American Story: Thirty Days by Greyhound and a Meditation on Patriotism

I’d done a year and a half of college, done okay, sort of, but must have felt that it was a path that was being mapped out by someone else, so that summer in 1980 I mapped out my own course, a bus trip across the country by Greyhound, staying at youth hostels, and lit out. I was 20 years old.
   I remember plotting it out over a map of the United States spread out before me on the floor of my bedroom in the suburban home I grew up in. I would go to New Orleans, then up to St. Louis, out across the Rockies to Colorado, then to Salt Lake, then to San Francisco. Id turn back east stopping at the Grand Canyon; make a stop in Ohio to see my grandparents. And then I would come home. That’s how I decided it, just like that, sitting on the floor and looking at a map. I would do this using a Greyhound Bus Ameripass, which in 1980 allowed you to travel for 30 days, wherever and as much as you needed to, for $300, staying in youth hostels along the way.
   It was a humidity-sodden day in July—the kind of day in D.C. when everyone seems to be somewhere else; the kind of day that feels like you could lose it like so much soggy lint in your pocket—that I boarded a bus at the depot in Silver Spring, Maryland, the neighboring town to my own Bethesda, Maryland. Silver Spring, then, was (at least in my memory) a smoggy, congested concrete attachment to the nation’s capital, surfeited with carry-out joints and failing strip malls. This was just how I remember my departure on this adventure of mine across the country—humid, non-descript, a lost little day in mid-summer. The bus depot manager was a moon-faced fellow in a baseball cap from whom I bought the Ameripass that same day, but I told him I was headed to my first stop in New Orleans. I’d be taking the regular bus south to Richmond—it left two or three times a day—and all of the dozen or so other passengers waiting in the dingy little station were heading either to Richmond or to points north of there along the way. I would be switching buses several times in several stations in the old confederacy before reaching my destination; it was early afternoon when the bus departed and the plan was for me to arrive in New Orleans mid- or late-afternoon of the next day, something more than a 24-hour journey. But when the bus was ready to board the moon-faced manager called out “New Orleans” as if I was heading, maybe, across town or across state. I was in gym shorts, sneakers, and a T-shirt carrying one large grimy yellow knapsack stuffed with clothes, a smaller pack with books, a camera, snack food and the like, and a waist pack where I carried cash and my packet of bus tickets.
   It was a young man’s adventure, the kind of thing undertaken with not much more forethought or cautionary planning than I have just described, and it’s easy to look back now and say that I was, perhaps, more than usually immature. I had tried the college thing—both my brothers had gone off to schools before and were now graduated into the world—and while I hadn’t done badly, it hadn’t been a good experience. I had taken the second semester of my sophomore year off, come home to live with my parents, and worked at a drug store (a local chain then called “People’s Drug Store,” that would be bought out later by CVS). There was a plan in the works for me to attend a different school in the fall, but truthfully I wasn’t much focused on that; what I wanted to do was get out from under what felt like everyone else’s script and scout around the great world of my own country.
   It was an idea born of books I had read—especially, as a teenager John Steinbeck’s "Travels With Charley," "Grapes of Wrath," "Tortilla Flats" and "Cannery Row"—and an ethos I had absorbed from other writers and poets and singers and songwriters, the idea that to discover the country you had to go out and visit it, and in visiting it you would be transformed yourself. So that your own self-discovery was intimately linked with your discovery of what it meant—or some small piece of what it meant—to be an American.
   Something like that. Contemporary sophisticates may think that a tad melodramatic, but it’s a theme that runs deep in American literature. But I’ll confess up front, it’s really not such a dramatic narrative I have to tell—there are some high ights, but viewed from a certain vantage point it can look mostly like a kid in sneakers and a t-shirt on a bus, drinking a shitload of beer wherever he was able. (And I should add that the reader will have to trust me; I have no documentary evidence of this adventure, neither pictures nor the diary I carried have survived, and some pockets of this excursion have blurred with time.)
   But I have today, almost 34 years later, a great affection and respect for my younger, adventurous self, and it was a journey that has stayed with me. It did change me, and it was one in which I did come to know my amazing country more intimately. This is an American story.

 ************
It went mostly as planned. I toured the French Quarter in New Orleans, then stayed two nights in a dormitory at Tulane and rode the streetcar up and down the Garden District; spent one night in a homeless shelter in sweltering St. Louis (it was something like 111 degrees) because I arrived on a Sunday and the hostel was closed (so that didn’t go quite as planned); spent four nights in Boulder, Colorado, trying to absorb the fact that people there casually walked around doing their business with those mountains in their backyard; spent a couple of nights in Salt Lake, treating myself to a Holiday Inn (what I mostly remember is how clean the city was, and my amazement that there were non-Mormon churches, plenty of them, there.) From San Francisco, I hitchhiked north to the wine country, and south down the coast to Carmel (receiving a ride in a pick-up truck I will never forget). Turning back east, I stayed in Flagstaff, Arizona where the youth hostel at the time was atop a bar-café called Charlies; because of its proximity to the Canyon, it attracted young people from all over the world as well as students from Arizona State, and folks from the town--it was a lively place at night and in the morning you could hitch a ride to the Canyon, 90 miles north.
    I learned a lot that summer and I wonder why it feels slightly embarrassing to say that one of the things l learned was to love my country. Certainly I thought I loved my country before, or would have said so if someone had asked me—after all, I had said the Pledge of Allegiance in grade school and sung (or lipsynced) the National Anthem at ballgames, and had been told through twelve-plus years of American public school that I had everything to be grateful for being born here. But getting to see the colossal land of my birth or a fraction of it, gave me a physical, sensual sense of the country I hadn’t had before. I suppose it may have first come to me with my first glimpse of the Rockies; it was a breathtaking source of wonder to awaken in Boulder, Colorado and step outside and see a mountain—not the little green hills we call mountains back east but a great, jagged-tooth eruption of God’s earth tipped at the top with snow—looming over you. It will humble anyone’s provincialism. Standing on the grounds of the youth hostel in San Francisco on Fisherman’s Wharf at night, looking out at the twinkling lights of the city, I marveled at the distance I had travelled, and at the vastness of the country, aware for the first time and in a way that has stayed with me, that we are part of something that is larger than our own narrow ideas about it.
   But “patriotism,” the word we attach to the virtue of loving and appreciating one’s country, seems to be badly abused—overvalued, on the one hand, and valued in the wrong ways. Certainly, anyone who does not appreciate the enormous advantages of being born an American (material advantages, certainly, deriving from the world’s most colossal economy, but more importantly the advantages of freedom and the rule of law written into our founding documents) is an ingrate (and needs to get out and see the world); anyone who begrudges praise for the bravery of young people who serve in wars, even those we may think are seriously misguided or even morally wrong, is seriously lacking in humility and a capacity for respect; and anyone who doubts or rolls his eyes at the mention of the beauty and majesty of our country is lacking in imagination (and needs to get out of his house and visit America).
   So let us stipulate that patriotism is a virtue, and deserves a day—at least one!—devoted to celebrating and expressing this virtue. But forgive me if I dare to suggest that among the virtues—kindness, compassion, the ability to forgive, a capacity for acknowledging when one is wrong and owes an apology, loyalty to friends and loved ones—it strikes me as one of the lesser ones. Who wouldn’t be suspicious, and wary, for instance, of someone who was proud of being a patriot—and even had deeds of valor to his credit to prove it—but neglected his children, or treated animals or weaker humans with cruelty?
   Years ago Joan Didion wrote in an essay, “On Morality” that she distrusted the use of the word “morality” in any but the most concrete sense, distrusted its use as an abstract ideal and as a weapon to attack those who didn’t live up to it. I feel roughly the same way about patriotism, about love of one’s country. To me it means something real—that awareness that struck me when I first saw the Rockies, or looked back across the country from the wharf in San Francisco, of the vastness of the country, the realization that it was larger than my, or anyone’s, imagining. I carry it around with me, this awareness—just as I carry around with me the awareness of my name (though I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my name, or boasting to others, “I am Mark!”).
   Four centuries ago an Englishman observed that “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.” Today, it seems this refuge is turning into an ideological snipers nest. Candidates for office are asked about “American exceptionalism,” are asked, “Do you think America is exceptional?” and the answer—the only, obvious, acceptable, answer—is “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Unless you think enough to say, “Well, yes, I do think America is exceptional, and so I think America has a burden to live up to exceptional standards.”  People of the left—standing outside the status quo and typically demanding a change, typically demanding that America do better—have always been suspected of “blaming America first.”
   It seems easy enough to respond that people who agitate for the end of the death penalty, or for universal access to healthcare, or for amnesty for some undocumented immigrants, or for a tax policy that is fairer to the less well-off, or for policies that are protective of our natural resources, are arguing from their own awareness of what it means to be American, from their own inborn sense of what America should live up to—just as are those who march for the rights of the unborn, or for school choice, or social conservatives who believe that too much of American popular culture is noisy, celebrity-obsessed and borderline pornographic (causes with which I share some sympathy).
   But today there is an industry of right-wing megaphones working the theme that liberals just don’t get America, or worse, just don’t like it. Ann Coulter, for instance, has built an entire multi-million dollar enterprise around this shtick. Her latest screed is against proponents of amnesty for immigrants illegally residing in our country in a book colorfully titled, “Adios America: The Left’s Plan to Turn America Into a Third World Hellhole.”
   It occurred to me that Ms. Coulter or anyone seeking a picture of our possibly bleak future should contemplate not the “illegals” coming over our border, but the face of a white man legally born in the United States—the 21-year old gunman who shot nine Charleston, South Carolina churchgoers at a Bible study. I suppose this young man might be able to name the author of The Declaration of the Independence, and possibly “Huckleberry Finn.” But I doubt seriously he could say who wrote “The Scarlet Letter,” “The Great Gatsby,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Leaves of Grass,” or “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Eve”; doubt seriously he could say the historical significance of Plymouth Rock, Jamestown, or Williamsburg, let alone Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Pearl Harbor, or Selma, Alabama; doubt seriously he had ever visited a National Park, or could even name the state where the Grand Canyon is.
   Illiterate, or anyway sub-literate, bereft of any knowledge of our history, literature or geography, he is only nominally American. Jobless, mentally ill, vaguely aware that he is somehow falling behind, he does not have a high school education, but he does have enough information, gleaned from surfing the Internet, to determine that it is someone else who is the cause of his troubles. And he does have access to a gun. There are countless young men just like him. Who is to blame for this waste of a generation? Is he the face of our country’s future? 
   To carry your country around with you--that is the beginning and end of patriotism. It deserves its day on the 4th of July, but we need to drop it as a metric for judging others; we should be suspicious of those who noisily proclaim their love of country--no less than we would be of someone who went around loudly and repetitively proclaiming how much they love their wife, and accusing others of not loving theirs.
   Two of my favorite writers and thinkers are Andrew Sullivan and the late Christopher Hitchens—both of them Anglo-immigrant writers who never declined to extol the virtues of America. But Hitchens had this to say on an interview show when a caller asked him to say whether America is the greatest country on earth: 

"I think I like America most on all the days when people are not going around `USA! USA! We're number one! We're the greatest!' I prefer the days when they don't do that. It's a matter of always think of it, never speak of it."

But then Hitchens reflected and added, "Of course, objectively as well as subjectively, the American Revolution is now the only revolution with a fighting chance of survival and success: the idea that you could create a multicultural democracy over a vast expanse of the earth's surface that could possibly be emulated by other people.” 

******

I was on my way back from the Canyon, my last day there, hitching south back to Flagstaff, and I had gotten started late because I had lingered in the Canyon for a few hours before heading back up and by the time I got to the lip and began hitchhiking back it was late afternoon. The traffic going south from the Canyon is on interstate 180, which breaks southeast toward Flagstaff about 45 minutes in, at a little spot on the map called Valle; but some of the traffic continues due south to Williams, and my first ride dropped me at the intersection with Flagstaff still the better part of an hour away.
    The traffic had seemed to slow—most of the families had headed back to wherever they were going earlier in the afternoon—and I looked around at a vast desert around me as the sun began to set. There was, I think I remember, a building of some kind in the middle distance, but it was pretty lonely out there and a sense of foreboding began to build as I scanned the empty highway for southbound traffic. Darkness was not far off.
   It’s a moment that has stayed with me, as defining as any of the other more dramatic points along this journey—arriving at night in New Orleans, seeing the Rockies for the first time, the ride in the pick-up along the Big Sur, the Canyon, looking out at San Francisco at night from the Wharf—but to anyone viewing the scene they would see only a guy with a knapsack and his thumb out over an empty highway. It was an entirely interior moment, but I have never forgotten it, and have come to believe in it as a kind of hinge in my life.
   It was, simply, a decision not to panic, a determination not to be scared—although I was. That’s all I can tell you. I had come this far, I had charted this journey on my own, I had staked a claim of sorts on a vast, vast country, and now I felt myself to be a different, older person than when I had left—and somehow I would work this out. (In truth, I’m not sure what I could have done had the situation really gotten desperate; there was, maybe, that building in the distance—it might have been a post-office or some such thing—and there may have been a payphone there; maybe I thought I would stand on the highway and force someone, or a truck, to stop. Who knows? ) Anyway, I stuck my thumb out and waited. It did start to darken, but of course in time a ride came and I arrived back at Charlie’s well before nightfall.
   Maybe a lot of the most important moments in our life are like that moment of mine on the desert highway—private, interior transitions and epiphanies that can scarcely be conveyed to any others. A few weeks after returning home, I was off to a new school experience, a little bit more mature, more confident that I was capable of writing my own script. I had changed.
   Someday, I would like to recapitulate this adventure (although now I’m not sure I could deal with 30 days on a bus!). I’d like to travel a northern route, through the Great Lakes region, the iron range of Minnesota, the Dakotas, the great Northwest. I’d like to visit my country again.
   At the conclusion of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Chief Broom, newly escaped from the institution to which he had been harnessed his adult life, contemplates the open road and the continent that surrounds him. “I might go to Canada eventually, but I think I’ll stop along the Columbia on the way. I’d like to check around Portland and Hood River and The Dalles to see if there’s any of the guys I used to know back in the village….Mostly, I’d just like to look over the country around the gorge again, just to bring some of it clear in my mind again.

“I been away too long.” 

 Me too.

Whiplash: Move Over 50 Shades of Grey

Everything about the movie, “Whiplash,” including its title, suggests to me that its main supporting character, Terrence Fletcher (played by J.K. Simmons, who won Oscar for best supporting actor) should be dressed throughout the flick in black leather and chains, jackboots and crotch-less chaps. There’s a name for this genre, but it’s one that Hollywood doesn’t typically honor on Oscar night. 

The positive critical response to this appalling movie is bewildering. I have seen a lot of forgettable movies; this one is unforgettably bad. I mean that—the more I think about it, the more I dislike it, the more it arouses my hostility toward its pretense, toward the smug way it assumes to have achieved a statement—about what it takes to be excellent in a demanding field; about the value of being excellent, per se, above all other values associated with the effort to excel—that the story doesn’t support, a story that is dominated and obscured in any case by the repellent figure at its center. 

It is ostensibly a story about an aspiring jazz drummer (Andrew Neyman, played by Miles Teller) who is accepted into an elite music conservatory and falls under the tutelage of one of those mercilessly demanding mentors who pushes you beyond what you think you can do because of (we are supposed to assume) his great love and respect for the elite field you are entering. It’s a stereotype, but it’s one that repays revisiting for a lot of reasons—because the relationship between mentor and student is one that is, in some form, almost universally experienced; because the relationship is one that is almost always fraught, a power struggle very often invoking courage, determination and love; and because it is a vehicle for re-telling what is perhaps the most ennobling of human stories, the story of a character who achieves excellence. Consider a film, “Bull Durham,” very far removed in content and intent from Whiplash, but one that is also essentially about a mentor-student relationship; what makes it work—and what makes it, despite its antic humor, a serious movie—is the unashamed love the movie and its characters evince toward the art form that is the movie’s subject, the art of baseball.

It is just this—any real demonstrated love or passion for music, jazz, jazz musicians, jazz clubs, the history of jazz, the entire ethos of jazz that is for some people (I’m not one of them) a way of life —that is missing from Whiplash. On Andrew’s part his passion for the music is suggested in a few cut-away shots of him as a little boy at a drum set, and by gazing dreamily at his posters of Buddy Rich (I am no kind of aficionado of jazz—at all—but even I knew enough to doubt that Buddy Rich is any kind of real inspiration; I seem to recall he got famous briefly in the 60s or early 70s by appearing on the Ed Sullivan show as a guy who could hit the drums really fast). But Fletcher himself appears to be positively bored by the music; in the first scene where he appears to rehearse his elite band he walks to the conductor’s stand, reads a sheet of music to himself and mutters, “Cute.” He’s bored, it seems, by everything except his own cruelty, which really fires him up. Fletcher humiliates Andrew and his other student musicians with ethnic slurs, taunts about their sexual orientation, and aspersions on the size and functionality of their genitals.  

I wouldn’t begrudge J.K. Simmons his Oscar—it could be that the strength of his performance so outshines that of the others that it unbalances the entire story, drawing all the attention to Fletcher (and his wretchedness). But quite apart from Fletcher, the story is poorly told, weakly supported, or just plain not credible in so many places. The love interest: Andrew scuttles a relationship with a sweet, unpretentious girl before it has begun (yes, that’s the point, it’s supposed to demonstrate Andrew’s single-minded dedication to being the best drummer he can be—but the problem is that it’s scuttled before the viewer has seen enough to even care about the relationship). The girl’s intelligent, incredulous retort sounds like snarky subterfuge from a late-hired editor aimed at the director, or the primary screen writer, or whoever it was that was responsible for this silly, transparent set-up. “What’s wrong with you?” she hurls at him before stalking off.

There’s a curious scene somewhere in the middle of the movie of a dinner table conversation in which we are meant to see that Andrew’s talents are not appreciated by others than his father. But who are these people who show up with Andrew and Dad at the dinner table? Family? Friends? Neighbors? Oh, well, no matter, the scene is over quickly and they don’t show up again. 

Fletcher evinces no convincing feeling for the music, but he does care about winning competitions and about his reputation. There is a bar scene dialogue between Andrew and Fletcher after Andrew has testified to authorities about Fletcher’s abuse, resulting in the teacher being canned (we are supposed to believe that Fletcher isn’t aware that it is Andrew who betrayed him, and we are supposed to be surprised later when we learn that he was aware, but in fact this felt intuitively unbelievable when I watched it)—in this bar scene Fletcher announces his doctrine of Achievement Uber Alles. He bases it on a story about Charlie Parker being terrorized by a mentor. (This story is disputed by Richard Brody in his New Yorker review of Whiplash; Brody cites Stanley Crouch’s biography of Parker for a very different version). Whether the story is apocryphal or not, the doctrine (the greatest tragedy would be not to have pushed, by any means necessary, Charlie Parker to become Charlie Parker) is transparent bullshit; or, rather, what is bullshit is the tone of moral superiority in which it is announced and the implicit assumption that Fletcher’s notion is unassailable, unquestionable. In fact, it is I think a fairly serviceable definition of fascism. (Not at all incidentally, Bull Durham, mentioned above, manages to assert the dignity of not achieving elite status, of being a dedicated journeyman in the middle grades or minor leagues of a difficult meritocracy. Fletcher, I imagine, would have only contempt for this assertion, although I think Crash Davis could probably beat him up in a bar fight.)

This movie’s insistent awfulness makes me wonder what in the world its creator might have been thinking. And in fact there is a story buried in this movie, one that might have been meant to be told. For there is, I believe, an idea in the popular imagination (that is, in the minds of people like me who may like jazz when they hear it, but not really be wise in any sense to what it is about or how it gets made). This idea is a product, in part, of the art of improvisation, which I take to be a singular stroke of genius of jazz music; but it is probably also a result of some stories, apocryphal or not, that get told about how certain jazz greats seemed to take to their instruments without even trying. The idea is this—that jazz music does not require practice, diligence, hard work, sweat, tears or blood on their instruments; that jazz musicians just do their thing because they were born with that “jazz thing” that the rest of us were born without. 

It is an idea that certainly needs a well-made movie to kick to the curb, violently if necessary. But that story would have required the movie and its characters to really engage with the music, to show us—so, how do jazz musicians learn to do that magical thing they do? 

What’s left instead is a story not about Andrew Neyman, aspiring drummer, but about Terrence Fletcher, sadist and fascist with a personality disorder. As I say, there is a name for this genre, every major motif of which “Whiplash” manages to score—the waif-like hero who wanders into the lair of a cruel, dominating figure; the submission of the waif to punishment and humiliation; the effort by the waif to escape but his eventual return for more abuse; and the ultimate scene (this is supposed to offer catharsis) when the submissive waif upends the dominant figure. Aficionados will recognize this last move as “topping from the bottom” and the genre they love and adore as—move over Fifty Shades of Grey—S&M.

Pointing Beyond Absence: Mark Strand, Poetry, and the Voice You Are Waiting to Hear

When I was 25, no great or avid reader of poetry, I read in a magazine the following poem, entitled, “Itself Now,” by Mark Strand and was so struck by it that I cut it out and taped it to the wall over my bed-stand.

They will say it is feeling or mood, or the world, or the sound
The world makes on summer nights while everyone sleeps—
Trees awash with wind, something like that, something
As imprecise. But don’t be fooled. The world
Is only a mirror returning its image. They will say
It is about particulars, making a case for this or that,
But it tries only to be itself. The low hills, the freshets,
The long dresses, even the lyre and dulcimer mean nothing,
The music it makes is mainly its own. So far
From what it might be, it always turns into longing,
Spinning itself out for desire’s sake, desire for its own end,
One word after another erasing the world and leaving instead
The invisible lines of its calling: Out there, out there. 

 Just recently, many years later and just three months after Strand’s death at the age of 80, I read that he was an avowed atheist. Although I think I could have guessed that he might not have been any kind of conventional, orthodox believer, nevertheless this surprised me—a little bit anyway. I don’t suppose anyone would call “Itself Now” a “devotional” poem, but is it not very obvious that the poet feels creation to be animated by something so elusive as to defy the categories of prose? Call it an emptiness that always turns into a longing to be filled—with knowing, with relationship, with whatever might be the opposite of emptiness—but which resists it also, for to be filled would profane the purity of its own emptiness. And so it exists always as a desire unfulfilled, a possibility, a future leaving only the invisible lines of its calling—which is to be always out there, still to come, yet to be attained, an eternal tomorrow.

A most pensively abstract poem, it might be said, though when I read it as a younger man it spoke to me as of something quite real, concrete and close at hand. Now, consider this poem by Strand called “The Continuous Life,” which I came across after I began to look for his work, a poem that (in my reading) comes to the same place but seemingly from an opposite direction.


What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children crouched in the bushes
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender, 
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty, 
Have run their course? Oh, parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost—a name, 
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don’t really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave and wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.    

I met Mark Strand once, twenty years ago. I was on a date with the woman who would become my wife and we had gone to a reading by him—not a poetry reading, per se, but his reading of a lyric book he had written about the painter Edward Hopper. Wine was served before the reading and guests could chat casually with the poet; my wife-to-be and I perceived that he was, perhaps, slightly tipsy in an entirely endearing way. He was teaching at the time at a certain esteemed east coast institution of higher learning, and when we asked him about it, he had this to say, which I have never forgotten, about his colleagues in academia: “They’re smart but they’re barbarians.”

Poetry is sorely afflicted with the aura that hangs about it of preciousness and solecism and academia—such that many who might actually be sustained and buoyed by poetry run from it as from a plague; others roll their eyes and smirk. Some of this is due, no doubt, to the way poetry is generally taught in high school and college, but it is also probably a result of certain trends in modernism, or in modernist poetry, which reached their apogee, I think, with T.S. Elliott. I am not a reader of Elliott, but I think I have read that his declared intention was to create a poetry that was loosed of all traces of aural ornament, of the musicality of lyric. John Updike recalled that in the 50s Elliott could fill a college auditorium with reverent fans, but he went on to wonder if, in 50 or 100 years, anyone who read, say, “The Waste Land,” would even recognize it as poetry. And it does seem that if your intention is to drain poetry of lyricism, then what you are doing is draining the poetry from poems.

It wasn’t always like this. Poetry began as storytelling, to be declaimed, read out loud. (And even when one is alone in a room with a book, the “reader” of a poem must be a listener if he or she is to hear what’s being said.) Bards and troubadours of early English poetry were something, sort of, kind of like our popular music artists today. (I, for one, do absolutely count Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Van Morrison, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and many other masters of popular music as poets. And if someone were to then insist that I must include rap and hip-hop artists as well, so be it. Dare I suggest that poetry is a large mansion of many rooms, and that what happens in poetry is something so exclusively between the poet and the listener, that you may find your room, close the door and ignore what you consider to be noise and foolishness coming from other quarters of the house?)

Nearly 30 years after I came across Strands’ poem and taped it to my bedroom wall, I still cannot say that I am today a great or avid reader of poetry. But it has come to be important to me, as a reader and as a writer, and I can say I value it as a form of expression more than I did then. I do write poetry, too, have done so off and on (mostly off) since I was a child; as a teenager I had a teacher who was himself a fine poet—published and all of that—who taught me and some others a few fundamentals of how to do it. Some time I ago I resolved (and wrote somewhere in a journal) that to write mediocre or bad poetry was no great crime, as long as you didn’t flaunt it. And to try to do something that is difficult is always a worthwhile thing. I work professionally as a writer of a certain kind of journalism, what’s called a “niche” for a fairly specialized audience, and it is as far from poetry as one can possibly get on the printed page, but I find that writing poetry has aided me even in that far backwater of writing. For something I find that writing poetry does is to compel one to concision—to take an image, or an emotion engendered by an event or occurrence, in either of which is embedded a story you want to tell, and get to the point. Poetry, like diamonds, is created by an enormous force of compression; it is almost as if the force of that compression is the very force of the emotion a poem creates. Doing this well, I can testify, is very, very difficult.

With great compression of detail and emotion, the two poems by Mark Strand point beyond themselves –to the alternating sense of emptiness and urgency that characterizes human life. Is it possible that what we are looking for when we talk about looking for god is embedded in the very randomness and emptiness—pointlessness, it may feel like in our worse moments—that haunts our lives? You could write a theological dissertation about this conundrum—someone probably has—but while some people may read such a thing, who would really care to love it, let alone memorize it? But people do love poetry, memorize it, recite it aloud or to themselves in their darkest moments, in times of triumph and celebration.

Great poetry need not concern itself with matters so identifiably spiritual or esoteric to point beyond itself, to lift people out of their reverie or the torpor that befalls us when the world seems devoid of music. I have read a memorable poem about taking rubbish to a landfill with one’s children; there is delightful religious devotional poetry, there are exceptional patriotic poems; and of course there is a great surfeit of startling poetry about human love—sexual, filial, and altruistic. And there is poetry that speaks to grave historical events. I think it is fair to say there are at least some lovers of poetry who would venture that one of the greatest, if not the single finest, poem ever written in the 20th century was the 99 lines inscribed by a young man who was at the time of his creation a devoted follower of international socialism; he set his masterpiece in a Manhattan dive bar, where he contemplated with his fellows in uncertainty and fear the Nazi invasion of Poland. “September 1, 1939” is as tense and terse and grave a proclamation as you can ever hope to hear; it captures with great concision not just a moment in history, when people everywhere were obsessed by the waves of anger of fear then circulating over the bright and darkened lands of the earth; it seems to capture also in that moment the story of our western world—the enlightenment, and the enlightenment driven away. W.H. Auden later, so I have read, after he left behind Europe and international socialism, came to dislike his poem very much—but that is the prerogative of genius, which snubs its nose at things the rest of us can spend the rest of our lives trying to imitate. Auden’s poem speaks to me and to many others in our own deeply troubled time. I have always thought it said something encouraging about our American culture that “September 1, 1939” appeared on billboards in New York City and made the rounds of email in the days immediately following the terrorist attacks in September 2001. 

Surely, poetry has the virtue of being varied enough in its forms that anyone who hunts around long enough will surely find something that speaks to them—and speak to them in a very specific way so that the reader (the listener) can imagine the poem was written for them, or else that it says something they have been trying to say all their lives, or in some voice that sounds like their own, or a voice they wish they had. When I pinned that poem by Mark Strand above my bed stand more than 25 years ago it wasn’t because of any tortured conceptualization about God or lack of God, presence or absence. It was because something about the voice of the poet sounded exactly like a voice I thought I knew or had been waiting to hear; or perhaps it was the way I thought I sounded myself, when I heard my voice in my own head, or how I imagined it would sound if my voice were so elegantly organized in cadence and imagery—slightly abstracted but trying amiably to connect to the real felt world around me. If it were a painting in a museum, I would stare it at for a long time and finally be able to say only, “Gosh, that’s beautiful.” And if someone had demanded to know what it meant I would have thought a long while and finally been able to come up only with a shrug. “What it means, maybe,” I might venture to say, “is that I have one more reason to be glad I’m alive.”

Let Us Now Praise Andrew Sullivan

Against the dreadful, spirit-lowering acid rain of what we call our politics, and the leaden grey dross of what passes for political commentary, two things have stood out for me as hopeful in the past distressed decade-and-a-half since 9/11—the popularity of Christopher Hitchens, and the success of Andrew Sullivan’s blog “The Daily Dish.” Hitchens left us three years ago, having given everyone the experience of a seriously radical thinker and political pugilist who might just as convincingly have forged a reputation as a literary critic. The nominally “intellectual” political writers he leaves behind are, with an exception or two, little better than cheerleaders (Go left wing! Go right wing!).
   And now Andrew Sullivan—Sully—is closing up shop.  My first reaction, I confess, was confusion—Andrew told us he was worn out from blogging and no one could blame him, particularly the way he blogged, at a high pitch of serious concern. But why did the blog itself have to go, especially now that The Dish had grown into a lot more than a one-man show? Well, appears a lot of other readers have the same thought, and hope, that The Dish should continue.
   So perhaps the Dish will live on, Sully-less. But in the meantime let us now praise him for creating something entirely new in the blogosphere. What The Dish is today is something like a variety magazine: politics, poetry, humor, religion and spirituality, art and artists, photography, whimsy, sexuality, literature, beards. I wonder what I am leaving out. And when he began offering the full text of his blog to subscribers who could choose their own subscription rate, he opened up a new business model for writers.
   I think his eclecticism accounts for what attracted me to Sullivan in the first place. Sullivan is a political junkie who seems to know that politics is secondary (this used to be a conservative theme)--subordinate to literature, poetry, manners, fun, faith and spirituality, sex, family and marriage. Like Hitchens (with whom he was bosom friends) he is not a team player—and in Sullivan’s case the team he spurns day-after-day is contemporary American conservativism. An admirer of Margaret Thatcher and of Ronald Reagan, Sullivan is a conservative who insists that it is American conservativism that has gone off the grid. In The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How We Can Get It Back, he lays out his case—but I'm bound to say that its not as good a read as his blog. The immediacy of blogging—sometimes I think you could hear him hyperventilating through the page—is an animating force for Sullivan.
   The mainstream conservative thinkers, writers and media outlets have mostly ignored him, it seems. One could point to his militancy about gay rights, or to his tendency to emotionality bordering on hysteria, or to the fact that he has recently taken up criticizing the Israelis. But the real reason I think is that he doesn’t play the game, he won’t be a cheerleader—so they don’t know what to make of him.
   A gay rights activist, yet a devout Catholic who writes seriously and thoughtfully about atheism and skepticism, a conservative critical of American conservatives, a writer and thinker who is not afraid to publish sharp criticism from his readers, a political junkie who can think and write about something other politics—Sullivan plays for no team, but the team of true writers and thinkers who make us think. Whether The Dish continues or not, I'm going to miss Andrew Sullivan and I think American politics and culture will be the poorer for his leaving.

Charlie Hebdo: On Political Correctness, Speaking Freely, and the Need to Lighten Up

Recent events have demonstrated, as events have many times in the past, how controversies that barely reach room temperature in our colossal country surrounded by unthreatening neighbors and two huge oceans and cushioned by a gargantuan economic margin for error, in Europe frequently turn deadly.

   The tense boundaries between free speech, good taste, and regard for religious and ethnic sensibilities in a fraught religious and racial society erupted this month in Paris in the massacre of cartoonists and staff at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Here in America, the same volatile controversies are played out most noticeably, when they are noticed at all, in the coddled atmosphere of the nation’s college campuses— defused, emulsified and distilled for our contemporary culture wars as the tepid little cocktail called “political correctness.”

   Beyond the general disgust at the killings, there was in the reaction of many here in America a certain amount of politically correct hypocrisy and/or operatic dramatization that actually revealed (while pretending otherwise) the dynamics of consensus-driven speech, of “saying the right thing” at the expense of more complicated nuances.
   The hypocrisy was largely on the side of the left, noted by David Brooks in his article, “I Am Not Charlie Hebdo,” which pointed out that here in the land of the first amendment, Charlie Hebdo would likely never be allowed to be published, certainly if it was attempted on a college campus.

Public reaction to the attack in Paris has revealed that there are a lot of people who are quick to lionize those who offend the views of Islamist terrorists in France but who are a lot less tolerant toward those who offend their own views at home.

Just look at all the people who have overreacted to campus micro-aggressions. The University of Illinois fired a professor who taught the Roman Catholic view on homosexuality. The University of Kansas suspended a professor for writing a harsh tweet against the N.R.A. Vanderbilt University derecognized a Christian group that insisted that it be led by Christians.

Americans may laud Charlie Hebdo for being brave enough to publish cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad, but, if Ayaan Hirsi Ali is invited to campus, there are often calls to deny her a podium.

  
In the 1990s when “political correctness” began to be taken up by the conservative right as a talking point (or shouting point), I tried to believe that the whole thing was a fabrication, something ginned up by talk radio. I don’t believe so anymore. On college campuses, liberal left political correctness of the sort described by Brooks is commonplace. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an extremely interesting woman, exceptionally bright (also very prickly and difficult, I have read) who escaped from an oppressive Islamic upbringing in Somalia to pursue a startling career as a legislator in Holland, then as an intellectual here in the United States. But she now writes and thinks for conservative think tanks, is an extreme hawk in the war on terror, has spoken out against not only the most heinous practices of radical Islam, such as genital mutilation, but also against Islam generally, has ridiculed “multiculturalism” (one of these days I’m going to have to find out what that actually means) and is generally a darling of the American right—so college campuses prohibit her from speaking.
   None of this is good for free speech or for education; nor is it good for the left, I think. Don’t like what someone is saying? Say something smarter, better, more persuasive.
   But Brooks also went on to say that outrageous satire and ridicule, of the sort that Charlie Hebdo engages in, is a kind of commentary that, while occasionally useful and revelatory, grown-ups generally outgrow.

….When you are 13, it seems daring and provocative to “épater la bourgeoisie,” to stick a finger in the eye of authority, to ridicule other people’s religious beliefs.

   But after a while that seems puerile. Most of us move toward more complicated views of reality and more forgiving views of others. (Ridicule becomes less fun as you become more aware of your own frequent ridiculousness.) Most of us do try to show a modicum of respect for people of different creeds and faiths. We do try to open conversations with listening rather than insult.
  
(He went on further to posit a “grown-ups” table where the commentators of Le Monde and presumably, though he didn’t say so, The New York Times, sit, while the satirists and court jesters of Charlie Hebdo, and those of the more tepid American variety, sit at the kiddie table. A tad arrogant, you might say, but how delicious is it that he placed Ann Coulter at the kiddie table?)
   The operatic dramatization was on the side of the cartoon right, which suddenly seized on socialist leaning France, so uncooperative in our misadventure in Iraq, as standard-bearer in the fight against terrorism. “For those who recall Charlie Hebdo as it really, rankly was, the act of turning its murdered cartoonists into pawns in a game of another kind of public piety—making them martyrs, misunderstood messengers of the right to free expression—seems to risk betraying their memory,” wrote Adam Gopnik, who placed the cartoonists in a long tradition of French irreverent satire dating to the 19^th century. The magazine, whose motto was “Nothing Sacred,” was regularly savage toward French Catholics and Catholicism, and caricatured Christ in ways that Sarah Palin might in another context have found to be one more objectionable instance of liberal-left sacrilege.
   On both sides there was a “right thing to say” and the right thing to say was, along with Twitter tweeters everywhere, Je’ suis Charlie. Less common, or at least less audible over the chorus of the righteous, was the voice of one such as Stephen Litt, who pointed out in an exceptional Cleveland Plain Dealer column that the cartoons of Islamic figures in Charlie Hebdo play heavily on exaggerated physical features—uncomfortably echoing anti-semitic Nazi caricatures of Jews. Litt also cited Gopnik’s column and argued in retort, that the satirists of revolutionary France had aimed their slings and arrows at kings and priests and the landed powerful, whereas the modern-day satirists of Charlie Hebdo were lampooning a segment of French society that appears to be hopelessly on the bottom, with no way up. That’s another important factor in understanding what happened in Paris on January 7 and another reason why it was weird to see the American right becoming all Frenchy: France’s vast social insurance structure has provided its people an unprecedented cushion of benefits—a very high level of healthcare accessible to all French-born citizens from birth to death (in a system in which no one ever asks the patient if they have insurance), extensive sick leave, extravagant maternity-leave benefits, paid vacation of the sort unheard of in America, a very generous retirement fund—while also making upward mobility virtually impossible. Adam Gopnik himself (the New Yorker’s expert on all things French) wrote in an entirely different context, the following: “Every Frenchman who is not outright destitute sits…within a domain of private benefits that he enjoys by virtue of his place in civil society. The triumph of the Fifth Republic was to have expanded that domain so that it included nearly everybody. The people who are left outside now seem to be left outside for good. The North African immigrants…are not just a minority; they are without any entrée at all. They are called, simply, the excluded.”

 

**********

“It is not enough to have free speech,” Christopher Hitchens wrote once in a withering column on the subject of political correctness. “People must learn to speak freely.”

   In that essay written during his days at The Nation, Hitchens made the point that political correctness was by no means confined to the left, or to college campuses, or to the sometimes innocuous or silly issues with which the campus left occupies itself (“empowerment etiquette,” Hitchens called it). Rather, he said, “the real bridle on our tongues is imposed by everyday lying and jargon, sanctioned and promulgated at the highest levels of media and politics.” It is the “culture of euphemism” by which everyone learns to repeat certain phrases—say, “peace process”—that may cover a multitude of sins everyone agrees to overlook, “a public language by which almost nobody employs plain speech.” For palpable evidence of what Hitchens is talking about, spend some time watching the Sunday political talk shows where cabinet officials and other dignitaries are supposed to answer questions posed by journalists. After several hours and a torrent of words, you will realize that no one has answered anything, or told you anything you don't already know--that's the point, and even the journalists seem to be in on the game.
 People must learn to speak freely. It’s harder to do, I believe, than many people may think. The hand of the social censor works its way into many a text. You get riled up about something; you sit at the laptop and produce a masterpiece of savage wit and brutally insurmountable logic and reason. You sit back and think—my god, people will never be the same after they read this. You are just about to hit the “send” button when a vision of this thing as it will actually look in print appears in your mind and the thought occurs to you unbidden: I wonder what my friends at church will think. You contemplate this for a moment, feeling a little less triumphant, and then you think again: I wonder what my daughter’s friends’ parents will think (they have all the wrong opinions, you are sure) or what her teachers will think. And what if, having been routed by your brilliance, they start to subtly take out their angry bias against your pride and joy?
   So you go back to the masterpiece to soften it here and there, toss a bone to the other side, round down the edges of your angriest rhetoric—and before you know it what you send to the local rag is just a slight variation on the conventional wisdom. That’s a caricature perhaps, but David Brooks is right—we are social beings and we strive, if we are grown-ups, to be polite and even-handed. But in just such microcosmic ways does wisdom risk becoming conventional, then trite, then meaningless.
   Sometimes the language of political correctness is not so passive, but employs certain phrases that no one (or not everyone) can really define, but which are widely agreed—with little or no examination—to be either very good or very bad, and hence can be used as a weapon to intimidate anyone who might dare to examine the subject further. My favorite candidate in this category is the phrase “socialized medicine,” which has been employed for more than 80 years by the American right to strangle any rational discussion about a publicly funded healthcare system that might finance a basic level of healthcare services for all. This phrase gets applied in all kinds of ways—it has been used to describe the Affordable Care Act, which preserves and enriches the private insurance industry and which was supported by the major for-profit, stockholder-driven private insurance companies—and although I think many people who use the term most promiscuously could not actually describe what a socialized healthcare system looks like (or just as important, what it doesn't look like), everyone it seems knows that it is a very, very, very bad thing.  
      Speaking freely does require a certain amount of reckless courage to break through the miasma of passively acquired non-speech, as well as the coerciveness of accepted but unexamined platitudes. Which is why we honor, or at least tolerate, the satirists at the kiddie table, whether they are the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo or our own Ann Coulter, and why we are right to be outraged when they are prohibited, let alone massacred. But if our aim is to be something more than outrageous, if our aim is the truth—so evasive in this vale of misinformation, misunderstanding, mediocrity and bullshit—then speaking freely will also require intelligence, discernment, and an wide-eyed awareness of the possibility that we might just possibly be wrong.
   Would we risk our college campuses being bombed and shot up if Ayaan Hirsi Ali were allowed to say what she says? Well, we have risked—and we have reaped—a great deal of murderous mayhem at our nation’s schools and elsewhere in our zeal to protect the right of people to own guns and assault rifles. And if thoughtful Muslims and non-Muslims can organize themselves they can talk back to Ayaan Hirsi Ali and say something better, smarter, and more persuasive.

   Much homage has been paid to free speech by many of us who don’t know how hard it is to speak freely, or how easily we all fall into repeating things that obscure a great many nuances. But there is finally also this to be said: that all of us who hold our deities and ideals so dear—everywhere, but certainly here in America where we have so great a margin for error—need, for God’s sake, to lighten up. It is not possible that anyone’s God can be so thin-skinned and quick to take offence as we in our age have become about almost everything.

   I am reminded of the remarks by a notable writer recalling his teenage years when he went through what he called a “crisis of faith”; he felt he no longer believed in God. He went to his rabbi to tell him the troubling news. The rabbi has likely long since left us but he is, I believe, on the short list of humankind’s lasting friends. And though his response may have stunned or shocked the teenage atheist, I believe it must have also been received as oddly comforting. For what he told his young unbeliever was this: “Do you think God really cares?”