“In what concerns my association with men, with things, I refuse to be coerced even by truth, even by beauty.”
- Cicero
Thinking about the seventies again. They always get a bad rap these days – spun as a dark time of crime and chaos (there is of course a political element that gains power by our thinking of this creative time in a negative light) when actually there was a lot of joy – we were going to overcome the problems of the world with our increasing intelligence, humanity, and technology. Then came the conservative backlash… But that’s another sad story.
I used to perform occasionally with a drag king troupe. When I do drag I do it to celebrate maleness. My own male aspect, and the beauty of men. “All Right Now” is, in my mind, a perfect expression of the liberation of the seventies – a skinny English boy strutting out his sexuality in front of one of the thickest, baddest guitar riffs of all time. For the act I dress like a blue-collar guy in a ridiculously overstuffed toolbelt, an a-shirt, Levis and Dickies work boots. I bust open a 12 pack of Budweiser and invite my friends over to party, which snowballs into a swaggering air-guitar festival.
When I first presented this idea to the rest of the drag troupe, some people wanted to add another element: some femme women would walk by with placards replying in sassy ways to the protagonist’s sexually confident come-on statements (“In your dreams,” “Yeah, right,” etc.) The troupe had a very strong poststructuralist, gender-critical feminist element in it, which I supported, of course. This was my first show with the troupe and I went along with the placard idea, but it really detracted from the point I wanted to make.
We’ve all heard the phrase “whenever anyone is oppressed, we are all oppressed.” I would like to add, “Whenever any one of us is liberated, we are all liberated.” The confident white boy in “All Right Now” reflecting on his (probably imagined) successful sexual exploit is just one voice in a whole freedom movement. One of the loudest, of course, because he is one of the dominant group: white men – the ones who got the recording contracts and all the other advantages. But to the degree he is truly singing from a state of freedom, he is the voice of all freedom.
I know the sexual liberation movement became an excuse for many men to push themselves on women with renewed brashness. I definitely had my share of men on dates responding to my rejections with “you just need to relax, baby – you’re too uptight,” and succumbing to them because I believed it – that there was something wrong with me. I have been through my anger over these violations many times. It really sucked that they did that. It sucks that they still do it with different excuses, or even worse, with chemicals.
But Love and fear are always interlaced – we haven’t managed to separate them yet.
Maybe just a listen to the song would clear this up better than all my words. Listen to the joy in Paul Rodgers’s voice, the delicious power chords barking out of those humbuckers, the sassy cheap-ass bass tone. The claves! A great moment in recording history that was, whenever someone in that studio said, “How about some claves?” Or maybe they used them from the start to hold down the tempo. Whatever the story is around the claves, the song wouldn’t be right without them.
In the liner notes of the “Best of Free” Jim Bickhart tells the story of how “All Right Now” came out of a riff that guitarist Paul Kossoff came up with “fooling around backstage.” The song came out of fooling around, some boys playing around together. Free. Free to play, free to strut, free to make big fat sounds in the night on a stage in front of thousands of other people feeling a little bit freer by the time they went home. Free.
This is what my drag piece was about. A blue-collar white boy celebrating his simple, sexy self. Knowingly or unknowingly toward the liberation of all of us, and inspired by the overall feeling of hope and freedom of the early seventies, riding the wave of the liberation movement of the women, the queers, the people of color, and inviting everyone along for the ride.
I just went online to look for pictures of Free, and ran across Andy Fraser the bass player’s website. I looked at his photo page and thought, “god, what a beautiful man!” Then I read his bio, and found out he’s just recently come out of the closet and is living with AIDS. And there’s this sublime video about his coming out to his family. Then I surfed on to concert clips of Free on YouTube, including the recent Paul Rogers and Queen tour. Paul Rogers is still a total babe, too! Wow! Sexy men. And knowing it.
Words create reality. Naming your band Free puts a certain responsibility on your shoulders; that word carries powerful medicine. The guitar player overdosed. The band split up. But the survivors are so beautiful it makes me want to go work out. Free. Free. Free. Can we be? Can we support someone to be free even when their expression includes the language or trappings of the old regime? Can we bring the old boys into the new world? I guess it’s a situational decision, how far to stretch or how firm to stand. That old democracy thing again.
When I allowed the placards in the drag piece, I sold out in the same way I did when I let the date guys convince me that my lack of attraction was my own personal flaw. I thought there was some feminist message I was just not sophisticated enough to think to include; I needed to literally include the “woman’s voice.” But in retrospect, I realize that the message of freedom is enough. It’s the height of sophistication, and feminism. It’s the voice of all of us, beyond gender – or far beneath it, at the core of who we are. It can only be found in joy, acceptance… Love, in other words. Not tearing someone down, but lifting them up. It’s really not that difficult to do, it’s just hard to see you’re tearing someone down sometimes. That’s what we’re here to learn. And we get to do it over and over until we get it right.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
LarryCowellRIP
My father, Larry Cowell, passed on Saturday, July 12, 2008, at 10:30 am. I started a blog to honor him:
http://larrycowellcelebration.blogspot.com
http://larrycowellcelebration.blogspot.com
Monday, June 09, 2008
A missive on my father, America, and all that
When you don’t have to think about something, you generally don’t. This is the problem of privilege. White people don’t have to think about the point of view of people of color. Men don’t have to think about the point of view of women, straight people of gay or gender-variant people, wealthy of poor, free of those in prison. If your position is comfortable and safe relative to someone else’s, it takes a monumental, sustained effort to leave that comfort zone and feel someone else’s perspective without quickly falling into the easy traps of condescension, such as charitable contributions and the assigning of false consciousness, that seem compassionate on the outside but allow the giver to unconsciously maintain the same spiritually destitute perspective.
I think white America is at a turning point. Last week my white, middle-class family spent ten hours in an emergency room waiting for a doctor to see my 84-year-old wheelchair-bound father – a man who fought in World War II, worked all his life at a tedious job, supported a family, did all the things he was expected to do. He had fallen down and hit his head – a bloody mess, but all he needed was twenty stitches. We sat beside a weeping young woman who had also fallen down and whose tooth was sticking through her lip. She waited ten hours too. As did the two people with broken legs, the ambulance arrivals, and the whole annex full of children in various states of misery. None of us had any choice.
This is not a new scenario for the poor and the marginalized – I heard similar stories about the Charity Hospital emergency room when I lived in New Orleans almost twenty years ago. The waits were not as long as they are in the current health-care crisis, but the insanity of the sick and injured being compelled to wait hours for care due to purely socioeconomic factors is the same. What is politically significant is that it’s happening to white middle-class folks now.
My whole country is becoming a ghetto. Under constant surveillance, economic stress, inadequate social services, and yet this transformation is still invisible to the continuing blindness and unconscious cruelty of the remaining privileged few.
The outrage, and even the mild discomfort, of white people over the words of the Reverend Jeremiah White exemplify the unconscious ignorance of the privileged. Because it requires so much effort on the part of the listener, it’s no fun for the privileged to hear the truth from the “other” perspective. It asks you to work. Who want to work? Isn’t life all about getting the maximum return for your investment, even spiritually and intellectually? I would guess most of our economically privileged are privileged because they follow, and have probably internalized, the basic principles of maximizing returns – whether they learned it the hard way or from their parents is irrelevant. It’s an ideology, the “naturalness” of free-market individualism having been psychologized hundreds of years ago in Western “Enlightenment” thinking by our friends like Locke and Hobbes. All we have to do is look out for ourselves. There is no moral imperative to care.
I only participated in the ten-hour emergency room vigil for a few hours – I had a plane trip to pack for. I called my stepmother’s cellphone at 10 p.m. – hour six – to see if they needed me. She said no, they were already in a room now and would be taken care of any minute. When I called the next morning, she said they finally got out of the hospital at 2 a.m. For twenty stitches. Then I was taken to the airport, bound for visits to Political Science graduate programs in the Northeast, burning with rage at my father’s and the tooth-girl’s mistreatment by, and vulnerability to, a pathologically imbalanced national economy and “health care” system.
You have to understand something about my father to see the significance of this series of events. My father is the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Golden Age of Greece. He is Plato and Galileo and John Stuart Mill. He is the triumph of reason over the dark night of religious ignorance – atheist, secular humanist, scientist, former communist, realist artist, engineer, peace activist, civil libertarian. He rails against the conservatives and still flies his flag every Fourth of July. He critiques this country and has been willing also to die for it. He flew fifty-one missions over Germany. And like the Enlightenment Man, he has had some myopia. He has “a few Black friends.” He calls women girls sometimes. He thinks gay people are superior in intelligence and creativity. (Well, ok, he got that right.) He spoils his daughters, though it looks like liberty, and lays unreachable expectations on his son, though they are always unstated. I was allowed almost absolute liberty as a child, to the degree that I have had to learn about boundaries and self-discipline the hard way, as an adult. (A problem of too much democracy?) While we are free to become whomever we please, and are praised for our progress, some invisible Platonic ideal hangs constantly over our heads: who we become is never enough. Religion and spirituality cannot be discussed. But over all, I agree with the general opinion of almost everyone who meets my father. He is a wonderful man and he must be a cool dad. Yes, he is, and I’m very proud of him.
He was diagnosed with ALS a couple of weeks ago. He kept falling down. Older people almost never contract ALS – it’s a “young man’s disease.” My dad was the picture of vitality until a few months ago, flying his airplane, walking the dog every day, proud of his health and attributing it to his positive attitude toward life. Now, all of a sudden, his brilliant mind can’t tell his muscles what to do. We are all devastated, and there is no telling how or at what speed this disease will move.
I am his seed. For my whole adult life I took the liberty to pursue happiness, as a musician, artist, and lover. While disdaining calcifying institutions, I still believed in the critical importance of education (my sister became a teacher, my brother should have several autodidactic PhD’s by now); while disdaining Western masculinist literary culture I still get misty over the Great Books (my sister is now a librarian, family gatherings always see somebody with their nose in a book); while exploring alternative spirituality and seeking intuitive feminine wisdom, this wisdom still strains against a rational humanist skepticism in my mind (my brother converted to an orthodox religion for many years, but one with a strong intellectual discursive tradition.) And though for most of my adult life I rejected political involvement and awareness in favor of “personal growth,” I am now a born-again activist looking at graduate work in Political Theory. I can’t escape Plato. Well, can any of us?
Now back to the airport.
Still breathing through my anger and frustration over the emergency room, I went as calmly as I could through the security check. They told me I couldn’t bring my bottle of water through, so I went back outside to drink it. Coming through the second time, I guess someone read my rage; though it had gone through fine the first time, this time a belligerent, clearly ex- (or wanna-be-) military security guard carried my suitcase around a corner and came back with a baggie full of my shampoo, lotion, and deodorant. He asked me scoldingly if I knew what a ziplock bag was. I calmly told him yes. He told me condescendingly that he wasn’t going to trouble me with the very important security reasons, but that from now on I needed to put my little shampoos and lotions in one, and that my deodorant bar was over the liquid limit and he was doing me a favor to let me keep it. He talked to me as if I were a misbehaving child.
Marilyn Frye calls this the “double bind” – when you are enraged over your treatment, but showing that rage can get you in worse trouble. So you are forced to put on a happy face. A shit-eating grin. It’s a familiar feeling for folks of color. Look at the trouble Reverend White has gotten Barack into just by letting out some of that rage, years ago. It’s also familiar to women. How do you keep from looking like a “hysterical” (from the word for uterus) bitch when you finally blow your top at being treated like a child?
I got about halfway from the security checkpoint to my gate, and I just let it out. I started making animal retching noises like a Black woman at her son’s funeral. Then I fell on my knees sobbing for my violation by that security officer, for my country, for the Home of the Brave crippled by stupefying fear, for the way it treats its veterans (my dad told the hospital orderly about the “fifty-one missions over Germany” as he was helped out of the car. I think it helped get him into triage early, but he still had to wait as long as everyone else for actual care. Which is really only fair, in a boneheaded Aristotelian way.) I doubled over my suitcase and wept for the people in emergency rooms all over the country, for the mothers in Iraq, and for the Fathers who thought that this nation could stand for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For the Father who was poisoned 2,400 years ago for trying to show us what justice is, only to have his ideas co-opted and misread by generations of selfish and pusillanimous elites. I cried for the mothers of children sent off as chattel slaves to the prisons of the Land of the Free. I wept for our betrayal.
I am America. My Fathers’ child.
My hope is that when a white woman can fall down screaming a mother’s grief all alone in an airport while a nervous crowd looks on, that maybe a corner has been turned. If we couldn’t hear the wailing of the African, American Indian, Filipino, Hispanic, Iraqi, German, Japanese, Jewish, Vietnamese mamas, and all the others all over this continent and elsewhere, if we couldn’t hear the wailing of the Earth for the stripping of her forests and the undignified mass enslavement and slaughter of her animals, maybe we can hear the wail of a formerly-privileged, now-we’re-not-so-sure, middle-class-and-falling white woman.
With a strange mixture of joy and a heavy heart, I’m bundling up and going off to Canada this fall to study democratic theory from outside of the U.S. They have more money to offer me – I can live comfortably and give my mind to my studies rather than having to work, and scrimp, and read heavy theory while malnourished and stressed-out. As I prepare for this major move, I’m thinking of all the international students I’ve seen pass through the University of Arizona, here from war-torn, exploited, poverty-stricken countries, happy for the opportunity to study comfortably in the richest country in the world, but always with a subtle sadness behind their eyes for a faraway people and home. When I traded my Canadian twenty for U.S. nineteen dollars and fifteen cents for my return trip, I felt a loss of more than eighty-five cents. I’m thinking of Richard Wright making it through grade school on greens and a piece of white bread for dinner – no lunch. I’m thinking of the War on the Poor taking lives by martial law in my other home of New Orleans, and leaving wounded lying in the park up the street from my current home in Tucson. I’m thinking of my friends and family under the stress of increasing police surveillance, the skyrocketing price of gasoline and bread, diminishing salaries and wages, and of the mysterious lightness of my steps along the frozen streets of Toronto. I pray I don’t lose my edge. Because I’m doing this for my country: for all those I leave behind, and for all those to be born, and for the cultureless culture that no other culture can imitate.
This has gotten rather long. I was supposed to be writing another paper. In fact, this was going to be a piece about the Reverend White uproar. Well, suffice it to say that I agree with Cornel West: we have indeed become a “blues nation.” Even the white middle class is feeling the boot heel on its throat. The words of Reverend White and Barack Obama’s graceful and moving response to the “scandal,” and the economic stress and biopolitical security state we are now all faced with, are an opportunity for us white folks to look at the truth, step up to a more compassionate worldview, and make this a more loving country. I think we need nothing short of a miracle in the United States right now to save any semblance of democracy, and that electing Barack would be the first step toward us creating that miracle. We are the miracle. Of course, I would support Hillary too, and pray she could pull off that health care plan (but preferably from Congress.) But if McCain gets in, I’ll set up camp for you all in Toronto, ok? Because that would be a wrap for the U.S. Work for the Democrats and Greens, in Congress and in your own states. Please. And turn off your TVs – it will only drain you.
PS for my homies:
If my father’s health takes a turn for the worse soon, I will defer grad school for a year. Otherwise, I’ll be leaving this summer, with my family’s blessing, to do the work my dad groomed me for. (Oh well. Screw psychology. We do become our parents to some degree – just hopefully the better parts of them, augmented.) Yes, of course I’ll still do music, silly! Maybe more, now that I don’t have to hold down two part-time jobs. With some difficulty I’ve chosen the amazingly huge, diverse and excellent Political Theory program at the University of Toronto over the small, intimate, and surprisingly cool Social, Political, Ethical and Legal Philosophy program at SUNY Binghamton. I made fast friends with the folks at Binghamton and I’m sad to decline their offer, but there are friends to be made in Toronto too, and I find my heart is more in Political Theory than Philosophy. And the resources at U Toronto are unbelievable. I hope to be involved with the new Centre for Ethics, among other things. And the law school looks really good too. Anyway, I’ll be back to visit, and back to stay someday. I love you all. Come say hi before I go, ok? Or at least come to the party – July 12 or 13, tba.
I think white America is at a turning point. Last week my white, middle-class family spent ten hours in an emergency room waiting for a doctor to see my 84-year-old wheelchair-bound father – a man who fought in World War II, worked all his life at a tedious job, supported a family, did all the things he was expected to do. He had fallen down and hit his head – a bloody mess, but all he needed was twenty stitches. We sat beside a weeping young woman who had also fallen down and whose tooth was sticking through her lip. She waited ten hours too. As did the two people with broken legs, the ambulance arrivals, and the whole annex full of children in various states of misery. None of us had any choice.
This is not a new scenario for the poor and the marginalized – I heard similar stories about the Charity Hospital emergency room when I lived in New Orleans almost twenty years ago. The waits were not as long as they are in the current health-care crisis, but the insanity of the sick and injured being compelled to wait hours for care due to purely socioeconomic factors is the same. What is politically significant is that it’s happening to white middle-class folks now.
My whole country is becoming a ghetto. Under constant surveillance, economic stress, inadequate social services, and yet this transformation is still invisible to the continuing blindness and unconscious cruelty of the remaining privileged few.
The outrage, and even the mild discomfort, of white people over the words of the Reverend Jeremiah White exemplify the unconscious ignorance of the privileged. Because it requires so much effort on the part of the listener, it’s no fun for the privileged to hear the truth from the “other” perspective. It asks you to work. Who want to work? Isn’t life all about getting the maximum return for your investment, even spiritually and intellectually? I would guess most of our economically privileged are privileged because they follow, and have probably internalized, the basic principles of maximizing returns – whether they learned it the hard way or from their parents is irrelevant. It’s an ideology, the “naturalness” of free-market individualism having been psychologized hundreds of years ago in Western “Enlightenment” thinking by our friends like Locke and Hobbes. All we have to do is look out for ourselves. There is no moral imperative to care.
I only participated in the ten-hour emergency room vigil for a few hours – I had a plane trip to pack for. I called my stepmother’s cellphone at 10 p.m. – hour six – to see if they needed me. She said no, they were already in a room now and would be taken care of any minute. When I called the next morning, she said they finally got out of the hospital at 2 a.m. For twenty stitches. Then I was taken to the airport, bound for visits to Political Science graduate programs in the Northeast, burning with rage at my father’s and the tooth-girl’s mistreatment by, and vulnerability to, a pathologically imbalanced national economy and “health care” system.
You have to understand something about my father to see the significance of this series of events. My father is the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Golden Age of Greece. He is Plato and Galileo and John Stuart Mill. He is the triumph of reason over the dark night of religious ignorance – atheist, secular humanist, scientist, former communist, realist artist, engineer, peace activist, civil libertarian. He rails against the conservatives and still flies his flag every Fourth of July. He critiques this country and has been willing also to die for it. He flew fifty-one missions over Germany. And like the Enlightenment Man, he has had some myopia. He has “a few Black friends.” He calls women girls sometimes. He thinks gay people are superior in intelligence and creativity. (Well, ok, he got that right.) He spoils his daughters, though it looks like liberty, and lays unreachable expectations on his son, though they are always unstated. I was allowed almost absolute liberty as a child, to the degree that I have had to learn about boundaries and self-discipline the hard way, as an adult. (A problem of too much democracy?) While we are free to become whomever we please, and are praised for our progress, some invisible Platonic ideal hangs constantly over our heads: who we become is never enough. Religion and spirituality cannot be discussed. But over all, I agree with the general opinion of almost everyone who meets my father. He is a wonderful man and he must be a cool dad. Yes, he is, and I’m very proud of him.
He was diagnosed with ALS a couple of weeks ago. He kept falling down. Older people almost never contract ALS – it’s a “young man’s disease.” My dad was the picture of vitality until a few months ago, flying his airplane, walking the dog every day, proud of his health and attributing it to his positive attitude toward life. Now, all of a sudden, his brilliant mind can’t tell his muscles what to do. We are all devastated, and there is no telling how or at what speed this disease will move.
I am his seed. For my whole adult life I took the liberty to pursue happiness, as a musician, artist, and lover. While disdaining calcifying institutions, I still believed in the critical importance of education (my sister became a teacher, my brother should have several autodidactic PhD’s by now); while disdaining Western masculinist literary culture I still get misty over the Great Books (my sister is now a librarian, family gatherings always see somebody with their nose in a book); while exploring alternative spirituality and seeking intuitive feminine wisdom, this wisdom still strains against a rational humanist skepticism in my mind (my brother converted to an orthodox religion for many years, but one with a strong intellectual discursive tradition.) And though for most of my adult life I rejected political involvement and awareness in favor of “personal growth,” I am now a born-again activist looking at graduate work in Political Theory. I can’t escape Plato. Well, can any of us?
Now back to the airport.
Still breathing through my anger and frustration over the emergency room, I went as calmly as I could through the security check. They told me I couldn’t bring my bottle of water through, so I went back outside to drink it. Coming through the second time, I guess someone read my rage; though it had gone through fine the first time, this time a belligerent, clearly ex- (or wanna-be-) military security guard carried my suitcase around a corner and came back with a baggie full of my shampoo, lotion, and deodorant. He asked me scoldingly if I knew what a ziplock bag was. I calmly told him yes. He told me condescendingly that he wasn’t going to trouble me with the very important security reasons, but that from now on I needed to put my little shampoos and lotions in one, and that my deodorant bar was over the liquid limit and he was doing me a favor to let me keep it. He talked to me as if I were a misbehaving child.
Marilyn Frye calls this the “double bind” – when you are enraged over your treatment, but showing that rage can get you in worse trouble. So you are forced to put on a happy face. A shit-eating grin. It’s a familiar feeling for folks of color. Look at the trouble Reverend White has gotten Barack into just by letting out some of that rage, years ago. It’s also familiar to women. How do you keep from looking like a “hysterical” (from the word for uterus) bitch when you finally blow your top at being treated like a child?
I got about halfway from the security checkpoint to my gate, and I just let it out. I started making animal retching noises like a Black woman at her son’s funeral. Then I fell on my knees sobbing for my violation by that security officer, for my country, for the Home of the Brave crippled by stupefying fear, for the way it treats its veterans (my dad told the hospital orderly about the “fifty-one missions over Germany” as he was helped out of the car. I think it helped get him into triage early, but he still had to wait as long as everyone else for actual care. Which is really only fair, in a boneheaded Aristotelian way.) I doubled over my suitcase and wept for the people in emergency rooms all over the country, for the mothers in Iraq, and for the Fathers who thought that this nation could stand for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For the Father who was poisoned 2,400 years ago for trying to show us what justice is, only to have his ideas co-opted and misread by generations of selfish and pusillanimous elites. I cried for the mothers of children sent off as chattel slaves to the prisons of the Land of the Free. I wept for our betrayal.
I am America. My Fathers’ child.
My hope is that when a white woman can fall down screaming a mother’s grief all alone in an airport while a nervous crowd looks on, that maybe a corner has been turned. If we couldn’t hear the wailing of the African, American Indian, Filipino, Hispanic, Iraqi, German, Japanese, Jewish, Vietnamese mamas, and all the others all over this continent and elsewhere, if we couldn’t hear the wailing of the Earth for the stripping of her forests and the undignified mass enslavement and slaughter of her animals, maybe we can hear the wail of a formerly-privileged, now-we’re-not-so-sure, middle-class-and-falling white woman.
With a strange mixture of joy and a heavy heart, I’m bundling up and going off to Canada this fall to study democratic theory from outside of the U.S. They have more money to offer me – I can live comfortably and give my mind to my studies rather than having to work, and scrimp, and read heavy theory while malnourished and stressed-out. As I prepare for this major move, I’m thinking of all the international students I’ve seen pass through the University of Arizona, here from war-torn, exploited, poverty-stricken countries, happy for the opportunity to study comfortably in the richest country in the world, but always with a subtle sadness behind their eyes for a faraway people and home. When I traded my Canadian twenty for U.S. nineteen dollars and fifteen cents for my return trip, I felt a loss of more than eighty-five cents. I’m thinking of Richard Wright making it through grade school on greens and a piece of white bread for dinner – no lunch. I’m thinking of the War on the Poor taking lives by martial law in my other home of New Orleans, and leaving wounded lying in the park up the street from my current home in Tucson. I’m thinking of my friends and family under the stress of increasing police surveillance, the skyrocketing price of gasoline and bread, diminishing salaries and wages, and of the mysterious lightness of my steps along the frozen streets of Toronto. I pray I don’t lose my edge. Because I’m doing this for my country: for all those I leave behind, and for all those to be born, and for the cultureless culture that no other culture can imitate.
This has gotten rather long. I was supposed to be writing another paper. In fact, this was going to be a piece about the Reverend White uproar. Well, suffice it to say that I agree with Cornel West: we have indeed become a “blues nation.” Even the white middle class is feeling the boot heel on its throat. The words of Reverend White and Barack Obama’s graceful and moving response to the “scandal,” and the economic stress and biopolitical security state we are now all faced with, are an opportunity for us white folks to look at the truth, step up to a more compassionate worldview, and make this a more loving country. I think we need nothing short of a miracle in the United States right now to save any semblance of democracy, and that electing Barack would be the first step toward us creating that miracle. We are the miracle. Of course, I would support Hillary too, and pray she could pull off that health care plan (but preferably from Congress.) But if McCain gets in, I’ll set up camp for you all in Toronto, ok? Because that would be a wrap for the U.S. Work for the Democrats and Greens, in Congress and in your own states. Please. And turn off your TVs – it will only drain you.
PS for my homies:
If my father’s health takes a turn for the worse soon, I will defer grad school for a year. Otherwise, I’ll be leaving this summer, with my family’s blessing, to do the work my dad groomed me for. (Oh well. Screw psychology. We do become our parents to some degree – just hopefully the better parts of them, augmented.) Yes, of course I’ll still do music, silly! Maybe more, now that I don’t have to hold down two part-time jobs. With some difficulty I’ve chosen the amazingly huge, diverse and excellent Political Theory program at the University of Toronto over the small, intimate, and surprisingly cool Social, Political, Ethical and Legal Philosophy program at SUNY Binghamton. I made fast friends with the folks at Binghamton and I’m sad to decline their offer, but there are friends to be made in Toronto too, and I find my heart is more in Political Theory than Philosophy. And the resources at U Toronto are unbelievable. I hope to be involved with the new Centre for Ethics, among other things. And the law school looks really good too. Anyway, I’ll be back to visit, and back to stay someday. I love you all. Come say hi before I go, ok? Or at least come to the party – July 12 or 13, tba.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
letter to a superdelegate
Hello Superdelegate!
I am actually not as alarmed as many people seem to be about the superdelegate factor. Between going door-to-door and lobbying Congress and knowing some local officials, I know that we are all human beings and all possess the capacity to act from a hopeful place inside of us, or from a fearful one. I think you can’t be involved in progressive politics without having a foundational belief that things can really get better. But I think this belief can be buried under layers of disappointment and cynicism, as it was for me.
I was born in 1964. Most of the people who would later become my political heroes were killed before I even knew who they were. Almost every election of my life, I have voted for the lesser of two evils, or at the very least settled for someone perhaps quantifiably “qualified” but uninspiring. This constant state of disappointment eventually left me dispirited, and I “checked out” of political involvement, until 2004 when I realized that I needed to do something about the Bush administration. Even then, I was not walking for a candidate, but to root out a diseased administration. As always… damage control.
This is the first time in my life I have been fundamentally lifted up by a candidate for the presidency. I didn’t decide on Barack Obama until about a week before our primary. Hillary Clinton is highly qualified and would make an excellent president, and the subconscious sexism underlying the Republican hate campaign against her galls me to no end. But compared to a candidate who is not only qualified, intelligent, and good on policy, but also inspiring on a level many of us have never seen before, voting for her would have been settling again. And in the deepest part of me I feel that nominating anyone but Barack Obama would break the heart and the spirit of the American people. I really do. We need him. The potential for healing this country is phenomenal: African Americans are feeling respected like never before, young people are getting involved because they see someone who finally speaks clearly to what they as untarnished souls know is possible, and even the red-blue divide is breaking down around this man. I stood outside of a polling place on February 5th and actually had Republicans walk up to me and tell me that if Obama got the nomination they would vote for him. Three or four of them, of their own volition. No kidding.
But this is not an argument for a favored candidate as much as it is a respectful request that the principle of democracy be upheld in our party. I understand that in its highest purpose the superdelegate element of the nominating process may perhaps act as the “voice of reason” to keep the passions of the people from sweeping an improbable or unelectable candidate into the nomination purely based on charisma or star appeal. I have two answers to this possible argument. First, Obama is highly electable – various polls have shown him to be more popular among Republicans and Independents than Clinton. He is also highly qualified. The only argument any opposition has had against him is that he has not spent as much time in Washington as the others. Because he was busy fighting in the Illinois legislature to make federal promises come true on the state level. I think this makes him more qualified.
For the second part of my response, I’m going to have to draw on Plato. Please forgive me, but the old guy was pretty wise about human nature, and our Founders seemed to think so too. (My political reawakening in 2004 inspired me to go back to school and study political theory – I am in my last semester now.) In Book IV of the Republic Socrates found reason and passion to be allies against capricious decisions based on fleeting factors like appetite and addiction. Passion can actually be very reasonable. And I think this is what we are seeing in the movement behind Obama’s candidacy. We are passionate about this candidate because we know what’s good for us – as individuals, as a nation, and as a planet. This passion more resembles the passion of Tom Paine than that of a Britney Spears fan. The exciting thing is that it’s happening in the Britney fans too! We all love our country.
I feel Barack Obama represents me not so much on policy (all of the candidates are too conservative for me, really,) but in a certain spirit I wish to embody myself. I think we call it the American spirit. For me, it’s the idea of our “improvability” through participation in the democratic process – that the very self-evident truths this nation was founded on provide a basis for the ongoing creation of a more humane and just society. I can tell you that even listening to the respectful, honoring, and positive tone and language of Obama’s speeches has inspired me to greater integrity in my own speaking, writing, and interaction. His candidacy has improved me. I want this man to represent me, and this country I am so proud of, in the world community.
I think John McCain’s little-publicized strength is in a certain integrity of character that he projects. He has stood against torture, and for electoral integrity. I think that any wide appeal he might find would not be based on policies as much as character. The Democrats need someone with a similar strength, and Barack Obama has this in a depth that even McCain’s political advisor Mark McKinnon refuses to contest.
I know this is a long letter, and I appreciate your time. I am sure you will do what is best for our country and our planet.
I am actually not as alarmed as many people seem to be about the superdelegate factor. Between going door-to-door and lobbying Congress and knowing some local officials, I know that we are all human beings and all possess the capacity to act from a hopeful place inside of us, or from a fearful one. I think you can’t be involved in progressive politics without having a foundational belief that things can really get better. But I think this belief can be buried under layers of disappointment and cynicism, as it was for me.
I was born in 1964. Most of the people who would later become my political heroes were killed before I even knew who they were. Almost every election of my life, I have voted for the lesser of two evils, or at the very least settled for someone perhaps quantifiably “qualified” but uninspiring. This constant state of disappointment eventually left me dispirited, and I “checked out” of political involvement, until 2004 when I realized that I needed to do something about the Bush administration. Even then, I was not walking for a candidate, but to root out a diseased administration. As always… damage control.
This is the first time in my life I have been fundamentally lifted up by a candidate for the presidency. I didn’t decide on Barack Obama until about a week before our primary. Hillary Clinton is highly qualified and would make an excellent president, and the subconscious sexism underlying the Republican hate campaign against her galls me to no end. But compared to a candidate who is not only qualified, intelligent, and good on policy, but also inspiring on a level many of us have never seen before, voting for her would have been settling again. And in the deepest part of me I feel that nominating anyone but Barack Obama would break the heart and the spirit of the American people. I really do. We need him. The potential for healing this country is phenomenal: African Americans are feeling respected like never before, young people are getting involved because they see someone who finally speaks clearly to what they as untarnished souls know is possible, and even the red-blue divide is breaking down around this man. I stood outside of a polling place on February 5th and actually had Republicans walk up to me and tell me that if Obama got the nomination they would vote for him. Three or four of them, of their own volition. No kidding.
But this is not an argument for a favored candidate as much as it is a respectful request that the principle of democracy be upheld in our party. I understand that in its highest purpose the superdelegate element of the nominating process may perhaps act as the “voice of reason” to keep the passions of the people from sweeping an improbable or unelectable candidate into the nomination purely based on charisma or star appeal. I have two answers to this possible argument. First, Obama is highly electable – various polls have shown him to be more popular among Republicans and Independents than Clinton. He is also highly qualified. The only argument any opposition has had against him is that he has not spent as much time in Washington as the others. Because he was busy fighting in the Illinois legislature to make federal promises come true on the state level. I think this makes him more qualified.
For the second part of my response, I’m going to have to draw on Plato. Please forgive me, but the old guy was pretty wise about human nature, and our Founders seemed to think so too. (My political reawakening in 2004 inspired me to go back to school and study political theory – I am in my last semester now.) In Book IV of the Republic Socrates found reason and passion to be allies against capricious decisions based on fleeting factors like appetite and addiction. Passion can actually be very reasonable. And I think this is what we are seeing in the movement behind Obama’s candidacy. We are passionate about this candidate because we know what’s good for us – as individuals, as a nation, and as a planet. This passion more resembles the passion of Tom Paine than that of a Britney Spears fan. The exciting thing is that it’s happening in the Britney fans too! We all love our country.
I feel Barack Obama represents me not so much on policy (all of the candidates are too conservative for me, really,) but in a certain spirit I wish to embody myself. I think we call it the American spirit. For me, it’s the idea of our “improvability” through participation in the democratic process – that the very self-evident truths this nation was founded on provide a basis for the ongoing creation of a more humane and just society. I can tell you that even listening to the respectful, honoring, and positive tone and language of Obama’s speeches has inspired me to greater integrity in my own speaking, writing, and interaction. His candidacy has improved me. I want this man to represent me, and this country I am so proud of, in the world community.
I think John McCain’s little-publicized strength is in a certain integrity of character that he projects. He has stood against torture, and for electoral integrity. I think that any wide appeal he might find would not be based on policies as much as character. The Democrats need someone with a similar strength, and Barack Obama has this in a depth that even McCain’s political advisor Mark McKinnon refuses to contest.
I know this is a long letter, and I appreciate your time. I am sure you will do what is best for our country and our planet.
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