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A Utopian Sorta Day

July 11, 2009 - View Single Entry

Yesterday started off with a prolonged argument with the United States Postal Service about the non-timely non-delivery of an Express Mail parcel to one of my trade publisher clients. The more I hear about how big corporations function, the gladder I am that I've never had to work for one, and the surer I am that the country is in more desperate trouble than those big corporations think.

Today wasn't like that. Today was much better. Today started off with an outdoor shower -- the air was remarkably chilly for mid-July but the water wasn't. I needed that shower when I got home last night, but the problem is that showers make me sleepy and I still had work to do. So I woke up feeling a little greasy. After shower, Travvy and I went for our brisk morning walk. There weren't many ticks on his legs after we got back -- yee-hah!

I booted up Morgana V, set the tea kettle on to boil, de-ticked Travvy, read and answered e-mail, then got down to the essay in progress on "why this country needs an independent feminist movement." Worked a couple of hours on that, managing not to get too distracted searching the Bloggery for comments on a panel on the "new women's movement" that I attended at Katharine Cornell Theatre -- I thought four years ago, but it was only three.

Then Trav and I went for a stroll, pausing to play on the platforms at the school playground. He loves jumping from one to the next, on, then off. Then I worked for another couple hours on the On Joanna Russ review -- I'm still in the read-and-make-notes stage, but the essays are good and the book is well organized; it also meshes very well with the "independent feminist movement" essay, and before I went to bed I took Russ's What Are We Fighting For? off the shelf and started to reread it.

It being another glorious September day in July, I had to go for a ride. Travvy stayed home on the deck. Allie and I had a great ride, up the Old Holmes Hole Road, down the Dead Truck Trail, eventually across Stoney Hill to the trail that runs along the back of Thimble Farm, then up through Greenlands and along the edge of the state forest. We got back later than I'd planned (I don't wear a watch). I'd switched off barn chores so I could go to the second-to-last performance of Brian Ditchfield's wonderful Kim and Delia (which I saw as a staged reading a little over a year ago), curtain time 5 p.m. My plan was to run home, feed Travvy, and hightail it to Edgartown, but time was much too short -- the venue was old Katama Farm, now the Farm Institute, which is on the far side of Edgartown, almost all the way to South Beach. The play wasn't very long: Trav could eat a little late. Thanks to the summer bottleneck from the Triangle past the Shop & Shop, not to mention missing the turn for the farm (where did I get the idea that it was on the left??), I got there a few minutes after five, but the show hadn't started. Whew.

Kim and Delia was staged outside, with the (good-size) audience seated on hay bales arranged in concentric semi-circles. The "stage" was bordered on stage right by a big old barn, whose hayloft door made for an excellent balcony. To stage left was the short end of a small house, whose porch became part of the set. As the play got under way, a wagonload of newly baled hay came in for storage in another barn a little ways off, and a couple of ducks wandered through the stage. It was a great venue, and the production made excellent use of it. The staging was wonderful, the acting likewise -- both wonderfully suited to the story: Kim is a young girl whose mother has just died, Delia is her new imaginary friend, and much of the action takes place in the land where imaginary friends go when their "real" friends forget them.

Travvy got his supper a little late, but then we went for a walk and it seems all was forgiven. Being greeted upon one's return home by a woo-wooing malamute is very cool, even if one knows that the woo-woo subtext is I want my supper!

Read some more of the Joanna Russ book and eventually went to bed. If I didn't have to work for a living, this is what my days would look like: write, walk with dog, write some more, ride, go see other people's creativity in action, come home to dog, write some more, sleep.

Robert McNamara, R.I.P.

July 07, 2009 - View Single Entry

Robert McNamara was high on my list of villains when I was an antiwar activist, and for many years after the war ended I predictably frothed at the mouth when his name was mentioned. But then I saw Errol Morris's film The Fog of War not long after it came out in 2004. I won't say the film -- which is subtitled "Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara" -- changed my opinion of what the man had done, but it sure deepened my understanding of both McNamara and the rarefied upper echelons of business and politics in which he moved.

Against my will I emerged with a serious respect for the guy. He was one of the very few from that era who really did wrestle with the morality of the war. He came to understand that U.S. involvement in Vietnam was a huge mistake not just because the U.S. lost (which still seems to be the prevalent conviction in the halls of Congress, not to mention in the country at large) but because the assumptions underlying that involvement were, to put it mildly, flawed.

To question all the truths you've held to be self-evident all your life -- the ones that are taken for granted by most of the people around you -- takes courage for anyone. But for someone like Robert McNamara, whose adherence to those flawed truths helped cause vast death, suffering, and destruction in the world . . . ? Stiff-upper-lip denial would be so much easier, at least on the surface, even if you had to reinforce it with alcohol or medication.

The pressing question, of course, is why he, his colleagues, his successors, and all the rest of us have such a hard time identifying those deeply flawed but "self-evident" truths before they get us in big trouble. McNamara asked himself that, and he found no easy answers.

Marriage

July 05, 2009 - View Single Entry

Speaking of declarations of (in)dependence, I saw this headline on AlterNet the other day: "For Many, Marriage Is Sexless, Boring and Oppressive: Time to Rethink the Institution?" When I stopped sputtering -- someone thinks this is news?? -- I read the article. It was about one Sandra Tsing Loh, a writer whose 20-year marriage had just ended, in part because she had had an affair. This apparently led her to the conclusion that the institution of marriage was problematic. She said this in writing, then was astonished at the invective directed against her. I was so astonished that I wrote the following.

Reading this article I got the feeling that the women's liberation movement never happened -- that it never raised any questions about marriage as an institution: its history, its purpose, its assumptions about male and female roles. I remember those questions, and I also remember the defensiveness with which mainstream feminists tended to react to the critiques of radical feminists, socialist feminists, and lesbian feminists. The Betty Friedans et al. took every critique of marriage (and of institutionalized heterosexuality in general) as an attack on their personal choices. The defensive reaction to Sandra Tsing Loh's writing about marriage is nothing new. Neither is Tsing Loh's story. Maybe if she'd paid more attention to earlier feminist critiques of marriage, she wouldn't have been so shocked by either her divorce or the reaction to her writing about it.

Marriage is a contract. When one party or another reneges on a particular contract, do we immediately question the existence of contracts in general? No, we don't. We look at the particular contract, the circumstances under which it was signed, the behavior of the two parties, their interpretation of the contract, and their expectations of each other. (If you think any of this is cut-and-dried, take a look at all the case law that's been devoted to contracts since the founding of the republic.)

The history, conventions, and laws about marriage are out there for all to see. The huge trouble is that plenty of people don't want to see them. I don't think Tsing Loh sees them very clearly, even now; if she did, her heart wouldn't "lift" at the sight of her daughters' Tiffany-blue wedding invitations -- she'd be bummed out. Plenty of people, even feminists and politically savvy women and men, manage to willfully suspend what they know (or at least deeply suspect) to be true: that marriage is a very problematic institution, and it's strong enough to shape its participants even when they're determined to "have it their way."

Sure, I've known a few married couples over the years who've managed to survive and thrive, both as individuals and as a couple, but they've also worked like hell to do it -- and quite a few of these marriages are second ones for one or both parties. But the successful marriages of a few, or even many, couples shouldn't limit our critique of the institution.

Marriage is the default setting in this society. It's not surprising that most people get married: they're expected to get married, and not getting married (especially for women) takes a lot of courage and determination. What's surprising is how many people who understand the history and nature of the institution and who are privileged enough to have alternatives keep sleep-walking into it, and celebrating when their friends and their kids do likewise. If Sandra Tsing Loh would address that perplexing question, they'd be making a real contribution.

I believe that the limiting of personal options is one thing that makes marriage attractive to so many people. Getting married, like having children, sets one's course for a long time. In the old days it was pretty much the only big choice a middle-class woman had to make: pick a husband and (if you made a good choice) you didn't have to decide what to do with your life. This abdication of responsibility spawned the "problem with no name" among women of my mother's generation (those who were raising children in the Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best years) that Betty Friedan wrote about so memorably in The Feminine Mystique.

Whether we grew up in dysfunctional families or not (I sure did!), we've all grown up in a dysfunctional society -- and as far as I can tell, the "off-the-rack" mentality has gotten worse in recent decades. The idea that you have to practice something -- a skill, an art, a relationship -- to get good at it seems to escape a lot of people. At the first, or second, or third sign of frustration, they're outta there.

Free Our Speech

July 04, 2009 - View Single Entry

I submitted this to the Vineyard Gazette for its July 3 edition. It didn't get in, possibly because I didn't have it finished and sent in till last Sunday night. Here it is.

The older I get, the more awed I am by the U.S. Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. By today's standards the drafters were not a diverse lot: every one was a white male property owner. But in the 220 years since it went into effect, it has proved flexible enough to grow with a country that becomes more diverse with each passing decade, while comparable documents in other countries often don't survive the regime that promulgates them. What is its secret?

Privileged though the founders were, they clearly had lack of privilege in mind as they drafted the new document. As colonial subjects, their rights had been regularly violated by the colonial authorities. Their freedom, their property, and even their lives had been at risk. They took threats to those rights very seriously. They were not just thinking about small, distant, or unpopular minorities. They were thinking about themselves.

The right to free speech was very high on their list, along with the closely associated freedom of the press and the right to peaceably assemble. They knew from personal experience that the right to talk to oneself was not enough. The right to circulate one's words -- in meetings or in print, the "mass media" of the time -- was crucial in resisting an abusive government.

Note, however, that the First Amendment imposes no obligation on citizens to speak responsibly, or on the press to act in the public interest. It specifies only that Congress shall not get in the way. For the rest we're on our own.

The murder of Dr. George Tiller on May 31 has focused attention on these freedoms. Dr. Tiller, one of the few doctors in the U.S. willing to perform late-term abortions, had been threatened repeatedly over the years. Much of the rhetoric directed against him, on the World Wide Web, in newspapers, and on commercial airwaves, was vile, intemperate, even incendiary. Some of it advocated stopping him by any means, legal or illegal. Some people believe there should be legal restrictions against such extreme forms of "hate speech." I don't.

Yet I do believe that out-of-control speech helped create the climate in which someone decided that killing Dr. Tiller was a moral and upstanding thing to do. Speech is not innocuous. It can be dangerous. The drafters of the U.S. Constitution knew that: it had, after all, helped free the American colonies from Great Britain. So the First Amendment doesn't make exceptions for speech that makes people nervous, or speech that advocates unpopular points of view, or even speech that recommends breaking the law. Laws that restrict speech for any of these reasons are on shaky ground. When Congress in its panic passed the Patriot Act, they forgot that. Many of its members have yet to recover from their amnesia.

But though the First Amendment says that Congress shall pass no law abridging freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, it doesn't order the citizenry to let irresponsible speech pass without comment. Nor does it guarantee anyone access to the mass media. As journalist A. J. Liebling famously said, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."

Back before cell phones, when bullhorns were the best and cheapest method to communicate with a large and mobile crowd of people, every astute demonstration organizer knew that there were some people who just could not be trusted with a bullhorn. Either they'd go off on a crowd-control ego trip or they'd sound so panicky that they'd scare everybody else. Denied access to a bullhorn, plenty of people yelled that they were being censored, but they weren't. They were free to say anything they wanted. They were free to go get their own bullhorn. They had no constitutional right to the organizers' bullhorn.

If I were king, I'd be sorely tempted to take some people's bullhorns away. It's just as well I don't have that power. We the people, however, do. The presses and media outlets that amplify the voices of hate speakers are subject to economic pressure. We are free to organize and publicize a boycott of the outlets and advertisers who amplify hateful voices, while supporting the advertisers who do otherwise. We are free to counter hateful speech in one-to-one conversation, at the supper table, and in the workplace.

It's important that we do so, even when speaking out makes us uncomfortable or even puts us at some risk. Most hateful speech doesn't inspire murder or other criminal activity, but it has serious subtler effects. An unrelenting spew of bilious thinking drowns out quieter, more thoughtful voices. It stifles rational thought, the sharing of personal experience, and discussion of ideas. And it spreads: you can't go to any major newspaper's website without finding post after post of this regurgitated bilge in the comments sections. It's one reason the political climate in this country is so dismal. Swallow enough canned soup and you forget what the good stuff tastes like, and why it's worth the effort to make your own.

Today it's 233 years to the day since the Continental Congress officially adopted the Declaration of Independence. I, like millions of my fellow citizens, am wondering how this country is going to pull out of the mess we're in. I'm going to spend this July 4 going back to basics: the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. The signers of one and the drafters of the other not only set us a high standard, they expected us to live up to it. Let's give them our best.

Wired

July 01, 2009 - View Single Entry

The sun came out a couple of times but mostly it's been an unbelievably dark and rainy, not to mention thundery and split-with-lightning, day, so in between editing I've been catching Quicken up with my checkbook and paying some bills. Being less than impeccable about entering debit-card transactions in my checkbook, I've recently got myself into the habit of skimming my bank transactions online to see if I missed anything or got any numbers wrong.

My bank listed two transactions that I hadn't recorded yet in either Quicken or my checkbook: two deposits on June 29. I yelped. I'd hoped they were coming, but it was a fingers-crossed kind of hoping. Nearly all my income arrives in the form of checks. These two deposits arrived by wire, from Norway. I know this is old hat to some of y'all, but I'm thrilled. I send out an invoice with my bank info on it and money arrives in my account. How cool is that? What's really cool is that my bank doesn't charge a fee the way it does to cash or deposit a check from another country, even if the check is in U.S. dollars.

Maybe I'll celebrate by catching up on my damn estimated tax payments.