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30 juli 2004
Mama T
I have a long history of paying attention to Teresa Heinz Kerry. I went to college in Pittsburgh, PA, where the Heinz's are from. The Heinz "pickle plant" was near a bridge I crossed to work every day on the Norsside, at Allegheny General Hospital. There absolutely is no other real ketchup than Heinz, in my opinion.
That said, I cannot say I know very many facts about her, no personal history or list of specific charities in which she was active. But I do have that sense of her that everyone who's known (or, rather, known about) Teresa Heinz for a long time has: an ineffable strength and stalwartness. She was always just there, a force of nature or a Happy Given.
These days, the Republicans don't seem to know what to do with her. This is similar to 12 years ago when they didn't quite know what to do with Hillary Rodham Clinton, didn't know what to do with a strong woman who spoke her own mind. Back then, they resorted to name-calling and piling-on. Back then, in the hangover following the longest political bender in American history (that would be "the Reagan Years"), shrill voices from the right were permitted to be sexist, frustrated Gordon-Gekko-wannabes exercised their personal rights to free speech in the course of trying to knock her down a peg or two.
I can't imagine them succeeding with Teresa Heinz. She's a good person, she's decent. And other than having been married to politicians, she remains separate from politics.
More than that, according to the woman herself, we queerfolk have a mom in the Whitehouse! We can refer to her, if we like, as "Mama T". I'm thrilled; I'm honored. And in the context of that statement, I'll try to be as good as son to her as my own wonderful mom says I am to her.
I have to say it again: we'll have a mom in the Whitehouse! And folks, that's more than even Mary Cheney can say today.
Posted by jeff at 11:49 am | Comments (0) | TrackBack
28 juli 2004
Other
I have a thing for answering questionnaires. Maybe because it's one of the only situations left where one has the chance to answer in direct and unnuanced ways; maybe because there's not going to be a tumid Republican at the other end screeching "what did you mean by 'None of the Above!' Tell me now, don't hide behind words!"; or maybe I just like talking about myself (I mean, I'm here after all, right?).
This morning I got a spam from classmates.com. Back in the day (years ago) I signed up and actually paid them for the privilege of potentially getting in touch with lost classmates, most of whom I have not seen nor spoken to since graduating over 22 years ago. I'm no longer considered by Classmates.com to be Golden, but they do still permit me to answer questions about myself, so what the hell.
This time around, though, there were an alarming number of cases where only the "other" choice seemed apt, but even then it was just the least inaccurate and not a good fit. There were quite a few cases where the question was phrased in such a way as to be nearly orthogonal to the savage garden of my brain. Most of the questions were thuddingly passé.
Now, I knew from the start, even years ago (when I was Golden in their eyes) that any questionnaire attached to such a past-minded organization wasn't going to be geared toward anyone who wasn't heterosexual and who didn't believe they knew what the future held for themselves back in 1982 (or whatever year). This time around, however, in answering the new questions, I began to wonder if that's what today's conservative mindset really has in mind for everyone: following the Path.
They want families to picket-fence themselves into a mortgage and produce a fractional-average number of children, knowing in advance everything they want to occur for themselves in the future. Moving away from the path would be failure. Choosing otherwise is failure. Being Wrong About Something is Failure.
Now, I've been wrong a bunch of times; I'm certain—though I may be wrong about this—that I'll be wrong again. Sure, it's a ding to the ego of someone who prides himself on brainpower. Perhaps the ego is so large as to not mind a ding, but I like to think it's that when approaching learning, when approaching knowledge, a certain intellectual humility must be present in order to actually learn something New. I mean, at some point you'd have to have admitted you don't know a thing in order to be able to accept new information, right?
I had lovely and powerful teachers in both highschool and in college who drove this point home. The Zen call it Beginner's Mind. Linda Kauffman, who taught the Molecular Genetics and the Biochemistry Labs at CMU, would say, "All data is good; good data is better."
She'd written over and over in my lab notebook that the math and the procedure were good, but that I wasn't "getting" the biology of it. I had no idea what she meant by this; I'd plugged away at the math and the procedure, checking for errors in addition and in form, and getting a decent grade, but with the niggling "not getting the biology" comment every time.
Near the end of the semester, I was writing up a lab where we were generating digest maps from liquid chromatography data and what I was seeing sort of leapt past the math we'd done in calculating the dimensions of a high-enough-resolution column, leapt past the data-fitting, and saw what we were trying to do, saw what was going on with the biology of it. The math and the procedure shook itself out into an organized tableau behind the biology of it. I "got" it.
I wrote it up, though, as I'd written up all the other labs: show the math, explain the procedure, describe the significance. Sure enough, Linda saw the difference. Her comment? "Finally!" I was thrilled.
There were two big lessons I learned in this. The first, there's more meaning to any given thing than the laundry list of refutable facts attached to a thing. Secondly, that being wrong isn't the end of the world, it's the beginning of a brand new one.
Linda's Labs (as we called them) happened for me 18 years ago, and I can still see her handwriting in my mind. I can still smell the bleach and the phenol of the lab. And I still try to get the big picture of a thing, because of or in spite of the so-called refutable facts presented in "black and white".
So when I was chugging through the questions on that silly questionnaire, mostly checking "other", I realized that I don't wish to make demands that the world bow to my ideologies, my worldview. That would be boring and I hate being bored. It would be nice, however, if people would look less at the list of literal facts attached to a bigger picture and spend more time looking at the artistry and beauty contained in that bigger picture.
Once you gain the knack of that kind of appreciation, the facts find their own way.
Posted by jeff at 01:32 pm | Comments (0) | TrackBack
26 juli 2004
The Evidence of Things Not Seen
In quieter times, in more balanced times, speakers have had at their disposal allegory, anecdote, whim, flourish, illumination, metaphor, abstraction. The speaker could be expansive, tangential, even explosive, going out on that limb of orotundity knowing that decorum, even politesse would allow for a soft landing back in the literal world. A story told, a point made, a bit of context cut out and illuminated for the purposes of instruction, even persuasion.
Decorum and politesse were, in times past, considered so important as to be codified. They provided rhetoric with a pause to take a deep breath so that ideas could be completed, digested later in their entirety, to be weighed on merits rather than ownership. A time when argument's purpose was to change the nature of truth itself.
The speaker had all these things at his disposal, but the most important thing she would have going for her: listeners.
There is an art to listening; listening requires effort. The audience must assume some responsibility for interpretation. The audience should have the knack of recognizing fact from abstraction, should keep near enough to the beginner's mind to avoid conclusions that come too quickly.
There is responsibility on the speaker's part as well: to speak without knowingly imparting falsehood and to know enough about the subject matter to minimize the unknowing.
In short, both the speaker and the audience must have at least short-leap faith that there's a greater good to be had by participating in the whole process with copious good will. And here, I'm taking a page from the King James Bible, Hebrews 11:1, in defining faith: "The substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen."
There seems to have been a deadly frustration built up in the 1990s by the Right in this country, trapped as it was between the over-companionable past of the Ronald Reagan "I got mine, you get yours" dogma and the then-present of a Clintonian America which had the Democrats changing what the Republicans had always wanted them to change: their fiscal behavior. The Demos spent less than the Reaganites; the Demos built an economy that had wings.
Instead of applauding the Democrats for having learned from them, the Republicans stomped their feet and cried thief, demanding that the Democrats stop co-opting their ideology.
The frustration built such that the legions of the uneducated, the unprepared, the un-understanding took it upon themselves to target every little bit, every little word, every little—dare I say it—nuance, set it apart out of its original context, subject it to the harsh interrogation illumination of a single bulb, and broadcast to the world that it had found proof of Hell Incarnate.
Clinton goes down for having been gone down on (I know, none of it makes sense to me, either), the result of a Cleansing Hunt by the Right. I blame Clinton, too, not for having had a hummer or twelve, not even for lying about it. I can understand why he answered the way he answered: he knew that the truth would be too much to take for the American public, because they wouldn't just hear it once in his testimony, they'd hear it over and over and over again, taken out of context by the so-called Liberal Media, taken out of context and twisted into something of Doomsday magnitude by the likes of Fox News and the legions of not-intellectually-up-to-it conservatives out there thinking with their stomachs.
No, Clinton had the chance to play the Trickster here. He is certainly charming enough to have stepped up instead of stepping around, smart enough to have figured out a way to be a flawed and human man and still be Presidential, clever enough to have pulled the collective stick out of America's ass and gotten us all to have moved on.
But then again, would anyone have been good enough? With millions of armchair deconstructionists sadly lacking any literary abilities beyond literalism, I doubt that even Clinton could have done what I just attempted to give him credit for.
The art of argument is lost because the field of play has been overrun by those who should have stayed in the stands. Death by a million bombasts whose main tack is to bog you down in the minutae of single words while they counter with broadly vague statements about Good, Bad, Nature and Design.
Thing is, I'm certain that this isn't the first time in the history of the world that Rhetoric has suffered at the hands of rhetoric, that Argument has devolved into arguing. The big question here is, how in the world did the world get back to statesmanship from brinkmanship last time around?
I have no idea; I don't (yet) know enough about world history to take a guess. But then again, "knowing enough" means remembering you can never know enough.
Posted by jeff at 10:31 am | Comments (0) | TrackBack
25 juli 2004
Coffee & Sandwiches
Today I walked out of the bathroom and heard another person milling about. The sounds came from the kitchen, as did the smells of soup and other cooking. I have these moments where I forget that I do not live alone anymore; with no disrespect towards Sam (well, at least not the bad kind), it still hasn't sunk in organically that Sam is here and with me. In this house in which I've lived for so long.
I am used to the water being used by only me: the water pressure out of the shower head shouldn't change while I'm under it. Sounds coming from the kitchen should only be mechanical: popping and chugging of brewing coffee, the rhythmic backbeat of the dishwasher, the blowing of the microwave fan. To hear pots and pans being moved about, the water being run and then shut off, the fridge door opening and closing. These are unexpected.
Unexpected, but only for a split second. Then comes the happy realization that he's here (and as of today's mail delivery, it's documented that he's officially free of the un-American strictures of the U.S. military).
Today he made us sandwiches and soup. And I drank coffee while I did some work at home today.
He's a good boy. I'm a lucky man. He's a lucky man. I'm a good guy.
Posted by jeff at 12:52 am | Comments (0) | TrackBack