By Jesse Last

Sunday afternoon, I found myself inspired by Hillary Clinton. It was not what she said in her speech – as usual, her mastery of policy impressed me – but rather how she connected with me. She explained that making change in this country is a task that no single person, even the President, can accomplish alone. Instead, she argued, it will demand the hard work of individual citizens. She stated that while she would promote clean energy, she would also ask us to conserve. While she would work to improve our schools, we as parents would need to read to our children and support their study. And while she would push for Universal Healthcare, she would want us to take more responsibility for keeping healthy. I felt respected, challenged and above all involved.

In short, Hillary took Obama’s message of change and emphasized the small, but hugely important, individual contributions we must make in transforming America. This co-opting of his rhetoric is serious business, at least for me as an Obama supporter. When I consider what initially drew me to Obama, it was his proposed *process* of change as well as the change itself. He seemed ready to set aside partisanship in serving the greater good, and he asked that I and all other Americans regardless of race, gender, and political affiliation join one another in doing the same.

Recently, he seems to have turned up the “change” volume but neglected the “individual contribution” sound, and now his message feels slightly out of tune. When I watch him speak on television, I see the crowd cheer with an incredible fervor. And there is nothing inherently wrong with such passion – friends who have heard him speak attest to the enthusiasm he generates. I just wish I did not feel as though I were watching a rally bordering on a revival. We need soaring rhetoric in a world of depressed resignation, but such rhetoric should be filled with content. I want to hear more about his proposals (I know he has them, I’ve checked!) Even more than policy, I want to hear more of his original humility, more of his reaching out to me, asking me to not only support him but to support the incredible work that is confronting global warming, restoring the country’s security and standing in the world, and improving our economy.

I’m pretty young – sadly, I never got to see John F. Kennedy speak. But I have read his quotes and even watched recordings of several of his speeches. And no matter how many times I hear it repeated, Kennedy’s appeal to my better self still gives me shivers:  “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”

I think our country is ready for this message of strength and sacrifice again. During the last eight years, very little has been asked of many of us, while too much has been asked of a few. While our soldiers have died or returned scarred by war, the President has encouraged those at home to continue in self-indulgent spending. And I think we have; I think I have. We have consumed more than we can afford and now find ourselves in debt. We have let the terrorists terrify us and our government take away fundamental freedoms and civil liberties. Above all, we have allowed ourselves to believe that we are helpless – that it is the role of the President to make our most important decisions for us.

Obama has challenged the idea that we as a nation are somehow too weak or too unwilling to think for ourselves and to sacrifice for the larger good. He has showed us the respect borne of high expectations. He has inspired us with his hope and his faith in a better America, and asked that we as citizens work to make it a reality. We have responded. Record numbers have turned out to cast their votes, including many groups traditionally skeptical of the political process. As of the most recent primaries, we continue to do so, and Obama continues to win States.

Now, I am concerned that he is losing the core of his message – the one that Hillary appropriated so well on Sunday. My hope for Obama is that he will return to expressing the principles that gave him his initial momentum. I want to be invited back into our project of renewing America – only not through giving money or cheering madly at rallies. I want to be invited back by his telling me, honestly, what he sees as the central problems in our country today, and what, precisely, he plans to do about them. And I want him to let me know that his vision includes a role for me, one of service as well as privilege, in making it a reality.

Jesse Last grew up in Massachusetts, attended Pomona College in California, and lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As a Truman Scholar, he is passionate about public service and interested in energy, sustainability and finance.

..
“Faith is a window or a mirror, you never know which. But every once in a while they both could use a little Windex” –Clara Lichtner

Dim Bulb on Watch —North Atlantic
Jim Culleny
 
At sea in a cork
on the back of a frothing bull
grey to infinite horizon
smack in the middle of it
stupid in adventure
bullspit flying everywhere
lurching twenty, thirty feet per leap
pitching, yawing, rolling, falling
it never occurred to me
that I might drown

And so, the dim bulb
of the boy I was
lit my way. And what
dim bulb still does?

..

Michael Blim

As I was entering my Massachusetts polling place on February 5, I encountered a Clinton supporter yelling out to prospective voters about how Senator Clinton was “the real liberal,” and how Mr. Clinton had brought the country eight years of economic growt and well being. I couldn’t hold my tongue. I responded that it was after all Alan Greenspan and Silicon Valley that accounted for the good times; that they were only really enjoyed by some; and that it was Bill Clinton’s good fortune to be in the White House at the time. Senator Clinton’s poll watcher responded chanting over and over again as I walked into the polling place: “You’re wrong. Clinton did it, Clinton did it, Clinton did it…” So much for dialogue, but here in Jamaica Plain, people spit up their politics like they spit up like curdled milk. Even at 6:30 in the morning.

Chalk it up to misguided enthusiasm, wishful thinking, or just ignorance. Take your pick. Senator Clinton cannot be held to account for one over-zealous poll watcher.

But in a way, Senator Clinton and Ex-President Clinton “did do it,” or are doing it.

And to Senator Clinton and her consort, I say: Beware the ABCs — “Anybody But Clinton.” I have never sat out an election in my life, and never voted for anyone but a Democrat for president. Even if my own politics stand considerably to the left of the party, I come from a yellow dog family, and have never strayed in the voting booth. In American politics, there is no other option, and I accept this as an “inconvenient truth.”

Well, God help me, as my Irish grandmother used to say.

“Anybody but Clinton” has crept into my thoughts. It was a shock – a kind of Pauline horse fall – that I experienced last Tuesday at the polling place. In my family, sitting out an election was a sin of omission. Despite all of the doozies that the Democratic Party has passed off on voters from time in memoriam, they still have to thank Franklin Roosevelt, my grandmother and her undying love for “that man” as the local reactionaries used to call him for my life as a, ahem, “block voter.”

It used to be so automatic. “Just pull the big red lever,” the committeeperson would say. Doing poll work and getting voters out for about forty years of election days, I would say the same thing too, and I even served some time as a committeeperson in the black and liberal remnants of the Philadelphia Democratic organization. Palm cards, election courts, running the voter lists around five in the afternoon were as natural to me as watching water run downhill. Not going out to work an election seemed a sin, let alone sitting one out. For all of the insurgents I worked for – and yes for the party hacks who at least voted the right way — there was always a reason. Spring or fall, fellow workers and I were like the postal carriers of politics. I guess the apple didn’t fall far from the machine. Da Mayor and his crowd in Chicago taught me a lot.

So I say to Senator Clinton and her supporters: Beware the ABCs. There have been many elections about passion since World War II. People were passionate – I was passionate – about John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson until the latter really dug us into the Vietnam War. I was for Gene McCarthy in the worst way, but I felt bad about Hubert’s Humphrey’s 1968 loss. Though a red-baiter historically and a little too friendly with his patron Dwayne Andreas, the Archer Daniels agro-business boss (Wonder why we have ethanol now so conveniently at our disposal? Your tax dollars at work for almost half a century), Humphrey fought for causes in the Senate nobody else would touch. Lyndon Johnson’s by then deadly embrace effectively ended the career of a now-forgotten man. Then when George McGovern’s running mate reported that he truly had lost his head in bouts of depression, George lost his. And as they used to say in my house, for McGovern that was all she wrote.

Reagan and a roll-over Democratic Congress pretty much finished the passionate politics of the Democratic Party, save Teddy Kennedy’s run in 1980 and the good works of fringe candidates like Fred Harris and maybe Mo Udall. Mike Dukakis is a very intelligent and decent human being, but didn’t inspire passion. There were other worthies, but I hope you get the picture. The passion that make movements and effective political majorities has passed from the Democrats to the Republicans.

Senator Clinton and her consort had better watch out. Barack Obama inspires a passion I have not seen abroad in the land since the Teddy Kennedy 1980 run, and that was nothing in size and scope to the feelings that Obama is inspiring. Perhaps Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 campaign came close, but many like me chose McCarthy, or mind over matter. With the assassination, the passion dissipated.

Kennedy’s capacity to inspire passion was palpable. In 1966, Bobby Kennedy stumped for Senator Paul Douglas, perhaps the last truly gifted intellectual Illinois sent to the Senate until it elected Obama. He and Senator Douglas spoke to about 50 people on the lawn of a shopping mall about a mile from my house. Bobby radiated heat. Trying with all my might to resist him, to channel thoughts for instance of his despicable performance as an aide to Senator Joe McCarthy in the fifties, it was impossible. He inspired passion.

So it goes with Obama. Pick your side, but he radiates that heat.

Obama is the “Hail Mary” pass of American politics.

Passion and desperation run together today: everyone except the rich has the sinking feeling or experiences the brutal truth that the United States itself is sinking into a cesspool, using the hiking boots of empire to drag itself out of a 25-year morass of a politics as destructive of American life as any since the age of the Roosevelt rescue.

By the way, talk about heat. Listen to any of FDR’s fireside chats and try not to feel the warmth of voice and feeling that when all else failed, actually talked my grandmother’s generation through the Depression. He was “that man” for a reason.

Obama is the “Hail Mary” pass of American politics because our political system has no game plan, no plays to move the country toward mending its ways and sorting out how to become a decent society of equal opportunity and a good neighbor abroad. Its elite of which the Clinton are proud members has little intention of pulling American ambitions and power back from their world struggle for resources and military dominance. Americans, one senses, are finally tired of fighting for Standard Oil (we call it Exxon now) and fighting daily struggles for affordable medical care and education for their kids. They want a Social Security retirement they can count on, and would I think be interested in stopping the spending of its blood and treasure for imperialism and repression abroad.

Obama brings no guarantee: when did you ever see a “Hail Mary” pass that did? He has joined America’s political elite, no doubt about it. The risks of betrayal are always there. But have you ever been to the South and “East” Sides of Chicago where Obama worked as a community organizer? I have. I worked there too, almost a generation before Obama. That counts for me as at least a forward pass.

Beware, Senator Clinton, of the passions Senator Obama is stirring up. Heart is winning over head – not yours, Senator Clinton, but the hearts winning over the heads of tens of millions placing whatever hopes they can conjure or hold on into Obama’s candidacy. Don’t expect those voters to come home to you if your campaign goes the way of your Massachusetts poll watche — and worse with each triumph. Democrats don’t always reunite for Election Day. Remember Hubert Humphrey. He lost because people stayed home, their passions spent and their hearts unwilling.

I was appalled by the 2000 “Vote for Nader where you can, and Gore where you must.” The narcissism was breathtaking. I recall so many West Side liberal New Yorkers I knew believing they could vote for Nader and leave the rest of the city, black, brown, working class, or whoever was not them, to get Gore New York’s electoral votes. Don’t you wonder where those Florida Nader voters got some of their gumption? From just the arrogance that the politically safe expressed Election Day 2000? And those assurances that Nader would be there for “us” afterwards: that was some whopper.

But as I write, I wonder: Perhaps Gore was the Nader voters’ bridge too far. By my reading, Gore despite efforts on behalf of Big Pharma and his deadly participation in the protection of the patents of multinationals, was surely decent enough to deserve election. His subsequent record speaks for itself. Did he deserve to lose because of Nader Know-nothingism?

Voting or not voting for Gore rested with the head, not with passion. It was a duty. It was pulling the big red lever. You did it out of habit, or out of rational belief. Save billionaire Bloomberg, he who proves what all that money can do to you and do for you, no third party prospects are stalking the horizon. So Democrats may have a decent chance this time.

Millions are leading with their hearts. Passion can be unreason, but it can also trigger the stuff of which major social changes are made. Step on that, Senator Clinton, and bring on the ABCs.

When people are passionate, and feeling that their candidate was ill-used or cheated by a well-oiled, client-driven political machine (The Clintons have been running for the presidency for a quarter century, and with those eight years of patronage from the White House, likely can call up favors in every election precinct in America), reason can take a holiday.

Beware the ABCs. Anybody but Clinton? If you are the candidate in November, Senator Clinton, it could happen to you.

Regrettably, given a desire for a rational world, I could happen sense a case of the ABCs coming on. Even possessing what Max Weber called the ethics of responsibility is not helping this time.

When the air leaves the balloon, it falls. Obama is part of the air in our political balloon. Puncture it, and the energy for reform dissipates, as does the majority to do it.

Ask Hubert Humphrey, who loved not wisely but too well. He was the happy warrior of his time and was defeated by disillusion and withdrawal. His combination of reason and passion didn’t prevail. The passions were too strong, and the disillusion too great.

Mark Twain said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Against all hope, I have begun to hear the world in couplets.

Elatia Harris

Valentine’s Day approaches. Are we a romantic bunch?  Or, what?

Last month, the 3QD Valentine’s Day Challenge was issued. Learning about the Museum of Broken Relationships in Berlin (it really does exist…), I asked readers to write in with an artifact that deserved to go on view there. It need not be a concrete artifact, but could be a memory, an idea, a painting, or a puppy, and anonymized entries were welcome. To say one word more than that would be to seriously take the fun out of what follows.

Our First Anonymized Tale

During my life I have been blessed to experience several unforgettable relationships, At least five were romantic, two of which were nothing but pure lust. Others were intimate in the Platonic sense. You are wise to allow anonymous stories. Otherwise this little fling could be dangerously combustible. It’s a variation on the “Post Secret” notion.

The only artifact I can recall suitable for your exhibit would be a wire screen on a summer cabin in the North Georgia woods. I had a summer job on staff at the camp less than a year after the most unforgettable crush of my adult life. A tour of duty in the Army had left me emotionally drained and desperately in need of love. Like a hanging ripe fruit I fell totally and wonderfully full force into an unforgettable relationship lasting almost a year. To this day, some four decades later, the memories remain fresh and promising, and I do understand how people in their declining years can rekindle long-lost loves after a lifetime of separation.

But the screen…

I knew the romance was done. Irretrievably and permanently relegated to the shelves of memory. And I could say with truth that it really is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. But the pain of separation remained a little raw. There was healing yet to be done.

One still, hot afternoon I was alone, getting a cabin ready for the next camp.  I sat down alone to take a break in the common area and noticed one of the screens. The angle of light in the afternoon sun caught the image of some writing scrawled on that screen years before.

Young campers discovered that toothpaste could be used to put graffiti on the screens. Since toothpaste would wash off with a water hose, it was harmless enough, so the powers that might otherwise forbid such mischief let it pass. Besides, the place was already covered with other graffiti done in felt-tip markers so more scribbling here and there didn’t matter.

There on that screen I could discern the name of my lost love, left there probably some ten or more years before when she was a little girl off at summer camp. Tears came to my eyes as I remembered our times together and I cried briefly for that lost experience. That shimmering image of a little girl’s name scrawled on a screen was God’s way of letting me know that although no one else would ever know, He understood and would help me recover and get on with the rest of my life.

I submit that screen for your collection.

Poetry Counts Here

Last month, Jim Culleny became the poetry editor of 3QD, and we’ve seen lots more poetry since then. Here’s a poem he wrote for us on today’s theme.

In My Museum of Busted Love
Jim Culleny

1. Ring

In my museum of busted love
would first be the engagement
ring of inertia

the sign urged upon greenhorns
when the young pulse of biology
meets the  traditional need to rein it in
and set it to the pace of Eros
in civilized society:

the circus maximus of fidelity,
the merry-go-round of oughts
of lust and love
–the diamond ring I one day reclaimed
with an ardent,
whew!

Display that once dazzling rock
beside the big one called Hope
in the museum’s Hall of Almost,
and watch it diminish
in the glare of possibility
to the luminescence
of dull inevitability.

2. Car

And of course there would be my tiny TR3,
a courtship vehicle of desperate love:

its bucket seat of impossible sex,
its inconvenient gear shift,
its shock absorbers announcing
the illicit choreography within,
bouncing its comical, dead serious,
life-altering profundity.

Put it and all its dents upon a dais
at an car show under hot spots
next to a Porsche.

Adorn it with a fender babe
in plenty of flesh and lurid pout
and let it tell its fun-filled
soon sad but torrid tale.

3. Insight

And last
(but way more than least)
at the gallery’s back door
near the broom closet
in a glass case unlit and forlorn,
passed by countless tenderfeet
hip and horny, tattooed, pierced,
bristling with ipods, iphones,
and lost in Myspace ,
seething with tech knowledge
but clueless as  lovers
suffering the old implacable
urge of hormones in love
that doomed unwired Romeo
and foolishly unconscious Juliet
to live and die their misconceptions
in the pages of a play-write

… there upon a simple bronze base,
ignored but brilliant in its banality
sits the sweet fruit of my own

I-It
turf fight:

the Bubered wink of battered,
bruised, and tardy

I-Thou
insight

Men with Special Boxes — They Have Them, Too

Quondam 3QD contributor Josh Smith:

I am a sentimental man. By sentimental I don’t mean in the coarse way, like weeping along with fluff films, or incessantly scribbling little notes and drawings in my Moleskine. Rather, I appreciate memories for what they are. So I keep, well, keepsakes. Little tidbits of life. Real, visceral pieces of my material existence. “Proof,” as Duane Michals would call it. And where better the need for proof than my story of love.

This “Museum of Broken Relationships” is quite an interesting project, especially considering that I feel I’ve done it first (albeit only for myself). My own museum rests in the tiny front closet of my tiny studio apartment, itself a tiny little box that sits a little precariously above other boxes. (Recently, old keepsakes were moved to this new box from an older box, which had scrawled on it, in terrible, large-print, felt marker: “MEMORY TYPE STUFF.”) Here rest the remains of my broken relationships, from notes passed in school to movie stubs from first dates.

I struggled hard to imagine which artifact I would relinquish, which one would do the most justice to my story. But then I began to think about the museum itself. I thought about the museum, the one in Berlin and the one in my box. I thought about how all the pieces in the Berlin museum would weave a sort of story about their people, and the place they held and hold in their lives. Here are all these stories, somehow connected, telling us things about ourselves, from the admittedly crazy to the bittersweet.

And I realized that my own museum must remain intact. Whether it sits on a pedestal in Berlin or a shelf in suburban Maryland, it must remain part of a story. Its doors should always remain a little open. It should always sit a little precariously. And should always be open to its own kind of revisionism.

Now I realize that all this sentimentalizing, this whole, heavy chest of lost love, can become some sad weight on a person. Ever since I gave the film Citizen Kane its first true watching, I’ve always worried that my intense desire for love has and would echo that of poor Mr. Kane. Remember what they said about him? “That’s all he ever wanted out of life… was love.” And what did Kane do, when he couldn’t fill his world with love? He tried to fill it with keepsakes. From around the world, he bought and brought to his estate the world’s finest animals and artwork, making it a museum of a lovely world that always just eluded him.

Kane’s museum was a sad one. It was a museum that immortalized a struggle. But sentimental does not mean sad. The kind of museum I aspire to, whether it be in my box of “MEMORY TYPE STUFF,” or the more biological museum between my ears, is one of sentimental wisdom. The memories kept in such places will always be simultaneously glowing and fading away. They must be understood as a story, where one can reorder them and give them new meaning. Then, the “proof” that someone loved you, or that you were simply “naïve back then,” won’t just be some silly cop-out. Instead, you grow. You become reordered. And you always remain just a little precariously placed.

Read more »

News stories sometimes provide strange anecdotes. One that has often been useful for me came from the flurry of coverage after the arrest of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, in 1996. As everyone now knows, this odd duck was for a brief time a math professor at the University of California at Berkeley. One of the many articles recounting this fact (I forget which one, alas) included a sentence that went something like this. “After receiving his Ph.D from Harvard in 1967, Kaczynski took a position in the Math Department at the University of California at Berkeley, one of sixteen assistant professors hired in the department that fall.” The story then went on to describe his loneliness amidst the carnival of freaks on Telegraph Avenue, his descent into misanthropy and despair, and so on. But I could hardly make it that past that sentence, tripped up as I was over the sixteen assistant professors hired by the Math department in one year.

For those of you who don’t know much about these things (and why should you?), nowadays an academic department in a university the size of Berkeley hires on average three assistant professors over a five year period, give or take depending on the vicissitudes of budgets, retirements, and so on. Kaczynski’s hire came at the high water mark of the post-war expansion of the American university system, when the baby boomers were all going to college, the economy was doing well, and cold-war dollars poured into higher education. Things would soon change, irrevocably.

Enter the 1970s. Expansion gave way to constriction, the good times to recession. In English Departments (my little corner of the world), the jobs that had been abundant throughout the 1960s disappeared virtually over night. 1971 was a year like any other. 1972 saw effectively no jobs. If you were in graduate school at the time, your fate was decided by the dumb luck of when you defended your dissertation. Had you applied for jobs a year earlier, you might be an assistant professor at Brandeis. Now that the bottom had fallen out, you were lucky to get by as an adjunct. From what I gather, the same was true of other fields as well. Suddenly those dissertations written in a space of six months took six years to finish. Four-year stints in graduate school stretched to a decade. The culture of graduate school, with its attendant malaise and cynicism, was born into the world.

Here’s a little known fact about recessions and graduate school. When job offers plummet, applications for admission swell. Those same factors that constrict hiring at universities ripple across the entire economy. And what is a bright college graduate to do when faced with few prospects? Why go to graduate school of course! The result is somewhat curious. In the midst of job crisis and despair, the number and quality of those wanting to go to graduate school rises. So here’s how things stacked up in English in the 1970s: fewer PhDs were getting jobs, brighter and more interesting BAs were entering graduate programs. No longer a brief period of apprenticeship, graduate school became a place of intellectual ferment. From this ground sprang post-structuralism, literary theory, and the sense that literary study was really beginning to change.

My point in revisiting this history is not to have anything to say about the intellectual content or value of seventies-era literary theory. Nothing could be more boring at this point in time. Rather, I want to point to the interesting convergence of economic recession and intellectual change, especially since we seem to be heading to a recession just now. My argument is simple: more applicants to graduate school + fewer jobs for PhDs = intellectual change. The advantage of this argument is that it is impersonal and structural and thus does not rely on the charismatic influence of great minds. Were Derrida or DeMan not around, in other words, someone else would have fit the bill. The disadvantage is that the equals sign does a lot of heavy lifting. Oh well.

The second great job crisis hit the academy during the recession of the early nineties. I was around for this one. I entered graduate school in 1989. The NY Times ran a story that same year about how a slew of academic retirements were about to produce a boom in jobs. That never happened. By the early nineties, job-crisis talk was all over the place and had produced a small industry of whining and hand-wringing (often by those folks who lucked out in the 60s). To this recession, we may credit the arrival of cultural-studies and historicism. The former was almost dead on arrival but the latter is still the dominant paradigm of literary study.

We are too close to the culture of nineties-era literary study to have much to say about it in comparison to what’s going on now. Without waxing nostalgic, however, I think we can credit something at least provisionally to the combination of more applications from BAs and fewer jobs for PhDs. What I can say for sure is that the job market in English has on balance gotten better over the past decade while applications to grad school have gone down. What this moment will look like to the eyes of the future is of course anyone’s guess. If my argument is true, however, it would be of equal interest to ask what a coming recession might bring.