I come from good people (reposted)

This is a post from November 21, 2012. Went to the beach today and could not write, so I leave you with it. Hope you enjoy it.

There’s an old saying—a wise man knows his father, but no man knows his mother.

Is it true?

Can’t say. I’ve spent a lot of time on Franny, lately—in fact, I can claim I wrote the book on her. Did I get it right?

Highly sanitized, is Eric’s take, and he’s right of course. There are significant omissions, a couple of slants not explored, and one chapter—I now come clean—entirely made up. I needed something funny, so I imagined a silly conversation between Franny and me about John Cage’s 4’33” (of silence).

Here’s the scary thing—now it feels that it actually happened.

Well, Jack wouldn’t have approved. Like Eric, he would have written the story straight and got the facts right and spelled people’s names right (I flubbed on Franzmann) and made the deadline and done it all over again the next day.

Or would he?

‘Cause he got pretty wrapped up in some causes. The police chief—Weatherly—who got embroiled in some issue, had to resign, moved to Texas and became a drunk. His wife shot him, one day, and was tried and given parole. Came back to town only once, sat in the green sofa, talked.

Hard woman.

“You’re the only person I’m gonna see in this town,” she said to Jack on leaving.

He was a big guy, and big on fairness. He hated the bastards getting away with things. Made him crazy when good people got stepped on.

Which is why he pushed for the equal right housing amendment in the early 60’s. And never saw a contradiction with the State Journal’s strong Republican stance and its support of the amendment.

Couldn’t understand why the Cap Times was silent on the issue.

So by chance, Eric came across a Taliaferro, and I wrote about it. Sent it up to Hesselberg—an old colleague of Jack’s, and fine writer. He came back immediately with this—a letter written by Odell Taliaferro after Jack’s death.

NEWHOUSE FOUGHT FOR RACIAL EQUALITY

   Now is the time when friends are moved to extol the virtues of John Newhouse and to soft-pedal any shortcomings of which they are aware, but we assure you this is not the case with us. We have been singing the praises of John for about 40 years - and we are aware of no shortcomings.

    He wrote profusely of the modern dance abilities of our daughter, Joan Taliaferro Hartshorne and we feel that his news stories and pictures were very influential in enabling her to acquire a position with the Jose Limon Dance Troupe. We offer this fact, not as a virtue, but as an example of effective reporting (though, to us, it was a virtue).

    Once we moved into a segregated neighborhood (it was all white - until we arrived) and the prospective neighbors divided themselves into three groups:

    1. A small number gave a party to welcome us.

    2. A large group paid no attention.

    3. A small group threatened to burn our house down the first night!

    When John heard of this, he came in person to the neighborhood and we visited all the nearby houses. In a calm manner he explained, there was nothing to fear. We have lived there for 30 years - and no one has ever been treated better by their neighbors.

    John was a great man to have on your side.

Well, Jack was a good guy to have on your side. And when he wasn’t?

That same Norwegian-Lutheran backbone that led a black guy into a racist’s home and stared him down could get a little twisted—usually on sexual issues.

“I’m not voting for the Equal Rights Amendment (remember that!?) because it’s for homosexuals and ALL OF MY KIDS ARE NORMAL!”

Words converted to a slap.

In the end, he came around. Many people did. And many people made that change because of a phenomenon occurring in the plague years of the AIDS crisis.

The gay and lesbian choruses.

Virtually every major city had one. San Francisco, of course, had or has a famous one. Toured nationally, recorded. And once, did a heart-breaking rendition of the last act of Poulenc’s opera “Dialogs of the Carmelites.” The opera ends as the nuns, singing their prayers, are taken off to the guillotine, heard offstage. The sight of gay men, many of them HIV positive, reenacting the scene?

And I—not knowing whether the virus was flowing in my own blood?

Catharsis, in a way.

Yes, I will face it. Yes, it may come. Yes, I won’t back down.

Which is why I said to him, today, at the beach, “well, how did I do? Turn out OK? You proud of me?”

We plunged, the water was warm, and surprisingly clear for this time of year. Did the retrot back home. Then he reminded me of this….   

A Rich Recluse

Confess it, Marc—you have spent three hours of productive writing time reading about Huguette Clark, the reclusive copper heiress who had mansions on both coasts which she never visited for more than half a century, as well as a 42—yup, that’s 42—room apartment on the upper East Side of Manhattan.

Which is why I can tell you that Clark chose to live in a hospital for the last 22 years of her life. Oh—and she loved dolls, and went to Dior fashion shows, just to see the latest trends; she liked her dolls in fashion. Well, she could afford it—she was raised in the biggest house in Manhattan, and her estate is worth about 300 million bucks. So the five million dollar checks that she wrote out in her pristine handwriting—an elegant cursive—to her Filipino nurse didn’t hurt much.

Born in Paris, she was the daughter of a copper baron, a man born poor but who struck it rich and got richer, eventually buying land under a town that would become Las Vegas. So Huguette was born with a platinum spoon in her mouth—and she indulged her considerable money in art and antiques. She acquired the taste from her mother, who once took down a Cézanne from the wall, got the chauffeur to drive her to an art gallery, sold it, dropped by a string instrument store, and returned home to deliver the four Stradivari to a cellist who wanted toform a string quartet. That was the mom—Huguette, if memory serves, bought a rare double keyboard piano for Gunnar Johansen, Artist in Residence at the University of Wisconsin, after hearing him play one in New York.

Huguette married twice, briefly, but had no children. And after her mother died, she became a Miss Havisham, living in just one room of her vast apartment, which in fact had been three apartments.

So she was loaded, this lady, and by some accounts was childlike but not crazy. And she, according to one relative, would occasionally call him, but never gave him her number. When she died, at age 104, she had never met most of the 19 relatives who she left behind. And she left two wills, the last of which carried a stinging slap at the relatives who had never called, never visited. Instead, the people who had served her faithfully, especially her nurse, got big money. And her huge California mansion was to be made into a foundation for the arts.

In a move that will surprise no one, the 19 relatives got together and decided to go to court; next Tuesday, the process of selecting the jury will begin. And so we’ll know in three weeks who gets the loot. The nurse, who worked from eight AM to eight PM seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, whom Clark called every night to make sure she got safely home, and would come the next day? Or the family?

Well, it’s a story that resonates, especially for me, having lost a job two years ago, and having relatively little income currently. And last year, I went through a transformation: I embarked on a three or four week journey into self-willed madness, fighting an ingrained belittling demon. During that time, I spent recklessly, as a way of trusting that yes, at some time in the future, I would have money again. And to do that, I needed to be whole, I needed to trust myself and love myself. So I gave money to the homeless lady with no teeth, and told her to keep the small collages of coral and seashells she wanted to sell me. I put twenty bucks in a church hymnal because a lady had smiled at me, as she gave me it.

Today, the cat is on the rug, the husband is on the couch, reading Iguanas in soft cover. The cello is wedged between a china cabinet and the wall. I’m back to playing, you see, after five years of not. And two days ago, I finally heard a glimpse of the musician I had been, as I played a Bach suite agonizingly slowly. I was in flow.

I can only say this about a state that is blissfully hard to describe—somebody or something else takes over playing. My fingers are used by a daemon, a spirit infinitely more talented than I. Time slows, attention both narrows and widens. And if I could have that state—that flow—or heaven / Nirvana? Flow—hands down.

And yes, I was a little drunk, several hours later, when I went to CVS, paid for my purchase, and left the store. But I don’t think that’s why I stopped in my tracks, began to weep, and said, “thank you!”

He had fixed my cello, the man who had battled me, and now I could play again after so many years and it felt so unimaginably good and I had missed it, oh missed it, oh MISSED it, and now I can play again so thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!

“Not a problem,” he says, just the way my brother Johnny does.

So we walk up the street, and we pass the homeless guy and then he knows what he has to do, so he turns and wakes up the guy.

“Caballero,” he says.

“Por favor,” he says.

“Tenga,” he says.

And gives the guy the twenty. The guy who rolls over, takes the bill, and says dios te bendiga not knowing that…

…he already has.

The Disappearing Daddy

It’s a hard question, the question of Eric Myers—a rich, conservative, Evangelical guy in the closet who somehow disappeared in 1991, leaving behind a wife, five kids, and two parents.

Confession—I have thought of this, and in fact came to the conclusion (helped greatly by a very adolescent brain) that if I simply stopped calling, my parents would forget about me.

I tell you this as evidence that under some emotional pressures, you don’t think very well or logically. I was maybe 19 or 20 at the time, I was gay, and I believed it when my eldest brother wrote, “you must never tell our parents this; it would kill them.” So the answer was to distance myself, geographically and emotionally. It would make it easier for everyone.

Somehow, my parents weren’t buying in….

For Myers, it was different. There was the Evangelical thing, which I didn’t have. There was getting married, which he had to do to try to convince himself that he was straight, and that he could pray it away if he were in a “normal” relationship. So though it was a decade or two after I had faced coming out, Myers was facing what I had faced, but much more.

His story is that he had a fugue state—what used to be called temporary amnesia. He remembers leaving Arizona—his home state—and arriving in San Diego, but he denies remembering checking into or out of the hotel.

And this was a different era, Dear Reader. There were no Internet traces, there was no GPS, no security cameras to speak of. So, the next thing Myers knew, he was in Cabo San Lucas, where he fell in love with Sean Lung, a Canadian tourist. After four months, they moved to Palm Springs, later they moved to Canada—where Myers assumed a false identity and gave himself a fake degree from Princeton.

Well, things were good, right? Except, of course, for that little eight-year old girl who was crying and screaming for her daddy, who had been frolicking in luxury pools and resorts with his boyfriend. Then there’s the wife, who had to put her family back on its feet. And the aging parents, of course, who were still wondering where their child was.

At a certain point, Myers was declared legally dead, but never given a funeral or memorial service. So the family collected $800,000 from a life insurance policy—which didn’t give them back a father, but did take a bit of the sting out of the loss.

So the family had the money; then they got a shock. Because in 2007, Myers returned, still with the Canadian guy he had met in Mexico. His mother gave him a big hug and took him back immediately. The rest of the family?

Well, his brothers and sisters came around as well. But his wife stated that she thought the antichrist had returned. And the eight-year old?

Well, she had turned to alcohol and then poly drug abuse in her early teens. So she had kicked the pills and the booze, gotten her life together, and started a family. And no, she hasn’t seen her father and doesn’t want to. Here’s what she told ABC News.

"I know how much I love my children," Ruggiano, who was 8 when Myers vanished, told ABC News. "And if he loved me even half as much as I loved them, there would be no situation where he would ever think that it was okay to leave me."

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/presumed-dead-dad-shows-gay-lover-article-1.1405049#ixzz2ennTX6Ml 

And here’s more:

"I know a lot of [gay] people who would never do this and absolutely never blame it on their homosexuality," youngest daughter Kirsten Myers Ruggiano told ABC. "I don't believe that he is capable of love ... toward anyone but himself."

Here’s what Myers says:

"I'm sitting there, saying, 'You can do this and still go back. You can still do this and still be OK. Maybe a week. Maybe two weeks,'" he said.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/presumed-dead-dad-shows-gay-lover-article-1.1405049#ixzz2enoFaWC6

So the question becomes—how much of Myers’s story is real? Do you buy in about the fugue state? And how do you get in and out of three different countries without legal ID? And is the pressure of living a lie and feeling that you are damned and possessed by Satan a sufficient excuse for abandoning a wife and five children? Myers said that he tried not to think of his kids—those 22 years he was on the lam—because it put him in a bad place. Probably, but not as bad as the place his kids were in.

Two thoughts occur to me—the first being that Myers never at any point told himself that he was going to disappear for 22 years. He believed he could go back tomorrow, or next week. And those tomorrows became 22 years, the way just one more drink becomes cirrhosis.

Second? Could it have happened to me? Had I had the pressures that Myers faced, could I have ended up in Mexico in the arms of a lover, forgetting my grieving family back home?

‘They’re going to be better off without me’—I told myself when I was going through that patch of drifting away. Did Myers reason the same thing? He wasn’t abandoning his family—he was in exile, or so he might have reasoned.

And is still in exile, as far as his kids are concerned. And his wife, as well. Oh, and the insurance company? 

They want their money back….

Don't know....

Kevin Breel is 19 years old, a standup comedian, and depressed.

Three adjectives, or maybe—he might say—two adjectives and a stigma. Because that’s what mental illness is, he argues in his TED talk—there’s still a lot of shame and blame about being sick in that part of your body behind the eyes….

Well, as someone who swallows 20 mg. of Lexapro and 15 mg. of Remeron daily, I was more than prepared to listen. Also to consider the question: has anything good ever come for me from my long years of depression?

Change a life—I had never known those many, many dark days when it was only habit and custom that got me out of bed. I never sat in those toilet stalls at Wal-Mart weeping silently, never canceled classes and sat in my classroom and stared at the walls, trying to banish the thought, “I want to kill myself,” which had become the mantra echoing through my mind. I woke up every morning, felt happy, and went about my business.

In short, the forty years of depression never happened—they felt as good as I feel today.

First reaction?

God, do I wish!

Breel argues that one of the benefits of depression is that it allows you to see the bright side of life, and that you have to know the valley to appreciate the mountain. Yeah? I’m not sure; would I appreciate walking more if I had spent time wheelchair bound? Don’t think so….

The depression may have made me more sensitive to others—that’s true, I think. It also gave me a certain strength—if I survived those years, I’ll probably get through today.

And yes, I’ve read Thomas Moore’s books and I think they’re good—and I don’t buy in. Sure, if you’re going through a divorce, or a significant loss, or a major life change—you may experience the dark night of the soul. But there is one hell of a difference between a major life event and a major depression.

Consider it—I was in a stable, long-term relationship; I had a job, a home, pets, and a loving family. I was also excruciatingly depressed. Yeah, you could argue that the job wasn’t the right one, that a creative side of myself was unexpressed. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shake the depression. The only answer was medication.

Sorry—but to say anything else is just more stigmatization, another way of saying, “oh just buck up and adopt a positive attitude.” And so, by the way, is the recent spate of articles saying that antidepressants don’t work.

Yeah? Let me tell you what doesn’t work—exercise, music, writing, time spent in contemplation, meditation, talking with friends. How do I know? ‘Cause I do all of these things on a regular basis, and guess what? If I miss two days of Remeron, I start to feel shaky and anxious. That happened to me two weeks ago, but I was smart enough to go to the pharmacy, explain that I had run out of the pills two days before, and that I had an appointment with my doctor in a couple of days.

They know me, nodded, and got me the pills. I took the Remeron immediately, though my hands were shaking so hard I could barely hold the glass. And I felt perfectly fine forty minutes later.

I feel now that I’m spinning my wheels—that I need to write something and I don’t know what and it’s scary. I’m not undisciplined, I’m not a coward—but something is blocking me. So I may do the dark night of the soul—why not?—and sit down and confront myself. But trust me—no depressed person could do that. That takes every molecule of mental health—a depressed person doesn’t have the strength even to think of it.

That said—I wonder if there really is a stigma today about depression or admitting to a mental illness. Part of it is having come out as a gay man—after you do that, admitting to depression is a sort of snore. But it may be true—for many years I could not get help, and it took a screaming brother and a panicky husband to drive into the arms of a psychiatrist.

“I want to die,” I once told a student, who popped back with, “that just means you’re not listening to God.”

The fury that surged through my body was liberating—perhaps nothing she could have said was more beneficial. And so we come to the theory that depression is simply rage or some other negative emotion suppressed.

Maybe—but can we just do whoever-it-is theorem? Remember—the idea that when there are two or more competing explanations, go with the simplest? Here it is, then.

We’re gonna have to go back to the idea that there are two major types of depression—one situational and reactive, the other biochemical. And we absolutely have to get through our heads—asking anyone with a biochemical depression to do anything except take medicine is like asking a diabetic to adjust his blood sugar without insulin.

The other thing we need to do? Interventions—because a depressed person cannot get help by himself. I robbed myself of forty years because I couldn’t reach out and couldn’t get to a shrink. Until the crisis came, I was stuck. So it’s simple—we ask everyone close to us if they’re depressed. If the answer is yes, we call a shrink, make an appointment, and tell the person, “I’ve made an appointment for you, and I’ll go with you.” It’s the only way to do it.

Was it really 40 years? Were there really no good times, happy days, smiles, light moments?

Yes and no. Of course there were good times. But depression is a psychic pair of sunglasses that seem to get brighter and darker on different days, but never seem to be taken off. Change the metaphor—depression is the movie in black and white, when all the rest of world is watching in color.

And if the medium is the message? In other words, was I watching a different movie because I was seeing it black and white?

Don’t know.

Think so. 

Don’t know….

A Composer First, a Lady Incidentally

Who knew? The eccentric English gentleman has become so accepted that he is now cliché, but what about those Victorian / Edwardian ladies? People like Gertrude Bell who energetically managed to be a writer, explorer, archeologist, state maker, administrator, and…oh, did I mention spy?

It’s been a rather trying time here—I have been battered for four months with construction in the street; at one point there were two jackhammers, an electric generator, and a tractor busy breaking up cement. And last night, I arrived home from the café which provides me escape as well as coffee to discover that there was no water. What had happened? Well, the construction workers had broken our water main, and had deemed it easier to turn a valve before the break than actually repair the break. So that they had done, leaving me very sweaty on one of the hottest days of the year.

Nor was calling the water company the solution, since I had no idea what our account number was, and of course had thrown the bill away after I had paid it. This prompted the less than helpful observation from Mr. Fernández that he always has the most recent electric bill in his wallet.

With the restraint for which I am famous, I forbore to point out that Mr. Fernández has the last 20 years of electric bills—as well as every receipt for everything he bought in the last two decades. And why is that? Because he throws nothing away. He also, however, can find nothing.

Right—got the account number by accessing “edit payees” on my bank’s electronic site. Then Raf called the water company, and waited for twenty minutes for a voice that was attached to a person, and then spoke for another twenty minutes to a charming lady who managed to locate our account—though incredibly it was under neither of our names, social security numbers, or any current address. That done, the nice lady gave us a work order number, with the assurance that someone would come and repair the break—or at least turn the valve a quarter turn.

Did they?

Well, it was nice to have the number.

And today, the little guy with the two pierced lips was busy at work, having been encouraged by Mr. Fernández. At this point, I have traveled through annoyance, anger, outrage, fury and am now squarely in abject misery. A sort of Stockholm syndrome has taken over—the little guy was my best friend, my savior.

“You won’t,” I said, “ever, ever take away my water again. Please!”

So I trotted off to see my shrink, who assured me that he wouldn’t sniff me too closely. Then I came home and thought to check in on a classical music website that was going to tell me a list of the 10 greatest gay composers. Well, I had a good idea—there’s Copland, Barber, Poulenc, and…duh, Tchaikovsky. But I had forgotten some big ones—most notably Franz Schubert (contested, but likely) and Handel (ditto).

And then there was Ethel Smyth.

Say whah?

Yes, in fifty years of listening to music, I had somehow never come across Ethel Smyth, 1858-1944, who studied composition in Leipzig with Carl Reinecke, where she also met Dvorak, Grieg, and Tchaikovsky. And it was Tchaikovsky who said, "Miss Smyth is one of the few women composers whom one can seriously consider to be achieving something valuable in the field of musical creation."

Well, the lady got around—among other passions was the Suffragette movement, and when Mrs. Pankhurst urged her followers to break the windows of any politician who opposed them, Miss Smyth did, and then paid for it by spending two months in Holloway Prison. The conductor Thomas Beecham went to visit, and found Miss Smyth conducting a group of Suffragettes in a rousing anthem called “The March for Women,” which she had composed, and which had become the anthem for the movement. The Suffragettes were in the courtyard; Miss Smyth was conducting—with a toothbrush—from out a second floor window.

And she was vigorous in other ways—golfing, mountaineering, and fox hunting. Here’s how she described herself:

Because I have conducted my own operas and love sheep-dogs; because I generally dress in tweeds, and sometimes, at winter afternoon concerts, have even conducted in them; because I have written books, spoken speeches, broadcast, and don't always make sure that my hat is on straight; for these and other equally pertinent reasons, in a certain sense I am well known.

Throughout her life, she had passionate affairs with women, but apparently only one male lover. At the age of 71, she fell in love with Virginia Wolf, who described it as “being like caught by a giant crab.” Nonetheless, they became good friends.

Right—and the music? Wow! Check out the cello sonata below—it’s original and fresh. Is it top drawer? Perhaps not, but it’s well above floor level….

More Than a Singer

It’s a nice thing to see—a guy get totally smitten by a woman in twenty minutes or so.

The guy is unknown, though that may change. The woman is famous, although in the rarified world of opera. He’s British; she’s American, from Prairie Village, Kansas. And they come together at a master class, where he is singing, and she is….well, mastering.

Blessedly, she’s nice about it, as a girl from Kansas should be. And so Joyce DiDonato met Nicolas Darmanin in London at the Royal Opera House, and listened as he made his way through a difficult aria of Rossini (right, point taken—are there any easy arias?)

And Darmanin does a good job of it. Then DiDonato gets to work, and at one point asks him why he repeated a phrase; “do you just like the sound of your voice,” she kids him. Well, he doesn’t deny it, and she says, “I just love tenors.”

She’s as sunny as a Kansas sunflower, and also funny. But when she takes a chance, as every teacher learns to do, she opens up a world for Darmanin. First, she prefaces it with a warning—she’s not a voice pedagogue, she doesn’t want to screw him up. But what does he think of his breathing?

In the next ten minutes, she has taken a good tenor and made him substantially better. And in Darmanin’s case, she has focused on technical matters. In another case, she takes on a mezzo, and focuses on character development. Again, she’s totally winning, saying at one point that generic opera is ridiculous. When does it get sublime? When a singer digs deep into his or her character, and really understands the role.

DiDonato, in the words of opera critic Rupert Christiansen, has “a sound so perfectly beautiful – so purely projected, so elegantly shaped, so intensely felt and delicately coloured – that adjectives such as angelic and sublime floated to mind.”

She also is a complete professional—she’s canceled only twice in her life, when her father died. Even more remarkably, she once fell in the first act of an opera, broke her fibula, but carried on through the rest of the evening.

Well, this amazing woman has just performed at the Last Night of the Proms, and has included “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” in her pieces. And so—electronically, though not on stage—she has dedicated the song to all the gay and lesbians who have suffered rejection, and specifically to the Russian LGBT community, who are affected by Putin’s anti-homosexuality laws. Here’s what she wrote on her website:

There are well-intentioned parents, siblings, friends, strangers, communities, schools, as well as governments, that insist on trying to make homosexuals feel like lesser human beings, hoping for their silence, which is seemingly so much easier for their oppressors to bear. “These gays” are much greater human beings for having to look into the eyes of these misguided forces that try with all of their might to degrade them, and yet they audaciously stand up and say, “No. You listen: I am worthy.”  What a courageous, shining example of being true to yourself.  They deserve the applause and celebration for their valiant courage and for teaching us (if we’re strong and brave enough to learn) how to be better human beings.

Underneath the sunny personality, there’s a very sensitive person, a person who has had to struggle with her self worth. And it comes out in the second clip below—when she talks about silencing the self-critic.

It’s been seen 5,800 times on YouTube—but it should be shown to every conservatory student every day throughout their student career.

Thanks, Joyce!

A Journalist and an Historian

Well, he’s an interesting guy, with an interesting set of beliefs. And he’s much in the news, now, since he has taken Edward Snowden’s revelations public through The Guardian and The Washington Post.

But the hour-long interview that I just watched was filmed two years ago, when Glenn Greenwald was relatively unknown, and had just published his book, With Liberty and Justice for Some. The central premise of the book? That our political institutions have become so corrupted that we now have a two-tiered system of justice—one for the rich and powerful, the other for the rest of us.

A defining moment for Greenwald was Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. From then on, the idea that we had to “look forward, move on, achieve closure” meant that every president since then joins the old boys network. A classic case, according to Greenwald, was how even in the interregnum of winning the election and the inauguration, Obama was slithering out of persecution of the Bush administration for war crimes, for lying to the American people and to Congress, for launching an aggressive war. Which, by the way, was the key crime of Adolf Hitler that the United States and the world charged in the Nuremberg Trials after World War II.

And it’s a clear path—the lack of prosecution of Richard Nixon lead to the lack of persecution for Irangate and high officials in the Reagan administration, the invasion of Iraq in Desert Storm, the torture and abuses of human rights in the Bush years. And as Greenwald points out, anybody who suggests that Bush be held to justice has instantly self-marginalized himself.

What’s particularly curious is—where’s the outrage? We are, after all, living in the most connected era in history. I can now tell you that in Syria, the foreign minister has appeared to agree to demands to allow international inspection or control. A hundred and fifty years ago, people were still fighting in wars after the truce had been declared.

By now, everyone can see the problem: we have an oligarchy. Members of Congress spend half of their time—minimally—struggling to get elected. And that money doesn’t come from you and me. Unless, of course, your last name is Rockefeller….

The other curious thing is how easy it should be, hypothetically, to solve the whole thing. Look, other governments have found out or figured out ways to take the money out of politics. Why can’t we?

We could start with simply funding public elections. Punto—oh, and can we put an end to television advertising? Debates, yes—but a president or senator isn’t (or shouldn’t be) a product. Though they have become so….

The next thing to do would be to throw out all the fancy voting apparatus and go back to the paper ballot and the cardboard box. The voting machine industry, by the way, is highly technical, extremely expensive, and is dominated by about three companies, all headed by rabid Republicans.

We also are going to have to increase minimum wage. Oh, and speaking of which—and speaking also of the corrosive effect of money on public policy—here’s Bill Moyers on the other NRA.

In June, the National Restaurant Association boasted that its lobbyists had stopped minimum wage increases in 27 out of 29 states in 2013. In Connecticut, which increased its state minimum wage, a raise in the base pay for tipped workers such as waitresses and bartenders vanished in the final bill. A similar scenario unfolded in New York State: It increased its minimum wage, but the NRA’s last-minute lobbying derailed raising the pre-tip wage at restaurants and bars. The deals came despite polls showing 80 percent support for raising the minimum wage.     

Rounding back to Greenwald, he argues that we have a system in which the powerful get away—figuratively and even occasionally literally—with murder, whereas the poor are more easily incarcerated than ever.

OK—jailing is one thing we do to the poor. The other thing we do—as I learned in class today—is to use them as cannon fodder. That’s what my student taught me, as she showed me a photo on her iPhone of her nephew, who had just enlisted in the army.

Well, he thought it was all he could do. He had just turned 18, he had bad grades and couldn’t go to the university, and jobs? Are you kidding?

I tried to be hopeful; my student was near tears. But the reality is that if her nephew comes back, his life may be just as hellish as it was in Iraq. It may, in fact, become something like Iraq 2.0, with the terrors being internal and systemic, as opposed to external and random.

Oh, and the people who wrecked the system, so that there are no jobs, and kids have to off to war? The criminals in the thousand-dollar suits? They’re free, and riding a soaring stock market right now….

Greenwald also makes the point that we have blended the lines between the public and private sectors. And nowhere is this more true than in “national security.” Who would have imagined a world in which we have out-sourced granting security access? It’s madness.

And Greenwald’s observation that journalists have changed is interesting—instead of the hard-bitten, cynical, go-after-the-bastards-and-damn-the-costs guys of the past, we now have people who are employed by corporations, and who know how the corporation works. Which—news flash, here—is by smiling, going along with the herd, ducking your head and not rocking boats.

Well, I came upon Greenwald by listening to “Conversations with History,” a great, hour-long program coming out of UCLA. Yesterday, I watched William Cronon, the president of the American Historical Association and a professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Today was Greenwald.

And both men were inspiring. Oddly, both men spoke briefly of the necessity of hope. Given that Cronon is a specialist in Environmental History, and Greenwald in First Amendment and Civil Rights, one wonders…

Which man has the most reason to be hopeful?

Or the most need?

Adventures in Male Philosophy

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Maya

Who knows why it happened, and anyway, it’s probably not important that it did; any proper Buddhist would term it maya, or illusion.

It could have been the cello, which after five years of not playing, I have started again to play. After three days, I’m an eighth of where I was, five years ago, at my height. I am, however, also eight times better than I was in the first five minutes of getting back to playing.

And it feels good, you know. For many years, the instrument was a battlefield, a thirty-year war in which I struggled to wrench the sounds that I heard in my head out from the cello. In the process, I attacked myself savagely; I screamed insults at myself; I raged and at one point began biting my left arm in frustration. Predictably, it took a physical toll—I began holding my breath until I began panting. My shoulders were permanently tense; my neck ached.

I gave up playing; I went back to it. The day came when I knew: my dream of being a professional musician was over.

What had happened? I choked consistently in three or four auditions. And yes—it was the classic choke. I didn’t play badly—I played horrifically, unimaginably badly. Think a fifth grader with about a year of practice behind him….

After the auditions, I would come home and play perfectly the piece I had massacred hours before. And it lead to a lot of cognitive dissonance—what the hell was I doing? Did I want to fail? Didn’t I believe in myself? Was I sabotaging myself out of guilt? If so, what was I feeling guilty about? Had I not resolved being gay?

Yes, that was how extreme the thinking went. Things about which I have little interest—teaching, for example—I do quite well. The one passion in my life? I fucked up.

It hurt, I stopped playing. Then, a nice lady called me up, announced herself as a neighbor and a pianist, and suggested that we get together and make music. We did, and for years we played every week. We had a tradition: every New Year’s Day, we played the three Bach cello / piano sonatas.

And I healed. I began to look at myself mechanistically, to see that I react with a full fight / flight reaction to the least stimulus. In short, my body, those bad days of the auditions, was flooding and flooded with cortisone and adrenalin at such levels that nobody could have performed.

What does a conservatory teach you? To play, yes, but also to compete. And I had forgone the conservatory—choosing to study privately. So I was an excellent player and a terrible competitor.

OK, maybe what happened this morning—this bit of maya—was because of the cello. Or maybe it was seeing the book in my hands. For the proof of the soft cover edition of Iguanas arrived yesterday, and it looks great.

Or maybe it was what I wrote to José, a man who does me the courtesy of reading this blog and commenting through Facebook. I had written, in response to his comment, that I had great respect for people who devote their lives to religion, and all the questions that implies. ‘Was that true,’ I wondered? Did I mean that?

Well, if I’m a hypocrite, I’m at least a consistent hypocrite. I thought about the acolyte I had seen when I took a three-day retreat in a Catholic monastery in Chicago. He was, frankly, a stunningly beautiful man in his early twenties; I admit frankly that I chose my pew especially to gaze on him, which I may have done rather too obviously.

The fruit, of course, is much juicier for being forbidden—but I think there was something more. This man was giving up what I had or could have, and what I took almost for granted: a home, a spouse, children, sex, and love. In the process, he would wrestle with himself, struggle, doubt, despair, and…what? Because nothing is guaranteed—Mother Teresa, for thirty years before her death, felt the presence of God very little. She was spiritually dry, and also spiritually thirsting. Who knew where, spiritually or psychically, my beautiful acolyte would be, at the end of his life? As bad as failing to become a musician was, wouldn’t it be infinitely worse to fail as a religious? Weren’t the stakes enormously higher?

So I looked at this beautiful man, and offered up a little atheist prayer, feeling a bit guilty as I did. I would hate to tar him with my brush…. 

But mostly, I think the morning maya was because of what happened last year, or a year and a half ago. That’s when I leapt off the existential edge and went into a fall, trusting as hard as the acolyte trusted that there would be celestial arms to catch me. I went willingly crazy—I faced myself and my demons. Or rather, my particular demon—a harsh, hypercritical self who relentlessly raged at myself, who sniped at every effort I ventured on, who lashed me mercifully.

Which is how I experienced him, that first Sunday of Holy Week of 2011 (I didn’t, by the way, know at the time that it was Holy Week). I was at El Morro, I was a slave, I was Christ, and I was walking to Golgotha. And the centurion behind me was a fierce wind, and the Brahms Piano Concerto Number One was the lash.

The week that followed was exhausting. I went into complete Buddhist awareness. In the process, everything that I had done automatically left me—and had to be relearned. I taught myself how to do a copy and paste, how to enter my name and password to the gmail account with the fewest movements of my fingers, how to wash dishes using the least water. Every action I did was scrutinized, analyzed, rethought and retaught.

In short, I was intensely focused on doing everything with complete consciousness. In the process, I learned that I had become the master, the man who was lashing the slave at El Morro. And I was teaching him, and he was learning, and he didn’t need the whip. He was loving, and I was loving, and he needed someone to teach him to do things—like wash dishes or play the cello—and I knew how to do those things. And I had berated him for decades for not being able to do what I hadn’t taught him to do.

Everything shifted. There is a very talented guy who can play the cello and write books. For that to happen, someone has to feed him and clean him and pay the bills and do…well, adult stuff.

And I answer to someone else, whom I call Domine, since that was the name he gave me, or rather blew at me, that day at El Morro. And the wind changed, and I learned to love that too. My biggest fear was hurricanes….

Well, today a tropical storm is scheduled to hit, but what do I care? I’ll just close the windows, and anyway it was a quiet morning, so why not walk to El Morro? It’ll look good, with the glowering sky behind it.

And that’s when the maya hit—in the opening Kyrie Eleison of the Biber Mass that was soaring in my ears as I walked again to the fortress. As much as I had been whipped, those 18 months before—now I was walking joyfully, ecstatically to my home, my fortress. I was sobbing and tourists were passing and trumpets were blaring and the sky indeed was glowering, and I was parading—victorious—to the fortress that awaited me and sheltered me and welcomed me. The music ended three feet from the door; I took the last steps in silence. 

“Can you take care of that?” he said a couple of weeks ago, after he had remarked that he missed playing.

“Sure,” I said, and took the cello to get fixed.

So now it’s back, and he’s playing again.

“Great,” I tell him.

“Beautiful,” I say.

And what does he say to me?

“Thanks.”