KADDISH

(Image by Driftglass.)

I keep remembering the early 1980s, when Reagan broke faith with the world by beginning to talk about a "winnable" nuclear war, and everyone who didn't have a bunker to retreat to realized we were at a heightened risk for destroying the planet. Sting responded with

In Europe and America, there's a growing feeling of hysteria (...)
There is no historical precedent
To put the words in the mouth of the President
There's no such thing as a winnable war
It's a lie that we don't believe anymore
Mr. Reagan says we will protect you
I don't subscribe to this point of view
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too

How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy
There is no monopoly in common sense
On either side of the political fence
We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too




String tried to sidestep some of the attacks he'd receive for writing this fuck you to Reagan by naming the song "Russians", but we all knew of course the Russians loved their children, as much as Reagan claimed to love his. That wasn't the point, really. The point was, Reagan is out of control and it's up to someone else to stop the insanity.

I believe "someone else" did stop the insanity then. I absolutely do not believe Reagan's actions or bluster or sleepwalking performance in any way created a safer world for us, any more than Dubya's criminal war has kept America from being attacked again.

I do believe one of the things which made a huge difference in that generation's approach to peace, in particular to the anti-nuke movement, was Deena Metzger. Deena is a writer and activist who first came to my knowledge with the poster she made of her mastectomy scar, her bare chest exposed with one side bearing massive jagged evidence of cancer interrupted, her arms outstretched in sheer joy for life. It was a radical act, that celebration of self-love, and it got all our attention.

During the 1980s, Deena traveled around speaking about the imminent threat of nuclear holocaust represented by the leaders then in our government -- many of whom repeated their roles in Dubya's regime. She gave us grim details of what nuclear winter would actually do, but then, like the rebbe I think of her as being, she offered a way out of despair: She urged us to grieve. Right then, standing or sitting in crowded rooms listening to her, she asked us to let our feelings out, release them with one another and to g*d if we believed in g*d. And we did, weeping, wailing, begging for help, hanging onto one another. She explained that our unexpressed grief and terror stood in the way of intelligent, effective action against the threat we faced. Old ways of doing things would not work. We had to find new ways, and we had to hack through the thickets of old betrayal, fear, and doubt to discover that path.

I believe it worked. Enough people found clarity to make a difference then, to guide action and maintain our direction in progressive circles. It's easy to look on the ascendancy of the Right as a failure of the Left, but it's more complicated than an either-or description. Reagan offered enough people an easy out that his influence is still among us, even on the Left. He wasn't only a bad wizard, he was a very bad man who launched the unraveling of American decency and responsibility.

We're now at another crossroads. In 24 days, Bush will walk out of an Oval Office he has trashed beyond description. I honestly cannot imagine the mindset of someone who wants to take on the job of being primarily in charge of scrubbing away Dubya feces from hallowed walls. I've thought about it a lot. I've been a community organizer and activist my entire adult life, and I do share Obama's frustration with how hard it is, how slow the road, the ethical dilemmas and corruption and lack of stability one encounters in that life. And, in my 30s, I engaged in magical thinking, imagining myself Queen of the Universe and coming up with What I Would Do to change things with a wave of my hand. I even petitioned for the job with friends, offering ready solutions to some of their personal problems if they would only vote for me. They took it as a joke, and it was. Mostly.

A number of events came along to push me in the direction of giving up wanting control, and in my case, it's been an extremely good thing. I'd rather work cooperatively than run the show, most of the time. I don't think I have all the answers, and I know I'm not healed enough to always recognize the truth when it bites me on the ass. I know what works for me, today, and that's enough. Tomorrow I may grow into a different approach, and that's as I want it to be.

So, that's one profound psychological difference between me and Obama. Another is that I never pursued upward mobility and if I had, it might not have worked for me. Contrary to the myth, it doesn't work for most people. Think Hoop Dreams, how many gifted young black basketball players never make it into the NBA. It's not a good ambition to hold out to them, unless you want to keep them locked into despair and self-doubt. Hero worship of the few who "make it" is deliberately promulgated by corporate consumer overlords to keep us from pursuing more rational means of bettering our lives.

Here we are now, having elected a President who talked to us constantly of hope and change, without ever having a definitive discussion about how change will be defined. It obviously doesn't mean the same thing to all of us. For instance, I don't consider the replacement of Joshua Bolten with Rahm Emmanual to be Change of a definitive sort. Indeed, Obama's choices for those who will lead with him are as Clintonesque as if, well, a Clinton had been making them. But I knew he'd do that all along, I knew the difference between him and The Other was hysteria created by an emotional reaction from several factors (CDS, untreated disappointment, dislike of powerful women who don't do the Girl Thang, etc.) and exploited by his campaign because, well, why not exploit it? It's what politicians do.

He wasn't my first or second choice. Neither was a Clinton. I'm a radical, I wanted at least a bona fide liberal in the position. I know he's going to disappoint, too, as much as Bubba did, and I'll take it to therapy if it starts keeping me from thinking clearly as an activist. My job is to think and listen, not to use my colleagues as unpaid counselors.

Even so, even as I expected him to do most of the things he's done, I admit I was thrown by the Rick Warren choice for inaugural prayer. I've said before, it's a clear mistake, a painful mistake. As one friend of mine commented, "It's obvious whoever is helping Obama think about such things, there are no gays or lesbians in that inner circle." Indeed. But it goes beyond that, because I'm hearing distress from all manner of progressives, not just lesbians and gays. It will do no good whatsoever, and it means for many of us (pretty much everyone I've asked) that the inauguration ceremony will have this nasty bit in the middle, a taint we can't ignore.

I believe it actually hinders the efforts of responsible Christians to restore balance to our culture, to separate church from state and pursue ideology not bent on conversion and dominance. I know many Christians who are those kinds of moral people, and Rick Warren is not who they want speaking for their faith. He's a huckster, as all evangelicals are. You don't rise in that field unless you (a) believe you have a g*d-given right to forcibly convert others and (b) lying is all right in the service of bringing souls to Jesus. Warren panders not just to queer-hating but woman-hating, class exploitation, child abuse, apocalyptic nihilism, and white supremacy. Within a few years, he will be brought down by some seamy scandal (probably related to gay sex) and his brief validation on an international stage will be revealed for the sick joke it is.

In the meantime, however, he and his ilk operate from the developmental level of five-year-olds and talking about "tolerance" has no real meaning to them. If your five-year-old throws a screaming fit because she wants more cookies, you can sit her down and have a long talk with her about nutritional balance, but if you then give her one more cookie for participating, she will take away from that the lesson "if I throw a fit, I can get more cookies". Somebody has to be the grown-up with these people. They are not a majority, they are not even that powerful, it's all a house of cards. I want a President who will move in the other direction, away from giving them more room in our public discourse. I'm sick of turning on TV and seeing a preacher talking, aren't you? And, as pedophiles exist with arrested development, evangelicals (whom I'm sure have a vastly higher percentage of pedophiles in their ranks than any group of queers) believe if you don't fight them loudly and assertively, you are secretly liking and wanting what they do to you. They serve Jesus instead of sexual gratification but that difference is irrelevant here.

Thus, I'm confronted with a massive blind spot in the vision of our President-elect. I already knew he had little to no comprehension of how to include lesbian/gay rights into a big picture of human rights, and that this extends to being unable to surround himself with adequate numbers of powerful women. (Uneasiness with queers psychologically goes hand in hand with difficulty seeing women as human beings identical to men.)

As disturbing, I'm seeing some of the enchantment fall away from his former most ardent fans. I know I'll be in the paradoxical position of defending him from his prior rabid supporters, those folks who always shouted me down as a Hillary supporter because I never hated her guts, as the next few years unfold. I'll do it because it is my responsibility to speak out against emotion-based attacks on the leaders of my party. As it becomes clear he's just a right-of-center politician who has lived in academic and beltway insularity as much as anyone else, and as he uses ego to back his pragmatism instead of relying on a larger vision, the Right will whip up froth against him into the same sort of condemnation they've successfully sewn onto Clinton heels like Wendy trying to give Peter back his shadow.

In the meantime, I intend to keep grieving the larger damage done, the death being distributed worldwide in our name, the loss of species and islands and schools and oxygen-making forests. Buddha once said the only rational response to the world's illusion as we live it is grief. I'm a poet, I'm adept with the catharsis of elegy. On the other side is release, and an intellect less burdened with remembering betrayal. You have the remainder of this holiday: Go outside and give up your lamentation to whatever you believe listens to you best, even if it's the other half of your miraculous brain.


(Montreux Pop Festival, 1985 -- Sting performing "Love Is The Seventh Wave")


[Cross-posted at Group News Blog.]

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REAGAN THE CLASS-BAITER

(10 June 2004 cover of the Portland Mercury)

It's encouraging to see some folks out there daring to eat a peach when it comes to redefining the reality of the so-called Reagan legacy -- currently, the history of his race-baiting is being illuminated at the New York Times. I guess he's been dead long enough for some of those who allowed themselves to be whipped into a corner by the "liberal" taunt to venture forward and reach out toward the third rail that is his popularity.

Likely there's some cultural sociologist taking measure of the interval between burial and when questioning of myths begins. It was at least a decade before I heard the first JFK joke -- I mean, after he died (the comedian who made fun of him before his assassination, Vaughn Meader, had his career interred along with the President at Arlington, of course). It was so shocking: "You remember what John-John got for Christmas in 1963? A jack-in-the-box". When we finally gave ourselves permission to laugh, it was a little crazed, that release.


I happened to be in Washington, DC at the time of Reagan's funeral. I was performing with Actual Lives as part of the VSA International Arts Festival. Artists and attendees from all 50 states and 64 countries were staying at the Hilton where John Hinkley Jr. had tried to kill Reagan in 1981. I rode my scooter out to the side driveway and, with the help of a worried doorman, found one of the remaining bullet gouges in the rock wall beside the entrance. I ran my fingers over the depression and considered who we've lost to assassinations (JFK, RFK, Dr. King, Gandhi, Lincoln) and whom we have not (Reagan, George Wallace, Hitler, bin Laden).

Later that day, I was in an extremely crowded elevator riding up to my hotel room when a young man with Down's syndrome said to us all conversationally, "Reagan was a great President, huh!" I smiled at him, to make sure he knew I meant him no ill will, as I answered "No, he most definitely was not. He and his administration have done lasting damage to this country." I could have taken a dump on the plush carpeting with less opprobrium. I got off at my floor to disbelieving silence.

Two days later, I was returning from one of the best memories of my life, visiting the Smithsonian and the Botanical Gardens with a group of three other women, all of them brilliant, progressive, and beautiful. As we waited at a streetlight, a camera crew of four Middle Eastern men approached us. I don't know why they selected me to ask if I'd be willing to be interviewed for a documentary about American reaction to Reagan's death -- something about my openness usually makes me a target in such situations. Not that I mind, and I guess that's the point.

The interviewer's first question was respectful and tenative. But once I began answering, they knew they'd struck gold and gave me free rein. They used ten minutes of tape on me, and no doubt Cheney and his Morlocks have that footage somewhere. The documentary guys were effusive in their thanks, and my companions were laughing wildly as we went on to find a restaurant.

Currently, Republican contenders for the 2008 Presidential election are all but dying their hair orange and hitting on Nancy in their attempts to convince voters they are walking in Ronnie's boots. I hope progressives and other members of the reality-based community continue to offer a cheerful counterpoint commentary on the emperor's tanlines, ass acne and similar evidence that the man is wearing no clothes, people.

My contribution will be to remind you of how, during the 1980 campaign, Reagan allegedly deflated Jimmy Carter's re-election bid with the question "Are you better off today than four years ago?" This was supposedly aimed at "the American people" and was repeated often during the 1984 campaign. But Reagan was not asking this question of everyone. This one line is evidence of subtle and deeply cynical class-baiting, a tactic that worked brilliantly.

Those who did not benefit from Reagan's policies include a staggeringly long list: air traffic controllers (how did our current airport congestion happen, again?), union members in general, people with AIDS, people with mental health disabilities, refugees from Central America, and the vast majority of the working class. Just to name a few. Homelessness became an American way of life under Reagan. Neocons got their KY-sticky little hands on the car keys in his administration, and one of their first calculated moves was to make sure disposable income was removed from the hands of those who might agitate for social reform and instead swelled the accounts of the owning class.

But they understood that, overwhelmingly, the working class in this country believes we are middle class, or will be in another few years ("We're outta the woods, we're outta the dark, we're into the light!"). Playing into that fantasy was something Reagan did to B-movie perfection, using Hollywood technique to convince the public that he was "folksy" (more accurate, I think, to call him "volksy" as Hans F. K. Günt might use the term). Watch footage of him delivering that line in 1984 -- "Are ya better off..." -- and ignore the make-up, the glib smile, focus on his eyes, and you can see the cold lie of it all.

Reagan played on the working class hunger to belong, to be decent folks rewarded for their effort, by pretending he was talking to them, exploiting their/our class-based survival mechanism of believing "maybe what's good gets a little bit better, and maybe what's bad gets gone", as the Theme from Norma Rae explains.

He never intended to be around when the bills came due, and neither do his descendants, the Bushies who are Paraguay-bound as soon as either the coup fails or several hundred million people wake all the way up. It wasn't Reagan who sleep-walked through his Presidency, it was the working class. We once again bought the earnest incoherence of yet another man who is all hat and no cattle, because Culver City told us cowboys don't lie to plain ordinary working people. Right?

But here's the bottom line: Race-baiting and the rollback of gender equality cannot take place if working class people aren't deluding themselves about their connection to how things function. Playing us off against each other is the only hope they have of keeping America from growing up into a genuine democracy. Reagan's gone. Let's bury the last of his snake-oil with him.

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