Please go back to your real job, Paul Broun (R-GA)

I am getting really, really tired of hearing U.S. Congressmen and Senators excoriate other public employees. For some reason, Republicans don't seem to think that federal employees are citizens; they certainly don't care if their budget cuts and threats not to raise the debt ceiling deprive hundreds of thousands of citizens of their jobs. And now Paul Broun, Republican Congressman from Georgia, flippantly states on conservative radio host Martha Zoller's show that not raising the debt limit would only put 250,000 or so people out of work. And who cares about those people, anyway? They're just federal employees:

Well, [Paul Broun said] those are gonna be government employees that are put out of work. There are a lot of government employees that need to go find a real job. [Hear these words here:"Paul Broun Fine with 250,000 Public Employees Being Laid Off..."]

Just what is a real job, Congressman Broun? Is taking care of the payroll with the Department of Defense not a real job? Is running the veterans' hospital system not a real job? Is collecting federal income taxes not a real job? How about managing federal lands and national parks? How about the crews who do the cleaning up after tourists at national monuments, national parks, national museums? How about the folks who provide summer informational tours and activities for children at those national museums and national parks? How about those folks at NOAA who chart hurricane activity in the summer and fall? How about the people who make sure (to the best of their ability even when stymied by budget cuts and ideological demagoguery) we have clean air and water?

I admit, Paul Broun, I have a dog in this fight. My husband works for the federal government; he was fortunate to get this job, one which he not only enjoys but for which he is eminently qualified, during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We have been married for thirty-three years, have seen hard times and good times, and are putting two kids through college. Well-educated, neither of us has ever received a paycheck that truly compensated us for our skills and education, but, also, neither of us has ever been motivated primarily by money. We've had jobs that enabled us to give back to society in some way, through education, conservation, or scientific research. And now we have reached the age when it becomes increasingly difficult to find appropriate employment if we lose our jobs. I know. I've been either under-employed or un-employed for the past several years, despite an excellent employment history (though being a woman who changed jobs to fit the needs of her family certainly did not help me in the long-term). There are hundreds of thousands--millions--of Americans like us, people who paid their taxes, took responsibilities for their families, contributed to their communities, and looked forward to, if not a comfortable retirement, at least a livable retirement.

Those hundreds of thousands of Americans include federal employees who have helped people like you steer the ship of state. And now, in a time of great distress, you are all for abandoning them and for taking an economic path that would not just put more Americans out of work when the current national unemployment rate is 9.1%, but that would also have additional serious consequences for millions of people around the world. Not raising the debt limit could--according to economists that include those from your own political party--cause another financial crisis, and we're not even out of the current crisis yet. Some are even predicting that the current crisis could escalate into another Great Depression. And you're just itching, evidently, to add fuel to the fire.

So please go back to your real job, Congressman Broun. As a federal employee.....you suck.

Traveling with Hate from One Century to the Next

This afternoon I read an article on Slate titled "The Persistence of Hate," by Ray Fisman. The author describes a study done by Nico Voigtländer of UCLA and Joachim Voth of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain. The two academics set out to answer this question by looking at the roots of anti-semitism in Germany: "How persistent are cultural traits?" By comparing historical records, the authors discovered a correlation between the treatment of Jews in certain locales during the Black Plague with anti-semitism in the same locales in Nazi Germany:

When the Black Death arrived in Europe in 1348-50, it was often blamed on Jews poisoning wells. Many towns and cities (but not all) murdered their Jewish populations. Almost six hundred years later, after defeat in World War I, Germany saw a country-wide rise in anti-Semitism. This led to a wave of persecution, even before the Nazi Party seized power in 1933. We demonstrate that localities with a medieval history of pogroms showed markedly higher levels of anti-Semitism in the interwar period. Attacks on Jews were six times more likely in the 1920s in towns and cities where Jews had been burned in 1348-50; the Nazi Party’s share of the vote in 1928 – when it had a strong anti-Semitic focus – was 1.5 times higher than elsewhere.

The authors conclude that hatred was transmitted over centuries, toward a group of people who basically disappeared from Germany in the 1500s (after all the burning and torturing) and who did not return in numbers until the 1700s. You can evaluate the authors' methodology yourself at the following link and download the published paper: Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany," Nico Voigtländer and Joachim Voth, Social Science Research Network: Tomorrow's Research Today, May 27, 2011.

I have scanned the article but have not read it thoroughly, but the findings do not seem out of the realm of possibility to me. Hatred is transmitted from one generation to another, even when the receiving generation has had no personal contact with the persons against whom the hatred is directed.

Just hours after I read the discussion of the study on Slate, my son returned from the tutoring center where he is working part-time this summer. "Guess what question a fourth-grader asked me today," he said to me. "He asked me which side I was on in the Civil War."

A regular student at the tutoring center, this child evidently often tries to engage the tutors with off-the-wall questions not related to the subject in which he is being tutored. He had asked the same question of the woman who was tutoring him, and, not liking her answer--"on the side of the North"--he turned for vindication to my son, who was tutoring other students. When my son said that he was glad that the Union had won, the fourth grader asked him why. "Because slavery is evil," my son replied, trying to keep his answer short and to the point before getting the student back on track.

"But the Civil War wasn't about slavery; it was about state's rights," the kid replied. "Abraham Lincoln made it about slavery to stick it to the South." Then he added that he hated Abraham Lincoln and that it was a good thing that John Wilkes Booth shot him. And he asked my son why he didn't live in the North since he wasn't "for" the South--still fighting the Civil War in his little head.

Later, as my son and I were describing to my husband these two interlinking experiences--my reading the article on Slate and my son's experience with the young student--we discussed a myriad of responses, some a little smart-alecky:

• "You're right: it was about state's rights--about the rights of states to establish or to maintain slavery as an institution."
  
• "Which side was I on? I wasn't alive during that war. Surely I don't look that old."

But it really wasn't a funny story. Hate never is. .......

Update: This must be hate-Abraham-Lincoln week. I just read Andrew Leonard's post on Salon: "Was Abraham Lincoln a Jewish Pawn of the Rothschilds?" Only in this story, hatred of Abraham Lincoln is directly connected to hatred of Jews. It seems that there are conspiracists who believe that Abraham Lincoln started the Civil War because the Rothschilds thought it would be good for banking. It's true that after the Civil War--and in order to help pay for that horrible war--Lincoln reformed the banking system, establishing a national currency--and thus stabilizing banking. As Leonard points out, a similar narrative is being tossed around today toward another president who initiated major banking reform. Is there no exit from these stupid conspiracy cycles and hate transfusions?

Back at the Farm

I left Georgia two months ago to relocate to Louisiana, but I still keep up with news there through the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's website. So I read with interest Governor Nathan Deal's recent signing into law House Bill 87, described as an Arizona-styled immigration law. An article published in early May in the AJC states that:

Deal and other supporters of HB 87 have hailed it as a victory for taxpayers who have borne the cost of illegal immigration in Georgia. A recent estimate by the Pew Hispanic Center puts the number of illegal immigrants in Georgia at 425,000, the seventh-highest among the states. Those illegal immigrants, supporters of HB 87 say, are taking jobs from state residents and burdening Georgia’s public schools, hospitals and jails. [Jeremy Redmon, "Governor signs Arizona-style immigration bill into law," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 13 May 2011.]

Supporters of the bill re-affirm that Georgia is a "business-friendly" state, but that HB 87 "represents [the state's] responsibility to watch the taxpayers' bottom line just as the business community vigilantly guards their bottom line." As the farming season gears up, however, one of the consequences to the bill has not been so "business-friendly." Evidently, Hispanic workers "are bypassing Georgia to work in other states." [Jeremy Redman, "Governor asks state to probe farm labor shortages," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 27 May 2011]

That Hispanic labor shortage has caused farmers to lose money, to let some of their produce remain uncollected in the field. One blue berry farmer estimates that he has lost 10% of his crop due to the labor shortage. An owner of a 4,500 acre vegetable farm near Tifton, GA, says that "between 75 and 100 Hispanic workers he depends on didn't show up for work this year....causing him to lose some of his vegetable harvests" [Redman, 27 May 2011]. Some farmers are talking about cutting back on production in order to adjust to the loss in labor; others have tried enticements, such as extra monetary bonuses, to get Hispanic laborers to overcome their fear of the restrictive law. According to the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association "the labor shortages afflicting South Georgia counties could put as much as $300 million in crops at risk" [Redman, 27 May 2011].

Now I know what some folks are going to say: with Georgia's unemployment rate still near 10%, that maybe those unemployed should seek work on Georgian farms. Well, we all know the history of farm labor in the South, don't we? Also, it's back-breaking, hot, tough 8-hours-a-day work. The typical wage, evidently, is $12.50 an hour, on average. And "experienced workers can earn as much as $200 a day" [Bill Chappell, "Georgia Farmers Say Immigration Law Keeps Workers Away," GPB News, 27 May 2011]. However, the work is temporary and seasonal. And it takes practice to become "experienced" in picking vegetables quickly and efficiently. Hey, I know. I used to pick peas every summer when I stayed with my grandmother Ruby Benton in Gum Grove, Texas. I hoed long rows of vegetables in our own family garden, and I helped harvest many Irish potatoes. But that work was brief, not five 8-hour days a week for five months. Evidently, Mexican and Guatemalan laborers weren't "taking jobs from state residents," as proponents of the bill claimed. Some farmers have described their lack of success in trying to get local people to do the work of the immigrant laborers.

Working as a laborer on a vegetable or fruit farm might put groceries on the table for a while, but it isn't going to offer any health benefits for the ensuing back pain.

I am always amazed--not!--at how the unintended consequences of punitive laws can be as problematic, if not more so, than the original situation the laws were meant to ameliorate.

Later Comment: I've been told that the guys who work on those farms don't work eight hours a day but work "can to can't"--from can see to can't see.

Depressing if True

William Greider, writing for The Nation, seems to think that while Republicans have certainly done their best to demonize Elizabeth Warren, there are folks surrounding President Barack Obama who also don't want this candid woman to chair the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Greider's information relies on a Very Reliable Source, unnamed, so who can really tell how accurate this is. But based on what I've read about the financial industry and how all those finance guys seem to end up in positions of power around the presidency (including Obama's), I wouldn't be surprised. Here's a quote from Greider:

Tim Geithner, said my Very Reliable Source, really, really doesn’t want Elizabeth Warren in the position where she is sure to be a tough-minded and independent voice on major financial-policy issues. As CFPB director, Warren would also sit on the new “systemic risk” council of regulators who decide very large questions like “too big to fail.” The other regulators can outvote her easily enough, but Warren has an alarming history of personal candor. She says what she thinks, out loud and in public. That naturally disturbs the club members, all of whom have a rank history of making life easier for the big boys of banking.

Warren made her integrity clear when she served as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel digging into the financial crisis and bailouts. Her investigations turned up alarming facts the bankers and bank regulators wished to avoid. Furthermore, Warren was often dissenting on legislative issues Geithner and team were pushing in the congressional debates on financial reform. Geithner doesn’t tolerate contrary thinkers in his midst; witness the galaxy of Wall Streeters he recruited to run the Treasury department. Geithner is a favorite of the president’s, perhaps because he is absolutely faithful to the financial establishment’s best interests. [William Greider, "Why is Obama Dragging his Heels on Appointing Elizabeth Warren to head CPFB?," The Nation, 27 May 2011.]

I don't know the answer to the question in the title of Greider's article, and I'm no expert. But I've read enough about the economic crisis to know that we can't blame just one political party for all the deregulation that eventually led to the risks that the financial industry took and the financial crisis that ensued. Those at the top seem to cover each other's backs very well. Just sayin'.

David Corn, an editor for Mother Jones and a former editor of The Nation, described the distance between Timothy Geithner and Elizabeth Warren in this article on HuffPost's "Politics Daily," in 2010. Here is a quote from Corn's article: "Elizabeth Warren Vs. Timothy Geithner: A Big Decision for Obama."

As head of the bailout oversight panel, Warren has fiercely called out Geithner and Treasury on a number of fronts: for providing a backdoor bailout to AIG, for botching homeowner relief programs, for failing to get mega-banks to resume lending. Moreover, she's an articulate and thoughtful populist, who applies a Main Street-first perspective toward financial matters and who has been a scourge of credit card companies and banks. Geithner is a member of the Big Finance establishment; he's no crusader.

It would be nice to have an "articulate and thoughtful populist" on one's side.

No Consequences for Bad Behavior; Little Regulation to Prevent It

For a long time I have been thinking--almost brooding--over the global financial crisis. Before 2007, I hadn't thought much about Wall Street though I had read my share of news articles over the years about the power of Wall Street and was passingly concerned about the influence of that power over our elected officials. With the financial meltdown in 2008, however, I began paying much more attention to financial and economic news. Nothing in my background--poet, teacher of literature and writing, gardener, art car enthusiast--prepared me for such an interest. I certainly knew nothing about derivatives. But the financial meltdown has enough sturm und drang for any engaging narrative of greed and corruption, tragedy and despair. And when the narrative touches one's own life, well, it does make one sit up and pay attention, doesn't it?

After reading numerous articles and blog posts about the crisis, after watching PBS Frontline specials and Charles Ferguson's documentary Inside Job (now available through Netflix), I think I can say with some confidence that the rats who almost blew up the world as we know it are still on the ship. Nor have they been caught and brought to trial and punished for their bad behavior. Nope. Some are at the helm of the ship. Others are cocooned on islands of privilege and are enjoying their millions.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans have been laid off, are out of work, can't find work, have lost their homes, are in danger of losing their homes, can't afford a college education or to pursue their dreams of owning a business. Ordinary Americans have bailed out the banks and the bastards who brought us to the brink--yet our elected leaders are trying to cut the very benefits that would prevent many Americans from suffering an impoverished and miserable old age. We can afford to save Goldman Sachs and Fannie Mae but not Medicare or Medicaid. We can regulate a woman's uterus but not the financial market.

Today, in The Washington Post, Ezra Klein points out that "though the financial crisis remains lodged in our minds, and in our jobless rates," our elected officials are not confirming leaders to help regulate the financial institutions that caused the crisis:

... [T]he Federal Reserve lacks a vice chairman for banking supervision. There’s no one officially in charge of the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research. The seat marked “insurance” on Financial Stability Oversight Council is empty. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has a leader but not a director. No one has been confirmed to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. And Republicans are still saying Nobel Prize-winning economist Peter Diamond is underqualified to serve on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors." "If it can go wrong, it will go wrong. And it'll be our fault," The Washington Post, 24 May 2011.

And, in their over-the-cliff plans to cut the deficit, "the House GOP is fighting to starve financial regulators of the resources they need to do their work." As Klein points out, we have a deficit because of the financial crisis, and we have a financial crisis because of a lack of regulation, and we're not funding regulation because we have a deficit. See some circular reasoning on the part of our leaders?

How to respond to such idiocy? With cynicism, says Kevin Drum (well, actually, he says the situation overwhelms his own cynicism):

It's this, more than anything else, that has convinced me over the past couple of years that America's wealthy class is simply morally bankrupt and that the leadership of the Republican Party is politically bankrupt. Five years ago I would have been embarrassed to write a blog post suggesting that this might be the reaction of the moneyed class to an economic collapse. Then we had one and this was the reaction. Once again, events have outrun my best efforts to be cynical.

It's certainly with cynicism that I listened to Dave Davies interview Gretchen Morgenson on NPR's Fresh Air today. Morgenson, who writes about finance for The New York Times, has just published a book she co-wrote with Joshua Rosner: Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon. In this book, Morgenson "focuses on the managers of Fannie Mae, the government supported mortgage giant." Like the later financial players of Wall Street--Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, et alia--the managers of Fannie Mae pursued deals that enriched them and that weakened regulatory oversight. But lest listeners think these details support the Republican narrative that the financial crisis was all due to mortgage defaults, to the government's "meddling in the market" in its determination to "push home ownership" to people who couldn't afford it, Morgenson adds that "Wall Street was not a passive player." Had regulators done their due diligence, had there been rigorous oversight, we would not be in the economic situation that we're in now.

And it's certainly with cynicism that I read today that the Tea-Party backed candidates who were elected because of the anger people felt toward the bailouts and Wall Street shenanigans "are now pushing pro-Wall Street legislation" and that "[t]he 10 Republican freshmen on the House Financial Services Committee have taken in nearly $600,000 from the financial industry since Election Day, according to the Sunlight Foundation." ["Tea-Partiers Swept in on Anti-Wall Street Wave Now Pushing Deregulation," Ryan J. Reilly, TPMMuckraker, 24 May 2011.]

To maintain that realistic and appropriate level of cynicism, I am creating here a list of articles to read (or re-read) and documentaries to view (or re-view) on the financial crisis, on who took us there (a bipartisan ride), who abandoned us, who profited, who suffered, and why it's probably gonna happen again. (in no particular order except that I'm working backward from today and jumping around locating articles I remember reading and identifying others I haven't read but which look promising)

• Marian Wang, "Cheat Sheet on Bank Investigations and the Probes that have Petered Out," ProPublica: Journalism in the Public Interest, 24 May 2011.
• Matt Taibbi, "The People versus Goldman Sachs," Rolling Stone, 11 May 2011.
• Matt Taibbi, "The Great American Bubble Machine," Rolling Stone 5 April 2010.
• Brian Beutler, "One-Time Warren Foe Now Pressuring Obama to Give Her Recess Appointment to Head Consumer Bureau," TPMDC 23 May 2011.
• Ben Protess, "Warren and Republicans Spar Over Bureau's Power," DealBook, in The New York Times, 24 May 2011.
• Katrina vanden Heuvel, "Why Obama Should Appoint Elizabeth Warren,", in The Washington Post, 24 May 2011.
• The Reckoning--a series of articles published in The New York Times that "explored the causes of the financial crisis of 2008." The series includes these articles, among others: Peter S. Goodman and Gretchen Morgenson, "Saying Yes, WaMu Built Empire on Shaky Loans," 28 December 2008; Jo Becker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and Stephen Labaton, "White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire," 21 December 2008; Louise Story, "On Wall Street, Bonuses, not Profits, were Real," 18 December 2008; Eric Lipton and Raymond Hernandez, "A Champion of Wall Street Reaps Benefits," 14 December 2008; Peter S. Goodman, "Taking a Hard New Look at Greenspan Legacy," 9 October 2008.
• Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein, "The Magnetar Trade: How One Hedge Fund Helped Keep the Housing Bubble Going," ProPublica, 9 April 2010.
• Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger, "The 'Subsidy': How Merrill Lynch Traders Helped Blow up Their Own Firm," ProPublica 22 December 2010.--Or read the series of ProPublica's investigative articles on the financial crisis here: "The Wall Street Money Machine."
• Oh, and this little post is sort of funny: Did Porn Cause the Financial Crisis?", posted 23 April 2010, by Daniel Indiviglio, associate editor at The Atlantic.
• Jack Dolan, Rob Barry, Matthew Haggman, "Borrowers Betrayed," Miami Herald, 2009--series on the Florida mortgage industry and the lack of regulation oversight that led to criminals being granted state licenses.
• Dean Starkman, of Columbia Journalism Review provides a list of worthy articles on the financial crisis: "No Pulitzers, But Here's an Audie", posted 21 April 2009.
• "The Warning," a Frontline report on Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during the Clinton administration, who tried to warn the economic power-brokers of the potential for economic meltdown if the derivatives market was not regulated. As of this writing, the full video can be watched online. DVDs are also available for purchase from PBS.(air date, 20 October 2009)
• Frontline's "Inside the Meltdown," first aired on 17 February 2009, at this writing, can be viewed entirely online on the PBS website. Or just go to the webpage that includes links to all the Frontline videos that are available online: "Watch Frontline Online".
• Michael Lewis, "Wall Street on the Tundra," Vanity Fair, April 2009--Unfortunately, this article is no longer fully available on Vanity Fair's website, but I found a .pdf version elsewhere, "Wall Street on the Tundra", that might still be accessible. This is the article that really got me interested in the details of the financial crisis. I remember reading it shortly after it was published online.
• Kevin Hall, "Mortgage Crisis Shows Why Financial Regulation is Needed", McClatchy, 1 November 2009. And you can see all the stories and videos that resulted from McClatchy's five-month investigation into Goldman Sachs here: McClatchy Newspapers, investigation into Goldman Sach's contributions to the economic crisis.
• Paul Solman interviews Charles Ferguson, director of Inside Job. In the interview, Ferguson talks about undisclosed ties and conflicts of interest in the financial relationships between academics in economics departments and the financial sector.

This is a short list of all one can find on the economic crisis online. I didn't include articles from The Wall Street Journal because I'm not a subscriber and am therefore unable to access them. Most of the sources on this list are not locked behind a subscription wall--except for, perhaps, The New York Times articles--because I do subscribe to the online version of The New York Times.

--so little time, so many opportunities for corruption.....

The Proliferation of Dubious Information

I guess that I was lucky in that when the Internet began to blossom, I was teaching at a university. Those born in the Internet Age won't understand this, but when one of my students described in a senior research paper in the late 1980s the possibilities of hyper-links, I was amazed. In 1994, my husband and I noted that when we searched the World Wide Web, we often found links that led to nowhere, to internet parking spaces for future development. By 1997, when I was teaching at a university in Georgia, those parking spaces had become shopping malls. I spent the summer finding information on the web that I could incorporate in my freshman English classes, as part of the university's mandate to help our students become Internet savvy. Every semester, I designed a workshop to demonstrate to my students the need to view their internet sources with a critical eye. We looked at websites that were parodies of official government web sites. We looked at websites with a political agenda; we looked at websites that seemed authoritative yet which provided no proof to support their authority. In educating my students, I was educating myself.

And so I look with a jaundiced eye at what I read online. When I write, I try to support any facts or figures or quotes with a trusted source. This morning, I experienced another lesson in the importance of this practice. I was looking for statements that politicians had said publicly about the unemployed. I remembered reading in the news some rather negative statements that Speaker of the House John Boehner had made about the unemployed in the government battle to extend or not to extend unemployment benefits during the worst economic slump since the 1930s. To find those quotes, I used Google's search engine, and I came across a blog with a very disturbing quote attributed to Boehner--but the language of the quote made me pause. Can this be for real? I wondered.

And so I "Googled" a selection from the quote, and lots of links to blogs appeared in which the quote was reproduced. The writer of one blog, however, did mention that the quote was from an interview Matt Taibbi, of Rolling Stone, did with John Boehner, but the author of the blog did not include a link to the interview. Now all the warning sirens were going off in my head. Blogs are often useful sources of information, but accurate blog writers are going to include references or links to news sources to back up their facts and figures.

Of course, some blog authors are journalists who do their own research and who interview their sources. And sometimes, news worthy information may be overlooked by national news outlets, for any number of reasons. And perhaps they've just buried the information in the inside pages. But this is my rule of thumb:

• If a search brings up a long list of blog sources, and particularly blog sources with a political bent or agenda, then, whether or not I agree with that political agenda, I look for additional information from news sources. (If the blogs provide links to such a source, then those blogs have made my search easier and have helped establish their own credibility.)

In this case, I went looking for the purported interview that Matt Taibbi did with John Boehner, and I came across Taibbi's own blog post about this purported interview: It never happened. In a blog post titled "I Did Not Interview John Boehner,", Taibbi writes:

There is a story flying around the internet that purports to contain an excerpt from an interview that I did with John Boehner. This interview is a hoax, and neither I nor Rolling Stone had anything to do with it. There are some seriously bored people out there... if people are going to make up a fantasy activity for me in the future, please, make it a foot massage from Jessica Gomes, not face time with John Boehner.

And, no, I won't reproduce the dubious quote here. But if you want to read what Matt Taibbi actually did write about John Boehner, you can read his article here: "The Crying Shame of John Boehner," in Rolling Stone, 5 January 2011.

It takes a lot of time to make sure that what one is reading can be trusted. Most people don't have that time. But, hey, I'm unemployed and over fifty. What better use can I find for my time? Now I'm going to go plant a garden.

"ObamaCare: It Totally Works for Me"

One day this week, my daughter, a college student home for the summer, my son, a recent college graduate working part-time until starting graduate school in the fall, and I were talking about our current situations. All of us now depend upon my husband's full-time job, a job he has had for almost a year after 6 months of job-searching during the most serious economic slump since the 1930s.  We are middle-class, well-educated, tax-paying, engaged citizens. So it was with a great deal of anger over the past year that I listened to politicians as they criticized the unemployed:

'Ninety-weeks [of unemployment benefits] is too long' [complained Jim Lembke, Missouri Republican Senator]. 'People need to get off their backsides and get a job. Maybe they'll have to get two jobs or three jobs to make ends meet, but they need to quit stealing from their neighbors.' ("Four Republicans Hold Up Missouri Jobless Benefits")

I am sure that hundreds of thousands of jobless Americans approached their job search much as did my husband, with the same intelligence, dedication and care he has provided in every job he has ever had in his life. He got dressed every morning, sat at his desk for hours searching the job boards, e-mailed his updated resume and letters of application, made phone calls, attended the mandatory federal workshops for the unemployed even when they weren't particularly useful, and did part-time work for neighbors so as not to be idle. My part-time job and my husband's unemployment benefits helped pay for the groceries and the bills. And, like many Americans, we spent a lot of what we had hoped to have had available when we retired. But we also know that we are better off than thousands of Americans still looking for jobs. And these folks are facing employers who won't even interview people who are currently unemployed.
 

Throughout his undergraduate years, our son worked part-time on the campus of the large university he attended and to which he will return this fall as a graduate student. With that part-time job, he paid his bills and bought his groceries; we paid for tuition, books, and housing out of a fund my husband had set up years before. After my husband and I married before our junior year in college, we supported ourselves with part-time jobs and scholarships--with a little help from my husband's parents, who paid his tuition, and with an occasional handout from my parents. As graduate students, we completely supported ourselves with part-time research and teaching positions at the university we attended.  My husband received a scholarship to work on his Ph.D., while I taught full-time in the English department of the university at which my husband was studying. We finished our undergraduate and post-graduate education with no debt. Today's college students cannot expect such opportunities. At the four graduate schools to which our son applied (and to all of which he was accepted), our son was told that he could not expect a graduate research position as a master's degree student. One university sent him a letter to let him know he was eligible for a financial aid packet--a student loan that would add up to almost $100,000 at the completion of his master's degree program. Such debts are not unusual for college graduates these days. According to Mark Kantrowitz, the founder of FinAid.org and FastWeb.com,

As many as one-third of bachelor's degree recipients can expect to still be paying back their student loans when their own children head off to college. Katie Leslie, "College Graduates Saddled with Debt," The Atlanta Journal Constitution, 22 May 2011.

This summer, our son has moved in with us to save money. All of his apartment furniture is in our shed. He and his sister, also home for the summer, are sleeping on twin mattresses on the floor because the furniture for our guest room hasn't arrived yet (and our daughter's bedroom furniture is headed to an apartment in June). He got a part-time tutoring job at a tutoring center in a nearby town. And because of the Affordable Care Act, we've been able to keep him on our health insurance policy.

So it was with all this background in mind that my son said, "President Obama needs to embrace the label 'Obamacare' that opponents call the Affordable Care Act."

"Do you mean 'co-opt' the label?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. "He needs to turn it into a positive. And I should get a t-shirt with the slogan--ObamaCare: It Totally Works for Me."

My husband and I are in our early fifties. We have worked all our lives; until recently, I taught at universities and colleges in or near every town in which we've lived. In 1987, my father retired at the age of fifty-four, one year older than I am now. Retirement is a distant goal for my husband, and unemployment an every day experience for me. We still have adult children to support.

We are the middle-class upon which the economic health of this country depends.

ObamaCare: It Totally Works for Us.

Laughing at the End Times

The story of Rev. Camping's deadline for the end of the world and the rapture of the faithful just barely crossed my consciousness at first. Others had predicted the end of the world and had lived to see the deadline come and go, to see the sun rise the following morning and set the following evening. I had seen a billboard announcing the end and made some passing comment to the other passenger in the car I was in. Then I pretty much thought of other things. But then news organizations began focusing on the predicted event, on the man who made the prediction, on the followers who were preparing to leave this earth, and on the millions of dollars of donations that Family Radio has received.

On Thursday, NPR posted a request on Facebook that people choose the song or musical composition they thought was most appropriate to be listening to as the end approached. Thousands of Facebook friends complied, and, for fun, I created a Countdown to the End of Time play list of my own, and when I told my adult children what I was doing, they started creating their own play lists. I first scrolled through the responses of NPR's FB friends and chose from those suggestions songs that I liked. Then I added my own pensive suggestions. When I finished, I had 30 songs on my End of Time playlist, and I posted the list in my notes on Facebook, along with YouTube links to performances. Some of the songs I chose were melancholy (Eliza Gilkyson's "When You Walk On"), others comforting and hopeful (Modest Mouse's "Float On"), and some downright silly (Monty Python's "Galaxy Song: Remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving and revolving...").

My family shared our songs, we noted the next day the times that Reverend Camping said the Rapture would begin, and also noted that the Rapture could be happening and the four of us would not know it because, well, we expected to be left behind if such an event really occurred--though there was a time when I, a child of the Southern Baptist Church, would have expected to be in the number of those rising into the clouds.

As Saturday evening waned, I expressed some sympathy for Reverend Camping and his followers, who were discovering what they so longed for was not going to happen as predicted. We wondered what these disappointed folks would do now. And then we passed the evening in playing a game of Scrabble.

Then, this morning I began some selected reading online and came across Tiffany Stanley's finger-wagging article "The Media's Shameful Obsession" on The New Republic's website. Stanley takes to task those in the media who have expressed smugness or superiority in their coverage of Harold Camping and his followers. She labels the coverage "a media circus."

There's a cruelty underlying our desire to laugh at this story [Stanley writes]--a desire to see people humiliated and to revel in our own superiority and rationality--even though the people in question are pretty tragic characters, who either have serious problems themselves or perhaps are being taken advantage of, or both.

Well, maybe that's so in many cases, but as a survivor of The Rapture--or, rather, of obsession with The Rapture--I think that I need to feel no shame at creating my playful play list for the end of times and for shaking my head at the hubris or senility or insanity of a man who thinks he can predict the end of the world.

In the Southern Baptist church in which I grew up, I was immersed in the literature of the End Times. We read Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth, studied it in evening services, pored over its confident charts outlining the ages of man and world events that all inevitably led to the world's ending....maybe in the 1980s. In any event, we were convinced that the end was near. My sisters and I, a performing trio in our church, sang a song "I Wish We'd All Been Ready," which not only scared the hell out of me (literally, I decided to be baptized a second time, just in case the first baptism didn't take) but also gave me nightmares (Christ came in the clouds, and my feet couldn't quite get off the ground). 

I was a smug, self-righteous twerp who also agonized too intensely over the state of her own soul. But because I was also a studious child, really interested in the world and in the viewpoints of other people, and also, of course, sinful beyond my own childish imaginings, I outgrew that  insular religious phase. The world didn't come to an end. And when, in 1978, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the Camp David Accords, my love affair with The Rapture and the teachings of the end times in the Southern Baptist Church pretty much ended. I watched the news with great expectation. The 70s had been full of violence, and the thought of two enemies trying to make peace between their nations filled me with hope. Yet many people in our churches did not welcome this event; it was viewed through the distorted lenses of a particular interpretation of the most controversial book in the New Testament, The Revelation. The predictions were that instead of ushering in peace, the agreements heralded the approaching end of the world.

I began to note that every movement toward peace was viewed with suspicion, as evidence that some crazy Anti-Christ was going to take over the world. How mixed up is that, I thought. It's almost as if the those who revel in the chaos of some End Time are working toward a self-fulfilling prophecy--reacting with suspicion and even outright hostility to any person or world event that suggests peaceful solutions are possible. Any charismatic leader with a message of hope was a possible Anti-Christ.

That world view has consequences today. Hal Lindsey can suggest that Barack Obama, with a campaign message of hope and change, may be the Anti-Christ, the Beast described in The Revelation, and thousands, perhaps millions, of people take his comment seriously. Michelle Bachmann, a possible Republican candidate for President, can negatively twist Obama's speech on the Middle East, and thousands of Christians will believe her distorted version, especially when she purses her lips into the dog whistle that those who reject Israel (in whatever way she defines "rejection") will be "cursed." 

In 2010, the Pew Research Center, in conjunction with The Smithsonian, polled Americans to discover what they thought about the future of the world and the United States. Forty-one percent of those polled believed that Jesus Christ will return within the next 50 years. If you're expected to be taken out of the world in an instant, in a flash of lightning, you're not going to get too torqued about world peace or global climate change or Medicare or Medicaid--or in making the world a better place in any number of ways. In fact, you might be pretty hostile to any organization or group of people who would attempt to make the world a better place or the lives of others less fraught with peril. A peaceful world--or even a somewhat peaceful world--would undermine your whole world view, that only you and other selected good people will be saved while the world erupts in flames.

I hear and understand the dog whistles. My ears were once atuned to those high-pitched tones. I've lived in Oz; I believed in Oz. But I've been behind the curtain, and I didn't like one bit what I saw. Unfortunately, those who would laugh at that forty-one percent also might not recognize the serious consequences of a belief that absolves one of responsibility toward a world one expects to be providentially destroyed in one's lifetime.

So, here's to Reverend Camping and all those who would divert us from trying to solve the problems that we have here on this one world: John Lennon--"Imagine."

Book Review: John Barry's "Rising Tide"

John Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America

As the Mississippi River began to pass previous flood records, I re-read John Barry's history of the 1927 Mississippi River flood. We bought the book in 1999, if I remember correctly, when my husband and I were in New Orleans for several days. During the day, my husband was attending a conference, and I was wandering the streets of the French Quarter and spent some leisurely time in Faulkner House Books on Pirate Alley. The second time through this book was as interesting to me as the first time I read it. I highly recommend this telling of that historic flood that most people had never heard of until news organizations began mentioning it again in light of the flood that is still making its way down the Mississippi River as I type these words. Barry weaves together the stories of nineteenth century engineers whose personalities had a profound effect on decisions made in trying to tame the Mississippi; of the personalities of the Percy family of Greenville, Mississippi, whose authority as planters and politicians had profound effects on the lives of the descendants of former slaves, blacks who labored on the plantations made fertile by thousands of years of flood deposits of the Mississippi; of the racism of the South and of the flight of African-Americans after the flood to the north, carrying with them the birth of the blues that came out of their horrendous experiences in that flood; of the venality of the rich and powerful in New Orleans.

And just a few minutes ago, while looking up and reading reviews of Barry's book, I came across a review by one of the Percy family, William Armstrong Percy, a character if there ever was one--and an academic.

When I lived in Louisiana before--all those years ago, from 1983-1987--when Tom was working on his Ph.D., and I was teaching in the English Department at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, I became interested in the writings of Walker Percy, grand-nephew of Leroy Percy, the Mississippi planter and senator who figures so largely in Barry's history. One of my friends recommended to me Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book," and I was hooked. I read much of Walker Percy's fiction and a couple of his novels. I was a serious Walker Percy fan for a while. Now that I'm living again in Louisiana, near the town where Percy spent his adult life, I've been thinking of him. Maybe I'll pick up Lost in the Cosmos and re-read it. I seem to be in a re-reading phase, returning to books I read years ago. Maybe that's a sign of approaching old age--reviewing what one once knew and now remembers rather hazily!

Meanwhile, pick up Barry's book Rising Tide, immerse yourself in another time, and ask yourself just how much has changed in how money and power work in this country.

Lessons Learned about Self-Monitoring?

On Saturday of this past weekend, my husband, son, and I traveled to Franklin, Louisiana, to attend the Franklin Black Bear and Birding Festival. On the banks of Bayou Teche,venders had set up booths of local products and crafts, various conservation groups had prepared displays and games for children in a nearby warehouse, and musicians were scheduled to play for a street dance. We took a pontoon ride into the Bayou Teche Wildlife Refuge managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It was a beautiful day, clear and cool, and on the trip up a canal dug over one hundred years ago for logging, we saw several alligators sunning on the banks as well as several species of egrets. The particular area of the refuge near Franklin that we boated into is closed to motorized vehicles from September 1st to April 15th. That area had just been opened for motorized vehicles, and the gate was open, as the picture at left illustrates.

As we motored slowly down the canal, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife employee steering the boat and directing the tour mentioned that there were no old-growth trees here because the area had been intensively logged at the turn of the last century--that is, from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. Historical records indicate that from 1890 to 1935, timber companies removed virtually all of the cypress from Louisiana; any old growth remaining was few and far between. The trees one sees now are ones that have regenerated since then. The canal we were traveling on was also left over from the timber industry's work. Canals were dug in the swamps in order to get to the trees and then to drag the trees to waterways where they could be then be floated to timber mills. If you pull up a Google Earth map of Lake Maurepas and Lake Pontchartrain, you can still see straight canals radiating out from the places where cypress had been harvested, dragged into the canals by pullboats, and "cribbed up into booms and pushed like barges" to mills.  [Frank B. Williams: Cypress Lumber King, by Anna C. Burns]

Timber industry supporters today complain about the restrictions on harvesting the cypress that has regenerated since 1935 when Louisiana was just about completely stripped of cypress. But the past history of just about any industry that pulled its resources from the natural world--or just about any industry, for that matter--indicates that industries are unable to monitor themselves. It doesn't matter if it's an industry that harvests the resources of the natural world or the banking conglomerates that sell derivatives.  Management and employees live high on the proceeds until they have exhausted the resources that provide those proceeds--or until the financial enterprise threatens to go bankrupt and take the country down with it and is bailed out by the government. Frank Williams "celebrated his fiftieth year in the lumber business by distributing $100,000 in bonuses among his employees" [Burns]. A few short years later, the cypress industry had exhausted its resources. Other timber industries began liquidating their assets in the 1910s, but the company that Frank Williams established managed to branch out into oil and real estate and thus operates to this day.

In 2006, Goldman Sachs paid "its employees a total of $16.5 billion in compensation," bonuses that, if distributed evenly, would mean "$623,418 for every" one of its 26,467 employees. ["The Goldman Sachs Premium," by DealBook, 18 December 2006] By 2008, it was clear that Goldman Sachs and other financial industries had almost brought the U.S.--and the world--to financial disaster. Millions of Americans have yet to recover. But taxpayers bailed out the financial industry, and those "titans" got to keep their bonuses.

But have we learned this lesson: that industries must be vigilantly regulated for the health,  safety, and welfare of not only ordinary people but the planet? It seems that a lot of us haven't. More on that in another post.

More on the logging of cypress in Louisiana:
Jacobs, David. "Logging Off." Baton Rouge Business Report. BusinessReport.com. 10 September 2007. http://www.businessreport.com/news/2007/sep/10/logging

Cypress Logging in Louisiana, circa 1925 (Part 1 of 2)   YouTube. Archival footage provided by Krantz Recovered Woods, Austin, TX. http://youtu.be/HF3-0NISvs4

Cypress Logging in Louisiana, circa 1925 (Part 2 of 2). YouTube. Archival footage provided by Krantz Recovered Woods, Austin, TX. http://youtu.be/FxSP08zJ5tE

Pruning

As I try to shelve my books here in our 120-year old cottage, with its sloping wooden floors and lack of storage, I discover that I still have way too many books for the available space.  It's time once again to prune back the overabundance of reading material that still remains from previous thinning. I did some serious pruning in 2007, when my family and I moved from Texas to Georgia, then again before packing up for another move to Louisiana, and now, soon after, another attempt to corral my books to fit the available space.

It's a difficult task, for even the books that I know I will probably never read again provide a service for me: they remind me of the different interests I cultivated during certain times of my life--hence the volumes of Walker Percy non-fiction. Some remind me of particular people, for there are inscriptions inside that reveal relationships, expectations, promises. On the inside cover of a slim volume of Nikki Giovanni's poems--Happy birthday, Anita. I love you. Always, Marie, written by a once-close college friend from whom I am now separated by years of sporadic--and then failing-- communication. On the inside cover of Michael Shaara's novel of the civil war, Killer Angels, a student from my first years of teaching at Louisiana State University thanks me for providing him with a better insight into reading. He tells me that he enjoyed the class very much. How unappreciative I am in not having yet read this novel. I'm putting it on my bedside table right now. (I've done this before, but because this yellowing paperback novel has survived several "thinnings," it seems that I continue to believe that someday I will follow through with my resolution.)

Then there are the necessary kind words of the poetry workshop leader. To Anita, Margaret Gibson salutes me on the title page of Earth Elegy: New and Selected Poems; with warm wishes and respect for your work. On the title page of Recovered Body, my poems go from achieving "respect" to "beauty." For Anita, Scott Cairns has written, well-met at the Glen. Here's wishing you the best as you continue with your beautiful poems. Barbara Crooker's volume of poetry, Radiance, reminds me of a workshop I had attended the year previous to the date of this note: For Anita, In the pleasure of your company (missed you this year) & in the great pleasure of your work. Well, I must keep these books to cheer me in the dark hours of the night when the muse is MIA, and I am afraid I'll never write another poem again.

Other books recall the ghosts of emotions I felt when I first read them, like the recollection of passion long past spent. This morning as I was sitting in the old recliner in my study, looking at the piles of books on the floor, I spied the tattered cover of John Graves' narrative of his canoe trip down the Brazos River in Texas, Goodbye to a River. For a fleeting moment, I was in my mid-twenties once again, newly aroused to the fecundity of meaning in the natural world that a poet could delve and develop. That much younger me bracketed the first sentences of chapter seven with these words: read in English 103 class. I suspect I was teaching descriptive writing to English freshmen at Texas A&M University at the time and thought of using Graves' words to coax my students toward specificity. And an asterisk beside the following words suggest that I identified with the author's sentiments:

Origin being as it is an accident outside the scope of one's will, I tend not to seek much credit for being a Texan. Often (breathes there a man/) I can work up some proud warmth about the fact that I indubitably am one. A lot of the time, though, I'd as soon be forty other kinds of men I've known....If a man couldn't escape what he came from, we would most of us still be peasants in Old World hovels. But, if, having escaped or not, he wants in some way to know himself, define himself, and tries to do it without taking into account the thing he came from, he is writing without any ink in his pen. The provincial who cultivates only his roots is in peril, potato-like, of becoming more root than plant. The man who cuts his roots away and denies that they were ever connected with him withers into half a man.

In these books I see the roots of what I once was, the evidence of how and why I have become who I am. To subvert a line from Tennyson, "I am a part of all that I have read." But there is just not enough room in this house for all our stuff and the stuff we've been dragging around from previous generations of my husband's family. Time again to prune. Maybe someday soon I'll get the courage to do the same with my journals and letters--only instead of pruning, I'll build a bonfire to my vanity.

The Old Recliner

If anything represents how we cannot seem to divest ourselves of stuff, this old recliner does. The first time I met it, it was at my in-laws' house, with the stuffing pooching out. The recliner had belonged to my husband's grandfather, who was a lawyer in Houston, Texas, and I guess Sam Tom's (first and middle name--Samuel Thomas) daughter kept it not only for sentimental reasons but for practical reasons as well. Eventually, my mother-in-law had the chair recovered; what you see is her choice of fabric, circa 1980s.

My husband loves this chair. I have stuffed it away in sad corners, but it always manages to make its way to a more public and useful place. I have threatened to sell it or to give it to Goodwill, but I have decided that I value my marriage more. This time I made a place for it right away, in my study, where my husband can read, rest, watch, or comment while I blog or work on my latest craft project. And so I celebrate compromise, resilience, and a long marriage by allowing this chair in my own space! Now if I can only convince Tom to have it recovered!

Maybe we hang on to these things because life itself is so unpredictable. We thought that our move to Atlanta would be our last move until retirement, that we would have a cool, urban place for our college-age children to return to and to call home. But our married life of almost 33 years has been one move after another, moves which we have decided to take upon ourselves, seeking better prospects or more amenable accommodations and surroundings or moves that have been forced on us by circumstances, such as layoffs, budget crises, and uncertain economic times. However, there is no exceptionalism in these experiences; American society has been a mobile one since its inception. My husband often reminds me of an article he read the year he finished his Ph.d. at Louisiana State University. The author predicted that college graduates of that year would move an average of seven times over the course of their working lives. We have met that average. Our experience is not uncommon, particularly in these unsettling times. Though the unemployment rate has recently dropped below 9%, millions of Americans are still seeking jobs, and college students can't find jobs comparable to their skills and education. Again and again, I read of college students who graduate with huge debts, who expect to spend the rest of their lives paying off the debt they incurred in order to achieve that degree. Is it worth it?

We face this question--is it worth it?--as our oldest child heads off to graduate school and our youngest child begins her second year as an undergraduate in the fall. Our son was admitted to all four aerospace engineering schools to which he applied, but it looks like the choice he will make will be the one that's less expensive. The school he has chosen--the one he attended as an undergraduate--is a great school, ranked in the top 20 aerospace programs; at least one of the other, more expensive schools is ranked in the top 10. Does that difference matter? Is it worth it to shackle one's future to a huge debt? We think not, but only the future will determine whether or not our son has made the right decision. And isn't that the case for every decision that we make? We just do the best we can with the cards we've drawn from the stack.

What I do know is that we're not ready to make that recliner our permanent seat in our new home. For our generation and generations to come, retirement will be pushed further and further away unless one belongs to that lucky 1% of Americans who own 40% of the nation's wealth. The recliner will just be a respite from life's difficulties, not a permanent refuge. 

But today I read an article in which a doctor describes research that suggests resiliency is the characteristic we most need in order to achieve a healthy old age. He has patients who are over 100 who have full mental capacity. What characteristics seem to have served them well? The ability to overcome serious setbacks without whining, to face those difficulties with a deprecating sense of humor, and to move on. These we can all practice to achieve. And life does seem to be providing us with plenty of opportunities to practice!

And so I welcome this change even though it was not one of my making or choosing.

New Year, a Little Late

A new year suggests new beginnings to many of us, and this year, despite our country's economic woes and our own family's geographic woes (husband working in one state, myself remaining behind in another state to help daughter adjust to university and change on top of change, son now graduated and in-between states as he applies to graduate schools), the new year is still freshly minted, shiny, and promising. After the holidays, my husband returned to Louisiana, my daughter returned to the University of Georgia, and my son remains here for a short while longer with me. We just give thanks that a tough year is over and a new year offers new beginnings.

Here in Metro-Atlanta, we ended the year with snow on Christmas Day, and we have begun the new year--the second week into the new year--with more snow, ice, and freezing rain. The city is practically in lock-down due to the weather, but at least I'm not alone, and my husband left behind lots of firewood for our fine fireplace insert. There's nothing that will warm the heart more on a cold, gray day than some radiant heat--and perhaps a couple of cups of hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps.

Yesterday, my son and I took a long walk in the neighborhood. The neighborhood roads and sidewalks were covered with ice-crusted snow and slick in places, but there were a few folks out enjoying the winter. Some folks had managed to build snowmen before the snow became too icy, and other folks had roped off steep streets where kids and their parents were sledding down the smooth, icy surfaces. In one yard, two men had built a fire and were inviting passersby and neighborhood friends over for cookies and hot chocolate. The walk reminded me of how much I love this town just east of Atlanta. It's been designated the most walkable town in Georgia. Although it's also one of the most densely populated towns in the state, it's also one of the most green urban areas I've ever seen. People care about the environment, community gardens, dog parks, recycling and neighborhood block parties. It's very hard for me to leave. But I've lived in many places, and I know that I will create a space for me and my family to live and to thrive.

Neighbors provide a warm spot from the cold

Neighborhood street roped off for sledding

Another street in the neighborhood full of winter activity

Snowman in our neighborhood

It's a new year. I gotta believe.

What Doesn't Change

I have recently been reflecting on being in my early fifties and confronting change once again when I had hoped life to be more settled, not knowing, really, any better than I did at the age of twenty-five or thirty-five, the best course to take. It seems that one just muddles through, no matter what the age. One of my Facebook friends recently posted a cartoon of two chickens celebrating a birthday.  The cartoon is one of Doug Savage's "Savage Chickens." Standing over a birthday cake with candles, the first chicken assures the second chicken: "You're not getting older, you're getting wiser."

The second chicken testily responds: "That's bull@*!#!"

In the next frame the first chicken chortles: "See? You're wiser already!'"

Whenever I think of the "wisdom that comes with age," I remember a conversation I had with my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat when she was in her eighties (she lived to be ninety-six). I guess I had asked my grandmother how it felt to be as old as she was. She was a very stoic woman, a faithful member of the Southern Baptist church, a non-smoker, non-drinker, a lifetime gardener, and for many years a middle-school English teacher.

When I was young, whenever we had a crisis at our house, which was located just across the country lane from my grandparents' house, Grandma Dugat was often the first person we turned to (though this statement fails to convey the complexities of family dynamics and secrets). When my sister Cynthia fainted in the bathroom one day, with the door locked, and she wouldn't respond when we called, my sister Nancy crawled through the window while my mother frantically directed me to call our grandmother. Calm came into the room with my grandmother.

But years later, when I asked my grandmother what it felt like to age, her answer surprised me: "Inside I still feel like I'm fifteen years old," my grandmother said. "And I look in the mirror and don't recognize the person there."

My grandmother had always been old to me. When she was the age I am now, two months short of fifty-three, I was almost five. My grandmother's seemingly unwavering view of the world, of her place in it and that of God's above it, had prepared me to expect a more weighty answer. And then--to say she still felt as if she were fifteen! I remembered what it was like to be fifteen--full of questions, bursting with hormones, head full of dreams--a vulnerable age. How could my grandmother, former middle-school teacher and Sunday School teacher, daily Bible reader, experienced gardener, woman of sorrows, feel like a vulnerable fifteen-year-old? Couldn't she at least feel like she was twenty-five or thirty? What hope did I have of becoming wiser as I aged if my own venerable grandmother still had a vulnerable fifteen-year-old peering out of her faded green eyes?

Now that I am on the cusp of old age, I understand, at least a little, my grandmother's answer. The accreted knowledge of age forms like layers of plaster of Paris, like those masks my children and I made years ago, taking strips of plaster of Paris, soaking them in water, then molding the strips to our faces and removing the resultant form when it began to harden. We all have a "mask" of experiences that help us determine what roles to take in a new stage of our lives, what choices might be appropriate. But, sometimes, the eyes staring out of that oh-so-carefully molded mask are those of a fifteen-year-old, who suspects that the choices are capricious, multitudinous, with unpredictable consequences.

Last week, as we curled against one another in bed, facing together another challenge in our 32-years of marriage, my husband murmured, "I keep thinking about how two-thirds of our lives is already over."

That fifteen-year-old in me gazed wildly into the darkness of the bedroom. "But I've only just begun to live!" she whispered.

photos above: my first-grade photo; my grandmother, picking butterbeans, in her eighties (click on the photo for a larger version)

Reflecting on Links to the Past

I have been going through the hundreds of letters that my husband's family kept over the years, letters that go back to the 1850s. The work is tedious because each letter must be opened carefully, quickly read, and then filed. As I read, I store ideas for posts on my Left for Texas blog, which I am using to create a narrative of the family, to establish connections in the family genealogy, and to help organize the overwhelming material that we have. I also perform online research and have made interesting discoveries about the history of the South before and after the Civil War as well as discoveries about distant relatives of my husband's, all descended from the same great-great-great grandparents. (I plan more extended research--in university libraries and on locale--after I have organized this material.) I have also made other discoveries: that human nature hasn't changed, that people can paradoxically hold progressive and abhorrent ideas, and that much of the daily experiences of our ancestors weren't much different than our experiences today. We may have better technology, access to faster transportation, better nutrition (perhaps), and multiple conveniences, but much remains the same.

One idea that many people have about the past is that people remained in one place for generations. This might be true in old civilizations, but it's less true in America, where folks seem to be in continual flux. News articles make a great deal of spouses living in separate cities or states, but these family letters reveal that spousal mobility and separation is not all that new. My husband's great-grandfather, Baker White Armstrong, moved to Texas from Virginia, where he was first employed with a drugstore/pharmacy in Bryan, Texas. Then it seems he began representing a large drugstore retail business based in New Orleans, and he traveled all over Texas from town to town promoting products for that company. His traveling meant that he was often separated from his wife and young family in the last decade of the 19th century. His wife, Mary Ophelia Nugent Armstrong, would also take the family back to visit relatives in Virginia, staying for weeks. The couple communicated by writing two or more letters a week to one another. As the family grew and Baker became more prosperous (by speculating in oil in Houston), Mary followed her young brood to boarding schools, staying nearby for weeks, and to sanitariums, where the couple sought medical help for their daughter Helen, who was epileptic. Also, the family bought a second home in Boulder, Colorado. Mary and the family would precede Baker in moving to the home in the summer. Of course, Baker and Mary were among those better-off individuals, but Baker was not only supporting his immediate family; he was sending money back to Virginia to his un-married sisters as well as to his wife's un-married sisters (two of Mary's sisters lived with the Armstrongs in Houston for a time in the early twentieth century), and the occasional handout to various other relatives, including Baker's youngest brother, who never seemed to succeed in anything he undertook.

Reading these letters provides some comfort to me, as in this current economic climate, our family has its own separations with which to cope: one spouse working in one state, the other spouse working in another and remaining there until the youngest child can be successfully situated, and a second young adult child in yet another state. Our concerns for our young adult children are really no different than the concerns that Baker White Armstrong's parents reveal in their letters. The worries may be slightly different--yellow fever, the lure of strong drink, the "wildness" of Texas in the 1800s--but the underlying parental concern is much the same.

The letters also provide cautionary tales. In 1879, Perry Nugent's family was doing well. The girls were being educated at female academies, and the boys were soon to be sent away to well-respected institutions of higher education. They had recently moved from New Orleans to a fine old home, called Longwood, in Salem, Virginia. Perry still had his business concerns in New Orleans, and he was able to wonderfully furnish the family's new abode. Two of the oldest girls, Lizzie and Helen, were enjoying the waters, body rubs, and meals at Clifton Spa, probably located near Clifton Springs, New York. Helen writes a very diverting letter to her younger sister Mary, describing the clientele. She bemoans the changes in dress and style of the current clientele, and she makes mild fun of a woman from New Orleans with a heavy drawl who knocks on Helen's and Lizzie's door to inquire whether or not the girls might be acquainted with her own friends in New Orleans. As I read the not-very-flattering description of the young woman that Helen Nugent provides for her sister Mary, I couldn't help thinking of Helen's own future as well as the future of Perry Nugent's family. In December of 1888, less than ten years after Helen and Lizzie were enjoying the good life at Clifton Spa, Longwood and most of its lovely furnishings were to go up in smoke. Shortly after the fire, Perry Nugent was to experience a number of financial set-backs (the house was inadequately insured), and the family was to be scattered. Helen was to end up in a boarding house, carefully counting every penny, and becoming more and more obsessive and manic. Eventually, she was to find some safe haven in the Armstrong house (with her sister Mary and family) in Houston, Texas, but the intervening years were to take a terrible toll on her.

These letters remind me to count the blessings I have today, as small and insignificant as they may seem, and to judge carefully the actions and appearances of others, trying not to let diverting vindictiveness rule my judgments.

The past is not so different from the present.

Image above: Perry Nugent Family in better days at Longwood, near Salem, Virginia--Click on the image for a larger version of the photo.

The Press Should be the "Friend" of Political Candidates?

Every political candidate and elected politician would love to be questioned by "friendly" reporters, of course, but more and more far-right candidates refuse to speak to any reporters other than those they believe will shill for them. Sharron Angle, the far-right candidate running against Henry Reid in Nevada, has avoided all press questions from any but the friendliest news outlets--and friendliest for conservatives and the far-right is Fox News. On Fox News yesterday (h/t to Matt DeLong, Washington Post) Sharron Angle said that she wanted the press to be the "friend" of her campaign. That would mean asking no difficult (or serious) questions and allowing her to advertise her campaign for free in any interview or press session:

We wanted them to ask the questions we want to answer, so that they report the news the way we want it reported.

Voting for Sharron Angle is voting for someone with a warped view of the responsibility of the press. Her view, however, is becoming less and less radical and more and more mainstream, as the propaganda of the right that the press cannot be trusted gains more and more ground. Without a free and robust press, we're sunk. Of course, Fox News is just the kind of press the Sharron Angles, Sarah Palins, and Rand Pauls of the world want, a press that will not report on their truly radical ideas and that will ask only softball questions, as Angle herself described in an interview with David Brody:

Well, in that audience will they let me say I need $25 dollars from a million people go to Sharron Angle.com send money? Will they let me say that? Will I get a bump on my website and you can watch whenever I go on to a show like that ["Fox News or more conservative outlets"] we get an immediate bump. You can see the little spinners.

Additional note: This kind of use of the press is the wave of the future, Kevin Drum points out. Conservatives and right-wingers have led the way, but liberals will follow suit--so he thinks.