Gerard Jones

Dad in a Bag

2012-01-17T21:01:00.000-08:00

Getting ready for my dad’s memorial party—he wasn’t the type to want any kind of memorial service, but a family gathering at his sister Betty’s place to share anecdotes about him would have suited him just fine—I pulled the bag of his ashes out of the particle-board box that the crematorium sold as its lowest-priced “urn” to see if it might fit into something fancier.
       It was disorienting, lifting that clear plastic bag full of white, stony chips into the light and trying to realize that these were the last physical remains of my father. He had been so huge in my imagination once, so limitless in strength and knowledge, so frighteningly and reassuringly potent, that it made no sense to think that he could be reduced to this, a bag the size of a head of lettuce and light enough to bounce in the palm of my hand.
       In my earliest memories, my father was a towering figure who could lift me into the air and set me on his shoulders as though I had no weight at all. Looking down from his height, I understood that the world he strode through was far smaller and less frightening than the one that loomed over me, that the mysteries of high shelves and counter tops lay exposed to him and that to him the neighborhood dogs who glared into my eyes were only knee-high pests. Once my mother hinted that he might spank me for something I’d done, and although he’d never once hit me—she was the only one who ever did that—the mere suggestion that he might turn his strength against me made me burst into sobs of terror.
       I learned to hike by following him on the trails of Glacier National Park, and I can still picture him ahead of me on the trail, rising against the sky like the erosion-carved pillars that jutted from the mountains themselves. The more I learned about the larger world, the larger my father seemed. In those years the culture of American boys was filled with recapitulations of World War II—Combat on TV, G. I. Joe under the Christmas tree, Iron Crosses scrawled on homework folders—and the knowledge that my father had fought in that war, that he had manned a giant gun on a Navy cruiser off the shores of Guadalcanal and felt the shudder of Japanese shells exploding against the hull beneath his feet, gave him the magnitude of a mythic hero.
       But somewhere along the way, he and I seem to have stepped in front of a pair of fun-house mirrors, because suddenly he looked much smaller and I looked much bigger. I remember the day, when I was thirteen or fourteen, when he and I were heading home after an impromptu lunch with a family friend and it dawned on him that my mother might have made lunch for us in our absence and would be annoyed if we came home with no appetites; he asked me not to tell her we’d already eaten and to join him in forcing down a second lunch, and it struck me that my father was afraid of my mother, far more afraid than I was. From that moment on, I think, I saw him as smaller than me and in need of my protection.
       During one of our last hikes together in Glacier Park, his fifty-five year old knees gave out and I had to rush ahead to stop the boat docked at the trail head on Two Medicine Lake from leaving before he could limp to it. It was the sort of physical heroism he’d once have exhibited for me. I began to understand his emotional as well as his physical fragility: listening more carefully to his war stories, I could hear that he had been a hero—he saved men’s lives that night off Guadalcanal—but he had also been just a twenty-one year old kid who would never entirely recover from feeling his world being blown apart around him.

       Decades later, as my mother lay dying and my father began to come apart emotionally, cognitively, and finally physically, I would have to become much bigger than he was. I comforted him, took over his finances, sold his home for him, and found him a new place to live. I became his father. He shrank into a wheelchair, so that when we went out I now looked down on the top of his head as he had once looked down on mine. His memory decayed relentlessly, leaving him smaller and smaller as a person. In his last weeks, the only sentence I heard him speak was “Hold my hand.”
       At last he became no more than an unconscious body in a bed, and then not even that. When he died he became smaller still, his chest no longer inflated by breath and the flesh of his face no longer plumped up by blood. I left the hospital room for a while and came back to find that he'd been zipped into a body bag but still not removed to the morgue. Where my father had lived for his last few days there was now a six-foot long, two-foot wide translucent plastic bag, tented here and there by jagged bones. To the very end he had held the firm jaw and closed lips that had always given him an air of strength; but now through the gauzy plastic I could see the dark oval of his open mouth below the peak of his nose, and somehow that made what was left of him look hollow and insubstantial.
       Now my father is in another bag, a bag of little chips that crunches when I squeeze it. I see him beside me, chuckling at the absurdity of it: “You mean that’s me? Son of a gun!”
       But this is how we all shrink, isn’t it? Most dramatically in the eyes of our children but also in our own. My son once saw me as the giant man who could protect him from anything and always knew best, an image I very much wanted to sustain for us both. But in the years he wrestled with his chronic migraines, as each new doctor I brought him to proved unable to help him and nearly every plan of attack I suggested either fell short or backfired, as I encouraged him to keep trying while I failed more and more to keep the frustration and despair out of my own voice, he watched me shrink.
       First Nicky pushed back against my advice with a frustrated anger of his own, but then his attitude shifted to that surest evidence that parent and child are changing places: compassion. He told his therapist that he felt bad for me because I’d become so miserable about my inability to help him, and he asked how he could explain to me, without hurting my feelings, “that it isn’t his responsibility to solve my problems.”
       It’s not just my son’s perspective on me that’s changed, of course, but my own. I felt so capable of soothing his fears and helping him through life’s crises when he was little, and for years I clung to the belief that I could help him through this one too, that his mom and I would eventually find the right medical or nutritional or psychological treatment that would restore him to the life he wanted. Jennie was able to admit much earlier than I that we seemed to be up against something powerful and incomprehensible, that we should think about lowering our expectations and accommodating the illness rather than continuing to try to beat it. I think it’s just that she was more invested in easing his pain than in proving to him that action and determination could win the fight, which had a lot to do with a mom’s willingness to look human and right-sized, while I wanted so much to see myself as powerful and heroic.
       In the end, her wisdom prevailed; now Nicky turns mainly to her for medical advice, and I don’t question his judgment. There are still areas where he turns to me for guidance—just last night he asked me how to get payments on a PayPal account—but those areas are a lot smaller than they used to be. Just like me.
      It will be a long while before I’ve shrunk away the way my father ultimately did. I’ll still have my moments of bigness. But someday my son will also be handed the bag that contains his father. Someday he will be able to hold me as easily as I hold my father, as easily as I held him when he was little, as easily as my father held me.

Why I Write...Today

2012-01-10T17:03:00.000-08:00

Every few days, especially when the deadlines come faster than the words, I ask myself why in the hell I ever decided to write for a living. A rhetorical question, of course; except that I recently made the mistake of asking it in front of my therapist, who immediately responded, “Well...why did you?”

Any simple answer seemed inadequate. That’s the thing about a long career: what drove you to pick it up in the first place may be entirely irrelevant to what keeps you doing it now. A great deal of disenchantment can grow in that gap, especially if it’s unacknowledged. I have to ask myself not just why I made that decision but why I keep making it over and over again, every day that I don’t decide to do something else.

It was fear that got me started. When I was fourteen my mom pulled me out of school, inspired by one of her alcoholic delusions; I was ashamed to talk to my friends, and pretty soon they forgot about me, leaving me with no companions but my dog and my fantasies. Right before I turned sixteen it dawned on me that sooner or later I'd have to enter the adult world and make my own living, an idea I found horrifying. What did I know how to do but read and make up stories? So I made what I can now pass off as a daring decision but was in fact the only safe one I could think of: I was going to make my living as a writer of fiction.
Within a few months I was back in school, although not the same school I'd left. I wanted to make friends, but I felt like such a freak that I needed something to hide behind. My new aspirations were perfect for that. To my peers I became that weird kid who was always writing, which was better than being just that weird kid. To my English teachers I was that weird kid who deserved special attention. I was very productive for my age, mostly because I was afraid to stop.

       But things started to get better: my writing intrigued a cute and only slightly nerdy girl, who became my first girlfriend, and eventually my wife; then it led me to take a job at a used bookstore where wannabe writers were not only approved of but even given a sort of dusty glamor. Another guy at the store, Will Jacobs, talked me into collaborating with him for the hell of it, and we started reading the results to our friends. Pretty soon we were hosting parties just to give readings. Our humorous stuff went over best—I think that’s where my giddy new love of existence came through loudest. By my early twenties, writing had become my greatest source of joy.
         Fortune just kept turning her wheel in my favor. Will and I landed an agent and sold a humor book. It sold well and got us interviews and reviews all over the country. The editor of the National Lampoon called and asked us to write for him. I even quit my day job. Joy and love were rewarded.
        The trouble with Fortune is that she never knows when to stop the goddamn turning. Our second book tanked. We couldn't sell the third. We broke with our agent and couldn't get another one. The Lampoon burned us out. I couldn't even get my old day job back. Writing had become all about frustration and anxiety; but it was also the only way I could imagine to get back to the joy.

The way back turned out to be, of all things, one of my favorite old escape routes from adolescence: I started writing comic books, and apparently I was pretty good at it. Suddenly writing meant flights to New York for editorial meetings, collaborations with great cartoonists, fans lining up at comic conventions, a strangely sweet power over the fates of my childhood heroes. My comics attracted attention in Hollywood, so now writing also meant flights to L.A. for development meetings, agents buying me breakfast, and more money than I’d ever expected to make. I don’t know if that was quite joy, but it felt good.
Money's sneaky, though: it wants you to spend it. My wife and I bought a house, she quit work for the first five years of our son's life, then we put him in a private school. When the work slowed a bit, I was hooked like a trout; the writing had to be mainly about money. But I learned pretty quickly that I couldn't write just for money.

I wish I could claim that at as an ethical stance, but no. I just didn't know how to write well when I didn't care about the work. So the work started to suck, and people stopped hiring me, and finally the answer to "why do I write?" became "desperation." I went kind of crazy with it, actually. I took on writing jobs I felt contempt for. I tried to make up for writing bad things by writing worse things. I discovered old child-of-alcoholic patterns I didn’t know were there. My marriage hit the rocks and so did a lot else.

         Some of us are slow learners: I was in my early forties when I finally realized that the only way to write something good was to write something I believed in. What I believed in most was my son. His mom was now working full time, and for a while not living with me, so I did a lot of hands-on parenting. Watching him deal with the struggles of kindergarten, thinking about my own childhood, I decided I had to write a book about fantasy, growing up, and symbolic conflict.
        That book came out under the name Killing Monsters, and soon I was giving interviews, engaging in public debates, and writing articles to say things I believed about children and imagination. For the first time, I could answer “why do I write?” with “to say something that matters.”
        I decided to reorganize my life around that answer. The new work wasn't paying all the bills yet, so I kept the least demanding just-for-money work and refinanced the house to pull money out of my equity (there was a time you could do such things). I joined the San Francisco Writers Grotto to build a professional network. I wrote another book I believed in and sold the proposal for a third. I thought that by the age of fifty I might be making all this work.
        Then my son got sick. He’d been suffering from periodic migraines since second grade, but in sixth they turned chronic and disabling. He had a few respites over the next couple of years, but in high school the migraines came down like an avalanche, sweeping his whole life away.
        I let them sweep a lot of me away, too. Yes, there were other issues: marriage again, money as ever, having to rethink the book after someone else published one too much like my original idea. But it was the parenting that carried me over the edge. If I wasn’t trying to help my son get to school or catch up on his work, if I wasn't talking to neurologists and homeopaths and psychologists, then I was worrying obsessively about everything I wasn’t doing. “Why do I write?” became “why can’t I write?”Which, as we all know, becomes a spiral in itself.

Which is when I learned how much I need other people. A little band of us at the Grotto confessed our productivity issues to each other in a group we called Ass-Kickers Anonymous. I also went to real 12-step meetings for "compulsive underearners." I lined up friends to offer me incentives or threaten me with punishments for getting my work done or not. I started another book with my old friend Will Jacobs to remind myself that writing can be more play than work. I even let another Grotto member talk me into teaching classes, where I was reminded how much writing means to people who are still trying to master it.
Bit by bit, with a lot of help, I started turning the spiral the other direction. I began to get rough paragraphs down, then rough chapters. Ideas that had once lain strewn across the chaos of my brain began to come together, and every once in a while I'd discover that a graceful sentence had somehow slipped through. Still, though, if you’d asked me why I wrote, the best answer I could have come up with was just that not writing was too frightening an option to contemplate.

       Then, this past fall, near the end of a long, hard draft of the new book, I participated in the Grotto’s group reading at San Francisco’s annual literary block party, LitCrawl. I can’t quite tell you why, but I decided to read a piece from The Beaver Papers, the humor book Will and I wrote thirty years ago that became my first published work. Reading it gave me a sense of the totality of my career, the most joyful times and the most grueling.
       Later, the Grotto gang came together at the LitCrawl after-party. At first I drifted toward a conversational clump, but I kept feeling pulled toward the dance floor. Holly Jones saw me wavering and pulled me out onto the floor. Soon a bunch of us who’d read that night were out there, celebrating our rare moment of glamor and blowing off our tension. We didn’t say a word about writing; we sang crappy pop lyrics and whooped for each other’s more ridiculous moves. But that night I had no questions about why I wrote.
       Like I say, that’s the thing about a long career. I chose writing in the first place so I could avoid other people, but I keep doing it now so I can connect with them. Tomorrow I may finally wake up and realize I have no reason to keep choosing this job. But just for today, I know why I’m here.

Death and Football

2012-01-04T19:49:00.001-08:00

My dad died the day after my last post. Perfectly, for him—sadly, funnily, beautifully—he died during a 49er game. He would have appreciated the D. H. Lawrence poem I posted the day before; he was a literate enough guy. He would have appreciated the words I spoke to his unresponsive form late that night; he had his sensitivities, even if he didn't like to show them much. But he would have found much more meaning and poetry in the fact that he breathed his last as the Niners took a 9-6 lead into the locker room, flanked by both his sons. Most of all, I think he would have enjoyed the fact that because we were yelling at Jimmy Johnson's halftime inanities, we both missed his final breath.

Russell Jones was a sweet man and a genial man, but not an easy man to reach. His father died when he was young, leaving him in the care of a cold, mean mother during the cold, mean Depression. (As my Aunt Betty likes to say of their childhood, "The wrong parent died.") The best years of his life were his first two in the Marines, 1940 and 1941; he had a place in the world, an ordered life, a community, and enough to eat for the first time in his life. Then the war tore that ordered world apart and sent his community of shipmates to the bottom of the Savo Sea. That, I think, was the betrayal that sent him into his shell for the rest of his life. He married a woman who seemed nothing like his mother but turned out to be too much like her in some painful ways. He endured an often cruel marriage by keeping his head down and his eyes turned away from his heart, and he sought comfort in the pleasures he'd learned to trust in childhood: old movies, hiking, big band jazz, fixing cars, and football.

He wasn't one to stretch out and embrace his sons' interests; I suspect he was afraid to stretch too far beyond the places that felt safe to him. My brother and I learned, years apart and on our separate paths, that the way to connect with our father was by learning to care about his interests. Ray was the more physical one, the better hiker and the better repairman. I was the one who in his teens knew who directed The Public Enemy and who played lead trumpet for the Benny Goodman band. Both of us, though, knew the 49ers.

When my brother was young, in the early 1950s, the family lived in San Francisco, at one point in an apartment across the street from Kezar Stadium. My dad would take him up to the roof to watch games for free, hoping nothing too exciting happened near the west end zone, where the curve of the stadium cut off their view. When Ray names players from those years, they echo with the depth and weight of a liturgy: Tittle, Perry, Nomellini, St. Clair. A decade later, when we were living in the suburbs and watching the games on TV, I learned to recite magic names of my own: Brodie, Washington, Wilcox, and the real Jimmy Johnson.

The family kind of flew apart in the '70s. My brother wasn't getting along with our mom, who had developed an inexplicable distaste for his wife; I'd pretty much turned my back on my dad and his interests as I pursued the young-writer role that my mom liked to see me in. Then came that autumn day in 1981. I was living in San Francisco and couldn't help overhearing that the long-hopeless 49ers had just beaten the Dallas Cowboys 45-14. Not quite able to bring myself to be a football fan again, I nonetheless checked the sports section the next week to see that they'd beaten the Packers in Green Bay, then actually listened to the radio for a while as they held off the hated Rams to take control of the division. So when I visited my parents the next weekend, I suggested to my father that we watch the 49ers play the Steelers to see if these guys were for real.

For years he had been following the 49ers on his transistor radio in the garage, if he managed to follow them at all, driven underground by my mother's loathing of sports. But she could raise no objection when her favored son (hell, I'd just landed a literary agent and had an editor interested in my first book) wanted to watch the game. San Francisco won. My dad, his heart wounded by decades of 49er disappointments, focused mainly on the fact that their offense hadn't been very productive, but I was excited, more excited than I'd ever have expected to be. I think that afternoon was the first time in years that I'd picked up the phone to call my brother. Had he been following these guys? Was this really happening? He'd also been burned by the Niners too many times, but I remember a cautious note of optimism in his voice when he said, "It looks like Montana might actually turn out to be a pretty good quarterback."

Over the next two decades, the 49ers were the linchpin of my family's socializing. Watching them with either my brother or my father had a special sweetness; when Ray and I both managed to watch a game with the old man I felt as though I were part of a sort of triangular perfection. Gradually even our mom got excited by playoffs. The last time Ray and I took my dad on a major outing, when the hydrocephaly was beginning to rob him of his mobility, it was to see SF beat Detroit at Candlestick Park. The day, months after our mother died, when we moved our father into an assisted living facility, the 49ers were playing the Eagles; we plunked him down in the common room to watch the game, taking turns checking on him and the score. We forgot about the furniture moving for a while as our boys sealed the game with a magnificent goal-line stand, the last football we three watched together until the day our father died.

His mental decline paralleled the team's decline. I watched a few games with him in the bad years of 2004 and '05, but he couldn't quite follow what was happening. The seasons after that were entirely lost to him, as was life itself except for a narrowing circle of emotions and half-memories. We got the call on a Sunday night that he'd gone into the hospital with pneumonia and might not come out. For a few days we lived at the hospital, watching him fight for life, until he settled into a morphine sleep. Then we took turns with the vigil, agreeing that it was too much to hope that we could both be there for his death, hoping that one of us could be.

Late Sunday morning I came in to relieve Ray. He was watching the morning NFC game on the TV mounted to the hospital room wall. He would have left right away, so he could watch the 49er-Giants game at home, except that the Falcons put on a fourth-quarter rally to tie the Saints and he couldn't tear himself away. The Niners game started, and he decided to watch a little of it before he left. It turned out to be one of those gut-clenching defensive match-ups, and a little became the entire first half. We talked about how fitting it was that we got to watch one more game with Dad. When a doctor came in to check Dad's uneven breathing and stopped to look at the TV, Ray told him about watching games from the roof of that apartment building across from Kezar. In the closing minutes of the half I noticed that Dad's breathing had gotten more ragged, but how could I think about that with the Niners botching a chance to score right before going into the locker room?

Finally, at halftime, Ray stood up and gathered up his book and his sweatshirt in order to go. He paused just long enough to watch Terry Bradshaw and Jimmy Johnson trading inane remarks. I looked at Dad to tell him, as a matter of ritual, that Ray was leaving. Then I said, "I don't think he's breathing."

We watched the rest of the game together, with our late father between us. We talked about the immensity of what had just happened, the loss of our last parent. We talked about our memories of him and our gratitude that his decline hadn't dragged on any longer than it had. But we also talked about Justin Smith's perfectly timed leap to knock down Eli Manning's fourth-down pass and win the game for San Francisco. Russell Jones raised his sons to know what really matters.

To bid farewell to one's own self

2011-11-12T11:34:00.000-08:00

My father is dying, and this is what I'm reading:

The Ship of Death

D. H. Lawrence

I

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion.

The apples falling like great drops of dew
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.

And it is time to go, to bid farewell
to one's own self, and find an exit
from the fallen self.

II

Have you built your ship of death, O have you?
O build your ship of death, for you will need it.

The grim frost is at hand, when the apples will fall
thick, almost thundrous, on the hardened earth.

And death is on the air like a smell of ashes!
Ah! can't you smell it?
And in the bruised body, the frightened soul
finds itself shrinking, wincing from the cold
that blows upon it through the orifices.

III

And can a man his own quietus make
with a bare bodkin?

With daggers, bodkins, bullets, man can make
a bruise or break of exit for his life;
but is that a quietus, O tell me, is it quietus?

Surely not so! for how could murder, even self-murder
ever a quietus make?

IV

O let us talk of quiet that we know,
that we can know, the deep and lovely quiet
of a strong heart at peace!

How can we this, our own quietus, make?

V

Build then the ship of death, for you must take
the longest journey, to oblivion.

And die the death, the long and painful death
that lies between the old self and the new.

Already our bodies are fallen, bruised, badly bruised,
already our souls are oozing through the exit
of the cruel bruise.

Already the dark and endless ocean of the end
is washing in through the breaches of our wounds,
Already the flood is upon us.

Oh build your ship of death, your little ark
and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine
for the dark flight down oblivion.

VI

Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul
has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.

We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying
and nothing will stay the death-flood rising within us
and soon it will rise on the world, on the outside world.

We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying
and our strength leaves us,
and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood,
cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.

VII

We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do
is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship
of death to carry the soul on the longest journey.

A little ship, with oars and food
and little dishes, and all accoutrements
fitting and ready for the departing soul.

Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies
and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul
in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith
with its store of food and little cooking pans
and change of clothes,
upon the flood's black waste
upon the waters of the end
upon the sea of death, where still we sail
darkly, for we cannot steer, and have no port.

There is no port, there is nowhere to go
only the deepening blackness darkening still
blacker upon the soundless, ungurgling flood
darkness at one with darkness, up and down
and sideways utterly dark, so there is no direction any more
and the little ship is there; yet she is gone.
She is not seen, for there is nothing to see her by.
She is gone! gone! and yet
somewhere she is there.
Nowhere!

VIII

And everything is gone, the body is gone
completely under, gone, entirely gone.
The upper darkness is heavy as the lower,
between them the little ship
is gone

It is the end, it is oblivion.

IX

And yet out of eternity a thread
separates itself on the blackness,
a horizontal thread
that fumes a little with pallor upon the dark.

Is it illusion? or does the pallor fume
A little higher?
Ah wait, wait, for there's the dawn
the cruel dawn of coming back to life
out of oblivion

Wait, wait, the little ship
drifting, beneath the deathly ashy grey
of a flood-dawn.

Wait, wait! even so, a flush of yellow
and strangely, O chilled wan soul, a flush of rose.

A flush of rose, and the whole thing starts again.

X

The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell
emerges strange and lovely.
And the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing
on the pink flood,
and the frail soul steps out, into the house again
filling the heart with peace.

Swings the heart renewed with peace
even of oblivion.

Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it!
for you will need it.
For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.

(1929)

And to conclude Chapter One...

2011-11-03T09:56:00.000-07:00

Robert Indiana

After two years in New York, Tony Comstock had improved his station not at all. He impressed his employers with his hard work and dogged seriousness, but he apparently impressed them only enough to keep him as a shipping clerk. Lacking the intellectual nimbleness and hunger for opportunity that the modern city favored, he was not clearly not one of those young men in the popular novels destined for fame and fortune. He was also not destined to rise in the society of his fellow workers, for not only was he not the sort to go out drinking, gambling, and joking with the other chaps at the close of business, he was, in fact, not even the sort to bite his tongue when he felt the other chap needed spiritual guidance. Tony’s social life comprised essentially just his regular prayer meetings.

Comstock watched the YMCA’s campaign against published smut closely. Through work, he knew a young man who had come down with a venereal disease, presumably at a brothel, and he felt certain that a particular erotic book had led him there. The moment the YMCA’s obscene-publications bill was passed into law in 1868, Tony tracked the boy down and demanded to know where he’d bought the book. The purveyor had been a bookseller named Conroy, an Irishman and a Catholic. Tony marched promptly to the shop, bought a dirty book, carried it to the nearest police station, showed it to the precinct captain, and demanded that an officer accompany him back to the shop to arrest the seller under the new obscenity law.

The captain himself took on the task; in the six years since he’d failed to persuade a sheriff to shut down an unlicensed saloon, Tony had developed enough ferocity of demeanor and weightiness of presence to impress authorities that he was not to be dismissed. The captain sized up Conroy’s stock, placed the man under arrest, and seemed to feel the job was done; but Comstock insisted that the captain seize the shop’s entire indecent stock. Again the captain did as he was told. Tony Comstock had brought justice for his friend, had protected other young men from the same fate, and had made the hand of God felt among the smut-shots of lower Manhattan.

He had begun building a dam against the rising flood of mass publishing, a dam that would rise higher and hold firmer than he could ever have dared hope.

No man does it all by himself

2011-10-26T21:58:00.000-07:00

Having described the rise of the pornography business in America, we've just made mention of its imminent opponent, the Young Men's Christian Association:

Twenty-one years before the Confederate surrender, a group of young Evangelical men, mostly working class, still mostly in their early twenties, founded an association to aid their fellow workers. Seeing drunkenness, venereal disease, and other epidemics sweeping through the growing industrial slums, they believed the city needed places where young men lacking families could find safe rooms to sleep in and activities to keep them busy that improved them not only spiritually but intellectually and physically too. Their YMCA proved to be at the growing edge of “purity movement” spreading out from London—an answer to the poisons of industrialism that stressed bodily purity as essential to Christian rectitude—and within a decade had not only sprouted branches throughout urban Britain but was sending up shoots in Europe and America.

In the young, robust New York City branch, within months after the war’s end, the association’s leaders added to the list of urban ills from which men must be protected obscene publications. American Evangelicals, mainly Congregationalists and Presbyterians, had inherited Jean Calvin’s distrust of secular literature and drama, and to them the fouling of the mind was no less destructive than the fouling of the body with liquor and disease. In that moment, they also saw their work as crucial to the building of a more civilized and moral post-war world.

In 1866, a committee of leaders of the New York YMCA produced a memorandum on the dangers currently threatening those young men. Brothels, saloons, theaters, gambling dens, and billiard parlors were high among them; but obscene publications ranked highest. “Illustrating the audacity with which this temptation is flaunted in the faces of young men,” read the memorandum, “it may be stated that, at one place, on a principal thoroughfare, there are openly exposed for sale two vile weekly newspapers, which can be purchased at ten cents a copy, and more than fifty kinds of licentious books, each one illustrated by one or two cuts…. The debasing influence of these publications on young men cannot be over-estimated; they are feeders for brothels.”

The YMCA’s directors typically preferred to act as a safe haven against worldly ills than to battle against them, but this issue meant enough to them that they began lobbying sympathetic members of the New York state legislature to draft a bill for the suppression of obscene literature. As news of the Association’s battle spread, more and more reform-minded New Yorkers began to see the fight against obscenity as a significant one. Typically, those reformers contented themselves with sending funds to the Association or writing letters to their representatives in Albany. There was one friend of the YMCA, however, who could not be contented by such indirect means. One who felt that if a mad dog threatened the innocent, then the dog would simply have to be shot.

With mass print comes mass porn

2011-10-19T22:28:00.000-07:00

Many Americans like Tony Comstock were worried about the rise of mass print and its capacity for challenging current mores. And sure enough...

Obscenity laws were spotty and rarely enforced, and no one had time or resources to keep watch over everything that poured from the presses of New York. Just as the anonymity of city life allowed a greater personal freedom than the closeness of the village, the opportunities for transgression were much greater once publishers could expect their creations to go unnoticed in the clutter of the newsstand or the overstuffed shelves of downtown bookshops. And those voices spoke true. The cheaper newspapers increasingly took ads from the purveyors of products that couldn’t be displayed in stores: potions to aid male virility and rubber devices to prevent pregnancy and unmentionable diseases. Some book publishers brought out risqué stories, others guidebooks to local vice for the newcomer and visitor. And if one knew where to look, there was pornography.

The pioneer of American mass-pornography was a surgeon from Ireland named William Haynes who found it difficult to establish a profitable practice in New York and thought he’d make a little money on the side through his private hobby. In 1846, taking advantage of the cheap printing in which his new city abounded, he put out a two-dollar edition of Fanny Hill, a bargain for the sort of book that had until then been circulated quietly among cognoscenti. The edition sold out. He printed another, that sold out too, and he decided to reprint other old works of pornography. Soon enough, he began hearing from customers who were seeking a publisher for their own erotic efforts. By the time war broke out, he had issued a catalogue for all his wares.

By then other publishers had jumped into the business too, all of them in New York, many of them cheek-by-jowl with the more mainstream publishers on Ann Street. The Civil War was good for business: lists of the effects of soldiers captured or killed show quite a few catalogues of dirty books, and both postal and military authorities expressed outrage at the quantity of smut being mailed to Union Army outposts. One captain wrote of lighting a large bonfire of all the obscene publications he had confiscated from his men.

Many of these books aped the flowery style of Fanny Hill and its ancestors, some seemed to aspire to be romance novels of the type then bursting from the cheap publishers, and some expressed genuine points of view. One, The Secret History of a Votary of Pleasure, spent its first thirty pages excoriating Congregationalism—Tony Comstock’s own faith—and declaring that religious prohibition of sexual behavior was the greatest possible goad to prurient thinking, before the non-stop frotting began. Some of them danced about with euphemisms, but some did not, and left no doubt as to the techniques and pleasures of sex of many kinds, including oral and anal. Some took the guise of education, like Mysteries of the Wedding Night: Techniques for the Making of a Strong Marriage and Robust Children.

Then, of course, there were the dirty lithographs and photographs. For photography had been making great technical advances in those years, too, and by the 1850s it became possible to reproduce unlimited paper prints of a single negative. The man with the big coat selling “French photographs” had become a fixture outside train stations and saloons by 1860. Nor were all such items hidden beneath coats. Among the ads in the cheaper newspapers were those for vaguely described books and photos. And a few careful questions at a well-stocked newsstand might turn up quite a few items hidden behind the counter.

As citizens began to voice concern about some of what was finding its way to the newsstands, local governments began to pass more legislation concerning the content of publications. In 1860 Congress passed what was, essentially, the first federal censorship law, stating that newspapers containing “indecent” material could not be sent through the U.S. mail. The law was vague, however, and although its terms were explicated a bit more in an 1865 revision of the law (largely inspired by reports of the mountains of pornography being mailed to the soldiers), still it lacked teeth. With a great war and a volatile economy to worry about, few Americans paused to be concerned about the content of publications. But as the Civil War ended, that was about to change. A new war was about to be launched between a ragtag militia of smut mongers and yellow journalists—and the hale-bodied troops of the YMCA.

The terrors of the press

2011-10-17T10:24:00.000-07:00

The first mass medium sweeps America and does what new media always do: shapes a new generation and frightens a poweful few....

Keller’s first pulping machines reached the market in 1848. His timing was perfect, for just a year before year a young New York printer named Richard March Hoe had reinvented the wheel: a rotary printing press, a colossal spinning drum that could shoot out not four thousand pages an hour like the fastest of the steam-driven flatbed presses, but four hundred thousand. At first, not enough paper could be found to meet its capacity, but then Keller’s wood pulp hit the market. The huge, endlessly spinning drums of Hoe’s presses turned publishing into an inexhaustible fount. And from the moment those drums began to roll, New York became the publishing center of the western hemisphere. Boston, Philadelphia, and Montreal became instant backwaters.

By the beginning of the Civil War, American publishing had become a giant industry. Fat, prosperous newspapers battled for circulation and political power. Fiction publishers began to organize the production of content along industrial lines. Story papers were increasingly replaced by “dime novels” and “five-cent novelettes” produced by in-house writers to fit a uniform format. A couple of New York printers still in their thirties, Francis Scott Smith and Francis Shubael Street, kept costs down and production smooth by developing a “fiction factory”: on the top floor, clever young men scribbling novels in pencil, every one a hodgepodge of formula and plagiarism; editors at neighboring desks, plowing rapidly through pages to catch the most incomprehensible passages and the most egregious violations of audience expectations; on the floor belong them the typists and typesetters; and on the ground floor the ceiling-high stacks of paper the ever-whirling presses, and the stitching machines that bound the books. No plot or word left the building between the time it left the writer’s brain and the time it went on sale. And so the American popular-culture factory was born.

The largest audience for such products were young people, adolescents and yet-unmarried adults of that most broadly literate generation in history, that first generation raised on mass publications. They poured into the towns and cities, putting their rustic backgrounds behind them, filling the ranks of a fast-growing and volatile class: the skilled mechanics and semi-skilled laborers, the clerks and copyists, the delivery boys, the seamstresses—and the newspaper and print-company employees. Literate and often ambitious, aware of greater economic and social possibilities through promotion or marriage, vastly more cosmopolitan and invested in the future and the greater world than the farmers and manual laborers who sired them, and yet still shut out from affluence, property, and social power, they were a complex and heterogeneous, an optimistic and restless bunch.

They shared a vast appetite for news of social scandal and sensational crime, and for loud, simple fiction that could be ingested in a few gulps on ferry rides, during lunch breaks, and in the brief evenings after long, exhausting workdays. They liked stories of the criminal underworld and the wild west; they liked tales of lethal jeopardy and last-minute rescues, fistfights and wrestling matches with innocent lives at stake, death and tears offset by romantic awakenings, fires and raging rivers, depravity banished by virtue, occasionally the crack of a gun or the thunder of cannons. They liked their heroes young, brave, and forward-looking; in the wake of the Civil War they especially loved stories of young men coming to the city to seek their fortunes.

So, as the children of American farms and the escapees of impoverished Europe flowed into the cities, as the city of New York surged like dirty floodwaters up the length of Manhattan, a great wave of printed words and images rose with them. Booksellers sprang up everywhere. A new institution, the newsstand, peddling newspapers, magazines, and cheap books, began popping up on the street corners like mushrooms.

A few voices rose in alarm, mostly the same voices that expressed fears of immigration, unbridled growth, epidemic disease, the growing armies of the poor, and moral decay, the voices of those invested in a more homogeneous and less volatile America. With sensation and titillation as selling points, they knew that much of what saw print must violate the bounds of decency.

The first mass medium

2011-10-10T10:11:00.000-07:00

We've stepped briefly outside the particular story of Tony Comstock to note the birth of mass publishing, with which young Tony is about to grapple:

During the same decades, paper production was being speeded through chemistry and steam-powered pressing machines, raising supplies and lowering prices. Some quality was sacrificed as the new methods of processing and bleaching rag-paper left it less supple, more likely to tear or to break with age. But the appetite for words and information far outweighed that for nice paper. Soon magazine and book printers were switching to steam printing and cheaper paper, discovering vast new markets for news, articles, and fiction. By the late 1820s, the prices of some English newspapers had dropped to a penny; where the earlier mass-produced newspapers had still aimed for a middle-class and reasonably well educated audience—those who had been interested in newspapers before but curtailed their purchases due to the price or were unable to find them easily enough—these went after an entirely new audience, one that not long before had read little but shop signs, pamphlets, and broadsheets pasted to building walls. Clerks, mechanics, and even those industrial workers who could read began to discover the pleasures of written information and diversion.

In the span of just a few years, an entirely new reading public had been invented. As the material spread, so did literacy, for the arrival of this cornucopia of entertainment and information stoked a desire to read fluently among people who hadn’t seen much point in it before. Although news led the way, every other form of written diversion quickly followed: gossip, illuminating articles, editorials, humor, fiction, and everything else that had graced the expensive and rather exclusive magazines of the 18^th Century, now targeted at broader and less sophisticated audiences. “Story papers” and “story magazines” proliferated, turning fiction from a haute-bourgeois amusement into an industry, a craze, a sweeping common denominator. Publishers quickly discovered the power of the serial to bring readers back, and soon great, sprawling novels began to wend their way like rivers through the magazines, pooling into fat books a few months later.

This was something new: a mass medium. A new generation grew up on it, shaped by it, making from it a new kind of culture, a mass culture. It worked the way mass culture still works: new media arenas aren’t driven by artistic visions needing a venue. Machines make the arenas just as big as technology and market will allow and then the writers and artists fight to fill them, and to shape them. And as with every new medium since, the audience was in love with the medium itself. So Charles Dickens became its first hero in part because he was the cheap press, in his riverrine productivity, his relentless surge toward undetermined endings, his casts of characters as motley and restive as his still-evolving readership. A readership happy to slog through his swamps of page-filling dribble to reach those peaks of his from which they could scan this sprawling new world that paper and ink were making them part of.

The flood of cheap publications rose first in England, but it quickly swept across the Atlantic to inundate America’s cities. The American belief in freedom of the press then extended to lax copyright laws, including a complete indifference to the copyrights of Europe. Anything published in London was likely to show up, often riddled with errors but dirt cheap, from pirate printers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore almost as quickly as a ship could cross the sea. British writers and publishers howled, but, as has been the case ever since, nothing could slow the American production of mass culture.

The typeset word was not the only beneficiary of new technology. A clever young German actor named Alois Senefelder had devised limestone lithography in the last years of the previous century, and over the next few decades it had been refined by sundry hands to become a practical and inexpensive means of mechanically duplicating pictures in large numbers. Lithos were far more expensive than text, but they allowed illustrations in moderately priced books and pictorial covers even on cheap newspapers, making imagery an integral part of the new mass culture.

At the end of 1835 a twenty-two year old printmaker’s assistant in New York City named Nathaniel Currier published a lithograph of a dramatic fire that only days before had devoured most of Wall Street; he sold several thousand copies, and the litho became part of the news revolution. When two years later, a Frenchman patented “chromolithography”—the use of multiple plates to create an image in different colors—Currier jumped on it instantly with a lurid, two-colored litho of another fire, this one on steamboat. It sold so well that the New York Sun, one of the new generation of mass newspapers, contracted him to supply a chromolitho of some current event every Sunday. Now with a steady supply of capital, Currier turned his energies toward publishing “Cheap and Popular Prints” of whatever type the public wanted, and soon he became the leading figure in a “chromo” craze that swept the nation. He began hiring the most popular artists from the newspapers and magazines to turn out original images of American life and events, and soon was putting out as many as three new images a week and selling over ten thousand prints a year. Countless other printers followed him, plastering the nation with color posters, advertisements, novelty cards, bookplates, and home decorations.

Meanwhile, the flood of mass print rose higher as inventors and capitalists competed to find ways to exploit a market for cheap publications that seemed to grow faster by the year. Almost simultaneously in the mid-1840s, two innovations appeared that multiplied the productivity, and thus the power, of the press exponentially. In the middle of the 1840s a German engineer named F. G. Keller developed a chemical process for making paper out of trees. Many others had tried before, but it was Keller who realized that wood contained fibers that, if extracted, could be chemically turned into pulp just as rag was. And that wood pulp, just like rag pulp, could be pressed and dried and bleached into paper. That paper was more brittle and easily torn paper than even the cheapest rag paper, and because of its high acidity it would quickly destroy itself in a “slow fire,” likely to turn yellow and fall apart within months. But it was cheaper than rag paper. And as the means of logging and transporting low-grade wood improved—especially in America, as canals were dug and railroads were built into the trackless forests of the hinterland—the price would drop still further. Keller sold his patent for almost nothing and ended his life in poverty; but he had given the world pulp—newsprint—the very stuff of mass culture, the fat, cheap, porous, ephemeral, and universally accessible foundation on which a new world of rapid information and disposable mythology would be erected.

Enter our antagonist: mass publishing

2011-10-03T21:39:00.000-07:00

Having brought our Puritan hero Tony Comstock into contact with New York pornography, we take a section break and return with:

The story of mass culture in the 19^th Century is largely the story of paper. In fact, it was paper that made possible a “mass culture.” Over the span of four or five decades, a tidal wave of cheap paper and printer’s ink surged across the cultural, social, and economic landscapes of Europe and North America. Industries were born, old trades were wiped out, hierarchies were toppled and the obscure were vaulted into power. Paper transformed the ways in which information was transmitted, children were taught, class identities were shaped, politics was conducted, morals and aspirations were shaped, literature and art were developed, and the whole shape of culture was formed. New York was one the cities most changed by paper, and in the years after the Civil War it became the center of the one first great cultural battles over paper’s new power.

As the century began, little had changed in publishing, printing, or paper manufacturing since the Gutenberg revolution had settled down in the early 17^th Century. Paper, hand-pressed from linen and other rags, was expensive as a raw commodity: middle-class letter writers developed the practice of “cross-writing,” completing a letter and then turning the page at a right angle in order to write perpendicularly on top of the earlier words, thus squeezing two sheets’ worth of words onto one precious slip of paper.

Printing, conducted mainly by independent artisans with small staffs of journeymen, made published material more expensive still. Book prices were such that many writers lined up subscribers in advance to cover the costs. In 1796, the English novelist Fanny Burney filled the first thirty-six pages of her novel Camilla with a list of her subscribers; Camilla was a best-selling novel by the standards of the day, but it was aimed at a select and mostly affluent audience. Some books sold in the tens of thousands, a few may even have mounted toward a hundred thousand, but they were those that became required reading among the intelligentsia: Voltaire’s Candide, Goethe’s Faust, Rousseau’s Julie. A market for popular fiction was building, but its clientele remained well-to-do and even the more successful novels sold only to a few thousand readers. Burney’s Camilla was considered a tremendous success for having sold out its first print run of four thousand copies.

Newspapers were circulated among the affluent and posted in public places for the less affluent. The “broadsheet,” the gigantic page that was becoming standard for news, was as much poster as reading material. Most newspapers, especially in the United States, were partisan political organs, supported by wide-ranging political networks more than by local readers and advertisers. Production and distribution were slow, often creating a lag of a few days between an event and its description in the journals, and most of them ignored the stories of crime and mishap that we think of as “news” today in favor of discourse on political developments. Circulation was primitive: copies were sold at the printing offices, delivered by hand or wagon to scattered general stores, or mailed to subscribers.

All these publications consisted almost entirely of the typeset word. Pictures could only be reproduced by engraving, a slower and far more expensive process even than printing. The less costly and more widely circulated publications generally contained no pictures, and what pictures did reach print were mostly simple line drawings. Art and illustration remained the province of people who could see original pieces—which for most meant only what was displayed in churches and other public buildings—and those who could afford fine engravings. There was no such thing as a mass visual medium or a popular illustrative vocabulary. Fine art, precise representation, and pornography were all the provinces of the few.

By the end of the 18^th Century, however, it had become clear that the markets for all kinds of printed material were growing, and that a vast number of customers were eager to buy whatever they could afford. The populations of Western Europe and America were growing rapidly, and literacy was on the rise thanks to burgeoning industrial economies and a spreading doctrine of the value of education—even for the poor, in the United States and a few other countries. Urban populations were growing especially quickly, creating vast new markets for newspapers. In 1780, a French chemist named Aimé Argand, knowing how much this new urban, literate citizenry must crave more hours to read, developed a clever lamp that burned as much as ten times brighter than a candle. By the end of the century, the darkness of night had been driven back more violently than it had been in millennia, and the time taken from it was used mainly to consume the printed word.

Soon other chemists, mechanics, and printers were devoting themselves to finding ways to lower the costs of producing those words. For generations, most printers had been able to press about one hundred pages in an hour, the fastest printers double that, scarcely enough to keep up with the growing market. An Englishman, Charles Stanhope, worked out a new press in 1800 that more than doubled that, but then a German outdid him: Friedrich Koenig developed a steam-powered press that put out over a thousand pages an hour. The Times of London, its circulation already the highest in the world, inaugurated the Koenig press in 1814; two years later Koenig sold them another press that could print on both sides of a sheet simultaneously, instantly doubling productivity. The Times instantly longer and come pouring out of the presses earlier in the morning, while its price dropped. The newspaper for the masses was born.

The new scourge

2011-09-28T22:44:00.000-07:00

In the last excerpt, we saw the squalor and vice of New York as viewed by the likes of Tony Comstock in 1868...

Countervailing currents, though, surged through the city’s consciousness too. Talk of reformation, of cleansing and uplift and reconstruction, was everywhere. The tremendous growth of the city had brought tremendous challenges, including sanitation issues at a scale America had never before had to deal with. Sewer systems were overtaxed almost as soon as they were built. No aqueduct had been built capable of bringing adequate water to the burgeoning population, and so the island was dotted with pools and reservoirs that became breeding grounds for cholera and malaria. Now, with the war over and vast reserves of public money and manpower freed up for other ends, monumental public works were launched, most prominently a new, interrelated system of aqueducts and sewers. New York’s civic conversations were dominated by talk of bringing in clean, pure water and sweeping out filth.

And as the resources dedicated to war were now turned to the physical improvement of urban life, so were the moral energies that had been devoted for years to abolition and the preservation of the republic now brought to bear on uplifting the city’s moral life. With slavery removed as the principle evil for ministers, reformers, and evangelical organizations to battle, new attention was brought to the evils of alcohol, sexual license, the exploitation of women, and the neglect of children. A movement to take care of children and young men who were left without resources by poverty, or by parental death or neglect, had spread from England to America in the 1840s and ‘50s, most notably in the form of the Children’s Aid Society. Tony Comstock approved of their work. The thrill of reform coursed through him as intensely as did his revulsion at vice.

It was another English transplant, however, that spoke most to him: the Young Men’s Christian Association, dedicated to “Improving the spiritual, mental, social and physical condition of young men.” Its principal concerns were men like Tony and like the men he saw around him at work and in his boardinghouse, men who’d come alone to the big city and were especially vulnerable to its seductions. It was the New York branch of the YMCA that would give Tony Comstock his next mad dog to kill, and so doing give him his purpose in life. It was the YMCA that drew his attention to a new scourge threatening the young, a scourge that he found more alarming than alcohol, prostitution, crime, poverty, cholera, syphilis, Catholics, and rabies: publishing.

New York as Tony sees it

2011-09-25T20:46:00.000-07:00

Next excerpt from the book. Young Tony Comstock has just arrived in New York from small-town Connecticut in 1868.

Nothing in Comstock’s life had prepared him for New York. The city was exploding in size, from half a million in 1850 to nearly nine hundred thousand by the late 1860s. And nearly a quarter of those nine hundred thousand people had been born in Ireland, most of them to the rural poor. Other foreigners were pouring in too, especially Germans, tens of thousands a year, most of them as Catholic as the Irish. The city grew rapidly, ruthless northward, but no amount of construction could keep up with the population. Vast shantytowns sprang up at the edges of the new neighborhoods and old neighborhoods were overbuilt by denser new dwellings, or old buildings were carved up into tenements. Wide swaths of the city fell prey to such overcrowding, neglect, and poverty that living conditions in them approached the unendurable: open sewers, backyard livestock pens and open-air slaughterhouses, hundreds of people living in windowless basements, defecating in the corners, falling prey to the waves of cholera, malaria, and tuberculosis that swept through the city. Descriptions of the city speak of filth in the streets—human feces, animal feces, sometimes the offal of slaughtered pigs—filth sometimes so thick that a man couldn’t walk through it without it slopping over his shoes. And they speak of a brutal, inescapable stench.

Crime ran rampant. A growing army of abandoned and orphaned children survived largely by theft, and violent gangs grew up to run graft and extortion rings in the rougher neighborhoods. From those neighborhoods came political power, too. Just three years before Comstock arrived, immigrant workers had rioted violently against the draft, paralyzing the city for weeks. Fear of another insurrection haunted the established classes. Tammany Hall and its Democratic machine had been amassing more and more power through the decades of immigration, and the year after the draft riots it had cemented its power over the city’s politics by getting one of its own elected mayor. Boss Tweed became a hero to some and the embodiment of ruin to others. Political corruption became business as usual.

Laws were increasingly enforced on a pay-as-you-go basis. Prostitutes lined some streets and bordellos others. Female poverty, official corruption, and a great number of unmarried workingmen guaranteed that prostitution would be a big business. Sophisticates considered prostitutes part of the local color, writers and artists—Walt Whitman among them—were fascinating by the figure of the whore, and guides to sporting houses were sold openly throughout the city. Other industries sold sex too: a great vogue in those years were the “pretty waiter girl saloons,” restaurants and watering holes that replaced the traditional male waiter with women hired for their looks whose job it was to bring men in and keep them buying. Theaters were popping up everywhere, and more and more entertainments advertised their beautiful actresses and dancers. Local gossip was filled with tales of rich men trolling the restaurants and theaters for women who were willing to be kept.

Tony Comstock found all of it alarming, but at first he seemed most troubled by the ubiquitous saloons. New York had always been a hard-drinking city, but now whatever attempts the more upright city elders made to control the number of drinking establishments were swept aside by the rising political and cultural power of the Catholics. Young Comstock had known drinkers all his life, but in Connecticut he had been able to draw a clear line in his mind between the rude farmers and workers who thrived on cheap liquor and the teetotalers who dominated the social, religious, and political community. The mongrel world of the city, where Catholics and sophisticates of all classes and vocations imbibed without shame, made him worry for the fate of the city and the nation. He heard those fears echoed often among the people he knew. The idea that New York was in a catastrophic moral decline grew as the city grew; for not only were more Catholic foreigners arriving to change its mores, but more small-town Protestants were arriving to be horrified.

Tony Goes to New York

2011-09-20T10:08:00.000-07:00

Another excerpt from this draft of The Undressing of America. A section break follows the previous part, in which Tony Comstock shoots the mad dog and busts up the saloon, and then...

When his brother died at Gettysburg, Tony’s extended family expected him to enlist to take his place—that’s what good New Englanders did—but for seven months Tony ignored the call. His brother’s death seems not to have affected him terribly; lifelong Tony would bond strongly with women, especially women like his mother and sisters, whom he could protect or depended on him, but he built no strong ties with other men. He also showed little interest in the war itself, or in any political or moral issues beyond his local battles. He finally went off to war in the spring of 1864, with the Confederacy already in retreat.

Like any Congregationalist, the young Comstock saw slavery as an evil, but the battle for abolition seems to have been too abstract for him to care much about it. In the diary he kept during his year of service, he never mentioned the larger issues of the war and tripped lightly over the tiny bit of action he saw, instead writing mainly of his relentless efforts to organize prayer meetings and urge his fellow soldiers to attend. He was frequently “twitted” for lecturing his fellows on the evils of alcohol and nicotine, and once rather violently hazed, but he never stopped. Usually he enjoyed arguing and took a special satisfaction in calmly standing his ground when vastly outnumbered. He railed against his own weakness when he fell into wrath or self pity over the twits and insults of these men who knew not what they did.

When the war ended, Tony returned to Connecticut, but there was little there now to hold him. His sisters were growing up, he was not close to his extended family, and he had no real friendships. His closest bond had always been with his mother Polly, the one person he believed had loved him truly and completely. When the judgment of New Canaan had descended on the family for his father’s inconstancy, it was Polly who had protected him. He often said that her memory was his most constant companion, and that when he fought to defend the innocent he wanted to give them the protection his mother had given him. But having let other relatives take over the family farm during the war, his last physical connection to her had been severed. A year after the war, jobless and nearly penniless, he asked a family friend for help.

No young man with Tony’s energy should stay in Connecticut, the man said. In the wake of the war, too many men were competing for too few jobs. But a great boom was coming. Huge industries had been springing up before the war, and now they would be making up for lost time. The West about to be opened: the two ends of the transcontinental railroad had stretched to within a few hundred miles of one another. Any young with ambition should be heading for the center of the nation’s business and finance: New York City. The man even offered to give Tony money to stake him. He could only afford five dollars, but that was more than Tony had. And so, in the summer of 1866, the twenty-two year old Tony Comstock arrived in America’s biggest city with three dollars and forty cents in his pocket.

Very quickly, he discovered that other young men had left Connecticut for New York, and countless others had left every other state in the union. There were jobs, but there were men lined up for every one. After days of dogged searching he secured a place as a shipping clerk at a dry goods company. Unable to afford to live in New York itself, he had to take a cheap room in the neighboring city of Brooklyn and commute by ferry.

Nothing in Comstock’s life had prepared him for New York.

Finding the Story

2011-09-17T08:56:00.000-07:00

This is a post I wrote for my friend Meghan Ward's terrifically informative Writerland blog. It's mainly about a class I teach at the San Francisco Writers Grotto called "Finding the Story," but it also touches on a lot of the struggles and discoveries of writing the current book.

You know the line: “Those who can’t do, teach.” Never the favorite homily of those of us who write for a living and teach on the side. But I’ve developed my own version, and this one I’ll stand by: “Those who can’t do learn how to do...and then they’ve got something to teach.”

Some aspects of writing have always come easily for me: dialogue, pace, a generally smooth style. I entered this business with a kind of natural glibness, which in the early going I thought could carry me all the way. It took me years to realize—and even more years to admit to myself—that what didn’t come naturally for me was telling a story.

Oh, I was clever enough with structure and the mechanics of plot. I could outline with the best of them. But somehow my narratives, in both fiction and nonfiction, rarely had the forward drive they needed or came together with the symphonic inevitability I wanted. When it did happen, I never quite understood why; I could only step back and marvel at how a story had miraculously emerged from the sludge and found its own way to a satisfying ending. More often I had to dig my way to a reasonably satisfying ending through countless wrong turns and massive rewrites.

The books I read about story didn’t help much. I was getting screenwriting jobs for a while, so I became especially familiar with the geometric approach of how-to-write-a-movie books, all those three-act structures and juxtaposed A-plots and B-plots. The more I tried to use those, the more my stories came to feel like those wooden frames they use to build sidewalks, inert boxes waiting to be filled with concrete. (A lot of what they say isn’t even accurate; any savvy screenwriter can tell you that Hollywood runs on a four-act template, and why people insist on calling it three acts with a turning point in the middle of the extra-long second act I have no idea.)

The more I looked at the usual ways of breaking down a story, the less sense most of them made. What’s this “beginning, middle, and end” business? Isn’t the end implicit in the beginning and the beginning still continuing to the end? How do you separate the “middle” from either? Once separated, how do you keep it from becoming just a receptacle for narrative miscellany? And what’s all this about the “character arc”? Why does a character have an “arc”? Does it go up in the middle and then back down? In a story of midlife fullness and senile decay it might, but that’s hardly every story. I don’t see my life as an arc. A line, a road, a river, or a tree, fine. But not a parabola.

So I started looking hard at how other writers made their stories work, “reading like a writer” and feeling for the sandbags and steel girders under the fascinating details and pretty prose. I started summarizing the most compelling and satisfying stories, and I found that with the best of them I could keep boiling them down, making them simpler and simpler, and they never lost their essence.

“A bunch of sheltered aristocrats are lost in assorted self-preoccupations and existential riddles until their nation is nearly destroyed by an invader, tossing them back on the basics of life, death, and love, enabling them to see the hand of God in human events.” A lot more happens along the way in War and Peace, but I never did catch Tolstoy losing touch with that core story.

That’s when I really understood (and it’s not like I’d never heard this, but I finally started to get it in a concrete, applicable way), that a story is not a plot, and it’s not a structure, and it’s not a series of concrete events. At its heart, every coherent story is a single event. A single transformation or revelation. It isn’t made up like a brick building of its component parts; its parts are manifestations and demonstrations of its essence. I discovered I could get pretty metaphysical about it, especially late at night after working too hard. But I also discovered I could find the heart of my own story through a series of exercises.

The most important step always turned out to be understanding just what my story is. Who’s it about, what’s it about, what one big thing is happening, what I’m saying about people or the world. That turned out to be a lot harder than it sounds. The details of writing can be awfully distracting, not only for the reader but for the writer; I learned that I could write thousands of words of dramatic events about interesting people without ever fully understanding what I was trying to say—and without understanding that, I could never know just which events mattered or just how to tell them.

My work got better. It felt stronger, it got easier, and the world started telling me I was onto something. When your editor—a publishing veteran so tough she’s known in the business as “the Dragon Lady”—tells you that your final chapter brought tears to her eyes, and when you get Michael Chabon and Art Spiegelman calling your book “relentless” and “a constant delight,” you know you found your story. Which meant a lot more to me than the praise I was accustomed to for my breezy dialogue and catchy voice; because for that I had to go at my own weak spots and make myself better. Like the difference between being six feet tall and being able to run eight miles.

That also gave me something to teach: exercises, tools, and tricks I could give to other writers wrestling with the same issues. Working with them has been teaching me far more than I ever learned on my own, because you can also turn that annoying comment on doing and teaching a different way: “Those who teach learn how to do.” But that, trust me, is another story.

Undressing of America, excerpt 3

2011-09-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

This follows right on the previous two: Tony Comstock has killed the rabid dog and realized its tavern-keeping owner is a threat to the community. This closes out the first section of Chapter 1.

The next morning, Tony went to the sheriff and told him everything he had heard about the saloon, including the rumor that the owner had no legal license. The sheriff didn’t deny the charge, but he also didn’t seem inclined to do anything about it. The saloon was a popular local service, and clearly there was no political gain to be had in shutting it down at the insistence of an outraged stockboy still years shy of voting age.

Tony left him in a rage. He knew the damage wrought by men who would not do their duties: his own father had repeatedly abandoned his family to chase financial phantasms, leaving little Tony to be his mother’s support, until that neglected woman had died and left Tony with no one to look after him but God and the church. This man who would not use his authority against vice was as guilty as the purveyor himself. And if civil authority could not be trusted to do good, then a higher authority must be invoked.

“I wish to buy some apples,” Tony boomed as he stepped through the saloon door. The owner told him that he didn’t sell fruit. But Tony paid no attention to his answer, because he was casing the saloon. He took note of the big, wooden, fauceted kegs that held nearly the man’s entire stock, and he took note of the windows nearest them.

He stole back under the darkness of night. He waited to be sure that he was alone on the street and that no lamps burned in nearby windows. Then he grabbed one of the saloon’s window shutters and, with all the power of his solid torso and unblinking faith, he tore it free. He climbed through into an even deeper darkness. His memory led him to the kegs, where he felt along until he found a faucet. He opened it full, then groped his way to another. The air filled with the hiss and stench of cider, gin, and whiskey gushing to a dirt floor. When that sound subsided, and Tony could only hear the splash of his boots in the man’s foul stock, he wrenched the kegs off their struts and sent them rolling across the floor. He felt the walls until he found bottles and mugs, and he smashed those against the shelves. At last he found the counter and laid on it a note he had written earlier that day: if the man did not abandon this evil business, it warned, then next time the Lord may bring down the entire building.

Such attacks were not yet established tactics of the religious battle with alcohol: Carry Nation was then just a sickly fifteen year old wheezing in bed in rural Missouri, still twenty years from her saloon-smashing days. This was simply what Tony Comstock knew God wanted. He went to bed that night with the “same consciousness of having done a good job completely that was felt when the first dog lay dead and harmless.” He had found the one thing that, for the rest of his life, would give him true pleasure and satisfaction: stopping mad beasts and moral disease before they could destroy the innocent.

Undressing of America, excerpt 2

2011-09-09T10:21:00.000-07:00

Picking up right where the last post cut off: draft #2 of the beginning of the book.

This dog, this Winnipauk mastiff, was doubly damned, because it belonged to a saloonkeeper. Tony Comstock was well aware of this particular saloonkeeper. He not only sold the Devil’s drink to mill workers and railroad men, preying like all saloonkeepers on the loneliness of men who had left behind their families, their home towns, and their native churches; he sold it also to women and children. Tony had heard stories of the man exchanging gin and cider for groceries, even with women, even with mothers of young children. Already the man spread dissolution and destruction through liquor, indifferent to the lives of the innocent. That he would do the same in an even viler manner by leaving his dog untethered and unwatched was only to be expected.

Tony was one of two young men working at the general store when a neighbor burst through the door and cried for help. Both boys took guns from the store’s stock, poured powder into the muzzles, and rammed home bullets. One bullet per gun, and poor guns at that; every decent weapon in New England had gone south to the war. Facing a mad dog, a man could hope to kill it with his first shot or hope the beast didn’t charge him if he missed, because no man could reload faster than a dog could close a gunshot’s distance between them. Tony fell to his knees and prayed for courage. Then he stood and strode to the door. When he held the door open for his fellow worker, he saw the boy still standing at the counter. He’d lost his nerve. Tony stepped into the street alone.

Finding the dog was not a complicated task: wherever other people ran from, Tony walked to. Soon enough he marched alone through the streets (or so he would always tell the story), watched from doorways and windows by terrified men, women, and children. He saw the dog at the end of a street. It turned toward him as he brought the gun to his shoulder. He fired his single shot, and the cur dropped. His fellow citizens began streaming toward him, thanking and praising him. He admitted later that he enjoyed their adulation. But his greatest pride, he said, was that “I killed it before a single child could be bitten.”

Tony went straight back to work at the store, knowing that his Lord wanted a man to attend to his work as earnestly as to the protection of innocents, but not many hours had passed before he found his day interrupted again. Another dog had been seen racing through the schoolyard at the other end of town, and it too appeared to be rabid. Evidently the saloonkeeper’s dog had already begun to spread its illness before it could be killed. This time the townspeople turned to no one but young Comstock to deliver them.

Again Tony loaded the gun. Again he tracked down the dog by forging upstream against the terror of his neighbors. Again he fired his single shot. But this time he missed. The dog wheeled and charged at him. Tony had no time even to hope to reload, but he did not run. He asked guidance of God as the beast bounded closer. Then God answered, in the sound of a gunshot. This time, one of the men watching from a window had his own rifle ready. The dog crumpled and fell at Tony’s feet.

That evening, Tony hiked back to his small, bare room as a local hero. He had proved himself to be not just a young man who could track and kill a mad dog, but one who would stand steadfast, unarmed, as a mad dog charged him. But his was not the unfurrowed brow of the hero who knows his battle is won. He knelt and thanked his Lord for this opportunity to protect the women and children of Winnipauk from unimaginable horror. And yet, that mission seemed scarcely completed. For the first cause of the horror was not the saloonkeeper’s dog but the saloonkeeper himself. Even as the dog ran wild, spreading its madness and physical corruption, its master sat in his den spreading his own madness and corruption. His poison worked more slowly, but it would spread death among women and children even more widely and for far longer. Tony sought guidance from his own Master, and the truth came instantly clear: the dogs had been only his calls to arms. His true battle was against the man.

The Undressing of America: opening, draft 2

2011-09-07T22:34:00.000-07:00

This is how the first chapter will begin, until either I or my editor decides that it has to change. I still haven't made up my mind about whether to start right here or lead with some kind of introduction.

Although the great forces of history are most likely immune to the acts of any individual will, and most of what we like to see as turning points are probably, really, the first manifestations of movements already bound to happen, still it’s interesting to speculate on how the cultural history of America may have turned on the shooting of that rabid dog in Winnipauk, Connecticut in the late summer of 1862. There were other events to the south that had a more obvious impact on the nation’s course and no doubt deserve the much greater attention historians have given them—the Battle of Antietam and President Lincoln’s first Emancipation Proclamation to name a couple—but even so, what happened inside the soul of one young man when he leveled his gun, not at a Confederate soldier but at a drooling mastiff, would echo through the next five decades and beyond.
          Tony Comstock was eighteen years old. Just six months before he had left New Canaan, one of those Congregationalist communities scratched by sheer puritan zeal out of the thin New England soil over a hundred years before, now withering slowly as the wealth of America moved to more temperate, more southerly, and more secular climes, to seek better fortunes in the mill town of Winnipauk, burgeoning with the recent arrival of a railroad link to the coast and the rest of the world. Tony was less interested in worldly fortune than in serving the austere God whose spirit had informed every joy and sorrow of his childhood, every lowering winter sky and hard row of sod and tender spring shoot of barley on his now lost family farm; but he had obligations. His mother had died when he was ten, his father had vanished while chasing another of his financial pipe dreams, and his older brother had gone to war to end the evil of slavery; his younger sisters were living with relatives, and Tony’s income provided their keep.
          In those six months, Tony had already impressed his Winnipauk neighbors with his energy, industry, and earnestness. Tony was, above all things, earnest. His round face, nascent jowls, full chest, and thick legs made him look several years older than he was. His air of complete devotion to every task he undertook, the gravity he brought to discussions of morals and politics, his obvious love of little children, and his unquestioning willingness to lend his energies to anyone who needed help made him seem older still. So it was that when rumors shot through the town of a mad dog on the loose, Tony was among the first men asked to hunt it down.
          This was not a request made lightly. Rabies was one of the great terrors of nineteenth century American life. There was no cure, or any treatment known other than washing the wound (which many people dismissed as superstitious nonsense anyway), and the contracting of it was a sentence to agonizing death, inevitable from the appearance of the first symptom. Reported cases had been rising since early in the century; although to what extent that reflected the genuine spread of an epidemic as opposed to the rise of a terror within the national imagination is hard to ascertain. America’s canine population surged exponentially along with its human population, and the ever-quicker flow from farms to towns and towns to cities brought dogs, like their owners, into closer contact. So epidemics are spread.
          But times of change stir their own special nightmares, too. In communities like those of New England, where once-homogeneous societies found themselves increasingly disrupted by rapid economic and population shifts, where the moral and philosophical control of the founding churches was being steadily eroded by spreading secularism and free thinking, the idea of the loyal family dog turning suddenly into an agent of death was a compelling one. Common belief held that the first symptom of rabies was a sudden mania, a feverish energy, a frantic and directionless roaming: canine echoes of the unbridled human ecstasies that earlier generations of New Englanders had read as products of witchcraft. Many a cry of “mad dog” went up before the creature in question had a chance to show the insatiable thirst and foaming chops that would have proved it to be rabid; and many a dog surely died for no more than a bout of uncharacteristic energy or anxious restlessness.

Excerpts coming

2011-09-05T21:40:00.000-07:00

Ten months since I called my blogging break. The book's going well and I'm sending chapters to my wise and patient editor, Eric Chinski. I think it's pretty good; all that procrastinating may have had a purpose after all, since this version of the book feels a lot more interesting than the one I originally sold to FSG. I'll be posting excerpts here from time to time, to see how the words look outside the privacy of my own computer and draw some comments if anyone's kind enough to leave any.

Blog Break

2010-11-10T22:48:00.000-08:00

I'm taking a little break from blogging, because, as important as blogs may be for self-marketing and all that in today's whatever-it-is publishing environment, there gets to a point where a fellow either has to blog or write his book. I'm writing my book. The Undressing of America for FSG, specifically. I'll drop in here occasionally and post some information about it to keep you curious. But mostly...I'll be writing my book.

Have yourselves a merry little Christmas?

2008-12-26T15:27:00.000-08:00

My son made this movie as a Chrismas present for his mom and me. In less than half the length of a Vince Guaraldi tune it captures just about everything I like about this time of year. The performers are Godzilla, Godzilla Junior, Gigan, and "Toho King Kong," who isn't really King Kong but has his own charms.

More Godzilla

2008-08-21T17:56:00.001-07:00

Another short kaiju movie by my son:

The trailer

2008-07-06T00:23:00.000-07:00

My son Nicky has posted a trailer to his new daikaiju movie on YouTube, trying to generate enthusiasm among on-line giant-monster aficionados. I sympathize, as I've been using the web pretty heavily myself lately to generate interest in my new books. Looking at this, I think he may be doing the better job:

More from Nicky Jones

2008-07-01T00:30:00.001-07:00

My kid's movie

2008-06-24T18:13:00.000-07:00

My son Nicky is working on a monster movie pitting the Godzilla villain Gigan against the Gamera villain Irys, combining stop-motion animation with a scaled-down version of Japanese "suitmation." Or "vinylmation," call it. Here's Irys entering the city, complete with sound effects:

And here's a snippet of aerial combat, pre-sound effects, in which Gigan has just been knocked out of the sky. The kid's got a directorial eye, I think.

My Pal Splendid Man on line!

2008-06-23T12:50:00.000-07:00

My pal Will Jacobs and I have just posted the first installment of yet another humor book on its own website, this one a series of short stories about the friendship between a superhero and a decidedly un-super young would-be writer. As with our novel Million Dollar Ideas, we would love to get your reactions as we get it ready for publication.

I've also written a short essay about how it took us over a quarter-century to write the dang thing, which you can check out on my blog about the writing process, The Undressing of America.

I Shall Return

2008-06-17T16:17:00.000-07:00

I heard myself saying it to my son as I let myself out of the house: "I shall return." In an arch, mock-stentorian voice. He didn't react. He never does, and I'll bet I've said it a thousand times. I didn't intend to say it, but I know where it came from: My dad used to say it to me when I was a kid, in exactly the same circumstances, when he'd leave me alone in the house and wanted to make sure I noticed but didn't want to make a big deal out of it. I never said it back to him; in fact, for the first forty-some years of my life I may never have said it at all. But from the time my son hit the age when he was conscious of me leaving the house but no longer needed real reassurance that I'd be back soon, I think I've been saying it a lot. I say "think" because I'm sure I don't always notice. I definitely don't plan it. My father's words just appear in the air.

For my dad the words were an in-joke. Not only a self-consciously wry phrase to cover a slightly awkward social moment, which was always his way, but also a reference to General Douglas MacArthur's pronouncement upon retreating from the Philippines in the face of the Japanese invasion in 1942: "I came through Bataan...and I shall return." Russell Jones was a Marine, stationed on a Navy ship, and the Marines and Navy did not think much of the performance of MacArthur's Far East Army. My father was in the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, and his ship was sunk off Guadalcanal. He lost a lot of friends there, and he knew a lot of Marines who would fight in the horrible island conquests to come. As far as he was concerned, MacArthur's fixation on retaking the Philippines was all posturing. By the time the Army got there, the Philippines had already been cut off by Navy and Marine combat, and the Japanese withdrawal was inevitable. The newsreels of MacArthur wading ashore at Leyte after the shooting was all done and declaring "I have returned" were just showbiz as far as he was concerned, and an expectoration in the faces of the men who'd died.

Then my dad read somewhere that when MacArthur had first declared, "I shall return," President Roosevelt had asked him to amend the line to, "We shall return." MacArthur refused. That sealed it. From then on, he was going to trivialize "I shall return" by intoning it every time he went to the hardware store or the auto parts store and left his kid watching Bullwinkle on the couch.

My son knows a bit about World War II. He watched the whole Ken Burns series. He's heard me tell retell a few of my dad's war stories. He can't ask my dad anything directly, because he's pretty much lost in dementia now. He would probably be interested to know about the MacArthur connection if I ever remember to tell him. And if he's ever even been conscious of my "I shall return." But he wouldn't think much about it. He could never feel the pain and indignation that his grandfather somehow managed to convey with that ironic cliché. It would be a bit of family trivia, quickly tossed into whatever half-memory holds such things.

I wonder, though, if it's in him somewhere, the same way it was in me for decades before it came out again. I wonder if he'll ever find himself saying "I shall return" to his own kid as he lets himself out the door. If, even just once, that phrase, that tone of voice, the veiled satiric stance that's found its way from World War II to the '60s suburbs to San Francisco in 2008 will reach another set of ears, who knows where, who knows whose, carried from one slightly stilted dad to another to another, a century after it was born.

They had faces then

2008-06-12T14:19:00.000-07:00

I'm in the mood to let the great issues of American politics take care of themselves today and think instead about one of those cultural contributions of ours that flourish despite all political and economic vicissitudes. The movies, specifically. A video artist named Philip Scott Johnson has made two stunning little films with some still photos and some morphing software and posted them on YouTube.

The first, Women in Film, shows 80-some actresses morphing into one another, from Mary Pickford to Halle Berry, set to a haunting Bach cello solo. The effect of the morphing is hypnotic, and I'm struck simultaneously by the changes in ideal type, in facial structure and hair and make-up as well as in the expressions we expect our beautiful women to strike, and by the essential continuity of what we've thought of as beauty and glamor for the past 90 years.

Then there's Men in Film, in some ways less "easy on the eyes" but in others more fascinating, as it really lets us see what a greater variety of facial types we allow to our ideal men than our ideal women. Watching Fred Astaire stretch out of Erroll Flynn and then squish into Clark Gable is quite a moment.

I find them both endlessly compelling. It's hard not to just keep hitting "replay." The names of all the actors and actresses are listed, but I had more fun trying to identify them on my own several times first. Some surprises when I finally checked the list: the face that I thought was just a transitional morphing image between Gene Tierney and Ingrid Bergman turned out to be Olivia de Havilland (was that why she never quite made the first rank of stars?). And I strongly recommend watching them on full screen, with the sound on.

That's Entertainment

2008-06-09T11:28:00.000-07:00

The post-mortems for the Clinton campaign still fill the punditverse, most of which fade into one long, annoying drone: hubris...didn't find her voice...no plan after Super Tuesday...underestimated caucuses...generation gap....

But Dr. G. Clotaire Rapaille, founder of a marketing consultancy called Archetype Studies, brings a new twist that is, if nothing else, more fun than the rest. As Paul Mulshine summarizes this Frenchman's take: "What we demand in our politicians is not competency but entertainment value, a fact that explains the success of Hillary's husband." Quoting Dr. Rapaille himself: "Bill Clinton is a comedian. He is the entertainer-in-chief, with a girl in the Oval Office and a cigar." Hence Clinton's easy reelection in the midst of the Lewinsky mess and the fact that the Republican Congress began to bleed support from the time it chose to impeach him.

Bush, Rapaille says, was popular as long as he played the dumb, folksy Texan. Now that he "is rigid and boring and is surrounded by people who are boring and rigid," we can't stand him. "The big mistake from Bush was that after 9/11 he thought he had a mission."

As Rapaille sees it, Hillary Clinton, with her earnest, combative wonkiness, never had a chance against Obama's giant rallies, strutting, gutter balls, gangsta moves, and crazy preacher. And McCain will be making a serious mistake if he tries to choke back his obscene temper tantrums and bizarre outbursts in order to come across as some sort of grimly paternal conservative scold.

Personally, I find McCain the most entertaining figure in American politics these days...although I don't know if it's in a way that will get him elected.

"Identity" Is Not So Simple

2008-06-08T11:48:00.001-07:00

For all the talk of identity politics in this past Democratic race, what strikes me is how little it really was about that. The press wanted it to be all about "women for Clinton," how resentful they are and how hard it is for them to accept being unable to vote for a female president this year. And yet, millions of men voted for Clinton too. In many states, the male vote broke strongly in her favor. And in many states, Obama did better among women than Clinton did. The polls show that many women started the campaign supporting Clinton and then shifted to Obama; some shifted back later, many didn't.

As for race: yes, by the end, Obama was polling between 80 and 90% of black people, but not in the beginning. Late last year, Clinton was leading him in the polls among black Democrats. African-Americans didn't flock automatically to him because of some great law of "identity politics"; the Clinton campaign had to alienate them actively. And if Clinton ended up winning among white voters, it was by the slimmest of margins. This was not a race dominated by race and gender, despite the determination of journalists to simplify it and sexy it up for the needs of headlines. It was far more about economics, generations, classes, managerial styles, people's expectations of their government, and ideas than it ever was about such superficial concepts of identity.

When I started this blog, I quoted my friend Xandra Castleton (writer and producer of the movie Full Grown Men) on some of these issues—or actually kind of misquoted her by editing most of the nuance out of what she'd said. She then gave me a fuller version of what she had said, which I'd like to reproduce here. This is from late February, before the race became a long, angry battle, with the choices still seemed so electric. I had just written about how I wished my mother had lived to see this election, how it would have been such a thrill for her and yet such a difficult decision for a woman had been a feminist and a civil rights activist for decades, and Xandra responded:

When I heard that Oprah had supported Obama, I felt an instinctive initial resentment that in the hierarchy of identity politics, gender always loses. I thought that Oprah was choosing her race over her gender as black women did in the black power movement and as women in every cultural/racial/class struggle seem to constantly be asked to do. But I think I was wrong. I don't know if Obama really represents me so much more than Clinton does, but I'd rather have him representing this country to the rest of the world, and I'd like to have a president for the first time in my life as an eligible voter who is not named either Bush or Clinton. That has been my first and enduring opposition to her candidacy. But if she does become our nominee you can be sure I'll be sharpening my weapons against the Hillary haters and trying to expose the sexism behind the vehemence of that hatred, which I believe is very real and alive. I'm with the hope candidate, yes, so I hope that your mama will be looking down at a future election and smiling down at the female candidate of color sweeping the country off their feet (and I hope she's a lesbian too).

These were the sorts of decisions we had to make over these past few months, the sorts of conflicts we had to balance and negotiate. In the process we all learned a hell of a lot about what matters most to us. This has been a profound process of national self-examination, and I suspect we'll only gradually realize how much it's taught us. To reduce that to the simplest old definitions of "identity" completely misses the point.

(Oh, but I do have to point out: if we do have a lesbian of color running for president in the near future, it'll probably be Condoleezza Rice. No thanks! There are a lot of old, straight white guys I'd vote for first....)

Movie Fun

2008-05-27T14:33:00.000-07:00

One of the great movie quizzes of all time has just been posted at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. No, it's not a test of trivial knowledge, though it does include such obscuranta as Question 3: "Eugene Pallette or Charles Coburn?" And 8: "Foxy Brown or Coffy?" And it does tempt us movie junkies into dangerous realms of pretension with, "Using our best reviewer-speak, what is an 'important' film comedy? And what is to you the most important film comedy of the last 35 years?" But it also includes some fine, universal thought-provokers, like "What was the last movie you saw in a theater? On DVD? And why?" And, "What's the worst movie title of all time?" And, "Name a movie you think of as your own?"

The comments of other readers are fun too, including many familiar figures from the cinegeek blogosphere. And my personal favorite movie blogger, Campaspe at Self-Styled Siren, runs her answers on her own blog, which are worth reading by themselves. Even though she is wrong about Jane Greer and Veronica Lake.

Second Chapter of the New Novel!

2008-05-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

Will Jacobs and I have now posted the second chapter of our new humor-novel, Million Dollar Ideas, at edandjohnny.blogspot. This time we get to see Ed and Johnny, our indefatigable screenwriters, recovering from their encounter with Darryl F. Zanuck, hanging out with a couple of fairly well-known friends, and concocting another can't-miss movie idea. Please do check it out, and please do leave us a comment once you've done so. The first chapter (still on the site too) has earned us some wonderful comments over the past three weeks, and we're eager to hear what you think of this one. Thanks!

The Crucible

2008-04-29T22:49:00.001-07:00

When people who have been separated by resentment and unresolved grievances come together to unite, the first emotion you see is hope. But once they're all in the room and they start opening up about why they've felt cut off and put down and neglected and misunderstood, then what you see is anger. I've been in this situation, giving talks or participating in workshops that bring together the critics of mass entertainment with the makers and defenders of it. And I've been in it in workplace discussions and family disputes and marriage counseling. You can't go straight from the optimism that brings people into the room to the genuine concord when everyone's gained a little more understanding of each other and choose to push on together. People have to know that their resentment has been heard and respected before they can let it go. People have to cross boundaries and be reminded to step back. People have to vent. The whole group has to go through the anger to get to the other side.

This is where we are now in this election. We've been through the excitement: yes, we can unite. Yes, we can put our old resentments aside. But then we start talking about our resentments. Who compromises with whom, who feels like she's compromised too much, who feels like he's never been allowed to voice his frustration. So the conservative rage starts spilling out, and the liberal rage, and the white rage, and the black rage. And it feels bad for a while. We start thinking, what happened to that soaring hope? This isn't the conversation we thought we were starting.

But the conversation will not stop here unless we retreat behind our separate resentment again and walk away. If we keep talking honestly we will begin to understand that we all have our anger and we don't have to be afraid it. We can overstep, but we can learn to modulate it too. None of us has to hold any more resentment in us than we want. We can let the other person have his anger and we can let go of ours. Then we notice that it becomes easier for him to let go of his.

The power in those conversation seems to shift for a while to the angriest people in the room. But if we keep talking, and if most people in the room have a genuine will to come together, and if someone leading the discussion can remind us with some firmness of our purpose for being there, then the power will start to shift. It will shift to the calmer voices. To the people who can hear the anger and allow it to be, but still leading us forward. For a while, the angry voices will be turned against the calmer voices. When we're frustrated we like to pick fights, and for a while we tell ourselves that the person trying to bring us together is siding with the people we don't like. "If you're not on my side, you must be on his!" But as it sinks in that he's acknowledging everyone, asking everyone equally to come together, we calm down. We get it.

I believe that the majority of Americans do want to move beyond the resentments that have split us apart and alienated us from one another. We're going through the angry part of the conversation now, but I believe that we're moving through it. Barack Obama has been one of the clearest, calmest voices in the room, and right now that makes him a target. But he keeps reminding us, with a misstep now and then, that his purpose is to hear all of us and bring us together. He pushes back when people overstep the bounds of constructive conversation. But he doesn't vilify or demonize or try to pick fights so that he can divide and conquer.

I believe that once we get through this ugly passage we will see people moving back to the idea of unity. The Democratic party will come back together. Senator Clinton will help pull it together, once Obama has locked up the nomination. And if Senator McCain and the Republicans try to fight this movement with nothing but anger and calls to disunity, they aren't going to do well in November at all. This isn't a downward slide back to where we were. This is just the crucible of rage that we all have to pass through.

Savior Returns from Dead, No Punches Thrown

2008-04-28T13:06:00.001-07:00

Following up on my last post: Apparently the Orthodox clergy in Jerusalem have successfully gotten through Easter without another round of fisticuffs over who has what rights in the Lord's tomb. Maybe this was due to embarrassment over the worldwide press coverage of Palm Sunday's palm-frond battle with the police, or maybe it was the presence of hundreds of said police at the ceremonies.

In any case, this is a good thing, viewed from any humane or spiritual perspective. I know it's a good thing. Really. We shouldn't be rooting for priests to start whaling on each on the holiest day of the year. But still. I'll bet I'm not the only one who'd have been willing to make an annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem just to the see the priest-fights in the Holy Sepulcher.

Jesus Christ!

2008-04-26T15:05:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is Orthodox Easter, the holiest day of the year for all the Eastern branches of Christianity. And on that holy day, in the holiest place in all Christendom, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, where Jesus was buried and rose again, the police will be standing guard to prevent an outbreak of violence. Not violence against Christians by non-believers, nor violence against non-believers by Christians. They'll be watching for Christian priests to start punching and kicking and throwing rocks. At each other.

The problem is that the Sepulcher is shared by several different Christian sects, and two of those—the Greek Orthodox and Armenian Orthodox—have been arguing for years about who gets to handle what duties. The Greeks have been the dominant group for a long time, which they see as their right (they were Christians first, after all, and they used to rule the place, right up until 637 AD). The Armenians are feeling that, as one priest put it, "We are the weak ones, persecuted by them for many centuries." So the Greeks will forbid the Armenians from participating in certain ceremonies, the Armenians will show up anyway, the Greeks will try to toss them out, and suddenly everyone will start throwing hands. And vice versa.

This past Christmas, at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem (the second holiest site in Christendom, and subject to the same power sharing scheme), Greek and Armenian clergy fought over whose turn it was to sweep the floors, started hitting each other with brooms and ended up throwing rocks. Last week, on Palm Sunday, they got into such a brawl in the Sepulcher that the cops were called. When the police showed up, the believers started beating them with their ceremonial palm fronds.

Easter is traditionally an even hotter button, especially the ceremony when the Patriarch of the Greek Church enters the shrine and the candles (according to the Greek priests in attendance) miraculously light themselves. The Armenians keep trying to slip believers into the ceremony, presumably trying to catch the guy with the lighter. One journalist reports that "people attending the Holy Fire ceremony have been trampled trying to escape the violence that breaks out."

So tonight the cops aren't waiting to be called. They're already on duty to protect the sacred rites of Christianity on Holy Saturday and Easter. Jewish cops, no less. Shamuses, you could say.

Yoram Sabo, a filmmaker producing a documentary about religious fervor in Old Jerusalem, acknowledges that these battles "may seem trivial, but you have to look at it through religious glasses—people fight for what they thing is important." Evidently what's not important anymore is all that love and peace and unity in the body of Christ and turn the other cheek stuff. But that's hardly news, is it?

What charms me about the this story is how perfect an example it is—and an amusing one, being refreshingly free of religious killing—of the inherent logic of institutions. No matter how they started or what their original intention was, sooner or later their primary purpose becomes the perpetuation and enrichment of the institution itself. The priests and monks whaling on other priests and monks don't even seem to see the irony that they're doing all this to honor the Savior who came to lift us out of worldly conflict, tribalism and institutionalized religion. (A theme very cleverly explored by one of my favorite Russian journalists here.)

This is one of those times I really hope I'm around for the Second Coming. I hope there'll be some holy laughter in the air.

Train Keep a Rolling

2008-04-24T15:56:00.000-07:00

I knew I needed a break from thinking about this election when I went onto one of my favorite left-leaning blog sites this afternoon and found myself reading a furious discussion of the fact that the MSM (that's "mainstream media," the bane of political bloggers) has been reporting Clinton's Pennsylvania victory margin as 10% when in mathematical fact it was only 9.2%! The argument centered mainly on whether this was more evidence of an anti-Obama media conspiracy or just of the criminal sloppiness of modern reporting, followed by many suggestions on how to get the word out to the public that Clinton didn't really win by "double digits" after all.

Personally, I'm going to get the word out that I'd rather watch old movies for a week or two. Barack Obama's train ride to victory is clearly going to be a local, not an express, stopping everywhere from Kokomo to Raleigh to San Juan...or maybe the problem is that Hillary keeps tying herself to the tracks whenever it starts to pick up speed...pick your own metaphor...and we have plenty of time to think about other things.

(But no, I'm not just going to "sit there and let Clinton steal Barack's momentum," to quote another blog thread. I'll be making calls to Indiana. I refuse to read any op-eds telling me that Indiana is now a must-win state for Obama, but I'll be making calls.)

First of all, anyone who is or can soon be anywhere near the San Francisco Bay Area should check out a couple of local film festivals. The Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto—a graceful, perfectly restored, Moorish Deco movie house from 1925, complete with live organ music between shows (with Richard Rodgers's heartrending Isn't It Romantic? for a theme song)—is running an unprecedented tribute to Bette Davis on her 100th birthday, showing every one of her first 36 movies, from her first supporting appearance in The Bad Sister in 1931 (in which she was cast as the good sister—talk about not knowing what they had!) to Jezebel from 1938. Unfortunately, now that I look at the schedule, I see that Jezebel is already past, as is the gloriously twisted Of Human Bondage, but there's some fascinating stuff still to come, many views of Davis as a skinny blonde playing a wide range of good girls and bad. So Big, tonight and tomorrow, is a Wild Bill Wellman movie from 1934 that has her backing up Barbara Stanwyck. Bette is out-acted—no one could touch Stanwyck in the crackling, rackety days of early-'30s shoestring soundies—which is a fascinating thing to watch by itself.

Coming up are The Rich Are Always with Us (with Ruth Chatterton, always fun to watch do her self-conscious theatrical razzle-dazzle), Jimmy the Gent (Cagney being Cagney), Three on a Match (much of the great Warners' stock company—Joan Blondell, Warren William, Bogart, Lyle Talbot, Ann Dvorak—playing off each other), Fashions of 1934 (a Busby Berkeley musical starring William Powell, with Bette appearing weirdly where you'd expect Ruby Keeler), Dangerous (Davis's truly unsettling embodiment of an alcoholic), Satan Met a Lady (a pre-Bogart, pre-Huston adaptation of The Maltese Falcon), and a bunch more. Then in June, running through the summer, the Stanford is going to show "many but not all" of her movies from 1939 on.

Oh, and I just looked it up: Jezebel and Of Human Bondage are both on DVD. I'll watch them both soon (and try not to think about the Kentucky primary as I listen to Bette's Southern accent in Jezebel).

Meanwhile, at the Castro Theatre, right over the hill from my house, the San Francisco International Film Festival is opening tonight with Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress. The program describes the star as "the alluringly vulpine Asia Argento," which is probably exactly how Vin Diesel thought of her in XXX. A lot of very intriguing sounding new movies will follow, but there'll also be some great old stuff mixed in during the two weeks of the festival: tomorrow The Golem from 1920, with funky new music by a guy from the Pixies; later The Sweet Smell of Success, Some Like It Hot, and others; and this Saturday a new 35-millimeter print of Leave Her to Heaven, a most idiosyncratic psychological suspense movie scripted by Jo Swerling (one of my heroes) and also one of the most gorgeous movies you'll ever see, partly because of the throbbing Technicolor and Southwestern locations but mostly because of Gene Tierney.

Tierney is not an actress I've taken very seriously until quite recently. I knew she was ethereally, almost mystically beautiful, at least when 20th Century Fox wanted her to be. I've loved Laura for decades and couldn't imagine any other actress bringing to life that ghost of everything men imagine women to be. But in Night and the City I thought she was just fine, and in The Shanghai Gesture almost dorky. I lumped her in with Linda Darnell and Hedy Lamarr as just one of those faces that clever cinematographers and erotically complicated directors could play wonderful tricks with. Then a friend of mine told me she was his favorite "screen goddess of yore," and coincidentally I had a chance to catch one of her early comedies, Rings on her Fingers (and she was pretty funny, too), and that got me to rent Leave Her to Heaven, and all of a sudden I saw something opening up behind her otherworldly gaze: she plays a cruel, dissociated bitch posing as a sweet girl next door, and she brings up something truly spooky from her depths in doing so. (And is she ever fascinating to look at.)

A lot of awful things happened to Gene in her life, including a first child born severely retarded and a decades-long journey through major depression, probably bipolar disorder. She came of age when the mental health establishment was determined to "conquer" depression, but the drugs that might have helped hadn't been found yet. So she spent years in and out of institutions, getting her brains scrambled by electroshock. But she did her best to get through, and to take care of the people in her life as well as she could. Late in her life she wrote a book about it all, Self-Portrait, that I've seen praised for its candor and humanity. I'll be at the Castro on Saturday the 26th to see her on the big screen.

Meanwhile, Turner Classic Movies, my favorite place to hide when I just can't handle the real world, is showing some fun stuff as usual. Some Hedy Lamarr movies tonight—and after the wonderful essay about Hedy and John Garfield on Self-Styled Siren's blog, I realize I've been probably been too quick to dismiss her, too. And Saturday morning Detour, one of the great, weird, punch-drunk, low-budget noir quickies, starring yet another inconsistent but fascinating actress of the '40s, Ann Savage (whom my pal Will Jacobs and I find so compelling that we're going to be using her in our new novel, Million Dollar Ideas.)

So there you go. Lots of ways not only to avoid worrying about the election, but to avoid engaging with the present altogether.

My new novel

2008-04-08T12:34:00.001-07:00

You know, I started out as a humor writer. Twenty-five years ago my friend Will Jacobs and I first got into print with a humor book called The Beaver Papers, which did well enough to lead to a whole bunch of National Lampoon pieces and finally to The Trouble with Girls comic book. Will and I went in separate directions for a while, but neither of us has ever had as fine a time as when we were writing funny stories together. Now he and I are finally tackling something we always meant to get to: a novel. A humorous novel, but a real novel, with characters and a plot and all that stuff. It's called Million Dollar Ideas, and we've started uploading it, chapter by chapter, to see what people think. I love the thing, and I believe it could really build a following, but it's kind of an offbeat book—light and snappy but with a surreal twist. Any comments you can offer on the material or help you can give promoting it will be hugely appreciated.

The plan right now is to upload a chapter a month, but we'll increase that as interest warrants. Because each chapter is fairly self-contained but also has enough suspense to keep pulling it forward I think this book should work well in serialization. It's set in Hollywood in the late '40s, although it's not without its modern references, and while the heart of it is the two lead characters, their friendship, and their battle with the world around them, it's also full of those literary and mass-cultural gags that Will and I always like. In fact, some critics are already saying that it makes the most intelligent use of Cesar Romero references of any novel in recent memory. So if you have a minute, do check it out and let me know what you think. Oh, and if the links aren't working, track it down at http://edandjohnny.blogspot.com.

Jules Dassin

2008-04-06T11:36:00.000-07:00

No politics this time, except a retelling of a political life. Jules Dassin, the director, died last week, and I keep thinking about him. Although it's only been recently that I've really begun to notice or understand him, he's been a presence in my imaginative life since I was a kid.

My parents loved his movies. My dad especially liked Rififi—nothing gratified him more than a finely wrought heist movie—and explained to me what was great about Topkapi when he took me to see it when I was seven or so. For my mother, the great Dassin movie was Never on Sunday. I had no idea then, but now I understand how that sentimental comedy about a scholar in love with a whore gave voice and image to everything she wanted to believe about her own sexuality and passion for life and hunger for self-acceptance. She would speak Dassin's name with something between a sob and a sigh; although that was partly, I think, because she (like most of the art-house audience) assumed he was French, and so invested his name with wet flourish: Zhool Dah-SANH. She didn't know he was really just Julie Dassin from Morris High in the Bronx—"DASS'n"—son of a Jewish immigrant barber.

Dassin's journey to the movies was a fairly standard one for a New York Jew of his generation: Yiddish Theater, Group Theater, radio, Broadway, then the invitation from RKO to learn directing by assisting a master (Hitchcock in this case). And like most of the creative kids who came up through that world he got involved in left-wing politics, joining the Communist Party during the "Popular Front" days and leaving it when Stalin signed his pact with Hitler in 1939. If you were a son of Yiddish immigrants in the Depression, that was how you expressed your humanity, your civic responsibility, your essential patriotism. It showed in his movies, too. They were never overtly political, but his inclinations and talents led him to stories of exploitation, alienation, and crime—Brute Force, Naked City, Thieves' Highway—and his brutal focus on the agony of individuals struggling against an indifferent environment turned those stories into indictments of the culture of money and what it did to people.

He was just becoming an important American artist when America turned on him, as it turned on so many of the idealists who had held up the progressive pillar of our national coalition through the Depression and the War. In the late 1940s the House of Representatives and the mavens of the movie industry teamed up to destroy the careers of left-leaning filmmakers, and the great mass of those filmmakers' coworkers and fellow citizens, even their own labor unions, sat by nervously and let it happen. Never mind that Americans of all political stripes had eaten up the dark images of corruption and conflict that left-wing moviemakers had perfected. Never mind that stories of the little guy battling plutocracy were a staple of the American imagination on the right wing as well as the left. We were in one of our fits of ideological madness when any call to change is heard as a threat to our identity, and the word went out to sacrifice the "Communists" to our terror.

When Dassin took on Night and the City, he knew he was about to be blacklisted, that it would be his last movie for an American studio, and it showed in the nausea and hysteria, the mad persistence of dreams in the face of hopelessness that shaped every scene. With a good crew, a strong script and one brilliant actor—Richard Widmark, who also just died—he crafted a whole vision of a fear-driven world with its soul out of joint. There was not an explicitly political line in the entire thing, no angry laborers or cruel bosses, only touts and conmen and B-girls and cabbies and wrestlers, and yet without a moment of posturing or cant he made it one of the cinema's most relentless critiques of capitalism, its psychological, spiritual, and social costs, like Brecht without the speeches or surrealism. And then his American career and life were over.

The blacklisters weren't just cowardly or conciliatory, they were petty and mean-spirited, too: American film distributors passed the word among their European counterparts that no movie in which Jules Dassin was involved would ever be exhibited in the United States. That kept him from landing a movie job even in France for five years, and when one came to him it was nothing special: a low-budget crime flick called Du rififi chez les hommes. But his loving attention to the mechanics of theft made it a nasty delight. It was a huge hit in Europe, and American distributors wanted a piece of that cash. So money became Dassin's savior and the blacklist began to crack. But Dassin never wanted to be an American again. He directed a movie with the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, fell in love with her, fell in love with her country, and became a "first-generation Greek."

Even in Europe his work was rarely political on the surface. His best movies were sentimental comedies and ingenious crime capers. And yet, through his amused fascination with thieves, prostitutes, and fly-by-nighters he continued to make brisk points about the effect of cash on morality and law. He cast himself in his most personal movie, Never on Sunday, as an American intellectual named Homer who is disappointed when Greece will not reflect back to him his own fantasies of its cultural purity. He falls in love with a Greek prostitute but cannot accept her for what she is, trying to reform her through education until he finds himself sinking into the muck of the modern Greek underworld. In the end he arrives at the essential Dassin understanding: that we and the world are painfully flawed and money is stronger than any of us, that we can save ourselves only through honest acceptance of what we are. Dassin wasn't a very good actor, and that's part of the reason the movie doesn't hold up as well as his Hollywood work, but in his fragility and eagerness to please and sometimes too self-conscious effort we can see his journey out of pain and into love.

(And it launched my mother on her own version of Homer's journey. For years after seeing that movie she was desperate to see Greece, but when she got there she found no sign of the singing, stomping, glass-tossing gaiety Dassin had promised. My father took her to a taberna to hear bouzouki music, but the music was overamplified and everyone smoked. She hated it.)

Dassin's interest in movies—and his talent for them—faded as he grew older, and he gave more and more of his energies to helping Mercouri, his wife and moral compass, in her work as a socialist politician and eventual Culture Minister of Greece. After she died in 1994 he devoted himself to her last cause, the return of the British Museum's Elgin Marbles to their original home on the Parthenon. Not a quixotic battle, exactly, because it might yet succeed. But still a heartbreaking one somehow. For over two centuries those marbles have sat there, white and serene in their London tomb, far removed from the passage of time and the turmoil of Greece and the racket of New Oxford Street, and the British are in no hurry to let them go. The corrosive smog of Athens, they say, would damage them. Dassin outlived his wife by fourteen years, but in those years he came no closer to bringing the marbles home. So they stay frozen, those Centaurs and Lapiths and horsemen and basket-bearers, some headless, some handless, but all imperturbed, so far from the building they were meant to glorify.

There's a trace of the pain of all those early 20th century left-wing patriots in that unrealized dream: the return of a pure, shattered beauty at long last to its rightful home.

(Listen to the) Paisley People

2008-04-04T15:20:00.000-07:00

Nothing about America’s future today, only our distant past. Archaeologists from the University of Oregon have just announced the discovery of the oldest known human DNA in the Americas: coprolites—fossilized doo-doo—radiocarbon dated to 14,300 years ago. The petrified dung was uncovered in the Paisley Caves, near the town of Paisley, Oregon (named by a settler after the mill town in Scotland where the famous Persian teardrop pattern was introduced to the West), and so we can hope that the original depositors will become known as the Paisley People.

For seventy years the oldest known humans in America were the Clovis People, whose 13,000-year-old spear tips and cutting tools were unearthed in Clovis, New Mexico. (When I was a kid I learned about them as Clovis Man, because that’s how they did it then. Java Man, Peking Man, Piltdown Man. Sometime around 1970 archaeologists got reluctantly in touch with their feminine sides and started talking about the Clovis People, making our antecedents sound less noble but more homey.) Some archaeologists have disputed their place as “first known Americans” for years, but no one has been able to provide the hard data to strip them of the title—not until Dennis Jenkins and his UO team found, not stone tools that could be dated only roughly by the stone strata they were buried in, but the perfect, dateable organic relic.

That in itself is a miracle. Picture it: some guy takes a dump in a cave, a minute later he's forgotten that particular dump forever, but the stuff somehow survives all the dung-eating bugs and molds until it gradually turns to stone so that 14,300 years later it’s thrilling the scientific community and getting written up in our family newspapers. It’s one of those times you really wish people could have a sudden glimpse of the future. “Who are these wondrous beings with their vast villages and miraculous devices? And what are they doing with my crap?!”

What a symbol of eternity! What a reminder of the continuity of time and life. It’s like the Clock of the Long Now, except instead of a whirring masterwork of perfectly calibrated machinery it’s a pile of turds.

But here’s the real revelation: the first known Americans were the Paisley People of Oregon. The Paisley People. Of Oregon. Forget your noble savages, man. Forget your bronze-skinned warriors and your blood-stained hunters of the plains. This has always been a hippie nation.

Happy Easter

2008-03-22T14:18:00.001-07:00

I swear, this election really isn't the only thing I think about. It's what I've chosen to make this blog about so far, but I do have this whole other life: family, work, dog, the whole routine. And today I'm thinking about Easter.

Easter is one holiday that meant little to me as a kid but that takes on more and more depth as I get older. I'm not a practicing Christian and don't believe literally in the Resurrection, but boy, do I love that metaphor. I suppose I love the baby born at midwinter midnight even more, but the release of God's mortal form from death is sure grand. I love the journey from Good Friday through Holy Saturday too, when we're led deep into that still, dark, timeless singularity, that sweet mystery of death. And the rabbit! The rabbit that rises from its hole bearing colored eggs! Could you possibly come up with a better fairy-tale complement to God blowing the rock door off the tomb and bringing us Grace? Two metaphors in one, and both bring me back to awareness of the eternal recurrence, the constant reborning, the omnipresent now, the atonement of life with itself. When I wake up on Easter morning I feel like I've just come back to life myself.

But I can't sign off without saying something about the election, can I? Because, you know, there've been times in this process that I've felt something like a rebirth. In the finest moments of the campaigns—not only Obama's, which is obviously where my heart is, but Clinton's at its best and Edwards's and, yes, even brief flashes of the GOP's—I've felt a restoration of my belief in the American people and our political process. I've felt a hope for our future that I thought had died years ago. And I've certainly found in myself a renewed willingness to engage with the whole of the nation I live in.

So yeah, happy Easter to us all. He is risen!

Can We Talk about Race?

2008-03-17T12:22:00.000-07:00

Ask anyone concerned with the growth and healing of people and institutions—a therapist, a religious leader, an addict in 12-step recovery, a motivational speaker, or that consultant your company hires for team-building workshops—and they’ll all agree with one principle: you can’t solve a problem unless you can talk about it. If we can’t be honest about our fears and resentments—with an expectation that we’ll be listened to with a measure of openness—then they’re only going to fester.

So how is this country ever going to get past its racial tensions, especially in politics? I applaud Barack Obama’s effort to run a “post-racial” campaign, but one of its side effects has been an intensification of our reflexive, angry suppression of racial discussion. As unpleasant as Geraldine Ferraro and Jeremiah Wright’s recent comments were, I don’t see us helping ourselves when the only responses we hear are cries of “race-baiting” and demands for heads to roll. Maybe the way to be “post-racial” or “trans-racial” or “inclusive” is to talk without venom and sloganeering about why so many of us bring race into our political decisions.

Like, I keep wondering if this blue-collar white resistance to Obama in the Rust Belt isn’t so much due to “racism” as to decades of experience with ugly battles between white and black Democratic political machines. Philadelphians remember the Rizzo machine being replaced, not always to good effect, by the Wilson Goode machine in a racially split election; more recently they’ve seen John Street disappoint the early promise of a broad-based administration and fall back on “the brothers and sisters are running the city!” cant. I think there may be a lot of white people who’d like to see themselves as being willing to vote for a black man but find some experienced-based worries getting in their way. Maybe the reason Obama does so well among blue-collar whites in Illinois is just that they’ve known him long enough to see how well he works with the Daleys, the Blagojeviches, and the Reznos to believe that he can avoid the old us-and-them politics that Chicagoans know so well. (I don’t know that this eases the minds of voters like me, but then latte-sipping Prius-drivers aren’t the main issue in the Pennsylvania primary.)

But how can we find out if this is true or not—how can we understand what this racial divisive is and how we can get past it—if we can’t talk about it?

I like the tone of Obama’s most recent comments on divisiveness in the campaign, but I feel that there’s more he can say. He’s better positioned than any politician in our history—and, as an orator, perhaps more capable—to lead us to think more deeply about our own ideas of race, ethnicity, identity and national unity. And now is the perfect time to start. There are risks in talking openly about a subject that makes us all so uncomfortable and that we have all been so conditioned to fear mentioning in public. But there might be huge rewards too. It might be good for the campaign, giving him the chance to reassure white voters that he understands their reservations and that it’s safe to move past them-and-us politics. It would certainly be good for the country.

Change of Shift

2008-03-01T16:45:00.000-08:00

David Ignatius has just written a column in the Washington Post expressing his doubts that Barack Obama will be an effective bipartisan "bridge builder" because he "has not shown much willingness to take risks or make enemies to try to restore a working center in Washington." Later in the same column he writes that "unlike McCain, Obama bears no obvious political scars for fighting bipartisan battles." His point is that creating true bipartisanship often involves opposing the more divisive elements in one's own party, which is true enough. But it strikes me as a peculiar idea that one must "make enemies" and bear "obvious political scars" to bring parties together.

It comes as no surprise to me to learn that David Ignatius was born in 1950, in the thick of the "baby boom." Because this is the essence of boomer politics: There must always be enemies. There must always be scars.

I've never been able to consider myself a "baby boomer." Any demographer would include my birth year, 1957, in the boom—it was the crest of the wave, in fact, the peak procreational year in American history—and yet, the people who generally identify themselves as boomers are distinguished by a set of cultural and political experiences that I do not share: an awareness of America before the mid-'60s upheaval; a consciousness of Kennedy and the impact of his death; a visceral involvement with the Vietnam War; the draft, or at least the fear of it; an active experience of the Counter Culture, or an active reaction against it; a lifelong sense of "the '60s" as a personally formative moment.

Not me. I never heard of Kennedy until he died. It seemed like Vietnam and the anti-war movement had always been on TV as I became vaguely aware of what my parents watched before dinner. I'd learn later that the draft was the reason my brother joined the Coast Guard and moved out when I was nine, but I didn't get any of the connections at the time. I turned ten during the Summer of Love. One day that summer my mother drove me to Haight Street because she was about to take her first job as a high school teacher and figured she ought to know what it was all about; all I remember is that a young man gave her a flower, which I thought was some sort of official greeting, and that we had lunch in a place that sold piroshkis. I liked piroshkis—that's what I learned from the Summer of Love. The assassinations of 1968, Kent State—news stories I couldn't quite comprehend. I didn't even hear about Woodstock until the movie came out a year later; I was in seventh grade and far more interested in the next Planet of the Apes sequel. The war was over and the draft being abolished a couple of years before I had to worry about it. The big song at my senior prom was Mandy, and the first election I could vote in was the 1976 California primary: Jerry Brown vs. Jimmy Carter.

To me the great battles of the '60s are a mixture of vaguely remembered news items and historical recountings. The great battles of my own '60s were in my backyard and mostly involved G.I. Joe. I grew up hearing about baby boomers, but the phrase always referred to my big brother's peers, those grinning, yelling, fearless, arrogant, argumentative, eternal adolescents riding their roller coaster of manic idealism and self-pitying disappointment. There was no label for us quieter, humbler, more conciliatory little brothers and sisters of the boomers, and that's just as well. A lack of generational self-consciousness suits our temperament just fine.

During the 1980s we heard much about the rise of those "children of the '60s" who were becoming the mainstream. Surely, we heard, they would surely change the world yet again with their vast numbers and hunger for change. When Bill and Hillary Clinton took over the White House after 32 years of occupation by the generation that had come of age in the Depression and World War II, when they danced at their inaugural ball to Fleetwood Mac, looking so young and alive, the boomers were enshrined as the generation in power. But it wasn't just the old lefties, the ones who'd gotten all the media attention during the '60s, who'd ascended. The big rebellion had shocked other baby boomers into action too, Young Republicans and neocons and angry anti-hippies and newly politicized evangelical Christians. Dan Quayle, Rush Limbaugh, George W. Bush, and Karl Rove represent their generation just as thoroughly as the Clintons and Gores, and the tribal elders of both right and left were "proto-boomers" of the same vintage: Jerry Rubin was born the same year as Pat Buchanan, Dick Cheney the same year as Bob Dylan.

But left-wing or right, the generation has shared a single approach to public life: endless conflict.

This is a generation that has always defined itself through denouncing an Other. We're us, they're them, and we have to fight them to remember that we're us. Once the "us" was generational, the youth movement that didn't trust anyone over thirty. That was the battle line that gave the generation its original unity and power. Over the decades the "us" has proven to be endlessly plastic, but the basic dynamic doesn't change.

The "culture wars" have been mainly a boomer fight. Dan Quayle brought the baby-boom style of symbolic combat to presidential politics when he attacked Murphy Brown as the embodiment of all that was wrong with liberals, Democrats, and the media. Just as the over-thirties with their Sinatra and their martinis could be objectified, so could those liberals with their un-American values and entertainment. (And how perfect for a man born in 1947, part of the first tube generation, that wave of kids raised on Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, to launch his culture war over a sitcom.) Karl Rove's divisive electoral strategy is a literalization of the same attitude, its implicit underpinning being that it's fine to hurt, enrage, and alienate those people as long as we win the power struggle and piss them off.

In struggling to retake the electoral center in the wake of Reagan, the Democrats have never embraced the culture wars so openly (anyway, it's hard to fire up the troops by advocating unwed TV moms) and have shown far more willingness to transcend party lines. And yet, they've certainly enjoyed playing the hipper, smarter party, parading their movie stars and rockers, still defining themselves as the young rebels to the parental Republicans. From the conversations of boomer Democrats you'd almost think that Bush's Texas drawl and cowboy affectations were as offensive as his politics. And the Clintons and their peers have always relished their literal and metaphorical boxing gloves, their battles against vast conspiracies and attack machines. In the end, the Clinton administration was hamstrung nearly as much by its own partisan gamesmanship as by the assaults of the Republican Congress.

Yes, I'm over-generalizing, I know that. Plenty of boomers hold the opposite ethos; they were the first generation, after all, to go big-time for Buddhism and Sufi and other philosophies of transcendence. But those who have led and shaped the generation politically, those who rose to positions of power when the boomer ship came in, have been driven by an angry passion for being right—and for seeing the other side as wrong. By a need to define an "other side" even when there doesn't have to be. By a love of arguing, of mocking, of righteous indignation. A joy in watching opponents sputter in frustration. An intolerance of contrasting viewpoints. Little interest in "win-wins" or the "big tent," preferring a vivid delineation of who's hip and who's not, who's telling the truth and who's not, who's right and who's not.

There's a power in that, no denying it. The most combative leaders of the generation are capable of great things. Their intellectual energy is inexhaustible. They are fearless in their willingness to dispute what has been handed to them from the past. Their innate belief in their own rightness gives them an extraordinary resilience: have there ever been two more indestructible politicians than Bill Clinton and George W. Bush?

But mostly the "'60s generation" has squandered its powers and wasted its potential in endless skirmishes and the hunt for new skirmishes.

To me, this is Hillary Clinton's tragic flaw. For all her dedication to children and health care, issues close to my own heart, she ultimately limits her effectiveness and hurts her causes through her reflexive combativeness. She has become a "polarizing figure" not simply because conservatives have developed a neurotic fixation on her (although they have), but because she plays the part with such obvious joy. She has defined herself by her battles with the vast right-wing conspiracy and the Republican attack machine to such an extent that she can't see outside that even as the electorate, driven by younger generations, tells her that it's done with those battles.

Among Clinton's criticisms of Obama—which I hear echoed by many of her boom-aged supporters—is that he's never had to stand against the right-wing attack machine, that he won't be able to survive it. She asks us to support her because she's "tough" and "a fighter." This is a frequent justification of Clinton's own attack strategy: she has to prove that he's "not tough enough" before the Republicans prove it and it's too late.

And yet, so far, Obama only grows more popular as he is attacked. His success is largely founded on the belief that the opponents' attack machine can be mostly dismissed because the attack itself has no more power than we give it. The voters under 50 who are driving his campaign don't want to give attack machines power, and so the attacks are blunted or even turned back on themselves. But the Clinton camp, wedded to the idea that enemies and conflict define us, can only see this as naivete, more evidence of his unreadiness for the battle with the Republicans. At times Clinton and her followers seem almost addicted to battle, to the maneuvering and short-term victories and tit-for-tat squabbling—but most of all to the anger. They see Obama's call for unity as weak because their entire sense of political identity is built on the eternal hostility of us and them.

Eleven years after my mom took me to Haight Street, another woman led me back there: my girlfriend moved to the neighborhood in 1978 and Haight was our main street. There were still relics then of the explosive moment of the '60s—we were always walking by the purple Victorian with the sign reading, "The Jimi Hendrix Electric Church Foundation"—but there were also the twitching speed freaks in the doorways and the panhandlers on the sidewalk and the sullen long-hairs in the book and record stores who looked suddenly so much older than their years. My sense then was that a powerful wind of dreams and ideology had swept down the street and left wreckage behind. The kids my age and younger—call them late boomers, after-boomers, downslope-boomers, or, better yet, give them no label at all—suddenly looked a lot better to me. Without a lot of noise and fireworks, we were trying to clean up the wreckage and make the place habitable for all of us again.

When I look at the aftermath of the Clinton and Bush years, I see the same wreckage. When I look around me, I see the same desire to clean it up. Not through more fighting and more finger pointing, but just through doing what we have to do and doing it together as best we can. I look at the candidate born in 1961, and I hear his rejection of those decades-old battle lines, and I know it's time to put a new generation in charge.

Presidents' Day

2008-02-17T15:10:00.000-08:00

This "President" thing has always vexed me.

The first time I ever heard of a president was when I asked why my mother was crying and my brother told me "the president" had been killed. I was told that he was a great man and he had two children around my age who were now very sad. A president, I gathered, was a good thing, but also a vulnerable one who brought pain and fear.

My first awareness of what a president was came through Lyndon Johnson. At first I was hearing good things about him in my family, as he signed the Civil Rights Act, but then came that hideous war and I began to hear about his cruelty and duplicity, his vulgarity and madness. A president, then, betrayed people.

When I was eleven, I first began to understand some basic political realities, and the American people elected Richard Nixon. He defined "president" during the six most formative years of my political education. I don't imagine I need to elaborate.

I almost thought Ford was going to get in and out without causing too much damage to the nation or its soul, but then he pardoned Nixon. Not just for the crimes we knew he'd committed, but for any crimes he might have committed.

And yet, all through this I was being taught in school that there had been great presidents in the past who changed history in noble ways and came to represent what was good about our country. Not all of them, not hardly: one February my class held a "Presidents Pageant," and somehow I ended up being James Knox Polk. And even then I suspected that the story was a bit cleaned up. But clearly it had once been possible for a president to be a leader. My parents spoke of one—"FDR" my father called him, with something like infatuation in his voice—who in their childhoods had turned the mood of the country from fear to hope and sustained that hope through twelve hard years. I fell in love with '30s movies and through them—Warner Brothers from Little Caesar through 42nd Street to Dead End—I could feel the transformational power of that president across the intervening decades. Even Truman and Eisenhower didn't sound so bad against the self-destructive losers I'd seen in the job.

I wanted to give my heart to Jimmy Carter, although even before the election there were yellow flags waving all around him. I waited and hoped for him to rise above the confusion and ineffectiveness of the first part of his administration. I even wanted to believe that his "malaise" speech was the turning point, although that cold spot in the middle of my gut told me that it was really the opposite. Perceptive sociology but lousy politics. Then came the Iran hostage crisis and his announcement that he would not leave the White House until it was resolved, still my personal choice for the just-plain-stupidest presidential moment in history.

Reagan at least acted presidential. He at least made it through two full elected terms and actually became more instead of less popular as he went along. And a lot of things went pretty well during his tenure: the economy perking up, the vile Soviet empire beginning its final crack, a national snapping-out of the malaise, a lot of fun dance tunes. (Those were also the most exciting years ever for the comic book industry, for reasons that had a lot to do with Reagan; but that's another essay.) The problem with Reagan was that I hated what he was doing to the country long-term. The hastening of the two-tier economy, stirring up our latent social intolerance into a hostile and wrong-headed "values" movement, the so-called war on drugs that's still crippling us as a country, the manipulation of the Iran-Iraq War that led us straight to where we are now.

The first Bush was more a place-holder than a president, at least until his own contribution to the Middle East mess.

I was 35 years years old and feeling pretty well beaten up by American presidents when Bill Clinton caught my fancy. Yes, I was a bit troubled by the faint aroma of sleaze that filled every room he entered. Even then he had the air of a man who would say anything to get the approval he craved. But he said some fine things, and I liked his wife, and I saw the potential in him to turn the nation's political tide. Then came those infuriating first two years, when he handed Gingrich and the neocons everything they needed to take over Congress. The dawning awareness that he would cut any deal to remain the main conduit of power in the room. He did some good things too, and for a while my country seemed to be doing better, but gradually his obvious love of political gamesmanship and symbolic victory came to overwhelm his political agenda.

Finally came the nightmare of the Lewinski aftermath. Not that I couldn't feel some compassion for his obvious sexual compulsiveness: I grew up under a cloud of addictive behaviors, especially alcoholism, and I've had to deal with plenty of my own compulsive patterns. What sickened me was the smug, gleeful game-playing afterward. The hairsplitting over not having had "sex" with that woman. The definition of "is." His apparent belief that he had won the fight, although he had demoralized his party and his country on the way to scoring a legalistic stalemate. For years the public life of my nation was about Bill Clinton's dick. Literally and metaphorically.

By the election of 2000 I felt thoroughly disgusted with presidents. I started telling myself that there was something so inherently wrong with the post or the system or the country that we could not do any better. I even voted for Ralph Nader in the 2000 election—and I don't even like Ralph Nader very much. I just wanted to believe that there could be some way out of the duality of the party of Clinton and the party of Tom DeLay. So disgusted was I that the difference between a Democratic and a Republican president didn't really seem to matter.

Then the Republicans on the Supreme Court hijacked my democracy and handed my country to a gang of thugs. That taught me something about the need to choose between the Democrats and the Republicans, but even it wasn't enough to thrill me about the prospects the Democrats were offering up. I campaigned some for Kerry, seeing him as clearly the lesser of evils, but I also felt some relief at his defeat; I didn't see a Kerry presidency doing the progressive cause much good in the long run. Knowing that Hillary Clinton would be up next did not thrill me. I liked her a lot more than Kerry. I knew I could admire her savvy and toughness, and with a Democratic Congress she might be a lot more effective than her husband. She might well be a president who could engineer the legislative and executive changes I wanted to see made. But I also saw her pulling us deeper into a political drama I was sick of. She still seemed to have her punitive streak, her feeling of entitlement, her love of conflict for its own sake, and, of course, that husband and co-president of hers. I would vote for her, even campaign for her, but with a certain sickness of heart.

I found myself at 50, beaten up and resigned and not believing that I would never know what it was like to have a president who wanted to make this country better and had the mind and soul to do so, who had the skill and the spiritual soundness to turn his values into realities, who could actually represent what I hoped was still true about America, who could actually be an inspiration and not an obstacle to my belief in my country. Then I heard Barack Obama speak, and I found myself thinking that it might be possible. I began to follow his campaign, I studied him, I talked to my trusted friends about him. And sometime in January I realized that I'd begun to believe.

I've wanted to know a Presidents' Day that actually made me want to celebrate the president. Next year I think I may get that at last.

Hard Choice

2008-02-15T15:27:00.000-08:00

I wish my mom had lived to see this election. Leslie Jones was the definition of a Loyal Democrat. In November 2000 she was dying of cancer—she’d chosen not to continue chemotherapy and we all knew that the end couldn’t be more than a few months away—but she was more depressed about George Bush’s victory than about the end of her own life. “God, I hate to go out on this note,” she said. “I was hoping I could at least leave you all with a Democrat in the White House.” She did, in fact, die a few months later, and over the past seven years I’ve often been glad that she didn’t have to see what was happening to her country. But I wish she was here for this one. I wish I could ask her who she would choose between Obama and Clinton.

My mother was a feminist: by instinct lifelong, by political self-identification starting in the late ‘60s. On camping trips our family game was Parcheesi, and one year, when I was twelve or so and newly in thrall to Marvel Comics, I named my four Parcheesi men after the Fantastic Four, writing the names Reed, Ben, Johnny and Sue on their wooden bases. My mother snatched my pen, tipped up her four "Parcheesi women" and marked them with the names of her heroes: Germaine, Gloria, Betty and Simone. (As in, for you younger readers, Greer, Steinem, Friedan and de Beauvoir, four great mid-century feminists.)

But before feminism, her driving political passion was civil rights. She was born in the piney woods of Mississippi into a family of Methodists who spoke up for racial decency in a time when the Klan spoke for the mainstream. She was finding radical civil-rights groups to join in the mid-‘40s, before most of liberal America found its voice on racial issues. She took non-violent resistance training through the Congress of Racial Equality in 1962, planning to participate in sit-ins or freedom rides in the South. Ultimately she didn’t go, I think because she didn’t want to die and leave two young sons.

My mother dreamed of the day she would someday be able to vote for a woman for president. One of her favorite elections was 1984, when she got to put a mark by Geraldine Ferraro’s name for the vice presidency, even though she knew Reagan was going to roll to victory. I know she dreamed too—though more privately, not daring to believe it could ever come true—of the day she would be able to vote for a black nominee.

Well, here is that election of her dreams. A woman and a black man as the sole contenders for the Democratic nomination in a year when the GOP seems bound to lose. It’s not Elizabeth Dole versus Colin Powell, either, but liberals who support nearly everything Leslie Jones believed in.

And yet, what a cruel dream it’s turned out to be. Because she would have to choose. She’d have to vote against one or the other. I can only imagine how agonizing it would have been for her—and how agonizing it must be for those millions of women who fought the feminist battles of the ‘60s and ‘70s—that in order to elect the first woman to the White House she would have to rise up against the first plausible candidacy of a black man. No wonder so many women in their fifties and older have said that they hope Obama will settle for the vice presidential spot, or just that they wish he had waited eight years.

In her essay Goodbye to All That 2 the feminist writer Robin Morgan casts her support for Hillary Clinton as a direct continuation of those struggles of the ‘60s and ‘70s. A Clinton victory will mean “Goodbye to the double standard…to the toxic viciousness…to the news-coverage target practice….”

“The real question,” she writes, “is deeper than her re-finding her voice. Can we women find ours? Can we do this for ourselves?

“‘Our President, Ourselves!’

“Time is short and the contest tightening. We need to rise in furious energy—as we did when Anita Hill was so vilely treated in the U.S. Senate, as we did when Rosie Jimenez was butchered by an illegal abortion, as we did and do for women globally who are condemned for trying to break through. We need to win, this time. Goodbye to supporting HRC tepidly, with ambivalent caveats and apologetic smiles. Time to volunteer, make phone calls, send emails, donate money, argue, rally, march, shout, vote.”

She concludes, “I’m voting for Hillary not because she’s a woman—but because I am.”

I get it. I understand the desire to believe that supporting Clinton is the right thing for any woman to do. But if my mother were still here, I’d have to ask her if she could really believe it was true.

Yesterday my friend Xandra, a feminist of the generation after Hillary Rodham’s, born in the ‘60s, told me, “I’m not sure Hillary Clinton is the feminist hero I’ve had in mind. For one thing, her life and her career are so completely intertwined with her husband’s. From her election to the Senate until the unspoken message of her campaign has been, ‘Let’s elect the two Clintons again.’” There’s no question that Hillary Clinton is extraordinarily tough, smart and capable, and her politics are mostly true to classic feminism. But she does trade on claims of experience that more accurately belong to her husband. Polls show that much of her support, especially among blue-collar males, is based on the expectation that we’re getting Bill back. She hasn’t been a very active or outspoken Senator in her own right. And why does her husband, when ostensibly campaigning for her, keep referring to “us” and “our agenda”?

And she’s made such painful compromises with male power. I can still visualize her on that talk show in early 1992, as her husband was working damage control on his Gennifer Flowers mess, talking about how strong their marriage was. I think how profound her humiliation must have been. And then she had to go through it again over Paula Jones, and then again ten-fold over Monica Lewinsky. Of course, her endurance of public humiliation by her husband is probably more than politics; she probably really loves him. But still. The feminist revolution of the ‘60s was supposed to do far more than merely knock down the barriers that kept women out of public power. The wife who would suffer any indignity silently in order to advance her man’s career was supposed to be one of its casualties too. And yet Hillary drags that ancient, prefeminist response to the philandering of powerful men into the 21st Century.

She’s also trying to play her relationship with that male power in a way that’s becoming embarrassing. She’s on record in many sources, including her own autobiography, as supporting NAFTA. But now that NAFTA has become a bone of contention among the blue-collar workers she’s courting, she’s trying to dissociate herself from it, implicitly saying, “That was Bill, not me.” She seeks equal credit for whatever is still popular about her husband’s administration (her “experience”) while making him exclusively responsible for what isn’t. Every politician dances a similar dance with his or her political history, of course, but in Hillary Clinton’s case this is compounded by a quality of ducking behind the male screen, minimizing her own public self. This too feminism was supposed to undo.

And then there’s the war. She supported that war, including troop increases after the fall of Saddam Hussein, more energetically than she now wants to admit. And when she speaks of ending it, she adds that first we must find a way to do so with “honor, dignity and respect,” words that echo eerily Richard Nixon’s “peace with honor,” which turned out to mean four more years of war. Are this the agenda of a candidate who embodies the values of feminism, or is it another uneasy compromise with an old male power?

I would tell my mom what my friend Xandra said. And what she said next: “At first I was sure I was going to support Clinton and I saw Obama mainly as a male threat to her. But after a while I stopped seeing the candidates as people of a certain gender or race. I started seeing them as people. And the more I learned about Obama, the more I felt he was the one representing me.” We will have our female president. Now that Clinton has shown that gender doesn’t stop a candidate from being a contender, more women will emerge. There will be one who fulfills the feminist dream in a way that Hillary Clinton cannot, one who has beaten her own path and not made so many deals with the devil along the way.

I don’t think the Democrats offer absentee ballots where my mother has gone. (They used to in Cook County, Illinois, but they’ve stopped the practice.) If they did, I’d say, “Mom. It’s okay. This is Obama's time."

Thanks...

2008-02-09T16:43:00.001-08:00

...to those, especially MC, who nagged me into finally creating a blog. For the time being it will mainly concern the election, but we'll see where it evolves from there.