The "N" Word

This morning's Times reported some college administrator's admonition to a white student that it was not okay to sing along with the lyrics to some some song on the radio where the singer uses the "n" word.  It becomes a racial slur when she does so even if the song she hears, the singer, everything in the production of the "n" word, is from black persons, arriving invisibly over the airwaves.  It just seems to me that this goes too far.  Nigger as a derogatory term employed by bigoted whites has a long history.  It is a great example of the theory of the Marked and the Unmarked where the Unmarked represents the majority group who control the culture, in our own country, this being or used to be white Anglo Saxon Protestant persons,  and the Marked were persons outside of that marking, for instance, African-Americans, Jews, Irish Catholics, etc etc whose identity was imposed upon them by the Unmarked group.  That in fact extends to male and female where the male gender dominates and determines the definition of woman.  Black persons have taken back "nigger" and made it their own word, although from my own experience it is not a word that one hears passing the lips of middle and upper middle class African Americans.  But they have taken the word back ferociously and are so insistent upon controlling its meaning and use that they have made white afraid to say the word, while at the same time provocatively using it themselves.  I dare you to define me, is what is being said by this prohibition.  As a gay person I have dealt all my life with straight persons, straight males, particularly, wanting to determine my personality, my sexual habits, my ethos, so I can well understand why some gays like to identify as "fairies" and other more derogatory terms so as to control them, and impose their own meaning and context on them.  Life gets really complicated for the young when they cannot sing along with something they hear on the radio.  I always told my daughters when they were teenagers that they should seek out cute black boys and date them so that they could become comfortable around another body, another thought process, another projected identity, as girls of the great Unmarked, surrender to a relationship with a Marked person and surrender your impulse to create identity.

I Hate Tuesday Mornings

when the cleaning lady arrives, not really of course, but we feel such pressure to present a relatively neat space that the night before is a fury of organizing, hiding items in cupboards.  I get up very early almost every day so that I have plenty of time to organize the incredible mess of pill bottles, lotions, razors, tubes, and more tubes that litter what ought to be a spacious and modern counter surrounding my bathroom sink with its oversize over the top Hollywood of the thirties  huge mirror that the previous owner left behind.  And all the while in my frantic rearrangements my brain is whirling with ideas, suggestions, all kinds of improvements that I feel we should make in our lives.  My husband is an introvert who spends hours of his time by himself.  Cocktail parties, any gathering is a torture for him; although he can be charming, his heart is not into it. I am variously described as bubbly and charming or an over the top manic threatening to sink into deep depression.  I prefer the Mary Tyler Moore version of me.  In any case, in the early hours of the morning I think of all the improvements I need to make in my life.  I guess the symbolism of the cleaning lady moves me into high gear since I always have so many things, ideas, suggestions, I want to share the minute hubby comes out into the dining area.  It is a terrible moment, and I have to hold my tongue.  Today I just needed to tell him right away of my brilliant idea of exchanging the door mats in front of the doors of our live in condo and guest residence condo.  Ours is too high, if I feel, and I am afraid of tripping.  He loves it because it is beautiful even if poorly proportioned.  I suddenly feel today that I must, I must, I must make this switch, and so I must talk to him directly.  Still, even I realize this is not the propitious moment as I see him scowling and uttering imprecations when he notices that his bag of dried apricots has got some mold or mildew or whatever.  The cleaning lady will be here in a matter of seconds.  Best to go next door and hold my tongue.

What To Do With Poor Old Roger Brooke Taney?

Once the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court (1836-1884), he is famous or notorious for handing down what is known as the Dred Scott decision in which he declared and thus made authoritative the ruling that African slaves because they were not free at the time the Constitution was created could not be considered then or ever citizens of the United States.  Thus people of African descent had no legal standing in this country, a ruling from which untold misery and privation.  The 13th and14th Amendments overturned the Dred Scott decision, but could only be enacted after several years of bloody Civil War. The 13th Amendment simply bans slavery in the U.S. The 14th amendment states inter alia, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."  A bust of Justice Taney is now up for debate, whether it deserves to be part of the landscape where it sits or should be relegated to a back closet.  I say keep these things our and polished, the same with Calhoun College at Yale University, and in fact I would add more, plaques, for instance, to designate known sites of historic lynchings, plaques in public squares where slave auctions took place, better yet bronze statuary groups a la Rodin's Burghers of Calais.  Somewhere on a roadway there should be similar bronze groupings or some kind of commemoration of the slaves chained together in bands and force marched hundreds of miles as though they were no different than the building materials transhipped across the country creating an economic boom.  I admire the plaques thither and yon in Europe which designate a site where a Partisans was shot or a band of Jews were machine gunned to their deaths.  Europe's suffering is there to see.  History is not necessarily a happy story, and the United States cannot present itself forever as a television commercial where everyone is smiling and everything is coming up roses.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt has statues everywhere commemorating his great role in American life; Chief Justice Taney was also a great mover and shaker who from the bottom of his heart and intellect believed people of African descent could not be citizens.  Millions agreed with him; a war was fought over the idea.  Millions in Nazi Germany believed that all Jews should be exterminated.  Extermination factories still stand to preserve the horror of this perversion that seemed normal to many people at the time.  A people that acknowledges their horrible deeds are closer to cleansing themselves of them than those who hide or deny them

Watching Films On Rainy Days

As the hurricane passed by about seventy or eighty miles north of us it spread a wide arc of torrential rains and flooding coupled with gusts of high wind that at one point threatened to knock imprudent me to the ground when I had journeyed out with a friend for lunch.  These were the days to stay at home, and this we did for the most part, and saw three films where otherwise we might have been out of doors.  Our house guest who was from the parched lands of California literally reveled in being drenched in rain, we said, "good for you," but otherwise the out of doors had nothing to offer other than stupefying tropical humidity.  The three films were "White Mischief" a twenty year old drama based on a true story of a decadent group of English settlers, young sons of the aristocracy and so on, who had to make a living out in the colonies, in this case Kenya, in the so called Happy Valley, where they farmed.  It was the story of two sexual adventurers, male and female, and the disruption their behavior brought to the group, ending in scandalous murders.  The fascination of the film lay principally in the accomplished cast of actors who acted out the hurts, the angers, fascinations, and sexual attractions racing through the group of men and women whose fundamental decadence acted as the perfect catalyst to the monumental boredom the area engendered.  It makes you think about Isaak Dinesen's "Out of Africa" in a new light.  Another we watched was the documentary of Vivian Maier, the Chicago based nanny who managed to take over one hundred thousand photos during her off hours, which she secreted in a rented storage facility, just as she kept herself a secret from her employers through the years.  The effort to build a character from the reminiscences of her now grown up charges and their parents is only partially successful; she was aggressively private.  Much more revealing was a selection of her photos showing an astonishing capacity to frame the happenstance and unexpected, and the humanity of her direct vision into the subjects who came before her camera.  Here was revealed a woman who surrendered all of herself to the vision outside of herself, from which Mr. Maloof, who somewhat discovered her, promoted her photos,  tries to assemble a person (although at the end of the film it is not clear that she has really emerged from behind the assiduously locked doors of the rooms she inhabited in her employers homes),  The third film we watched was about the American pilot of the U2 that was shot down over Russia and the efforts of an American lawyer (Tom Hanks) to arrange a deal with the Russians for the return of one of their spies (Mark Rylance) captured by the Americans.  The acting was exceptionally strong in this film, but it is not a kind of film I enjoy.  Everything happened to the various protagonists of this story; the makers of the film never went into how they felt as the story unfolded.  I tried to explain that I always come away from films like this thinking that I had read the account in The New York Times and no closer to the persons who were the protagonists than what the printed word allowed me.  My husband and our house guest were united in their disgust exclaiming that I was a fool.

Sunshine Again

I looked out the window when I got up happy to see the early morning's bright sun glancing off the walls of the building opposite me.  Instinctively I sensed that I could walk out into the fresh cool dawn of the aftermath of the last two days of high winds and torrents of rain.  But that, of course, was nonsense.  We are not in New England anymore, Toto.  The air as I bent to pick up the Times from the mat was as dense, moist, and claustrophobic as ever.  The only change was the rain had stopped and the wind had died down and the hot morning sun was back in business.  Living in Florida is a challenge that I am happy to accept so that I do not have to do battle with ice and snow.  But the later summer months are always a challenge.  Heat and humidity start in early May and by late August has long since overstayed.  But September, they say, is the big hurricane month.  Ah, well, we have the gym schedule, the balance clinic treatments for me, all the books from the library to read, television series from lists compiled from all our recommendations, swimming in the condo pool which I love to do except I am afraid I will get a stroke, and am not sure that drowning is a fun way  to die.  No one else goes out to the pool and I hate to ask my husband to sit in the heat and humidity and read out there although he has more than once offered to do so.  It seems strange to be the only one in the pool but then I am sure that is the life of the very rich, so I should suck it up and jump in.

The Lunacy of Modern Life

Wireless Diagnostics is the title of some boxes that have started popping up on my Mac computer screen, and I have systematically ignored them.  But today we had a hurricane, or should I say that one was scheduled to descend on the land some two hours driving time north of here which dramatically made our electricity go on and off.  So I became a little interested. I clicked on one of these sites so impressively entitled.  The text I uncovered was extraordinary.  One has to assume or at least I did that what was there to read would be comprehensible to the lay person who routinely uses computers, me, for instance, a college educated professor humanities, long since retired, author of several books composed on just such a computer as I was now perusing.  An average Joe.  But indeed the diagnoses of Wireless Diagnostics were couched in a technical language utterly incomprehensible to me, not one word, nothing available for my understanding.  It made me recall the biography of Steve Jobs which highlighted his arrogance and indifference to his fellow human beings.  Take or Leave it is the Motto of Apple.  Well, I will do what I can.  As a kind of psychic or thematic embroidery to the text page were the underwear ads.  Recently I discovered while reading the Huffington Post on line an outfit which made very stylishly designed mens boxer briefs.  The colors and patterns were startling and pleasing, and although I am a shapeless and unattractive eighty six year old I knew it would bring me pleasure to have colors and patterns next to my skin, not to mention the delightful fantasy that the male models in the advertisements might in some way turn into me, or rather me into them.  So I clicked on this advertisement and was led into their online shop and immediately bought some of their wares.  Curiosity sent me into a search of their competitors wares.  And now amazingly enough as I struggle with brow furrowed to comprehend the technological language of the Wireless Diagnostic people, the page before my eyes contains images of the crotches of men in their stylish and so carefully engineered ("everything is the pouch for your junk these days") underpants.  Technology at its very best!

All The News That's Fit To Print

As an assiduous, nay compulsive reader of The New York Times for the past four or five decades, I was amazed to turn to the Arts section this morning and discover that I did not know about any of the persons mentioned in its three or four pages.  I have long realized that various activities and personages were slipping beyond my grasp--I never quite managed even a tiny interest in rap music or the performers of it--but there it is, from Boyancé to oh, you name it, anyone of the people cited today, names and personalities and physical appearance.  These are the people who are in dialogue with the American public for better or for worse, and the clear implication is that I am out of the conversation.  And, indeed, if I stop to examine my situation I am very much on the sidelines, signaled as nothing else quite can, by the fact that I do not watch news or commentary programs on television, thus definitely am not sitting at the breakfast table or in the parlor with my fellow Americans.  I remember well enough talking to my grandmother when we visited my aunt in Oak Park who housed her mother in her declining years.  Declining?  At the time I doubt that she was as old as  I am right now.  But she seemed exceedingly remote in time, if only by virtue of her faint voice, the words all pronounced in a Beacon Hill Boston accent (I have to mention Beacon Hill; I would die if anyone imagined she spoke like a Southie.) which made her almost foreign to me.  She came down to take dinner with the entire family, and sipped sherry beforehand during the cocktail hour.  The conversation went back and forth, and I could see that although Grammy Beye was an exceedingly alert woman, she really did not care to enter into anything because she did not care that much--the rest of the group almost shouting as they went back and forth over the behavior and ideas of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  That's sort of like me.  I confess to never having seen or heard either Secretary Clinton or Donald Trump speak on television, although one day I was somewhere perhaps in a store and busy with something and while waiting for the service whatever it was that I required caught a glimpse of Clinton on a television screen across the large room I was in.  Nothing however prompted me to draw close and investigate.  Somehow events have eluded me.