mud.

I read, many times and in many places, that one of the witnesses who signed a statement implicating Troy Davis did so without reading it first because he is illiterate. I’d toss the whole thing based on that and that alone, but, as I’ve aptly demonstrated, a lawyer I am not.

Why did the guards and officers at the prison put on riot gear? Why, when Troy Davis was already inside the building where the killing was to take place, were the sirens heard so often throughout those hours of waiting for the court jesters to craft a single sentence? Why do these awful gatherings tend to be a sea of black faces? Why do the guards and the officials and the politicians announcing one thing and another tend to be white? Why do the cops show up at these things, regardless of the time of day (or night) wearing sunglasses that cover a third of their faces? What sort of perversion was behind the decision to have a black woman emerge from the homicide chamber to tell the watching, waiting world that Troy Davis, as of 11:08 p.m., was dead?

For me, the most unsettling aspect of the entire spectacle was not that Troy Davis died: It’s that his sister was alive enough to have realized, in a few swift minutes, that she had lost. Not her decade-long fight against cancer, but a fight, and an admirable one, waged against the centuries. It was she I thought of most for several days after the killing when I kept hearing and reading the phrase “justice has been served.” The words baffled me the same way that bumper stickers that say “Support Our Troops” do. What, exactly, do those words mean? Served to whom? And by whom? If justice is a master to be served, who are the servants? And what exactly are the terms of servitude? And are those terms nuanced, as so much else appears to be, by geography?

Though those four words may have been uttered in an unexamined way for the most part, for me the purpose they served was to flood my mind with images of Troy Davis’ sister. Listening to the narration on the radio the night of the killing was awful enough; looking at the images on the Internet the following morning was nearly unbearable. There were pictures of the sister from throughout the years, appearing in court rooms, marching, speaking, protesting and praying. Then, that Wednesday afternoon, her cancer-weary frame sitting in a wheelchair hours before her brother’s scheduled killing, speaking to a group that had gathered in a church near the prison. And finally, surrounded, shielded by a tight tangle of black arms and hands and bowed heads in a cordoned off area near the entrance to the building where her brother’s life, it had just been revealed, would soon end. In the images I saw spontaneous humaneness juxtaposed with brutal barbarism and I hoped that the very brave woman at the heart of that cocoon experienced, if only for a few moments, something that felt like safety.

Revision

Well, that was interesting. Since it was the 10th anniversary of you know what, and since I have shared my own recollections of the day enough times with enough people, and since I have such a negative attitude about the day’s aftermath, I thought I’d turn the microphone over to others. Around April or so I noticed that the number of posts lined up beautifully on the right side of this blog, the number 10 appearing beside each month. I like the evenness of it. And since it was the 10th anniversary and all, I decided to ask 10 people one question – what do you remember about September 11, 2001? And then write, without ever once veering into the first person. It was a good exercise for me, and to those who shared their stories, thank you.

In listening to and writing the recollections of others, I started thinking about my own memories of that day from a perspective that was different in that I was not writing it, or talking it, and I realized that over the years there’s a major detail in my own recollection that’s been distorted into something quite different from what it was.

I wasn’t terrified of the prospect of us going to war that day. I was terrified of the prospect of the power of PR people, the force of which I had – as of that morning – yet to fully comprehend.

I clearly remember setting a cup of coffee down on a table as I tried to figure out what all the racket outside was. I lived in one of the center apartments of a courtyard complex at the time, and the first thing that came to mind was that someone’s cat had been run over by a car. I lived in that building for eight years, and more often than not there were more cats in residence than people, so the thought wasn’t exactly out of the blue.

I was at work that morning by 10:00, and already little U.S. flags were being handed out at the front desk. I have, up until now, maintained that the reason the gesture was alarmed me was because it struck me as the beginnings of the beating of the war drums.

It was worse than that. I had been working in the PR industry for a year and a half at that point, and it was dawning on me slowly – I wasn’t nearly as jaded back then – that I was spending the majority of my waking hours with people unlike any I’d ever encountered, people who believed with spectacular fanfare in storylines in which billion-dollar, global corporations were cast as the underdogs not because they were true but because they were paid – six-figure salaries in many instances – to write them, people who did not answer to their conscience not because they made an honest decision to instead follow the money but because they did not have one. It was mind-fuck city down there, and there I was in their midst, functioning for the most part. I do not know what that says about me, and I’m not sure I want to know.

By the morning of September 11, 2001, the U.S. military, George W. Bush, Iraq and burning buildings were the last things I thought of when one of the most unscrupulous people I’ve ever met thrust a flag in my face and bellowed, “We’re going to get them.” She was a big, loud Amazonian woman who, in spite of having been born into a lot of money and showered with the most expensive and exclusive private education available, conducted herself without a trace of tact, class or decorum. I have never, before or since, met someone with quite the same knack for sniffing out power and then stomping over the head of anyone who interferes with her mission to align with it. She has children now, I hear.

The worst of the worst, to be sure, but still, one among hundreds of people whose mere presence put me on the defensive. I would work in that agency for six more years, and the feeling of being under siege never really went away. It gelled that morning, what I’d been sensing in an abstract way for months, as they handed out desk flags and gathered in conference rooms to yell at big-screen televisions as if the whole thing were a football game – which, in hindsight, was an almost refreshingly authentic reaction. That office was in downtown Portland, a nice distance from the mothership office, which was out in a suburb proudly inaccessible by public transportation (including walking). We were outcasts at that agency, I think, regarded as misfits because we worked in a neighborhood where there were drug rehab facilities and homeless people. We weren’t watched very much, so I was pretty liberal with the smoke breaks, and that day, I was even more so.