Terrible America

I should probably change that sign to "I bake and I know no things," because lately I'm just feeling mostly that I know very little if nothing at all. For instance, why is the rest of the country (other than New York City and greater Los Angeles county) getting back to what they deem normal? Who were those people in those bars in Wisconsin, for example, that bunch of burly white bearded men getting beer on tap, piled up in booths with blondes? And who are the people driving across the country to their beach houses? Who is my son, actually, getting ready to fly to the east coast to spend the summer in South Carolina where life is back to whatever normal is in South Carolina? We are still wiping down our groceries before bringing them into the house, rotating through the masks that lie, now, everywhere, making sure that we wash them before putting them on again to step into the dystopian world outside. We're looking at a fall with school still virtual, with even colleges and universities heading toward 2021 that way, even as other states are opening up their gyms and planning for football. Black men, women and children are gunned down doing normal things while being black even as men with submachine guns strapped to their bodies (and their adoring women because let's not leave out the women) protest for their freedoms in public places. Their idle white faces.

I'm confused, so confused.

Children are beginning to die in New York and New Jersey from a rare neurological/immunological disease related to Covid-19, but there are legions more protesting against their tyrannical government, peddling conspiracy theories and refusing to wear masks in the name of freedom. We've got Dear Leader spinning spinning spinning his lies and venom, health insurance companies diving back into states that they'd pulled out of one year ago, piling up record profits to reward their shareholders and executives, while the disability community faces the spectre of cuts in services, the usual sacrificial lambs at the altar of mammon.

We are divided, disunited.

We were encouraged to go outside and look up into the skies today as military jets flew through in a show of aerial support for healthcare nurses. Thunderbirds. Blue Angels. Who are the people that thrill to this kind of thing? I do not understand them, but I know nothing. I am confused. I put on my mask and go for a walk, my lips tight underneath, my glasses steaming up. Don't touch your face.

America is exhausting and terrible.

Corona

Just a thought among many, but it seemed entirely fitting that Max Von Sydow died yesterday. In my other life in the last millennium, I watched the film The Seventh Seal with the boy I loved at the time (which is all time because love is eternal) and my head blew up and rearranged itself into what would be the beginnings of the head I have now in this millennium. If you haven't seen The Seventh Seal, I don't know what to tell you. It's beautiful and dark yet funny. Max Von Sydow plays a Knight returning to his home after the Crusades, that charming time of Catholic hysteria. He travels with his goofy squire and both wash up arrive? on the beach in Sweden where Max plays chess with Death. There's also a sweet blonde family of traveling actors with a beatific child and at some point they meet up with the Knight and the father sees him playing chess with Death and knows what's going on and who's going to win so he flees with his wife and his child and the Knight uses the chess game to distract Death so the family can get away. And all throughout are scenes of plague-riddled medieval Europe with all its heavy and horrifying religious symbolism and ignorance and it's dark but also threaded through with great humor and beauty that like I said will rearrange your bones your dry bones and almost make you believe in revelations.

And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.

Revelations

I'm thinking about this movie and the perhaps pandemic Corona virus and the combination of
(1) over thirty years of anti-intellectualism in this country, (2) our horrific health care system that is based on profit and runs on the illusion of "progress" but will surely be overwhelmed when everyone else (I say everyone else because those of us with chronic diseases or disabilities have known this for a long time) floods it and the Medical Industrial Complex shows its true motives and (3) the Idiot Piece of Shit In Chief. I'm thinking about those three things and wishing Max Von Sydow a rest in peace. No one challenges Death and wins but some sacrifice themselves for others, and that's what we must aspire to do. My head re-arranged itself after I watched that movie so long ago with the boy I loved, a boy who told me Love never dies. It just goes underground.

The video is on YouTube -- click on the link where it says to watch it. It's not even in English, which is perfectly fine. You'll get it.

A Couple Days Ago in Georgia, My Home State

This happened.

What is there to say about that in 2018, the heart of darkness that is America? It's not sufficient -- and even grotesque -- to note that there were counter-protestors that far outnumbered those raising their hands in a Nazi salute and burning swastikas. A white guy who blew away four black people in a Waffle House is caught alive and sits in a jail cell, and it isn't enough to note that an unarmed young black man wrestled the gun away from him, and the Man in Charge, who runs at the mouth otherwise, said nothing.  It isn't enough to lie in bed every morning and wonder whether the Man in Charge is still alive, hoping that he isn't, aware that this is happening, this seethe and boil, everywhere, even in my heart. This is happening. It's difficult to remember that beyond all duality and consciousness is Love.

My friend Rosemarie wrote it --wrest it -- best:

Meanwhile in America











#BlackLivesMatter
#Resist

When We'll All Go Together

Channel Islands

And I will build my love a tower
At the foot of yonder mountain
And visit by the hour
From a lonely wooden tower

Van Morrison, from Purple Heather

That summer when I was still a girl, more offering than sacrifice, the boy I loved lived in an apartment in a suburb called Druid Hills. Putty colored buildings, mosquito-thick air, Georgia green, no Celtic magicians but a couch in a room where I lay while he took a shower, the sound of water behind the summertime has gone and the leaves are gently turning. I've always loved that song, will you go and we'll all go together. Solitude, the intense loneliness of new love, the piano chords singing of ends and gos.

This weekend I had carnival dreams. I kicked up my legs, hung upside down and swirled breath in my throat then out and over the tops of bars into sky. I slept. He said, You need this sleep. You are safe to sleep and I have, I had no memory of anyone ever saying that to me. You need this sleep. You are safe to sleep. Everything.






What does Drumpf mean when he asks to make America great again? What do any of them mean -- the man in the silly hat with the big bill, the couple in the Cadillac in the parking lot of the Harris Teeter in South Carolina with the semper fi and the sign:

M A K E  A M E R I C A  G R E A T  A G A I N.

Again is the operative word, I think, or maybe it's Make, yet neither seems right and much less left.


Back from a weekend away, I was shoving my small suitcase behind a chair in my room this morning, and a little book, a pamphlet, really, fell out of the bookshelf by the chair, fell out and lay at my feet. Let America Be America Again and Other Poems by Langston Hughes with a preface by Senator John Kerry.  I think I bought it when Kerry ran for President, when he called for inclusivity. That election, twelve years ago, seems almost quaint now. The book has a navy paper cover with silver type. Round water stains spot many of the pages, one dripping, bleeding onto the titular poem. Hughes wrote the poem in 1938.

Here's a bit of it with a link to read the rest:



Let America Be America Again

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!


Read the rest here

Raging Against the Machine in Little Tokyo with Howard Zinn's American Voices

The evening began in Little Tokyo, downtown, where Oliver and I went and slurped noodles. He had some sort of beef bowl, and I had seared tuna with a spicy wasabi dressing. Afterward, we walked over to the Aratani Theater, a small but classy joint where I've seen Toni Morrison and other literati. Some of you might remember that as part of our homeschool curriculum, Oliver and I are making our way through the young people's version of the great radical Howard Zinn's controversial People's History.  In a nutshell, Zinn writes American history from the point of view of the exploited as opposed to the "great" leaders, statesmen and warriors. The book has been suppressed over the years, bemoaned by the religious and patriotic right, but Oliver and I are finding it compelling reading, as well as overwhelming and sobering. Tonight's show had actors reading original texts of some of these people in American history -- familiar names like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X and Naomi Klein, and then ones less so like poet Marge Piercy, union activists and labor leaders.

An 1880 speech by the women's suffragette and populist Mary Elizabeth Lease who cried out against the excesses of Wall Street was weirdly prescient and brought down the house. The folk musician Joe Henry sang a Bob Dylan tune, and Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine sang Springsteen's Ghost of Tom Joad. Can I just tell you that while I recognized the name Rage Against the Machine, I didn't know Tom Morello from Mr. Morell, my eighth grade English teacher? Ya'll, I'm a believer after hearing this guy's voice and guitar-playing and just overall -- well -- passion. I might have even jumped up and down at the end during a rousing rendition of This Land is My Land when he told us to do so.

Oliver, who earlier expressed his reluctance to sit through all of these performances was completely jacked up when John Kresinski of The Office walked onstage, and don't tell him I told you, but I think he was smitten by Kerry Washington. Aside from feeling energized by the wisdom and spirit of these voices of our distant and near past, I left, too, feeling sober and not a little depressed at how little has changed, how we seem to be moving backward, again, in this country, involved in endless wars, rallying to deport and demonize the immigrants who do the bulk of work, taking away women's reproductive freedom, shooting men of color or throwing them in jail and allowing those who brought the country to its economic knees to walk free, their pockets newly padded, buying elections and driving an ever greater wedge between those who have and those who have not. For a few glorious hours tonight, though, I looked around and saw people of every age, shape and color, and the sight of my boy's smiling face and shining eyes made me feel a tiny bit hopeful.

Saturday Three-Line Movie Review

The Immigrant

The reason why I was particularly happy watching this movie was not because it told the sad story of an immigrant from Poland whose luck ran out the moment she hit Ellis Island, but rather because I sipped a fruity draft beer while doing so, having literally run out of the house in the late afternoon to a 21+ theater after punishing both of my sons for -- well -- that has nothing to do with the movie. I love Marion Cotillard's face, and she appears in nearly every single frame of this poignant film, as does her co-star, Joaquin Phoenix who I grew to love after his performance in Her, but that has nothing to do with this movie either. I think the only thing I have left to say is that The Immigrant was beautifully crafted and well-acted but entirely predictable (the sacrifices of our forefathers! the dismal outlook for women! the promise of America dashed!) except for the fuzzy yet brilliant opening shot of the back of Lady Liberty which should have told me right then how it would all turn out.







More 3-Line Movie Reviews

Chef
Cesar Chavez
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Gloria
Labor Day 
Philomena

August: Osage County

Her

American Hustle

I feel like my brain is being sucked out by a vintage hairdryer

1. Why did I argue on Facebook with some members of my family about the Second Amendment and gun control laws?
2. Why did I bother when I knew perfectly well that their beliefs are nearly antithetical to my own?
3. Why did the shooter in Colorado have no problem buying more than 6,000 rounds of ammunition for his guns?
4. Why is there not unequivocal agreement that the above is INSANE?
5. Why was it easier for that guy to buy his guns and ammo than for me to petition my private insurance company to add an epilepsy drug to the formulary so that I can afford to give it to my disabled daughter?
6. Why don't I feel nearly as much terror about what happened yesterday in Colorado than in the newest statistics about global warming?
7. Why do people believe the NRA to be anything but a powerful business conglomerate interested solely in money and power?
8. Why do people insist that owning a firearm gives one the ability to defend oneself? From what?
9. Why is everything couched in military terms? 
10. Why don't I feel the same warm, fuzzy feelings about American "liberty," "freedom," and "values" as my relatives?
11. Am I a bad person for not thinking like them?
12. Are they bad people for not thinking like me?
13. Why are Christian conservatives so afraid?
14. Why am I not afraid?
15. Why do I get called a "libtard" if I question American exceptionalism?
16. Why in the recent spate of mass shootings did no one fire a gun in self-defense if this is an argument used by NRA types? Surely one or more of the nearly 50% of Americans who own firearms have been bystanders in the recent spate of killings.
17. Why is the United States ranked fourth in the world for murders by firearms after South Africa, Columbia and Thailand?
18. Why is Switzerland, with such high gun ownership rates, such a peaceful country?
19. Why does Switzerland's populace feel that since they are a wealthy country, it's their duty to protect the most vulnerable (the disabled) from birth to death?
20. Why do Americans believe that protecting the most vulnerable is tantamount to socialism, one of the world's greatest evils?
21. Why do people insinuate that I should just "love it or leave it?"
22. Why don't I just move to Switzerland?
23. Why does the United States account for 5% of the world's population but 25% of the world's incarcerated population?
24. Why does posing these questions incite others to claim moral superiority over me with their faith in the status quo?

Reader, I'm certain you have answers to some of these questions and perhaps even some questions to add. 

Please do.

All this jingoism makes me sweat.

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