out the backroom window

oil spill demagoguery

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

It now appears that Judge Martin Feldman, who issued a temporary injunction against the administration’s moratorium on deep water drilling, has perhaps more than one conflict of interest. Other judges who, like Feldman, have money in oil and gas, recused themselves from lawsuits related to the Gulf Coast oil spill.

Republicans are engaging in follow-up demagoguery, or perhaps it isn’t follow-up. Judge Feldman’s arguments in this case could have been scripted by the oil and gas industry or by Louisiana Republicans, with press releases like this one flooding the Internet for weeks now.

I’m sure many of my persuasion will react with distress at the administration’s apparent lack of anger, especially in the face of demagoguery that blames the administration for the oil spill, itself. But I suspect pragmatism is better policy in the long run.

Filed in events, politics | Tagged Judge Feldman, Obama, oil and gas | Comments (0)

drill baby drill!

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

4:00 pm: I’ve just learned that a New Orleans judge has granted an injunction lifting the administration’s moratorium on deep water drilling. If the matter goes to the supreme court, and the supreme court agrees to hear it, will that signal a constitutional crisis?

8:00 pm: Now the administration has served notice that it will issue a second order and is appealing the ruling in regard to the first.

Read about it here and here.

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who cannot emote?

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Representative Joe Barton has now apologized for his apology, but his original charge of a shakedown of innocent BP management by a bullying Obama administration still stands as a marker of the hypocrisy of present-day conservatism. I’ve never bought the right’s claim to support limited government. Big government is fine with the right as long as it fights wars, restricts civil liberties, and skews the tax system to benefit entrenched privilege.

Actions, as my grandmother was fond of saying, speak louder than words. From health care legislation to recent supreme court decisions, right wing politicians in both parties have forced continuation of the dysfunctional marriage between the state and established wealth that has characterized US public policy throughout our history. This marriage, exemplified now for us in a series of public disasters wrought by corporate malfeasance, has currently produced greater inequality in this country than obtains anywhere in Europe; and it is this marriage, together with the various political and social inequalities it supports and maintains, that present-day conservatism seeks to preserve against the advance of cultural change exemplified by the election of Barack Obama.

In 2004 the American Political Science Association (APSA) issued a report entitled American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality that concluded in part:

Our country’s ideals of equal citizenship and responsive government may be under growing threat in an era of persistent and rising inequalities. Disparities of income, wealth, and access to opportunity are growing more sharply in the United States than in many other nations, and gaps between races and ethnic groups persist. Progress toward realizing American ideals of democracy may have stalled, and in some arenas reversed.

In this week’s issue of The Nation, a poignant letter to the editor underlines the point. Alice Skirtz, a casework supervisor at the Family Shelter Partnership in Cincinnati points to the growth of populations for whom “homeless shelters are lifesaving.”

If things proceed as they did in the 1980s, when the masses of Ronald Reagan’s “new poor” exploded, we can next expect the “basement dwellers,” followed by people from suburbia with foreclosures of their own. They will compete for precious shelter beds with the post-PRWORA [Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996] families stranded for lack of affordable housing.

The Moynihan Report, that influenced PRWORA, “the end of welfare as we know it” during the Clinton era, is now widely regarded as racist, its consequent greater isolation and enslavement of the poor yet another accomplishment of the US marriage between wealth and the state. But right-wing supporters of the document continue to condemn its feminist critics. Here’s the final paragraph of a recent diatribe by Rich Lowry in the National Review:

“There is one unmistakable lesson in American history,” Moynihan wrote, “a community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.” It’s a statement just as true and nearly as unwelcome as it was four decades ago.

Voices on the left sometimes reflect a failure to understand the tensions and dilemmas of present-day political animus. Today, Richard Cohen added some words to the growing chorus of demands that President Obama get mad at something. Cohen will give the president his choice among several objects of anger, including China and Russia—Cohen is an old cold warrior and Israel hawk—but he mostly thinks the president’s putative coolness prevents the rest of us from knowing “who he is.” As far as I”m aware, this particular critique of the president was first offered by Shelby Steele back before the 2008 election. Steele’s little book about then candidate Obama was entitled in part, A Bound Man . . . . Though I didn’t accept its conclusion, I thought its title suggestive. It reminded me of a short story by Ilse Aichinger in which the protagonist learns to function within constraint and finds great freedom in his condition. I said of candidate Obama then, that I thought his individuality consisted “in a complex and dynamic adaptation to the constraints imposed by a particular situatedness.” As my friend Tim Burke put it in a paragraph I quoted:

This is what politics is, what politics has to be. This is what transformation needs. Otherwise, the best you can hope for are momentary, transient achievements that are destined to be reversed almost as soon as they are accomplished. There isn’t enough power in the greatest political mobilization imaginable to abolish significant groups of people who experience history and society differently than you and people like you experience it.

And even if there were that much power, as from time to time in modern history there has been, I wouldn’t want it to be exercised. Cohen gratuitously and condescendingly gives the president a pedigree right out of the Moynihan Report and suggests that both the president’s situatedness and his intellect are weaknesses. I profoundly disagree with this claim.

Actions speak louder than words. Richard Cohen and the perhaps liberal savoyards around him in the chorus implore the president to lose his cool and smite the wicked whilst conservatives sound another theme accusing him of shaking down BP. That the conservative accusation didn’t play very well tells me more than the accusation did. While others see a president who needs to “emote,” as Cohen puts it, I see a president battling entrenched privilege with a cool pragmatism that seeks to coopt its concerns and transform them.

Filed in culture, politics | Tagged Joe Barton, Obama | Comments (0)

And I said that was good

Monday, June 14, 2010

This needs poetry, but prose is all I have to give it, at least today. An old friend and colleague at St. Barnabas Church in Denton, Texas, has died—Bob Lockwood. The obituaries will tell you he was Robert Minturn Lockwood, III, M. D., whose profession as a radiologist hardly defined him. They will tell you of his devotion to Ann’s Haven Hospice in Denton, a pioneering effort in the hospice movement and one of the large works of his life. I didn’t know Bob at the time Ann’s Haven began and can’t speak of that, but his friends and acquaintances who are quoted in the newspapers speak eloquently of his service to the community and how it grew out of his grief over the death of his beloved first wife.

Bob was almost a renaissance man when I knew him, as close to that ideal as any son of the twentieth century could come: physician, scholar, poet, playwright, churchman, birder, naturalist, gentleman farmer—a longer list could be made. He was also an idealist with an almost Emersonian edge of Yankee shrewdness (though he wasn’t literally a Yankee) in spite of all the years he spent in Texas. He was a brilliant man who chose to find his destiny in the community of scholars assembled around two universities in the little town of Denton, Texas, a long way from Harvard and Penn Med. Circumstance was part of the reason why, but also a certain venturesomeness, I thought, coupled with a tendency to discount his accomplishments. Bob sometimes spoke of his career at Harvard as though he had been a failure and treated his medical credential as slight achievement. He was not a proud man, at least not when I knew him. When he retired he sold his radiology practice and went to work for the people who bought him out. But he also translated Brecht’s Theepenny Opera once, because he thought the popular adaptation (Blitzstein’s, I guess) was too tame. Bob’s father had been a professor of Latin and the Librarian of Haverford College, also the college’s informal historian and a devoted teacher. Students dedicated their yearbook to him in 1924. Maybe some of Bob’s interests, as well as the shaping of his character, began at home.

For the better part of ten years I knew Bob at St. Barnabas—many knew him better than I. But we served together for a year in a discernment process that brought us close, and we shared a heart-wrenching experience of the death of a beloved priest and friend that surprised us like a thief in the night. When I learned of Bob’s own death, I first turned to a poem he wrote in 1993 as a memorial to Charles Williams, the rector of our church at that time. Charles had been diagnosed with lung cancer just shy of his fiftieth birthday and was taken from us swiftly, in less than six months. Bob’s poem is a powerful reflection, not just upon Charles’s time with us and his death, but also upon how Charles talked with us about his death as he was dying—in a series of wonderful pastoral letters. Just before he died, Charles asked me to put together a small book of his sermons; I asked Bob if I could include his poem in the volume. I’ll not quote it entirely, just the conclusion.

And then you died—and were no longer there
       I saw your chest x-ray myself.
       It said DEATH—soon, no matter what.

So then, we cared for you (with a little help from the hospice).
And as you died
       you learned
       you grew
       you bloomed.
It was beautiful, it was terrible.
We wept.

Now please live on in us your friends
We are now more connected, more a Church, more the Body
Because you cared about us.

In the willow-meads of Tasarinan—may we meet again in the spring.

In his second life, the only life in which I knew him, Bob devoted himself to land and to practicing what we are now coming to call sustainability, raising chickens and bees, the farm where he lived with his second family a favorite resort of at least a couple of generations of children at St. Barnabas—a chosen place, a Vergilian place if you will—it’s useful at my age to learn what one thinks. I didn’t know Bob’s family, never went to his farm. He always came to church alone, as I do mostly now, myself, church being something my beloved and I do not share. I knew about Bob’s second life, the private part of it, only from conversations with him; but I believe the farm had been his renewal, or perhaps his last reinvention, of himself.

Now as I reread Bob’s poem I particularly think about its last line, an allusion to a place invented by Professor Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings. Treebeard sings of it in a wonderful song that recalls one of the Genesis creation stories:

In the willow-meads of Tasarinan I walked in the Spring.
Ah! the sight and the smell of the Spring in Nan-tasarion!
And I said that was good.

Tasarinan, in the legendarium of Tolkien’s Elves, is part of the lost flat world, now “under the waves,” that preceded middle earth in the same way that the legendary world of gods and heroes preceded classical antiquity, where the stories of that former world were regarded as history. As the members of the ring fellowship bid farewell to Treebeard midway in their journey, Treebeard speaks these poignant words: “I too must bid you now farewell. I do not think that we shall meet again. For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I—I smell it in the air.” To which Elrond replies, “Maybe not in Middle-earth, Fangorn. But when the lands that lie under the wave are lifted up again, then in the willow meads of Tasarinan we may meet in the Spring.”

Did Charles and Bob read Tolkien together? I don’t know—I’m not sure I even want to know. But I think I understand that in wishing his dear friend and priest a pagan immortality, Bob meant to wish Charles a place in a time out of time wherein the difference between Pagan and Christian has been erased—and the world in which humans dwell with fire and water, beasts and great trees, no longer innocent, has found a new beginning.

—I can think of no better wish for Bob himself, or for us all.

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memorials, days after

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

On Memorial Day my morning ritual was accompanied by occasional bursts of patriotic music from the bedroom next door where my beloved was watching the morning news. She likes to watch TV in bed as she reads the morning paper. I drink coffee in the adjoining study in front of my computer and read the news on line, but at one point I went into the bedroom to watch as Vice President Biden presided over the familiar wreath-laying at Arlington Cemetery. I thought how, as a summer exercise, Americans of many political persuasions still allow one another the benefit of the doubt on the two three-day weekends that frame the month of June.

And about allowing one another the benefit of the doubt, I hoped it remains true–that in our increasingly tribal society we have ways of practicing our citizenship that transcend our differences. I used to think the 1976 bicentennial celebration allowed us to do that in the aftermath of the terrible divisions over the war in Viet Nam. Now I’m not so sure—about that and a good many other things. In the past couple of days I have attended two events celebrating Memorial Day. Both events demanded my participation in the rhetoric of American exceptionalism. Both events shoved Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” in my face.

In the evening on Memorial Day, we watched Milk at my house. As that fine film reminds, the historical context of Harvey Milk’s death also includes the depredations of Anita Bryant. Bryant is still politically active, more’s the pity; though she seems to have fallen on bad times. A former website advertising her Oklahoma ministry is empty, and her MySpace page seems a rearguard action. It’s easy to see that Harvey Milk’s America and Anita Bryant’s are incommensurable. To my mind that same dissonance pretty much limns the difference between the Obama movement’s America and the Tea Party America of today.

And speaking of rearguard actions, Sunday after church some of us gathered around a memorial to parishioners who had served in World War II. One of our fellow parishioners had found it in the church archives. A simple glass picture frame containing a handsome, hand-lettered sheet of paper listing sixty-nine names, most marked with stickers—mostly gold, though some are are stars and some not (we couldn’t figure out the color code). This memorial no longer hangs in my church, though I think it should, even though there is now no one among us who remembers any of the people listed. I note, too, that not all those listed are men. We will likely find a place to hang it again, and the antiquarians among us can perhaps discover who the people were. Maybe somebody will also discover why honour is given the British spelling. But why was this memorial plaque removed from whatever place it had in the church and placed in the archives? What was the thinking that led to its removal? As time obliterates memory, do memorials become curios?

When I first started this blog, I wrote something about my father, who died in World War II. I’ve always liked this picture of him, taken at Ft. Bliss during training exercises before he and his comrades in the New Mexico Militia were sent to the Philippines as the United States 200th Coast Artillery in August 1941. He was a physician and a volunteer—at the time his unit was federalized physicians couldn’t be drafted—though he didn’t want to go overseas and hoped for a long time that the unit would be reprieved. I’ve always thought service in the National Guard was part of a payback for help with medical school—my father graduated from medical school in 1932—though I’ve never confirmed my suspicion. We saw him off with his unit on the train at El Paso a couple of days after my birthday that summer of 1941. He told me to take care of my mother. Here’s a bit more of what I wrote back then, paraphrased a little.

“More recently, I’ve read many of his letters to my mother. They describe his westward journey, first by train and then by ship, to the east, his arrival, much experience in the first heady weeks of his encounter with the MacArthur establishment. He didn’t like MacArthur, but I think he loved the old brown shoe army and relished being even a very lowly Captain, as he puts it in one letter, in that foreign outpost which must have had a certain old fashioned clubbiness and esprit. Then, of course, things turned sour. The letters are fewer from mid October on, and stop altogether in late November. One letter arrived after Pearl Harbor, written from a tent on Bataan in February, 1942. He died in 1944, somewhere in the South Pacific on an unmarked prisoner ship that was torpedoed by the U. S. Navy. The story of the sinking made the papers back home, with tales of escaping prisoners being beaten to death by Japanese marines. Of course that wasn’t anywhere near the whole horror of it.

“I learned more about the Japanese death ships when I read Dorothy Cave’s Beyond Courage a few years back. Apparently the Japanese used prisoner ships, marked with a red cross, to ship munitions, but there seems also to have been an intention to exterminate prisoners by transporting them on unmarked ships. Cave’s book also confirmed my impression from family and other history that my father and his comrades had been abandoned by their government when it was decided that the war in Europe took precedence over the far east. I learned too that my mother had been a member of an advocacy group during the war, that attempted to pressure congress and the president to rescue the folk in the Philippines. I found a collection of newsletters among her effects after her death. I also found a check for $100 that my father wrote to someone with a Filipino name. It was presented to my mother for payment after the war. The letter that accompanied it explained that my father had written it for black market medical supplies that he managed to smuggle into the prison at Camp O’Donnell.

“After his death was confirmed, they promoted him to Major and gave him some medals. One was a Bronze Star, the highest military decoration awarded to noncombatants. He also received a Presidential Citation, signed by Franklin Roosevelt, which my mother always cherished. I didn’t know much of this as a child. I thought my father’s Purple Heart more important than the Bronze Star, bigger and more imposing. And for a long time I refused to believe he was dead. I fantasized that he would come around the corner of my school one day and grab me up in his arms.” There’s an error in the Bronze Star citation. It dates my father’s internment from April 1941 and should read April 1942.

My father’s regiment was sent to the Philippines because its personnel spoke Spanish. It was a multicultural unit that included native Americans as well as hispanics and anglos like my father. It had been a horse cavalry unit only recently. I remember a closet full of my father’s cavalry uniforms and riding boots. It’s a nice irony that less than fifty years after the close of the Indian and range wars, and in a place where both had been pretty fierce, there was a military regiment that included soldiers whose recent ancestors had likely fought each other over territorial and other claims, some of them genocidal, now a unit engaged in a common struggle far from home and united in part by a common language that wasn’t English.

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and look away . . .

Saturday, May 22, 2010

I’ve just recently learned that my old friend, Jack Le Sueur, retired from the North Carolina Arts Council last December after thirty-five years’ service. Thinking about Jack brings back a flood of memories of a life I no longer have—of friends and places, sights and sounds: shaking hands with Jimmy Carter in the town park in Southern Pines, a copy of T. S. Eliot’s poems I bought in the Intimate Bookshop on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill when there was still such a place, the smell of woodsmoke at the Malcolm Blue Farm in Aberdeen, and the fireplace poker Jerry Darnell made me at his forge there one day. So many details, flakes of being floating on a river that never stops running.

Many of those memories include Jack. We met in 1974, some time in the fall, I think—though it’s been too many years to be sure. I got a call one day from a young man who had just taken a job with the arts council in Raleigh, and he wanted to come and see me. In a few days he showed up at the Campbell House in Southern Pines where I was housed as Executive Director of The Sandhills Arts Council (now the Arts Council of Moore County). We drove around the county all day together, getting to know one another and looking the place over. I had been on the job only about a year at that time. But I knew enough to take Jack to Jugtown, then operating as a nonprofit under the tutelage of the late Nancy Sweezy. I think I remember that we watched as interns unloaded one of the pottery’s big groundhog kilns.

And I’m sure I must have remembered to introduce Jack to board members and any community leaders I could find. I must have taken him to see Sam Ragan in his office at The Pilot, where he hid out behind a three-foot-tall pile of manuscripts that took up the front of his desk and banged away on the old Underwood he used to do his writing. But my memory of that day with Jack is mostly a recollection of country roads—Moore County is a beautiful place—and of pleasant conversation with a soft-spoken young man who was ten years younger than I but already an ex navy officer and a graduate of Duke, where I had studied for a PhD I never managed to get.

In his years at the North Carolina Arts Council Jack had many jobs. In those early days his job title was Community Coordinator. Jack, and later Fred Schultz, traveled the state as liaisons with local arts groups of all sorts. It was a natural step for Jack to become the administrator of the Arts Council’s signature Grassroots Arts Program, a program that’s been much copied around the country and a source of public funds for arts efforts large and small that continues to this day. But to me Jack was the North Carolina Arts Council, its face and its true soul, the embodiment of bureaucracy with a heart, something I guess I still believe is possible. Jack had a wonderful way of striking a balance between being my friend and advocate, which he mostly was, and sometimes being my boss. There was no pretense in him, no self-importance. He was always just Jack.

Hardly a month went by that we didn’t talk on the phone, sometimes just because he’d call to check in and see how I was. We’d meet at least four or five times a year at meetings and workshops, my favorite of which was a meeting of us professionals at the Quail Roost Conference Center, usually around Christmas time every year. We’d sit around a big seminar table and hear reports and instruction from peers during the day, and we’d party in the evenings. I remember one good poker game when I think I won ten dollars. I’m sure there were other communities of culture around the country like the one I was part of in North Carolina in the 1970s, but I was privileged to be part of that one. Thinking of Jack still takes me back to a time before the culture wars ruined so much of life for us, albeit I’ve not seen him these last twelve years. It was like Kristofferson’s great song; we were advocates for everything good we knew.

And so I’m moved to learn of Jack’s retirement and wish him godspeed in whatever future he travels. Jack is a fine musician. We used to spell one another at meetings singing and leading singing. He and his wife, Pattie, began performing together before they got married and have continued to do so over the years. They have a lovely CD that includes a wedding song, “Two Paths.” I hope Jack’s future holds lots of opportunities to perform and that I get to hear him and Pattie again before I go somewhere else. Here they are in a little video medley from a few years back that I found posted on the net. Jack’s “Administrator Blues” reminds me of a meeting in Denver when a couple hundred of us listened to Jack sing one evening and there were lots of lighters in the air at the close. I also especially like the Kate Campbell song that’s last in the video, and Pattie’s take on it.