Forever Isn't Over Yet

About that New Yorker Cover...

2008-07-17T20:02:23Z

Most of us were, at some point in our education, assigned to read Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," an essay that mocks mistreatment of the Irish poor by proposing that Irish children be bred for their meat. It works as satire because cannibalism is a powerful taboo in most societies. Blandly proposing it as a solution to poverty is, therefore, a shocking, obviously tongue-in-cheek indictment of the uncaring and inhumane policies towards the poor that were in place at that time.

Of course, if eating children had seriously been proposed as a solution in 18th century Ireland, "A Modest Proposal" would not have been very effective satire.

This is why I'm annoyed rather than amused by the latest New Yorker cover depicting Obama as a Muslim and his wife as gun-toting black radical. In a society where the likes of Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh were consigned to the fringes of political discourse it might be a nice punchy, obviously over-the-top bit of satire.

Unfortunately, that's not the society we live in. On the contrary, people like Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh are invited to air their views on nationally broadcast shows and treated as though they are serious political thinkers. They are, in effect, part of the "mainstream."

And while there are many complacent liberals and moderates trying very, very hard to pretend otherwise, the images in that cartoon are not taken as fact only on the margins of society. They, too, have been mainstreamed. Ergo, they don't embarrass or outrage either that dumb section of the right wing who believe Michelle Obama is a black radical and Barack Obama a secret Muslim, or that smarter section of the right wing who don't believe it but are delighted that other people do.

Let me make it clear that I'm not redfaced with rage, demanding apologies from the cartoonist and threatening to cancel my New Yorker subscription. The smug naivete that cartoon reveals, however, does irritate the Hell out of me. I'm reminded of the dozey moderates who, when confronted with our country's dangerous slide into hateful political rhetoric, declare that "Coulter is just crazy" and "Limbaugh is just an idiot" as if these facts render both Coulter and Limbaugh harmless. Many Americans seem unable to get their heads around the idea that a crazy woman and an idiot could do a tremendous amount of damage given the kind of national coverage enjoyed by both Coulter and Limbaugh. And they also seem unwilling to admit the deep inroads raw hatred and irrationality have already made into the American mainstream, and the effect it is having on our political process. Somehow they missed the Swift Boat veteran attacks on John Kerry.

No doubt being annoyed rather than amused at the cartoon qualifies me as one of those stone-faced liberal dogmatists Gary Kamiya has deounced in Salon. I just don't think political satire can be separated from its context.

In fact, I don't see how political satire can be separated from its context.

Frustrated

2008-07-07T13:48:55Z

The word of the month is "frustrated." Up quite early, just time enough to drink a cup of coffee and read some news online, then I'm out and onto a bus to Bayshore. Teaching until noon, another bus to the library where, if there's an event or a rental, I may stay until as late as 9:00 pm.

I'm a morning person, which means I write in the morning. No time for that now. Hence, two weeks without an entry, and nothing but this dry explanation when I do get around to it. My fiction takes longer too. Usually it only takes me one week to germinate and get at least a first draft of a story. Now it's two weeks, three if it's troublesome. I like the kids I see every day, but dear God what a relief it will be to have my mornings back in a few weeks.

Mercury is Still Messing With Me

2008-06-22T16:52:59Z

The word among astrologers is that Mercury has been doing doing something hinky for the past three weeks, going into retrograde or something and that until last Thursday, we all needed to be on our guard. As a skeptic who relies more on Tarot cards than the stars (they're easier to shuffle) I tend to ignore such foolish superstitions, but events since May have caused me to rethink my position. First there was the issue with our cat bullying two cat sitters into meek compliance while we were out of town. Then there was L's family emergency. Then last week I arrived for work at the Library just in time to see an ambulance pulling away with one of the librarians, who had some sort of scary reaction to the heat. Oh, and there was the car that chased me about fifteen feet down Bush Street that same day, turning the corner of Powell just as I crossed and barreling straight towards me while I did an arm-flapping backwards gallop that garnered applause and possibly even some pictures from tourists on a passing tour-bus. (There is nothing like watching the grill of a car roll towards you without so much of the squeak of a brake and having it stop just three feet away. My face didn't entirely relax from its wide-eyed, o-mouthed , "o nooooooo" Mr. Bill expression until an hour later.)

And now, we are sitting in our apartment in moody silence, waiting for the plumber. Our bathtub had been draining slowly since yesterday, so we knew we were having problems, but we didn't think it was anything a plunger and perhaps some drain cleaner wouldn't solve. The full extent of it didn't become clear until, after my shower this morning, I heard a knock on our door. Our neighbors had come to tell us that it was raining, not just in the apartment just below us, but in the apartment below the apartment below us.

I don't know how these things work, but it seems to me that Mercury is still messing with us.

Sleepless

2008-06-18T14:10:23Z

I'm teaching in the mornings, which means my usual prime writing time is now spent on the other side of town in classrooms. Because we're short-handed at the library, I had to forego sitting on the film jury this year, but weekends for the next two months are still going to be jealously guarded.

The students are all Asian American. The fact that I speak no Asian language is considered a plus by the people running the school, since my students already speak English but need some supplementary help in grammar and reading comprehension. In the four years I've taught there I've learned only "aya," (the Asian version of "oy vey") and the precise pronunciation of a younger, more rambunctious student's name. Unlike his classmates, who abound in "Fionas," "Jasons," "Tiffanys" "Erics" and "Jackys," he's retained his Chinese name, and in the second-third grade section I've gotten a lot of practice snapping it at him over the past two summers.

"Jianguo! Come out from under your desk this instant!" "Jianguo! turn around in your seat." "Jianguo! Do you want to go out and sit in the hall? Then stop bothering Karina and pay attention." "Jianguo..."

I've always felt slightly guilty about the fact that I sugar my lectures with stories ("Scary stories" my students will insist) at the end of class. Yesterday I was a little relieved when, during some confusion about who would teach which class, one of the male teachers came into the classroom and the students began clamoring, "It's the candy teacher! Give us some candy!" He politely declined, we straightened it out, and I explained they were not getting the candy teacher that day, but the story teacher. A few gratifying cheers.

Bugs

2008-06-12T17:50:04Z

Where are these bugs in my coffee coming from?

I get up in the morning. I shower. I prepare my vital, absolutely necessary morning coffee. This is done using a coffee press, three tablespoons of freshly ground beans and boiling water so hot it snarls as I pour it. As the coffee steeps, I rinse out my coffee pot -- no, not just rinse -- I wash out my coffee pot with soap and hot, hot water. I pour myself my first cup, and then pour the rest into my coffee pot and put it on the burner to stay warm.

Cream, sugar, stir. Nothing like that first cup. I carry it back to my computer, savor it, slowly finish it as I read the news, then head back to the kitchen for that second cup. Pour it from the coffee pot, add a little sugar, a little cream what is that bug doing in my coffee?

A bug. A bug with legs and antennae and everything. Small, dead but still unmistakable in its bugness.

This has happened to my second cup of coffee two days in a row.

How does it get there? When does it get there?

Something has got to be done.

Dentists

2008-06-12T15:16:56Z

Okay, I can understand my dentist yesterday morning, after poking around in my mouth, handing me a toothbrush and asking me to demonstrate my brushing technique to him and his assistant. Plainly they needed to get to the bottom of what they'd seen. But was it really necessary for them to laugh?

Which, of Course, Changes Everything...

2008-05-30T18:48:40Z

Some call it desperation. I call it a sense of impunity. Never underestimate the lobotomizing comfort of uttering malicious crap secure in the knowledge that you’ll be surrounded and backed up by many others repeating the same malicious crap. The latest kerfuffle in the right-wing blogosphere, still fresh from their triumph over Rachael Ray’s terroristic accessorizing, has to do with Obama’s “gaffe” in citing an uncle who was among the American troops that liberated Auschwitz.

Except that it was a great uncle, and the camp was Buchenwald.

Which, of course, changes everything. How could Obama have gotten such a thing wrong? I mean, really, doesn’t every school child knows the difference between Auschwitz and Buchenwald? And he called his great uncle his uncle! Pretty damning that. Nobody calls a great uncle “uncle.” It’s just not done! These gross inconsistencies call for a closer look. After all, nobody who has ever recounted a family story from two generations back could possibly be so imprecise unless they were either willfully lying or so stunningly ignorant they are unfit to hold office.

Fortunately, eagle-eyed rightwing bloggers are on the case, and they’ve discovered some disturbing discrepancies involving the “uncle's” middle initial, which naturally raises the question -- was this so-called “uncle” of Obama’s really at Buchenwald? Boy detective Steve Gilbert, of the right wing website Sweetness and Light contacted a website devoted to the 89th division and posted the following question to him:

Mr. Kitchell,

As you may have heard by now, Barack Obama has claimed that his great uncle Charlie Payne was a member of the 89th Div that liberated Buchenwald.

According to records his full name is either Charles W Payne or Charles T Payne (most likely the former), and he was born in 1924 — and he is still alive today.

He most likely was from Kansas at the time of enlistment.

Do you have any record of this gentleman?

Thank you,

Steve Gilbert sweetness-light.com

And blushing prettily, he added the following postscript:

PS - If you go to my website, you will see that I was probably the first to note the error in Mr. Obama’s first claims about his “uncle.”

The response he got from the website manager, 89th infantry division veteran Raymond Kitchell, was sensible and succinct:

Please crawl back under the rock you came out from.

Good day

Raymond Kitchell, veteran 89th Inf Div

The reaction from Steve Gilbert and other right-wingers has been pretty fascinating. Gilbert described the website as one that “purports to honor the 89th Infantry Division.” (Other people might be fooled by the website’s sections on the 89th’s combat history, personal accounts, and reunion events, but not Mr. Gilbert!) Rightwing blogger Macsmind declared that, “While there are no doubt some antiwar WWII vets who are against the present conflict, after knowing a lot of them I’ve never heard this type of language or rhetoric coming from them” and snidely implied that Raymond Kitchell was too senile to have actually responded, adding, “Of course the man is 83, but if the father is indeed - the website claims - active, mentally vital, he should be able to answer his own emails.”

This last is a bizarre form of skepticism that’s endemic among bloggers who fancy themselves online detectives. Frequently the self-appointed expert will make comments intended to impress readers with his or her knowledge and experience, but instead leave the impression of startling naivete – in this case, the notion that WWII vets opposed to the current Iraqi war are so rare and gentle a breed that acerbic language calls into question whether or not it’s actually a veteran who is speaking.

No, I don’t know for sure whether or not it was Raymond or Mark Kitchell who told Gilbert to crawl back under a rock – but I have no trouble imagining a WWII vet saying such a thing to someone questioning the war record of a soldier who served in his infantry division. And it certainly doesn’t strain belief to the breaking point to imagine someone in his 80s dictating this response to his more Internet-savvy son.

It’s possible that not only Obama’s great uncle, but the Kitchells and their site are going to be subjected to the kind of rightwing “detective work” already endured by Graeme Frost’s family and the late Andy Stephenson. If that’s the case, I can only hope that the online spectacle it creates will at last give this manner of blogging the unsavory reputation it deserves and embarrass the right wing mainstream into reassessing its tolerance for this kind of garbage.

The Power of Bone Stupid

2008-05-27T17:15:57Z

(Also published at Thoughtcrimes.org)

Tell me, my fellow Americans, when we speak of World War I, is the renaming of sauerkraut “Liberty Cabbage” cited as one of our finer hours? How about the harassment of German Americans? When we talk about World War II, are “patriotic” American shopkeepers who put up signs like “No Jap Trade for the Duration” or wags who bought amusing “Jap Hunting Licenses” remembered fondly by most of us? Are these things ever cited by reputable historians as factors that ensured our victory in these wars?

Of course not.

Time and time again over the decades, there’s been a segment of our population who imagine that wars are won by harassing their fellow citizens, instituting loyalty oaths, insulting people with German/Japanese/Arabic names, renaming foods so that hamburgers become “Liberty steak,” and French Fries, “Freedom Fries,” demanding that others refrain from owning dachshunds/listening to Madame Butterfly/wearing anything that looks like it might be a kaffiyeh. Time and again, after a few years have passed, these manifestations of “patriotism” are remembered with emotions ranging from embarrassment to profound shame.

And yet, we keep doing them. It’s as if some incurably dumb part of humanity is incapable of learning from history. “Sure,” some of us think,” it was stupid and wrong back in 1917 to drive that hardware store out of business because the owner’s name was Gerstein and he had been spotted wearing lederhosen at a picnic the summer before. But this time it makes sense…”

Its latest manifestation took place last week, when a dastardly attempt to brainwash America through accessorizing was foiled by the wide-awake folks at Little Green Footballs and other right wing websites. It seems that Rachael Ray wore a black and white fringed scarf in an ad for Dunkin’ Donuts that looked kind of like a kaffiyeh. And we all know what that means, right? As a poster on Exurbanleague so sagely and civilly put it:

“You see Rachael donning the Palestinian kaffiyeh above, while shilling Homer Simpson's favorite toric delicacies. I must admit that the scarf pairs nicely with the Swastika earrings.

I'll take one glazed, a large coffee, and death to the Jews... to go!”

Now, quite aside from the fact that a close look at the ad in question reveals Ray to be wearing a fringed black and white paisley scarf – not a kaffiyeh – there’s the offensiveness of assuming that this widely used and practical item of middle-eastern clothing is the equivalent to a Nazi lapel pin. Countless people wear kaffiyehs who are not genocidal anti-Semites and have no connection whatsoever with terrorism -- except in the minds of those who equate wearing a kaffiyeh with being Palestinian/Arab and being Palestinian/Arab with being a terrorist.

But the sheer power of bone stupid has once again revealed itself. Dunkin’ Donuts has withdrawn the ad and now Little Green Footballs and Exurbanleague are exchanging high fives.

It’s tempting to dismiss this kind of thing as a joke – until you consider that it’s really all about bullying people into compliance with the bully’s narrowly defined notion of “patriotism.” A passage in Exurbanleague’s post on the subject is especially revealing: “The last thing we need is for the kaffiyeh to become the next version of the ubiquitous Che T-shirts.”

We all know the dire results of the promiscuous wearing of Che’s image, right? Who can forget back in the seventies, all those desperate suburbanites battling the armed cadres of roaming reds? Exhausted Republican householders could only pause occasionally behind the barricades they’d constructed to shake their heads with regret and think, “If only I’d done something about that college boy who was spotted wearing a Che t-shirt in the park last year…”

It’s not about protecting western civilization. It’s about intimidation, about conformity. It’s about these cowards having the power to smear and punish those of us who dare to wear something they don’t like because it looks like something those durned AY-rabs wear. Don’t imagine for one instant that this is not going to result in individuals who wear kaffiyehs getting hassled or insulted, equated with Nazis. That’s what it’s all about, and the people who spearheaded this campaign know it.

Thirty or forty years from now, when the attacks on the Rachael Ray Dunkin Donuts ad are being cited as another example of stupid bigotry akin to kicking the Grubers’ pet dachshund to death during WWI, many of those who participated will, if they’re still around, be damned grateful they were doing it using pseudonyms.

Or maybe they’ll be too busy protecting America by writing angry letters about an ad campaign featuring a model who looks like she’s wearing something similar to a Bolivian pollera, a choice of costume that shows a criminal ignorance of, or possibly even sympathy for, the Bolivian menace…

Life is About to Get Very Busy

2008-05-24T20:26:22Z

Now is that long inward breath before the hurricane that always hits in the middle of June. Once again I'll be sitting on a film festival jury. Once again I'll be teaching at a private summer school for Asian students. Once again I'll spend several weeks feeling as though I have hardly a minute to call my own, with papers to grade, films to watch, jury forms to fill out, not to mention Bloomsday at the library, AND Bastille Day in July... I'm really looking forward to it.

And no, that's not meant to be sarcastic.

At the summer school, I am the "scary story" teacher. This was, I swear, completely inadvertent on my part. The first year I taught there, (I think it was 2004) I wasn't clear on how the summer semesters worked. I knew there were two, broken in the middle of July, and I asked one of the administrators if I was going to be having the same students the second semester -- was there a complete turnover, or would a lot of students come back? I was given to understand that it would be all new faces.

So, on the last day of the first semester, I decided to give the kids in my morning class a break and spend the last quarter of the class telling them a spooky story. It was a tongue-in-cheek children's story about a mysterious house in the woods, a disappearing family, and it closed with a comic finish unlikely to cause any sleepless nights or irate parental phone calls. I did this, I repeat, on the assumption that most of these children would be spending the rest of the summer doing summer things with their family instead of sitting in a little cinderblock classroom being drilled by me on irregular verbs.

It really is astounding how fast word can spread in a school in a matter of minutes. My next class, who was slightly older, demanded from the moment class started that I tell them the story their younger brothers and sisters had mentioned. I had to insist on at least reviewing a little of what we'd gone over before, and even then I kept being interrupted by students who, every ten minutes, would raise their hand and, instead of answering the question I'd thrown out, ask me "Now are you going to tell the scary story?" My last class were high school students whom I expected to be more blase about it. They weren't. They had to hear it too.

And, I discovered when I returned the next year, not only did the same students return the following semesters. The same students returned the following summer. And they remembered me. Part of my research in the weeks before classes now consists of learning new scary stories for them because these kids are damned retentive, and if I repeat a story they instantly let me know, and if I deviate one whit from a story their older sister or brother was told the year previously, they let me know about that too. It's a very demanding audience.

They no longer ask me to tell them a scary story every ten minutes, but I am expected to come up with one for the last five minutes of my classes. Sometimes, if I plead hard enough, they'll settle for a funny story, but if I thought they were demanding about the scary stories, that's nothing to the humiliation of a funny story falling flat. And then they demand a scary story as a consolation prize. I've learned the meaning of the term "flop sweat."

It's all very discouraging and gratifying at the same time. Which I guess means it's fulfilling.

The Little Door: Another (Allegedly) True Ghost Story

2008-05-23T18:03:28Z

It’s been a while since I told a ghost story. I heard this one from a young couple I met almost thirty years ago at a party in Louisiana. Obviously I can’t vouch for its truth, but I still think it’s a good story.

They had bought a house a few years before somewhere in New England, exactly the kind of home they’d always dreamed of having, old, picturesque, in a neighborhood of old, picturesque houses. It had two stories, hardwood floors, fireplaces, moldings, a large kitchen. Because the previous owner had lived there for a very long time – had in fact been born and raised there – there were all sorts of artifacts. They’d found stacks of magazines dating back almost a century in the basement, along with an ancient furnace and one of those round-cornered refrigerators from the 1930s. The strangest thing they found, though, was built into the house.

In the kitchen, on the wall facing the covered driveway, was a little door, hinged at the top. It was quite low on the wall, and rectangular, about two feet high and three feet wide. It had plainly not been used for a very, very long time and the hinges were in terrible shape, but once unlatched it could still be pushed, creaking, an inch or two outward, like a flap. Obviously it had once had some practical use – it was just high enough to have been used to load the bed of a pick-up truck – or, given the age of the house, a horse-drawn cart -- pulled up under it on the driveway. After scratching their heads over it, they concluded that it must have been intended as an aid to moving out, perhaps for loading trunks and other luggage before a trip.

They had other things on their mind. Old, picturesque houses that have had the same resident for a lifetime generally need work, and this one was no exception. Shortly after moving in, they began the badly needed repairs and renovations. The bathrooms and certainly the kitchen needed to be modernized, and soon there were workmen tramping in and out of the house and all the attendant headaches.

The husband’s job was in the next town, and he was away for most of the day, but the wife, a writer, worked out of the house and she had to endure the constant noise of hammering and sawing, the voices of strange men downstairs, the occasional soda can or fast food wrapper left behind on the kitchen counter or back steps. To add to her annoyance, she began to suspect one of the workmen was bringing a girlfriend over. At times, when they were supposed to be at lunch, she would hear a woman’s voice downstairs in conversation with a man, but when she went into the kitchen it would be empty and the workmen sitting outside on the back steps or at the picnic table in the back yard.

Even more unnerving, both the husband and the wife began to wonder if one of the contractors was coming back to the house off the clock. At times when the wife was supposedly alone, she’d hear noises from the kitchen as though someone was pushing a table across the floor, or running water, or opening a drawer. Sometimes she’d hear a cabinet open and shut. Going downstairs silently on the uncarpeted stairway was practically impossible, and by the time she got to the kitchen nobody was there. Once, quite late at night, both of them were awakened by what sounded like a door slamming shut in the kitchen. When the husband went to investigate, nobody was there, nothing was disturbed and all the doors were firmly locked.

The final straw for the wife, the moment when she began to suspect the house was haunted, came one afternoon when she arrived home from having lunch with a friend. As she opened the front door she heard, very clearly, a man and a woman’s voice in the kitchen, pitched as if they were arguing. She couldn’t understand what they were saying but they sounded so ordinary that she was positive she’d at last caught whoever it was, and she marched angrily towards the kitchen to confront them. Just as she got to the door, the woman’s voice rose in a cry so tearful, so agonized, that she almost stopped. “Does it have to come off?”

The next instant, she pushed the door open. The kitchen was empty and completely silent.

She and her husband began asking around in the neighborhood about the house. No, they were told, nobody had ever said anything about the house being haunted. The previous owner, Mildred Baldridge, had been born and raised there, and had died in her eighties, still in possession. No, she hadn’t died in the house, but in the hospital after a stroke and she had led, as far as everyone knew, a very uneventful life. She’d worked as a schoolteacher, was never married, and had no brothers and sisters. The only person who might have some answers was a very, very old fellow who had grown up on that street, a college professor. He knew the house well, had gone to school with the previous owner and had frequently visited it in his childhood. Unfortunately, he no longer lived in the area, but his son, who still lived nearby, gave the couple his phone number. Somehow they never got around to calling him.

The work in the kitchen was completed and the contractors were paid. Once the renovations were done the noises, the thumps and the voices, seemed to abate. Only occasionally did the wife think she heard something downstairs, usually the sound of a door opening and closing but by that time she was so used to it she could distinguish between the “ghost” sound and the actual sound of the back or front door. She learned to ignore it.

That August the couple decided to show off their refurbished home with a housewarming party and a backyard barbecue and the whole neighborhood was invited. As it happened, the old professor was visiting his son and was included among the guests. Naturally the wife offered to give him a tour before the husband showed everyone else around, and the first thing she did was take him inside to show him the kitchen and the little door. Did he have any idea what it was for?

Oh yes, he said, looking down at it as he held his drink, a white-haired, bearded little man, still quite straight-backed and keen in spite of his years. He remembered that door. And yes, it did have a practical use. He glanced sideways at her and smiled slightly. Was she sure she wanted to know what it was?

She said she did.

Well, Milly’s father had been a physician who practiced out of his house back in the 19th century. The kitchen had been used as his surgery. “And things being as they were back then, you understand, operations weren’t always successful. The neighbors didn’t like being reminded of that, so Dr Baldridge had this door added, for discretion’s sake. That way the undertaker’s wagon could be loaded out of sight of the street.”

“What you have here, my dear, is a coffin door.”

Rejection

2008-05-22T20:26:14Z

A recent discussion on Catrambo's blog has me thinking about rejection letters. The most demoralizing one I ever got was a scrap of brown paper plainly torn from a paper bag on which was scribbled the word, "overstocked." The most perplexing was a very nice, detailed rejection letter from an editor in response to a ghost story I'd sent in which my heroine wakes up one morning to find writing on the ceiling over her bed. The editor wanted to know how the ghost could have done this without waking my main character up (presumably the rattling of the spray can should have roused her.) The most infuriating -- and the only rejection letter I was ever tempted to respond to -- was a snotty note from an editor who informed me that if I'd bothered to read the guidelines to the magazine I would have realized that they didn't accept stories with that hackneyed ending in which the narrator turns out to be dead and wouldn't have wasted the editors time...

My story didn't end that way. My story was not intended to end that way. My story had been read by many other people in my writers group, not one of whom even remotely interpreted it to end that way. This rejection letter enraged me even more than the one I got from an agent informing me that they'd "disposed of the manuscript" after I'd sent her my novel with a large and expensive SASE. I spent the week afterwards startling co-workers by muttering to myself broken phrases like, "...well, if you'd bothered to read the story..." and "...I mean, we all have bad days, but..." and "...nobody else has ever so much as suggested..." In the end, of course, I didn't reply, though I did commit her name to memory and, for a while afterwards, haunted conventions as a grim silent figure peering keenly at the name-tags of editors sitting on slush-pile panels.

You Asked

2008-05-22T17:25:02Z

Okay, I’ve read Liberal Fascism. I was asked for my thoughts on it, and I’ve already given a few in an earlier post. Now that I’ve finished the last chapter, here’s what I think. This post is addressed to Jonah's fans.

Jonah Goldberg is lying to you. Enumerating every one of his lies would practically fill a new book, so I’ll just start here with the biggest one.

”the fascist label was projected onto the right by a complex sleight of hand…before the war, fascism was widely viewed as a progressive social movement with many liberal and left-wing adherents in Europe and the United States…After the war, the American progressives who had praised Mussolini and even looked sympathetically at Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s had to distance themselves from the horrors of Nazism. Accordingly, leftist intellectuals redefined fascism as “right-wing” and projected their own sins onto conservatives, even as they continued to borrow heavily from fascist and pre-fascist thought.”

This is what’s called a “whopper.” First of all, anyone going through periodical archives of the 20s and 30s, anyone reading writers of that era, knows that both liberals and conservatives associated fascism with the right wing well before WWII. Travel books of the 1930s, for instance, listed the Nazi party under right wing political groups, as did liberal magazines like The New Yorker and conservative magazines like Time :

There will be 607 Deputies in the new Reichstag, largest, in German history. Simplifying the returns, it means that the Nazis and other Right Wing Parties will have a total of 277 seats." Time Magazine, 8/8/32

It took no “liberal sleight of hand” to associate fascism with the right – unless you are willing to characterize Time’s rock-ribbed Republican and conservative publisher, Henry Luce as a liberal engaging in “sleight of hand.”

And yes, there were some liberals and leftists who said good things about Mussolini or even Hitler. That does not change the fact that most people on the left were hostile to them, or that there were more of these fans – like Henry Ford -- on the right side of the aisle. Contrary to Goldberg’s claims, it wasn’t, as a rule, leftists who were red-faced and scrambling to explain past sympathies in the wake of revelations about the holocaust.

Which brings us to Goldberg’s lies of omission. He presents this book as a work that tells the whole story about fascism when in fact, the picture he offers is much less complete than that offered by all those supposedly liberal historians who’ve been – he’s claimed -- intent on hiding the “truth” about fascism. It’s fascinating to observe, for instance, how he handles the knotty problem of Henry Ford:

“Hitler said he was a great admirer of Henry Ford, though he didn’t mention Ford’s virulent anti-Semitism. What appealed to Hitler about Ford was that he ‘produces for the masses. That little car of his has done more than anything else to destroy class differences.’”

This is practically the only mention of Ford you will find in this book, and it strongly implies that Hitler’s main attraction to Ford was not Ford’s bigotry, but the fact that Ford produced cars “for the masses.”

In reality it was Ford’s anti-Semitism and his beliefs about the superiority of “Anglo-Saxons” that made him a hero to the Nazis, who bought up translations of his book The International Jew at a tremendous rate. It was also his anti-Communism and, in spite of all Hitler’s rhetoric about eliminating “class differences,” Ford’s disdain for the concept of equality. Ford believed that there was “no greater absurdity and no greater disservice to humanity in general than to insist that all men are equal,” a philosophy that jibed quite well with Hitler’s belief that “men are not of equal value or of equal importance.”

There’s nary a mention of this in the book. Nor is there much talk about the Spanish Civil War, an odd omission in any discussion of 20th century fascism. (But then, the number of leftists and liberals who flocked to Spain to fight fascism well before the Second World War wouldn’t do much for Goldberg’s claims about that liberal plot to associate fascism with the right after WWII, would it?) Nor is there much about such Hitler supporters in Germany as Emil Kirdorf, an industrialist “so reactionary that he called the policies of the Imperial government ‘dangerously radical’” because it “had allowed Bismarck’s antisocialist law to lapse.” (From Who Financed Hitler, by James and Suzanne Pool) or steel heir Fritz Thyssen.

What Goldberg is doing here is juxtaposing the complex politics of the 20th century against the ignorance of many 21st century young people who have apparently gleaned their notions about the rise of fascism from skimming novels or half-watching movies about it while they blog on their laptops. Goldberg then declares this historical ignorance to be the fault of liberals out to fool us all and presents facts well known to anyone who’s bothered to read up on the subject as if they were carefully hidden secrets. At the same time, he carefully omits facts that indicate the more widespread popularity of Hitler and Mussolini and Franco among their contemporaries on the right.

If you’d like me to go into more detail, I’ll happily do so. Let me know what you find unclear or untrue about any of this. I’d be delighted to discuss it with you at greater length-- I'd especially like to have a cozy chat about the connection between Jonah Goldberg's eagerness to revise history and his admiration for the bloodthirsty policies of mass murderer Augusto Pinochet.

Now that would be fun!

Thoughts on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

2008-05-19T17:12:10Z

The opening scene of this latest Indiana Jones installment is terrific. To the strains of Elvis’ “Hound Dog,” you’re plunked squarely into 1957 America, an era of the cold-war, the red scare, and hot-rodders. A jalopy full of exuberant teenagers is tearing down a New Mexico highway alongside a long green convoy of army trucks and jeeps. The soldiers’ reactions range from grim shakes of the head to one young jeep driver, barely older than the teenagers, who’s delighted and plainly longs to hit the gas and race with them. It’s a fun, adrenaline pumping sequence that effectively lays the groundwork for the action scene that follows. (The teenagers in the jalopy, by the way, seem to be lifted from a classic Life Magazine shot of a group of 1950's kids playing “chicken.”)

So long as the film is set in 1950s America, it works. Lucas does a great job of neatly and vividly distilling that era. Leather clad, switchblade wielding bikers with DA haircuts duke it out in diners with the “squares,” and KGB agents and the FBI/MIB bedevil a noticeably older and more cranky Indiana Jones. The blacklisting of academia, the sterile rise of middle class suburbia, nuclear testing, Roswell, and Soviet psychic research are invoked and in a neat bow to the 21st century, Swift-boating is briefly touched on. The feel of that section of the film is similar to the best of that sadly short lived and intelligent Young Indiana Jones television series.

Unfortunately, once the action moves to South America, that kind of detail vanishes, and Lucas relies more and more on special effects, puzzle solving, and non-stop chase scenes. It turns, essentially, into a huge non-interactive video game. It’s not a bad film by any means, but I found myself thinking wistfully of the first movie, when Speilberg had to rely less on CGI and more on making the interplay between his villains and his heroes and their environment interesting. Kate Blanchett is fun in a Boris-and-Natasha sort of way as a spooky, sabre-wielding Soviet agent, but she can’t compare with Belloq (who could?) or even with the Nazi blonde from The Last Crusade. As glad as I am to see Karen Allen again, the father/son interaction between Harrison Ford and Sean Connery in that same film was more complex and engaging.

Watching this movie in the wake of seeing some of the trailers and commentary about the new computer game Grand Theft Auto IV raised an interesting point. It seems to me that the rise of computer generated images is causing a shift in story-telling genres. Filmmakers are relying so heavily on CGI that even action movies are getting dumbed down while at the same time, computer games seem to be getting more intelligent. I was impressed by what I saw of Grand Theft Auto IV. With its embittered greenhorn protagonist and gritty landscape of urban posers and dreamers, it's a computer game with characterization that goes beyond bad guy/good guy. It’s too bad that so many action films are abandoning that level of nuance.

Perhaps because it's a new medium, computer game creators seem to be in the process of figuring out that spectacular CGI functions best as a backdrop, even as filmmakers struggle to cope with a changing industry by relying on it more and more. Until filmmakers stop looking for easy and quick answers to the shift in audience viewing habits, CGI will continue to be more of a detriment than an asset in Hollywood.

In the meantime, an entirely new and exciting form of fiction may be evolving on home computers, a hybrid of gameplay and genuinely complex storytelling.

Thank You, thank you, THANK YOU!

2008-05-16T03:51:28Z

I never thought I'd say it, but credit has to go where it's due. The sheer historical illiteracy of some of those on the right who casually invoke Hitler and Chamberlain is at last exposed. This twit doesn't have the foggiest idea what Neville Chamberlain did.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMMklhX74_w

Thank you, Chris Matthews!

Another Hot Night

2008-05-15T19:16:58Z

There’s nothing like a stroll down Columbus on a hot night -- crowded pavements, men in shirtsleeves and t-shirts, women in sundresses, people arguing in English, Italian, Chinese, French, German, Spanish, every window thrown open, the diners inside talking to strangers on the sidewalks, music and light spilling out. Il Pollaio is one of those long-lived North Beach restaurants too often overlooked, a modest joint with a limited menu. But damn, what they do serve is good. We had plates of roasted, moist, perfectly seasoned half-chicken, spicy fennel sausage, and fresh combo salads. We talked politics a bit, M and our houseguest, K reminisced about college life in Champaign, and while they talked sports I counted the number of times I heard either “Hillary” and “Obama” in the conversations at other tables. (Eleven. One slight anomaly – the name “Con-do-leez-a” pronounced with emphatic precision by an older, sharp-faced man leaning across his table and gazing fiercely into the eyes of his dinner companions, a couple of slightly younger guys in baseball caps. I couldn’t hear the rest.)

On such a night, after such a meal, gelato is vital. We crossed the street a block down to a packed gelato shop, typical rectangular joint with white fluorescent lighting, no tables and a long glass and metal counter and freezer displaying mounds of different colored gelato with flavors like Green Tea, Raspberry, Orange Chocolate, Madagascar Vanilla, and some white and dark streaked gelatos with long Italian names that I tried but failed to commit to memory. There was no pretense of a line, just a layer of people milling about in front of the counter, which was manned by a round twenty-something guy with a goatee and great self-assurance and a slender, silent girl with glasses who seemed slightly overwhelmed by the crowd and confined herself to serving and nodding.

“We don’t do lines,” the round guy said in response to a murmured comment from one of the customers. His method seemed to be to stride down the counter, see a customer whose appearance he liked, and point at him or her saying simply, “you.” When a woman in a sundress hesitated, suddenly looking at the gelatos as if she’d only just arrived instead of standing there chatting with her neighbor for several minutes he said severely, “you’re not ready,” and went on to someone else. (I liked the man’s style.) He leaned forward to take another order, a combo. Strawberry and something else. “That’s not right,” he said, shaking his head, but he served it up anyway. M waited patiently, but when he was at last chosen he was so crazed with success that he forgot to order the gelato (Orange Chocolate with Madagascar Vanilla) with a cone. So he ended up bringing me a little plastic dish of gelato with a cone stuck on top like a dunce cap, which we ate separately.

We strolled down Columbus sharing this, edging around the husky female barker trying to get us into a strip club, pausing at City Lights to window shop and admire the coolest coffee table books ever – among others, The Mutter Musuem, The Education of Hopey Glass, and a compilation of what looked like Civil Rights era activist mugshots. The sound of music and a crowd gathered outside some joint on Vallejo Street attracted our attention, and we wandered over to watch. A jazz band trying to cool off had set up outside a club and were playing on the sidewalk, with a large black female singer in a tiger-striped halter dress effortlessly belting out “Laissez Les Bontemps Roulez.” Our neighbor Andie the Crossword Puzzle Queen, blonde, grinning and in her element, was working the crowd, brandishing the band’s tip jar in the form of a glass water pitcher filled almost to the top with dollar bills.

The band played a couple more numbers then went back into the club. We strolled down Jack Kerouac Alley and came out into the deserted streets of Chinatown, walked off the gelato on the upwards slope back to the apartment.

Past the Chinatown housing project, a concrete apartment block that would be ugly if it weren’t for the Asian touches added, the elaborately decorated metal gate, the scrolled tile roof, the Chinese characters on the outside walls. Windows were propped open, curtains drawn back, offering brightly lit glimpses of other people’s lives, the most memorable being a room that seemed to be furnished entirely with piles of untidy clothing, with a picture on the wall opposite the window of three handsome young Chinese men in black tie. As we passed, the inhabitant, visible only as a slightly hunched, gray-haired silhouette, came to the window and leaned out of it, talking on her cell-phone as she breathed in great draughts of fresh air.

Where else but San Francisco do you see a street like Jackson, almost vertical and nubbled overhead with bay windows? A crowded car overtook us and Andie shouted our names, hanging out a window and waving as they whooshed by. Half a moon hung over the rooftops.

A rare and beautiful weekday night.

Good Book, Bad Book

2008-05-14T19:08:07Z

I just finished reading a novel I liked very much, Gerri Brightwell’s The Dark Lantern a thriller set in Victorian London. To read it is to be plunged, as a twenty-first century reader, into an alien and inhospitable city seen from several POVs – a naïve young man struggling to make a name for himself in the new “science” of psychometry, his beautiful secretive wife, and a country girl newly arrived in London to work as a housemaid.

It’s a claustrophobic, gas-lit, pungent world that Brightwell creates, and she’s populated it with people so vivid, so believably shaped by their time that I found it almost impossible to put down. The main character, the housemaid, is not so much naïve as painfully aware of her own ignorance and vulnerability, occasionally shaken by the repressed rage of the powerless and hungry. The villains range from a skin-crawlingly evil ex-convict, to an ordinarily malicious and mercenary fellow housemaid, to the secretive wife, who veers from sympathetic character to antagonist and back throughout the book. Best of all, the ending is logical, satisfying, and unpredictable. Not many fiction writers can open and end a novel well. Or so neatly illustrate what a myth is the term “the good old days” when it comes to the poor.

In the meantime, I am continuing my long, thankless slog through Jonah Goldberg’s book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. No, I am not a masochist. Badlydrawnjeff threw down a gauntlet of sorts by saying he’d be interested in my opinion of the book once I’d finished, and now I’m chained to the damned thing until the bitter end. The last time I felt so honor bound to finish a nonfiction book was when I read The Bell Curve, and that was at least clearly written.

So far the “secrets” breathlessly imparted to me by Lucianne’s boy include the astounding news that Mussolini preceded Hitler, that the KKK was once quite a powerful force in American politics and that Margaret Sanger had an unsavory connection with the eugenics movement -- in short, “secrets” that are well known to anyone who’s actually read about WWII, the holocaust, the Klan, or the eugenics movement.

Goldberg’s target audience seems to be very young and/or very ignorant souls who have not actually read books about twentieth-century history. In fact, they’ve apparently not even seen movies or read novels about the rise of the Third Reich etc. They’ve just read rightwing websites talking about what all those commie-lib college professors, novelists and filmmakers supposedly say about it. It’s a mindset moved three notches to the right of reality.

And unlike The Bell Curve, it’s badly written. I’d been assured that Goldberg, whatever his faults, is a very witty lad indeed, but I have this fetish about lucid writing and if he’s witty I’m missing the jokes as I try to sift through a sticky morass of shifting definitions and illogical connections.

I’ll go into the self-serving and Conservapedia-like lies of omission that riddle the book later, after I’ve read the last page and have returned the thing to the library, possibly using a pair of tongs.

Recovery

2008-05-14T15:36:57Z

On Monday I went through a medical screening test that requires what they call “mild sedation.” The prep the day before was bad enough. I’d prefer not to go into great detail except to say that doctors have an annoying habit of treating the logical and obvious as though they’d never heard of such a thing. When I asked mine about the prep – “what if I vomit?” he looked politely puzzled and asked me to repeat the question. Then he thought for a moment, his brow furrowed at what was plainly a baffling question and told me. “Well, just pace yourself if you have to.” Which, I learned on Sunday night, didn’t do much good. To quote Mark Twain, “I thought I had thrown up my very soul.”

Of course, the following day, when I mentioned it at the hospital to the nurse who was inserting the IV, she just nodded and said, “Oh yeah. That happens,” as though she’d heard it a thousand times before.

In fact, it was not the prep that was the worst part, but recovery. The procedure itself was nothing. My main memory is of being very pleasantly stoned. After I woke up, they drove me home in a van and I ate some soup M had bought just before passing out on the couch. It was when I woke up there a couple hours later that I remembered why I don’t drink.

I felt like a roach that had been doused in Raid. The last time I’d been so miserable had been in my twenties, after a Harvey’s Bristol Cream binge. I crept about the house, a trembley nauseated and paranoid wreck, and by nightfall had such a pounding headache that I slept, or tried to sleep, with an ice-pack balanced on my forehead. The night was spent occasionally waking up to adjust the pack and then dropping off back to sleep to continue a long, bizarre dream about adopting a green kitten. Not until yesterday afternoon did I begin to feel normal, and I’m still a little shaky this morning.

Gumbo today.

Why a Woman Edged Away from Me on the Bus the Other Day

2008-05-08T18:52:32Z

When I was six, and my sister was four, our family lived in a small rented house on the banks of Lake Ponchartrain in Slidell. It was a wild, remote, very beautiful place set in a broad cleared space surrounded by trees and brush. The blazing Louisiana sun made the leaves glitter and the long grass hot against our legs in the daytime. The nights were loud with frogs and insects and the long burp of gators. To step outside at dusk was to walk into a curtain of mosquitoes. I remember the interior of that little house as cool and dim and faintly rustic, with lots of dark wood and a stone floor in the living room. My sister and I shared a room at the back of the house, where, to save space, our twin beds had been pushed together. Mom and Dad’s room adjoined ours.

I liked our parents’ bedroom because it had what I called “secret passages.” It was so completely and totally lined with the dark wood paneling popular in the early ‘60s that it didn’t have proper doors. Both the door to the hall and the door to the master bathroom were little more than man-sized vertical flaps cut into the room’s paneling, with little knobs added on as an afterthought and “locks” that were nothing more than hook and eye arrangements. Once the doors were closed – and they both swung closed completely unless propped open -- they were pretty much invisible to anyone in the room who didn’t know exactly where they were.

One night our parents, who were still in their twenties, had a party. An advantage to being that age and renting a house out in the middle of a Louisiana swamp is that you can throw loud parties without the neighbors complaining. My sister and I were always entertained by our parents’ parties. Even after we’d been sent to bed, we could usually hear and enjoy what was going on.

That night, Crosby had come over. I think every family has a Crosby, the naughty bachelor friend who tells good stories and brings a different girl with him on every visit. Late into the evening, a bit after the music and laughter had peaked but while the liquor was still flowing, Crosby needed to go to the bathroom. There was already a long queue to the little hall toilet, so he decided to use the one that adjoined our parents’ room.

From our bedroom my sister and I heard him announce this intention. We heard several tipsy, ribald “good lucks” to him from the people in the queue to the other bathroom. We heard the “door” to our parents’ room open, then shut behind him. We heard a metallic rattle as Crosby fumbled with the little hook and eye on that first door and managed to latch it.

We listened with great interest.

There was a long pause, where we mainly heard the usual sounds from a waning party. Then, after a minute or two we heard a thump, as of a hand striking the wall in the next room. There was a pause. Another thump, slightly fainter. Then another slightly louder and closer. Then another from someplace else in the other room. My sister and I nudged each other.

The thumps were becoming increasingly frequent and loud. At the point where Crosby began beating a tattoo along the wall, circling frantically in search of a door, any door, we both began giggling uncontrollably. At the point where he began yelling for help, “I gotta go!, I gotta go!” we were rocking and squealing with suppressed laughter. When a crowd gathered outside the door to my parents’ room, discovered it was locked, and began shouting questions to the almost hysterical Crosby (who was now blundering against the walls of the room like a moth in a glass jar and roaring for help), we had given up trying to be quiet and were practically screaming.

We managed to subside into weak gasps during a moment of relative silence and calm, as Dad was summoned from the front porch to deal with this crisis. But when he began trying to talk Crosby through the door to the door, and we heard the Dad’s deeply serious voice saying “To your right…Your right. Well which way are you facing Crosby? Are you facing the dresser? The dresser, it has a mirror… Look, try moving counter-clockwise…” girlish shrieks again erupted from the back bedroom.

It’s not clear to me how Crosby was eventually decanted from that room. Dad may have just decided to break the latch, given how cheap and flimsy it was. All I know is that even today, four decades later, that experience left its mark on me. I had to stop typing this twice in order to get ahold of myself and wipe my eyes.

The memory of Crosby trapped in my parents’ room has made me laugh ever since. It made me laugh in grammar school and high school classrooms, on long flight layovers, and during business meetings at telecom companies and real estate agencies. It makes me laugh walking to work and waiting for BART.

I don’t have one of those lovely, musical laughs that some women have, and I can no longer giggle like I did when I was six. My laugh is more of a deep throated, slightly sinister chuckle that kind of bubbles up from deep in my chest. (Heh-heh-heh-huh-huh…) When it suddenly becomes audible from someone who’s walking beside you on the street or sitting next to you on a bus I’m sure it’s a little disturbing. Which is a pity.

There are other memories that make me laugh out loud, but that one is something to be cherished, taken out and enjoyed, and kept as fresh as possible. I will never give it up, no matter how many strange looks I get from anyone in earshot when it occurs to me.

Hopefully when I’m on my deathbed, I’ll be able to hearken back to it and let out one last mordant “Heh-heh-heh.”

Lies, Damn Lies, and...

2008-05-05T19:30:07Z

Mark Twain once wrote that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. There are also lies, damn lies, and cites. One of the first things I learned when I started discussing issues online is that when someone offers a cite that can be tracked down, eight times out of ten it:

A) doesn’t say what the person claims it says,

B) directly contradicts what the person claims it says,

or,

C) consists entirely of an opinion piece that merely echoes the opinion cited by the original poster without offering any factual backup that can be checked.

Keep in mind, by the way, that I started online in the early 1980s, back when computer bulletin board discussions tended to be longer, more detailed and frankly, a lot more intelligent. Even then, there were people who either didn’t understand what a “cite” was, or did and assumed that the other person wouldn’t bother to check it. Before links and online resources were common, that was not an entirely unwarranted assumption. The fact that I had access to a good library and learned early on how to use hardcopy resources like periodical archives, statistical abstracts, and the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature gave me a definite leg up.

Today, even with online databases and archives and quick access through links, an inability to grasp the importance of facts is even more endemic. The abstract, non-physical community of the Internet apparently makes it easier for a poster to announce “The sky is brown” and not only stick to it, but count on a bevy of other posters who will repeat in chorus “The sky is brown” until people stop being startled by it and just accept it as another opinion upon which sane and intelligent people can disagree.

The Devil Himself

2008-05-02T19:32:08Z

Our much heralded lunchtime event with Da Mayor took place yesterday without too many hitches. In spite of some dire predictions – “He’s always late you know. Always” -- and the announcement the day before by his social secretary that he could only stay until a little after 1:00, Mayor Willie Brown stepped out of the elevator at exactly 12:00 and cheerfully settled down to signing and occasionally personalizing copies of his book, Basic Brown for attendees. He gave his talk, held a Q&A, and stayed a good half hour past the time we’d been told he absolutely positively had to leave. (The warning about him being always late impacted not us but his next appointment.)

Willie Brown is a true San Francisco character who will probably be remembered in the same way Abe Ruef, Lillie Coit, and Melvin Belli are remembered. I see him occasionally in our neighborhood, usually walking up Leavenworth. There seems to be a legal requirement that the word “dapper” appear in any description of Willie Brown, but it’s not an unreasonable one. Yes, by God, the man is dapper as all Hell. His taste in ties and suits is impeccable, his hat is always set at a perfect angle, and his handkerchief always peeks out in four precise little points from his breast pocket. Listening to him speak is like watching a magician. Brown is adept at a sort of verbal sleight of hand in which you become so engaged by his wit that you only notice after he’s finished that he just spent thirty minutes talking about himself to an extent that would be dull and irritating if he were anybody else. I do believe he could make an hour-long lecture on tax law entertaining by including at least five anecdotes about Willie Brown. And it might very well be a damned good lecture on tax law.

Well why shouldn’t he be delighted with himself? He was born poor and black in Mineola Texas. He’s now rich and powerful in San Francisco California. How he managed this, whether by hook or by crook, is worth knowing. He is smart, pragmatic and absolutely ruthless. He has the faux naïve charm of a bon vivant who considers the fact that he enjoys good things wonderful news that should be shared with everyone. The day before the event one our members dropped by the office to make his reservation and told us an anecdote about encountering Brown at Wilkes-Bashford, passing him in the store. The weave of Brown’s suit was so beautiful. so soft, that he tentatively reached out to touch it, and Da Mayor stopped, grinned, and obligingly held out his arm.

His ghost-writer, P.J. Corkery did a wonderful job. Basic Brown is no ordinary boring political memoir. It begins with a description of Brown’s dirt-poor childhood in Texas, then leaps to an almost gleeful account of Brown’s deft and merciless payback to the “gang of five” who tried to oust him as Speaker back in 1988.

I have some serious problems with Willie Brown as a politician. During his tenure as mayor, many working class San Franciscans, many artists and filmmakers were driven out of the city because of his emphasis on development. The only citizens he seemed willing to acknowledge as worthwhile San Franciscans were either the people he encountered at the Big Four or other uber-wealthy hangouts or the affluent-on-paper young dot-commers who helped drive rents into the sky (many of whom by now have probably moved out of the lofts they infested in SOMA and back into their parents basements.) He’s even quoted as saying at one point, “poor people shouldn’t live in San Francisco.”

He never keeps records he declared, smiling, during his talk. “When I was an attorney, I learned that’s how people got in trouble. So no records. No emails, no letters, nothing.”

There’s a scene in the horror film, The Ninth Gate, where a wicked old woman says that, as a young girl, she once glimpsed Satan himself. “I saw him one day. I was fifteen years old, and I saw him as plain as I see you now: cutaway, top hat, cane. Very elegant, very handsome. It was love at first sight.”

At the time, I pictured Satan as a dashing young Italian count. Now I’ll always imagine the Devil she saw as a rather stocky late-middle aged black man with a moustache, a tilted hat and a perfectly tailored suit.

A True Ghost Story

2008-05-01T14:49:05Z

One of the writer’s block questions here at Live Journal recently was ,”Have you ever seen a ghost?” No, I haven’t, so I didn’t post an answer. I have, however, experienced a ghost. A few years ago I wrote that experience into a short story entitled “The House on the Bayou” that was published in Space and Time, so there’s the remote chance that someone reading this already knows that version of it. But “The House on the Bayou” was fiction and I swear – the part of this story that I can vouch for is perfectly true.

The house on Bayou Desierd was where my father and uncles grew up. It was a shady, white-painted, single storied home, built in the 1920s as a hunting lodge I think, and it sat high on the bank overlooking Desierd. I still associate that house with all that was romantic and secure about childhood. Mystery permeated it, but it was a pleasant mystery for me as a child, the mystery of fairy tales and my father’s past. The only thing that ever came close to truly frightening me there was the bearskin rug in front of the fireplace in the Sun Room where our grandmother entertained, and after a while I managed to make friends with it (though I could never bring myself to touch the its eyes. I was positive it would blink.)

Whenever we visited, my sister and I would sleep in the room Dad had once shared with his younger brother, and I would always sleep in Dad’s old bed. It was an incredibly heavy sort of metal cot, very comfortable, but next to impossible for a single person, even an adult, to move. It was also very low. My sister and brother and I knew every hiding place in the house and its front, back and side yards, and that cot was no more feasible to hide under than the old chiffarobe in our grandparents’ bedroom. One look at the bed’s dark, low-slung underside and its barrier of metal levers and hinges was enough to send most sensible kids scrambling to find someplace else in a game of hide and seek.

Which as why the behavior of that bed baffled me. Frequently – not every night I slept there, but often enough – it would shake so hard I’d wake up.

I’m not talking here about a delicate tremor. I’m talking about the mattress bouncing up and down, the springs squeaking, sometimes even the iron legs of the bed scraping on the wooden floor. It was as if someone had hopped onto the bed and was jumping up and down with all their might while doing the twist, so that the bed not only bounced, but shimmied. A couple of times, when I was sleeping on my side, I woke up as the movement tipped me over onto my back.

Considering what a nervous kid I was at other times, I don’t know why I was annoyed rather than frightened. Unlike my bedroom at home, there were no giant spiders or man-eating green blobs at the house on the bayou to keep me awake at night. Maybe it was because my sister and I loved that room so much. The windows faced the back yard and the bayou, and were crowded with honeysuckle so that during the day the sunlight poured through in greenish dapples, and the air that came in was sweet. There was an old fashioned radio on the table between the two beds, one of those from the 1930’s that looked like a small, brown cathedral. There was also an alarm clock that showed a tipsy man leaning against a light post, raising a foaming mug of beer to his mouth with every tick. Pictures of Dad and my uncle as teenagers were hung over the beds, two old black and white portraits showing them with short, brylcreemed hair, smiling, suspended in grayish blobs against a white background.

So the shaking of the bed was just an irritating mystery to me. I asked our grandmother about it once. She shrugged and looked a little puzzled, said something about perhaps trucks passing on Loop Road. The next time it happened I listened, but I could hear no traffic at all outside. And besides, it was only the bed that shook. Nothing else in the room so much as creaked, as you would expect if the cause was a truck going by.

At some point I resolved that when it happened again, I would throw myself at the foot of the bed and grab whoever or whatever was doing it. (What I intended to do after that, other than shouting “A-HA!” I don’t know.) The opportunity came one night, I was awakened by the shaking, and I hurled myself forward, arms outstretched, so that I landed at the foot of my bed. The bed gave one final, almost defiant shiver and was still. All I had was the bedspread clutched in my fingers. I could hear our grandmother snoring in her room down the hall, and in the other bed my sister was curled up, plainly asleep.

I wish I could remember the last night the bed shook, but I can’t recall that any more than I can remember the last night I spent in it. When I was about fourteen, our grandmother died, quite suddenly, of a stroke at a bridge party at the Bayou Desierd Country Club. The house stood empty for a while after that, but not unused. For a couple of years it served as a sort of summerhouse. Sometimes in the summer a friend and I would ride our bikes over to the house, put some cokes in the now almost empty refrigerator, and spend the day swimming off of the dock. It was only in that period that I felt a sense of disquiet in the house. There was something about the stillness of its rooms in daylight that made me reluctant to stay inside. Everything was in place, but it was waiting to be broken up and carried away and thinking about that made me sad. Finally one of my uncles moved into the house with his family, who made it their own.

By the time I was in college in Greensboro, I considered the mysterious shaking bed part of my distant past. Once, when Dad took me out to dinner at The Elms, I told him about the bed and asked him if that had ever happened to him. He grinned and said, “Didn’t I ever tell you about that house?” He told me didn’t remember his bed shaking, but he always felt, even as a little boy, that there was something eerie about the place. I tried to get him to tell me more, but Dad, though he smiled as if there were more he could tell me, wouldn't go into any more detail.

I graduated from University. I moved to Pittsburgh, then San Francisco. The shaking bed became little more than an anecdote. Then one weekend a few years ago, my youngest brother, J, and his wife drove up from LA for a visit. We sat in the living room sipping wine and reminiscing, and the subject of the old house on Loop Road came up. “Do you remember that old metal bed that used to be Dad's?” I asked, about to launch into my account of the shaking bed, but before I could continue J laughed. “Oh yeah,” he said, “That was the weirdest thing that ever happened to me!”

“You slept in that bed?” I asked.

No, he hadn’t. Here is what he told me:

About a year after our grandmother died, he and my other brother, T, were at the house on the bayou playing hide and seek. J would have been about six or seven, T ten or eleven. I don’t know where the adults were – possibly my father and uncles were down at the dock doing maintenance on the boat. T began counting down in the back yard, leaning against the old pecan tree that shaded it, and J ran into the house to find a hiding place. For some reason he decided that the best place would be under Dad’s old bed, and with a great deal of squirming, he managed to cram himself under it.

And get firmly stuck.

At first he was merely uncomfortable and annoyed, but wriggling only got him more firmly wedged, his head stuck painfully between the floor and the bottom of the bed. There were cobwebs down there, which meant spiders, and he quickly went from mild discomfort into panic. He began yelling for help.

It was summer and the windows to the bedroom were open, so it sounded to T, who was still in the backyard, that J was calling from somewhere outside. “Where are you?” he shouted anxiously. “Tell me where you are!”

By this time J was hysterical, struggling and shrieking. He could hear T running around the back yard, beating the bushes for J and shouting “tell me where you are!” over and over again, but J was crying so hard he could barely make himself understood. His head felt as though it were about to be crushed and he was sure he was going to die there in the dark under that bed.

Then suddenly, the pressure vanished. J felt the bed being lifted and he rolled out from under it. He turned to see who it was who was standing at the foot of the bed holding it up, and he sat there on the floor, fuzzy with dust and cobwebs, still sobbing, watching fascinated as the end of the bed settled gently back onto the floor.

As you have probably guessed, nobody was there.

My Daily Sacrifice

2008-04-30T19:42:47Z

I baked a cheesecake last night and I'm now enjoying it one soft velvety spoonful at a time. Since I've never liked graham cracker crusts I did a pate-brisee instead. Flavored the cake with vanilla, almond extract and Amaretto liqueur, and spooned on a sour-cream Amaretto topping. (This is not my own recipe. I can't remember where it comes from. Maybe the Silver Palate series?) My own addition to it was to slice up some strawberries after the cake had cooled, arrange them on the top, and brush them with a glaze of strawberry jam and brandy. Very nice.

We're up to our chins in strawberries in this house because they were on sale a couple days ago and I couldn't NOT buy them. Unfortunately, there are only so many strawberries we can put in our morning shredded wheat. I had to get rid of some, hence the cake.

So you see, it was really very self-sacrificing and frugal of me.

Oh. Dear. God.

2008-04-30T17:10:05Z

It’s always risky to read what a fiction writer Thinks About Things, “things” being issues in the real world. It’s especially risky when that writer writes science fiction, a genre that often involves some weird takes on the real world and society. Larry Niven has written some of my favorite science fiction short stories, but this, which I got courtesy of Sadly No, qualifies as one of those head-slapping, groaning moments. His suggestion for dealing with the healthcare crisis? Read it and weep.

Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.  

“The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren’t going to pay for anything anyway,” Niven said.

I know, I know, it’s not news that Niven is a flaming right-winger. It’s just that the freight of astounding cluelessness, not to mention callousness carried in this brief statement is a reminder of the overlap between right-wing politics and some areas of science fiction and fantasy. Norman Spinrad (who has written his share of head-slapping, oh-dear-God takes on the real world) dissected this brilliantly in The Iron Dream.

It’s a connection that most frequently comes out in discussions with right-wing libertarians. After a few posts, you begin to realize that this person’s vision of an ideal society is closest to some post-apocalyptic science fiction novel or high fantasy, and involves him/her striding through a crowded and dangerous marketplace, wearing either an automatic weapon and military fatigues or a sword and a rippling cape. Never, never do they seem to imagine themselves as one of the hoi-polloi in such a world, part of the struggling masses whose misfortunes form a colorful backdrop to the ubermensch main character.

And so you have a millionaire like Larry Niven suggesting a good way to control hospital costs is to frighten the low income Latino community in general (all of whom he apparently defines as “illegal aliens) from availing themselves of medical care. Presumably all these grubby peasants will find some place to bleed or cough themselves to death out of sight or earshot from folks like Mr. Niven.

And no doubt any contagious diseases they contract will thoughtfully refrain from spreading as these unvaccinated and untreated people clean, cook, and baby-sit for the rest of us.

Leave Her to Heaven

2008-04-28T17:18:30Z

I am a festival widow this week. Until a week from Thursday, M is going to be busy at the International Film Festival, watching movies, schmoozing, schnorring, interviewing, etc. Because we wrote some of the program notes I’ve already seen a few of the films, though I’ll try to get out to see a couple more over the week. Late on Saturday afternoon, after hearing an enthusiastic description from a friend, I met M at The Castro to watch the restored version of Leave Her to Heaven, which is described in the program as “Technicolor Noir.”

Leave Her to Heaven is a perfect Castro film. For one thing, this wonderful restoration really is best appreciated on an epic-sized screen. Yes, Technicolor does look artificial, but it’s in the sense that the colors of a beautiful painting are artificial. The browns and golds are richer, the sky bluer, sunsets deeper and more dramatic. And the melodramatic plot of Leave Her to Heavenn lends itself to the Castro, where audiences tend to participate, faintly hissing the villains, moaning at moments of heartbreak, murmuring uneasily at signs of danger…

We were all fairly restrained for a Castro audience last Saturday, though you could feel everyone shudder every time some skin-crawling hint was delivered early on about what a sick, sick girl Gene Tierney was. The hints in that movie come so thick and fast that by the time she’s maneuvered Cornel Wilde into marrying her it’s hard to maintain much sympathy for him. Who but a complete chowderhead would marry a woman two days after a dinner party that she spent enthusing about how much he looks like her recently deceased father? Any sensible man would have started backing away and invoking a nonexistence fiancée after she’d gathered everyone around a picture of Dad and invited them to comment on the resemblance. And Mom’s resigned expression every time she looks at her daughter, along with the fact that she has an adopted daughter (Jeanne Crain) who was apparently taken on as a badly needed emotional back up should have tipped him off that there was something abnormal about that whole family dynamic.

Gene Tierney had a spectacular overbite, and Cornel Wilde at that age was so doe-eyed he resembled a Keane painting, so the predator vs. deer-in-the-headlights dynamic is believable up to a point. Vincent Price minus his moustache makes an appearance early on in the film as Tierney’s spurned fiancé, and his slithery, blue-blooded, freakishly tall good looks do make him look like a more appropriate mate for her than Wilde. Nobody but Price could make the passionate statement “I will always love you,” sound quite so much like a threat. You can have a pretty good time mulling over what that marriage would have looked like while watching the train-wreck of her union with Wilde unfold in glorious Technicolor.

Or you could just watch the train wreck. Most of the screenplay is so deftly put together that you can see and believe the people around this couple -- like a doctor caring for her invalid brother-in-law, and an old family friend and retainer at the family lake house -- being seriously freaked out by this obvious borderline case well before her besotted husband figures it out. There is a broad daylight murder that’s one of the most harrowing I’ve ever watched, and a death scene that's so creepy that the audience let out a long collective, “eeeeeeew” (and I mean this in a good way.)

Unfortunately, in the last twenty minutes the film devolves into a completely illogical courtroom drama that is plainly intended to set up the unbelievable, tacked-on happy ending. Tierney was no great shakes as an actress, but the nasty woman she plays is the heart of this rather disturbing movie. Once she’s gone, it’s just not as interesting. But she’s only gone for the last fourth of the film, and while she’s there, the term “Technicolor Noir” actually makes sense.

Prejudice

2008-04-25T19:04:05Z

Prejudice is fascinating, in all its forms. Over twenty years of posting political commentary online using my own, unmistakably feminine name, for instance, has been an object lesson in how some guys respond to the female voice.

I’m not saying that every man who argues with me is guilty of sexism, but there are cases where responders seem to be struggling to figure out exactly how and where I’m being “irrational” and working themselves into quite a dudgeon about it. This comes not so much from people who disagree with me politically as from people presumably on my own side of the political aisle, guys who refer to themselves as liberals or leftists or anything other than “conservative”

For instance, there was one guy I used to debate online who, after a few messages, invariably went into what I call “therapist” mode. In discussions relating to women’s issues he’d start asking me personal questions about my relationship with my husband, or whether I like the way I look, or how I felt about the whopping psychic trauma I presumably endured from that professor I once cited in passing as an example of casual sexism. I don’t want to do this guy an injustice. I never got the sense he was stalking me, and he certainly wasn’t one of those Slobbering Yahoos who, when they sense they’re losing ground in a debate with a woman, unzip themselves and start waving it at her.

But his approach always included the apparently unshakeable assumption that my disagreement with him had to be rooted in my emotions. After a while I began to suspect that he was reacting not to what I’d actually posted, but to the fact that I was the person posting it.

I think women as a rule are aware of this undercurrent, this assumption by so many men, even those who consider themselves liberal and broad-minded, who call themselves “feminists,” that someone posting under a female name must be on some level incompetent, illogical. Almost certainly women of a certain age are aware of it. We don’t speak up about it every time we encounter it because if we did we’d end up giving ourselves ulcers, but we do know it’s there, and there’s a lot we don’t say to our male friends and acquaintances about it.

When I consider this, and I think about how African Americans or other racial minorities must perceive whites, all the things they have probably noticed about assumptions held by me and other WASPs, assumptions we’re barely aware of – when I think of all the things my black friends, acquaintances and co-workers have probably noticed but left unsaid… It makes me shudder.