Remembering Billy

My brother died on December 1. I had thought myself to chronicle his difficult and strangely fascinating life, but the great Madison journalist and family friend Bill Lueders beat me to it. And what a job he did. Lueders is one of Madison's great treasures for his fine investigative writing both for Isthmus and now for The Center for Investigative Journalism's Wisconsin Watch, and his passion to give voice to those who would not otherwise have one. He also happens to write with great wit and style.

Have a look for yourself and read Remembering Billy.

No More Vampire Love

So I got home from yoga class last night and watched the last half of the first Twilight movie, which was apparently making its television premier. And all I could think was how dated it all seemed. Already. The movie came out in 2008 and the books aren't really much older, and yet, I realized, I am already so over vampires.

You might think that that would have something to do with the pulpy nature of these stories, the laughable writing, bad acting and etc. But sadly, none of these things deterred me the first time around, when even recognizing the bad writing, the pulpiness and etc., I indulged in an adolescent obsession with addictive outsider love.

What I'm toying with now is the idea that a significant part of the rising obsession with vampire love in our culture over the past several years has been driven by a need to make sense of key elements of living in a late-stage capitalist society where we understood only subconsciously that the wealthy (attractive, pale, powerful) are sucking the proverbial blood out of the rest of humanity.

While these books were being written and consumed, a lot of the mechanics of this were still sort of underground. Of course there were people who already understood that these were the mechanisms of our financial systems and what that was doing to society at large. But now, few people can be mistaken. It is all out there for everyone to see.

Vampires are the 1%, and we (okay, at least I) am just not that into them anymore.

Hunger Strike

The Capitol Square is a lovely place to walk on a summer night. This past Friday night the car noise was minimal and a gentle breeze made the walking a pleasure after a very fine dinner at which we all ate a bit more than we needed. Groups of young men and women were chalking thoughts about the treachery of our current all-Republican-all-the-time, completely-sold-out-to-corporate-interests government onto the sidewalks around the Capitol building. They chalked with such admirable purpose in their body language, moving quickly from one place to the next.

At the head of the State Street entrance to the Capitol, I encountered Hallis Mailen, the man who has been on hunger strike for something like 70 days now. Hallis, even after two months on hunger stike, is still a portly man, though he looks like a much bigger man from whom half the air has been let out. He is 50 years old, bearded, usually wearing a blue bandana around his head. he says that he will remain on hunger strike "until the bitter end or until President Barack and Michelle Obama announce an official investigation into why our service women and men are not receiving the support they need from the Veteran's Administration as well as the Social Security Administration." He is a veteran, he told me, of the US Army, having served in the Korean DMZ.

There is nothing slick or sophisticated about Hallis or the way he has gone about articulating his cause. After talking with him for five minutes, I wanted nothing more than to hug him. He is a gentle bear of a man, who has been involved in the protests at the Capitol since the beginning. He clearly cares deeply about social justice, regardless of whether he can put his finger on exactly what needs fixing and how that should happen. He has been labeled a crackpot by some, a dirty hippie and a liar in a few of the blogs I've since read about him. Still, it is shocking to me that aside from Letters to the Editor, I have not seen a word written in the local press about him. Do they fear they will be giving air time to a crack pot, or fear that somehow they will be boosting the politics he supports?

Regardless of what you think about Hallis or the merits of his cause, going on hunger strike -- some have scoffed at the fact that he is still drinking liquids but I say to them, you try it -- and staying with it for over two months, is an act of amazing, some would say reckless courage. I remember the Irish IRA hunger strikers, dying one by one in the 80s. On the one hand, a crazy, seemingly empty gesture against the likes of Margaret Thatcher and her government. And yet somehow I was riveted by grandness of the gesture, and though I could not condone the violence the IRA was perpetrating in those days, my sympathies were with these men. They exposed the heartlessness of British government and its austerity policies of that time. Whether they had any lasting effect on anything is highly debatable. I doubt it. And yet I remember those Irish hunger strikers with wonder and horror for what they were willing to say by starving themselves to death on Thatcher's doorstep, so to speak.

Defend Wisconsin has posted some videos of Hallis talking about what he is doing and why.

In the meantime, if you happen to be up on the Square, make a point of talking to Hallis. He is in every way that matters a very good man.

Reunions

A big high school reunion is looming for me. I find myself loath to say the number of years. A lot. That I'm ambivalent about joining the festivities has little to do with the pleasures and pains of meeting up with old high school classmates. My problem with this one is that I transferred to the high school I graduated from as a sophomore. I did not grow up with or attend elementary school with my high school classmates. I have almost no shared experience with more than a few of them, and looking through the reunion website, it would appear that all but one of those people will not be attending. When I look at the yearbook, I find I can't even remember an awful lot of my graduating class.

I do, however, have regular reunions with my core of friends from college. I've written about this before as I've described the yearly trips we join up to take. The second of those was a trip to England in 2007. We started with a 6-day walking tour of the Dorset-Wiltshire border country (Wessex to Thomas Hardy fans) and ended with 3 days in London. It was a summer of torrential rains in Britain, and there is nothing that solidifies old friendships like slogging through woods and over meadows in heavy rain gear day after day. It may sound like a nightmare, but that would be wrong. Oh, there was complaining along the way. But mostly we had a blast; we never ran out of things to talk about. And the beer was good, too.

Here's a poem I wrote last year, trying to recapture part of the experience.

HAYMARKET PUB

In the city at last we needed to stretch
our legs, to feel sun for the first
time in days, though it came with a scrappy
wind and we wore our long sleeves. Standing
half way across Hungerford Bridge we surveyed
the domain -- Thames high and churning after long
rains, the Houses of Parliament making their usual
postcard impression, the Eye in suspension over
the bank like the great and powerful
Oz. We snapped photos with hapless tourist
abandon, eyes squinting, hair flailing. I look
at those now and remember the unremarkable
pub where we sat to rest our feet and drink
for a while out of the summer squalls, how we must
have seemed loopy and loud, we middle-aged
Americans: old friends, companions,
the loves of each others lives, giddy
with joy to be reunited
once more.

--RZC

My Big Little Tea Party Experiment

For a week in April and a week in June, I joined what might loosely be called "the conversation" at Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com, or as I began to call it when my family wanted to know what the hell I was doing on the computer for hours, Tea Party Central.

Though I knew who Breitbart was, BigGoverment.com was not on my radar until someone sent me a link to an article there in which a friend working in the Obama administration was trashed. I was fascinated by the posting, which was based entirely on innuendo and included a number of misstatements and outright falsehoods. And then I began to read the comments.

Anyone reading the comments to online articles these days is well aware of the level of right wing nastiness on display. It's not that left wing commentators are always so nice, it's more the sheer number of right wingers who evidently spend large amounts of their time trolling news sources in order to trash any view that appears to support liberal values.

Because in the course of my daily life I rarely run into anyone whose political beliefs conflict much with my own, I often feel as if I live in an echo chamber. I have been starved for a little lively argument with people who think differently from me. And as I read the comments on this truly awful posting about my friend -- an old fashioned true heart who believes that government service is a treasure and a duty -- I found myself craving an argument (I am half Italian, after all).

I realized that in joining the conversation at Big Government I would be regarded as a liberal troll by commenting in a contrary sort of way to the postings, so I made a couple of rules for myself. I decided I would not trash anyone's comments or beliefs, only challenge them with questions or information. I would not use ridicule or sarcasm. In the course of my little experiment -- I lasted one week in April, and again, about a week in June -- I argued with Tea Party people about what they call Obamacare, about the various developments at that time in Wisconsin politics (Walker's budget, the Prosser/Kloppenburg election and recount), and briefly about the Anthony Weiner incident. I think in the back of my mind I had an idea of writing an extensive article about the experience, an idea which now seems too depressing even to contemplate.

At first I was invigorated by the arguments, though usually after getting past a barrage of insults for my evil liberal viewpoint. There were, a little to my surprise, some people who seemed to be willing to think and be challenged, particularly on the issue of health care. The libertarian right wing that seems to hang at Tea Party Central is in favor of health care savings accounts, which a couple of people defended creditably until we started to talk about such tricky problems as single parents and people without jobs. Let me put it this way. On every issue where I thought I was talking to an intelligent, thinking person whose views simply differed from my own, I eventually reached the point where what they believed or their rationalization for what they believed was, well, crazy. I don't know how else to describe it.

Like the guy I was talking to about health care who after a brief discussion of Planned Parenthood's mission (he believes all they do is abortions, of course) informed me that Margaret Sanger was an admirer of Adolph Hitler and that she founded Planned Parenthood as a genocidal tool for convincing black women to kill their unborn babies. Or the woman who felt that insurance companies are much kinder and more generous than the government in paying for health care services. When I described several examples of friends and family members who had been denied services by insurance companies or were paying exorbitant rates to keep themselves and their kids insured, fell back on, "Too bad for them, but why should that be my problem?" Or the comments on the Prosser/Kloppenburg race that invariably devolved into anti-Semitic, woman-hating garbage. I do not use the word invariably lightly.

A few months back I heard somebody say that conservatism is a form of psychosis. I balked at that at the time. I wanted to believe that people could hold different views from my own without being branded with a psychiatric diagnosis. But honestly, after spending two weeks of my life in intense conversation with the Tea Party faction of American conservatives, I'm not so sure. At the end of that first week in April, I found myself feeling unaccountably depressed. There were times I would close down my computer after a session on Big Government, feeling as if I'd been sucked into a vortex of negativity and paranoia, not to mention the sheer meanness of many of the comments I passed over and never responded to. I began to have nightmares. My husband insisted I quit. When I went back in June, I lasted only four or five days.

I would love to be able to share some pithy and enlightening conclusions from the experience. Instead all I have is this little poem.

TEA PARTY

No china cups at
this table, no clink
of polite stirring
spoons, only mad
hatters, shrieking
invective, upending
the cakes.

--RZC

Row Out

Just a little summer poetry.


ROW OUT

I see the old woman I will
become in the dark screen
of my iPad, not my mother's face
yet, but she's there in the sag
and roll of the jaw line, a suggestion
of heaviness above the eyes.

I think of this later on my bike, racing
alongside the gray lake only hoping
to stir muddy air; it feels like wading
with my face, with every jiggle of loose
flesh as I ride over pebbles
and ruts. The crew team laps
silently away from the shore, shining
so brightly through watery shadows.

A sheen of dew coats the blades
of quack grass that cover the ground between
shrubs and it strikes me a person
might at some point begin
to think that this
is enough, that
this, in fact
is all

and I can see myself rowing
out from the sheltering green
of this path, from the amplified shouts
of the coxswain, reaching
for that swelling monochrome
quiet as my legs pump in rhythm
with my still
persistent
heart.

--RZC

Travel for Agoraphobics on Kindle

Finally, here is a link directly to the Kindle version of Travel for Agoraphobics.