Bringing guns to the tea party

While the drama of the hostage-taking tea party may be on the wane, and we might like to believe that the country is moving toward a sane center, I feel a little like the parent who waits for her children to return late at night and, when they do, still stays up worrying about what they might have done. Experienced parents know how to temper that fleeting sense of relief, to anticipate that you're never really out of shark-infested waters.

Terry McAuliffe may have "run against the NRA," but we've already equipped most of the country with a small arsenal, guns we would have to "pry out of their cold, dead fingers" to stop. More importantly, the people with guns are mad, real mad. And if we think a small setback is going to make the extreme right go away, we should remember the formidable, disciplined infrastructure they've already set up. They have infiltrated schools, rewriting textbooks and history, and privatizing education. They have found deep pockets, turning our democracy into a plutocracy. They know how to stay on message, to fuel the fires that deprive reason of oxygen. The world looks very different to people who have a great deal of anger, a great need to fight to right wrong.

If you're tempted to be encouraged, pay attention. We may not need another civil war to divide our country. We may have already done it with words, money, and cynicism. As Yeats predicted, the center did not hold. The worst are full of passionate intensity, while the best lack all conviction. 

Paris: A Cautionary Tale

Ever since I understood the word “lipstick” I’ve wanted to go to Paris. It wasn’t a just a fantasy, it was more like an obsession, like something I needed to complete me in some way.  But even though my less deserving husband had been there, even though we had taken the children to Provence, I had not gone. I had even chosen not to go when I had the opportunity. Maybe I was saving it for the right moment; for the time when, after thirty years of marriage, I would need to decide if romance was still there.

I thought I was prepared.  I had a new wardrobe, a few months of French lessons, and stylish shoes that would allow me to walk for miles without calluses. I had researched “beautiful walks,” secret gardens, the top ten of everything, found the perfect apartment for our two-week stay, and a knockout restaurant to celebrate our anniversary.

Shortly after arriving and getting my bearings, a nagging, unsettling feeling came over me.  I’d recovered quickly from jet lag, but still felt disoriented. Despite my traveler’s French and well-selected clothes, I was not as chic, prepared, or fluent as I had fantasized.  Something about the city of my dreams was deeply upsetting.

It would be too easy dismiss this as the clash of a lifetime of expectations against the reality of, well, reality. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Paris hadn’t disappointed me in the least. All the sites, the food, the sunsets on the Seine; they were perfect.  As a native of our nation’s capital, I knew how annoying tourists could be, but that wasn’t it either. My discomfort was entirely internal, the kind of back-of-your mind nagging that makes you think you’ve left the oven on even when you know you have an automatic shut-off and haven’t baked anything in years. I either needed to get over myself or ruin the vacation I had spent so long anticipating.

As so often happens to people who’ve been married for a very long time, I transferred these feelings into a bad mood and cranky attitude, and waited for the inevitable blowup with my husband to sort it all out. This helped a little, but it was exhausting, and I was wasting precious time. I splashed on some Shalimar and red lipstick and resolved to enjoy myself.

Paris began to work on me—every street, sunset, croissant, sip of wine and bite of fois gras were as perfect as I had imagined.  Ancient streets and buildings had the texture of history, something I missed in Washington, where we like to think of ourselves as steeped in history. You can visit Paris without being disturbed by the mysteries that it holds, but for me, I couldn’t avoid being assaulted by big questions that came out of nowhere.  Why did Monet paint at least 5 huge oils of the cathedral at Rheims—what was he getting at, what was bugging him so much that he did this one painting over and over? Are the run-down streets of Montmartre decaying or hiding an artistic renaissance or another revolution? Speaking of streets—why do they need to have so many different names at the same time? And why was there a goat tethered in one of the ditches in the Tuileries Garden?

And: why do Parisians speak so quietly?

This, I discovered, was the thing that was itching the place that couldn’t be scratched, making me feel obvious and disoriented. I noticed it by accident: at a restaurant one night there was a table of 8, talking and laughing loudly. Before then, I hadn’t really paid attention, but after, I noticed: in the metro, the restaurants, the shops—everyone spoke this beautiful language in an equally beautiful, perfectly manicured voice. Whispered almost, begging to be heard. And actually looking at each other when they talk.

I felt like the proverbial bull in a china shop, an ugly American in spite of my stylish clothes. When I talk, it is different.  I talk at people. I say what I need to say and don’t always wait for a response. If my face is animated, it is not because I’m attentive, but because something angers me, or at least incites negativity. I can’t even imagine sitting in a café (in the afternoon!) and engaging in small talk with a friend for hours. Small talk bores me: I have never appreciated it, and never really cared.

This is my nature. But also, somehow, it seems like an American thing. We are not great conversationalists. The chairs in our cafés face each other, not the street, so we cannot whisper secrets into each other’s ear. In fact, our restaurants are usually so loud that we can’t even have a conversation. And taking time for long, intimate, private time with friends is to us like drinking wine with lunch—frivolous, a little forbidden.  It is our nature to be busy, to move on to more productive things.

There were other things, too, that made me feel as if I was from another planet. Like drinking wine in public. On a perfect late summer evening, tout le monde was sitting on the cobblestone paths lining the Seine. There were pairs of lovers, of course, but mostly groups—large groups, spread out on blankets with containers of food and many, many empty bottles of wine neatly stacked together, as if forming their own little party.

As we watched from the opposite shore, my husband and I were amazed at the quiet camaraderie, waiting in vain for the boisterous and obnoxious behavior that, at home, always seems to accompany public alcohol consumption. I told him about a friend who had been taken to police headquarters (a middle-aged mom whose husband worked at the White House years ago) for holding a glass of wine on the sidewalk outside a restaurant while making a phone call.

But in Paris, a picnic is an occasion, and it deserves wine. This communal meal, not organized around a football game or a holiday or for any reason other than celebrating a beautiful night, had the respectful trappings of a ritual eaten with appreciation, with respect.  I was angry at first about this difference—how many plates of chicken tarragon salad would have been so much more delicious served with the perfect wine (shiraz, perhaps?).  How many sunsets watched from the banks of the Potomac begged for a champagne toast? Wine is more than just wine, just as conversation is more than just words. Both change things: food is nibbled, hours stretch out.

Paris made me realize how American I truly am. How I have to force myself  to enjoy the things that I routinely take for granted, to taste my food and savor wine and not deny myself the blessing of a summer evening outdoors. I am not romanticizing the French when I say they do these things better: it is their trademark, their gross national product.

When I was preparing for my trip, my French teacher offered some pointers about traveling in Paris. “You do not go up to a shopkeeper and immediately say, ‘Deux croissants, s’il vous plait.’ That is rude. You walk into a shop, say ‘Bonjour, Madame’ and wait for them to respond. You have a little pleasantry, a recognition of each other first.”

We think the French are snobby; they think we are self-centered and rude. Such a simple thing like speaking with shopkeepers underlines the difference. Even if I had a relationship with the people who make my bread, which I usually don’t, it would be my practice to make my purchase and let them move on to the next customer. It’s good manners, American-style.

A boulangerie in Paris is not only about buying bread—it is a place to linger, to smell what’s fresh and agonize over the choices with the shopkeeper. You absorb the texture of the paintings on the wall and the tiles on the floor and all the things that have little to do with bread. And what you taste has an ancient chemistry that is magical because of the way the flour is grown and the attention paid to the ingredients.  A bakery doesn’t have to be all these things if it all you require is to buy bread.

Vacations, like disasters, reset your focus. That so many people come to Paris to fall in love is not a coincidence; it happens because slowing down to enjoy life—wine and food and conversation and what happens on the street before you opens your heart to new possibilities.

In this time in our history when we are asking big questions about our relationship to the economy, the government, and even to each other, it’s reasonable to also ask what it means to really live well. If it means buying more things, being so busy that we don’t even taste our food, running all the time instead of walking, we might remain an economic powerhouse, but I don’t think we can call ourselves a great people to be around.

I hope to carry the lessons of Paris with me for a long time. Eventually, Paris will become like sillage, the French expression for the scent of perfume a woman leaves behind after she has walked past. You catch a whiff of sillage while walking in a crowd, waiting for a train, at a patisserie. Each time I stop and am moved for a small second into a beautiful place.

The scent, and Paris itself, dissipates; over time, all that is left is a memory.

It is enough.

Facing reality

My children frequently get in situations over their head without realizing it or, if they do realize, without knowing how to swim to shore (or sometimes even recognize where the shore is...but that's a different story.) Like journalists who report stories about how too much emphasis is given to polling in an election and only minutes later report on the latest poll, they seem caught without tools to evaluate our understand the contradictions in their lives.
When I was a child, I had a reality show. The entire world watched while I sang, danced, and went through the everyday drama of being 8 years old. When I was 9, the show was cancelled: I knew it was stupid.
I would hate to grow up in my children's future, where reality is much more slippery. But the truth is, I'm already there. My son's thinking that he is invincible and can drive a car to the limits of its control on a windy road is not so different from thinking that the election before us won't change our life one way or the other. When our debates become reality show contests, with winners and losers and all of us already knowing who we like best without giving the others a chance, we allow ourselves to be distracted from the real reality: that politics is about one thing only: power. The air we breathe, education we receive, jobs we are allowed to have (or not to have) and health care we access are not coins in a game of poker--they are real.
Reality.

Racing to the bottom

When Rick Santorum famously called Obama a snob for espousing the right to a college education, it reminded me back to when adolescents started wearing torn, homeless-people clothes and the bling and low-slung jeans of the ghetto. Although Santorum would cringe at the analogy, the message was the same: I reject your right to tell me what's good for me, even if it really is. It's a normal stage of adolescent development; in adults, it's embarrassing.

Over the years, children slowly learn the value of putting aside childish things, like calling names, bullying when they don't get their way, or not listening to people who have more reasoned ideas about things. Santorum's arrested development serves him well--he is rewarded with publicity, and has successfully worked people up who agree with him on a gut level and don't really want to think about it too much. There are a lot of people out there who firmly believe that education is elitist, who are sanctimonious about their firmly-held, uninformed, gut beliefs. I have met people like this--you cannot argue with them because they know what they know, but they don't know why because they haven't really thought about it.

I have seen enough political craziness in my lifetime to know that this man could, in fact, one day be our president. At least the kids will be happy.

Ode to Noam Chomsky

On a frigid January evening, a line of maybe a few thousand people stretched around the campus auditorium. Many had never heard of the aging professor who was there to speak, but they knew he was a big deal--the Washington Post headlined him in their "to do" pages as the voice of anti-capitalism, as someone whose ideas had definitely reached their time.

The crowd was diverse: college students who wanted to see what the buzz was about, aging hippies, people who had taken the Metro from the Occupy encampment, professors, suburbanites. More than half the crowd would be turned away, without seats or even standing room.

I like to think that many of them were like me--people who had spent way too many years feeling out of touch with a country they no longer recognized. People who had not only suffered through Bush, but also through Reagan, who had a vague feeling that things would never be right again, that even "hope and change" weren't enough. I like to think that there is a groundswell of people who want what they're not now getting--justice, fairness, sane policies toward our health and earth and each other.

In the end, I wasn't in line soon enough to hear Professor Chomsky's thoughts on "anti-capitalism." I hope I get another chance. What I took away from the hour I spent in line waiting, however, was just as thought provoking. And, maybe, even more hopeful.

Welcome to the United States of Adolescents

My past 20 years as a parent has given me a lot of respect for the process of growing up. Children learn how to put away their toys and do things they don't want to do, or to go to bed for no other reason than it's bedtime. They come to understand that good manners can take them far in the world, and that beating people up (literally or verbally) won't.

Although my children are still not yet in possession of full-frontal lobe development, they are on their way, headed in the right direction.

I wish I could say the same of Congress, or TV program chiefs, or corporate leaders, or the drivers I encounter every day on the Washington Beltway. I wish I had more opportunities to feel that, as a country, we were in a really good place, and headed for maturity. Or at least, that we were more willing to listen to each other, to think before developing opinions, to sacrifice and give each other the benefit of the doubt.

Mature people know that you stop playing video games when the baby's crying, and don't whine about it. Mature people know the difference between entertainment and information, and don't overdo one at the expense of the other. Mature people know they can't have it all; mature people don't even want it all!

If we were a mature nation, I believe, our relationship to each other would be different. Our government would be different. How we educate, entertain, travel, use our spare time, and inform ourselves would be different.

I created this blog because having a conversation about this seems important. We live in a time of miracles and wonder--as well as devastation and horror. We can be better than we are. This is one vehicle I have to learn how to make this happen.