by Rachel Zlatkin
A short while ago on FB, I provided a link to an opinion article written by Bernie Sanders, “Democrats Need to Wake Up,” published in The New York Times. Along with the link, I made the following post: “I miss Joe Bageant. I also keep having flashbacks to Dennis Kucinich at the DNC: Wake up, America! I respect Hillary Clinton -- her determination, her stamina, her work ethic, her patience, her intelligence, all of the focus, planning, and work it took her to reach this hard earned place. How she managed it through decades of misogyny. I understand, to a point, why people think Sanders was a one issue candidate, and I understand why people think to vote for Jill Stein comes from privilege... that it is easier to do so when you will be less affected by a Trump presidency. I get so frustrated, though, that the same critique does not happen of a vote for the Democratic party and establishment politics. That vote protects us from Trump, but we have so much to do beyond that and I'm not convinced that's on the agenda yet. I think this may be the start to my next post on Lens Out. :-) but I just have to say, I really miss Joe Bageant these days.” I had a particular clip of Joe Bageant in mind when I wrote that post. He discusses the motivation behind his memoirs Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir and Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War, books in which he discusses his Virginian/Appalachian roots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYaqEgyrh1M I’ve never forgotten the first time I heard this interview clip. It woke me up. Bageant had the kind of voice I most enjoy. Gravelly and expressive, good humored with a calmly submerged anger, he hangs on his vowels as though contemplating his own sincerity. His voice carried me along even as he directed me to his uncomfortable point: that we middle class liberals are detached enough to let the poor in the heartland remain poor and uneducated. “You didn’t reach out. You didn’t do anything for those people. You’re perfectly happy to let them be dumb.” I hope you’ll listen to all three minutes or pick up one of his books sometime, if only because he takes the time to write to us. He could easily have decided to write off liberals as intellectual snobs. Instead, he reaches out. He identifies as a redneck (and he’s studied the etymology of that word); he understands his people as a culture. But we are his intended audience. And he’s a really good read. I’ve been thinking a lot about how we communicate with each other, especially online and in social media. I think it’s common knowledge that Democrats and Republicans tend to do more talking at each other than with each other. But as Bernie Sanders’ campaign became more of a challenge to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, I began watching how we communicate within the Democratic party… because of course I had friends on both sides. What I saw was often enough the same, talking at rather than with. I felt oddly situated. I’m a Sanders supporter. Voting for a Democratic Socialist meant more to me than the opportunity to vote for a woman. A Democratic Socialist vote is a vote for women, so my feminism felt incorporated in Sanders’ campaign. I was less concerned with the fact that, due to his privilege as a white male, he is able to rant, bluster, or be grouchy, and more interested in the use to which he put that privilege and anger, the policies on which he campaigned, and his history as an activist. At the same time, there’s nothing comfortable about being a feminist reading the rhetoric used to describe Hillary Clinton, enraged and hateful language that has since exploded on the RNC stage. When Bernie Sanders was still in the race, however, I often felt I was reading posts in support of Hillary Clinton from the sidelines, simply by virtue of my being a Sanders supporter. If I managed to feel like a member of the intended audience, it usually carried the weight of association with the misogynistic “Bernie Bros” (I was guilty by association, and thus must defend my position as a Sanders’ supporter). I was largely silent about this conflict because I didn’t (and I still don’t) fully trust my own reading of why I felt torn. I was raised in a house with Rush Limbaugh in the background, and I’ve absorbed enough hate toward the Clintons to be especially self reflective when discussing her. My method has been to keep my focus on policy and to do my research. Also, the political discussions on social media did not feel like a safe space to ask the questions I still have about the Bernie Bros phenomenon; it’s a pejorative term. It works to categorize, so it doesn’t exactly invite questions about who they are, how many of them exist, why they’re so angry, and how many of them are trolls aiming to divide the party while also getting their jollies by hating on Hillary Clinton. Sanders’ delay in responding did not help either. It left people like me, who were observing what was happening, with no clear path through the thicket of hate and back to the message. It’s a missed opportunity inside the party, especially because such emphasis was placed on the mere existence of BBros that any examination of why did not happen (There's the longstanding Republican campaign against the Clintons... but I wanted more details about why/how inside the Democratic party). It also bothered me that the Bernie Bros narrative seemed to overwhelm any acknowledgement or study of the class and generational divisions within the party. I think these latter divisions are still under-appreciated by the party establishment, and that is unfortunate because it threatens the Democratic party’s chances of winning the presidential election. The divisions between Democratic white collar and blue collar workers and between the generations within the party need examining. Anyone watching the RNC over the last few days knows that Trump has mastered the media technology of the youth and is at least a Republican in his sense of audience: he has tapped into angry white male blue collar workers and given them voice by providing them social media access of which he and his campaign are master. It’s monstrous and scary. Those questions about the Bernie Bros might have helped orient the Democratic campaign at this point… regardless of candidate. Most of my friends are academics and scholars, and we’re supposed to be good at critical thinking and discussion. We’re trained in argument and — at least theoretically — value diversity, the rhetorical situation, context, and thesis balanced with antithesis. Maybe it’s just because FB, social media, and texting do not communicate the act of listening or facilitate the silence necessary to deeper contemplation. The implicit message of these modes of communication is that we must communicate fast with little to no time for contemplative silence. These modes of communication invite, even require, a reactive response. And we already have a two party system that invites, even requires, splitting candidates and messages into simplistic categories of “all good” or “all bad.” Once you know which side you’re on, why bother listening to other points of view or appreciating the nuanced context of your own position? I wonder how Facebook and other social media might look if we insisted on using language intersubjectively: “When we consider language as speech between subjects, we modify our understanding of the move from body to speech. Speech no longer figures as the activity of a subject empowered to speak, but as a possibility given by relationship with a recognizing other. Or, we could say, speech is conditioned by the recognition of two subjects, rather than a property of a subject. Because communicative speech establishes a space of dialogue potentially outside the mental control of either or both participants, it is a site of mediation” (Jessica Benjamin, Shadow of the Other 27). Relinquishing "mental control" over meaning is frightening, especially within the confines of a two party system that promotes either/or thinking, but letting go of our control over a message is at the core of true dialogue and democracy. The language of identity politics is an important step (BLM), but change only comes when a voice is in relation to other voices. A co-creative mode of communication still recognizes the other as a subject in their own right and includes the context from which an other speaks; it also invites improvisation, self reflexivity, meaning building, and requires at least an openness to change one’s view … maybe not completely, but enough to incorporate a bit of the other, enough to allow for the subtleties of our political moment or the significance of any given candidate. I listen to Joe Bageant because he presents a view I have come to value. The Democratic party has not paid it sufficient heed. By encouraging everyone to get a college degree as a means to national progress, the party fails to recognize the hard work of a population it professes to represent, the working class. Blue collar workers are a group of people made invisible, they feel their erasure, they know their mode of work is becoming obsolete… To say their anger results from the fact that they are no longer the privileged white male / class they once were is only part of their story. For example, they know, as Sellus Wilder points out, that the coal industry is in decline and that the decline is irreversible. They have, as Joe Bageant repeatedly reminds us, fought “in every war since the French and Indian War.” But what concrete alternatives does the Democratic party work toward at a local, state, or federal level for the livelihood of this population? Where’s the push for infrastructure? Where's the drinkable water? Sellus Wilder lost his Kentucky Senate run, and that is as much because the Democratic party values winning over progressive policy as it is the way people vote. We’ve seen the Democratic party choose its candidate often enough to know that the people’s vote is manipulated, anyway (Just ask the Hillary Clinton of 2008 alongside the Bernie Sanders of today). Thus far, the fantasy provided by the Republican party weaves an immediate magic that the Democratic party fails to break through. And just to be clear, we all need denial to a certain degree. How else do we get in our cars and drive each morning without crashing over the horror-cliff that is climate change? Denial occurs in degrees. Can the Democratic party allow for multiple voices to be heard without assuming that person’s vote? Can we the people allow for a context beyond the two party system by listening to third party candidates and Millenials, and then find ways to support components of their platform? Can we consider voices like those of Joe Bageant before mocking the stupidity of Trump’s supporters or writing them off as racist and sexist assholes? Can we recognize the privilege that comes with a white collar enough to do what we can to change it? Can we counter the corporatization of establishment politics and vote for an establishment candidate? The Democratic party has been able to rely on the Republican party to scare progressives, Greens, and Democratic Socialists into voting Democrat. Donald Trump is the scariest Republican candidate yet. But his convention (and Bernie Sanders' run) also highlights the fact that the American public is angry enough to make substantial challenges to establishment politics. I’m a Bernie Sanders’ supporter who believes, for this reason, that Sanders is right where he needs to be… changing the Democratic party from the inside and inspiring a generation of people to join him. Allowing for change is a better option than a hostile takeover, if the RNC is any indication of the possible fall out for ignoring the populace. When I listen to Joe Bageant describe the metaphorical wall middle class liberals have built around blue collar poor in the heartland, it does not pale beside the “real” wall Donald Trump would build across our border with Mexico. It explains the success of that fantasy. Bageant makes his point in 2010, one year before he died and six years before Trump’s candidacy. I don’t know that it even matters whether I agree with Bageant or not. Bageant describes how his people feel, and those feelings are based on how they live, on their material conditions, not just Republican propaganda. Bageant helps me understand the vitriol at the RNC, the hatred for Obama, for Clinton, for immigrants, for refugees, for women, for Muslims, for LGBTQ, for the other. From a socialist’s perspective, the economy is never a one issue topic. The economy provides the structure on which racism and misogyny function and thrive. It splits an increasingly powerful underclass. If the Democratic party wants to win in November and remain relevant to the people who currently feel left behind, then it needs to become more willing to take the risk of losing in favor of advocating and following through on progressive change. And its members, supporters of Clinton and Sanders, need to activate on behalf of policy change so that those who feel voiceless have concrete alternatives to what could otherwise become a fully actualized Trumpian phantasy. By Susan Meier
When it comes to understanding words used in a religious context, looking up their denotative meaning in a dictionary is like trying to capture the majesty of Niagara Falls by staring at a molecule of water. H20 may begin a perfectly acceptable explanation, but it certainly doesn’t convey the thrill and magnitude of the Falls. In addition, if we consider that Hebrew words were yanked out of the Torah and dragged through various translations of Greek, Latin, and every other offshoot of the Indo-European mother tongue, we might never find our way to the Falls. Nevertheless, to understand what the Purity Pledge signifies to those involved, we can start with the dictionary definition, which states that the word, “purity,” first surfaced in writing around the year 1200 in Old French and meant “simple truth” (Harper). If the fathers who prompt their daughters to take the Purity Pledge specifically mean for their girls to cling to “simple truth” in an ever-turbulent, complex world, there probably wouldn’t be many objections to the Pledge (unless we, like the ancient Sophists, question whose simple truth the fathers mean ― but that’s a topic for Rachel to wrestle with). Obviously, “truth” and the etymology of the word “purity” cannot be “simple” and to track down what the Old French believed about “truth” would take us far afield. The water gets even murkier when we consider that the Old French word “purity” was used rather late in time as a translation for much older words. Specifically in the Torah, (written about 1900 years before the Old French stuck their nose into things) the word translated from Hebrew as “purity” is actually niqqayon. According to Bible Study Tools online, “the basic sense of the Hebrew word for purity [niqqayon] is probably an emptying out” (Dunnett). A similar word used in the Torah is chaph meaning, “’scraped,’ or ‘polished,’ therefore ‘clean’” (Forrester). Both words reveal a fascinating aspect of the Hebrew language: words in Hebrew do not necessarily stand for other words, rather, Hebrew words stand for mental pictures. We cannot fully understand a Hebrew word without visualizing the picture, and in the case of the Hebrew use of “purity,” the mental images of “emptying out” ― a bowl, for example ― or “scraping” ― for instance, a pot ― offer startling insights into the original meaning of “purity.” For instance, the noun conveys a verb or action in which contaminants are already present and must be removed; whereas our Western connotation for “purity” implies an innate, tenuous state of being that applies only to young girls. The early Hebrews must have viewed “purity” as a process for everyone to constantly work at, whereas our modern concept of “purity” signifies a vulnerable state that must be owned and constantly guarded, lest it be snatched away and lost forever. This later connotation of ownership and guardianship of a girl’s “purity” is central to Rachel’s blogs about the Purity Pledge. The Pledge is used to refer specifically to a girl’s virginity and celibacy, whereas the Hebrew word is much more expansive and refers to many aspects of life, the three primary realms being food and animals for eating, cleanliness for religious rituals, and the state of every individual’s “heart.” According to John J. Parsons, writer and teacher of Hebrew for Christians, “the heart (lev) is the inner person, the seat of the emotions, thought, and will” (Parsons). So don’t blame the early Jews for making sex naughty or impure. From my limited research, the Torah appears to consider sex just dandy, thank you, and not impure as long as it’s within marriage. And it’s not just for procreating. In fact, as Tracey R. Rich explains in Judaism 101, “Sex should only be experienced in a time of joy.” And here’s a real mind-bender for our patriarchal friends: according to the Torah, “Sex is the woman’s right, not the man’s” (Rich). So when and where did this twist in the connotation of “purity” occur? Enter the Greeks. Around the year 246 BCE (BC), the Greek-Egyptian emperor Ptolemy ordered 72 Hebrew scholars to translate the Torah into Greek. This work became known as the Septuagint, meaning “of the seventy” and was undoubtedly known by the writers of the New Testament because, “Greek became a significant second language among Jews [around the time of Jesus] as a result of this translation” (“Friday, January 6, 2017”). Here, we see that the Hebrew word niqqayon was translated into the Greek word hagneia, meaning “purity, chastity” according to Strong’s Concordance (“47. Hagneia”). Hagneia also means “sinlessness of life” according to the New American Standard New Testament Greek Lexicon (“Hagneia”). This is evidently when “sin” and “sex” became solidly associated with “purity.” Evidently, modern Christian fathers skipped right over the early Hebrew’s concept of “emptying out” a bowl, disregarded the Old French idea of “simple truth,” and zeroed right in on the Greek additions of “sin and sex.” Does it feel like we just wandered around a fence and suddenly got swept over Niagara Falls? Oh look ― there are rocks down there. We might like to believe that most Christian fathers who engage in the Purity Pledge with their daughters are sincere in wanting to support their daughters’ self-respect in a world designed to pound it away. This particular attempt, however, is horribly ill conceived and reveals systemic disgraces in patriarchal culture, as Rachel explains. In addition, the Pledge presents a spiritual puzzle along with the many contortions of mind it already represents: many of the participating fathers adhere to the Victorian-era concept, as expressed by evangelical clergyman J. C. Ryle, that “children are born with a decided bias towards evil, and therefore if you let them choose for themselves, they are certain to choose wrong” (Ryle). At the same time, the Pledge insists that children ― or girls, at least ― are innately sinless and chaste and must be guarded to remain so. This implies that the only thing “sinless” and valuable about a girl is her sexual self, which belongs to her father. This contradiction in self-concept and personal autonomy cannot be easy for girls and their families to tiptoe around. Ultimately, we need to reclaim the word “purity” to more closely align with its Hebrew and Old French intentions. In addition, perhaps all of us need to remind ourselves, as stated by writer Cindy Brandt, that “To posture children as totally pure and innocent is to be naïve and also unfairly strips them of their capability to make decisions according to their will” (Brandt). And, we might add, it strips them of the ability to speak up in order to guard themselves against anyone who threatens their “simple truth.” Works Cited Brandt, Cindy. “Are Children Born Evil? Challenges for Christian Parenting.” Sojourners. 2016. Web. 17 July 2016. Dunnett, Walter M. “Purity.” Bible Study Tools. 2014. Web. 15 July 2016. “47. Hagneia.” Bible Hub. 2004-2016. Web. 17 July 2016. Forrester, E. J. “Innocency.” Bible Hub. 2004-2016. Web. 15 July 2016. “Friday, January 6, 2017.” Chabad. Chabad-Lubavitch Media Center. 1993-2016. Web. 17 July 2016. “Hagneia.” Bible Study Tools. 2014. Web. 17 July 2016. Harper, Douglas. “Purity.” Online Etymology Dictionary. 2001-2016. Web. 15 July 2016. Parsons, John J. “Lev Tahor – A Clean Heart.” Hebrew For Christians. N.d. Web. 15 July 2016. Rich, Tracey R. “Kosher sex.” Judaism 101. 1995-2011. Web. 17 July 2016. Ryle, J. C. “The Duties of Christian Parents by J. C. Ryle. Grace Online Library. 2016. Web. 17 July 2016. By Aaron Zlatkin Rage is the language of men,
Layers of particulates fused. Rage is the wine father pours to the ground for men whose time has passed. Rage is gripped in the hands like the neck of a broom held tight. Rage gets stuck in the throat, suppressed. Rage is a promise kept. --Portrait of My Father as a Young Black Man When I was eight years old my family moved to a CMHA subsidized housing project, the end of a short, frayed string of bad housing choices. The home that I still idealize in my mind was the old Victorian in Price Hill where we moved when I was four, which had been split into two apartments, of which we had the second floor. This was where we stayed until my Dad lost his job as an office clerk at Queen City Metro a couple of years later. Then came the first floor apartment of the house in Clifton Heights, where the insulation was so bad the toilet literally froze over in the winter, and the upstairs neighbor ruined many quiet weekends with bone-vibrating performances on their hi-fi of Another One Bites the Dust. (When I think back on those days I am always amazed by how differently time moves for a child, how two years in that old green mansion signified as a lifetime, while two years in an apartment now is a gradually diminishing percentage of relevance.) One year in that place must have been enough, because the next thing I knew we were moving to Millvale, a couple of streets wedged between the neighborhoods of South Cumminsville and English Woods. We were the first all white family to move in to those apartments, and we became an immediate curiosity to those who had lived there for years. Our first day after moving in, my older sister and I decided to explore the new neighborhood on our own – a pastime still forgivable in 1982 – and we quickly discovered a swing set down at the end of one street in a small park. As we sat there, we noticed a couple of girls, about our age or a little younger, staring at us in the unabashed way of youth, and they eventually made the decision to approach us. We said hellos, and then one of the girls asked a question that still echoes down through the years and remains a vitally important moment in my personal history. This little black girl asked us shyly, but in point-blank fashion, “Why did your granddaddy make our granddaddy slaves?” That question has burned inside of me for nearly four decades, politely but insistently demanding an answer that I could never give without incriminating myself – like responding to the question of when precisely I stopped beating my wife. My first response was to deny it. Within a few years of that encounter I had my answer all worked out. “My grandfather did no such thing. My grandfather was a Polish Jew who fled the Bolsheviks in 1907. He didn’t have slaves, and escaped from an oppressive state, so don’t lump me in with slave owners!” I had my spiel down, and repeated it as the need arose, all the while dutifully ignoring my Mom’s Dutch side, who were rumored to be distantly related to Peter Stuyvesant, who ironically did not want Jews to settle in New Amsterdam because he considered them “a deceitful race” – but I would deal with that later. I was also 1/32 Mohawk after all, and that seemed like a better identification to my teenaged disposition. I longed to be seen as one of those oppressed. In part, I imagine that longing stemmed from a desire to have an answer to that girl’s question that could somehow let me off the hook. I was Jewish, I was Native American, I was anything but the obvious, slightly pasty thing right in front of you. If you believed my story, then I would be exonerated. If not, well…then I would have to figure out what exactly my whiteness meant, both to me and to my place in the world. I think I instinctively knew I would not like the answer. When I first started my undergrad coursework I was working at the public library part time to help pay my way through. A couple of girls who also worked there as shelvers were taking a political science class together and had to interview people about stories of oppression. They were explaining the project to me and another shelver, a black man, and in an almost mirror image of that scene at the playground, they turned as one to Norman and asked point-blank, “So, what’s it like being oppressed?” Being a gracious guy, he spoke to them at length about the types of situations we now understand as being a regular part of the African-American experience: being pulled over for DWB (driving while black), being tailed in stores to make sure you don’t shoplift. All of those things happened to my friend every day, and I sat there, barely listening to his personal narrative because by now, in my early 20s, I was furious. I was livid at these young women for making what I saw at the time to be a racist assumption. This guy here is white, so he could not possibly know what it means to be hated or oppressed, to know fear. But this guy over here is black, and therefore must have stories of mistreatment and inequity. Seeing the words on the screen now, it seems so obvious. But back then it was about my own bitterness of growing up poor, not being able to do so many of the things that my friends could. On top of that, while we were on friendly terms with our immediate neighbors back then, there were plenty of folks who did not like us living on their street. We had rocks and trash can lids thrown through our windows; we were occasionally harassed, even told to go “home.” My whiteness (as I saw it then) did nothing but act as a shield to render my oppression invisible to everyone else. Of course, by then I was struggling with a different kind of invisibility. Going to college meant socializing with a group of people who valued education, and many came from working class or middle class backgrounds. But most people there in the mid 1990s were white, and I began to realize that everyone assumed my background, my personal history, mirrored their own. And I finally began to see first hand that those assumptions, even as they negated my true narrative, could be used to my advantage. I could make whiteness work for me; instead of constantly fighting against it, I could blend in, disappear in an entirely different way. Over the next decade or so I filled my time working in an office on campus, and playing in a couple of different bands. Rachel and I began dating, got married, and there was a kind of equilibrium for a while on the identity front. It wasn’t until I went to grad school for Communication that I began to discover just how much damage growing up in poverty did, how much time I wasted on trying to craft an identity, and how much denying the cultural value of my whiteness to myself prevented me from recognizing just how easy I really had it. Poverty was certainly a barrier to success, and one that should not be casually dismissed. But in my case, those hurdles were all psychological. The hurdles of race are in many ways external: cultural, systemic, and for that reason, seemingly insurmountable. I can be far more outraged now on behalf of my black brothers and sisters in this country than I could be back then. But, as a friend of mine recently put it on Facebook, “Mine is the comfortable rage of the hegemon.” There is still a “wall between” my anger and yours, even when it is pointed in the same direction. Because no matter how much I feel when I see these videos of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, no matter how much I may be horrified or saddened, I know that tomorrow morning I can get in my car and go to work and never once worry that it could be me that doesn’t make it back home. by Rachel Zlatkin
1. For a short time growing up, I slept in my own room. The room once belonged to my parents, who now slept on a fold-out sofa in our living room. My sisters and brother slept on two sets of bunk beds one room from me, while I felt dwarfed on my parents’ old queen size mattress. I had no idea what to do with the space, no idea what posters to hang on the walls, what toys to keep. Everything I’d ever owned I’d learned to share and now I found myself in a cavernous space all my own. I’ve still no idea what prompted my parents’ decision, perhaps my adolescence. Mostly I read or slept, as if to escape the demands of quiet. We were seven people living in five rooms. It was a loud house, and the silence made the room even more foreign. One night my dad woke me from my criss cross slumber. The room was dark. A sliver of street light peeked through the curtains, a jagged line across the blue and black bedspread. “Roll over.” All he said. All he needed to say. Bleary eyed and short sighted, I squinted up at him standing in silhouette. I made out the figure of a young woman with long hair and average height standing next to him, and I promptly scooted over. He left the room and closed the door behind him, and I was not alone. “Well, are you getting in, or aren’t you?” I asked who I knew was one more hitchhiker he and mom picked up and brought home. And then I was alone, because she promptly left the room. Not long after, my mom entered to tell me I’d be sleeping downstairs on the second couch that night so that the young woman had a place to sleep. On the way home from a date, my parents might pick up a hitchhiker, make him a meal or buy him a Big Mac, and then let him shower and shave before dropping him off at the next stop. Or dad would bring someone home off the railway that ran behind the nursing home where he cut the grass. When he asked me to “roll over” and share my bed, I did not feel endangered and I did not think it an odd request. Hitchhikers were people who ate dinner with us and who we addressed by name. Some of the hitchhikers sent us letters when they reached their destination. Mostly we never heard from them again, but we’d still talk about them by name at supper time, wonder where they might be now, whether or not they’d made it, found what they were looking for. My father was the music director of our Catholic parish and my mom stayed home to raise five kids. We weren’t a factory family, ourselves, but my mom’s dad had made a career in the car factories, after serving in Japan during the Reconstruction, and had a position of leadership in his union. My dad’s dad owned his own neon business and tried to get a farm started until he died in a car accident during the Vietnam War. My dad was a staunch Republican and my mom was a closet Democrat. Despite their different politics and backgrounds, I think both identified with blue collar workers and the working class. Both were raised as if the Great Depression never ended, despite the upsurge of middle class during their post war childhood. My maternal grandparents never ceased collecting bacon grease in old coffee cans. My mom graduated with her BA three hours before I did, and thus became the first in her British, Irish, Welsh family to do so. The fourth oldest of seventeen in a German Catholic family, my dad was the first and only in his immediate family to receive a four year degree. Being a church organist is not a typical blue collar job, but my dad, smart as he was, chose to work with his hands. And mom babysat while we were in school, so that other women might go to work. Even though I was born in 1972, it feels more accurate to say that I was raised in the 50’s with a dash of the Great Depression thrown in. It was a patriarchal house with a lot of rules, right down to how many squares of toilet paper we were permitted to use(That would be 2, 3 if necessary). My political leanings are about as different as politics can get from that of my father, who enjoyed Rush Limbaugh, but my sense of citizenship rises from my father’s tendency toward political debate over the dinner table and his habit of bringing hitchhikers home for supper. My dad believed in small government because he believed people had a responsibility to care for each other, as Christians, sure, but also as citizens. I remember how confused some of his friends and colleagues were after my parents divorced when I was sixteen, as if the divorce proved him morally bankrupt… I mean, they were already confused, as are many liberals, that he could be a Christian while so politically conservative. The divorce made it harder still, because suddenly all of his hard lining fell flat. But confusing as the divorce was, I could never share in that particular confusion. Even sharing the hitchhiker story for the first time, in my twenties, it never occurred to me that anyone would be upset by it. My friend shifted in her chair, clearly uncomfortable, pulled on her hair, avoided eye contact, angered on my behalf while I was not. I had never thought about how dangerous it was to bring someone home, for me to scoot over so that she had a place to sleep, until my friend was so vividly upset. Even now, it’s hard to feel angry, though I know that it is a mistake to invite a hitchhiker into a daughter’s room while she is fast asleep. My dad and I volunteered at St. Vincent dePaul over Christmas sometimes, but it never came close to making the impression that feeding a person in our home made. Never came close to the effect of sharing my bed. The next day, I woke and the hitchhiker had already left. It was as though I had dreamed the whole thing, but when I asked my mom she confirmed the hitchhiker’s stay. “No. She slept in your bed.” No further comment. “Okay. It happened,” I thought as I walked away and turned upstairs toward my bedroom. Not knowing her, never actually seeing her face, never speaking to her beyond “Are you getting in, or aren’t you?” made the whole event deeply affecting because she really could have been anyone. Anyone. 2. How does this story mean to family members not myself? To people outside my family? To those who lived with my mom or dad before I was even born? Or to those who sang in my father’s choir? To those who he brought home from the rails? What meaning does it create for those of you kind enough to read the blog I share with Aaron? To those who know me, as opposed to those who know him? I have written for a long time, densely on a good day, cryptically on a bad, but long enough to witness how writing changes over time, sometimes due to circumstance, sometimes due to a perspective that comes with age, but never changing wholly within my control or even according to my desire. Lately I am trying for a different kind of communication, a kind that goes a little against my academic training, a communication more transparent than difficult, more contemplative than argumentative. For about two years in my twenties, I wrote a certain kind of poetry. I’ll call it religious, not due to its content, but due to its use of language. I’d just lost three very important people, quite all at once: my grandma, and two friends, women in their forties who played the part of the big sisters I’d never had. There was no making sense of this. I handed over poems as if I handed every reader my shattered heart or the broken bodies of the lost, as if to say to every random stranger “I don’t know you, but hold this, will you? Feel how much pain I’m in? Feel the weight of the lost?” I wrote poems like a Catholic raised on transubstantiation and a resurrection in suffering. Which I was. I suppose this is how many poets enter poetry — through a broken heart — but recreating the broken in every reader is not a meaning making communion. I think, though, that this is how language functions for many conservatives — patriarchally. Language as one OCD attempt to stop time, to control the world, to hold it still in one graspable moment, to make and enforce a reality in the image of the speaker, who remains body centered, without any thought to a readers’ personhood or needs, without any thought toward a meaning’s reception because the meaning is nothing more than a contagious ghoul (it will eat your flesh, if you let it). “Roll over” and it never occurred to me to do otherwise. This is how power works, and I’ve become, as I age, more tentative (or more understanding) in my use of language. In one of my first poetry workshops, the instructor asked me if I was on drugs when I wrote. The piece I’d written was so enraged, mixed so many metaphors, was so imagistic and passionate, that I suppose he assumed I had to be. When I said “No,” he turned to my classmates and said, “Writing this way requires absolute faith in language.” It never occurred to me that anyone would not trust language, but then I’d only ever written to myself. In my research writing, I am drawn to scenes of intense loathing of the female body or intense longing for that body. It occurs to me that in studying this language, I am studying how it is used patriarchally, how language functions as a means to organize knowledge and understandings in accordance with differences that are either idealized or demonized. I do not support the demonization of Hillary Clinton, but I also take issue with how the very word “idealism” is used to demonize or other Bernie Sander’s supporters. The word gives the speaker permission to discount any view on policy that the “idealist” holds, which is more a patriarchal move than a democratic one. (One can, in fact, be both idealistic and informed, for example.) Now that I engage in political discussions with the commitment to seeing them through, now that I hold multiple views in mind, asking questions and contemplating responses, I enter a different use of language, one that is more democratic and vulnerable. It’s the kind of language I think we need now… at the dining table, on social media, and on the streets. We have time to ask questions, to listen to other voices, to study a candidate’s policies and decisions, and to contemplate what a vote for our candidate might mean beyond our own personal narrative. As bewildered as my father may be by the role he played in my politics, my inclination toward systemic change is an extension of the care my family shared in our home. Just so, we citizens have time now to situate our vote within the context of what is best for “the people.” These days when someone says “Roll over,” I stop to read the fine print. And when I vote, I will know what my vote means; I’ll not be sleeping. by Aaron Zlatkin I have to be honest with you: I am conflicted about guns, and I think that might be a good thing. From a personal standpoint, I mean. And not because there is any uncertainty in my mind about the need for what the political left calls “common sense gun reform,” but because the debate over how, how much, and why is always so limited and incomplete. We talk past each other in plenty of important debates, but the right to bear arms is a ridiculously hot button issue in this country. I have many friends who own them, who use them for hunting, or for self-protection, and who conceal carry (and I never feel unsafe around them, even when I remind myself of that fact). So I can’t help but wonder if I’m missing something, some aspect of the debate, some too compelling reasoning that might allow me to understand fully the arguments being made on the other side. But I think the problem goes deeper than that.
The problem with our current approach to cultural and political discourse is not that we are missing some trump card of a talking point that will open our eyes. The problem is that we talk past each other, and call it a conversation. There is no real debate about guns, gun control, or gun violence in this country that I have seen. There is no real debate about anything. I suppose the term for the thing that I feel is missing is dialectic. Generally, a dialectic is any dialogue used as a means to discover truth through reasoned argument. The term dialectic is often used to refer even more broadly to any conflict or tension between two forces or concepts in search of a resolution, and is usually considered to apply to perceived opposites, such as good/evil, liberal/conservative, freedom/captivity, etc. Jon Stewart famously carpet bombed the set of Crossfire in 2004 with a critique that at its core was a demand for a true dialectic to replace the false dichotomy for which that cable show was famous. To be honest, when I say “a true dialectic” I’m probably expressing my own prejudice here; apart from the obvious lack of any resolution on those cable shout fests, the presentation is as much a dialectic as any other put forth by Hegel, Socrates, or Bakhtin. What Stewart was pleading for was a more constructive dialectic. And that is what I am pleading for now, not just in the context of a culture grown complacent about weekly gun massacres, but also in the context of our daily interactions with one another. Talk about anything need not be the polarizing exercise to which we accustom ourselves. Imagine if you will a conversation about favorite bands between two guys from my generation: one says U2 was their favorite, the other insists on R.E.M. If you’re older than this, imagine the same debate over Beatles vs. Stones; if you are younger, well, your bands are terrible. (Ha ha! Dialectics!) What would the potential arguments be for one band over the other? You might look at the total number of chart topping singles or total album sales; or perhaps staying power, the catchiness of their songs, how much each artist had been repurposed in pop culture, or any number of other potentially influential factors to make your case. You might also criticize the other band, pointing out the annoying quality of the vocals, the lack of musicianship, the formulaic chord structures, the political grandstanding, the clearly egotistical front man, or how, yeah, they were okay...until they sold out in 1991, not like my guy oh wait I see what you did there. Because what is really happening during that debate is a combination of (among other distractions) willful blindness or cognitive dissonance. Maybe you think Bono’s voice is more pleasant than Michael Stipe’s. But this is an aesthetic preference, not an objective truth, and deep down you know this. Maybe the song structures of R.E.M. were formulaic (Justin Lynch and I spent the better part of our 20s making good use of that fact), but they were simply using a different formula than the equally formulaic lads from Dublin. That is, at least, until the formulas began to change over the years, because nobody wants to hear 200 variations on Driver 8, and there aren’t even 3 variations of With Or Without You anyway, even if you include playing it backwards. The point is, you have to live with a certain amount of cognitive dissonance if you insist on making the case for your band, and even after all that you won’t “win” the argument. The truth is simply that you have a preference, and it is not the preference of your friend. Things get a lot trickier – and heavier – when the topic turns from 80s college rock to gun control. There are a number of important factors that need consideration before any real dialogue can take place, such as agreeing on the definitions of terms (shared vocabulary), the prevalence of culture bundling (using a view on one topic as a signifier for assuming other views on unrelated topics), how statistics and other facts are sourced, and basic logical fallacies. This post from last year by Ken White has a good description of where to begin. All of this is in addition to the very real problem that we don’t always recognize when we are being intellectually dishonest in a debate. Since I do not see the gun control issue resolving anytime soon, I plan to explore some of these aspects of discourse in future posts in the hope of beginning a conversation about practicing a more constructive dialectic in our nation’s discourse. by Rachel Zlatkin
One of the first blog entries I ever read was a 2008 entry Digby wrote at Hullabaloo. Digby described the purity ball, a ceremony that originated through an evangelical ministry in Colorado Springs. Her post led to a series that extended over several years coinciding with the ball’s growing popularity and heightened media attention. The ball, created and sponsored by Generations of Light Ministry, combines elements of the father-daughter dance, the purity covenant or vow, and a wedding ceremony. After reading about the ball on Hullaballoo, I began exploring the Generations of Light website and watching interview footage of Randy Wilson, the ministry’s founder, and families participating in the ceremony. Like most people, I was disturbed by the incestuous nature of the ball’s content. But I also had a lot of questions about how the media othered the entire practice, as if its evangelical base meant the ceremony had no bearing on mainstream culture. The Purity Ball entails a three course meal, a ritualized ballet performance, the purity covenant ceremony, and a dance consisting of waltzes and Hollywood film scores. The most important component of the ball, or at least the part that sets it apart from other versions of the purity vow, is the fact that the daughters are not the only ones to take a vow of purity. During the meal, each father stands behind his daughter’s seat, places his hand on her shoulder, and recites the following pledge: “I, (daughter’s name)’s father, choose before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity. I will be pure in my own life as a man, husband and father. I will be a man of integrity and accountability as I lead, guide and pray over my daughter and my family as the high priest in my home. This covering will be used by God to influence generations to come.” (Generations of Light Ministry) The father’s pledge “to cover [his] daughter” blurs the line between an unconscious wish for sexual contact and a conscious emphasis on patriarchal control. According to the pledge, the father will be the only “cover” over his daughter’s “purity,” as if he is the blanket of “authority” beneath which she sleeps or the indestructible hymen-esque “protection” often equated with female virginity. The repetition of the word “cover” -- in “This covering will be used by God to influence generations to come” -- echoes the story of Abraham, the man God appoints to father his nation. The father is the “covering” God uses to “influence generations to come,” an influence enacted through his daughter. The vow implies repressed incestuous longings a father has for his daughter while also aligning him with the source of all things. He is the “high priest.” He is both godly protector and godly procreator, the Abraham of his home. Taken at its extreme, the vow conflates the father’s physical authority with parts of his daughter’s anatomy, and presents a father confused about physical boundaries. An exultant narcissism is also evident in testimonials offered by fathers on the Generations of Light website: “How can you measure the value of your eleven year old [daughter] looking into your eyes (as you clumsily learn the fox-trot together) with innocent, uncontainable joy, saying ‘Daddy, I’m so excited!’ I have been involved with the Father-Daughter Ball for two years with my daughters, Sarah and Anna. It is impossible to convey what I have seen in their sweet spirits, their delicate, forming souls, as their daddy takes them out for their first, big dance. Their whole being absorbs my loving attention, resulting in a radiant sense of self worth and identity. Think of it from their perspective: ‘My daddy thinks I’m beautiful in my own unique way. My daddy is treating me with respect and honor. My daddy has taken time to be silly, and even made a fool of himself, learning how to dance. My daddy really loves me!’” (Generations of Light Ministry) In this testimonial, the father describes his experience of his daughters at the purity ball. They are ethereal spirits and souls, yet in formation, their radiance a result of his love, their identity a result of his attention. When his daughters finally give voice in the testimonial, it is because he speaks as them: their repeated “My daddy,” notably in the subject position of each sentence, infantilizes the father-daughter relationship at the same time it professes the daughter’s possession of her father. Their “radiant self-worth and identity” result from his total absorption into her “being.” The sexually charged description of their shared eye contact and joy indicates the father’s high levels of narcissism. Their “dance” with him, he asserts, is their “first” and it is “big.” As such, his daughters embody the consummation of his wish. Even with all of the interview footage I have watched over the years, these are the two passages to which I most return because they capture a root of patriarchal control that I have rarely seen discussed in the media: envy of the female body. As Melanie Klein defined envy, the emotion is twofold. It entails both a desire for what someone else has alongside a desire to take it and destroy it (If I cannot have it, no one can). The purity locket is one more example of how the covenant mediates these conflicting sides of envy. After a daughter inserts her pledge, often written as a direct address to her future husband, she locks it in the locket. Her father holds the key until her wedding day, at which point he offers it to her husband (Okay… you can have her… as long as you’re an exact replicate of me). The boundary confusion exhibited in the vow and the testimonial are symptomatic of a patriarch who has not fully differentiated his body from the female body that carried him. He feels perfectly entitled to owning the female body… because in his mind it is his. This is not a problem limited to the evangelical culture. We hear reports about the results of boundary confusion everyday, as women’s health and reproductive rights take hit after hit, and as certain "fathers" obsess over who is in a daughter's bathroom (Envy plays a part in both cases, I'd say). It’s a mistake to dismiss the purity covenant as “freakish,” simply because the practice is not our own. The daughters are one touchstone to a virgin-archetype and the sexual attraction one can feel only through denial -- a denial that extends all the way to her personhood and her rights. *** The purity ball poses questions about children's rights, the development of personhood and bodily integrity, the role of differentiation, and the sway parental phantasy can hold over a child's experience of her world, her bathroom, her bedroom, and herself. In his 1912-1913 essay, "Totem and Taboo," Freud asks “How much can we attribute to psychical continuity in the sequence of generations? And what are the ways and means employed by one generation in order to hand on its mental states to the next one?” (511). One way to think of the home (or in this case, to think of the purity ball) is as a spatial metaphor for a parental or generational "mental state" -- Parents are so much larger than life. Can any of us forget those grand first impressions based on a parent’s height, sitting on his shoulders with nothing but air to stop us? Or the spread of her arms, and how found we could feel lost in her embrace? While the Generations of Light Ministry recently stopped hosting the purity ball in Colorado Springs, I take it as a living text, one that does, in fact, “influence generations to come,” just as it is professes in the father’s vow. In my next post, I’ll take some time to explain why I think its "mental state" (511) has a reach well beyond the evangelical homes that participated in the ball. Sigmund Freud. "Totem and Taboo." The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989. 481-513. By Aaron Zlatkin I always get a thrill of satisfaction whenever my birth city makes it into the news. The outside world’s grudging recognition that Cincinnati is in fact a place, and that things sometimes happen there, gives me an opportunity to see my hometown through someone else’s eyes. Of course, when Cincinnati makes it into the national press, it has historically been for not very awesome reasons. Like that time we had the riots. Or the time a really awesome band came to town for a concert, so we stampeded each other to death. Or that time one of our council members resigned because he got caught writing a personal check to a prostitute (and the coda, in which we accepted his apology so much that he became mayor, and later still became Jerry Springer). Or when Marge Schott owned the Reds. Or when we got the vapors over Mapplethorpe.
Or the time when, as God as our witness, we thought turkeys could fly. The point is, seeing my hometown from the perspective of other cities has not always been satisfying so much as enlightening. So when I first heard about a gorilla being shot at the Cincinnati Zoo after a child fell into the enclosure, I had a vague sense of foreboding as I realized I would probably get the opportunity again. What I did not expect was the fascination of having a front row seat to a viral phenomenon, from breaking news all the way to “Hey, remember when that gorilla thing happened?” Which, all told, was about a week and a half. In some ways (after a couple of days following the news like everyone else) I became more fascinated with attempting to trace the spread of the story than the story itself. And not in the literal sense of how widely it disseminated, or how many hits the video got on YouTube, but in the viral sense: what hot button topics would naturally arise from the event; how would the imagery get repurposed in gifs and satirical motivational posters; how long before the thoughtful, in-depth reporting begins; and, of course, how long before it becomes old news and just as quickly forgotten? Part of the answer to those questions depends upon what kind of story you’re looking at. Is it breaking news, or is it an in depth expose? According to a 2014 study that looked at the life of news articles published at Al Jazeera English: “News articles describing breaking news events tend to decay in attention shortly after they are published and thus have a shorter shelf-life. These articles also have more repetitive social media reactions, as most users simply repeat the news headlines without commenting on them. In-Depth items portraying or analyzing a topic tend to exhibit a longer shelf-life and a richer social media response, including more content-rich tweets in terms of vocabulary entropy and fraction of unique tweets, and more shares on Facebook for the same level of tweets. “By going deeper into the first few hours after publication of News articles, we found three distinctive response patterns in a roughly 80:10:10 proportion: decreasing traffic, steady or increasing traffic, and rebounding traffic. We found that there can be multiple causes for nondecreasing traffic, including the addition of new content to articles, social media reactions, and other types of referrals” (Castillo, et al., 2013). What is overlooked in this study is the nature of a viral news event, which is usually by definition both a breaking news story with developments over time, and an opening to a discussion of larger issues in society. For a story like Harambe, or Columbine, or whatever, the event itself is shocking enough to create interest (small boy falls two stories into a wild animal lair!), has enough conflicting interpretations to be compelling for a while (was the gorilla actually protecting the boy?), and intersects with so many larger issues (conservation, parenting, conceptions of responsibility, and perhaps the biggest issue of all: how exactly does one harvest sperm from a dead gorilla, and who got stuck with that job?). While I found plenty of research about online news readership that focuses on the predictability of visitor interactions (hits, shares, likes, comments, etc) in order to determine the shelf-life of an article (Castillo et al), or the best structure of a web site for news-reader optimization, I have yet to find an article that lays out plainly how a news story like Harambe’s death migrates through all of the varied media outlets we visit throughout the day. I had hoped to find something that explained how the story moves from breaking news on local TV stations and localized Facebook posts, to viral video uploads and national news stories, then exploding into the realm of online opinion (comment sections of news articles, blog posts, Twitter feeds), then the inevitable visual memes that repackage the core image of the event (now universally recognizable) into something irreverent, or politically charged, or obscenely racist. Then come the longer, more thoughtful essayist pieces that focus on ancillary issues raised by the initial news event: the Wired article about gorilla conservation, the HuffPo article about the plight of gorillas around the world (is it too on the nose that it was written by their “Viral News Editor?”), or Rachel’s essay with a focus on representations of the mother. Like the five stages of grief, these steps need not occur in this precise order, or even at all, but what cannot be denied or bargained away is that they are all a part of the news cycle now. Whether it is the death of Osama bin Laden, the hacking of Jennifer Lawrence’s phone, the international crisis that brought into tense conflict Australia’s government and Johnny Depp’s dogs, or the shooting death of a gorilla in a zoo, each of the above steps in the movement of the story should seem familiar to anyone literate in the mediascape. Information now spreads more like an ink spill on fibrous paper. Even better: it spreads like that virus at the end of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. What I’m getting at with all these tortured analogies is this: the linear model of communication on which the news industry has historically been structured no longer holds. News, especially anything with a viral component to it, is transactional along every step of its life-cycle; that is, it is an act and a reaction – in short, a dialogue. In order to begin to fully appreciate this shift, one only need consider how "Hands Up, Don’t Shoot" became a legitimate, nationwide political protest movement: from the shooting of unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, to the perpetual reiterations of the phrase that spawned the message that spawned the memes, that led to further news coverage. “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” was not a 3 or 4-day news cycle. In truth, it never left – it is part of the social lexicon now. And to fully appreciate how little the traditional news outlets appreciate the shift from linear to transactional, just watch a cable news host read tweets from viewers on the air, as though he were doing a great public service by “giving” these plebes a “voice.” I don’t know how much one could conclude quantitatively about interest in the story of Harambe. As best I could tell, a couple of days passed before we began to see stories taking a broader perspective on the themes hidden in the event: the proper role of zoos, the ethics of keeping animals in captivity at all, and the responsibility we all bear to be mindful in such a public space. From the original events of May 28th until this Wired article explored the question in some depth, five days had passed before anyone seemed to wonder publicly about the other gorillas living with Harambe. And I do not mean discussion of what his death might mean for conservation efforts and breeding, but how his death signified to the other gorillas in his troop, especially Chewie and Mara, with whom he was destined to mate. Did they see any of it? Did they sense the guilt and shame and anger pouring off of the zookeepers in waves? Does the incident affect their behaviors, or their interactions with their human handlers? Do they trust us less now? Perhaps the big takeaway from all of this is what we can learn about our own interests and priorities. Not only is a human life worth more than that of a gorilla, but the human perspective is vastly more important than the perspective of any one member of the band of gorillas who had lived with him for over a year. Or maybe that kind of empathy take us too much out of our comfort zone of dominance. by Rachel Zlatkin
1. I am thinking of Harambe in the context of my morning read, “Entering the Age of Humans.” We are mammals and part of an ecosystem, and while I was raised to believe the human creature as the most fantastic and evolved of creatures, when I remember our place in an ecosystem I cannot think so. We are simply members. I teach in an interdisciplinary program now, so I teach more college students in STEM than in English these days. Their appreciation of the effects the smallest change can have on our world persuades me to listen ever attentively to what they have to say. I’m on record as a Bernie supporter and a lot of that has to do with an impatience that is more often associated with youth. When I read articles like “Entering the Age of Humans,” I feel a shift in my middle-aged perception. I realize D.C. is slow moving, but the speed of climate change and the scope of its effects mean that "slow and steady" are no longer practical. I worked at the Cincinnati Zoo for one year while starting my doctoral dissertation. I could say a lot about that experience. For instance, how wrong I think it is that employees operating the rides outside in the winter were not permitted heavy coats as part of the required uniform at the time. Or the fact that workers only received 30 minutes to eat when the walk from one side of the zoo to the other could take about that long on a crowded day. Worker rights kind of things. I felt like a Marxist den mother after a while. But one thing I will say about the zoo is that when something happens to one of the animals everyone who works there is affected... from the grounds staff to the keepers. You feel like a family. Everyone identifies, to a certain degree, with the zoo’s mission to conserve and care for the animals. There’s an entire backstage area that zoo patrons rarely see, dedicated to the animals’ care and fighting their extinction. Most employees are aware of the debates about holding animals in captivity. Discussions about the problematic position a zoo holds in our culture didn’t happen everyday, but they weren’t rare. No one avoided that conversation. You have a way of being reminded when you work there every day... One day some rare birds flew out of the bird house. My colleagues and I were both worried for their safety and celebrated their temporary freedom. We were relieved once they were inside their container again. I was working when Akilah died. When we left after closing, we left in silence; no one spoke, as if we were on hallowed ground (It’s blacktop). And it was when I was working there that I learned why the zoo decided not to have peacocks roaming free anymore: children chased them and pulled out their tail feathers. That is frightening and physically painful for the peacock, and they would turn and attack the child. The zoo is vigilant when it comes to protecting the animals and the patrons from each other. The zoo’s philosophy is built into the exhibit architecture. I remember having several conversations about the philosophical differences between the Columbus Zoo and Cincinnati Zoo exhibit spaces. The Columbus Zoo utilizes glass walls, while Cincinnati Zoo utilizes fences, plant growth, and moats. Columbus patrons can look into the eyes of an orangutan, while Cincinnati patrons often look across a great open space toward an animal in its setting. The Columbus Zoo animals are out and on exhibit for the duration of the zoo's hours. The Cincinnati Zoo animals always have an open exit to a living space patrons cannot see. I have been thinking about Harambe because I have a sense that his life continued behind the scenes. I’ve read posts on FB defending the mother and emphasizing the speed of children. I don’t want any demonizing of the mother here -- But I am not a parent. I worked at the zoo, and I am childfree. I think of the zoo as belonging to the animals. It is their home. While it is there for human entertainment, it is there to educate humans and to conserve animal life, too. The zoo advertises its work in conservation; it invites patrons to do small things like donating a cell phone or recycling the zoo map. It offers educational camps and overnight visits. I do not think the zoo actually advertises all of the work it does on behalf of endangered species or invites patrons to consider their visit as part of that larger conservationist effort. Whatever your thoughts about zoos and animals being born and bred in captivity, the Cincinnati Zoo does important work on behalf of endangered species. But Harambe’s death underlines the fact that we endanger these animals even as we try to save them from extinction, the possibility of which we continue to play a part in creating. In the macrocosm that is “the age of humans,” “Human activity has disrupted a complex natural cycle that took millions of years to evolve and stabilise, and that disruption is rapidly changing the state of the planet.” In the aftermath of this microcosmic event, I’ve read a lot of posts describing how the child was endangered. Even Thane Maynard said so in his interview when he described the decision making process behind killing Harambe. The child is -- thankfully -- okay. Harambe is not. Once the child fell into the moat, the gorillas’ lives were also endangered. There is an entire apparatus in place at the zoo to protect human life, that values the human lives of patrons and zoo employees over those of the animals. Harambe’s death exposes this largely invisible fact. We placed more value on the child’s life than we did on Harambe’s, even as Harambe is part of an ecosystem to which we all belong, even as we looked to breeding him to help save his species. (He was 17 years old, and just approaching the maturity necessary to breeding. From a conservationist perspective, losing Harambe is a huge loss for the zoo's work.) A zoo is an ambivalent space, but when it comes right down to it the apparatus is on our side. I realize the fall was an accident, but killing Harambe was no accident. The explanations of how fast a child can move don’t really address this issue. When a child falls down the stairs he does so in his own home and is the only one hurt. When a child runs into the street, her life is the only life endangered. I realize these comments are written in defense of the mother who needs all the support she can get, but the analogy breaks down once the child is being dragged by a gorilla and you shoot and kill Harambe to save him. I have walked zoos differently ever since working in one. When I visit the zoo now, I still feel how I need to work on the animals’ behalf. I have come to understand my visit as part of that work. I believe it would be good for the zoo, the animals, and the patrons, if everyone were encouraged to think of a visit to the zoo in these terms, alongside the fun we have there. I am not surprised by how many of the discussions in the aftermath of Harambe’s death have dealt less with the gorilla and more with the mother’s (ir)responsibility. I research medical history and the cultural attitudes regarding motherhood -- attitudes which are surprisingly similar today despite all the medical “progress” we’ve made regarding female anatomy, pregnancy, and childbirth since the classical, medieval, and early modern periods. According to one old wives' tale, if a pregnant woman feels startled when a hare leaps from a bush into the road, then her infant may be born with a harelip. “It’s all the mother’s fault” is not exactly an original claim. My study of the cultural attitudes toward motherhood began as a strictly academic project. However, I’m now in my mid forties without children of my own. I’ve lived through the commentary on my body and whether or not I’ll have children through several life phases, and I am to the point of conceding that I have been, to a certain degree, the subject of my study. By not having children, I created a kind of negative space in which to make an "objective study." I have no child to serve as a cathexis, no child who underpins my scholarly concept of motherhood, or my feelings about Harambe’s death. But this negative space also leaves room for personal questions: in the absence of a child, what do I have (aside from my study)? What cultural assumptions will swirl into consciousness here? Those assumptions are fond of making themselves felt, and some of them have appeared since Harambe's death as parents and non-parents became entrenched in their respective positions. Overall, I find the comments and assumptions I am dealing with in my forties far worse than any I received in my twenties. They are less absurd and more insidious. In my twenties, people simply assumed I would eventually have children. I didn’t see any need to tell them any different. It was none of their business anyway, and I tend to keep an open mind about things. I enjoy telling the story from my bellhop days: two different guests took me aside as I carried heavy luggage to warn me “You will ruin your womb!” Two separate occasions at least a year apart. Direct quote, word for word, two times, two different people. That cracked me up at the time. I’d been working on theater sets and hanging lekos for years by then, and I have many other organs more likely to be strained when lifting a bag. (In my thirties, I could simply say “Not during graduate school.” That was easy to say and easy to understand.) But now in my forties, I have no easy blow-off-the-question answer. Unlike in my twenties and thirties when people questioned my future, in my forties the questions and assumptions focus on the life I live now. And because I am sharing my life with some of these people, it is harder to say that it is none of their business. I have absorbed enough of the cultural BS about motherhood to feel self conscious about my childfree status. Sometimes I feel defensive and even invite comments. It is a way of picking on myself, of holding myself responsible even for the children I do not have and that our culture assumes I should. After all, as Judith Butler points out, our body shares space with other bodies; it is always vulnerable to the other’s gaze; it is never completely our own even when we want it to be. I can feel anxiety whenever motherhood or parenting is a topic of discussion outside of an academic setting because of the assumptions made about non-parents. For example, when discussing Harambe's death, parents have commented that non-parents "have no idea how fast a four year old can move!” We can have such an idea, actually. We are fully capable of all kinds of kid oriented ideas. We can even know how fast a kid moves because we see kids run... like at a nephew’s soccer game, or in the grocery store when a stranger’s child runs right into our cart and it bashes us in the belly, or, worse, when a child runs out in front of our car. But boy, does that kind of remark cause some anxiety on this end, even when I understand the defensiveness every parent reading the comments about Harambe’s death must feel. Commentators, many of them non-parents, are scapegoating the mother. There’s a long historical tradition of leveling blame on mothers, especially when experiencing such feelings as shock and grief. That historical context matters. (That's why I study it.) But let’s not short change each other by ignoring our capacity for understanding or falling into a cultural split. Everyone is avoiding the real tragedy here. The boy is alive, so now we are faced with the fact that Harambe is not. And we are all culpable in that, especially those of us who visit or work in a zoo. Guilt and rage are not easy emotions to process, so we’ll make sure the mother feels (and, thus, is made responsible for) every ounce of our feelings, or we'll shut down and say those without kids can never understand (and so are not held responsible for the vitriol they spew). 2. Look. Let me introduce you to a non-parent, non-mother, fascinated by cultural attitudes about motherhood, non-blaming person (that’s me): I’ll be the first to admit that I have always held a great deal of ambivalence toward motherhood. I am the oldest of 5, and I was cast in the role of a mini-mom. I don’t think anyone was happy about this arrangement. Every evening before bed we kids would clean our playroom, pick up the blocks, put the games back on the shelf, etc. If a younger sibling did not want to pick up the blocks (or the legos -- a definite pain in the butt because our parents made us separate all the pieces), my mother would sometimes short cut the argument by turning to me to say, “Rachel, you’re the oldest. Set the example.” And then I would have to pick up that toy so that my sibling knew what it looked like to pick up what she or he did not want to pick up (and I suppose follow suit... some day). After supper I’d wash the dishes while my mom cleaned the table and swept the floor. The rest of the family would be watching the television. This was not fun “mom” time. She checked for pieces of food I may have missed. (I was “responsible” for those bits of food.) I also knew I would get in trouble if one of my siblings was not in bed on time when I was babysitting. One night I dragged one of my sisters across the living room floor to get her to bed on time (Yes, she received a healthy rug burn), rather than deal with my parents’ upset when they got home. (Not upset about the rug burn.) I felt my responsibility for the behavior of my siblings acutely, and my siblings had to deal with me as the measuring stick of their behavior alongside my mean treatment of them. This is not a good model of motherhood, let alone sisterhood, but it is the model I was raised with and the part I was expected to play. And it took a long time to rid myself of the resentment I felt at always having to be “the responsible one.” So imagine my feelings when someone made the following comment just a couple of years ago: “You do not really know what it means to be responsible until you have a child.” Context matters. The Cincinnati Zoo makes this argument in every open air exhibit. The comment has bothered me for so long because, as a child, much of my identity was based on my being “responsible.” That word provides a structural framework to my psyche. The weight of responsibility fluctuates: sometimes I can brush it off; sometimes I still feel “the weight of the world on my shoulders” (another refrain from my childhood). It can be an awesome and inhibitive weight. It is really not healthy all of the time. I feel a lot of responsibility. But when I read essays written by other childfree or childless people, almost all of the writers feel the need to say something along the lines of what I am about to say: “You’re right. I will never know the responsibility of having a child.” My point is that, even with my background and the emphasis my parents placed on responsibility, I would not presume to know the responsibility of having a child. I am aware I do not have one. My other point is that the speaker can not know the responsibility I felt for my four siblings, or the responsibility I now feel as a forty something without kids. The speaker will never have my four siblings or my upbringing. The speaker will never not have kids while in the fortieth decade. And by the way, the responsibility I feel now without kids is different from the responsibility I felt in my twenties without kids or in my thirties without kids... and thank goodness it is different from the responsibility I felt growing up as a mini-mom. My point is, also, that while we humans may not always know an experience, we can certainly imagine it. We can learn to understand. I have always wanted to suggest to this person that it might do you well to contemplate not the “freedom” you suspect I have without children, but the use to which I put that open space. That space allows me to feel a responsibility beyond any singular child or biological family unit. I have no cathexis-child that channels my processing of Harambe's death, or any subject, for that matter. I’m not sure any of the comparing between our mutual groups serves much of a purpose when it is made with no mind toward context, human development, and personal integrity. Yet, the outrage over the avoidability of Harambe’s loss in comments takes the form of a binary that either demonizes or defends the mother who never even entered the gorilla’s space. None of it really tries to understand the significance of Harambe’s loss in a larger context or pauses long enough to feel the 400+ lb. loss. Even “RIP” is a wishful denial -- of guilt, of sorrow. Harambe is not resting. Harambe is dead. It is easier to blame the mother’s irresponsible parenting or another group’s inability to understand a child’s fall than to examine what a zoo is, to contemplate how we inhabit its space or participate in its work. A zoo, like (non)motherhood, is an ambivalent space. These categories of understanding contain contradictory ideas and conflicting expectations. A little boy and Harambe broke all of that open. One evening after I got home from a day at the zoo, I realized I had the keys to the train in my pocket. The maintenance crew tests the train every morning before the rides staff arrives, so I needed to return the keys. One of my supervisors let me back into the zoo on her way out. As I walked back to the train station in the early night, I realized, as if for the first time, that I was in the animals’ home. The zoo is a different place at night without all of the patrons and employees. The litter is gone; the trash cans are empty. The train and carousel are still and locked. No one shouts or calls out, or pushes you out of the way for a better view. The animals are alone, alive in the quiet, probably happier for it. I slipped the keys into the train station’s ticket booth and walked slowly through the zoo to my car, passing no other human. I stopped to watch the lions pacing back and forth. I listened to their roars, just the fence between us. I drove back home to the hum of our refrigerator, the whir of a/c... to Aaron in our Ikea bed. At night, zoo animals do not live to educate, or to entertain... (that was my day job, driving the train). They do not need to defend their tail feathers. At night, they live to roar, groom, to roll in the dirt, to have sex, to shit, to smell what the wind carries, to pace before the fence, to sleep. Outside, they might catch tiny versions of the wild to which they are so ill equipped to return and which is increasingly ill equipped to receive them. These days I think of the zoo as a new kind of halfway house: its animals are half way from nature (or further still), half way to domesticated (not even close), never fully both. It is our job, all of our jobs, to protect them from ourselves. |
AuthorSRachel Zlatkin ArchivesTopics
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