I invite you to join me and share my rage at the reaction of some of our fellow Americans who were viewing, as if it were a spectacle, the protesters marching on Wall Street.  Here is the website to watch:

http://www.nationofchange.org/wall-street-mocks-protesters-drinking-champagne-1317397531#comments

The self-satisfaction of the Wall Street onlookers brought my blood to a full boil, and it was already simmering anyway. In an earlier blog post or two, I lamented the fact that none, not one, of the bank or corporate officials who brought the crisis of 2008 upon us, has been arrested or charged in a court of law.  Millions of Americans, including me, have lost savings, retirement income, homes, investments, and hope for the future because of the unbridled greed and avarice of some Wall Streeters,  and their obvious inability and unwillingness to regulate themselves–as the free market folks would have us believe they are able to do. Balderdash!

Self-regulation by Wall Street and Corporate interests–whether it be on matters of environmental degradation or exploitation of workers or devising  bundled securities and deceptive mortgage practices hawked by outright lying, fraud, deceptive advertising, or covering up heinous debasement of air-water-food sources to increase profit margins–is impossible.  Self-regulation is only a pipe dream, a will-o’-the-wisp, a fantasy  in an environment gorged with and driven by greed.  Those who argue that self-regulation is possible, and that less government in this matter is desirable,  are either naive, or captives of some unrealistic political ideology, or have become partners themselves in the piratical schemes purveyed by the moneyed interests.

In the meanwhile, some of those people who were responsible for our economy’s  gigantic fiscal and human losses get “punished” by their companies with multi-million dollar separation packages. At the height of my earning power as a teacher, it would have taken 25 years of bringing home my gross pay, 25 years!, to accumulate a $1,000,000 total. And I was successful doing what I did.  To get rewarded so handsomely for failure seems to me to be outrageous, if not criminal.

Ironically, I take note of the arrests today of 700 Wall Street protesters for violation of pedestrian restrictions on the Brooklyn Bridge. In the last weeks, I have seen  protesters arrested for all sorts of misdeeds at and around the park where they are encamped in lower Manhattan.  I see others attacked by police with pepper spray and still others manhandled, hit, and pushed and dragged around by officers with billy clubs. There is a Selma-like feel to this whole event, and I’m glad that the mainstream media are finally acting responsibly in their reporting.

I’m getting most of my news these days from  nationofchange.org an avowedly progressive site. I use this source because, quite frankly, I am weary of the game-playing and posturing of both Democrats and Republicans in the Congress–fiddling while Rome burns, rearranging the seats on the decks of the Titanic. This is, in my opinion, a time of major national crisis–economic for sure, but socio-political and governmental as well. I am deeply concerned about the future of the Republic, more so than I have ever been in my 75 years of life.

I was a life-long Democrat, liberal in education, and by instinct. I was an enthusiastic Obama supporter and defended him and his cause and his dream among my myriad liberal Republican friends and relatives who felt free to attack him not only for his politics, but also for his race. In my heart, I still want to believe that he really means :”Yes we can” and also means “YES WE WILL.” However, daily evidence is dimming my fondest hopes. Sad, too, because Obama is a bright, decent human being who elevated the hopes of millions for the first time in many years.

Right now, I have, with few exceptions disavowed most politicians of both parties until someone emerges who demonstrates at least a modicum of brains, common sense, courage, knowledge of the basics of American and world history, some guts, a heart, basic integrity and honesty, the courage to put jerks in their places,  and the ability to listen with empathy to the plight of everyday Americans–and then act on their behalf.

I continue to believe that America is and should be a democratic republic that rewards and cherishes merit, and not a plutocracy that remunerates, with high office and astronomical salaries,  slick “deals,” deceit, screwing the vulnerable, and unbridled graft.

I guess I’ll just have to watch multimillion dollar athletes adorn my TV,  my corn chips (no cake for me),  and boil while watching the Wall Streeters smirk and drink their champagne.

What is the American Dream?: Dueling Dualities in the American Tradition

by Gus Speth

• 

Throughout our history, there have been alternative, competing visions of the “good life” in America. The story of how these competing visions played out in our history is prologue to an important question: What is the American Dream and what is its future?
The issue came up in the early Republic, offspring of the ambiguity in Jefferson’s declaration that we have an unalienable right to “the pursuit of happiness.” Darrin McMahon in his admirable book, Happiness: A History, will be our guide here. McMahon locates the origins of the “right to happiness” in the Enlightenment. “Does not everyone have a right to happiness?’ asked …  the entry on that subject in the French encyclopedia edited by Denis Diderot. Judged by the standards of the preceding millennium and a half, the question was extraordinary: a right to happiness? And yet it was posed rhetorically, in full confidence of the nodding assent of enlightened minds.” It was in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, that Jeremy Bentham would write his famous principle of utility: “It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.”
Thus, when Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration in June of that memorable year, the words “the pursuit of happiness” came naturally to him, and the language sailed through the debates of June and July without dissent. McMahon believes this lack of controversy stemmed in part from the fact that the “pursuit of happiness” phrase brought together ambiguously two very different notions: the idea from John Locke and Jeremy Bentham that happiness was the pursuit of personal pleasure and the older Stoic idea that happiness derived from active devotion to the public good and from civic virtue, which have little to do with personal pleasure.
“The ‘pursuit of happiness,'” McMahon writes, “was launched in different, and potentially conflicting, directions from the start, with private pleasure and public welfare coexisting in the same phrase. For Jefferson, so quintessentially in this respect a man of the Enlightenment, the coexistence was not a problem.” But Jefferson’s formula almost immediately lost its double meaning in practice, McMahon notes, and the right of citizens to pursue their personal interests and joy won out. This victory was confirmed by waves of immigrants to America’s shores, for whom America was truly the land of opportunity. “To pursue happiness in such a land was quite rightly to pursue prosperity, to pursue pleasure, to pursue wealth.”
It is in this jettisoning of the civic virtue concept of happiness in favor of the self-gratification side that McMahon finds the link between the pursuit of happiness and the rise of American capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Happiness, he writes, “continued to entice with attractive force, providing a justification for work and sacrifice, a basis for meaning and hope that only loomed larger on the horizon of Western democracies.” “If economic growth was now a secular religion,” McMahon observes, “the pursuit of happiness remained its central creed, with greater opportunities than ever before to pursue pleasure in comfort and things.” Max Weber saw this transformation first hand. “Material goods,” he observed in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, “have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.”
The story of the pursuit of happiness in America is thus a story of its close alliance with capitalism and consumerism. But in recent years, many researchers have begun to see this relationship as one of misplaced allegiance. Has the pursuit of happiness through growth in material abundance and possessions actually brought Americans happiness? That is a question more for science than for philosophy, and the good news is that social scientists have in fact recently turned abundantly to the subject. A new field, positive psychology, the study of happiness and subjective well-being, has been invented, and there is now even a professional Journal of Happiness Studies.
Imagine, if you will, two very different alternatives for affluent societies. In one, economic growth, prosperity and affluence bring steadily increasing human happiness, well-being and satisfaction. In a second, prosperity and happiness are not correlated, and, indeed, prosperity, beyond a certain point, is associated with the growth of important social pathologies. Which scenario provides a closer fit to reality?
What the social scientists in this new field are telling us is of fundamental importance. Two of the leaders in the field, Ed Diener and Martin Seligman, carried out a review of the now-voluminous literature on well-being in their 2004 article, “Beyond Money: Toward an Economy of Well-Being.” In what follows, I will draw upon this article and other research.
The overall concept that is gaining acceptance among researchers is “subjective well being,” i.e., a person’s own opinion of his or her well being. Subjects in surveys are frequently asked, on a scale of one to 10, how satisfied are you with your life? Most well-being surveys today ask individuals how happy or satisfied they are with their lives in general, how satisfied they are in particular contexts (e.g., work, marriage), or how much they trust others, and so on.
A good place to begin is with the studies that compare levels of happiness and life satisfaction among nations at different stages of economic development. They find that the citizens of wealthier countries do report higher levels of life satisfaction, although the correlation is rather poor and is even poorer when factors such as quality of government are statistically controlled. Moreover, this positive relationship between national well-being and national per capita income virtually disappears when one looks only at countries with GDP per capita over $10,000 per year. In short, once a country achieves a moderate level of income, further growth does not significantly improve perceived well-being.
Diener and Seligman report that peoples with the highest well-being are not those in the richest countries but those who live where political institutions are effective and human rights protected, where corruption is low, and mutual trust high.
Even more challenging to the idea that well-being increases with higher incomes is extensive time series data showing that throughout almost the entire post-World War II period, as incomes skyrocketed in the United States and other advanced economies, reported life satisfaction and happiness levels stagnated or even declined slightly.
But that is not all. Diener and Seligman note that, “Even more disparity [between income and well-being] shows up when ill-being measures are considered. For instance, depression rates have increased 10-fold over the same 50-year period, and rates of anxiety are also rising … [T]he average American child in the 1980s reported greater anxiety than the average child receiving psychiatric treatment in the 1950s. There is [also] a decreasing level of social connectedness in society, as evidenced by declining levels of trust in other people and in governmental institutions.” Numerous studies also stress that nothing is more devastating to well-being than losing one’s job and unemployment.
Instead of income, Diener and Seligman stress the importance of personal relationships to happiness: “The quality of people’s social relationships is crucial to their well-being. People need supportive, positive relationships and social belonging to sustain well-being … [T]he need to belong, to have close and long-term social relationships, is a fundamental human need … People need social bonds in committed relationships, not simply interactions with strangers, to experience well-being.”
In short, what the social scientists are telling us is that as of today, in Ed Diener’s words, “materialism is toxic for happiness.” Whether the pursuit of happiness through evermore possessions succeeded earlier in our history, it no longer does.
Norton Garfinkle traces another dueling duality in the American tradition, one reflected in the title of his helpful book, The American Dream vs. the Gospel of Wealth. Although the phrase “the American Dream” entered the language thanks to James Truslow Adams and his 1931 book, The Epic of America, Garfinkle argues that the force of the concept, if not the phrase, derives from President Lincoln.  “More than any other president,” Garfinkle believes, “Lincoln is the father of the American Dream that all Americans should have the opportunity through hard work to build a comfortable middle class life. For Lincoln, liberty meant above all the right of individuals to the fruits of their own labor, seen as a path to prosperity. ‘To [secure] to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible,’ he wrote, ‘is a most worthy object of any good government.'”
“The universal promise of opportunity,” Garfinkle writes, “was for Lincoln the philosophical core of America: it was the essence of the American system. ‘Without the Constitution and the Union,’ he wrote, ‘we could not have attained … our great prosperity.’ But the Constitution and the Union were not the ‘primary cause’ of America, Lincoln believed. ‘There is something,’ he continued, ‘back of these, entwining itself more closely about the human heart … This is the just and generous and prosperous system which opens the way to all, gives hope to all, and consequent energy and progress and improvement of condition to all.’ This was, for Lincoln, the American Dream, the raison d’être of America, and the unique contribution of America to world history.”
Although Garfinkle does not bring it out, I believe James Truslow Adams’ vision of the American Dream is at least as compelling as that of Lincoln. Adams used the phrase, “the American dream,” to refer, not to getting rich or even especially to a secure, middle class lifestyle, though that was part of it, but primarily to something finer and more important: “It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” That American Dream is well worth carrying with us into the future.
The competing vision, the Gospel of Wealth, found its origins in the Gilded Age. In his 1889 book, The Gospel of Wealth, Andrew Carnegie espoused a widely held philosophy that drew on Social Darwinism and, though less crudely expressed, has many adherents today. To Carnegie, the depressed conditions of late 19th century American workers and the limited opportunities they faced were prices to be paid for the abundance economic progress made possible. Carnegie was brutally honest in his views: “The price which society pays for the law of competition, like the price it pays for cheap comforts and luxuries, is also great; but the advantages of this law are also greater still than its cost — for it is to this law that we owe our wonderful material development, which brings improved conditions in its train. But, whether the law be benign or not, … it is here, we cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have been found; and while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment; the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few; and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential to the future progress of the race. Having accepted these, it follows that there must be great scope for the exercise of special ability in the merchant and in the manufacturer who has to conduct affairs upon a great scale. That this talent for organization and management is rare among men is proved by the fact that it invariably secures enormous rewards for its possessor.”
Garfinkle recounts the many ways Carnegie’s Gospel stood Lincoln’s vision on its head: “Whereas in Lincoln’s America, the underlying principle of economic life was widely shared equality of opportunity, based on the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence, in Carnegie’s America the watchword was inequality and the concentration of wealth and resource in the hands of the few. Whereas in Lincoln’s America, government was to take an active role in clearing the path for ordinary people to get ahead, in Carnegie’s America, the government was to step aside and let the laws of economics run their course. Whereas in Lincoln’s America, the laborer had a right to the fruits of his labor, in Carnegie’s America the fruits went disproportionately to the business owner and investor as the fittest. Whereas in Lincoln’s America, the desire was to help all Americans fulfill the dream of the self-made man, in Carnegie’s America, it was the rare exception, the man of unusual talent that was to be supported.”
Since the Reagan Revolution, of course, the Gospel of Wealth has returned with a vengeance. Income and wealth have been reconcentrated in the hands of the few at levels not seen since 1928, American wages have flatlined for several decades, the once-proud American middle class is fading fast, and government action to improve the prospects of average Americans is widely disparaged. Indeed, government has pursued policies leading to the dramatic decline in both union membership and good American jobs. In a sample of its 20 peer OECD countries, the United States today has the lowest social mobility, the greatest income inequality, and the most poverty.
A third historical duality in envisioning America is that between an American lifestyle that revolves around consumption and one that embraces plain and simple living. In her important book, The Consumers’ Republic, Lizabeth Cohen traces the rise of mass consumption in America to policies adopted after World War II: “Americans after World War II saw their nation as the model for the world of a society committed to mass consumption and what were assumed to be its far-reaching benefits. Mass consumption did not only deliver wonderful things for purchase — the televisions, air conditioners, and computers that have transformed American life over the last half century. It also dictated the most central dimensions of postwar society, including the political economy (the way public policy and the mass consumption economy mutually reinforced each other), as well as the political culture (how political practice and American values, attitudes, and behaviors tied to mass consumption became intertwined).”
However, Cohen also documents that, whatever its blessings, American consumerism has had profound and unintended consequences on broader issues of social justice and democracy. She notes that “the Consumers’ Republic did not unfold quite as policymakers intended … the Consumers’ Republic’s dependence on unregulated private markets wove inequalities deep into the fabric of prosperity, thereby allowing, intentionally or not, the search for profits and the exigencies of the market to prevail over higher goals. Often the outcome dramatically diverged from the stated objective to use mass markets to create a more egalitarian and democratic American society … [T]he deeply entrenched convictions prevailing in the Consumers’ Republic that a dynamic, private, mass consumption marketplace could float all boats and that a growing economy made reslicing the economic pie unnecessary predisposed Americans against more redistributive actions …
“Most ironic perhaps, the confidence that a prospering mass consumption economy could foster democracy would over time contribute to a decline in the most traditional, and one could argue most critical, form of political participation — voting — as more commercialized political salesmanship replaced rank-and-file mobilization through parties.”
The creation of the Consumers’ Republic represented the triumph of one vision of American life and purpose. But there has been a competing vision, what historian David Shi calls the tradition of “plain living and high thinking,” a tradition that began with the Puritans and the Quakers. In his book, The Simple Life, Shi sees in American history a “perpetual tension … between the ideal of enlightened self-restraint and the allure of unfettered prosperity. From colonial days, the mythic image of America as a spiritual commonwealth and a republic of virtue has survived alongside the more tantalizing view of the nation as an engine of economic opportunities, a festival of unfettered individualism, and a cornucopia of consumer delights.”
“The concept [of the simple life] arrived with the first settlers, and it has remained an enduring — and elusive — ideal … Its primary attributes include a hostility toward luxury and a suspicion of riches, a reverence for nature and a preference for rural over urban ways of life and work, a desire for personal self-reliance through frugality and diligence, a nostalgia for the past, a commitment to conscientious rather than conspicuous consumption, a privileging of contemplation and creativity, an aesthetic preference for the plain and functional, and a sense of both religious and ecological responsibility for the just uses of the world’s resources.”
In the end, these three dueling dualities in the American tradition — competing over the meaning of happiness, the path to prosperity, the centrality of consumerism — tell much the same story: the vision of an America where the pursuit of happiness is sought in the growth of civic virtue and in devotion to the public good, where the American dream is steadily realized as the average American achieves his or her human potential and the benefits of economic activity are widely shared, and where the virtues of simple living, self-reliance and reverence for nature predominate, that vision has not prevailed and has instead been overpowered by the rise of commercialism, consumerism, and a particularly ruthless variety of winner-take-all capitalism.
These American traditions may not have prevailed to date, but they are not dead. They await us, and indeed they are today being awakened across this great land. New ways of living and working, sharing and caring are emerging across America. They beckon us with a new American Dream, one rebuilt from the best of the old, drawing on the best of who we were and are and can be.
There is an America beyond despair, and it is fueling these developments. Ask a parent, ask yourself, what America would you like for your grandchildren and their children, and the odds are good that in the reply, the outpouring of hope, a new America unfolds.

James Gustave Speth is an environmental lawyer, advocate, and author, most recently of The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. Speth is a professor of law at the Vermont Law School. From 1999 to 2008, he was dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. From 1993 to 1999, he served as administrator of the UN Development Programme and chair of the UN Development Group. Prior to his service at the UN, he was founder and president of the World Resources Institute; professor of law at Georgetown University; chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality; and senior attorney and cofounder, Natural Resources Defense Council.

 

I happened on this speech by Cornell West quite by accident, but I saw that he was holding forth on a panel at the historically famous Riverside Church in NYC, so  I took the opportunity to watch him in action. I knew that we had both been at Yale at different times, that he had argued with  (then) President Larry Summers of Harvard (I have always despised Summers), resigned from a posh Harvard professorship as a result, and eventually moved to Princeton where he continues to teach. He is a very dynamic man, a preacher, prophet and rabble-rouser, a visionary, and a keenly intelligent observer of the American scene who’s not afraid to call it like he sees it.

This particular discussion was held to commenorate the 40th anniversary of the Attica Prison uprising in 1971 (for a history of that event see http://libcom.org/history/1971-the-attica-prison-uprising).

West likens our situation in America today to that of the prisoners at Attica in 1971–deprived of our civil rights, crushed by the greedy oligarchs who run the country, etc.  He is angry and, I think, justly so.  I find the parallels intriguing, and his passion, logic, and enthusiasm captured my brain and heart.  I found myself excited by his erudition, moved by eloquence and guts, and becoming increasing enraged as I listened to observations which I have believed in and shared (in other places with a different set of credentials and dialect to be sure) for many years.  He puts it better than I ever could have.

What do you think?
http://www.nationofchange.org/cornel-west-attica-all-us-1315850855

** * * * * * * * *

The same day, I came upon this commencement address by Steve Jobs (“How to Live Before You Die” delivered at Stanford 2005) via a recommendation from my daughter. Listening to Jobs brought my blood pressure back to “near-normal.” The speech is brief and demonstrated to me that Jobs has a giant heart accompanying  and informing his humongous intellect. Jobs speaks his truth directly out of his personal  experience, and does so with love, intensity, and a commendable wisdom , unusual today in a world that seems to cater to, and applaud, mediocrity, avarice, cynicism, and BS on all fronts.

I’d be interested in your take on Jobs and what he has to say. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steve_jobs_how_to_live_before_you_die.html

I confess that both of these presentations inspired me to try to ennoble my own life in the remaining time allotted to me and, at the same time,  to be more sensitive to the ways I can best use my personal gifts and American freedoms to enhance and enrich life for  others.

I also commend to your attention a vast reservoir of speeches by famous, talented folks on an incredible array of topics. Check it out.  TED.com

This is the hardest blog that I have tried to write. Why? Because I was raised at a time (40’s-60’s) and in a Southern culture (borderline geographically, but culturally unreconstructed Southern)  in which WASPs  (hereafter “OT” or “our type”) shared  negative and destructive attitudes about those non-white people who lived among us who had skins that were varying shades of black or brown. As members of the “liberal” WASP class, we referred to them publicly as “Nigrahs,” and thought nothing of joining a couple of the good ole boys at a party telling, listening to, and laughing at “Nigger jokes”  (ones that usually began, “Did ya hear the one about the two niggers who…?”)

Now, if asked was I was prejudiced (“racist” wasn’t in use at the time), I would have vehemently denied that I was and would further have explained that I had been taught at home to treat Nigrahs as if they were as good as we were (“we” being OT). I confess to not giving a lot of thought to Nigrahs one way or the other because I rarely was in direct contact with them. Society was strictly segregated black/white in schools, churches, neighborhoods, in movie theaters and ball parks, in restaurants and hotels.  In short, in my normal comings and goings, I never sat or stood next to a Black man or woman, never ate with one,  prayed with one, shopped with one, or, God forbid, dated one.

The one modest exception to this cultural reality of ‘complete separation’ was our family’s version of “The Help.” Over the course of my growing up, I was on a first name basis with Bernice Jones who did “heavy” housework and yard work for mother a few days each week. Then there was Alice Starks who did the washing, ironing, vacuuming, dusting, polishing, food preparing, bed-making, child-rearing, and disciplining around our home when mother was shopping,  attending one of her many church circle meetings, playing bridge with friends, or presiding over one of the various woman’s clubs she belonged to or of which she was an elected official. They were in their place doing what they were supposed to do.

On the periphery of my life were Anne Carter and her husband, “Carter,” who showed up at our house from time to time for special occasions, laden with a bags filled with bottles of heavy cream, cartons of  butter, tubs of shortening, sacks of bread flour, and a collection of special utensils and pots and pans that were used to assemble a glorious, fattening  (caloric, fat-filled, and oh so tasty) meal for some social function in our ample dining room. “Carter” wore a starched white waiter’s jacket to go along with Anne’s crisp white dress, apron,  and frilly nurses cap. He served Anne’s homemade hors liced’oeuvres from sterling trays freshly polished by Alice, and distributed sparking grape juice (in lieu of bourbon) to guests in miniature crystal glasses since my parents religiously avoided any association with the immoral “Demon Alcohol.” They, also, were in their place doing what they were supposed to do.

I did not know or relate to our “Help” as people, however. I knew where Alice lived only because we took Christmas gift checks to her on occasion, but I never knew more about her than that she had a husband who was mostly in jail and a son who was always in some undefined trouble. About Anne and “Carter’s” life, I knew absolutely nothing. Bernice and I, on the other hand, had a number of conversations about my life and his, about cars and fishing, and about the “race problem” in the South, particularly during my early years at Yale Divinity School in the 60’s.

A Brief Intermission


[At that time I was becoming somewhat enlightened about my racism because of the Civil Rights environment at Yale. Many Yale students joined our chaplain, William Sloan Coffin, Jr., in Freedom Rides. There were local sit-ins, discussions, colloquia. At the time, I was trying to decide what my own “Christian” response to  the Southern race issue should be. Should I go South with my teachers and friends and march and  demonstrate? Enrage my parents and their friends? Maybe get hurt physically? Get ostracised from the South forever?  Become one of those dreaded and despised “outside agitators? “Maybe lose my life like Chaney, Goodman, and Scherner?


I confess to being caught an internal conflict between what I newly perceived as a theologically derived moral duty and age-old cultural racial mores that were deeply ingrained in my Southern soul. I was also fearful of displeasing my family, or alienating all my Southern friends and relatives, especially my parents and my country cousins, mountain folk, who would have written me off forever. I faced the fact (not for the first time) that when my physical life and limb might be at risk, I turned chicken. I really was afraid of being hurt or killed even for the best of causes (I would have been a Conscientious Objector if drafted to avoid facing this issue directly). So, no matter the keenness of my Yale enlightenment, I was driven by deeper forces which were both obvious and obscure as I was going through my decision-making].

Return for Final Acts

Other than “The Help,”my association with “Nigrahs” was very limited.  I was a fan of Jackie Robinson whom I admired as a brave man for breaking into White baseball and for his incredible talents as a baseball player, and because he played on the same team as Pee Wee Reese, a Louisville product, who was occasionally a golfing partner of my uncle Emory. Somehow this connection made it OK to admire old Number 42 and the Dodgers, even though he was Black and controversial.

Then there was Cassius Clay, the boxer, another Louisville product. Clay, when I first saw him in person, was in his late teens, just returning by train from the Olympics where he had won a gold medal.  My family and I drove to Louisville’s Union Station  to give him a hero’s welcome home, perhaps out of civic zeal of some sort. I  remember mother’s remark that day as we were exclaiming about what a handsome young man he was, and what an incredible fighter Clay was and what a glowing future there was ahead of him.  “Yes,” she said, “and he obviously has white blood in him.” The inference was not lost on me,  even then: a Black man without white blood couldn’t be a champion, or a scholar, or a physician, or a great athlete, or President.  This was the default attitude I grew up with and that, in unguarded moments, functions automatically and unconsciously to this very day.

I could list many more Black men and women who performed on the edges of my life and consciousness–mostly as celebrities, entertainers and sports figures. However, there was no one, not one Afro-American man or woman who ever became part of my life on a daily basis, not  one I shared intimate feelings with, hopes for the future, worries–stuff that really matters.  This was the reality of my life until recently.

On the wall behind my desk is a photo, one that in itself reveals at least part of what has happened to me as a WASP racist in the last couple of years.  The photo is of three people: my 44 year old, white skinned, red-haired daughter, her new baby, Della, and her husband, Doug, a smiling black-skinned Afro-American man (should be capitalized “MAN”) who has made Kate the happiest I’ve ever seen her, and who helped create Della, named after Nelson Mandela, but spelled to fit this miracle female child–conceived in vitro in their final attempt after years of effort  and dollars and dashed hopes and pregnancy tests, but finally, success, yes a miracle child for sure. Does color of skin make any difference to me now?

It has taken this miracle for me to see, to really “get it” deep down inside, what love and skin color and race are all about. To see Doug and Kate absolutely blown away by the little person they have created, and to be able to share that with them, to see their smiles and joy and wonder has erased much of the detritus left behind as I struggled to think my way out of many of my racist default settings.  The particularity of Doug-Della-Kate has become my new generality, the exception which now defines the rule. So, much to my surprise,  I now see Black people, mixed marriages, mixed race children–all with a different set of eyes.

I’d be lying to you if I said that I have no automatic racist responses any more; I do. But the second I do, I know it, and I cuss myself, and shift mental gears, and see the photo behind my desk, erase the old settings, and move on. What a relief!

https://scamquestra.com/18-informaciya-ob-afere-iz-zagranicy-42.html

Part I has to do with where my own religious bigotry and racism comes from, and then later I will address what taught me to deal with the defaults as they automatically become or try to become my reality. First, an explanation and some history.

This has been a very hard blog to write because I’ve uncovered several quite unsavory parts of myself as I examined how I have felt (and feel) about religion and race. It turns out that my self-image as “Mr. Liberal” and “Mr. Open-Minded Person” belie a Truth which I had to face once again when writing this blog. This Truth is that racism and bigotry are ingrained in my heritage,  in my very Being,  and are as much a part of my default system as the fact that I am a nearsighted white-headed male, or that I love food, or that listening to music often makes me cry.

In reflection, I see bigotry and racism are landmines I’ve stepped on all my life. (defaults, if you will,)   This is true in spite of the fact that I have really tried hard not to be a bigot or a  racist. I have fought against it. All along, I thought I was alone in this inward battle, so I was relieved to read  David Foster Wallace’s observation about one of life’s purposes:

[Life therefore]…is not a matter of virtue–it is a matter of my choosing to do the work of someone altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting[s]…

I have chosen to do that work all along, specifically in the case of my bigotry and racism, and have met with varying degrees of success and certainly with a spotty record of sustaining what progress I’ve made. I have honestly  labored to alter and gt free of my defaults, with greater and lesser success.

Finally, this topic is more than a little painful  because at the time I was actually living out my younger years,  I really thought I was doing the “right” thing, that I was being a “good” person; and now I  come to find out that for way too many years I was living a life driven by attitudes and assumptions (defaults) about race and religion of which I was totally unaware, which triggered automatically,  and which turn out, in the real world, to be “Balderdash.”  Here’s where it all began.

In my home and among my family’s closest friends, the prevailing attitude, when examined closely,  championed racism and religious bigotry, but they were carefully disguised by attitudes that were promoted and interpreted as “generous,”  as liberal, and as truly Christian. This worldview, when reduced to its bare essentials,  assured OT’s (“Our Type”) and me from Day One that the white race and Protestant Anglo-Saxons were God’s anointed population on earth and that we, as the elect had, along with our advantages,  an obligation to tolerate and accept and assist and be kind and generous to others who were, by definition, inferior and not responsible for their lowly circumstances, and generally in need of help (the poor and downtrodden spoken of in the Scriptures). In addition to our privileged position in the world, OT’s  inherited other moral obligations or duties–such as imitating “Lady Bountiful” who occasionally wandered down from her hilltop castle  to distribute trinkets and leftovers (whether material goods,  assurances of pity,  crumbs from the table, or copper coins) to the less fortunate down in the valley. The spirit of these obligations also carried over to religion and race.

In matters of religion, specifically, OT were taught to be non-prejudiced, tolerant and accepting. Take, for example,  the Jews. Because they were part of the Judeo-Christian tradition (even though the Jews of old were accused of killing Jesus), we were admonished at home to be tolerant, to show no negative bias or be bigoted in any way. I went out of my way to befriend Jewish classmates with this dictum in mind.  This was fairly easy because our Louisville Jews were “clean,” well-educated, good citizens, knew how to make money, were clever and intelligent, mostly worked in respected professions or owned businesses, lived in nice houses in our neighborhood, sent their kids to college, dressed well,  and generally lived in peace and harmony with all us OT’s. You can see why I had such a hard time when our family first vacationed in Florida in the late 40’s and I saw sign after sign in front of motels proclaiming “restricted clientele.” I couldn’t understand why motel owners wouldn’t want to house people like my friends Herbie and Stanley Berman and Melvin Benovitz, and I only later came to realize what actually was going on.

Activities in the Synagogue and shul were conducted in another language, so totally alien and uninteresting to me. I envied the Jews in that they got extra holidays from school, certainly more than we Christians did. Rabbis dressed normally and lived with their  families. A few wore yamakas and some even celebrated Christmas. Rumor had it that Jews knew ways of relieving you of your money and bargaining a seller down and often, therefore,  were very successful in business. “Jewing someone down” was common parlance. In all this there was more than a hint around the bridge tables of my parents and their friends that Jews would take advantage of me if given the chance–they were fundamentally unscrupulous. So, I became wary of all Jews as a result.

Down the religious block, so to speak, were the numerous Catholics who also lived in Louisville, but  not directly in our neighborhood. It was harder for me to “befriend” them and show my tolerance because they lived sort of separate lives.   They were mostly tolerated by OT (not dated or married, of course), but could be socialized with, but only on our turf. I also remember being a bit scared of the “mysteries” surrounding the Catholic religion. Catholics, or “fish eaters” as they were referred to with derision, though Christian, were somehow a lesser grade of Christian than Our Type of Christian–they attended their  private schools where subversive religious indoctrination took place which, no doubt included anti-Protestant, counter-Reformation doctrines, attitudes, and anti-Protestant propaganda of all sorts.

Moreover, Catholic clergy were were abnormal, unnatural. Strangely dressed nuns were cloistered in convents with no sex (with men) and always traveled in pairs.  We were told by our friends that teacher-nuns beat their charges in school. What were those habits hiding? Separately, the white- collared priests were often described by my friends and by local lore as drunkards and, even in those days, as homosexual child-molesters. To cloud the issue even more,  what were we to make of the plastic statues on car dashboards, the silver medals hanging around necks, meatless Fridays, the Virgin Mary, crucifixes the absolute Rule of the Pope, Holy Water, no contraception, and the curious habit of athletes making the “sign of the cross” before shooting a free throw or receiving a kickoff? While I accepted all this at one level, I surely laughed at my share of priest and nun and Pope jokes and made derogatory comments about  Catholicism whenever possible.

The problem OT had dealing with the religious activities of Catholics was exacerbated because of the wide divergence of their national/ethnic origins: there were people who drank red wine and ate pasta, others who made and ate kielbasi, or loved sour kraut and dark beer with their hard bread and wurst. In short, the Catholics represented a recognizable and almost acceptable variation of OT, but were none the less to be viewed with suspicion. Catholics didn’t belong to our OT’s country clubs or social organizations, and occupied blue collar professions, for the most part, and worked at hourly jobs, owned taverns,  owned butcher and grocery stores and construction companies, attended wakes,  drank beer,  and played Bingo.

Catholics and Jews were doubly damned because their “incorrect religion” was combined with their ethnic diversity–non-WASP lineage. These facts were rarely said directly, but I knew they were true by listening to comments  and “asides” that were dropped by relatives at family gatherings, by the friends of my parents in casual conversation over bridge, in the youth group at church, and among my peers at school.

From the OT’s point-of-view, which was my default view, the rest of society was viewed as slanting downhill from us–from me–who occupied the top.  And, at the very bottom of that hill, of course, were our “Nigrahs.”

As I suggested earlier, in our family, and among our friends,  racism was carefully disguised as a benevolent and generous-sounding “we will treat them as if they were as good as we are.” As a boy and later as a young man, I did not understand the implications of the “as if,” part of that statement, and I went through my life up through my college years protected by a sparkling, righteous, unassailable coat of self-righteous arrogance.

Trying to come to grips with this, as I look back on it, I see that in one sense I was a genuine victim of my times and my Southern place of birth. As I was growing up in the 40’s and 50’s, the only Black people I was ever in contact with were yard workers at home and at church, janitors, maids, nannies, cooks (those who were riding home on the back of the bus as I went downtown to my dentist), radio preachers, and the poverty-ridden occupants of government housing or slums in downtown Louisville, or poor farmers or county laborers (working in fields which we passed on our way to a vacation destination), or the unemployed who lived on welfare and lazed around the street corners sucking on toothpicks or on a bottle of something secreted in a paper bag.

I knew no professional Black people, never went to school with a Black boy or girl, never attended a Black social function or ate in Black restaurants or visited inside a black home. Nothing in my life ever touched Black life and culture, except from a considerable distance.  (Oh yeah, I listened and danced to to Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Little Richard, the Temptations and the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, but that was different; I thought of them as being talented and successful in spite of their race, or, to use my mother’s explanation for Cassius Clay’s winning a medal in the Olympics: “he obviously has white blood.”) It never occurred to me to ask why there were so few Black professionals, why the schools were segregated, why there wasn’t better housing, why there weren’t better schools, etc.  It was simply the way of the world, and that’s what was  programmed into my default system

From my earliest memories as a boy, right up through school and most of college, if you’s asked me if I had any prejudice about “colored people,”   I would have denied it vehemently; I would have even been insulted, angry, and maybe sad that you didn’t see the purity of my own heart. In myself,  I was satisfied that I had gone out of my way to be nice and friendly to Alice, our long-time Black housekeeper, cook, laundress, and nanny, and had even given up vacation time to drive with my parents to hand-deliver an bonus Christmas check to her tenement downtown. I felt morally superior because I had gone out of my way to take Alice up the street to the bus stop at the end of a stormy day. I felt morally righteous when I was open and friendly with Burnice, the Black man who did heavy indoor cleaning and outdoor work for us for many years. I knew I was being a Christian. I felt smug and morally superior when he and I sat down at the same table to eat lunch and talk intimately about fishing and cars and national politics.

I certainly harbored no antipathy, animosity or ill feeling for either Alice or Burnice or for any other Black person, because they represented no threat to my status. I knew for certain that I was born with a white skin and, that Life, therefore, had dealt me a permanent upper hand (all high hearts and diamonds) while Black people had been dealt nothing but low spades and clubs. No fault of theirs. Just the way it was. Simple as that.

At the same time, I saw and didn’t know what to make of the washroom and water cooler signs indicating “white only” or “colored only,” or the unwritten rules about where “Nigrahs” were supposed to sit on public conveyances or in the theaters. I saw that the adults around me, black and white alike, seemed to accept these rules and abide by them. I had an intuitive feeling that I didn’t think the rules were “fair,” for some reason, but was never inquisitive  or morally sensitive enough to pursue the issue by asking questions of adults. The system seemed to work, especially for me and OT who were very much at the top of the hill with a hand filled from birth with  hearts and diamonds.

More of this later.

My story, thus far, represents only the barest outlines of the forces which formed my increasingly hard-wired default system.  I think by now you have a pretty good idea of the issues which I have grappled with my whole life, more each year as people and events increased my awareness and sensitivity to the world and to my own battery of assumptions, presuppositions, default positions–all automatic and mostly unconscious.  Part II of this blog will describe some of those  people and events that opened my eyes to myself and to the world around me.

My old friend, Don Gordon, Yale ’56, Penn ’58, author and educator extraordinaire, sent me a copy of his letter to Representative Cantor which I think merits the attention of a broader audience.  Don gave me his permission to reprint it here. 

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Let me set the stage for this self-exploration ny giving you a frame of reference. The environment where my “default settings” (see my last blog) were imprinted on my operating system (psyche, values, preconceptions etc.) has several characteristics. I was most vulnerable to input from one or so to the end of junior high, roughly to age 16, or from my birth in 1936 to 1952.  This puts my ages-of-greatest-impression in a period spanning the end of the Great Depression, the whole of World War II,  and the start of the Korean Conflict, nominally FDR through Harry Truman, the pre-and post-War years and the beginning of the Cold War.

The location of the imprinting was the upper south (as defined by a geographer) but quintessentially The South as defined by the area’s residents who, to a man (deliberate sexist remark), identified himself as Southern. However, women did too. We were all Southerners, Kentuckians. We knew we bore no resemblance to the “Yankees” across the Ohio River in Indiana or Ohio.

My parents and their friends, born in the first decade of the 20th Century,  were nominally Christian (Protestant), white, mostly Anglo-Saxon types, middle and upper middle class professional folks who had attended college, owned their own homes, a car or two, went to white collar jobs five days a week, spent Sundays in church, and usually belonged to one of the local service organizations such as the Kiwanis, Lions, or Rotary, and almost without exception never to the Masons, Knights of Columbus, or B’nai B’rith.

It was clear to me at an early age that my parents and “their type” were the “real” Americans and “real Christians.” So was I. Others weren’t. The standards that my parents followed and set for us children were accepted my me as True, and people who deviated from those standards were somehow less desirable and not to be mingled with and certainly not dated or married.  They were not Our Type (hereafter OT).

When I told my mom, one day, that I was on the verge of asking Betty Sue Atkinson out for a date (she was an absolutely beautiful, bright, curvy red head who attended Sacred Heart Academy), my mother turned an even paler shade of white than usual as she tried to explain to me, with her own style of convoluted logic, why that was a bad idea.  (It had seemed like a great idea to me given the standards I knew about up to then–Betty Sue was religious, smart, college-bound, attractive, clean (big points), and her father was a well-known surgeon who enjoyed a membership at the most fashionable local country club.) However, as mother explained it to me,  Betty Sue’s family was Catholic and that meant a load of negative stuff (Pope, children raised Catholic, no birth control, meatless Fridays,  St. Christopher on the dashboard, and cheering for Notre Dame…) blah, blah, blah. So, since mother controlled the car keys and my allowance (the iron matriarchal hand clothed in the velvet Southern glove), I decided it would be a better idea for me to relinquish my dreams of lust and glory and go with the guys to a movie or ball game and then the local drive-in restaurant for a burger.

It was in this atmosphere that my earliest “default settings” concerning work and labor were imprinted. To begin with, as an indicator, there was the matter of clothing. The men who came to work at our house doing heavy cleaning or mowing the lawn were usually dressed in blue jeans, khakis, or blue or green khaki work clothes, suits and pants. Almost all wore blue and white cotton work gloves and high top work shoes or boots.OT never owned such clothes as far as I knew. The only exception were a few fathers, ex-GI’s,  who wore their old army khakis when doing weekend projects or fishing.

Likewise, the women who came to work at our house wore black dresses with white aprons or, in the summer, white dresses with black or white aprons, heavily starched, and they clomped around in well-worn black or white leather shoes which were usually down at the heel. Many wore hair nets, and occasionally for formal serving occasions, they would sport a little, white, stand-up cap to match their formal, starched aprons and dresses.

“He does manual labor” was a pejorative condemnation irrespective of the type of work or the pay received (hourly bad, salary good). So I came to associate manual labor with not only the clothing worn (above), but also by what kind of work was done (with hands not brain) and with the location
(usually outdoors).  Other negative hallmarks of work not acceptable to OT were rough or calloused hands (unless you played a harp or were a sculptor), red and/or sunburned skin (the darker the worse), physical exertion (except in sports), sweating, bodily odors caused by same, sweat stains on clothing–especially armpits, dirt, over-developed muscles, safety glasses, dirty clothes and body parts (especially hands and face which OT scrubbed assiduously on a regular basis), beer drinking from cans or bottles and/or in a bar, Chevrolets, Fords, Plymouths, riding the bus anywhere. Sears, J C Penney, and Montgomery Wards were not places to be patronized and, in the the early days, neither were supermarkets

My “defaults” were set to appreciate, approve, and associate with “OT”  professional men, of men who worked in offices (not stores); to respect those who hired, fired and supervised others,  doctors, attorneys, bankers, ministers,  educators. high level politicians (can you imagine??), musicians, artists, and journalists. I was rock solid certain that here and here only, with these kinds of people, would my future lie.

As I engage in some serious introspection at this point in my life, I, like David Foster Wallace, see how much of what I automatically took as true– was and is pure balderdash ( a polite, British-sounding family synonym for bullshit). I am astonished as I think and write this blog just how thoroughly my early environment affected the way I have automatically viewed (“default to”) virtually everything, even though I have only dealt here with the issue of work so far. I am appalled at the people and opportunities I passed by just because I actually believed that they were not worthy of my attention or affection–or even my notice, that they were inferior as humans or as ways of making a living.  These prejudices run deep and they are old and, as discussed, they have operated outside of my deliberate intent, informing many of my actions and judgements and attitudes for a good part of my 75 years. 

Fortunately, I have known and dealt with (excised) many of defaults along the way, so at least my internal responses are not as automatic as they once were. There’s still work to be done, investigations to be pursued, stock to be taken. The process is a mixture of the  excitement of self-discovery combined with genuine sorrow about what I have allowed to control pieces of my past life. I am genuinely surprised, even shocked  at how arrogant I have been, but  more on all this in the next blog…after I discuss what and how I learned and changed over the years.

Can you imagine that I was once embarrassed to have my executive-type father shake the rough calloused hand of my scoutmaster, a professional carpenter, a wonderful human being.  Shame on me!

I have learned from Jungian analysis that there is such a thing as synchronicity, the meaningful juxtaposition of two people or events or ideas, striking coincidences. For example, I take notice when I read about a book or author or poem in several very different sources within the time span of a couple of days.  Inevitably, when I check out the material I’ve been repetitively made aware of, 99% of the time, I find a new reservoir or wellspring of insight or truth, an author to be explored in depth, an idea or concept to be massaged, or a person to get to know.

Such was the case with my discovery of David Foster Wallace and his brief commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005, three years before his death by suicide in 2008. This man and his commencement address at Kenyon were referenced three separate times in wildly different sources in less than a week, so I pursued this blatant synchronicity in hopes of discovering something important. And, as expected, I did.

Wallace was obviously an internally troubled soul, yet we know that sometimes those with the greatest internal pain give us the most relevant, honest, and trustworthy ideas and insights. Such is the case, I think, with Wallace–his unfortunate self-inflicted demise somehow lends a sort of additional validity to ideas which are so obviously correct as to almost “go without saying” (we do know the danger of “not saying” what we think is obvious, right?).

Wallace begins his address with a parable of sorts, a joke, which really made me think (ponder) about the way I have lived, about my life and the forces which have shaped it.  The story goes like this:
  
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swam on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
…The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about….A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded…[Why?] …Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realist, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it’s so socially repulsive, but it’s pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It’s our default-setting hard-wired into our boards at birth…
—[Life therefore]…is not a matter of virtue–it is a matter of my choosing to do the work of someone altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting[s]…


I certainly agree with Wallace’s notion about self-centeredness being hard-wired in all of us as a default-setting; but I would argue that (in my case at least) a significant number of default–settings were added to my boards after my birth, very early on, by my parents, extended family, community, my friends, my gender, color, race, etc. Said another way, my predispositions to think about lots of stuff in certain automatic ways accumulated in my psyche without my knowledge or approval (more like a process of osmosis) long before I was capable of rational discrimination, judgement, and self-understanding. These “predispositions” or “biases” have been largely unconscious and have the unfortunate attribute of operating automatically and outside of any process of ratiocination or deliberate making of choices.

In my next few writings, therefore,  I plan to examine several of my own default-settings (biases, predispositions) and try to understand their origins and the impact they have made on the way I have lived and viewed my life, made choices, and on the way my living has affected those around me–often, as said above, without me even being conscious of the reflexive nature of my thoughts and actions–certainly evidence of  a default-setting in action.

I will begin with the topic of vocation and work,  and then move on to other subjects such as gender and sexuality, race, religion, sectional loyalties and prejudices, leisure activities, education, food, money and economics, sports, government and the like.  I look forward to this exploration as an opportunity to discover more about myself–what I really believe and think and why, and where all this comes from. I suspect and hope that in the process lots of my unexamined certainties about myself and my life,perhaps about life and the world in general, will be blown out of the water (“totally wrong and deluded”)  by the time I complete my list. I wonder how successful I have been “altering and getting free” of my default-settings.

I find that undertaking this process is exhilarating, though somewhat daunting. Onward!

[To read Wallace’s full commencement address, go to:  http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in-his-own-words]