Where You Been?

“Is there some reason you’re avoiding me?” he asked, after a long hiatus in their conversation.

“No, not you in particular, I’m avoiding all of them,” his old friend said.

“Whoa, ‘all of them‘?  Is it really like that?” he asked, more than a little aghast.  

“I cannot say if it is like that or not, because this is a world of illusion.  Your illusions are not mine and you can’t see what I do.  The questions you ask me are in your mind, a mind that asks itself no questions.”  

“I don’t like where this is going, Mr. Koh-Ann… if that is your name,”  he said.

“Who are you to like where this is going?”  The face on his old friend was like the finely chiseled face on a statue of Sekhmet.  It was the nonchalant face of the eternal cat.

The thought occurred, but remained unspoken, these old friends had not seen each other in several months.    

“I am what I am,” he said, realizing it was probably too late for philosophy or an appeal to his old friend’s sense of friendship.  

It had always been an exceedingly hard world for his cat-faced friend.   Everything made sense, but it was still terrible.

You Don’t Need Feedback

It’s the craziest thing, in a world where we buy entertainment and consume sponsored culture in paper cups, that anyone could expect to move forward in a creative business without a good focus group, marketing and branding experts, plenty of street smarts, energy, drive and ambition.  If you have enough money, none of this matters, I suppose.  But for everybody else, selling and funding is the life or death of the creative project.

You send the babies out into the world, but don’t expect too many smiles at those babies, unless you’ve been skillful enough to find the audience that really cares.  The world is a very noisy place, and smiling at babies is low in the pecking order.  The reasons are many.  Some are Zen masters, of course, and float above the world of desire and pain.   Some are being chased by too many things to look back, to pause and smell a flower.  Some truly, and to the bottom of their hearts, don’t give a rat’s tutu.

Myself, I don’t like babies very much.  Yet when somebody holds up their baby, with that proud, expectant look on their face, I have to say something.  “Cute!” I’ll say, trying my darnedest to make it sound genuine.  But that’s just me, too much time on my hands, so I wind up being like that, I guess.

  

Peekskill USA

My father and my uncle grew up in Peekskill, NY, a once-prosperous river town on the Hudson River.   As times changed, and transport by riverboat faded from memory, the town lost its most lucrative business and its luster.  It took on the haunted quality it possesses to this day.   By the time my father and his then infant brother arrived from the slums of New York City, just in time for the Great Depression, the town was probably a pretty hopeless place.   The father and sons who ran the hardware store were, according to a cousin who punched one of them in the face on his first day in town, proud members of the Ku Klux Klan.

In August of 1949 there was a Paul Robeson concert scheduled for a picnic area just outside Peekskill.  Robeson’s likeness is on a U.S. postage stamp now, but at the time this scholar, college football star and opera singer was considered by many to be a dangerous Communist sympathizer.   Eventually he would be forced to leave the country.  A powerful, outspoken Negro at a time when black people were supposed to be content with their second-class lot and play semi-comical servant roles in movies, Robeson spoke out against wars of aggression, against Jim Crow, against racism, against police violence, against the exploitation of workers and the unbridled materialistic greed of our money worshipping culture, against so many things that patriotic men like J. Edgar Hoover stood for.  It’s small wonder there was a riot in Peekskill in August of 1949 when he came to do a show there with Pete Seeger and other idealists who, at the time, were regarded as a fifth column, fighting for Stalin under the false banner of “brotherhood”.  

It’s easy to get stressed out people to support the fight against an enemy once that enemy is properly demonized, Hitlerized, Stalinized.  Particularly if the people supporting the war don’t have to endanger themselves in any way, they will support the war effort fervently.  And if they get a chance, as they did on a summer evening in Peekskill in 1949,  to kick some mixed race Commie ass in an ambush where they outnumber the race traitor Commies twenty to one, so much the sweeter.

My father was a World War Two veteran attending Syracuse University on the GI Bill in 1949, if I have my chronology straight.  He had grown up in grinding poverty (a phrase he uttered through gritted teeth when tersely summarizing his own childhood) on Howard Street in Peekskill.   A lifelong student of history and current events, in his early years he aligned himself politically with men like Robeson and Seeger.  He was an idealist who’d been in the army fighting fascism and he was passionate about righting injustice.  He wanted to see the world become less fascistic, rather than more so.  He believed in brotherhood,  civil rights and civil liberties then and for decades after.  He also acted on these beliefs, enduring catcalls and rotten vegetables as a spokesman for the integration of NYC schools after Brown v. Board of Education and its “all deliberate speed”, among other things.  I believe he returned to Peekskill for the concert that turned into a riot when angry white mobs overran it.

My father is gone now, as is my uncle, so, unfortunately, there is no way to verify whether he was there or not.  But visiting my aunt the other day for her 85th birthday I spotted a book on her shelves called “Peekskill USA” by Howard Fast.   I recall that my mother admired Howard Fast (although she acknowledged he was probably not a great writer), and hearing from her that he’d been blacklisted by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and also thrown in jail during the anti-Communist witch hunts of that time.

“Peekskill USA” is Fast’s eye-witness account of events in Peekskill on August 27th and September 4th, 1949.  The first one a riot, the second one an actual concert, as far as I can tell so far.  Published by the Civil Rights Congress Press in 1951, and printed in the United States of America (as it states on the copyright page) the book is a collector’s item.  My aunt was reluctant to let it go, though she certainly has not opened it in decades, if ever.  I understood her reluctance and promised to read it quickly, take good care of it and send it back to her soon.

I started reading it this morning.  The forward states that the events in Peekskill 1949 are destined to live forever in the memory of all who oppose fascism.  It was a hope, like many back then, that was swallowed whole during the so-called Cold War.   I often look around at the assumptions that underlie our singlemindedly materialistic society, like the one that says extremely wealthy criminals must be treated under a different, more forgiving, set of laws than petty criminals, and wonder about the actual winners of the Cold War.  

It seems they are the same winners as ever, the wealthiest citizens, casually united by common interests to preserve their sometimes hard-won prerogatives.  So much of the business of the 1% is amoral that it seems churlish to judge it as harshly as I do.  It’s not as though the richest among us want 45,000 Americans to die of treatable diseases every year for lack of health insurance, or want our wealthy nation to have the infant mortality rate of a third world country, or millions of hungry, malnourished, abused American children, or a permanent underclass and the largest prison population in human history.   These are surely forgivable externalities.  In order for some to have 100,000 times the wealth of others, certain sacrifices must be made.  It is only common sense, after all.

I have often thought, with that characteristic uncharitableness of mine, that Fascism prevailed at the close of the Cold War, disguised as Democracy, which, from the beginning, used phrases like “all men are created equal” with a certain puckishness.   The forces of reaction, inherently anti-humanist, amplified through the largest public megaphones, are always behind the status quo.  Why would it be otherwise?

So, if high ranking Nazi spooks were recruited after World War Two and hired by the American OSS, and their extensive anti-Communist knowledge and techniques incorporated into the CIA and used to undermine and eventually defeat the evil totalitarian system of Communism, why should I even mention this, at best, footnote coincidence, here?  If the same baldly manipulative techniques pioneered by Woodrow Wilson’s Committee for Public Information to drum up American support for unexplainable (except in terms of how it enriched certain already rich people) World War One were refined by Josef Goebbels and his Ministry of Public Enlightenment a generation later to drum up support for the war to cleanse the world of the Jewish virus and its Communist spawn, and if those techniques are still largely in use today by those who promote wars of every kind, why should I draw any negative conclusions?  Why bring Fascism into it?  After all, “collateral damage” is so much better than “murder of innocent civilians” and “Freedom is on the March” is so much better than “what are you going to do about it, asshole?”

I’ll report back on Howard Fast’s account of the Peekskill riots in Part Two.

What We Do Not Say

My mother’s last trip to her oncologist was a perfect example.  The doctor retired soon after the visit, shortly before my mother died.  He looked sort of dazed most of the time, sometimes lost key details of the patient’s particular cancer during an examination.   He acted like too many patients dying on him might have taken their toll, though he was trim, polite and ran a flourishing practice.  He could have been the sort who retires and dies a week later chasing a tennis ball.  But that day he was as focused and straightforward as I’d ever seen him, and so was my mother in her way.

“What’s the good news?” asked my mother with a cheery, girlish inflection.

“I’m afraid I don’t have any good news today,” said the shifty eyed oncologist.

“Then I don’t want to hear it.  I don’t want any more bad news!” she said.  The oncologist deftly shifted the conversation to other subjects and what was left unsaid was never said, until my mother looked at Sekhnet from her hospice bed and asked “how can I say goodbye to such a sweet face?”

And so it seems to be with this gentle, brilliant man we spent a few days with this weekend.   He looks shockingly bad, much worse than he did two and a half months ago, and he looked horrible then.  It is the darkness around the mouth that is most disturbing to me, but many aspects of his looks are disturbing.   He is weak but determined, in pain but uncomplaining.  Sekhnet kept asking if he wanted help and he kept telling her he didn’t, though things were difficult for him and it was also hard to watch him struggle.   It was important for him to struggle, and we could easily see this.  This struggle is called life.

“His memory is perfect and he’s brilliant and still remarkably mild and kind,” you could say, and you’d be right.  He was telling me about a baseball stadium trip he took with his son-in-law, a man with Asperger’s Syndrome, as far as we can tell.  It’s hard to gauge an expression, looking at the son-in-law.  He is the proverbial two eyes, a nose and a mouth.  He looks vaguely sad all the time, and he speaks very little.  A brilliant guy, from what I hear, and he and the man we visited, who looks like Death walking painfully as an exhausted but resolute man, grew very close.  In 2002 they set off, during inter-league play, to catch baseball games in 8 cities: Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit, Toronto, Chicago, Minneapolis… I’d have to look at the map to give you the eighth.  3,700 miles in ten days, they saw 15 or 16 teams play, there may have been one repeat, he doesn’t recall off-hand a decade later, and, really, what difference does it make?

It was apparently not hard for this pair of shrewd baseball fans to map their journey.  They took the schedule, inputted the games and locations into a spread sheet and tweaked it a few times.  It took under an hour.  And then they were off.  Hard to imagine their conversations during the average 370 miles driving a day, but knowing the man we visited and his almost limitless range of interests, I’m sure they had plenty to talk about.  One bond they had was their love of the man’s oldest daughter.  The future son-in-law lived in their house for a year or more before the wedding.  He was clearly the son the man had never had, growing up with his hard-working wife and three daughters.  The two are very close.

“We may do it again this August during inter-league,” the man said with an almost imperceptible smile playing across his wasted face.  Then he looked off slightly and said “maybe we won’t…I’m not sure yet, ” and his voice trailed off just a little.

3:46 a.m.

Mind pondering a dozen interlocking puzzles, it would take a stronger will than mine to get to sleep.  A passing thought about the winning combination of mildness and great intelligence of our dying host, the comfortable bed might as well be a trampoline, but not because our host appears so near the end.  Sekhnet is taking in and whooshing out the deep, puffing breaths of exhausted sleep, I’m  out from under the covers, doing a little staccato tapping, trying to get some thoughts arranged here, and out of my head.

Unleashing creativity is blessed work and I hope one day it will pay a few salaries (with a health plan) and spread from kid to kid, skills mastered and taught to other kids.  Proving what every adult knows, but so often forgets– kids are capable of many amazing things- and all of their creativity will be needed to avert the impending many-headed disasters that loom and leer, while greed gloats, and amasses weapons to defend its prerogatives. Meantime, how to get them to really care about their creations?  They are like the wanton gods in Shakespeare who create with indifference and tire quickly of their playthings.  Some call out for more structure, others need less.  My faith in their powers makes me forget sometimes that this one is only 7, that the oldest is only 11.  That they are also childish is something I need to not forget.  How to nudge them the right way, get them to refine their ideas and collaborate while leaving them free to invent and run things is one piece of the puzzle I turn like a kid playing with a loose molar, pushing it every possible way.

The most essential puzzle now is how to get a key number of bright, undistracted adults into the room with these animating kids and afterwards help me to make this delicate new being into a sturdier creature that will walk this troubled world with a light and whimsical step, stomping hard when necessary, but never causing harm.

Ten Minute Drill

My aunt turns 85, I think it is, today, is turning so as I tap.  We are going to surprise her with a call, one of our madcap turns on Happy Birthday, wherein I follow Sekhnet’s voice sometimes in falsetto and other times in my most profundo basso.   The victim usually makes a clever remark about the rendition, my aunt will probably just say thank you.

Her husband, my recently departed uncle, was a bit tyrannical with her.   Surprising, really, since he seemed such a mild-mannered man.  You have to watch out for seemingly mild-mannered men, I reckon.  I recall one such man, a Housing Court judge, quiet, affable, bookish and a complete vicious prick.  Enraged complete vicious prick.   My uncle could be this way to my aunt, apparently.  Maybe this is why my mother couldn’t stand to be around them, they bickered constantly about who had interrupted whom first.

But I have already used up half of my allotted time, and to say what?  To speak ill of the dead?  To make a passing comment about my octogenarian aunt?  Well, no.  We have to call my aunt, who identifies herself as my grandmother now when she misses me call and leaves me a voice mail.  She’s increasingly confused.  It’s as if she’s worn out by how difficult and irrational the world is and she’s longing for things to be simple and nice.   Her personality has changed accordingly.  

She no longer fights or protests.  Instead she hums to herself.  She may have a hard time choosing her food at the restaurant where we’ll take her tomorrow evening, if all goes well and we make our 230 mile drive to pick her up at the assisted living facility.   Fortunately, when we order for her, a dish that we know she loves, she will tuck into it with gusto and say “yum!”.  She’ll eat half, be amazed at how full she is and have the rest for lunch tomorrow.

I think of the sorrows of this world and maybe it is not a bad thing that my aunt can’t recall most of them.  She seems to live more and more in the present, with less and less complaint.   I look around at the present I live in and say “damn!”

Thirty seconds on the clock, only time to heave up a desperation shot at the buzzer and….. it’s off the rim.  Damn!

Empathy and its absence

Lack of empathy, one finds, is epidemic in our modern rat race world.  It’s a defining feature of our terminally distracted times, I would say.   Flip the channels, virtually every station features competitive zero sum games with one winner and everyone else losing.   An inadvertently dismissive or hurtful comment often comes from the same distracted place:   I’m telling you how it looks to me and I’m too overwhelmed by my own problems to consider how my observation will effect you, how it would effect me if someone offered it in response to my situation.

 
There are a hundred examples of our culture’s lack of empathy.   A true horror like the shooting at that Connecticut elementary school has everyone momentarily aghast while, off the news, kids are shot dead regularly in our nation’s poorest neighborhoods, while the tiniest kids the same age in Pakistan and Yemen live with drones flying over them daily that suddenly and without warning blast a group of people and send body parts flying.  Talk about instilling life-long PTSD!  
We rationalize why this “collateral damage” is necessary, but the exercise does not involve the slightest empathy.  Leave aside the deadly problems of our permanent underclass, as is always done, and let’s look at the drone program for one concrete example.  Suppose we really are killing many of the worst of the worst with drones, people who are actively plotting to come kill us.  The seven year-old and her five year-old brother who occasionally get blown up is a tragedy as big as a seven year-old middle class child getting blown up here, as devastating as a child’s death in the ghetto.  But we can’t grasp that any more with the drones and there’s no serious conversation about it.  We accept the false choice: it’s this drone program of targeted killing or American soldiers, with their boots on the ground, getting maimed, killed and, if they survive, coming home with PTSD of their own.  It comes under the heading of “shit happens, pass the roast beef, please”.
 
My closest friends often have the reflex to explain why hurtful behavior was not meant to hurt, and why one shouldn’t take it personally.  I’ve been trying to get them to at least pause to acknowledge that I feel hurt, and have a right to feel that way, and only then to offer the Perry Mason-like defense of why the other person didn’t mean to accidentally take my eye out with a stick and how bad they feel, worse than me, really, and did I stop to consider that an accident means it wasn’t done on purpose, and you know he’s preoccupied and why would you expect him, of all people, to be more careful with a sharp stick in a dark room, and some people see better in the dark than others, and maybe you won’t completely lose the sight in that eye when the bandages come off, why are you always so negative, you’re like your mother, the glass is always half full…. blah blah blah.
 
We all know these types, I guess.  The worst of it is, most of the time most of us are these types.  Living overwhelmed in an overwhelmingly demanding world.