Organized Decays

[organizeddecays]

Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona (his bumper sticker identified him as AuH2O) said the following when he accepted the nomination for president in 1964 at the 28th Republican National Convention.

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

In 1964 we were among the very few Democrats living in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. (We always joked that in 1960 the 44118 provided exactly four votes for John F. Kennedy: my parents and Joe and Lillian S., the parents of my best friend.) Yet even then, with the Cold War at its height, with McCarthyism still distorting political and cultural discourse, and the Civil Rights and feminist movements gaining traction and momentum, these words seemed ominous.

And they sound even worse now, has rhetoric from both Right and Left gets louder and uglier and more violent.

On the Right, Second-Amendment partisans (amplified by the National Rifle Association) scream that the government—specifically President Obama—intends to take away every last gun and then lead some heinous action intended to suppress and even imprison every “good” American. The same people who claim to be “good guys with guns” leave loaded guns where their children can get them; provide guns to their mentally-ill children and spend “quality time” on ranges ensuring that their children become skilled shooters; and respond to arguments and irritations by firing bullets in a blind rage and to the sounds of family members at night or police and firefighters responding arriving to conduct wellness checks by firing bullets at demons emerging from their own paranoia.

On the Right, individuals elected and appointed to local and state government, judgeships, Congress, and the Supreme Court are determined to remake our nation as a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. They would replace education with catechism and return women to a condition of chattel. Children would have no recourse against rapists in their families and social circles or parents who willfully withhold vaccinations that protect them from disease and medical treatment that heals illness and injury. “Rights” and “liberties” would be a matter of a person’s position within the social and political hierarchy.

“Extremism in the defense of liberty,” Goldwater said to the GOP, “is no vice.” But whose liberty is being defended and to what end? “Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The wealthy and the powerful have always been immoderate in their pursuit of “justice”—or as Charlie Sheen and Donald Trump might put it, “winning.”

On the Left—and I grant you the voices are primarily young, male, white and privileged—Hillary, Obama, and the entire notion of Democratic politics are cast as evil incarnate. Most of the partisans feel the Bern and see him as a savior. Bernie Sanders’ politics are untainted by any force of evil), his character is without flaw, and the world that he would bring about would be an ecology of honesty, prosperity, education and freedom underwritten by enormous sums that would be collected from the One Percent, Wall Street and Big Business. Should Bernie, the registered Independent and self-identified socialist, be the candidate of the Democrats in the fall, they cannot imagine either a loss in the election or a failure to enact his vision once in the White House. Should Hillary be the candidate, many say they will either not vote at all or vote for Donald Trump, and that a Republican victory would “serve the Democratic machine right.”

Extreme behavior? Yes, but they argue that desperate times call for desperate measures. It’s an old thought. The Greek physician Hippocrates (470-360 BCE) said, “For extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure, as to restriction, are most suitable.” Erasmus (1466-1536) concurred in 1500: “Malo nodo, malus quaerendus cuneus (“for a hard knot a hard tool must be sought”) But so thought the southern states when they committed to the preservation of slavery and fired on Fort Sumter in 1861. And so did brave Americans who risked their lives—and sometimes lost their lives—to win the vote, to end Jim Crow, to practice their full measure of American citizenship.

Revolution. It is an extreme measure. And Revolution hurts many innocent bystanders it purports to help.

But it is the vilification of the party and everyone associated with it that horrifies me. It is the extreme language, the advancement of any accusation however poor the evidence that supports it, the claims that are not only immoderate but wild, paranoid and Trumpian in their absolutism and utter lack of rational and substantiated evidence that so disturbs me.

I don’t disagree entirely with these folk who would change the world. We children of the sixties took on the project half a century ago. But their tone scares me. Their violence of expression scares me. And their abandonment of rational and measured discourse scares me most of all.

Some extremism is no vice and the companion moderation no virtue?

I cannot agree,

[organizeddecays]

True, False or Something Else

I was chatting with my bestest and oldest friend--she's a week older than I and we met more or less in the early days of 1958. There's not too much we have held back and we get directly to the issues when they come up.

We more or less raised the same issue at the same moment: we are recognizing our impatience with things while becoming less judgmental. A contradiction you say? A matter of semantics?

No. We are more impatient. I certainly am. I just don't have the time to put up with silliness, with beating around the bush, with whining about one's travails and the inconveniences that make life what it is. My paper can't be delivered by breakfast because 1) the route is so long or 2) the weekly paper that day doesn't have to arrive until much later or 3) this address is at the end of the route and that's just the way the cookie crumbles?

Both the Baltimore Sun and the New York Times guarantee my daily paper by 6:30 am and my weekend paper by 8:00--not that I consider 8:00 decently early. Hey, I'm paying to get the paper delivered and it's your job to get it here to me on time. I don't want your job but you apparently do want it, so just do it and qwitcherbellachin'. I'm no more forgiving in other aspects of the quotidian.

I allowed myself--stupidly and knowingly--to be drawn into an argument over Thanksgiving with an old friend of my husband. He cited an article by Heather MacDonald in the Wall Street Journal decrying the elimination of "single author" courses for UCLA English majors in Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer. According to Rebecca Schuman in Slate magazine, the change was accompanied by new "breadth requirements that include perspectives on gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, transnationalism, and—gasp—creative writing."

I listened to a tirade about what bad poets Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni and Rita Dove are and said that I like their poetry. I pointed out that the gentleman chose to exclude singer-songwriters like Phil Ochs from his survey of folk music but that I could not imagine the 1960s and protest without that voice. He said there isn't time to teach everything. I said, precisely, that an English major also has to read deeply in the literature of the 20th and early 21st centuries in order to be a scholar and that means that less time will be devoted to the works of dead white males. 

Then the turkey had to be taken off the fire and the gravy made.

But I have so little patience with these arguments, these prejudices, these demands that Art and Truth are pure and immutable things. 

My impatience is therefore part of a tonalist vision that has only the thinnest slivers of pure white and velvet black amid a sea of grays from silver and pewter to ash and charcoal. Although I was told my youthful liberalism would move to a more rigid conservatism, I have found that not to be the case. I need more information, more time to muse. How do I feel about the uproar after so many white police have shot and killed young black men? I feel that the anger and discouragement and paranoia need acknowledgement and consideration. I think that privileged white people like myself need to take a step back and think about how assumptions and attitudes--a sense of "Truth"--is a malleable, subject, and deeply ingrained thing.

Tonight I listened to an argument that torture inflicted by the CIA and its contractors on suspected terrorists was okay, even though torture is a bad thing, because it produced significant amounts of reliable intelligence that kept America safe. Is torture ever okay? I just don't know. But I know that any information elicited from people whose only goal is to get the pain to stop is dubious. I would be far less concerned in revealing "truth" than I would be in telling my torturer what he wants to hear.

Since when have we ever been sure that a person willing to do such heinous things to any living creature, let alone a fellow human being, was interested in hearing the truth rather than what he wants to hear?  

[organizeddecays]

Unwanted Gifts

Today an enormous box arrived. It was filled with an extravagant assortment of frozen meats we’re would prefer not to eat and for which there is no room in the freezer, and a set of kitchen knives not nearly as good as the ones we already own and for which we have no storage.

The givers—well the givers, I am sure, have the “best” intentions.

Yet we have asked—I specifically have asked often and clearly—that they not give us things, that they not spend money on us that simply makes us feel (although we cannot afford it) that a comparable gesture is obligatory. We want for nothing and we want nothing. Whatever the budget allocated, we’d rather by far it be spent, it spent it must be, on some cause we care about: the local nature preserve, the children’s program of the local symphony orchestra, the education department of an art museum, the Salvation Army for all we care.

The box arrived and we opened it and I was angry. Angry, hurt, discouraged, offended.

It is as though the pair involved put their heads together and said, “She really pisses us off, this intruder. How can we express our disdain for her, our rejection of all she embodies, and still look like good, caring, loving people who only want to show our affection in the Christmas season?”

In my crowd we call that passive-aggressive behavior.

It is a dreadful thing to say, but the affection I felt—or tried to feel—for the children of my Dear One is eroding. They have insulted my politics obliquely and sometimes overtly; they have dismissed my intelligence and what little wisdom I have accrued. At our first encounter I was given the third degree as to my financial resources and my objectives in attaching myself to their father, a man 18 years my senior; more than 25 years later, my motivations remain suspect.

They are rich, it is true; they made their own money and that is admirable. They have substantially more resources than their father and I combined and that is an accomplishment we can admire.

The depth of their pockets, however, is no indication of a well-tailored morality.

My family, some of whom enjoyed significant financial comfort, taught me that it was unkind, simply wrong, to use wealth to make another feel poor, diminished, of no consequence. When one expresses affection through a gift, the gift should neither overwhelm nor intimidate but only move. If something more than a card could not be reciprocated, then bake a batch of cookies. If it is their company that you cherish above all else, then treat them to a quiet meal in a restaurant that is not entirely beyond their means.

If you love someone, make them feel loved, not inadequate.

Gifts that are demonstrations of power, of emotional gamesmanship, of superiority: these are unwanted gifts. 

And I am so, so angry that the “gift” gives me nothing but anger. I am angry that I must make lavish expressions of gratitude for an insult. 

Honestly. Who the f*** do they think they are. And who the f*** do they think I am.

[organizeddecays]

As Language Changes

I find I have trouble with new words. Not new vocabulary, like interesting words I encounter when reading the New Yorker magazine or Hans Christian Anderson: European Witness by Paul Binding, which currently rests on my bedside table. I don’t have trouble learning new words; I have trouble accepting new words.

"Gifting." Now what was so wrong with the verb "to give" that it was necessary to coin a new verb? I grasp that "gifting" has to do with "making a gift," as distinct from transferring something from one person to another or making a gesture that requires no response. A philanthropist might make a gift to an institution as Jerry Perenchio recently did of a large collection of works of modern art to the Los Angeles Museum of Art.

He did not, however “gift” those objects to the museum. A gift is something that comes with no strings attached. Mr. Perenchio knotted some strings around the pictures. LACMA gets nothing until Mr. Perenchio kicks the proverbial bucket and then only provided that the museum has completed its proposed renovations, a rather astonishing structure designed by Swiss architect and Pritzker-Prize winner Peter Zumthor, which should be open by 2023. That’s only nine years away and it’s one heck of a complex. 

No, if Mr. Perenchio was freely giving—or “gifting”—his collection to LACMA, there would be no stipulations. A gift is a gift. The Oxford English Dictionary does recognize “gift” as a verb: it defines gifting as 1) “To endow or furnish with gifts; to endow, invest, or present with as a gift or 2) “To bestow as a gift; to make a present of.” The OED furthermore defines a gift as “The action of giving, an instance of the same; a giving, bestowal… as a gift, gratuitously, for nothing.” Mr. Perenchio is making an arrangement with the museum. There is a quid pro quo in place: you can have my art if you do for me something I want you to to.

While “gifting” is not a neologism—usage in the OED is documented in quotations ranging from 1619 to 1884—the word grates on my ear. It comes to me as something fuzzy in meaning, as deliberately ambiguous so as not to be confined to any denotative corner. Yes, I also cringe when I hear “impact” used as as a verb, especially when teeth are not the subject under discussion.And in this age of xenophobia, I’d find it helpful if people would distinguish between “immigrants”—folks entering a country with the intention of staying there—and “emigrants” or residents choosing to leave their country behind, presumably for good.

I also wish people could get a grip in the difference between “I” (a pronoun referring to myself used as the subject of a verb) and “me” (a pronoun referring to myself used as the object of a verb). But then, I wish, even more, that people would make a marginal effort to make the antecedents of any pronoun clear.

Of course language changes; it is the nature of language to accommodate new ideas and new information. I just wish that old folks like me could depend on old, familiar and dependable words as a means of finding our way into those new ideas and new facts—and learning the vocabulary that we must learn if we are not to find ourselves irretrievably distant from the world that, for better or for worse, is the world of our dotage.

[organizeddecays]

First Post

To find a name for this blog, a blog just for me, a woman of a certain age, I turned to a woman who did not achieve that certain age.

Crumbling is not an instant’s Act by Emily Dickinson

Crumbling is not an instant’s Act A fundamental pause Dilapidation’s processes Are organized Decays —

'Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul A Cuticle of Dust A Borer in the Axis An Elemental Rust —

Ruin is formal — Devil’s work Consecutive and slow — Fail in an instant, no man did Slipping — is Crashe’s law —