***
1
Whenever we consider or debate an issue of national significance, it would be very good for everyone to use the same frame of reference and vocabulary in the dialogue. Bringing my own religious tradition to bear on such an issue, for instance, is helpful to me and believers like me, but once we have made up our own minds as to right or wrong in the matter, that frame of reference is not likely to be useful in a public discussion.
And what better frame of reference could we all use than the U. S. Constitution?
Preamble to the U. S. Constitution
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defence, promote the General Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The Constitution to which this introduction is attached was "ordained" and "established" in order to improve the rather loose affiliation established among the states by the Articles of Confederation. In other words, these concepts – establishment, make more perfect – are matters of history; this is what the Constitution did when it was ratified.
The other concepts – "promoting the general welfare" and the others – are the purposes for which the Articles were replaced by the Constitution; and since the Constitution, as amended, is still in effect today, these purposes remain the goals and responsibilities today of our democratic republic.
In somewhat more current language, that is, our government exists today in order to do (at least) the following:
1. Establish justice
2. Keep peace within the nation
3. Provide for the nation’s defense
4. Promote the people's general wellbeing, and
5. Guarantee freedom to ourselves and our descendants.
Actions that jeopardize any of these worthy purposes - whether public or private, individual or group-led, executive or legislative or judicial - are reprehensible and should be stopped and punished. Laws and proposed laws that threaten any of these goals should be rejected or repealed. Leaders, media, and public figures who advocate or promote actions contrary to these fundamental goals of our nation’s government should be criticized and prevented from such behavior.
Let's look at these founding notions one at a time.
2. Justice
One has the impression that the concept of justice was unambiguous to the nation's founders. The colonies' experience with the government of England in the decades preceding the outbreak of the Revolutionary War had been filled with injustice. The colonists' lack of the ability to participate in governing themselves at home and in the mother country was unjust. Without a modicum of democracy, they felt, there could be no justice. "Taxation without representation" was a particularly onerous injustice to all the colonies.
At the micro-level too, the concept of justice seems to have been clear. It is unjust to imprison an individual and refuse to tell him (or her?) why. Conviction of a crime without a trial by a jury of one's peers is unjust. Establishing laws capriciously or arbotrarily is unjust. Punishing an individual for breaking a law that was not adopted until after the individual's offensive behavior is unjust. This was all clear.
Whether or not the concept of justice can be applied to all of society (a claim called "social justice") is not determined by the Constitution or its preamble. Can all of a society be said to act unjustly, or only individuals? But this question too could not even be debated, as it has been and is today, unless the concept of justice itself were understood with reasonable clarity.
Perhaps like us, two and a half centuries later, the citizens of the new United States agonized over precisely what was or would be unjust in their world. Would it be just to establish a high tariff on manufactured goods, produced mainly in the North, without doing the same for agricultural products, most of which came from the South? Would it be unjust to require every able male citizen to serve for a term in the military? Was it just for the right to vote to be limited to land-owners?
But in order to debate these questions and others like them, or even to deliberate within oneself over such questions, what justice is has to be reasonably clear, as it was and still seems to be.
3. "Domestic Tranquility"
This essential concept, on the other hand, seems somewhat less clear. We can note at least that this concept seems intended to contrast with the following purpose of the federal government: protection from external threats or defense. If peace with other nations should be maintained by the federal government, peace within our own country should likewise be maintained.
An armed insurrection by one group of citizens would certainly be a threat to internal peace, which may explain President Washington's firm and decisive response to "Shay's Rebellion." (Shay and the others were outraged by what they as poor farmers, of course, saw as the injustice of high taxes applied to rich and poor alike and unrelieved debt leading to debtors' prison. Work to insure that their representatives in both the state and national legislatures voiced their concerns and peaceful demonstrations in public would have been a "tranquil" or peaceful, non-violent means of overcoming such perceived injustices.)
On the other hand, injustice affecting large numbers of citizens with no voice in their government and continued over a long period of time would perhaps also be a threat to peace in the nation, because widespread and prolonged injustice provokes potentially violent public outbursts (like the American Revolution itself!). Taking this line of reasoning leaves to the individual the determination of precisely what social conditions are just and what are unjust and are not the responsibility of government. But the responsibility for maintaining "domestic tranquility" implies the responsibility to avoid creating wide-spread and enduring conditions that a significant proportion of the citizenry consider unjust.
In order to provide for the domestic tranquility, that is, the government must establish just laws, enforced justly.
At the micro-level, threats to the domestic tranquility may come simply from individual criminals. Interstate connection between crimes would naturally make it a responsibility of the national government to respond, as would violation of federal laws - such as income tax fraud or the denial of equal opportunity to a woman because of her gender (a violation of federal anti-discrimination laws) - despite these crimes' occurring entirely within one state.
Insuring peace and security within the nation thus requires federal action protecting against mob violence as well as individual crime.
4. Defense
The responsibility of the federal government for defense was apparently unambiguous to our nation's founders, as it still seems today. The original phrase, about providing for the common defense was evidently necessary to clarify that the national government is responsible for protecting the entire nation, all states in common, from external attack.
5. "The General Welfare"
The term "welfare" in the Preamble is not to be confused with public support to a disadvantaged individual (as in the phrase "a welfare check"). With this simple understanding, however, the concept of "promoting the general welfare" does not seem particularly ambiguous.
It is the duty of the U. S. federal government to insure relative prosperity for the people generally, not just for a few.
Even before the Constitution, our Declaration of Independence had declared that among the "inalienable" or inherent rights of every individual is the right "to pursue happiness" or wellbeing. Over the generations, it has become if anything even more apparent that guaranteeing an equal opportunity for all individuals to achieve personal prosperity is a key to maintaining the prosperity of the nation generally. Of course, all will not succeed equally well, but each must have a reasonable chance to succeed in order for the general welfare to be sustained over time.
(The first inalienable right is the right to life itself; the "general welfare" of the nation cannot be maintained over time, it seems obvious, if every individual does not have the wherewithal simply to survive.)
6. Liberty
And the other unremovable right of everyone is to liberty, the blessings of which it is the government's duty to insure are available to all. The meaning of this emotion-laden concept seems clear. Liberty is freedom from control of others, freedom to decide for oneself what one will do.
It is also apparent, on the other hand, that the freedom of one may actually threaten the freedom of another. In 18th-century America it was natural for some to feel they were free to own slaves, as many of the founders - and we today - understood and understand is self-contradictory. One cannot be allowed to feel free to infringe on the freedom of any other adult.
The freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, since 1791 a part of the Constitution, list what seemed to the nation's founders the most important liberties to cite individually: freedom of speech, freedom from an established religion, and so on. But in listing these specifically it was not thought necessary to clarify what the term "liberty" means, other than to use it interchangeably with the term "freedom."
Although in practice a complex matter, liberty or freedom is still well understood as a concept.
7
These are the most basic purposes, then, which the United States' government is designed to serve. I have written elsewhere that the cardinal American values are peace and prosperity, equality of opportunity, liberty and justice for all. "Peace and prosperty" are identified in the Preamble to the Constitution by the terms "Domestic Tranquility," "Defense," and "The General Welfare." "Equal opportunity," too, is addresed by the purpose of our national government to "promote the general welfare." The two phrases from the Pledge of Allegiance to the U. S. flag, promoted by presidential decree in 1892 and formally recognized by the Congress in 1942, "Liberty" and "Justice" are named explicitly in the Preamble.
As issues arise in the public debate, it seems obvious that these founding principles should be the first considerations in our minds as we attempt to decide where we stand. We should not argue, that is, for a proposal merely because it "seems right" to us at the time. The prohibition against one person's freedom impinging on that of another must be considered as well. What is obviously right from my point of view is not necessarily what seems right from another's perspective; I do not have the right to impose my belief on others, unless my view of what is right also serves the national purpose as described in the Preamble.
A proposal benefitting one group of people should be considered first in terms of whether or not to do so may reasonably be expected to address an existing injustice and in terms of whether or not the wellbeing of our society generally will be promoted by such a move.
A social condition that deprives any group of individuals an equal opportunity to participate in the general prosperty of the nation should be considered a threat to our shared value of justice and to the goal of insuring the wellbeing of all.
Whether or not to approve or endorse an individual's or a group's actions that may reasonably be expected to threaten the internal peace within the nation must be rejected (even when I sympathize with the individual or group in question).
And these are only a very few examples of issues the discussion of which could be clarified and focused by keeping in mind the Constitution's purposes, which should be considered as shared by us all.
***
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Story: Co-Incidents
***
It was very hot. They would have agreed about that. Even though it was dry. Even though there wasn't a whisper of a cloud and the sky curving overhead was more blue than white. There was no wind, and the intensity of the pervading, penetrating sunlight was like a broad, blunt- ended iron pressing down on the pavements and sidewalks, pressing down the tired foreheads, sticky shirts, and hunched shoulders of the afternoon traffic.
The man in the first car had already remarked to himself that it was actually pleasant to be so hot. He liked to feel himself sweating. He estimated 96 degrees at least.
The man in the second car wasn't even aware that he was ready to explode. He didn't notice his midweek weariness and he didn't notice the heat. His hand was still stinging where he had already banged his fist on the steering wheel, cursing aloud, when a car in front of him had slowed to make a left turn at an intersection without a light. There was no traffic at all going the other way so he hadn't even had to slow down. But he wasn't aware of the stinging either.
Now the traffic stream was moving along as quickly as it could, on a wide boulevard with three lanes going each way. There was a light every four blocks. They were set to let a car traveling twenty-five miles an hour right through. Of course, the rush hour traffic could never move faster than about twenty. The man in the first car had noted this immediately. He never had to drive in rush hour traffic and it didn't seem too important. He was just thankful that the back window of the car in front of them now, if he let it go about two car lengths ahead, did not reflect the sunlight back into his eyes. Even his sunglasses didn't prevent that from being unpleasant. Of course, driving that far behind tempted the cars in the right lane to turn in front of them. Then he would have to slow down a little so that the back window of the car that had changed lanes wouldn't reflect the sunlight into his eyes.
The beautiful young woman sitting next to the man in the first car had been looking silently forward since she had answered him two lights earlier that they would be turning left.
He didn't like changing lanes in that traffic, but a car just next to him had slowed to turn left at a corner where there was no light and he had been able to turn into the empty spot in the stream ahead of it.
The man in the second car had never liked little imported cars, although he was not aware of this prejudice. His frustration and anger increased slightly as he saw a car from the right lane pull in front into the left lane ahead of the little car in front of him. He raised his hand abruptly to push the horn ring, but hesitated. At least he would be turning soon. It was only a two-lane road, but it led away from town and shopping centers, toward open country, off to the left. Every day after he made the turn he zoomed off along the open two-lane road, racking the motor through the gears and exulting in the noise and the rushing wind through the windows. He was aware of that.
The left turn light at the intersection was very quick, even though there was never any traffic in the opposite direction. Sometimes when it was especially hot, or when the man in the second car was especially angry or frustrated, or happy (as on Fridays), he looked around quickly for a policeman and then whipped around the turn anyway, without waiting for the light. Almost no one turned at that corner, so the man in the second car was almost always the only one who turned into the left turn lane there.
The man in the first car had the habit of checking the rearview mirror every few minutes.
"It's the next corner," the woman said. "To the left."
The man did not reply but turned on his signal blinker. When he glanced at the rearview mirror, the sunlight glinted off the windshield of the car behind them and pierced through his glasses. He slowed down a little turning into the left turn lane. The green arrow was showing but it might change at any minute.
The second car was an older model American car, one of the most popular and less expensive brands. It was the best four door model of that brand, however, and was quite large and heavy, especially when compared to the first car. The first car was less than a year old, a deep blue, recently washed and polished.
The second car was a hardtop convertible, brown and cream. The paint was chipped in several places on the front fenders and around the grill, even on the front part of the hood. The grill and even the windshield was spotted with the smashed corpses of dead hard bugs, and the whole car was filmed and crusted with various layers of dust and dirt.
And it did change to amber just as the first car was reaching the end of the left turn lane. The man in the first car eased to a stop, noting how smoothly he had slowed as he turned into the lane, and stopped, as the light changed to amber.
There was a little toot on the horn somewhere behind. The man in the first car had raised his eyes to the rearview mirror before he remembered. The light flamed out at him again.
"Ha!" the young woman laughed next to him, as she screwed around in her seat to look back. She was suddenly revitalized. "We were cursed at, that time," she said and chuckled again turning back around. She was a little awkward in the cramped quarters of the small car. Both of them in the first car also had seat belts buckled around their waists and diagonally across their chests.
The man in the first car acknowledged the toot with a snorting sound noting surprise, but not amusement.
The woman lapsed into immobility and silence again.
When the light finally changed, the first car very gradually inched forward into the intersection. The man inside was completely aware that the movement was not only smooth and graceful. It was also remarkably slow. He wondered briefly if the young woman would be amused by this also. He smiled slightly himself, but didn't look into the rearview mirror.
The first car inched into the intersection and around the turn. The mouth of the two-lane road into which both cars were turning was very wide, almost like a four-lane road. There was no traffic anyway. The first car moved gradually out of the intersection toward the far right edge of the right lane. The man inside figured that by then his reply was sufficient. The woman next to him had apparently not realized that he was going slow on purpose, or for what reason. But they would laugh about it later.
The second car, just as the first car inched clear, thundered out to the left. As it zoomed alongside and ahead, it seemed to hesitate for an instant and the red, sweating face of the young man inside could be seen turned toward the man in the first car, apparently shouting angrily. He leaned toward the other car as he shouted and as his car jumped ahead.
The road narrowed.
The young woman was tall and dark. Her deep brown hair fell over her shoulders and down her back, touched at places with a lighter shade in the front and in faint, irregular streaks away from her face toward her shoulders. She was wearing a thin, smooth dress with a short skirt and no sleeves. The pattern was of magenta, muted orange, and violet flowers strewn across a pale pink ground. Her knees in the tiny car raised up off the floor above her waist. The thighs below her skirt were smooth and tan. She was turned toward the man beside her, looking beyond into the second car zooming by and the man inside shouting. Her eyes were dark and wide with long dark lashes, and her mouth was large and sensual. She was not laughing this time. Her face was quiet, inscrutable.
She saw the man next to her raise his left hand toward the top of the steering wheel as the second car reached a position in which the front door of the brown and cream hardtop convertible was two feet or so ahead of the front seat of the little blue car. The red-faced young man was still looking back and could see them clearly.
The man in the blue car was looking straight ahead. He raised the middle finger of his left hand off the steering wheel pointing it up, forward, and to the left.
He was slight and not tall. He had light brown hair combed neatly and closely trimmed, thick and curly beard. His sunglasses fit tightly around his eyes. They had heavy, black rims. He was wearing a light blue sports coat and black slacks, a neat white shirt with wide cuffs and a silver tie with flakes of red scattered on it. He might have been twenty-five or -six. The woman was somewhat younger.
She quietly regarded the man next to her. He didn't look over at her, or speak, looking blankly ahead down the road and lowering his left hand as the brown and cream hardtop convertible roared in front of them and on ahead down the road. There was a slow bend to the left, and after a minute the second car, which was now ahead, had disappeared around the bend.
The young woman turned back toward the front of the car, smiling slightly and tranquilly, and folded her hands on top of her knees.
The red-faced young man in the brown and cream hardtop convertible had still been shouting as his car moved ahead of the imported blue car, when the man inside had slowly and smoothly raised his left hand toward the top of the steering wheel and pointed his middle finger up, forward, and to the left.
The man in the hardtop convertible was tall and slender, but his shoulders were broad and his arms muscular. His face was long and rectangular, sweating, red, and wreathed with a rough late-afternoon stubble. He had big, hard hands with knobby knuckles and calluses on the palms and on the fingers below the joints. He was wearing a faded brown and white sport shirt with the top two buttons not buttoned, and a tee shirt underneath which was loose and irregular at the neck and soiled with perspiration. His slacks were dirty and tan and fit close to his legs and hips.
He had already roared ahead of the little blue car and around a slow bend to the left when he began to be aware of the full implications of the bearded man's gesture.
Still the couple in the imported blue car did not speak. The man did not know where they were going. The woman ran one hand over her knee and along her shin.
The car was moving faster now and the breeze whipping through the windows was loud in their ears. The man had remarked some time before that, in that dry climate, even on the hottest days, a little shade--such as that provided by their car's roof--and a little breeze was enough to cool one off. He decided it was even pleasanter than sweating in the stymied flow of traffic on the boulevard.
The little blue car entered the slow bend to the left.
The young woman looked toward the man next to her. He turned toward her for a moment and smiled briefly, looking back at the road. She smiled too and put her left hand on the seat behind his head and stroked his neck gently, turning her face back toward the front.
As the blue car came around the final section of the bend to the left, it suddenly came upon a brown and cream hardtop convertible which was blocking both lanes of the road ahead. A red-faced, ill shaven young man wearing dirty tan slacks and a faded brown shirt open at the neck was standing about ten feet before the car in the left lane, moving forward, with both fists clenched and his eyes squinting at the sunlight so that his teeth showed. There were black skid marks on the pavement behind and under the back tires of the brown and cream car across the road, swerving out from the right lane into the left lane.
The blue car had been moving fairly rapidly but came to a smooth stop, without skidding, before it reached the side of the brown and cream hardtop convertible. It had had to turn slightly off to the right, however, although there was not enough room for it to pass on the shoulder. The motor died with the suddenness of the stop.
The young man standing on the pavement approached the left side of the blue car, his fists still clenched at his sides. He was now shouting curses at the bearded man inside the blue car. The man inside did not look at the young man outside. He turned his head the other way instead.
There was a young woman in the seat to his right. She was looking ahead toward the front end of the car that was blocking the road before them.
"Roll up your window," the bearded man said quietly. As she began to do this, he rolled up his window and closed the wing window and clamped it shut. The woman did this also on her side.
"Is your door locked?" the man asked in the same quiet voice.
"Yes," she said and looked toward him.
"Mine too," the man said and for the first time turned to look at the red-faced young man who was steadily approaching from behind and to the left.
The young man was shouting louder now and as he did he waved his arms in front of him, clenching and unclenching his fists. His words were now almost unintelligible. When he saw the bearded man in the blue car roll up his window, he began to run forward shouting more rapidly. He slapped his hand, palm first, on the window at the side of the other man's head. He hit it several times with the heel of his hand.
Then he tried to open the door, but the handle would not move.
The man inside was no longer looking at him, but was looking blankly ahead. After a moment he reached across the knees of the young woman sitting next to him and took from a tray underneath the dash a clipboard with lined paper on it. He began to write with a ball point pen he took from his shirt pocket.
The man outside was banging his fist on the window next to the other man's ear and shouting with his face next to the glass. Perspiration ran down the sides of his face and off his nose and beaded up on the underside of his eyebrows threatening to drip into his eyes. He shook the drops away, however, by pounding the glass and stamping his feet on the pavement.
Inside the man said a few words to the woman next to him. She nodded and turned back around to face the front.
Outside the man could not make out what the other man was writing, and he couldn't hear what he said. He began to bang on the roof of the little car, the sound echoing with his shouts into the sky.
The couple sat quietly inside. The only movement was the man's writing.
The man outside hesitated a moment. Then he suddenly reached toward the front of the car and in two brisk movements had bent the left windshield wiper up from the glass and had torn it out of its socket.
Grinning fiercely the red-faced young man looked through the glass. The man inside had stopped writing and was looking forward. But his sunglasses completely masked his eyes. The other man beat the windshield with the bent wiper and screamed unintelligible curses at the other man's expressionless face.
He moved toward the back of the little car, pounding on the roof but not shouting quite so much. Through the window over the small back seat he saw the man inside suddenly hand his clipboard to the young woman and reach for the ignition key. The motor didn't start at once and the man outside had time to drop to his knees on the hot pavement on the left side of the car and begin to pound on the side of the left rear tire with the jagged edge of the windshield wiper. It bent around his fingers and cut them, but one corner of the torn hinge mechanism caught in a rough place in the edge of the tire. He kicked it and kicked it, holding it still with his left hand as the ignition whirred again.
It popped in, and the tire began to hiss.
The man grinned and pounded on the back fender as he pried his fingers loose from the bent pieces of metal in the tire.
As the ignition ground up again, he suddenly jumped to the rear of the car. The lid was not locked and, oblivious to the whirling pieces under the lid and the grinding noises they were making, he began to jerk out wires and to pound with his fist on the flat surfaces in the motor. They were hot and burned the side of his hand.
He straightened up and looked through the back window at the backs of the heads of the man and woman inside. The man was still working the ignition key. The woman was turned slightly toward him, holding the clipboard.
The man outside did not shout now.
He left the little car and walked slowly back out toward the center of the road, a spring in his step and his arms swinging loosely at his sides. His faded brown shirt was now deeply stained with perspiration under his arms in wide circles and all over his back. He felt the sweat trickling down the inside of his thighs as he approached the rear of the brown and cream hardtop convertible.
It was quiet except for the hissing of the left rear tire of the little blue car.
He felt his shirt pocket standing away from his body as he walked jauntily across the pavement. He touched it and the pack of cigarettes inside. His fingers happened to touch the book of matches he had slipped under the cellophane on one side of the pack. But when he stood behind the car, at the trunk, he did not take a cigarette.
Instead, he opened the trunk lid and surveyed the anarchic, dusty material strewn around the inside. He was not aware of the cuts and bruises on his left hand and fingers or of the burn on the side of his right fist. The heat of the pavement seared through the soles of his shoes, but he did not notice that either.
He pulled from under old pieces of cardboard and canvas a short, heavy chain that had dirt and grease caked on the inside of its links. And from behind the smooth old spare tire at the left he took a heavy black iron rod that had a wide, hexagonal socket on one end and was slightly bent in the middle toward the flattened tip at the other end.
He looked back at the little blue car at the other side of the road. The hissing was already fading away and the car sagged a little, off-balance to that side. The man inside was no longer trying the starter. Yet he remained in the car. Once he had looked out the back window, peering back down the road. He and the young woman next to him now sat motionless, facing directly ahead.
The young man outside, smiling again to himself, returned to the little blue car, carrying the heavy chain in his right hand (swinging it slightly as he walked) and the bent black rod in his left.
He had perhaps expected the other man to get out of the car, perhaps to run away, abandoning the car and perhaps even the woman. He perhaps expected now the other man to plead with him to stop since they could no longer drive away.
The clipboard had been replaced in the shelf in front of the young woman's knees. The couple sat immobile, looking ahead.
The man outside approached the front of the little blue car. He smiled proudly and held the articles in his hands up before the left side of the windshield, close to the glass. First he held up a dirty, heavy chain in his right hand, and then he held up a heavy black rod in his left hand. His face was red and sweaty.
A man inside the car was wearing sunglasses which hid his eyes. He didn't move and there was no expression on his face.
The man outside suddenly struck at the face behind the window with the heavy rod in his left hand. The glass did not shatter, but the end of the rod smashed a small round pattern into the window just in front of the other man's face. The broken glass in the circle was white. White cracks extended out several inches on all sides of the center like a spider web.
The man outside could not be sure if the man inside had flinched, and now he couldn't see his face at all. A young woman on the other side of the car was looking toward him now. Her eyes were wide and dark. After a second, the man outside smashed the window in front of her too.
On a particularly hot day, late in the afternoon on a seldom used two-lane rod, a brown and cream hardtop convertible was blocking the road to a small, imported blue car. A sweating and dirty young man, evidently seized by some frenzy, was fiercely attacking the little car, beating it on top and at the windows with a heavy chain and a bent black iron rod.
The windows were all smashed, although they would not collapse completely. The man shouted, hysterically at first, as he pounded the little car, jumping up before each blow with the chain in his right hand. He worked around and around the car, smashing the headlights and denting the fenders, hood, and roof.
He kicked the car also.
There were two people inside the car sitting motionless and looking ahead. Once, the young woman in the seat on the right had looked toward the back window and down the road behind them, but just then the man outside had begun to strike that window too with his chain, and then the smashed glass became opaque.
On one of his trips around the car, the red-faced young man stood for a few moments at the left rear fender striking again and again in front of and above the wheel. The fender buckled and banged. The man kept striking regularly, no longer shouting but grunting or snorting as he delivered each blow.
After a few minutes he suddenly stopped pounding the car. He was then in front of the car and to the left. The headlights were smashed and the glass on the pavement. The front hood was dented so badly that the front of the lid was open and bent off to the left. Even the left side of the bumper was sagging.
The man in front of the car panted deeply and dropped the chain and the heavy rod to the pavement. Then he began to stagger toward the rear of the car, staring open-mouthed at the damage he had done and looking blankly back down the road behind the little car.
He could not see a bearded man and a pretty young woman inside.
A man was leaning on the left rear fender of a ruined imported blue car toward the right edge of a narrow bending road in the late afternoon heat. He had his left foot propped on the left end of the rear bumper behind him, and he was looking back down the road appearing hot, sweaty, and tired.
The car he was leaning on was empty.
The red-faced young man tapped out a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket. As he struck the match to light it, looking down, he noticed a thin stain trickling from beneath the little car below his foot on the bumper. He slowly realized as he looked at it that he had been smelling gasoline for a time.
A man suddenly jumped away from the back of the car he was leaning on as though it was suddenly hot and burned his back and shoulder.
The gasoline was a tiny, irregular trickle on the pavement, slowly emerging from behind the flattened left tire.
Light the cigarette from three feet away. Toss the match toward the left rear wheel of the little blue car. Run back for the other car and around to the other side.
The first car exploded, sending up first a yellow flash and then orange flames and dense black smoke into the sky. In an instant the first car itself was completely hidden in the fire and smoke.
Another car, a dirty, brown and cream hardtop convertible roared to life, swung back toward the right lane, and headed away toward open country.
***
It was very hot. They would have agreed about that. Even though it was dry. Even though there wasn't a whisper of a cloud and the sky curving overhead was more blue than white. There was no wind, and the intensity of the pervading, penetrating sunlight was like a broad, blunt- ended iron pressing down on the pavements and sidewalks, pressing down the tired foreheads, sticky shirts, and hunched shoulders of the afternoon traffic.
The man in the first car had already remarked to himself that it was actually pleasant to be so hot. He liked to feel himself sweating. He estimated 96 degrees at least.
The man in the second car wasn't even aware that he was ready to explode. He didn't notice his midweek weariness and he didn't notice the heat. His hand was still stinging where he had already banged his fist on the steering wheel, cursing aloud, when a car in front of him had slowed to make a left turn at an intersection without a light. There was no traffic at all going the other way so he hadn't even had to slow down. But he wasn't aware of the stinging either.
Now the traffic stream was moving along as quickly as it could, on a wide boulevard with three lanes going each way. There was a light every four blocks. They were set to let a car traveling twenty-five miles an hour right through. Of course, the rush hour traffic could never move faster than about twenty. The man in the first car had noted this immediately. He never had to drive in rush hour traffic and it didn't seem too important. He was just thankful that the back window of the car in front of them now, if he let it go about two car lengths ahead, did not reflect the sunlight back into his eyes. Even his sunglasses didn't prevent that from being unpleasant. Of course, driving that far behind tempted the cars in the right lane to turn in front of them. Then he would have to slow down a little so that the back window of the car that had changed lanes wouldn't reflect the sunlight into his eyes.
The beautiful young woman sitting next to the man in the first car had been looking silently forward since she had answered him two lights earlier that they would be turning left.
He didn't like changing lanes in that traffic, but a car just next to him had slowed to turn left at a corner where there was no light and he had been able to turn into the empty spot in the stream ahead of it.
The man in the second car had never liked little imported cars, although he was not aware of this prejudice. His frustration and anger increased slightly as he saw a car from the right lane pull in front into the left lane ahead of the little car in front of him. He raised his hand abruptly to push the horn ring, but hesitated. At least he would be turning soon. It was only a two-lane road, but it led away from town and shopping centers, toward open country, off to the left. Every day after he made the turn he zoomed off along the open two-lane road, racking the motor through the gears and exulting in the noise and the rushing wind through the windows. He was aware of that.
The left turn light at the intersection was very quick, even though there was never any traffic in the opposite direction. Sometimes when it was especially hot, or when the man in the second car was especially angry or frustrated, or happy (as on Fridays), he looked around quickly for a policeman and then whipped around the turn anyway, without waiting for the light. Almost no one turned at that corner, so the man in the second car was almost always the only one who turned into the left turn lane there.
The man in the first car had the habit of checking the rearview mirror every few minutes.
"It's the next corner," the woman said. "To the left."
The man did not reply but turned on his signal blinker. When he glanced at the rearview mirror, the sunlight glinted off the windshield of the car behind them and pierced through his glasses. He slowed down a little turning into the left turn lane. The green arrow was showing but it might change at any minute.
The second car was an older model American car, one of the most popular and less expensive brands. It was the best four door model of that brand, however, and was quite large and heavy, especially when compared to the first car. The first car was less than a year old, a deep blue, recently washed and polished.
The second car was a hardtop convertible, brown and cream. The paint was chipped in several places on the front fenders and around the grill, even on the front part of the hood. The grill and even the windshield was spotted with the smashed corpses of dead hard bugs, and the whole car was filmed and crusted with various layers of dust and dirt.
And it did change to amber just as the first car was reaching the end of the left turn lane. The man in the first car eased to a stop, noting how smoothly he had slowed as he turned into the lane, and stopped, as the light changed to amber.
There was a little toot on the horn somewhere behind. The man in the first car had raised his eyes to the rearview mirror before he remembered. The light flamed out at him again.
"Ha!" the young woman laughed next to him, as she screwed around in her seat to look back. She was suddenly revitalized. "We were cursed at, that time," she said and chuckled again turning back around. She was a little awkward in the cramped quarters of the small car. Both of them in the first car also had seat belts buckled around their waists and diagonally across their chests.
The man in the first car acknowledged the toot with a snorting sound noting surprise, but not amusement.
The woman lapsed into immobility and silence again.
When the light finally changed, the first car very gradually inched forward into the intersection. The man inside was completely aware that the movement was not only smooth and graceful. It was also remarkably slow. He wondered briefly if the young woman would be amused by this also. He smiled slightly himself, but didn't look into the rearview mirror.
The first car inched into the intersection and around the turn. The mouth of the two-lane road into which both cars were turning was very wide, almost like a four-lane road. There was no traffic anyway. The first car moved gradually out of the intersection toward the far right edge of the right lane. The man inside figured that by then his reply was sufficient. The woman next to him had apparently not realized that he was going slow on purpose, or for what reason. But they would laugh about it later.
The second car, just as the first car inched clear, thundered out to the left. As it zoomed alongside and ahead, it seemed to hesitate for an instant and the red, sweating face of the young man inside could be seen turned toward the man in the first car, apparently shouting angrily. He leaned toward the other car as he shouted and as his car jumped ahead.
The road narrowed.
The young woman was tall and dark. Her deep brown hair fell over her shoulders and down her back, touched at places with a lighter shade in the front and in faint, irregular streaks away from her face toward her shoulders. She was wearing a thin, smooth dress with a short skirt and no sleeves. The pattern was of magenta, muted orange, and violet flowers strewn across a pale pink ground. Her knees in the tiny car raised up off the floor above her waist. The thighs below her skirt were smooth and tan. She was turned toward the man beside her, looking beyond into the second car zooming by and the man inside shouting. Her eyes were dark and wide with long dark lashes, and her mouth was large and sensual. She was not laughing this time. Her face was quiet, inscrutable.
She saw the man next to her raise his left hand toward the top of the steering wheel as the second car reached a position in which the front door of the brown and cream hardtop convertible was two feet or so ahead of the front seat of the little blue car. The red-faced young man was still looking back and could see them clearly.
The man in the blue car was looking straight ahead. He raised the middle finger of his left hand off the steering wheel pointing it up, forward, and to the left.
He was slight and not tall. He had light brown hair combed neatly and closely trimmed, thick and curly beard. His sunglasses fit tightly around his eyes. They had heavy, black rims. He was wearing a light blue sports coat and black slacks, a neat white shirt with wide cuffs and a silver tie with flakes of red scattered on it. He might have been twenty-five or -six. The woman was somewhat younger.
She quietly regarded the man next to her. He didn't look over at her, or speak, looking blankly ahead down the road and lowering his left hand as the brown and cream hardtop convertible roared in front of them and on ahead down the road. There was a slow bend to the left, and after a minute the second car, which was now ahead, had disappeared around the bend.
The young woman turned back toward the front of the car, smiling slightly and tranquilly, and folded her hands on top of her knees.
The red-faced young man in the brown and cream hardtop convertible had still been shouting as his car moved ahead of the imported blue car, when the man inside had slowly and smoothly raised his left hand toward the top of the steering wheel and pointed his middle finger up, forward, and to the left.
The man in the hardtop convertible was tall and slender, but his shoulders were broad and his arms muscular. His face was long and rectangular, sweating, red, and wreathed with a rough late-afternoon stubble. He had big, hard hands with knobby knuckles and calluses on the palms and on the fingers below the joints. He was wearing a faded brown and white sport shirt with the top two buttons not buttoned, and a tee shirt underneath which was loose and irregular at the neck and soiled with perspiration. His slacks were dirty and tan and fit close to his legs and hips.
He had already roared ahead of the little blue car and around a slow bend to the left when he began to be aware of the full implications of the bearded man's gesture.
Still the couple in the imported blue car did not speak. The man did not know where they were going. The woman ran one hand over her knee and along her shin.
The car was moving faster now and the breeze whipping through the windows was loud in their ears. The man had remarked some time before that, in that dry climate, even on the hottest days, a little shade--such as that provided by their car's roof--and a little breeze was enough to cool one off. He decided it was even pleasanter than sweating in the stymied flow of traffic on the boulevard.
The little blue car entered the slow bend to the left.
The young woman looked toward the man next to her. He turned toward her for a moment and smiled briefly, looking back at the road. She smiled too and put her left hand on the seat behind his head and stroked his neck gently, turning her face back toward the front.
As the blue car came around the final section of the bend to the left, it suddenly came upon a brown and cream hardtop convertible which was blocking both lanes of the road ahead. A red-faced, ill shaven young man wearing dirty tan slacks and a faded brown shirt open at the neck was standing about ten feet before the car in the left lane, moving forward, with both fists clenched and his eyes squinting at the sunlight so that his teeth showed. There were black skid marks on the pavement behind and under the back tires of the brown and cream car across the road, swerving out from the right lane into the left lane.
The blue car had been moving fairly rapidly but came to a smooth stop, without skidding, before it reached the side of the brown and cream hardtop convertible. It had had to turn slightly off to the right, however, although there was not enough room for it to pass on the shoulder. The motor died with the suddenness of the stop.
The young man standing on the pavement approached the left side of the blue car, his fists still clenched at his sides. He was now shouting curses at the bearded man inside the blue car. The man inside did not look at the young man outside. He turned his head the other way instead.
There was a young woman in the seat to his right. She was looking ahead toward the front end of the car that was blocking the road before them.
"Roll up your window," the bearded man said quietly. As she began to do this, he rolled up his window and closed the wing window and clamped it shut. The woman did this also on her side.
"Is your door locked?" the man asked in the same quiet voice.
"Yes," she said and looked toward him.
"Mine too," the man said and for the first time turned to look at the red-faced young man who was steadily approaching from behind and to the left.
The young man was shouting louder now and as he did he waved his arms in front of him, clenching and unclenching his fists. His words were now almost unintelligible. When he saw the bearded man in the blue car roll up his window, he began to run forward shouting more rapidly. He slapped his hand, palm first, on the window at the side of the other man's head. He hit it several times with the heel of his hand.
Then he tried to open the door, but the handle would not move.
The man inside was no longer looking at him, but was looking blankly ahead. After a moment he reached across the knees of the young woman sitting next to him and took from a tray underneath the dash a clipboard with lined paper on it. He began to write with a ball point pen he took from his shirt pocket.
The man outside was banging his fist on the window next to the other man's ear and shouting with his face next to the glass. Perspiration ran down the sides of his face and off his nose and beaded up on the underside of his eyebrows threatening to drip into his eyes. He shook the drops away, however, by pounding the glass and stamping his feet on the pavement.
Inside the man said a few words to the woman next to him. She nodded and turned back around to face the front.
Outside the man could not make out what the other man was writing, and he couldn't hear what he said. He began to bang on the roof of the little car, the sound echoing with his shouts into the sky.
The couple sat quietly inside. The only movement was the man's writing.
The man outside hesitated a moment. Then he suddenly reached toward the front of the car and in two brisk movements had bent the left windshield wiper up from the glass and had torn it out of its socket.
Grinning fiercely the red-faced young man looked through the glass. The man inside had stopped writing and was looking forward. But his sunglasses completely masked his eyes. The other man beat the windshield with the bent wiper and screamed unintelligible curses at the other man's expressionless face.
He moved toward the back of the little car, pounding on the roof but not shouting quite so much. Through the window over the small back seat he saw the man inside suddenly hand his clipboard to the young woman and reach for the ignition key. The motor didn't start at once and the man outside had time to drop to his knees on the hot pavement on the left side of the car and begin to pound on the side of the left rear tire with the jagged edge of the windshield wiper. It bent around his fingers and cut them, but one corner of the torn hinge mechanism caught in a rough place in the edge of the tire. He kicked it and kicked it, holding it still with his left hand as the ignition whirred again.
It popped in, and the tire began to hiss.
The man grinned and pounded on the back fender as he pried his fingers loose from the bent pieces of metal in the tire.
As the ignition ground up again, he suddenly jumped to the rear of the car. The lid was not locked and, oblivious to the whirling pieces under the lid and the grinding noises they were making, he began to jerk out wires and to pound with his fist on the flat surfaces in the motor. They were hot and burned the side of his hand.
He straightened up and looked through the back window at the backs of the heads of the man and woman inside. The man was still working the ignition key. The woman was turned slightly toward him, holding the clipboard.
The man outside did not shout now.
He left the little car and walked slowly back out toward the center of the road, a spring in his step and his arms swinging loosely at his sides. His faded brown shirt was now deeply stained with perspiration under his arms in wide circles and all over his back. He felt the sweat trickling down the inside of his thighs as he approached the rear of the brown and cream hardtop convertible.
It was quiet except for the hissing of the left rear tire of the little blue car.
He felt his shirt pocket standing away from his body as he walked jauntily across the pavement. He touched it and the pack of cigarettes inside. His fingers happened to touch the book of matches he had slipped under the cellophane on one side of the pack. But when he stood behind the car, at the trunk, he did not take a cigarette.
Instead, he opened the trunk lid and surveyed the anarchic, dusty material strewn around the inside. He was not aware of the cuts and bruises on his left hand and fingers or of the burn on the side of his right fist. The heat of the pavement seared through the soles of his shoes, but he did not notice that either.
He pulled from under old pieces of cardboard and canvas a short, heavy chain that had dirt and grease caked on the inside of its links. And from behind the smooth old spare tire at the left he took a heavy black iron rod that had a wide, hexagonal socket on one end and was slightly bent in the middle toward the flattened tip at the other end.
He looked back at the little blue car at the other side of the road. The hissing was already fading away and the car sagged a little, off-balance to that side. The man inside was no longer trying the starter. Yet he remained in the car. Once he had looked out the back window, peering back down the road. He and the young woman next to him now sat motionless, facing directly ahead.
The young man outside, smiling again to himself, returned to the little blue car, carrying the heavy chain in his right hand (swinging it slightly as he walked) and the bent black rod in his left.
He had perhaps expected the other man to get out of the car, perhaps to run away, abandoning the car and perhaps even the woman. He perhaps expected now the other man to plead with him to stop since they could no longer drive away.
The clipboard had been replaced in the shelf in front of the young woman's knees. The couple sat immobile, looking ahead.
The man outside approached the front of the little blue car. He smiled proudly and held the articles in his hands up before the left side of the windshield, close to the glass. First he held up a dirty, heavy chain in his right hand, and then he held up a heavy black rod in his left hand. His face was red and sweaty.
A man inside the car was wearing sunglasses which hid his eyes. He didn't move and there was no expression on his face.
The man outside suddenly struck at the face behind the window with the heavy rod in his left hand. The glass did not shatter, but the end of the rod smashed a small round pattern into the window just in front of the other man's face. The broken glass in the circle was white. White cracks extended out several inches on all sides of the center like a spider web.
The man outside could not be sure if the man inside had flinched, and now he couldn't see his face at all. A young woman on the other side of the car was looking toward him now. Her eyes were wide and dark. After a second, the man outside smashed the window in front of her too.
On a particularly hot day, late in the afternoon on a seldom used two-lane rod, a brown and cream hardtop convertible was blocking the road to a small, imported blue car. A sweating and dirty young man, evidently seized by some frenzy, was fiercely attacking the little car, beating it on top and at the windows with a heavy chain and a bent black iron rod.
The windows were all smashed, although they would not collapse completely. The man shouted, hysterically at first, as he pounded the little car, jumping up before each blow with the chain in his right hand. He worked around and around the car, smashing the headlights and denting the fenders, hood, and roof.
He kicked the car also.
There were two people inside the car sitting motionless and looking ahead. Once, the young woman in the seat on the right had looked toward the back window and down the road behind them, but just then the man outside had begun to strike that window too with his chain, and then the smashed glass became opaque.
On one of his trips around the car, the red-faced young man stood for a few moments at the left rear fender striking again and again in front of and above the wheel. The fender buckled and banged. The man kept striking regularly, no longer shouting but grunting or snorting as he delivered each blow.
After a few minutes he suddenly stopped pounding the car. He was then in front of the car and to the left. The headlights were smashed and the glass on the pavement. The front hood was dented so badly that the front of the lid was open and bent off to the left. Even the left side of the bumper was sagging.
The man in front of the car panted deeply and dropped the chain and the heavy rod to the pavement. Then he began to stagger toward the rear of the car, staring open-mouthed at the damage he had done and looking blankly back down the road behind the little car.
He could not see a bearded man and a pretty young woman inside.
A man was leaning on the left rear fender of a ruined imported blue car toward the right edge of a narrow bending road in the late afternoon heat. He had his left foot propped on the left end of the rear bumper behind him, and he was looking back down the road appearing hot, sweaty, and tired.
The car he was leaning on was empty.
The red-faced young man tapped out a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket. As he struck the match to light it, looking down, he noticed a thin stain trickling from beneath the little car below his foot on the bumper. He slowly realized as he looked at it that he had been smelling gasoline for a time.
A man suddenly jumped away from the back of the car he was leaning on as though it was suddenly hot and burned his back and shoulder.
The gasoline was a tiny, irregular trickle on the pavement, slowly emerging from behind the flattened left tire.
Light the cigarette from three feet away. Toss the match toward the left rear wheel of the little blue car. Run back for the other car and around to the other side.
The first car exploded, sending up first a yellow flash and then orange flames and dense black smoke into the sky. In an instant the first car itself was completely hidden in the fire and smoke.
Another car, a dirty, brown and cream hardtop convertible roared to life, swung back toward the right lane, and headed away toward open country.
***
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Story: The Fall and Ruin, a Rose
***
1
Her house was like a big, messy mind. And whenever she cleaned up downstairs, which was extremely seldom now, she always ended up brushing things under the rug or behind the sofa, stacking unread magazines in some other corner scarcely disturbing their dust, and throwing most of that stuff she was going to sort out one day into an unused old trunk she kept just under the stairs.
She thought sometimes that there must be things living under there, some enormous, uncharted animal, or rats and roaches and things, a teeming bed of life all covered up and not often talked about. "It was as if the house were built on the sea and if you opened the little door leading under the stairs you'd see the living waters shimmering with never-ending movement and undreamed excitement." That, she thought one time, was eternity...living just under her stairs like a sleeping hypothalamus.
And she never really went under there or even downstairs anymore, no more often than she had to. It was dirty: that was it.
She stood up to survey her work. Gleaming and clean, the tiny room lay before her.
All was prepared.
Mentally she surveyed the lab one floor below - the electrodes, the meters and computer, the as yet lifeless woman-model itself. Yes, all there too was waiting, ready, as she had left it. All was quietly awaiting tomorrow.
She stepped again across the tiled floor, stooped to peer into the crevice between the slick wall and the bottom of the stool, genuflected briefly as her aerofoam sponge swiped across the cool and curving stone. The drying film of moisture sparkled in the light.
She straightened again, and turned. Yes, here too in the tiny third floor room, all was neat and ordered. The sink, the tub, the stool itself, the cabinet before it where alone on the shining shelf sat her black box of bank statements and stock reports. All shone and winked at her, and she felt calm and relaxed.
"It does a woman good once in a while," she used to say, "to get down on her hands and knees." (Did her old mother used to say that?)
It had been during one of the times when she was reading over those bank and stock figures (her grandchildren, she called them), then when her neat little bathroom was still on the ground floor, one day already so long ago, when she had suddenly thought of all the dirty little things crawling around in her under-the-stairs basement. Perhaps she had been thinking of insecticides and rat poisons, and she had very distinctly heard a noise. Not a very frightening sound in itself, but definitely she heard, or was she only imagining it? a peculiar little rumble, or a snarl.
She had become somewhat alarmed, and had left that first tile-smooth chamber, somewhat dingy and old in those times, to prowl the great downstairs floor. She hadn't gone far, however, when there was something, was it a sound? a vibration? something which guided her attention to the doorway under the stairs.
It was then, and immediately too, that she had decided to move upstairs. For from behind the shadowed doorway there had been, or she felt there had been - she told herself now, of course, she must have been imagining it, "her reckless imagination" - what was it? how did she perceive it? a deep, sighing, groaning moan.
It had been - her eyes glazed now remembering it, and her stomach felt empty - "it was as if the house were built on a windstorm and now the winds were whirling through the aging beams of a pirate's trusty schooner, listing and creaking as the masts trembled and the ship groaned before splashing down, down into the turbulent waters of the sea below."
She had gathered all her things, her then small collection of equipment too, and had moved entirely and unhesitatingly to the house's middle floor. And ever after, despite the filth which had met her there (she surmised that the under-stairs pipes had been somehow blocked), despite the days of toil she had been forced to spend cleaning the foul rooms of the excrement she'd found there, she had made her decision final, and almost never again descended to her house's lower floor...no more often than she had to.
And soon, of course, she had been forced to leave that entire middle floor for her burgeoning laboratory, forced again to move up a floor, to lose days of valuable time cleaning the filth-choked rooms upstairs. But she had carried on, knowing then, of course, that there would soon be her own porcelain suite, spotless, bright and clean.
2
By now she had left the bathroom for the bedroom, and had begun to prepare for sleep.
She sat there in her clean little chamber with the fluorescent lights on before bed. She sat there, holding a shoe thoughtfully in her nimble hand. "Tomorrow," she said to the shoe.
Tomorrow she would descend to the lab (and there was warmth in the thought of it), and she would finish it, the woman she was building, her mirror image. Then she could begin, "and all her works would praise her name."
That, she thought to her shoe, is eternity.
She occasionally thought as well, though she said nothing of it since she didn't want it to seem she was complaining, that it was rather unpleasant to have to work where it was so dirty. Her laboratory was on the middle floor of her house, though sometimes she worked out of hours in her nice little room upstairs. And she couldn't help noticing now and again that there was a door which led from one dark corner of the lab into that eerie little storage room under the stairs by means of a short narrow staircase leading almost straight down. She would, on occasion, throw furtive glances in the direction of that little door, though it had long since been bolted and barred, and sometimes wondered if, when the lights were out in the lab, though they almost never were, she couldn't see just a little bit of a glowing, showing from underneath the door. "As if the house were built on the sunset and the door was the last cloud the old sol would wink behind before bubbling its hot orange magic underneath the very mountains she was standing on." (Where did these words come from?)
It had been only after the second move - she was getting into her pajamas - when she had left the middle floor for her lab, that her work had taken its new and decisive direction. She was building another woman, a model of herself, a woman which would walk and move and have her being just as she herself did. A perfect replica of the human form, just what humanity needed, a woman-model to observe. The model would show her what they required, for progress. And there would be no involvement, no uncontrolled subjectivity. She would be like a test tube or a centrifuge, the algae, or a mouth-watering dog.
It was such a great idea!
She swung her legs onto the bed, and, sighing, lay back. The fluorescents above sparkled through the water in her eyes.
She was never quite sure whether or not she liked her work. Not that that was important, but it sometimes amused her to try to decide, "lying there waiting for sleep to invade, like Ethiopia over Mussolini."
There was, of course, the money. Reluctant governments were nevertheless paying dearly those days for research and construction perhaps destined to solve oh so many problems facing humankind at the moment, perhaps at any moment.
"I'm not doing if for that," she said to herself. "Oh I'm not working for the money." For indeed, she had no real need for money, her house, her equipment, her food and simple pleasures all so freely provided by the government or from privately donated funds. Yet there was the little black metal box placed carefully on the empty white shelf in the bathroom cabinet, before her when she sat; and she would often pass an hour or two there, reading eagerly the records she kept in the box, the increasing figures, the history of her prolific little grandsons and grand-daughters running around from bank to bank, from pile to pile, from hand to hand, making people happy while they bred a little more the months ahead.
"That too," she liked to think, "was eternity: coins breeding in a fertile pile of gold."
She knew she must like all that sort of thing - and the calculations too - but somewhere, somewhere beneath the while rubberized laboratory trousers she always wore or next to the superthin calculator she often carried in her breast pocket, somewhere where her eyes could not see, nor her microscope, nor her fluoroscope, there a voice "like a warm breeze wandering through the hot fingers of a dry summer night's grass fire" was telling her there was something else in the work, in the lab itself, "something dark and fierce like the uncharted waters in some Louisiana pool." There was something fierce and dark in the lab which drove her on "as a midnight blaze drives a mad, blind stallion charging into the darkness where he cannot see, but charging on and on."
She rolled onto her back; she was panting.
But her work was important, perhaps vital, she told herself, to all humanity; and she would go on with it day by day, carrying on cheerfully, even eagerly. And tomorrow, she would . . .
She yawned, and the fluorescents swam above her. Her eyes fluttered closed, and she dreamed of a racetrack and of herself clocking a speeding unicorn.
3
She had risen early that day, nervous with anticipation. She had stubbed her toe on the cold white stool while her eyes were still filled with sleep. She had dressed carefully, favoring her throbbing toe and concentrating on remaining calm.
She had descended from her little room...as usual, she had thought to herself; it's just a normal day. Yet the key had somehow crawled through her fingers and bounced to the floor when she began to unlock the lab door, and somewhere she knew.
She had entered the lab; there was nothing changed. Her equipment lay still before her, meticulously arranged and prepared. Yet she had not begun her work. She had been drawn instead to turn about the room, which was quiet and somehow unbalanced by the slanting rays of morning sunlight which were playing through the only little window near the back. She had paused there before the little door leading down to the under-stairs; she had carefully reached out her hand to check the bolts and bars, and could not now forget that they had distinctly felt warm to her cold, unsteady fingers.
It had been months since she had checked her small white cabinet just beside the outer door across the room. But now she did; today she felt it was important. She ran a short test on a drop she took from the small black vial she kept there.
It was still potent.
It was foolish, she thought cynically to himself, to keep it there. Yet she did not trust the glowing, snarling, softly waving under-stairs, and the poison she'd distilled from monkey urine would kill any beast or monster she might have to face. Perhaps it was - yes, she smiled at her hesitancy, it was foolish; but she had humored herself that morning and had found there a sort of confidence.
She had moved on and on about the room, and had finally begun.
And just as the woman was born, just as the model began slowly to stir, to blink her glazed eyes and to scowl, then - she could not now forget it - then, she had felt the floor shift "like the deck of a faltering vessel." The room was suddenly warm, and from the little door - she must have been imaging it - there was a glowing like the sunrise and a moaning like a strange imprisoned animal.
The model-woman now sat before her, and knew why she'd been made. The model was wise, and her creator quick to note all her motions and thoughts, though the noting mind often clouded with a dark thought of the cabineted vial.
"I am empty,” said the model-woman.
And she knew that it was true.
Just then, as the model-woman had begun to speak, the floor started to shake and the walls rattle. The fluorescents flashed and died, but the room was light.
There was a rumbling, a snarling, a roaring like the wind in a fire, and the bars on the little door glowed with heat, then fell away.
There was fire everywhere, the floor, the lights. The model- woman's eyes flashed in wonder and in terror as her creator vomited and writhed in her burning rubber pants.
The door smashed open. The model-woman fled, and, running out and up the stairs to the clear white room, she gulped greedily from the foul vial.
But she herself, she did not flee, and knew she did not want to go. She was standing then, awaiting it, and it washed over her in a boiling bath. She stood fast, her hands raised high above her head, knowing that she did not want to run, exulting savagely and painfully in the violent burning of her flesh as the uncharted animal, the swimming seas of boiling unction, the blind, wind-blown, charging stallion, and the flames crashed upon her like black waves on a sunny rock.
And as she died, as she perished in the awful sea from the under-stairs, her house fell to ruin about her, an innocent victim of the dark savage fight between the flowing sunsets from below the floor and the piles of excrement on the roof.
Her house had fallen into smoldering rubble, floating like smelly scum on a sunlit sea.
And today the wet, charred ruins of her house cry out to the never-ending skies: "One day, oh humanity, let there be built a house where seas and stools can live united, as in the well-ordered mind of a rose!"
***
1
Her house was like a big, messy mind. And whenever she cleaned up downstairs, which was extremely seldom now, she always ended up brushing things under the rug or behind the sofa, stacking unread magazines in some other corner scarcely disturbing their dust, and throwing most of that stuff she was going to sort out one day into an unused old trunk she kept just under the stairs.
She thought sometimes that there must be things living under there, some enormous, uncharted animal, or rats and roaches and things, a teeming bed of life all covered up and not often talked about. "It was as if the house were built on the sea and if you opened the little door leading under the stairs you'd see the living waters shimmering with never-ending movement and undreamed excitement." That, she thought one time, was eternity...living just under her stairs like a sleeping hypothalamus.
And she never really went under there or even downstairs anymore, no more often than she had to. It was dirty: that was it.
She stood up to survey her work. Gleaming and clean, the tiny room lay before her.
All was prepared.
Mentally she surveyed the lab one floor below - the electrodes, the meters and computer, the as yet lifeless woman-model itself. Yes, all there too was waiting, ready, as she had left it. All was quietly awaiting tomorrow.
She stepped again across the tiled floor, stooped to peer into the crevice between the slick wall and the bottom of the stool, genuflected briefly as her aerofoam sponge swiped across the cool and curving stone. The drying film of moisture sparkled in the light.
She straightened again, and turned. Yes, here too in the tiny third floor room, all was neat and ordered. The sink, the tub, the stool itself, the cabinet before it where alone on the shining shelf sat her black box of bank statements and stock reports. All shone and winked at her, and she felt calm and relaxed.
"It does a woman good once in a while," she used to say, "to get down on her hands and knees." (Did her old mother used to say that?)
It had been during one of the times when she was reading over those bank and stock figures (her grandchildren, she called them), then when her neat little bathroom was still on the ground floor, one day already so long ago, when she had suddenly thought of all the dirty little things crawling around in her under-the-stairs basement. Perhaps she had been thinking of insecticides and rat poisons, and she had very distinctly heard a noise. Not a very frightening sound in itself, but definitely she heard, or was she only imagining it? a peculiar little rumble, or a snarl.
She had become somewhat alarmed, and had left that first tile-smooth chamber, somewhat dingy and old in those times, to prowl the great downstairs floor. She hadn't gone far, however, when there was something, was it a sound? a vibration? something which guided her attention to the doorway under the stairs.
It was then, and immediately too, that she had decided to move upstairs. For from behind the shadowed doorway there had been, or she felt there had been - she told herself now, of course, she must have been imagining it, "her reckless imagination" - what was it? how did she perceive it? a deep, sighing, groaning moan.
It had been - her eyes glazed now remembering it, and her stomach felt empty - "it was as if the house were built on a windstorm and now the winds were whirling through the aging beams of a pirate's trusty schooner, listing and creaking as the masts trembled and the ship groaned before splashing down, down into the turbulent waters of the sea below."
She had gathered all her things, her then small collection of equipment too, and had moved entirely and unhesitatingly to the house's middle floor. And ever after, despite the filth which had met her there (she surmised that the under-stairs pipes had been somehow blocked), despite the days of toil she had been forced to spend cleaning the foul rooms of the excrement she'd found there, she had made her decision final, and almost never again descended to her house's lower floor...no more often than she had to.
And soon, of course, she had been forced to leave that entire middle floor for her burgeoning laboratory, forced again to move up a floor, to lose days of valuable time cleaning the filth-choked rooms upstairs. But she had carried on, knowing then, of course, that there would soon be her own porcelain suite, spotless, bright and clean.
2
By now she had left the bathroom for the bedroom, and had begun to prepare for sleep.
She sat there in her clean little chamber with the fluorescent lights on before bed. She sat there, holding a shoe thoughtfully in her nimble hand. "Tomorrow," she said to the shoe.
Tomorrow she would descend to the lab (and there was warmth in the thought of it), and she would finish it, the woman she was building, her mirror image. Then she could begin, "and all her works would praise her name."
That, she thought to her shoe, is eternity.
She occasionally thought as well, though she said nothing of it since she didn't want it to seem she was complaining, that it was rather unpleasant to have to work where it was so dirty. Her laboratory was on the middle floor of her house, though sometimes she worked out of hours in her nice little room upstairs. And she couldn't help noticing now and again that there was a door which led from one dark corner of the lab into that eerie little storage room under the stairs by means of a short narrow staircase leading almost straight down. She would, on occasion, throw furtive glances in the direction of that little door, though it had long since been bolted and barred, and sometimes wondered if, when the lights were out in the lab, though they almost never were, she couldn't see just a little bit of a glowing, showing from underneath the door. "As if the house were built on the sunset and the door was the last cloud the old sol would wink behind before bubbling its hot orange magic underneath the very mountains she was standing on." (Where did these words come from?)
It had been only after the second move - she was getting into her pajamas - when she had left the middle floor for her lab, that her work had taken its new and decisive direction. She was building another woman, a model of herself, a woman which would walk and move and have her being just as she herself did. A perfect replica of the human form, just what humanity needed, a woman-model to observe. The model would show her what they required, for progress. And there would be no involvement, no uncontrolled subjectivity. She would be like a test tube or a centrifuge, the algae, or a mouth-watering dog.
It was such a great idea!
She swung her legs onto the bed, and, sighing, lay back. The fluorescents above sparkled through the water in her eyes.
She was never quite sure whether or not she liked her work. Not that that was important, but it sometimes amused her to try to decide, "lying there waiting for sleep to invade, like Ethiopia over Mussolini."
There was, of course, the money. Reluctant governments were nevertheless paying dearly those days for research and construction perhaps destined to solve oh so many problems facing humankind at the moment, perhaps at any moment.
"I'm not doing if for that," she said to herself. "Oh I'm not working for the money." For indeed, she had no real need for money, her house, her equipment, her food and simple pleasures all so freely provided by the government or from privately donated funds. Yet there was the little black metal box placed carefully on the empty white shelf in the bathroom cabinet, before her when she sat; and she would often pass an hour or two there, reading eagerly the records she kept in the box, the increasing figures, the history of her prolific little grandsons and grand-daughters running around from bank to bank, from pile to pile, from hand to hand, making people happy while they bred a little more the months ahead.
"That too," she liked to think, "was eternity: coins breeding in a fertile pile of gold."
She knew she must like all that sort of thing - and the calculations too - but somewhere, somewhere beneath the while rubberized laboratory trousers she always wore or next to the superthin calculator she often carried in her breast pocket, somewhere where her eyes could not see, nor her microscope, nor her fluoroscope, there a voice "like a warm breeze wandering through the hot fingers of a dry summer night's grass fire" was telling her there was something else in the work, in the lab itself, "something dark and fierce like the uncharted waters in some Louisiana pool." There was something fierce and dark in the lab which drove her on "as a midnight blaze drives a mad, blind stallion charging into the darkness where he cannot see, but charging on and on."
She rolled onto her back; she was panting.
But her work was important, perhaps vital, she told herself, to all humanity; and she would go on with it day by day, carrying on cheerfully, even eagerly. And tomorrow, she would . . .
She yawned, and the fluorescents swam above her. Her eyes fluttered closed, and she dreamed of a racetrack and of herself clocking a speeding unicorn.
3
She had risen early that day, nervous with anticipation. She had stubbed her toe on the cold white stool while her eyes were still filled with sleep. She had dressed carefully, favoring her throbbing toe and concentrating on remaining calm.
She had descended from her little room...as usual, she had thought to herself; it's just a normal day. Yet the key had somehow crawled through her fingers and bounced to the floor when she began to unlock the lab door, and somewhere she knew.
She had entered the lab; there was nothing changed. Her equipment lay still before her, meticulously arranged and prepared. Yet she had not begun her work. She had been drawn instead to turn about the room, which was quiet and somehow unbalanced by the slanting rays of morning sunlight which were playing through the only little window near the back. She had paused there before the little door leading down to the under-stairs; she had carefully reached out her hand to check the bolts and bars, and could not now forget that they had distinctly felt warm to her cold, unsteady fingers.
It had been months since she had checked her small white cabinet just beside the outer door across the room. But now she did; today she felt it was important. She ran a short test on a drop she took from the small black vial she kept there.
It was still potent.
It was foolish, she thought cynically to himself, to keep it there. Yet she did not trust the glowing, snarling, softly waving under-stairs, and the poison she'd distilled from monkey urine would kill any beast or monster she might have to face. Perhaps it was - yes, she smiled at her hesitancy, it was foolish; but she had humored herself that morning and had found there a sort of confidence.
She had moved on and on about the room, and had finally begun.
And just as the woman was born, just as the model began slowly to stir, to blink her glazed eyes and to scowl, then - she could not now forget it - then, she had felt the floor shift "like the deck of a faltering vessel." The room was suddenly warm, and from the little door - she must have been imaging it - there was a glowing like the sunrise and a moaning like a strange imprisoned animal.
The model-woman now sat before her, and knew why she'd been made. The model was wise, and her creator quick to note all her motions and thoughts, though the noting mind often clouded with a dark thought of the cabineted vial.
"I am empty,” said the model-woman.
And she knew that it was true.
Just then, as the model-woman had begun to speak, the floor started to shake and the walls rattle. The fluorescents flashed and died, but the room was light.
There was a rumbling, a snarling, a roaring like the wind in a fire, and the bars on the little door glowed with heat, then fell away.
There was fire everywhere, the floor, the lights. The model- woman's eyes flashed in wonder and in terror as her creator vomited and writhed in her burning rubber pants.
The door smashed open. The model-woman fled, and, running out and up the stairs to the clear white room, she gulped greedily from the foul vial.
But she herself, she did not flee, and knew she did not want to go. She was standing then, awaiting it, and it washed over her in a boiling bath. She stood fast, her hands raised high above her head, knowing that she did not want to run, exulting savagely and painfully in the violent burning of her flesh as the uncharted animal, the swimming seas of boiling unction, the blind, wind-blown, charging stallion, and the flames crashed upon her like black waves on a sunny rock.
And as she died, as she perished in the awful sea from the under-stairs, her house fell to ruin about her, an innocent victim of the dark savage fight between the flowing sunsets from below the floor and the piles of excrement on the roof.
Her house had fallen into smoldering rubble, floating like smelly scum on a sunlit sea.
And today the wet, charred ruins of her house cry out to the never-ending skies: "One day, oh humanity, let there be built a house where seas and stools can live united, as in the well-ordered mind of a rose!"
***
Friday, April 23, 2010
The "Too Big to Fail" Discussion: the National Interest (essay)
***
The cardinal American values are peace and prosperity, equality of opportunity, liberty and justice for all. These values should be pursued, supported, and honored above all others. Actions that threaten or diminish them should be avoided or prohibited, vilified, or at least highly taxed. Public leaders praising these essential values should be supported; those whose decisions undermine them should be hounded out of their positions of influence.
Peace and prosperity, equality of opportunity, liberty and justice for all: the most persistent threat to these essential values is the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few. Equality of opportunity is not possible when power – social, political, or economic power – is highly concentrated. Justice is undermined. Liberty is diminished. Peace too is endangered when power is concentrated, because a means of perpetuating the hold on power by the few is demonizing so-called enemies, promoting fear, and pursuing social conflict at home or war abroad. Prosperity depends on peace and equality of opportunity. Concentration of power – as the Founding Fathers clearly understood – threatens our pursuit and attainment of all that we value.
When political and economic leaders are forced to admit that failure of this or that individual company threatens the viability of the entire national economy, it is clear that such companies have become too large and too powerful, in other words that wealth and power has indeed become too concentrated. Care must be taken to prevent such concentration of corporate power, through rigorous fiscal and taxation policies and through prudent management of the economy in general.
*
The value of a nation’s economic system is measured by the degree to which the system benefits the nation including its public institutions, its businesses, its workers, and its families. A prudently managed capitalist economy has proven its ability to benefit a nation more effectively than any other kind of economic system. Capitalism is the most reliable means of making progress toward our essential values; to continue functioning efficiently and effectively, a capitalist economy must find a right balance between (a) reward to the most successful and (b) protection for all from a high concentration of power – economic or political – in the hands of the few. One might say, for example, that if the richest 5% or fewer of the nation’s population controls 50% or more of the nation’s economic assets, then the capitalist system is prevented from sustaining the most consistent and effective achievement of equality of opportunity, prosperity, justice, and liberty for all, as well as the stablest peace possible in an uncertain world.
High-minded and unselfish people do exist, but as our founding fathers realized, the most common motive for one’s actions is self-interest. As the wealth of a nation becomes overly concentrated in the hands of the few, experience has shown time and again that members of the wealthiest group, acting rationally, use their economic power to insure the continuation of their own financial advantage, including even that of future generations of their families. Although a relative few rich people give generously to those needing help, many – perhaps most – grow more and more motivated by selfishness, greed, and the pursuit of political power. Also, a nation in which a significant number of its poorer citizens are held in a perpetual state of dependence on charity is clearly not experiencing what might be accurately called prosperity.
*
As Lincoln wrote, “Labor precedes capital.” In a healthy capitalist economy, workers make products and provide services. Owners of the firms employing the workers are paid by customers for the goods or services they purchase, and earn profits according to the ratio between the price paid and the cost of materials and labor employed. In this system most individuals receiving income are either business owners or their employees; a relative few use money itself – rather than goods or services – as a means of earning income; in a healthy capitalist economy, those few make their money by providing loans to or investments in the businesses that make the goods or provide the services. Their role is solely to facilitate the efficient production and exchange of goods and services.
The long-term health of an economy and the prosperity of a nation depend in no small measure on the degree to which income earned results from the production of goods or services, rather than from the manipulation of money. The greater the proportion of income earned resulting from money manipulation, the more vulnerable the economy is to disruptive cyclical swings from times of great prosperity, created by money’s making money, and great privation resulting from the distortion of the healthy capitalist economy caused by such a high level of dependence on money itself to generate income, rather than on the production of goods and services.
A high level of concentration of wealth in the hands of the few makes it inevitable that the economy will be characterized by a relatively high degree of dependence on income from money manipulation rather than on producing goods and services or directly facilitating such production. This is true because, in this unhealthy system, the few controlling the economy have a surplus of money that they control directly, in contrast to the businesses manufacturing goods or providing services that they control somewhat less directly. When wealth and power is highly concentrated, it is to be expected and rational for the wealthy to find it more and more convenient and vastly more efficient to make their additional income more and more from finance than from production. But in excess, this practice has disastrous consequences.
Concentration of wealth thus creates distortion of a capitalist system that threatens the nation’s prosperity.
*
The value of a tool lies in the skill and competence with which it is used. A capitalist economy is a tool for achieving the highest level of prosperity possible for a nation and its citizens; the value of our economy lies in the cleverness, the skill, and the wisdom with which it is managed to the benefit of a nation’s citizens. As a complex and always changing tool, our capitalist economy requires careful and skillful management in order to create enduring and widely shared prosperity. Over-managed or over-controlled, a capitalist economy has the tendency to stagnate, to impede technological innovation, and to bog down in paperwork and bureaucracy. But, left without sufficient managerial control, a capitalist system has the tendency to create greater and greater concentration of wealth and economic power and to produce greater and greater dependence on finance rather than production. In any case, the economy must be considered a tool which can be used, consciously and deliberately, rather than a force of nature which can only be observed and endured.
*
For a democracy to work as it is intended, creating the conditions under which the citizenry – through elected representatives – may govern themselves, it is necessary for citizens to learn the facts, not merely to exchange opposing opinions or hear others do so . The most critical function of the public media is to acquaint the citizenry with the facts, which those in the media must come to know and to report as objectively, as fully, and in as disinterested a manner as possible. This is insured by the media’s taking seriously its core mission as conveyor of fact rather than opinion and by a diversity of individual media outlets which when taken together can cancel out the subjective residue that may remain in each other’s reporting despite good-faith effort.
When economic, political, and social control of the media becomes concentrated in the hands of a relative few, the chances of such disinterested reporting of the facts and actual conditions is significantly reduced. Social and political diversity will be diminished, and narrow partisanship will be increased. Biased readers, viewers, and listeners will come to use the media as the drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination.
Seeking arguments for support of one’s bias or for opinions supporting one’s self-interest is not to seek the truth in order to make reasoned decisions, which is the approach needed for a successful democracy. Concentration of media control undermines the effectiveness of democratic processes.
*
The greatest thing about our great nation is the ideals upon which it was founded. If we are to continue America’s noble tradition and live up to our great mission in the world and in human history, we must do everything in our power to nurture, sustain, and pursue our essential values. Highly concentrated wealth and power threatens all that we hold most dear in the United States of America: peace and prosperity, equality of opportunity, liberty and justice for all.
***
The cardinal American values are peace and prosperity, equality of opportunity, liberty and justice for all. These values should be pursued, supported, and honored above all others. Actions that threaten or diminish them should be avoided or prohibited, vilified, or at least highly taxed. Public leaders praising these essential values should be supported; those whose decisions undermine them should be hounded out of their positions of influence.
Peace and prosperity, equality of opportunity, liberty and justice for all: the most persistent threat to these essential values is the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few. Equality of opportunity is not possible when power – social, political, or economic power – is highly concentrated. Justice is undermined. Liberty is diminished. Peace too is endangered when power is concentrated, because a means of perpetuating the hold on power by the few is demonizing so-called enemies, promoting fear, and pursuing social conflict at home or war abroad. Prosperity depends on peace and equality of opportunity. Concentration of power – as the Founding Fathers clearly understood – threatens our pursuit and attainment of all that we value.
When political and economic leaders are forced to admit that failure of this or that individual company threatens the viability of the entire national economy, it is clear that such companies have become too large and too powerful, in other words that wealth and power has indeed become too concentrated. Care must be taken to prevent such concentration of corporate power, through rigorous fiscal and taxation policies and through prudent management of the economy in general.
*
The value of a nation’s economic system is measured by the degree to which the system benefits the nation including its public institutions, its businesses, its workers, and its families. A prudently managed capitalist economy has proven its ability to benefit a nation more effectively than any other kind of economic system. Capitalism is the most reliable means of making progress toward our essential values; to continue functioning efficiently and effectively, a capitalist economy must find a right balance between (a) reward to the most successful and (b) protection for all from a high concentration of power – economic or political – in the hands of the few. One might say, for example, that if the richest 5% or fewer of the nation’s population controls 50% or more of the nation’s economic assets, then the capitalist system is prevented from sustaining the most consistent and effective achievement of equality of opportunity, prosperity, justice, and liberty for all, as well as the stablest peace possible in an uncertain world.
High-minded and unselfish people do exist, but as our founding fathers realized, the most common motive for one’s actions is self-interest. As the wealth of a nation becomes overly concentrated in the hands of the few, experience has shown time and again that members of the wealthiest group, acting rationally, use their economic power to insure the continuation of their own financial advantage, including even that of future generations of their families. Although a relative few rich people give generously to those needing help, many – perhaps most – grow more and more motivated by selfishness, greed, and the pursuit of political power. Also, a nation in which a significant number of its poorer citizens are held in a perpetual state of dependence on charity is clearly not experiencing what might be accurately called prosperity.
*
As Lincoln wrote, “Labor precedes capital.” In a healthy capitalist economy, workers make products and provide services. Owners of the firms employing the workers are paid by customers for the goods or services they purchase, and earn profits according to the ratio between the price paid and the cost of materials and labor employed. In this system most individuals receiving income are either business owners or their employees; a relative few use money itself – rather than goods or services – as a means of earning income; in a healthy capitalist economy, those few make their money by providing loans to or investments in the businesses that make the goods or provide the services. Their role is solely to facilitate the efficient production and exchange of goods and services.
The long-term health of an economy and the prosperity of a nation depend in no small measure on the degree to which income earned results from the production of goods or services, rather than from the manipulation of money. The greater the proportion of income earned resulting from money manipulation, the more vulnerable the economy is to disruptive cyclical swings from times of great prosperity, created by money’s making money, and great privation resulting from the distortion of the healthy capitalist economy caused by such a high level of dependence on money itself to generate income, rather than on the production of goods and services.
A high level of concentration of wealth in the hands of the few makes it inevitable that the economy will be characterized by a relatively high degree of dependence on income from money manipulation rather than on producing goods and services or directly facilitating such production. This is true because, in this unhealthy system, the few controlling the economy have a surplus of money that they control directly, in contrast to the businesses manufacturing goods or providing services that they control somewhat less directly. When wealth and power is highly concentrated, it is to be expected and rational for the wealthy to find it more and more convenient and vastly more efficient to make their additional income more and more from finance than from production. But in excess, this practice has disastrous consequences.
Concentration of wealth thus creates distortion of a capitalist system that threatens the nation’s prosperity.
*
The value of a tool lies in the skill and competence with which it is used. A capitalist economy is a tool for achieving the highest level of prosperity possible for a nation and its citizens; the value of our economy lies in the cleverness, the skill, and the wisdom with which it is managed to the benefit of a nation’s citizens. As a complex and always changing tool, our capitalist economy requires careful and skillful management in order to create enduring and widely shared prosperity. Over-managed or over-controlled, a capitalist economy has the tendency to stagnate, to impede technological innovation, and to bog down in paperwork and bureaucracy. But, left without sufficient managerial control, a capitalist system has the tendency to create greater and greater concentration of wealth and economic power and to produce greater and greater dependence on finance rather than production. In any case, the economy must be considered a tool which can be used, consciously and deliberately, rather than a force of nature which can only be observed and endured.
*
For a democracy to work as it is intended, creating the conditions under which the citizenry – through elected representatives – may govern themselves, it is necessary for citizens to learn the facts, not merely to exchange opposing opinions or hear others do so . The most critical function of the public media is to acquaint the citizenry with the facts, which those in the media must come to know and to report as objectively, as fully, and in as disinterested a manner as possible. This is insured by the media’s taking seriously its core mission as conveyor of fact rather than opinion and by a diversity of individual media outlets which when taken together can cancel out the subjective residue that may remain in each other’s reporting despite good-faith effort.
When economic, political, and social control of the media becomes concentrated in the hands of a relative few, the chances of such disinterested reporting of the facts and actual conditions is significantly reduced. Social and political diversity will be diminished, and narrow partisanship will be increased. Biased readers, viewers, and listeners will come to use the media as the drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination.
Seeking arguments for support of one’s bias or for opinions supporting one’s self-interest is not to seek the truth in order to make reasoned decisions, which is the approach needed for a successful democracy. Concentration of media control undermines the effectiveness of democratic processes.
*
The greatest thing about our great nation is the ideals upon which it was founded. If we are to continue America’s noble tradition and live up to our great mission in the world and in human history, we must do everything in our power to nurture, sustain, and pursue our essential values. Highly concentrated wealth and power threatens all that we hold most dear in the United States of America: peace and prosperity, equality of opportunity, liberty and justice for all.
***
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Reminiscence: My 30th Class Reunion
***
1
Once, after I had lived away from home for several years, I visited my parents in early June. While I was at home, my Dad and I went to a bank or the post office; a young woman came up to me and spoke to me as though we were old friends. As we chatted, I realized she was a girl whom I had known in high school – and liked – but who had never been a close friend. “Betty” asked, “Are you in town for our tenth Reunion tomorrow?”
Frankly, I would have timed my visit to avoid coinciding with the Reunion if I had paid any attention at all to the materials I must have been sent. I said sadly that, Alas no, I was only in town for a day or two and would be leaving in the morning. As we left I apologized to my father for lying, since he knew that in fact I would be there for several more days, and as I explained to him that I had not wanted to hurt “Betty’s” feelings, I began to realize just how much I really (I mean, really) did not want to see my high school colleagues again. The idea gave me an unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Was I embarrassed for some reason, or did I think I was somehow better than they? No, I think instead that perhaps they were part of “the old me” I had been in stressful times (socially speaking), and I didn’t want to think of myself that way again. Come to think of it, the new identity I thought I had fabricated by then must have still seemed vulnerable if I feared the old identity would overtake me again just by associating with a lot of my old acquaintances.
2
Anyway, it was quite surprising to find, twenty years later, that when I received information about our 30th Reunion I kind of wanted to go. I had rediscovered only one old high school friend living near me in that time, but when he told me that he was going, I said I would too.
Just before I got on the plane, my wife said: “Oh, ‘Byron,’ don’t wear your glasses. If you wear your glasses, no one will recognize you.”
I pointed out that if I didn’t wear my glasses, I wouldn’t recognize any of them!
So I wore my glasses that first night to the pre-Reunion party. No one said anything about my glasses. Most of them said the same thing:
“Well ‘Byron,’ you still have all your hair!”
3
Our high school by this point in time had been replaced by a much larger and more modern building in a much different location; it was surrounded by parking lots. The old buildings in town still stood, however, though they had now become a community college. The next morning the Reunion planners had put together a little reception at the old school. A few of the old teachers came, including my favorite English teacher, Dr. “Ross.” I did enjoy seeing him again, looking remarkably unchanged although he had by then been retired for a number of years. I felt so comfortable chatting with him I told him my most memorable experience in another teacher’s English class at an earlier grade level.
Mrs. “Grable” had assigned for homework one day a short story about a barber in a European city who used to love his work; he would sing while cutting hair, and he played the violin from time to time for the amusement of all. Then the city had been bombed, and the barber had been trapped underground, in utter darkness, with a substantial crowd who had taken shelter together. He sang to them and told funny stories about various townspeople, keeping their spirits up until they were finally rescued.
As light began to dispel the blackness, they were horrified to discover that this barber who had kept them all from despair had himself been buried, his hands and arms completely crushed under the rubble!
This exciting story had been told as “Three Times I saw Giuseppe” (or whatever the barber’s name was). Mrs. “Grable’s” assignment was to write a story of our own telling of the fourth time “I” saw Giuseppe.
The next day, as we turned in our papers, some students told of their narratives of Giuseppe’s having become a successful music teacher, or the next mayor, or something else wonderful. Then the next day after that, Mrs. “Grable,” visibly upset, told us she was going to read us one of our papers; afterward, we were to tell her if the paper should receive an A or an F. I just knew this was my paper, and I was right.
In my little story, Giuseppe had been fitted with prosthetic hands but had lost his mind, and all day, every day, he would move from side to side behind an empty old chair, singing loudly the same songs over and over while pretending to cut someone’s hair since he could not manage the shears themselves anymore.
I concluded that he had lost his mind because “he had nothing left to live for!”
Of course, the other kids loved it. “A, they said; it should get an A!” But I suspected they all knew, as I did, that it would get an F (my first ever). But why?
Mrs. “Grable” handed back the papers as class ended. On mine, next to the F, there was only one comment: “Why can’t you conform to the English Department’s way of doing things?” I rewrote the last page of my paper that night, revising the last sentence to: “He realized he had nothing left for which to live.” She raised the grade to a D.
I had told that story to others before. Most people laughed. Dr. “Ross” didn’t say anything negative; in fact, he said nothing at all.
4
That morning too I had a good chat with a guy with whom I had gone all the way through elementary school, junior high, and high school (the ghost of Mrs. “Grable” should be happy). “Al” and I had been real buddies in elementary school, but had drifted apart in junior high and high school. He had become a major sports star, both in football and in basketball (in which we had won the state championship one year). I had been involved in other things. But it was really good to reconnect with him; he had become a doctor, like his dad, and lived in the nearby city where he had attended med school.
But the most fun came after that morning reception with the teachers. Several of us who had been in the drama club together gravitated toward one another and spent hours laughing and talking. It was a little odd that one man, whom we had hardly known, hung around with us and participated in our chatter. A little odd perhaps, but great, as it turned out.
5
The big banquet that second night was all it should have been, I suppose, but it seemed anti-climactic. Anyway, the whole experience was good.
I didn’t go back to the 40th Reunion. I don’t remember why or even if I wanted to at all. I think I will go to the 50th. After all, I still have all my hair.
NOTE added in June 2010:
The 50th reunion was also great, enhanced this time by the attendance of my wife. If the theme for me of the 30th was "Why 'Byron,' you still have all your hair," the theme of the 50th for me was "Why 'Byron,' you look just like your Dad"!
***
1
Once, after I had lived away from home for several years, I visited my parents in early June. While I was at home, my Dad and I went to a bank or the post office; a young woman came up to me and spoke to me as though we were old friends. As we chatted, I realized she was a girl whom I had known in high school – and liked – but who had never been a close friend. “Betty” asked, “Are you in town for our tenth Reunion tomorrow?”
Frankly, I would have timed my visit to avoid coinciding with the Reunion if I had paid any attention at all to the materials I must have been sent. I said sadly that, Alas no, I was only in town for a day or two and would be leaving in the morning. As we left I apologized to my father for lying, since he knew that in fact I would be there for several more days, and as I explained to him that I had not wanted to hurt “Betty’s” feelings, I began to realize just how much I really (I mean, really) did not want to see my high school colleagues again. The idea gave me an unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Was I embarrassed for some reason, or did I think I was somehow better than they? No, I think instead that perhaps they were part of “the old me” I had been in stressful times (socially speaking), and I didn’t want to think of myself that way again. Come to think of it, the new identity I thought I had fabricated by then must have still seemed vulnerable if I feared the old identity would overtake me again just by associating with a lot of my old acquaintances.
2
Anyway, it was quite surprising to find, twenty years later, that when I received information about our 30th Reunion I kind of wanted to go. I had rediscovered only one old high school friend living near me in that time, but when he told me that he was going, I said I would too.
Just before I got on the plane, my wife said: “Oh, ‘Byron,’ don’t wear your glasses. If you wear your glasses, no one will recognize you.”
I pointed out that if I didn’t wear my glasses, I wouldn’t recognize any of them!
So I wore my glasses that first night to the pre-Reunion party. No one said anything about my glasses. Most of them said the same thing:
“Well ‘Byron,’ you still have all your hair!”
3
Our high school by this point in time had been replaced by a much larger and more modern building in a much different location; it was surrounded by parking lots. The old buildings in town still stood, however, though they had now become a community college. The next morning the Reunion planners had put together a little reception at the old school. A few of the old teachers came, including my favorite English teacher, Dr. “Ross.” I did enjoy seeing him again, looking remarkably unchanged although he had by then been retired for a number of years. I felt so comfortable chatting with him I told him my most memorable experience in another teacher’s English class at an earlier grade level.
Mrs. “Grable” had assigned for homework one day a short story about a barber in a European city who used to love his work; he would sing while cutting hair, and he played the violin from time to time for the amusement of all. Then the city had been bombed, and the barber had been trapped underground, in utter darkness, with a substantial crowd who had taken shelter together. He sang to them and told funny stories about various townspeople, keeping their spirits up until they were finally rescued.
As light began to dispel the blackness, they were horrified to discover that this barber who had kept them all from despair had himself been buried, his hands and arms completely crushed under the rubble!
This exciting story had been told as “Three Times I saw Giuseppe” (or whatever the barber’s name was). Mrs. “Grable’s” assignment was to write a story of our own telling of the fourth time “I” saw Giuseppe.
The next day, as we turned in our papers, some students told of their narratives of Giuseppe’s having become a successful music teacher, or the next mayor, or something else wonderful. Then the next day after that, Mrs. “Grable,” visibly upset, told us she was going to read us one of our papers; afterward, we were to tell her if the paper should receive an A or an F. I just knew this was my paper, and I was right.
In my little story, Giuseppe had been fitted with prosthetic hands but had lost his mind, and all day, every day, he would move from side to side behind an empty old chair, singing loudly the same songs over and over while pretending to cut someone’s hair since he could not manage the shears themselves anymore.
I concluded that he had lost his mind because “he had nothing left to live for!”
Of course, the other kids loved it. “A, they said; it should get an A!” But I suspected they all knew, as I did, that it would get an F (my first ever). But why?
Mrs. “Grable” handed back the papers as class ended. On mine, next to the F, there was only one comment: “Why can’t you conform to the English Department’s way of doing things?” I rewrote the last page of my paper that night, revising the last sentence to: “He realized he had nothing left for which to live.” She raised the grade to a D.
I had told that story to others before. Most people laughed. Dr. “Ross” didn’t say anything negative; in fact, he said nothing at all.
4
That morning too I had a good chat with a guy with whom I had gone all the way through elementary school, junior high, and high school (the ghost of Mrs. “Grable” should be happy). “Al” and I had been real buddies in elementary school, but had drifted apart in junior high and high school. He had become a major sports star, both in football and in basketball (in which we had won the state championship one year). I had been involved in other things. But it was really good to reconnect with him; he had become a doctor, like his dad, and lived in the nearby city where he had attended med school.
But the most fun came after that morning reception with the teachers. Several of us who had been in the drama club together gravitated toward one another and spent hours laughing and talking. It was a little odd that one man, whom we had hardly known, hung around with us and participated in our chatter. A little odd perhaps, but great, as it turned out.
5
The big banquet that second night was all it should have been, I suppose, but it seemed anti-climactic. Anyway, the whole experience was good.
I didn’t go back to the 40th Reunion. I don’t remember why or even if I wanted to at all. I think I will go to the 50th. After all, I still have all my hair.
NOTE added in June 2010:
The 50th reunion was also great, enhanced this time by the attendance of my wife. If the theme for me of the 30th was "Why 'Byron,' you still have all your hair," the theme of the 50th for me was "Why 'Byron,' you look just like your Dad"!
***
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Compromise: Good? Bad? When? (essay)
***
1
We seem to agree that it is bad when an undercover police officer’s identity is compromised or for a relationship to compromise a person’s integrity; but we also seem to agree that it is similarly bad for an individual to be known as uncompromising. Also, when discussing a negotiation of some kind, we seem to agree that compromise is not only normal but essential (both good), and the much-admired antebellum Senator Henry Clay – Lincoln’s idol – was called “the Great Compromiser” as a term of praise. So it seems clear that, while not ideal in some circumstances, in resolving political disputes compromise is particularly important.
In decision-making processes generally, however, there are at least two outcomes preferable to compromise.
The first is agreement. This should be the conscious goal of any serious engagement among proponents of differing viewpoints. In Getting to Yes, their best-seller of forty years ago, William Ury et al. demonstrated that you should not assume that your opponent disagrees with your most highly held values, and vice versa. The two sides – or for that matter, the various several sides – may see different aspects or portions of the issue under consideration as the critical ones.
The standard, highly simplified illustration of this point has to do with a fierce argument between two strong-willed individuals over who will take the only orange available to them. A compromise, of course, would be for each to take half of the delectable fruit… but that way, both may be left unsatisfied. In this standard story, humble as it is, the two individuals state just why each wants that orange so much and so urgently. One is preparing to cook something special and needs all the zest of the orange peel, while the other has been for a run on a hot day and is desperately thirsty for the juice inside. A mere compromise is not necessary in this case. An agreement is obviously preferable, by which the one would take the peel including the zest and the other would take the insides including the juice. Both would get what they wanted and needed.
In real life, disputes are much more complex, but agreement is still a worthy goal, the preferred outcome. If the discussion begins with an assumption – on one or both sides – that agreement of some kind is not possible, the opportunity for doing better than compromise, for ending up with more than half an orange apiece, would be lost. The secret to reaching agreement, and thus avoiding a dreary compromise, lies in coming to know just what the other party, or parties, wants and why.
2
The second outcome of dispute-resolution preferable to compromise is consensus, which is not the ideal – agreement – but an arrangement that all parties to the dispute can live with, perhaps more comfortably than with merely balancing one’s own wishes off the others’ with no one’s getting what is most important to her or him. For multi-party disputes, consensus is probably the best alternative that can realistically be achieved, and it should be the objective of the discussion once it has been determined that a full agreement is not possible in that particular case.
Reaching consensus is often time-consuming, but it can be reached without too much pain if all parties to the dispute analyze and articulate early on not only all that they want to achieve but also just why each objective is desirable and how much it is desired. That is, one must be both willing and able to explain to the others how the interrelated objectives are prioritized. Self-understanding, honesty, and candor are needed for the prized consensus to be reached.
In the ideal version of such a consensus, all parties end up achieving many of the objectives most critical to them, as well as a sufficient number of the less critical objectives so that they can feel that the values of the gains, taken as a whole, outweighs the disadvantages of not gaining everything desired and of giving up what they may have preferred to keep.
If resolution of the dispute is honestly the goal of the decision-making process, it is surprising how often self-aware, articulate, and candid individuals can reach consensus.
3
Compromise itself, of course, is a bargain according to which each party gains something valuable by conceding something valuable to the others. The satisfaction level of a compromise is lower than that of an agreement or a consensus, but a compromise can still be satisfactory, even though the dispute under discussion may come up again relatively soon.
A good example of a very significant compromise was reached in establishing the U. S. Constitution. A majority of the framers wanted to eliminate slavery within a relatively few years, but a significant minority – all from the South – would have been willing to put up with the status quo under the generally ineffective Articles of Confederation rather than concede something of such high value to them. In other words, the very highest priority in the negotiations for the southerners was maintaining slavery.
The others’ highest priority was making significant improvements in the status quo, but the prospect of maintaining slavery was particularly onerous because the slaves – despite having no civil rights – were to be counted in determining each state’s number of congressional representatives. The now notorious compromise was for slavery to be maintained, but for only 60% of the total number of slaves to count in the census in determining the state’s representation in Congress. The southern states benefitted to some degree from the improvements made and also gained their highest priority, while the other states could live with the improvements made, perhaps as Lincoln said anticipating the slow disappearance of slavery, and in the negotiation had made maintaining slavery more nearly tolerable in the short run.
4
The question of timing is very important in any form of dispute-resolution. To reach an agreement, it is important to share with each other what advantage one is seeking at the outset of the discussion. To reach a consensus, it is also very important to say at the beginning what one is pursuing, why, and what matters the most. Proceeding in this manner is helpful also in trying to reach a compromise – presumably after the hope of agreement or consensus has withered away. But it is also of critical importance to avoid offering to give up something one desires too early in the process.
Doing so, even if what is given up is less important than what one gains, short-circuits the process which if allowed to take its course might allow limiting the final concession to only a portion of the valuable objective; whereas offering the major concession too early guarantees the loss of that desirable gain and – even worse – causes the negotiations to start with the assumption that the other side will make a minor concession, as a response to the offered bargain, and will go on to seek further concessions from the first party. The key in seeking compromise, as in resolving disputes through agreement or consensus, is to start by asking for everything one hopes to achieve and only then being willing to make compromises – first on minor objectives – only in return for significant concessions from the other side.
Frankly, the result may turn out to be the same when a concession is offered from the beginning, but to remove all hope of achieving all one’s objectives in the final compromise before conversations even begin is to despair of making the significant progress that may have been possible despite appearances to the contrary.
***
1
We seem to agree that it is bad when an undercover police officer’s identity is compromised or for a relationship to compromise a person’s integrity; but we also seem to agree that it is similarly bad for an individual to be known as uncompromising. Also, when discussing a negotiation of some kind, we seem to agree that compromise is not only normal but essential (both good), and the much-admired antebellum Senator Henry Clay – Lincoln’s idol – was called “the Great Compromiser” as a term of praise. So it seems clear that, while not ideal in some circumstances, in resolving political disputes compromise is particularly important.
In decision-making processes generally, however, there are at least two outcomes preferable to compromise.
The first is agreement. This should be the conscious goal of any serious engagement among proponents of differing viewpoints. In Getting to Yes, their best-seller of forty years ago, William Ury et al. demonstrated that you should not assume that your opponent disagrees with your most highly held values, and vice versa. The two sides – or for that matter, the various several sides – may see different aspects or portions of the issue under consideration as the critical ones.
The standard, highly simplified illustration of this point has to do with a fierce argument between two strong-willed individuals over who will take the only orange available to them. A compromise, of course, would be for each to take half of the delectable fruit… but that way, both may be left unsatisfied. In this standard story, humble as it is, the two individuals state just why each wants that orange so much and so urgently. One is preparing to cook something special and needs all the zest of the orange peel, while the other has been for a run on a hot day and is desperately thirsty for the juice inside. A mere compromise is not necessary in this case. An agreement is obviously preferable, by which the one would take the peel including the zest and the other would take the insides including the juice. Both would get what they wanted and needed.
In real life, disputes are much more complex, but agreement is still a worthy goal, the preferred outcome. If the discussion begins with an assumption – on one or both sides – that agreement of some kind is not possible, the opportunity for doing better than compromise, for ending up with more than half an orange apiece, would be lost. The secret to reaching agreement, and thus avoiding a dreary compromise, lies in coming to know just what the other party, or parties, wants and why.
2
The second outcome of dispute-resolution preferable to compromise is consensus, which is not the ideal – agreement – but an arrangement that all parties to the dispute can live with, perhaps more comfortably than with merely balancing one’s own wishes off the others’ with no one’s getting what is most important to her or him. For multi-party disputes, consensus is probably the best alternative that can realistically be achieved, and it should be the objective of the discussion once it has been determined that a full agreement is not possible in that particular case.
Reaching consensus is often time-consuming, but it can be reached without too much pain if all parties to the dispute analyze and articulate early on not only all that they want to achieve but also just why each objective is desirable and how much it is desired. That is, one must be both willing and able to explain to the others how the interrelated objectives are prioritized. Self-understanding, honesty, and candor are needed for the prized consensus to be reached.
In the ideal version of such a consensus, all parties end up achieving many of the objectives most critical to them, as well as a sufficient number of the less critical objectives so that they can feel that the values of the gains, taken as a whole, outweighs the disadvantages of not gaining everything desired and of giving up what they may have preferred to keep.
If resolution of the dispute is honestly the goal of the decision-making process, it is surprising how often self-aware, articulate, and candid individuals can reach consensus.
3
Compromise itself, of course, is a bargain according to which each party gains something valuable by conceding something valuable to the others. The satisfaction level of a compromise is lower than that of an agreement or a consensus, but a compromise can still be satisfactory, even though the dispute under discussion may come up again relatively soon.
A good example of a very significant compromise was reached in establishing the U. S. Constitution. A majority of the framers wanted to eliminate slavery within a relatively few years, but a significant minority – all from the South – would have been willing to put up with the status quo under the generally ineffective Articles of Confederation rather than concede something of such high value to them. In other words, the very highest priority in the negotiations for the southerners was maintaining slavery.
The others’ highest priority was making significant improvements in the status quo, but the prospect of maintaining slavery was particularly onerous because the slaves – despite having no civil rights – were to be counted in determining each state’s number of congressional representatives. The now notorious compromise was for slavery to be maintained, but for only 60% of the total number of slaves to count in the census in determining the state’s representation in Congress. The southern states benefitted to some degree from the improvements made and also gained their highest priority, while the other states could live with the improvements made, perhaps as Lincoln said anticipating the slow disappearance of slavery, and in the negotiation had made maintaining slavery more nearly tolerable in the short run.
4
The question of timing is very important in any form of dispute-resolution. To reach an agreement, it is important to share with each other what advantage one is seeking at the outset of the discussion. To reach a consensus, it is also very important to say at the beginning what one is pursuing, why, and what matters the most. Proceeding in this manner is helpful also in trying to reach a compromise – presumably after the hope of agreement or consensus has withered away. But it is also of critical importance to avoid offering to give up something one desires too early in the process.
Doing so, even if what is given up is less important than what one gains, short-circuits the process which if allowed to take its course might allow limiting the final concession to only a portion of the valuable objective; whereas offering the major concession too early guarantees the loss of that desirable gain and – even worse – causes the negotiations to start with the assumption that the other side will make a minor concession, as a response to the offered bargain, and will go on to seek further concessions from the first party. The key in seeking compromise, as in resolving disputes through agreement or consensus, is to start by asking for everything one hopes to achieve and only then being willing to make compromises – first on minor objectives – only in return for significant concessions from the other side.
Frankly, the result may turn out to be the same when a concession is offered from the beginning, but to remove all hope of achieving all one’s objectives in the final compromise before conversations even begin is to despair of making the significant progress that may have been possible despite appearances to the contrary.
***
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Lucy Meets a Count
***
1
Her house was like a big, messy mind. And whenever she cleaned up downstairs, which was extremely seldom now, she always ended up brushing things under the rug or behind the sofa, stacking unread magazines in some other corner scarcely disturbing their dust, and throwing most of that stuff she was going to sort out one day into an unused old trunk she kept just under the stairs.
She thought sometimes that there must be things living under there, some enormous, uncharted animal, or rats and roaches and things, a teeming bed of life all covered up and not often talked about. "It was as if the house were built on the sea and if you opened the little door leading under the stairs you'd see the living waters shimmering with never-ending movement and undreamed excitement." That, she thought one time, was eternity...living just under her stairs like a sleeping hypothalamus.
And she never really went under there or even downstairs anymore, no more often than she had to. It was dirty: that was it.
She stood up to survey her work. Gleaming and clean, the tiny room lay before her.
All was prepared.
Mentally she surveyed the lab one floor below - the electrodes, the meters and computer, the as yet lifeless woman-model itself. Yes, all there too was waiting, ready, as she had left it. All was quietly awaiting tomorrow.
She stepped again across the tiled floor, stooped to peer into the crevice between the slick wall and the bottom of the stool, genuflected briefly as her aerofoam sponge swiped across the cool and curving stone. The drying film of moisture sparkled in the light.
She straightened again, and turned. Yes, here too in the tiny third floor room, all was neat and ordered. The sink, the tub, the stool itself, the cabinet before it where alone on the shining shelf sat her black box of bank statements and stock reports. All shone and winked at her, and she felt calm and relaxed.
"It does a woman good once in a while," she used to say, "to get down on her hands and knees." (Did her old mother used to say that?)
It had been during one of the times when she was reading over those bank and stock figures (her grandchildren, she called them), then when her neat little bathroom was still on the ground floor, one day already so long ago, when she had suddenly thought of all the dirty little things crawling around in her under-the-stairs basement. Perhaps she had been thinking of insecticides and rat poisons, and she had very distinctly heard a noise. Not a very frightening sound in itself, but definitely she heard, or was she only imagining it? a peculiar little rumble, or a snarl.
She had become somewhat alarmed, and had left that first tile-smooth chamber, somewhat dingy and old in those times, to prowl the great downstairs floor. She hadn't gone far, however, when there was something, was it a sound? a vibration? something which guided her attention to the doorway under the stairs.
It was then, and immediately too, that she had decided to move upstairs. For from behind the shadowed doorway there had been, or she felt there had been - she told herself now, of course, she must have been imagining it, "her reckless imagination" - what was it? how did she perceive it? a deep, sighing, groaning moan.
It had been - her eyes glazed now remembering it, and her stomach felt empty - "it was as if the house were built on a windstorm and now the winds were whirling through the aging beams of a pirate's trusty schooner, listing and creaking as the masts trembled and the ship groaned before splashing down, down into the turbulent waters of the sea below."
She had gathered all her things, her then small collection of equipment too, and had moved entirely and unhesitatingly to the house's middle floor. And ever after, despite the filth which had met her there (she surmised that the under-stairs pipes had been somehow blocked), despite the days of toil she had been forced to spend cleaning the foul rooms of the excrement she'd found there, she had made her decision final, and almost never again descended to her house's lower floor...no more often than she had to.
And soon, of course, she had been forced to leave that entire middle floor for her burgeoning laboratory, forced again to move up a floor, to lose days of valuable time cleaning the filth-choked rooms upstairs. But she had carried on, knowing then, of course, that there would soon be her own porcelain suite, spotless, bright and clean.
2
By now she had left the bathroom for the bedroom, and had begun to prepare for sleep.
She sat there in her clean little chamber with the fluorescent lights on before bed. She sat there, holding a shoe thoughtfully in her nimble hand. "Tomorrow," she said to the shoe.
Tomorrow she would descend to the lab (and there was warmth in the thought of it), and she would finish it, the woman she was building, her mirror image. Then she could begin, "and all her works would praise her name."
That, she thought to her shoe, is eternity.
She occasionally thought as well, though she said nothing of it since she didn't want it to seem she was complaining, that it was rather unpleasant to have to work where it was so dirty. Her laboratory was on the middle floor of her house, though sometimes she worked out of hours in her nice little room upstairs. And she couldn't help noticing now and again that there was a door which led from one dark corner of the lab into that eerie little storage room under the stairs by means of a short narrow staircase leading almost straight down. She would, on occasion, throw furtive glances in the direction of that little door, though it had long since been bolted and barred, and sometimes wondered if, when the lights were out in the lab, though they almost never were, she couldn't see just a little bit of a glowing, showing from underneath the door. "As if the house were built on the sunset and the door was the last cloud the old sol would wink behind before bubbling its hot orange magic underneath the very mountains she was standing on." (Where did these words come from?)
It had been only after the second move - she was getting into her pajamas - when she had left the middle floor for her lab, that her work had taken its new and decisive direction. She was building another woman, a model of herself, a woman which would walk and move and have her being just as she herself did. A perfect replica of the human form, just what humanity needed, a woman-model to observe. The model would show her what they required, for progress. And there would be no involvement, no uncontrolled subjectivity. She would be like a test tube or a centrifuge, the algae, or a mouth-watering dog.
It was such a great idea!
She swung her legs onto the bed, and, sighing, lay back. The fluorescents above sparkled through the water in her eyes.
She was never quite sure whether or not she liked her work. Not that that was important, but it sometimes amused her to try to decide, "lying there waiting for sleep to invade, like Ethiopia over Mussolini."
There was, of course, the money. Reluctant governments were nevertheless paying dearly those days for research and construction perhaps destined to solve oh so many problems facing humankind at the moment, perhaps at any moment.
"I'm not doing if for that," she said to herself. "Oh I'm not working for the money." For indeed, she had no real need for money, her house, her equipment, her food and simple pleasures all so freely provided by the government or from privately donated funds. Yet there was the little black metal box placed carefully on the empty white shelf in the bathroom cabinet, before her when she sat; and she would often pass an hour or two there, reading eagerly the records she kept in the box, the increasing figures, the history of her prolific little grandsons and grand-daughters running around from bank to bank, from pile to pile, from hand to hand, making people happy while they bred a little more the months ahead.
"That too," she liked to think, "was eternity: coins breeding in a fertile pile of gold."
She knew she must like all that sort of thing - and the calculations too - but somewhere, somewhere beneath the while rubberized laboratory trousers she always wore or next to the superthin calculator she often carried in her breast pocket, somewhere where her eyes could not see, nor her microscope, nor her fluoroscope, there a voice "like a warm breeze wandering through the hot fingers of a dry summer night's grass fire" was telling her there was something else in the work, in the lab itself, "something dark and fierce like the uncharted waters in some Louisiana pool." There was something fierce and dark in the lab which drove her on "as a midnight blaze drives a mad, blind stallion charging into the darkness where he cannot see, but charging on and on."
She rolled onto her back; she was panting.
But her work was important, perhaps vital, she told herself, to all humanity; and she would go on with it day by day, carrying on cheerfully, even eagerly. And tomorrow, she would . . .
She yawned, and the fluorescents swam above her. Her eyes fluttered closed, and she dreamed of a racetrack and of herself clocking a speeding unicorn.
3
She had risen early that day, nervous with anticipation. She had stubbed her toe on the cold white stool while her eyes were still filled with sleep. She had dressed carefully, favoring her throbbing toe and concentrating on remaining calm.
She had descended from her little room...as usual, she had thought to herself; it's just a normal day. Yet the key had somehow crawled through her fingers and bounced to the floor when she began to unlock the lab door, and somewhere she knew.
She had entered the lab; there was nothing changed. Her equipment lay still before her, meticulously arranged and prepared. Yet she had not begun her work. She had been drawn instead to turn about the room, which was quiet and somehow unbalanced by the slanting rays of morning sunlight which were playing through the only little window near the back. She had paused there before the little door leading down to the under-stairs; she had carefully reached out her hand to check the bolts and bars, and could not now forget that they had distinctly felt warm to her cold, unsteady fingers.
It had been months since she had checked her small white cabinet just beside the outer door across the room. But now she did; today she felt it was important. She ran a short test on a drop she took from the small black vial she kept there.
It was still potent.
It was foolish, she thought cynically to himself, to keep it there. Yet she did not trust the glowing, snarling, softly waving under-stairs, and the poison she'd distilled from monkey urine would kill any beast or monster she might have to face. Perhaps it was - yes, she smiled at her hesitancy, it was foolish; but she had humored herself that morning and had found there a sort of confidence.
She had moved on and on about the room, and had finally begun.
And just as the woman was born, just as the model began slowly to stir, to blink her glazed eyes and to scowl, then - she could not now forget it - then, she had felt the floor shift "like the deck of a faltering vessel." The room was suddenly warm, and from the little door - she must have been imaging it - there was a glowing like the sunrise and a moaning like a strange imprisoned animal.
The model-woman now sat before her, and knew why she'd been made. The model was wise, and her creator quick to note all her motions and thoughts, though the noting mind often clouded with a dark thought of the cabineted vial.
"I am empty,” said the model-woman.
And she knew that it was true.
Just then, as the model-woman had begun to speak, the floor started to shake and the walls rattle. The fluorescents flashed and died, but the room was light.
There was a rumbling, a snarling, a roaring like the wind in a fire, and the bars on the little door glowed with heat, then fell away.
There was fire everywhere, the floor, the lights. The model- woman's eyes flashed in wonder and in terror as her creator vomited and writhed in her burning rubber pants.
The door smashed open. The model-woman fled, and, running out and up the stairs to the clear white room, she gulped greedily from the foul vial.
But she herself, she did not flee, and knew she did not want to go. She was standing then, awaiting it, and it washed over her in a boiling bath. She stood fast, her hands raised high above her head, knowing that she did not want to run, exulting savagely and painfully in the violent burning of her flesh as the uncharted animal, the swimming seas of boiling unction, the blind, wind-blown, charging stallion, and the flames crashed upon her like black waves on a sunny rock.
And as she died, as she perished in the awful sea from the under-stairs, her house fell to ruin about her, an innocent victim of the dark savage fight between the flowing sunsets from below the floor and the piles of excrement on the roof.
Her house had fallen into smoldering rubble, floating like smelly scum on a sunlit sea.
And today the wet, charred ruins of her house cry out to the never-ending skies: "One day, oh humanity, let there be built a house where seas and stools can live united, as in the well-ordered mind of a rose!"
***
1
Her house was like a big, messy mind. And whenever she cleaned up downstairs, which was extremely seldom now, she always ended up brushing things under the rug or behind the sofa, stacking unread magazines in some other corner scarcely disturbing their dust, and throwing most of that stuff she was going to sort out one day into an unused old trunk she kept just under the stairs.
She thought sometimes that there must be things living under there, some enormous, uncharted animal, or rats and roaches and things, a teeming bed of life all covered up and not often talked about. "It was as if the house were built on the sea and if you opened the little door leading under the stairs you'd see the living waters shimmering with never-ending movement and undreamed excitement." That, she thought one time, was eternity...living just under her stairs like a sleeping hypothalamus.
And she never really went under there or even downstairs anymore, no more often than she had to. It was dirty: that was it.
She stood up to survey her work. Gleaming and clean, the tiny room lay before her.
All was prepared.
Mentally she surveyed the lab one floor below - the electrodes, the meters and computer, the as yet lifeless woman-model itself. Yes, all there too was waiting, ready, as she had left it. All was quietly awaiting tomorrow.
She stepped again across the tiled floor, stooped to peer into the crevice between the slick wall and the bottom of the stool, genuflected briefly as her aerofoam sponge swiped across the cool and curving stone. The drying film of moisture sparkled in the light.
She straightened again, and turned. Yes, here too in the tiny third floor room, all was neat and ordered. The sink, the tub, the stool itself, the cabinet before it where alone on the shining shelf sat her black box of bank statements and stock reports. All shone and winked at her, and she felt calm and relaxed.
"It does a woman good once in a while," she used to say, "to get down on her hands and knees." (Did her old mother used to say that?)
It had been during one of the times when she was reading over those bank and stock figures (her grandchildren, she called them), then when her neat little bathroom was still on the ground floor, one day already so long ago, when she had suddenly thought of all the dirty little things crawling around in her under-the-stairs basement. Perhaps she had been thinking of insecticides and rat poisons, and she had very distinctly heard a noise. Not a very frightening sound in itself, but definitely she heard, or was she only imagining it? a peculiar little rumble, or a snarl.
She had become somewhat alarmed, and had left that first tile-smooth chamber, somewhat dingy and old in those times, to prowl the great downstairs floor. She hadn't gone far, however, when there was something, was it a sound? a vibration? something which guided her attention to the doorway under the stairs.
It was then, and immediately too, that she had decided to move upstairs. For from behind the shadowed doorway there had been, or she felt there had been - she told herself now, of course, she must have been imagining it, "her reckless imagination" - what was it? how did she perceive it? a deep, sighing, groaning moan.
It had been - her eyes glazed now remembering it, and her stomach felt empty - "it was as if the house were built on a windstorm and now the winds were whirling through the aging beams of a pirate's trusty schooner, listing and creaking as the masts trembled and the ship groaned before splashing down, down into the turbulent waters of the sea below."
She had gathered all her things, her then small collection of equipment too, and had moved entirely and unhesitatingly to the house's middle floor. And ever after, despite the filth which had met her there (she surmised that the under-stairs pipes had been somehow blocked), despite the days of toil she had been forced to spend cleaning the foul rooms of the excrement she'd found there, she had made her decision final, and almost never again descended to her house's lower floor...no more often than she had to.
And soon, of course, she had been forced to leave that entire middle floor for her burgeoning laboratory, forced again to move up a floor, to lose days of valuable time cleaning the filth-choked rooms upstairs. But she had carried on, knowing then, of course, that there would soon be her own porcelain suite, spotless, bright and clean.
2
By now she had left the bathroom for the bedroom, and had begun to prepare for sleep.
She sat there in her clean little chamber with the fluorescent lights on before bed. She sat there, holding a shoe thoughtfully in her nimble hand. "Tomorrow," she said to the shoe.
Tomorrow she would descend to the lab (and there was warmth in the thought of it), and she would finish it, the woman she was building, her mirror image. Then she could begin, "and all her works would praise her name."
That, she thought to her shoe, is eternity.
She occasionally thought as well, though she said nothing of it since she didn't want it to seem she was complaining, that it was rather unpleasant to have to work where it was so dirty. Her laboratory was on the middle floor of her house, though sometimes she worked out of hours in her nice little room upstairs. And she couldn't help noticing now and again that there was a door which led from one dark corner of the lab into that eerie little storage room under the stairs by means of a short narrow staircase leading almost straight down. She would, on occasion, throw furtive glances in the direction of that little door, though it had long since been bolted and barred, and sometimes wondered if, when the lights were out in the lab, though they almost never were, she couldn't see just a little bit of a glowing, showing from underneath the door. "As if the house were built on the sunset and the door was the last cloud the old sol would wink behind before bubbling its hot orange magic underneath the very mountains she was standing on." (Where did these words come from?)
It had been only after the second move - she was getting into her pajamas - when she had left the middle floor for her lab, that her work had taken its new and decisive direction. She was building another woman, a model of herself, a woman which would walk and move and have her being just as she herself did. A perfect replica of the human form, just what humanity needed, a woman-model to observe. The model would show her what they required, for progress. And there would be no involvement, no uncontrolled subjectivity. She would be like a test tube or a centrifuge, the algae, or a mouth-watering dog.
It was such a great idea!
She swung her legs onto the bed, and, sighing, lay back. The fluorescents above sparkled through the water in her eyes.
She was never quite sure whether or not she liked her work. Not that that was important, but it sometimes amused her to try to decide, "lying there waiting for sleep to invade, like Ethiopia over Mussolini."
There was, of course, the money. Reluctant governments were nevertheless paying dearly those days for research and construction perhaps destined to solve oh so many problems facing humankind at the moment, perhaps at any moment.
"I'm not doing if for that," she said to herself. "Oh I'm not working for the money." For indeed, she had no real need for money, her house, her equipment, her food and simple pleasures all so freely provided by the government or from privately donated funds. Yet there was the little black metal box placed carefully on the empty white shelf in the bathroom cabinet, before her when she sat; and she would often pass an hour or two there, reading eagerly the records she kept in the box, the increasing figures, the history of her prolific little grandsons and grand-daughters running around from bank to bank, from pile to pile, from hand to hand, making people happy while they bred a little more the months ahead.
"That too," she liked to think, "was eternity: coins breeding in a fertile pile of gold."
She knew she must like all that sort of thing - and the calculations too - but somewhere, somewhere beneath the while rubberized laboratory trousers she always wore or next to the superthin calculator she often carried in her breast pocket, somewhere where her eyes could not see, nor her microscope, nor her fluoroscope, there a voice "like a warm breeze wandering through the hot fingers of a dry summer night's grass fire" was telling her there was something else in the work, in the lab itself, "something dark and fierce like the uncharted waters in some Louisiana pool." There was something fierce and dark in the lab which drove her on "as a midnight blaze drives a mad, blind stallion charging into the darkness where he cannot see, but charging on and on."
She rolled onto her back; she was panting.
But her work was important, perhaps vital, she told herself, to all humanity; and she would go on with it day by day, carrying on cheerfully, even eagerly. And tomorrow, she would . . .
She yawned, and the fluorescents swam above her. Her eyes fluttered closed, and she dreamed of a racetrack and of herself clocking a speeding unicorn.
3
She had risen early that day, nervous with anticipation. She had stubbed her toe on the cold white stool while her eyes were still filled with sleep. She had dressed carefully, favoring her throbbing toe and concentrating on remaining calm.
She had descended from her little room...as usual, she had thought to herself; it's just a normal day. Yet the key had somehow crawled through her fingers and bounced to the floor when she began to unlock the lab door, and somewhere she knew.
She had entered the lab; there was nothing changed. Her equipment lay still before her, meticulously arranged and prepared. Yet she had not begun her work. She had been drawn instead to turn about the room, which was quiet and somehow unbalanced by the slanting rays of morning sunlight which were playing through the only little window near the back. She had paused there before the little door leading down to the under-stairs; she had carefully reached out her hand to check the bolts and bars, and could not now forget that they had distinctly felt warm to her cold, unsteady fingers.
It had been months since she had checked her small white cabinet just beside the outer door across the room. But now she did; today she felt it was important. She ran a short test on a drop she took from the small black vial she kept there.
It was still potent.
It was foolish, she thought cynically to himself, to keep it there. Yet she did not trust the glowing, snarling, softly waving under-stairs, and the poison she'd distilled from monkey urine would kill any beast or monster she might have to face. Perhaps it was - yes, she smiled at her hesitancy, it was foolish; but she had humored herself that morning and had found there a sort of confidence.
She had moved on and on about the room, and had finally begun.
And just as the woman was born, just as the model began slowly to stir, to blink her glazed eyes and to scowl, then - she could not now forget it - then, she had felt the floor shift "like the deck of a faltering vessel." The room was suddenly warm, and from the little door - she must have been imaging it - there was a glowing like the sunrise and a moaning like a strange imprisoned animal.
The model-woman now sat before her, and knew why she'd been made. The model was wise, and her creator quick to note all her motions and thoughts, though the noting mind often clouded with a dark thought of the cabineted vial.
"I am empty,” said the model-woman.
And she knew that it was true.
Just then, as the model-woman had begun to speak, the floor started to shake and the walls rattle. The fluorescents flashed and died, but the room was light.
There was a rumbling, a snarling, a roaring like the wind in a fire, and the bars on the little door glowed with heat, then fell away.
There was fire everywhere, the floor, the lights. The model- woman's eyes flashed in wonder and in terror as her creator vomited and writhed in her burning rubber pants.
The door smashed open. The model-woman fled, and, running out and up the stairs to the clear white room, she gulped greedily from the foul vial.
But she herself, she did not flee, and knew she did not want to go. She was standing then, awaiting it, and it washed over her in a boiling bath. She stood fast, her hands raised high above her head, knowing that she did not want to run, exulting savagely and painfully in the violent burning of her flesh as the uncharted animal, the swimming seas of boiling unction, the blind, wind-blown, charging stallion, and the flames crashed upon her like black waves on a sunny rock.
And as she died, as she perished in the awful sea from the under-stairs, her house fell to ruin about her, an innocent victim of the dark savage fight between the flowing sunsets from below the floor and the piles of excrement on the roof.
Her house had fallen into smoldering rubble, floating like smelly scum on a sunlit sea.
And today the wet, charred ruins of her house cry out to the never-ending skies: "One day, oh humanity, let there be built a house where seas and stools can live united, as in the well-ordered mind of a rose!"
***
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Too Much Government? Not Enough? Taxes?
***
Once I was one of four or five individuals from various locations invited to spend four days at General Motors headquarters in Detroit. The company’s interest was said to be, and seemed to be, to start recruiting new professional employees who were not engineers or accountants, GM’s traditional applicant pool. We were a historian, a writer, an artist, a speech teacher, and a psychologist.
Two things happened within the first two hours of our program that were memorable. First, our host was giving us an overview of our schedule. After our first day there at headquarters, we were to go visit several different manufacturing, design, and testing plants. We were shown a map, and directions were drawn indicating how to drive from our hotel to each site. Our host was astonished, indeed flabbergasted, to learn that none of us had a car with us. I had come by bus, two or three came by train, one local by taxicab, and one local had been dropped off by his wife on her way to work. That was the first memorable event. (After a few phone calls, we were provided with two cars and drivers for the next several days.)
Next on our agenda that first day was an elaborate presentation involving a large model displayed in stages around a large room, several films, and a presenter. The subject was the history of transportation in America, which started with the reasonable assertion that the development of our culture and the progress of our economy were significantly influenced by innovations in transportation technology. As I recall, there was passing reference to the shoddy roads (horsepaths) and inefficient and expensive private tollways of colonial America, before development of shipping along the larger rivers. Perhaps reference was made to the invention of the steamboat.
The first emphasized innovation, as I now remember it, was development of the great canal system, converting the unpredictable and inconsistent riverways into more dependable means of transportation for passengers and especially products. Next came the development of the railroads and finally trucking along modern and ever improving highway systems. This presentation was designed to show how dependent today our economy and our culture had become upon motorized vehicles, the prize products of American private industry.
Major private corporations, one of which of course was General Motors, were continuing to serve us fundamentally and well. We owed everything (or at least a whole lot) to the free enterprise system! At dinner that evening, among ourselves, we discovered that we had all noted the same thing: just about every major step forward in our transportation history – as the presentation that afternoon had clearly shown – was an intervention by government, due less to private enterprise than to public funding. The roads, the canals, the interstate highways, and – through tax subsidies and especially land grants – the rail system were all dependent upon government action and the use of tax dollars.
One hears a lot today about the right size of government and the right amount of taxation. Not only politicians but also private, ordinary citizens are often heard to say, “Reduce the size of government” and “Lower taxes.” This is for many a political dogma, a litany in the public worship.
And, I’m sorry, it is just wrong.
What matters and should matter to all of us is not how big or how small our government is; what matters is how good our government is, how well our government serves our long-term, mutual interest.
And what matters is not that we pay too much in taxes, but to what degree each of us and each group of us are doing our fair share to fund the quality of government we need and deserve. We should all demand good government – intelligent, efficient, effective, and long-term government – as well as the tax system most likely to provide it.
Let us recall: the cardinal American values are peace and prosperity, equality of opportunity, liberty, and justice for all. These values should be pursued, supported, and honored above all others. Actions that threaten or diminish them should be avoided or prohibited, vilified, or at least highly taxed. Public leaders praising these essential values should be supported; those whose decisions undermine them should be hounded out of their positions of influence.
These values must be kept foremost in our minds as we consider any proposed change in government. The size and forms of government as well as methods used to determine the size of each income-earner’s fair share of its funding should be decided not on some abstract or dogmatic principle about either the size of government or about the amount of taxes imposed on everyone; but about making government better and the tax system more just.
***
1
Once I was one of four or five individuals from various locations invited to spend four days at General Motors headquarters in Detroit. The company’s interest was said to be, and seemed to be, to start recruiting new professional employees who were not engineers or accountants, GM’s traditional applicant pool. We were a historian, a writer, an artist, a speech teacher, and a psychologist.
Two things happened within the first two hours of our program that were memorable. First, our host was giving us an overview of our schedule. After our first day there at headquarters, we were to go visit several different manufacturing, design, and testing plants. We were shown a map, and directions were drawn indicating how to drive from our hotel to each site. Our host was astonished, indeed flabbergasted, to learn that none of us had a car with us. I had come by bus, two or three came by train, one local by taxicab, and one local had been dropped off by his wife on her way to work. That was the first memorable event. (After a few phone calls, we were provided with two cars and drivers for the next several days.)
Next on our agenda that first day was an elaborate presentation involving a large model displayed in stages around a large room, several films, and a presenter. The subject was the history of transportation in America, which started with the reasonable assertion that the development of our culture and the progress of our economy were significantly influenced by innovations in transportation technology. As I recall, there was passing reference to the shoddy roads (horsepaths) and inefficient and expensive private tollways of colonial America, before development of shipping along the larger rivers. Perhaps reference was made to the invention of the steamboat.
The first emphasized innovation, as I now remember it, was development of the great canal system, converting the unpredictable and inconsistent riverways into more dependable means of transportation for passengers and especially products. Next came the development of the railroads and finally trucking along modern and ever improving highway systems. This presentation was designed to show how dependent today our economy and our culture had become upon motorized vehicles, the prize products of American private industry.
Major private corporations, one of which of course was General Motors, were continuing to serve us fundamentally and well. We owed everything (or at least a whole lot) to the free enterprise system! At dinner that evening, among ourselves, we discovered that we had all noted the same thing: just about every major step forward in our transportation history – as the presentation that afternoon had clearly shown – was an intervention by government, due less to private enterprise than to public funding. The roads, the canals, the interstate highways, and – through tax subsidies and especially land grants – the rail system were all dependent upon government action and the use of tax dollars.
2
One hears a lot today about the right size of government and the right amount of taxation. Not only politicians but also private, ordinary citizens are often heard to say, “Reduce the size of government” and “Lower taxes.” This is for many a political dogma, a litany in the public worship.
And, I’m sorry, it is just wrong.
What matters and should matter to all of us is not how big or how small our government is; what matters is how good our government is, how well our government serves our long-term, mutual interest.
And what matters is not that we pay too much in taxes, but to what degree each of us and each group of us are doing our fair share to fund the quality of government we need and deserve. We should all demand good government – intelligent, efficient, effective, and long-term government – as well as the tax system most likely to provide it.
3
Let us recall: the cardinal American values are peace and prosperity, equality of opportunity, liberty, and justice for all. These values should be pursued, supported, and honored above all others. Actions that threaten or diminish them should be avoided or prohibited, vilified, or at least highly taxed. Public leaders praising these essential values should be supported; those whose decisions undermine them should be hounded out of their positions of influence.
These values must be kept foremost in our minds as we consider any proposed change in government. The size and forms of government as well as methods used to determine the size of each income-earner’s fair share of its funding should be decided not on some abstract or dogmatic principle about either the size of government or about the amount of taxes imposed on everyone; but about making government better and the tax system more just.
***
Friday, March 12, 2010
Reminiscence: Dad Meets His Sister
***
1
My father lost his mother when he was 13 years old. It was the “Spanish Influenza” epidemic of 1917 that killed her. His grandmother, who had helped take care of him and his older brother most of their lives, had died only about a year before his mother.
Dad had been born in a small historic city on the Atlantic coast, when his father was away exploring new opportunities in Texas. His mother and grandmother had taken Dad as a babe in arms, along with his toddler brother, half way across the continent on the train to rejoin his father.
Shortly after they had arrived in Texas, and his mother had taken a job, Dad’s father left the family. A divorce came shortly afterward, and before long the father had remarried and left the area. He did not support the family from this point on.
2
Knowing that his father had acted irresponsibly toward his mother was a source of pain and shame to my Dad, whose most deeply held values were commitment to helping others, loyalty to family and friends, moral rectitude, and taking responsibility.
When I was in my early teens, Dad told me that he had met his father only once, when he was about six years old. His father had taken the two young brothers to an elegant barber shop in a neighboring city, where he had treated them to a manicure, the only one Dad ever had. That was it. He led me to believe that he suspected that his father had been unfaithful to his mother even before the divorce. That would have hurt him more for what it said about his father's moral character than for the harm to himself and his brother.
Dad and his brother, with advice from a concerned neighbor, raised themselves by selling newspapers both before and after school. They took other jobs when they could find them, going to school every day; they lived on the second level of a garage on their mother’s home lot, the neighbor exercising a Power of Attorney. The mother’s modest life insurance money paid for renovation of the garage. The lower level was rented out to a reporter at the local newspaper, and the house was rented to a family. Never did the boys hear from their father, who was simply not part of their lives.
Ten years or so later, when the two brothers were making their way in different cities, Dad saw an advertisement for a vaudeville song and dance act at a nearby theatre. The two performers, who turned out to be brother and sister, were also named “Derrick,” so Dad contacted them. Their mother told him she was the second wife who had left with Dad’s father all those years before. “Bob,” “Sally,” their mother, and Dad spent a few hours together during the day before the second performance. Dad learned that his father had divorced his second wife as well, though she and her children were still receiving support from him.
They went on their way on the vaudeville circuit, and Dad did not hear from them again.
3
Dad never knew anything about his forbears and had no knowledge of his family’s history. Growing up, I was not aware of any curiosity on his part to learn more. But many years later, after Dad had retired, Mother wrote that he was taking her to his birthplace on the coast to see if they could find out anything about his family’s life before the move to Texas.
My wife and I joined them after a few days. They had found some information in a local historical society, including Dad’s parents’ marriage license and the name of Dad’s grandfather on his mother’s side, and together we found a burial record at a local cemetery and several references to his grandparents – and parents – in turn-of-the-century city directories. I was surprised that all this seemed quite meaningful to my Dad, and was also surprised that he and mother were going on to another city farther down the coast to pursue hints that his father had come up from there.
By chance they came across a woman named “Derrick,” who turned out to have been the widow of Dad’s half-brother “Bob.” After Mother and Dad returned to their home, a little package came from this woman with several mementos of his father, which his half-brother had had. The next time my wife and I visited my parents at their home, Dad showed us the little treasures, which proved that his father had indeed lived in the more southern city before moving up the coast to where he had met and married Dad’s mother.
4
With my wife, I lived in a large northeastern city, a long way from Texas, but after seeing how fortunate Dad himself had been in his researches, I decided to make a cold call to the one person named “Derrick” in our own telephone book, one “S. Derrick,” who turned out to be “Sarah.” She had been a widow for a number of years. She was reluctant to tell me, but did eventually acknowledge that she had been known as “Sally” when she and her brother had had a song and dance vaudeville act. I don’t know whether she told me in that first conversation, but she also remembered the day when she had briefly met my father.
Although retired, Dad still traveled for his profession now and then. The next time his business brought him to our city, he brought Mother with him, and he told us he was going to call his half-sister and see if he could arrange a reunion. He seemed uneasy about this, which was unusual for my Dad, but was convinced it was the right thing to do.
After a brief telephone conversation, the meeting was arranged at “Sarah’s” apartment across town. We all went: Mother and Dad, my wife and I. The encounter was quite uncomfortable and did not last long.
We began by introducing ourselves, Dad giving a brief summary of his career and Mother chipping in to let “Sarah” know that he was being overly modest. My wife and I talked about our jobs and where we lived. All this was an effort to establish a friendly ambiance and to build a base for developing a relationship. “Sarah” seemed to understand this intent, but seemed rather distant and stressed herself.
Getting to family matters after a short while, a few sentences were exchanged between Dad and “Sarah.” He ultimately told her when he had been born, the day of the month as well as the year. Looking down at her hands in her lap, “Sarah” told us she had been born a month or so before him.
Dad seemed his usual outgoing, empathetic self, and we left soon after. As we drove off, he said quietly to us, “I was afraid of that." We knew how bad he felt.
***
1
My father lost his mother when he was 13 years old. It was the “Spanish Influenza” epidemic of 1917 that killed her. His grandmother, who had helped take care of him and his older brother most of their lives, had died only about a year before his mother.
Dad had been born in a small historic city on the Atlantic coast, when his father was away exploring new opportunities in Texas. His mother and grandmother had taken Dad as a babe in arms, along with his toddler brother, half way across the continent on the train to rejoin his father.
Shortly after they had arrived in Texas, and his mother had taken a job, Dad’s father left the family. A divorce came shortly afterward, and before long the father had remarried and left the area. He did not support the family from this point on.
2
Knowing that his father had acted irresponsibly toward his mother was a source of pain and shame to my Dad, whose most deeply held values were commitment to helping others, loyalty to family and friends, moral rectitude, and taking responsibility.
When I was in my early teens, Dad told me that he had met his father only once, when he was about six years old. His father had taken the two young brothers to an elegant barber shop in a neighboring city, where he had treated them to a manicure, the only one Dad ever had. That was it. He led me to believe that he suspected that his father had been unfaithful to his mother even before the divorce. That would have hurt him more for what it said about his father's moral character than for the harm to himself and his brother.
Dad and his brother, with advice from a concerned neighbor, raised themselves by selling newspapers both before and after school. They took other jobs when they could find them, going to school every day; they lived on the second level of a garage on their mother’s home lot, the neighbor exercising a Power of Attorney. The mother’s modest life insurance money paid for renovation of the garage. The lower level was rented out to a reporter at the local newspaper, and the house was rented to a family. Never did the boys hear from their father, who was simply not part of their lives.
Ten years or so later, when the two brothers were making their way in different cities, Dad saw an advertisement for a vaudeville song and dance act at a nearby theatre. The two performers, who turned out to be brother and sister, were also named “Derrick,” so Dad contacted them. Their mother told him she was the second wife who had left with Dad’s father all those years before. “Bob,” “Sally,” their mother, and Dad spent a few hours together during the day before the second performance. Dad learned that his father had divorced his second wife as well, though she and her children were still receiving support from him.
They went on their way on the vaudeville circuit, and Dad did not hear from them again.
3
Dad never knew anything about his forbears and had no knowledge of his family’s history. Growing up, I was not aware of any curiosity on his part to learn more. But many years later, after Dad had retired, Mother wrote that he was taking her to his birthplace on the coast to see if they could find out anything about his family’s life before the move to Texas.
My wife and I joined them after a few days. They had found some information in a local historical society, including Dad’s parents’ marriage license and the name of Dad’s grandfather on his mother’s side, and together we found a burial record at a local cemetery and several references to his grandparents – and parents – in turn-of-the-century city directories. I was surprised that all this seemed quite meaningful to my Dad, and was also surprised that he and mother were going on to another city farther down the coast to pursue hints that his father had come up from there.
By chance they came across a woman named “Derrick,” who turned out to have been the widow of Dad’s half-brother “Bob.” After Mother and Dad returned to their home, a little package came from this woman with several mementos of his father, which his half-brother had had. The next time my wife and I visited my parents at their home, Dad showed us the little treasures, which proved that his father had indeed lived in the more southern city before moving up the coast to where he had met and married Dad’s mother.
4
With my wife, I lived in a large northeastern city, a long way from Texas, but after seeing how fortunate Dad himself had been in his researches, I decided to make a cold call to the one person named “Derrick” in our own telephone book, one “S. Derrick,” who turned out to be “Sarah.” She had been a widow for a number of years. She was reluctant to tell me, but did eventually acknowledge that she had been known as “Sally” when she and her brother had had a song and dance vaudeville act. I don’t know whether she told me in that first conversation, but she also remembered the day when she had briefly met my father.
Although retired, Dad still traveled for his profession now and then. The next time his business brought him to our city, he brought Mother with him, and he told us he was going to call his half-sister and see if he could arrange a reunion. He seemed uneasy about this, which was unusual for my Dad, but was convinced it was the right thing to do.
After a brief telephone conversation, the meeting was arranged at “Sarah’s” apartment across town. We all went: Mother and Dad, my wife and I. The encounter was quite uncomfortable and did not last long.
We began by introducing ourselves, Dad giving a brief summary of his career and Mother chipping in to let “Sarah” know that he was being overly modest. My wife and I talked about our jobs and where we lived. All this was an effort to establish a friendly ambiance and to build a base for developing a relationship. “Sarah” seemed to understand this intent, but seemed rather distant and stressed herself.
Getting to family matters after a short while, a few sentences were exchanged between Dad and “Sarah.” He ultimately told her when he had been born, the day of the month as well as the year. Looking down at her hands in her lap, “Sarah” told us she had been born a month or so before him.
Dad seemed his usual outgoing, empathetic self, and we left soon after. As we drove off, he said quietly to us, “I was afraid of that." We knew how bad he felt.
***
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Poem: An Old Man Proceeds
***
***
The young woman
in the red car
in the space
next to me,
Without thought
effortlessly
moves up and on
ahead,
While I,
focusing my will,
concentrating,
lift the one knee
Pushing off
the other toes,
step up the curb
and go on
my way.
in the red car
in the space
next to me,
Without thought
effortlessly
moves up and on
ahead,
While I,
focusing my will,
concentrating,
lift the one knee
Pushing off
the other toes,
step up the curb
and go on
my way.
***
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