182. WE ARE ONLY COMING THROUGH IN WAVES

From the Archives

(January 2006) Okay does anyone see a pattern here? We withhold body armor from soldiers then mortality rates rise. We destroy our environment then hotter oceans yield stronger hurricanes and tsunamis. We destroy barrier islands then hurricanes hit cities full force. We deregulate, then inspectors who once drove their Chevies to the levees to see if they’re dry and structurally sound wind up bagging groceries somewhere. We lower taxes to the point that chronically understaffed offices can no longer perform vital services such as visiting mines to ensure compliance, then trapped miners die waiting for missing rescuers to arrive.

There’s a gap we’re not minding here, a critical black hole into which the cause-and-effect rationale of people who complain about long lines at the DMV while demanding further tax cuts has been sucked.

Meanwhile, 5 million more of us slipped into poverty in the last four years even as the conservative bobbleheads insisted that our economy is fine, and middle- and lower-class citizens experienced substantial cost-of-living increases alongside a 40-percent rise in health-care costs.

Molly Ivins points out that the federal minimum wage has held steady at $5.15/hour since 1997 even though the Economic Policy Institute reports that inflation has eroded away minimum wage’s buying power to its second-lowest level since the fifties.

The gap between (vanishing) middle-class workers and the super-rich is the largest ever recorded, yet no one’s calling it the new gilded age. Yet.

Conservatives argue that increasing the minimum wage hurts small businesses and causes layoffs, but there’s ample evidence to prove otherwise.

Meanwhile, Democrats are holding strategic sessions to determine how to best pepper their speeches with more religious and “moral” phrases. But bless Edwards’s lobbyist-fed heart, at least he is saying publicly that “the poverty thing” is a moral issue.

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I forgot to include one key event in my recap of 2005: Bill Frist watched a video of Terri Schiavo then declared that she “certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli,” even though her autopsy revealed that she was blind.

(It is, as Paul Simon says, an age of miracles though, isn’t it?)

Frankly, I haven’t met anyone who isn’t glad that 2005 is behind them. As Molly Ivins says, “With a few, shining exceptions (such as Cindy Sheehan) we can bid adieu to 2005 without great regret. Or, as Texas Gov. Rick Perry said to a reporter earlier this year, "Adios, mo-fo."

SANG IN SHOWER: “Slipsliding Away” by Paul Simon

READING: Hoppin’ John’s Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah Dining at Home in the Lowcountry cookbook (gotta find that poached pear recipe before this weekend)

BEST-OF SPAM: We cure any disease!

143. EVIDENCE-FREE ZONES

From the Archives

(August 2005) Have been logging onto weather.com off and on all day to follow the hurricane and just read that two massive oaks outside the almost 300-year-old St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square fell on either side of the huge marble Jesus, snapping off the thumb and forefinger of his outstretched hand.

This reminds me of a random fact I’ve always wanted to incorporate into a poem—one that would be a lot more effective if I actually believed in a savior (my utterances of “O Christ!” and “Oh For The Love of God!” not withstanding): When the black choirgirls died in the church bombings, the stained-glass windows remained intact except for Jesus’s face, which blew out ... almost as if he couldn’t bear to see the horror of what hate destroyed.

I hope we don’t find out just what happens when the urge to develo destroys over one million acres of coastal wetlands that once served as a storm buffer.

This puts me in mind of Hillary’s comments after her trip to Alaska. She said, after seeing the effects of climate change firsthand, “We can’t afford to live in an evidence-free zone where science takes a back seat to ideology” anymore.

What I find most pathetic is that the White House oilmen not only refused to join over 150 nations in signing the Kyoto Protocols to reduce emissions but also declared that, instead of regulating the harmful greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, they would instead make any such emission reductions voluntary.

The New York Times calls this “Washington’s stubborn passivity.” I call it Pure-T Greed.

Meanwhile, the mayors of over 130 cities have become exasperated enough with the oilmen’s failure to sign the Protocol that they have agreed to meet the emissions reductions contained in the pact at the local level.

And the state of California (which already went into the business of funding scientific research after Shrub announced his so-called moral prohibition against stem-cell research and which already has tough environmental laws on the books) is now exploring a regional agreement with Washington and Oregon.

Nine other northeast states have taken matters into their own hands too and agreed on a regional plan to reduce power plant emissions of carbon dioxide by 2020.

Dan Savage argues that we’re a series of cities that queers live in, that we Island hop between San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and the other big urban gay meccas, but progressive politics is alive at the state level in the humid Southland too. (And I must mention that Dan fails to include RTP in his formula, although it consistently ranks as one of the top 10 places for LGBTQ folks to live—and Asheville is right up there too, folks!)

The northeast states’ agreement exceeds the oilmen’s voluntary approach to reductions (which, no big surprise, has not produced a great response among the corporations and power companies). Of course, automobile companies are challenging these states’ laws too—particularly California’s, which will require a 30 percent reduction in vehicular greenhouse gas emissions. Car manufacturers argue that these laws are an illegal usurpation of federal authority to set mileage standards but, if the national leaders won’t do their job....

According to the Times, “Environmentalists who support a federal law to control greenhouse gases believe that the model established by the Northeastern states will be followed by other states, resulting in pressure that could eventually lead to the enactment of a national law.”

Maybe if Pataki is elected....

But think of it, folks: states are working together in a cooperative action to correct our president’s blatant oversights. Now that’s hopeful!

94. NATURE AND ITS PROCESSES

From the Archive

(May 2005) Have been re-reading Bill Moyers’ interview with Joy Harjo, who is interested in how our linguistic choices reflect our separation from the natural world and thwart connection. Our manufactured separations, she says, make it difficult for us to create a home for ourselves in the world and increase the likelihood that future generations will, like Shrub and Reagan, view nature as a compilation of resources to be plundered.

I study connection, contemplate how it might build bridges, because that, to me, is what good art does: it speaks across great distances and shows us our universality, our connections.

We use symbols, art, magic, pain—whatever works (and it all does)—to capture something that’s on the tip of everyone’s tongues (if we listen). We articulate what we recognize at a subconscious level, bring it out into the open and examine it.

This can build a bridge, create a connection with someone with whom we have no apparent connection, and thereby remind us that we’re all a part of the same big whole.

Harjo notes that these are “difficult times when the illusion of separation among peoples has become so clear.”

Moyer: You said “illusion.”

Because I think it is an illusion. I think this is more the shadow world than it is the real world.

Moyer: This world of alienation and of separation is the shadow world?

Yes, but this shadow world is also very real. There are many wars going on all over the world and each of them is very real, and the losses people suffer because of them are very real. I don’t mean to deny that at all.

Moyer: And yet there is something underneath that the artist sees?

Yes, but I think artists always have to include what’s apparent and real in that vision, even while we’re always searching for what makes sense beyond the world.

So, basically, she is simultaneously asserting that these separations are an illusion while acknowledging that they exist (gulp).

This is consistent with her poetry.

Europeans/Americans are separated from everything around us in Harjo's world. And we did this to ourselves. We're a sad collection of postlapsarian characters who stick our flags down into land and women and poor countries and whatnot, insisting that these things are MINE MINE MINE. Yet, in her big picture, we're all interrelated.

She also says that, since nothing exists, we are not really separate at all.

Bear with me.

Harjo's ultimate point is that we are not separate from the natural world at all, despite our insistence to the contrary. We exist in nature and its processes not as unique beings, but as one undifferentiated aspect of everything else. Even if we designed those clever little hierarchical structures and created that elaborate Great Chain of Being theory and the Judeo-Christian creator who defined us as separate, superior, the ones who name and have dominion over everything.

We’re related to everything, folks. We're interconnected and dependent, just one human mushroom in a giant steaming stew.

What strikes me most about this interview is that, when you think about it, Harjo has (as J. Scott Bryson noted before me) managed to have her ontological cake and eat it too. What she’s positing is that we’re all in relationship with nature but that we’re also separate from it, and by choice.

I make an obscure leap from that realization to folks with victim complexes, because this seems like another way that we humans create and maintain alienation, isolation, disconnection that we wind up propping up around us as protection.

Gotta ponder that one some more though and see if I can do something with it.

So think about it. We create the illusion of alienation from our environment and then this illusion creates actual alienation from our world and comes to defines us.

I don’t always feel a connection to people, but do always feel one to the natural world, and especially to water. Maybe that’s why I like Mary Oliver’s writing so much.

Oliver may be somewhat of a one-trick pony (as a poet recently announced to me), but she walks in the woods the same way that I walk in the woods and I feel that recognition in every one of her lines.

LISTENING TO: PARIS La Belle Époque: The Music of Gabriel Fauré, César Franck, Jules Massenet, and Camille Saint-Saëns, performed by Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott, currently Massenet’s “Méditation” from Thaïs. It’s very beautiful, especially when I stare into an orchid bloom and listen to that cello.

READING: still reading Carol Guess’s Switch and wish I had a block of time big enough to read the rest in one sitting. I like her awareness of working-class choices but wish some of her sentences were a little different.

SANG IN SHOWER: All right, I don’t know where these things come from, but this song came out long, long ago when I was maybe 10 years old and is now running through my head: It’s called “Daddy, Don’t You Walk So Fast” and I have no clue who sang it, but it’s running all ‘round in my brain.

BEST-OF SPAM SUBJECT LINES: Shed inches in minutes • It doesn’t hurt to check Alana

36. WILDLIFE REFUGE (FOR NOW)

From the Archives

(March 2005) I’m very glad NPR did a piece on Einstein as I was pulling into the parking deck this morning because, if I’d walked into work armed only with my latte and the knowledge that our idiot senators just voted to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and did so in a way to prevent a filibuster AND that our elected officials in Washington created legislation specifically to prevent a man in Florida whose wife has been in a prolonged vegetative state to pull her feeding tube and put her out of her misery—after the legal system cleared the way for him to do so—and that Wolfowitz will now rule the fuck!ng world ... and if I'd had five more minutes to think about Alaska and the native tribes and the wildlife and wildflowers that all those Haliburton trucks will destroy, well then I would have turned around and gone back home to watch Siberiade and Whale Rider and mourn.

Also, Today’s online NYT has an amazing interactive slide show about the wildlife refuge. Check it out while you can.