Carla Gugino, actress, quoted in Spirit magazine, December 2010: I was 16 years old, living on my own in Los Angeles, working very hard to become a professional actor, and this woman, Shelly, who became my mentor, said to me, "Make sure when you're on your deathbed, it's your life you've been living."
I used to think I was a trendsetter. Turns out I was only an early adopter.
In my 20’s I felt that I was at the forefront of social movements and pop trends. I was the first white kid to room with an African American in my college in 1965. I was an early feminist and among the first to document “neo-feminism” in the film Cindy: Shadows, which debuted on May 15, 1969. My pivotal years were 1968 and 1969. Only asthma – and my mother’s persuasion of a doctor to certify it – kept me from dying in Viet Nam in 1968 (and believe me this unathletic, asthmatic, wide-eyed kid would have been fodder). I was greatly affected by ‘60’s assassinations, especially that of Bobby Kennedy; in fact, I was driving with Charlie Reum through Utah, headed permanently west in my ’67 Mustang toward Los Angeles on June 6, 1968, the day Bobby was assassinated in Los Angeles. Mine was a multi-racial marriage on the Ides of March, 1969 – I had my own Yoko – which would have been illegal in 16 states only two years earlier, and in California and Nevada ten years earlier.
On September 17, 1968, I was a walk-in visitor at 4115 S. Central Avenue, the LA headquarters of Huey P. Newton’s and Bobby Seale’s Black Panther Party, engaging a BPP member there in a brief conversation about police brutality, hunger, disease, ignorance, and the oppression of Black people generally (and buying a poster of Newton sitting proud in a wicker chair, a guerilla leader with ammo belts strapped across his ebony chest), a year before the LAPD shootout with BPP leaders and subsequent raids at that same Central Avenue location on October 18, 1969 and the five hour shootout on Central Avenue on December 8, 1969. “The day after the raid, Angela Davis and others set up a vigil outside BPP's Southern California headquarters, during which LAPD attacked, forcing people to flee in all directions.” In the late 1960’s I truly felt I was riding the Pilot Wave.
Fast forward 40 years. At age 62 I again find my life a metaphor for our times. Weeks after the September 2008 apex of the global financial crisis and the global stock market crash, I fell on a defective brick staircase and broke my right leg in seven places. The metaphor, for me, is powerful: the staircase appeared to be solid and safe but was critically flawed, like our financial system – a flaw that had been there for years, unnoticed or unacknowledged. That flaw led directly to my fall and the crushing of two bones which had held me upright and stable for 62 years, like our financial system. The result was enormous pain, loss of ability, loss of income and ultimately all this was tied together – personally and economically – in a significant loss of net worth.
During these past six months I have endured and overcome much of the pain but still find myself mentally diminished, physically unstable and working diligently to regain the strength and mental clarity I once took for granted. My real estate investments took the fall, too, and I’m gradually steering them toward a completely reorganized future; there’s healing – and still pain – all around me. Others in our society and our economy have suffered far more and continue to be disabled; I recognize that and count myself fortunate, so far. I am changing and I perceive our culture is changing, hopefully rapidly enough and deeply enough. We can no longer live disconnected from each other, from our deepest needs and values, from reality and from the consequences of disconnection. The consequences are “in our face” – both in the sense of being unavoidable and in the sense of revealing themselves in our physical manifestations.
I’m engaged in three initiatives of physical therapy: the traditional insurance-paid work-your-joints therapy, a highly-evolved Egoscue musculoskeletal alignment with a series of stretches and gentle muscle-training exercises, and often painful deep tissue massage to continue to relax the knots that still form in post-traumatic musculature. What is the corollary in our financial system’s recovery? Certainly not the bailouts and phony bank stress tests. Those are comparable to splints. De-leveraging is a therapy. As are new financial regulations. Bankruptcy and business failure – very therapeutic. In this one area, perhaps, my own life’s recovery and therapy is ahead of the culture.
And yet the future remains unknown and unknowable. And all we have is – dare I say it? – our health, our relationships, our ethics and values, and our sense of community to pull us forward. We’re riding the Pilot Wave again. Are we hitching our wagons to a star? Or are we like Slim Pickins in Dr. Strangelove, strapped to a plunging bomb? Gee-haw!
Dear Mike, How am I doing. Let’s look around me. I’m here with seven pieces of my broken leg knitting back into one and now bearing weight, living each day in the middle of a state capital that is one grownup short of a complete financial meltdown, in the middle of a nation that is two years (or two weeks) short of a complete financial meltdown, plopped on a blue marble about 98 of whose nations are teetering on the brink of a complete loss of confidence in unbridled capitalism accompanied by complete financial meltdown.
Can democracy be far behind? If there are no jobs and no money for adequate police, can civil disorder be far behind…at least in pockets here and there?
Or will the collapse be so sudden, so severe and so complete that nearly everyone will pull together, assess their neighborhood situations and figure it out, three or four dozen families at a time?
In an essay on Norman Mailer's books on 1968 (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/books/review/Berman-t.html) occur these lines:
[In 1968] "Mailer prophesied that Communism, based on its inbuilt inadequacies, was going to collapse. There was no reason to go to war against it. His analysis would loom today as totally brilliant if only he had added a 20 percent tip about what was meanwhile likely to happen to the unhappy people of Indochina during the interval between America’s withdrawal from the war and the Communists’ eventual withdrawal from Communist doctrine — the interim experiences of policy-driven famine and poverty in Vietnam, extreme oppression, “boat people” fleeing for their lives and Cambodian horrors: the Indochinese catastrophes that have still not registered in the consciences of Americans when they are feeling dovish, just as Hiroshima and Nagasaki have not yet registered in the consciences of Americans when they are feeling hawkish.
Somehow this informs the discussion on the "War on Terror", just not sure how.
By the way, it is the likes of Bailey's jack-off analysis of a 40 year old text that sent me running and screaming away from a graduate degree in English and a life of professordoom. How can so many people spend so much time over-analyzing the musings of others. Digging into Shakespeare and Joyce, yes, I can see it, but the rest is, at best, cocktail conversation waiting to be distracted by the sight of a leggy blond (of whatever sex).
“Barack Obama’s candidacy was the Clintons’ worst nightmare. They had dreamed of the day when an African-American could be elected president. But they never anticipated it would happen on their watch and were utterly confounded.” — CARL BERNSTEIN, the author of “A Woman in Charge”, in the New York Times Op Ed “Low Riders”, 6/8/08
Reading this comment by a former Watergate reporting hero and recent biographer of Hillary Clinton took me back to the late summer of 1965, beginning my sophomore year in college, during the heart of the civil rights movement. In April, I had been one of fourteen students – seven black, seven white – who had attempted to desegregate the seven local Winfield, Kansas barbershops on a sunny Saturday morning.
It was my first civil rights activism, if you don’t count my speaking against my minister in 1962 for reading Uncle Remus stories (complete with Stepin Fetchit accent) to the Oklahoma white kids’ church camp in which one lone African American girl had quietly and single-handedly desegregated that little tradition.
Now I felt mainstream. I wasn’t taking the bus to Alabama to sign up Black voters, like some in my class, but I was acting locally and meaningfully. The barbershop incident had sparked a furor in the town of 10,000 and had split the mostly white town right down the middle – even the Methodist church in which I was student minister. After initial resistance, the barbers did, gradually over years, begin cutting everyone’s hair.
And it had highlighted other, closer racism within our own church-related college including an unstated policy of segregated dorm rooms. So when, in May, the Dean posted a signup sheet for students willing to room bi-racially, I was one of the first to sign it.
And I was one of the first three to be chosen, come the fall of 1965, to room bi-racially: Willie Williams, Roger Winfrey, and me. Roger was a Kansas boy and also a pre-ministerial student. Willie was from Texas, son of a sharecropper, who only had enough money for three of the four years of college (he would go on to graduate after three years).
Of the three of us only Willie and I survived the experience. Roger found it too stressful, too unreal, and eventually even left the school. But Willie and I grew to know each other very well, to share our very different childhoods, to cross the wide social divide and become genuinely warm friends.
All eyes were on us. Seriously, from a four-decade perspective it sounds silly and melodramatic, but it was quite simply revolutionary. My own grandmother denounced me. I lost my scholarship because the Tulsa racist right wing Christian who had put up the money refused to fund an integrationist. But for my Dad and an understanding banker in Oxford, I would not have been able to pay for my senior year – the college financial head would not sign off on a student loan.
But in all of it, the ring of truth in the above Carl Bernstein comment is my memory of my first reaction when I was told I had been selected to desegregate Southwestern College student housing. “Oh, my god.” I had no idea it would be me. An impulse of right thinking had prompted me to sign up for desegregated dorm living. Why wouldn’t I sign up? But I do remember that first thought, that first moment when it actually was about to alter the course of my own life.
I know, just a little bit, what the Clintons might be feeling. But I also know that my nine months with Willie Williams was a profound experience and a most healing one. And I know the same will be true for America when Barack Obama takes the oath of office on January 20, 2009.
Dear cousins, I completely understand both of your perspectives. And at 61, I, too, have lost much or most of my naivety. And I agree that anyone who would vie for the job of President or any state or federal level political post, is likely self-absorbed, much-flattered, and likely to compromise in far too many ways, just to get there. Since the ancient Greeks, politicians have pretty much been given to such traits and behavior.
But when I look at our loss of historic and constitutional freedoms, including habeas corpus; when I see that in our name torture is now an official practice which is (or at least for a time was) decided by top administration officials meeting in the basement of the White House; when I look at the exploding national debt with accumulating interest (to which we will likely add $1 to $3 trillion for the Iraq experiment, if you include costs of maintaining the veterans who have been injured in body and mind) and the fact that that debt is almost wholly financed by foreign, substantially, Chinese, money which can be quickly withdrawn, if they choose; and when I pay attention to the surging economies of China and India, whose growth rates will eventually doom us to second class world economic status, especially when factoring in our miserable public education system which fails to graduate roughly 40% to 50% of high schoolers; when I look at the overwhelming burden of Social Security and Medicare for which no solutions are being proposed and for which too few in our generation are saving; when I ponder the exploding price of oil, the loss of the dollar's value throughout the world, the exploding cost of food which this very day is leading to riots in many countries, and the shrinking glaciers and the climate change they portend (regardless of whether you think it is natural, manmade, inevitable or whatever) - then I think we cannot, for the sake of our grandchildren - allow ourselves to be so bitter and disillusioned that we become disconnected from being part of some solution.
I choose not to tie my happiness to the outcome of these awful circumstances; I'm ok with my little day to day bubble. But I also choose to move past my own security to ponder what I can do, what we cousins can do, what our children and their friends can do to take control of this careening car of the future and get it somewhat steering in a more positive direction. And when I entertain those thoughts, and I look at the choices for President, I feel obligated either (a) to run myself (which ain't gonna happen), (b) to choose a third party candidate (which I've done several times to no effect) or (c) to choose among McCain, Clinton and Obama, which of those might be most likely the one to create an atmosphere in Washington which fosters effectiveness for my own efforts at solutions, that's when I choose Obama.
While I do personally hold out hope, "the audacity of hope" (if you will), in fact, one need not be hopeful nor need one "believe" in anything political. One only needs to reject the thought of being totally helpless. And if one can reject being helpless, then there is some action-imperative growing from that. That's all I'm saying.
While the Democratic presidential candidates plan a two-division-a-month withdrawal strategy beginning in the Spring of 2009, John McCain cheneys his way across the Mideast talking of keeping American troops in Iraq for a century.
During a town hall meeting in Derry, New Hampshire 1/3/08, McCain told a crowd of two hundred that it “would be fine with” him if the U.S. military stayed in Iraq for “a hundred years“:
Q: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years — (cut off by McCain)
McCAIN: Make it a hundred.
Q: Is that … (cut off)
McCAIN: We’ve been in South Korea … we’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea 50 years or so. That would be fine with me. As long as Americans …
Q: [tries to say something]
McCAIN: As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. That’s fine with me, I hope that would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al-Qaeda is training and equipping and recruiting and motivating people every single day.
Two-thirds of the American electorate see the Iraq fiasco as unsustainable and draw a direct line to the depressed dollar, soaring federal deficits and a growing subservience to Chinese cash. McCain echoes the Veep’s “So?” and promises more quagmire with honor.
But McCain is one of our most knowledgeable foreign policy leaders – his senior confusion about Shiite Iran training Sunni Al-Qaeda notwithstanding.
So how about some “Straight Talk” from the old soldier? Once in office, how would the Iraq fiasco really play out?
“In an exclusive new index, [the magazine] Foreign Policy and the Center for a New American Security surveyed more than 3,400 active and retired officers at the highest levels of command about the state of the U.S. military. They see a force stretched dangerously thin and a country ill-prepared for the next fight.” (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4198)
"Today, the U.S. military is engaged in a campaign that is more demanding and intense than anything it has witnessed in a generation. Ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now entering their fifth and seventh years respectively, have lasted longer than any U.S. military engagements of the past century, with the exception of Vietnam. More than 25,000 American servicemen and women have been wounded and over 4,000 killed. Additional deployments in the Balkans, on the Korean Peninsula, and elsewhere are putting further pressure on the military’s finite resources. And, at any time, U.S. forces could be called into action in one of the world’s many simmering hot spots—from Iran or Syria, to North Korea or the Taiwan Strait.
"In all, more than 3,400 officers holding the rank of major or lieutenant commander and above were surveyed from across the services, active duty and retired, general officers and field-grade officers. About 35 percent of the participants hailed from the Army, 33 percent from the Air Force, 23 percent from the Navy, and 8 percent from the Marine Corps. Several hundred are flag officers, elite generals and admirals who have served at the highest levels of command. Approximately one third are colonels or captains—officers commanding thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines—and 37 percent hold the rank of lieutenant colonel or commander. Eighty-one percent have more than 20 years of service in the military. Twelve percent graduated from one of America’s exclusive military academies. And more than two thirds have combat experience, with roughly 10 percent having served in Iraq, Afghanistan, or both.
"More than 80 percent of the officers say that, given the stress of current deployments, it is unreasonable to ask the military to wage another major war today. Nor did the officers express high confidence in the military’s preparedness to do so. For instance, the officers said that the United States is not fully prepared to successfully execute such a mission against Iran or North Korea."
Over forty percent agree with the statement: “the demands of the war in Iraq have broken the U.S. military.”
Nearly 90 percent say that they believe the demands of the war in Iraq have “stretched the U.S. military dangerously thin.”
And therein lies the secret McCain exit strategy.
If McCain wins the 2008 election, he will continue a Bush-Petraeus surge-forever policy until some external new crisis forces him to redeploy the troops to a more urgent region.
There will be a new, more urgent war, sooner or later, and if John McCain lives to turn 80 in the White House, then on his watch he will have found an “honorable” excuse to redeploy our military to another war. Perhaps it will be another front in the thousand-year War on Terror. But sooner or later, Iraq’s security will have to be turned over to its neighbors without the massive presence of US military forces.
Regardless of the timing of the Iraq exit, the cost to America will likely approach $3 Trillion and the damage to the US economy and the US dollar will be irrecoverable. Don't believe it? Listen to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz.
It's time to be grownups. All of us. To stop the petty bickering and sniping and tackle the snowballing problems the dawn of the 21st century has brought us (with a lot of help from radicals on all sides).
So when, in David Gergen's words, "Barack Obama spoke to the American people like grownups" about race, it is time to respond with genuine national dialog about race and truly begin to get his divisive bigotry behind us.
One of Obama's lines was: "The point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, you know, there's a reaction that's been bred in our experiences that don't go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that's just the nature of race in our society."
And when, the next morning, "Fox and Friends" began running, out of context, a clip of Obama describing his grandmother as "a typical while person" Sunday anchor Chris Wallace came on and took them to task. The clip is worth watching:
Journalism is America's Fourth Estate. Investigative reporters, analysts and pundits are important guardian's of the people's interest in government and politics. But has the Fourth Estate become a cadre of slackers? Case in point: it has become cliche to discuss Hillary's attempts to stop her snowballing primary losses to Obama as creating a "firewall" first in one primary state and then another. This term "firewall" has been used repeatedly by journalists, analysts and pundits of all stripes:
11/30/07 - The Boston Globe: "I would argue that New Hampshire is the firewall of last resort," said Dante Scala, a University of New Hampshire political scientist. [http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/11/30/ with_iowa_tight_nh_becoming_clintons_firewall/] 12/18/07 - The New Republic - John B. Judis: "This hostility of Latinos toward blacks has sometimes showed up in political behavior....[this is] Hillary Clinton's Firewall." [http://www.tnr.com/politics/ story.html?id=314e8fae-3fd3-4af2-bfde-f0f8e069c1fe]
2/2/08 - The Atlantic - Mark Ambinder: "Clinton's Firewall Scenario" [http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/02/ clintons_firewall_scenario.php]
2/13/08 - The New York Times - David Leonhart: "Is it possible that Barack Obama has become the favorite in Texas, a state long considered to be a firewall for Hillary Clinton?" [http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/ online-market-watch/]
2/22/08 - Bloomberg.com - Lorraine Woellert and Kristin Jensen: "Ohio was supposed to be Hillary Clinton's firewall." [http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/ news?pid=20601087&sid=akZsaWjVqF90&refer=home]
There are, indeed, over 300,000 such "Clinton Firewall" references on Google.
Here's the problem. A "firewall" is a partition to inhibit the spread of fire within a structure or in a computer system to prevent unauthorized access.
Obama's wins are in wide open spaces - the 50 states - and he is moving like a prairie wildfire. When fighting a wildfire, professionals use a "firebreak", which is a strip of cleared, open space to arrest the spread of a wildfire through a forest or a prairie.
The correct word for Clinton's failed attempts is "firebreak".
Perhaps the only ones who care about such things are those of us who study language and feel passionately about precision in language. But shouldn't that include journalists and editors - those who live by their use of precise language? And if some early journalists, analysts, editors and pundits chose the incorrect word, are the rest such lemmings that they thoughtlessly follow suit?
The number of uses of the correct term "Clinton firebreak" on Google? As of today, three:FOXnews (sweet irony), The Baltimore Sun, and Mother Jones magazine. There are three journalists and their editors who know the difference between a firebreak and a firewall; and all of those correct references occurred in February 2008, months after the imprecision began.
Whatever word is used, it appears that Hillary Clinton will be ineffective in supressing the political wildfire of Barack Obama.
Born on a farm, first mentor at age 9, BA Cum Laude in English and Philosophy, Woodrow Wilson National Fellow, graduate work in religion and English, former prison counselor, restauranteur, construction project manager, university teacher, mediator, arbitrator, liason between public and private sector, third-party advocate of peaceful resolution of disputes, team builder, manager of the political space.
