Walk On

 “If there's ever somethin' bad you don't wanna see/Just keep on walkin' and let it be…” Curtis Mayfield, “Back to Living Again”

I’ve been listening to Curtis Mayfield today. He was a wise man who saw deep and expressed what he saw and felt in his music. I’m reading The Cross and the Lynching Tree by the late James H. Cone, a well-known and regarded black scholar and theologian. I began this book ten days or so before the mass shooting in the Tops Market in Buffalo; Cone’s writing about the Church and White Supremacy was fresh on my mind when I saw the headline. The contradictions of faith, of the relationship between the cross of Jesus and the lynching tree of white supremacy, and how the black church was a place of sanctuary from oppression and brutality. Jesus understood the suffering of the poor and downtrodden (at least until the Christian Right in America transformed him into a greedy capitalist with a nice suit and gleaming dental work). Vigilante violence, mob violence, a preview of which we saw on our screens on January 6, 2021. Blacks were never safe from the arbitrary, capricious anger of the white mob. The church and the Bible gave them faith, and faith gave them hope, and they kept on, and on. 

I’m into the final section of The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture & Society by William Deresiewicz. Wonderful book, a treasure trove of thoughts brilliantly expressed, across a wide range of subjects. I’ve learned much from it. Deresiewicz is insistent that people think, and surprised when they think clearly, because he understands the effort thinking requires. “It takes a long time to have an original idea,” Deresiewicz writes. Deresiewicz wrote a brilliant book about higher education called Excellent Sheep that I recommend. He’s a craftsman with language. We share an admiration for the writer Rebecca Solnit and the musician Zoe Keating. 

I begin reading Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire & Revolution in the Borderlands by Kelly Lytle Hernandez, and by the middle of the introduction I am hooked. I’m frequently amazed at how little I know about American history, and particularly of our long and often tortured relationship with Mexico. The knowledge that I’m not alone in my ignorance doesn’t make me feel better. Hernandez claims that one cannot understand U.S. history without Mexico and Mexicans. Mexico occupies an important place in the story of U.S. territorial expansion and imperialism. In the early 20th century U.S. capital flowed into Mexico, spurring the construction of railroads, mining, and oil extraction. I see a parallel with the history of slavery, white supremacy, and Jim Crow; you cannot understand U.S. history without examining these topics. In our strange day, the forces of the theocratic right allied with the power-mad GOP want to prevent Americans from confronting the past honestly; they want to ban books they find too revealing or challenging. Similarly, they want to control women. It’s dangerous and frightening, and, I fear, only the beginning. The authoritarian tide is rising and I’m not confident it can be restrained; millions of Americans don’t seem to care if what remains of our democracy is lost. 

It took me five or six months to read The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: The Happy Years by the Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia. The book is a hefty 500 pages, filled with references to the literary scene in Argentina in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Piglia wrote about the political situation, Peronism, the military coups that roiled Argentina during that period, literary rivals, women, and his constant state of near poverty. Due to his work as a writer and editor, he came under the scrutiny of the Army and had to flee his apartment with only what he could carry. I gained solace from Piglia’s false starts, stops, and doubts about the value of his writing projects. 

My decision to retire from the school district last year was the right one. I have many thoughts about my career, the work I did, the roles I performed, the good and bad moments, K12 public education in general, and in particular the experience of working in a bureaucracy. I was a cog in an institution, tasked with keeping a routine going, that’s all. My part-time job at Whole Foods Market provides daily satisfaction because at the end of a shift I can clearly see the results of my labor. I like and enjoy my co-workers, the vibe in the store is usually upbeat, and I never take the work home with me; there’s no need. My family members are healthy, we have a little money, no material wants. I spend many hours each week reading, though I never read as much as I want or think I should. I take long walks along the Riviera a few times a week. 

I’ll end this with a quote from The Cross and the Lynching Tree: “Whites today cannot separate themselves from the culture that lynched blacks, unless they confront their history and expose the sin of white supremacy.”

To that I can say, amen. 

Business As Usual

“I was tired of greed in particular and the ostentatious display of wealth that characterizes our times, and the justifications for despoiling the earth and injuring our fellow man.” James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues

I have struggled of late to write anything. It’s not due to a lack of interesting topics or a lessening of outrage at the steady decline of the United States driven by the stupidity, incompetence and venality of the Trump Junta and the GOP. That’s a constant for any reasonably conscious citizen today. Day after day Trump defiles the White House and embarasses our country and pulls us deeper into the morass. But how many times can I say that Trump is only a symptom, not the cause, of a much more pernicious disease? The incessant appetite of so-called free market capitalism for more, for bigger, for gaudier, is the disease.

The recent revelations of a sophisticated college admissions scandal angered, but didn’t surprise me. Of course well-heeled people cheat, lie, buy off pliable officials -- that’s the very essence of our hyper-competitive, dog-eat-dog, cat-eat-mouse system, it happens every day in all manner of circumstances. For many years in America, college was reserved for wealthy elites, liberal and conservative, blue-bloods, professionals, WASPs, for the most part. Harvard and Yale and Princeton became elite because they devised admission standards to keep the unwashed masses, predominantly Jews and Catholics, from queuing at their ivy-covered gates. Other schools followed suit. The Civil Rights movement, Affirmative Action, and feminism knocked down many of the admission barriers, but then, once the Market assumed the mantle of God in America -- and higher education became just another commodity, like deodorant or soap or suppositories, albeit a commodity with major economic implications for a person’s life -- and the cost of higher education rocketed into the stratosphere, money emerged as a significant barrier to a college education. Competition for entry got tougher, the stakes became higher and more unforgiving, the enormous student loan debts enervating.  

The best book I’ve read about the dismal state of American higher education is Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz. He covers it all: students turned into consumers, colleges and universities catering to “customers” rather than students, the emphasis on courses and degrees that lead to profitable careers rather than self-exploration, critical thinking, and engaged citizenship, the neutering of the humanities, the explosive growth in administrative positions, the use of low-paid adjunct faculty and teaching assistants, massive classes. And what happens before college with the test prep industry, admission “counselors”, enrichment programs. It’s a bullshit system that does terrible things to kids and makes parents go crazy with fear and worry. I remember attending “college night” at my daughter’s high school when she was a freshman or sophomore. There were probably 150 parents and guardians in the cafeteria, counselors from the school, representatives from local colleges, UCSB, City College, etc. The fear in the place was suffocating, the absolute neurosis on the part of parents who were deathly afraid, or so it felt to me, that their offspring might fail the great university admissions test and be forever left behind, consigned to the register at Taco Bell or taking inventory at Bed, Bath & Beyond just poisoned the atmosphere. I never attended another college night after that.

The wealthy buy their way out of difficulty and I suppose this isn’t new. In a jam with the law, write a check to the attorney and the charge is lessened or dismissed; your kid can’t handle the SAT or ACT, no problem, you can pay a ringer to take the test, and buy off an admissions official with another check. In Excellent Sheep Deresiewicz writes, “For the elite, there is always another extension: a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab. The fat salaries awarded to underperforming CEO’s are an adult version of the A-minus.”

That’s life in America.