Temporal Flush

Scott Brown’s election to the Senate is monumental. Its meaning is bigger than the man.

The message, if the Democrats have ears to hear, is loud and clear: A growing majority of Americans are disappointed and angry and afraid. The trust invested in Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, they feel, has been abused by both.

President Obama began his term as a man of the people, a representative of hope, a living example of what a person born into challenging circumstances can still accomplish in America. He helped us believe that one could be good and rise to the top, even in the 21st century. The Democratic Party was given substantive majorities in both houses of Congress to help this good man do good work.

One year has passed and many of us doubt the goodness of either the president or his party. He may mean well — I’m not here to judge his soul — but their actions say that Obama and the Democrats always have time and a favor in their hip pockets for Wall Street elites, corporate lobbyists and  fat-cat contributors. In addition, it would seem, they have little more than crumbs for the rest of us — broke or living hand-to-mouth, unemployed or underemployed, uninsured or under-insured; who have lost their homes to foreclosure or who feel it breathing down their necks or whose houses are so far underwater that it may be decades before they see  positive equity again; who live in cities that can’t pay for the fire and police departments they need; who live in school districts that can’t afford the teachers they need; whose children or spouses or parents are on their third or fourth or fifth tours of duty in combat…

With all of these burdens, and many more, weighing heavy on common Americans, in the midst of double-digit unemployment and the Great Recession, with the special election for a key Massachusetts Senate seat just a couple weeks away, Obama announced himself a liar and promise breaker of the first order. And no ordinary promise it was! No sirree, Barack Obama chose to compromise on the one issue he pledged was “firm,” to never support  “any form” of tax increase on families earning $250,000 or less.

Now the president and his most-devoted followers may disagree, but a majority of us view Obama’s backing of a proposed 40% excise tax on so-called “Cadillac” health plans as a promise to break a promise. And the majority who voted against Coakley yesterday, no doubt, see it that way too. Many of them heard or read that snippet of news and considered their own financial prospects over the bleak horizon, each wondering how long it would take before their particular health-care plan qualified as “Cadillac” and how well they might sustain such a crack over the head and shuddered a little, unsure whether that would be the final straw, the tipping point into personal financial ruin. And then they voted.

One year has passed and what we’ve learned is that the Obama administration is an easy touch if you’re already extremely  rich and a fat-knuckled fist up preferably unexplored nether regions for the rest of us. We expected change from Obama, something different from what we got for eight years under George Bush and the Republicans. Reality is,  Obama and the Democrats have mostly given us more of the same. Some of the words are nicer. They offer a kind gesture here and there. But where it really counts, on issues that matter to most Americans — working, squeezed-on-every-side Americans — the last year has taught us to expect very little from this president in the way of true change and to expect even less from this congress.

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Part Two of this series will be: What President Obama and the Democratic Party can do to salvage their reputations and what we can do to encourage them in that process.

Last month Raul Ramos y Sanchez was kind enough to answer a few questions I had about his novel, America Libre. The issues at play are complex and rooted deep in our collective and separate histories as Americans.

“It’s a sad fact that the U.S. public pays little attention to an issue until there is blood on the streets. With this novel, I put blood on the street in fictional form with the hope of preventing a similar fate in real life. My fondest wish would be for the novel not to be a prophecy.”

Raul Ramos y Sanchez

MARK: Where did the idea of America Libre come from? Did it start with one of the characters? …something in the news? …the idea of the United States breaking out into a civil war? …or with the premise of a new Hispanic nation being carved out of the southwestern US? …or something else entirely?

RAUL: Most people think the immigration issue inspired America Libre. Actually, when I began the novel in 2004, my primary focus was to dispel the many misconceptions about the Hispanic identity that pervade U.S. culture. At the time, I was working on a public television film titled Two Americas: The Legacy of Our Hemisphere. The film contrasts the differences in political traditions and attitudes toward race between the Anglo-dominated culture of North America with the Hispano-dominated societies in Central and South America. I’d been fortunate enough to attract a collection of scholars from the U.S., Latin America and Spain on the project that included professors from Yale and Harvard (Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of beer summit fame among them). But despite this world-class academic team, finding funding for the film was proving difficult. So while waiting for the foundations to respond, I began working on a fictional piece based on the same premise. I’m still waiting for the funding on the film, by the way.

The first scene I wrote actually turned out to be the last scene of the America Libre trilogy. (I don’t want to provide any more details since that would be a spoiler for the entire series.) That final scene set the premise for the plot and created the main characters. I have been writing everything up to that point ever since. In fact, I am presently in the editing process for the sequel to America Libre which will be released in January of 2011 by Grand Central Publishing.

I think it’s worth mentioning more on the original motivation behind America Libre: common misconceptions about Latinos. Most mainstream Americans, and even some Latinos, see Hispanics as much more of a monolithic group than we really are. In reality, the people of Latin America are as diverse as the people of the United States. But, for a number of reasons which I will discuss later, people of Latin American origin in the U.S. are lumped into a monolithic group labeled “Hispanic.” This label fosters a number of illusions, but the primary misconception about this identity is that Hispanics are a single race.

Few in the United States would assume everyone with the last name Johnson is part of the same race. Yet, when someone’s last name is Jimenez, many people do exactly that. This assumption is in sharp contrast to the facts.

The primary racial makeup of the U.S. and Latin America were shaped by the same historical forces: 1) the presence of indigenous people, 2) European conquest and colonization and 3) the importation of African slaves into the New World. Immigration from Asia and the Middle East played a smaller yet significant role in north and south as well. So the basic genetic stock of both the U.S. and Latin are essentially the same. Some say the difference between the two is admixture. In other words, that the races are more blended in Latin America. While this is partly true, the real differences lie in our perceptions of race. But let’s look at the issue of admixture first.

The earliest English colonists arrived in North America in the 1600-1700s as economic and political outcasts. The English countryside had undergone a massive switch from grain farming to sheep herding to fuel England’s exploding textile industry. This threw thousands of peasants out of work. These unemployed farmhands and their families flocked to England’s cities where squalid, crime-ridden conditions bred social unrest. Eager to be rid of these potential troublemakers, the English crown found a convenient solution: ship them to the wilds of North America, a relatively short trip across the North Atlantic. So the English arriving in North America often came in family groups. Moreover, most were working class people capable and willing to carve a life from the new land. The Pilgrims, (who were actually called Separatists), were but a small group among many other English outcasts.

In contrast, the Spanish arrival in the Americas was more conquest than colonization. Spain had recently ousted the Moors after a 700 year occupation. Christian religious fervor was high and the nation was awash in veteran soldiers. So Spain’s “surplus” people bound for the New World were typically single males. These men were adventurers and warriors, not farmers and craftsmen.

Because of the differences fueling the migration to the New World, English and Spanish encounters with the hemisphere’s indigenous people differed considerably.

The Spanish actively sought out native populations. They wanted new societies to plunder and new converts for their faith. So the conquistadores explored both North and South America before centering their New World empire in two areas with the most wealth and highest concentration of native people: Mexico and Peru. Being mostly males, the Spanish conquerors often intermarried with the daughters of the indigenous aristocracy—although many would eventually send for “proper” wives from Spain.

Meanwhile, the English had little use for the indigenous population as sources of labor–or brides. The English wanted only one thing from the natives: their land. So the English sought to displace indigenous cultures with their racially segregated societies.

Were this the end of the story, the myth of Hispanic admixture would be true. However, history is much more complicated.

Throughout its history and into the present day, the United States has continued to receive immigrants from all parts of the world. The peak of that immigration came between 1840 and 1910, a period now known as the Ellis Island era. Most of the immigrants during this period came from Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe. Little known to most mainstream Americans, Latin America experienced a parallel migration of Europeans during the same period, primarily to the temperate zones of South America. Most remarkable of all, this European migration drastically changed the racial makeup of many Latin American nations with population densities lower than that of the United States. Argentina and Uruguay, for example, became nations of predominantly European ancestry. As a result, some Latin American nations today accurately mirror the racial makeup of the United States. This reality, however, is almost wholly unknown to the U.S. public.

Our misconceptions about the racial identity of Latin Americans become especially pronounced when it comes to Afro-Latinos. U.S. films, television programs and commercials rarely portray a Hispanic as a person with Sub-Saharan African phenotypes. Not surprisingly, few mainstream Americans think of someone black when they picture a Hispanic. Yet the startling fact is that 95% of the Africans brought to the Americas in bondage arrived in South America and the Caribbean. Only one in twenty black slaves arrived in North America. In fact, more people of African descent speak Spanish than English in the Americas today. Despite this overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the idea of a black Latino baffles most mainstream Americans—and even many Latinos in the U.S. ignorant of their own history.

As you can see, Mark, the weight of evidence against U.S. misconceptions about Hispanics as a race is considerable. Yet these stereotypes persist, reinforced every day by official reports that divide the U.S. population into four “racial” groups: White, Black, Asian and Hispanic. It’s difficult to buck such a widely ingrained myth.

In writing America Libre, I developed characters that portray the true racial diversity of Latin America. Uruguayan-born Josefina Herrera is blond and blue-eyed. Panamanian Jesus Lopez is of African descent and indistinguishable from a U.S.-born black. I also tried to weave some of the historical facts listed above into the novel’s narrative without interrupting the flow of the action.

MARK: You used the phrase, “Hispanics as a race.” The word “race” is burdened with all sorts of connotations for Americans today, who tend to focus primarily on skin color and genealogical history. You seem to have a more expansive view. What do you mean when you say, “Hispanic race?”

As you point out, your Hispanic characters vary from each other in nationality, skin color, educational and economic achievement — a complexity that’s clearly lacking in most portrayals of Hispanics in U.S. media. Now I thoroughly understand the value of smashing racial and ethnic stereotypes, but you could have achieved that in any number of less-controversial settings. How does the story premise in America Libre serve or frustrate your goal of correcting American misconceptions of Hispanics? And is it working out as originally hoped?

RAUL: I think most scientists and progressive thinkers agree the term “race” is more a social construct than biological fact. There is no gene for any “race.” All the same, there are certain common genetic characteristics for people with similar ancestry. For example, many people of Sub-Saharan African ancestry in the U.S. show a susceptibility to sickle cell anemia. Skin cancers are more prevalent among those of European descent. The indigenous people of the Americas suffer more from diabetes than many other populations. Moreover, each of these groups has a racial label in the United States: Black, White and Native American. However, those labeled “Hispanic” in the United States are people from all three groups. I should add here that “Hispanic” is a term that exists only within the borders of the United States—and it’s a relatively recent invention. According to most accounts, the term was invented by the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the 1970s.

A wise person once said: “Race is an illusion. But racism is real.” This is unfortunately all too true. How people perceive a person’s race is more significant than biological facts. In the minds of many Americans, a person labeled “Hispanic” is presumed to have certain characteristics common to the “race.” Being hot tempered, passionate and devoted to family are the most common stereotypes. Just exactly how these traits are transmitted is never made clear, though I’ve heard many people (including the governor of California) say these traits are “in the blood,” an obvious reference to genetics. But just what blood would that be? European blood? African blood? Indigenous blood? This is just one of the many ways North Americans imbue the cultural similarities of Latin Americans with racial significance. In contrast, many in the U.S. feel there are national characteristics that set Americans apart: optimism, individualism, materialism, to name a few. Yet the idea these traits are genetic and an “American race” exists would seem absurd.

You might think racial stereotypes about Latinos are limited to the pickup-truck-with-a-gun-rack demographic. In reality, the concept of a Latino race is often fostered by politicians, corporations, academia and even some Latino advocacy groups. Each has something to gain from promoting this illusion.

Politicians from both parties often benefit from the illusion of a monolithic Hispanic bloc. For some candidates, Hispanics are courted for votes –although research shows Hispanic communities across the nation show little unanimity on most issues. For other politicians, a Hispanic race is a bogey man that helps stir fear among mainstream voters.

Corporate America is an enthusiastic booster of a monolithic Latino identity. The explosive growth of the U.S. Hispanic population has spawned a bonanza for “Hispanic marketing experts” eager to paint a simplistic picture of a complex group for corporations eager to sell their products. In this instance, it is often Latino-owned ad agencies and consultants who are pimping a false identity of other Hispanics.

Schools and colleges often receive government money based on minority enrollment. So any student whose last name ends in a “z” will be classified as a “person of color” and presumed to be underprivileged – even when they are no different in appearance and economic status than a student with a non-Hispanic name.

One of the largest Latino advocacy groups in the U.S. is the National Council of La Raza. (“La Raza” means “The Race” in Spanish.) The origins of this name come from Mexican politician and philosopher Jose Vasconcelos (1882-1959) who in 1925 wrote of a “cosmic race” in Latin America composed of the world’s three major races: White Europeans, Asian-descended Native Americans and Africans. While admirably idealistic, Vasconcelos’ theory is widely disputed by many Latin Americans who believe it creates the illusion of an evenly blended group with very little bearing on the actual diversity present in each nation. Nonetheless, the idea of a “Hispanic race” has support even among some Latinos.

Despite these widespread influences, the U.S. Census Bureau does not classify “Hispanic” as a race. In its official definition, the Bureau states “Hispanics may be persons of any race.” Indeed, the Census Bureau lists eight racial categories. Hispanic is not one of them.

Another widely held assumption is that “Hispanic” and “immigrant” are synonymous. When Sonia Sotomayor was first nominated for the Supreme Court, some media sources incorrectly identified her as an immigrant. In reality, Sotomayor was born in the Bronx of Puerto Rican parents. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, not immigrants. Not surprisingly, most anti-illegal immigrant rhetoric quickly descends into attacks on Latin American culture. In these tirades, Latin America is usually portrayed as squalid, ignorant and lawless. “Are you sick and tired of seeing your country turned into a Third World sewer by immigration?” asks one anti-immigrant organization. This is one of the most corrosive aspects of the illegal immigration controversy. The thinly veiled prejudice behind much of the anti-illegal immigrant rhetoric often offends even native-born Latinos in the United States who may not even speak Spanish or have connections to anyone undocumented.

The hatred for illegal immigrants has gone beyond words, too. Hispanics have become the number one victims of hate crimes in the U.S. since 2000. During that same period, extremist groups have grown by 40 percent. An Imperial Wizard of the KKK bragged about running out of membership applications after his group held an anti-illegal immigrant rally in Indiana. In the last two years, young men presumed to be Hispanic have been attacked by strangers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and New York. Clearly, negative preconceptions about Hispanics in the U.S. are creating serious consequences for all Latinos.

In America Libre, I tried to address these stereotypes about Latinos by creating a scenario where the hidden danger of these misconceptions for all Americans becomes very real. I envisioned a future where the disparate group known as Hispanics becomes radicalized and coalesces in response to prejudice and violence directed against illegal immigrants. When you consider large portions of the United States were once part of Mexico and Spain, you have the recipe for the type of ethnic conflict all too common throughout the world: the Basques in Spain, the Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka, the Chechens in Russia and that perennial hotbed of ethnic turmoil, the Balkans.

Without doubt, America Libre is a worst-case scenario. But the risk it represents could turn out to be the greatest challenge to U.S. sovereignty since the War Between the States.

Public reaction to the novel has been much what I imagined. Latinos have connected with the story, seeing their own feelings and frustrations reflected in the characters and storyline. Mainstream readers have been slow to embrace the book. I would say that’s primarily because the topic seems personally unimportant. Also, I think those with only a superficial knowledge of the subject may think it seems unrealistic. Unfortunately for all of us, if the novel does becomes more prophetic, that will change. The greatest criticism of America Libre has come, from the group the novel targets as one of the prime catalysts for the social upheaval: right wing extremists. America Libre has been the subject of the same hyperbolic bile directed toward illegal immigrants. No surprises there.

With America Libre, I chose an action-thriller genre to highlight social issues. It’s a sad fact that the U.S. public pays little attention to an issue until there is blood on the streets. With this novel, I put blood on the street in fictional form with the hope of preventing a similar fate in real life. My fondest wish would be for the novel not to be a prophecy.

Is America Libre “a wake up call to the dangers of extremism,” as its author Raul Ramos y Sanchez has claimed? Or does it deserve Phil Elmore’s epithet given on World Net Daily, where he called the novel “a thoroughly evil book” and said that it  “…exists for one reason only: to foment hatred and revolutionary sentiment among” Hispanics?

Elmore titled his “review” of America Libre, “Anti-Anglo racist tripe.”

Now just when I was ready to complain to the novel’s author about his  portrayal of non-Hispanic whites as ignorant, bigoted, arrogant, culturally blind, mean and nasty, Mr. Elmore chose to open his virtual mouth and vomit a rant of such reactionary, xenophobic, anti-immigrant venom, that I am left blushing before Raul Ramos and all Hispanic-Americans.

America Libre is a work of speculative fiction set in the second decade of the 21st century, centering around the evolution of Manolo Suarez, from loyal American and veteran Army Ranger to militant Hispanic nationalist and traitor. A lot happens in this novel’s 353 pages–probably too much.

Even by mainstream standards, this book is thin, considering the subject and number of characters at play. Were I Mr. Ramos’ publisher, I would have highlighted a dozen or so key passages and then said, give me another 350 pages.

However, Latina Magazine and USA Today both recommended America Libre on their summer reading lists, and if you want a fast-paced political thriller that you can read over a weekend, America Libre delivers. It’s entertaining and thought provoking. But considering the issues involved, from civil war to concentration camps to murder, love, devotion in marriage and loyalty to country, this book may have worked better had it been written to be read over a Russian winter instead of a California summer.

But this weakness hasn’t kept America Libre from resonating with Latino media.  In addition to a long list of interviews and book signings, Raul Ramos won the 2008 International Latino Book Award for Best Novel-Adventure or Drama in English, beating out veteran novelists Guillermo Arriaga and Cristina Garcia — no small achievement.

Still I keep coming back to the writer’s aspiration for America Libre to be more, to be “a wake-up call.” The author is obviously up to the task. He can plot an epic, multi-layered story and he can write crystal clear prose. Raul Ramos’ background in marketing might have been behind the decision to hyper-compress the novel, which hasn’t hurt it in the media but has left it vulnerable to criticism by serious readers of American literature, a vulnerability that radicals like Phil Elmore like to exploit.

Publisher’s Weekly described the problem succinctly, as an ironic “lack of diversity.” The so-called “Anglos” do tend to be very shallowly depicted, and they do behave abhorrently and inexplicably. But I am reading from the point of view of a middle-aged white man, so my emotional reactions may be biased.

If I were lucky enough to sit down and have a conversation with Raul Ramos, I would ask him:

• Is this how Hispanics really see non-Hispanic white Americans?
• Where are all of the other ethnicities that call America home in your book?
• Among the “Anglos,” where are the progressives, the anarchists, the socialists, the LGBT activists, the civil libertarians, the Greens and the Reds?
• Do you think we would quietly let the government force Hispanics to live in segregated ghettos or be hauled off to concentration camps?
• Don’t you think we would do a little rioting of our own in response?

Then I cringe. Memory and history make me shudder.

I cringe at this point in the imaginary interview because it’s not impossible to anticipate Mr. Ramos’ answer, which could be very short and to the point: You’ve already failed other victims of government power, why should we think you would be there for us?

He could point to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two or at the silent acquiescence of liberal whites to the Jim Crow laws that abused African-Americans for almost a hundred years after Reconstruction or to the systematic murder and oppression of indigenous nations and cultures within the United States, abuses that didn’t really come to an end until the 1970’s.

But that’s all ancient history, you say.

Perhaps.

But to that, Raul Ramos would only have to go back a  few years to point at the shameful passivity of America’s so-called progressives. He could answer my challenge by asking:

• Where were you and your progressives, anarchists, socialists, LGBT activists, civil libertarians, Greens and Reds during the so-called War on Terror?
  
• Did you do anything to stop the murder of civilians by the United States military in Iraq or Afghanistan?
  
• Did you force the government to shut down the prison at Guantanamo?
  
• Did America’s self-described “progressives,” who number in the tens of millions, take to the streets by the tens of millions and confront the Bush Administration after it became clear that it was engaging in war crimes?
  

No.

• Aren’t you even more passive before President Obama?

Yes.

From the viewpoint of the victims, we did nothing. We organized a few protests. We finally elected a new president. But on the whole, we did nothing, nothing, nothing. As bombs fell we did nothing. As prisoners were tortured mercilessly, relentlessly, we did nothing. As civil rights were abrogated and human rights were violated, we did nothing.

As soon as the pictures from Abu Ghraib came out in the media,  there should have been massive protests and strikes that would have brought this country to its knees and forced President Bush and Vice-President Cheney from office and put them and their accomplices on trial. But we did nothing. We did nothing then, like we did nothing while Japanese-Americans were being sent away to concentration camps, like we did nothing during Jim Crow, like we did nothing after Wounded Knee… Our long tired history and present reality of passivity before government lends credence to America Libre’s premise.

“Nothing will come of nothing,” says Shakespeare’s Lear, and war and self destruction results.

The flatness, the two-dimensional depiction of “Anglos” in America Libre, their moral absence in the narrative as viable human beings capable of asserting any counterweight to the oppressive will of a rogue government, is a permeating nothingness invading every chapter of this book. And as in King Lear, nothing in the face of power results in war and human misery and death.

Many “Anglos” may be appalled by the depiction of their race in America Libre, Hispanics may find it spot on.  Non-Hispanic whites may consider the book’s premise absurd, or as Phil Elmore put it, as some kind of…

La Raza fantasy of the “reconquista” – a Chicano nationalist movement that seeks to retake portions of the United States in the name of Hispanic racial and social justice. It is hate and an invitation to cold-blooded murder in the name of hate.

Hispanics and Americans from other minority groups may have — are having! — an opposite reaction to this novel. To them, the plot and characterizations in America Libre are more than plausible and are logical extrapolations from history and personal experience. In that, they are absolutely correct. Latinos have every right to think that when push comes to shove, most Americans won’t be there for them to stop a government gone mad, because we have failed others so many times before.

America Libre is a novel for all Americans. The emotions and the thoughts it provokes, the challenges it presents to us regardless of race or ethnicity makes it an important book. While not perfect, it is powerful. It certainly is not “an invitation to cold-blooded murder.” It is an opportunity to understand the experiences and fears simmering beneath the surface of America’s largest ethnic minority group.

As you read this novel, take the time to read yourself too. Those who feel threatened by it, who feel that their race and culture are being mis-characterized, should pause long enough to consider how Latinos may have felt threatened by the myriad characterizations of their people and culture in the media. Free your mind to empathize and understand. It’s not that hard and America Libre makes it easy.

@EileenLeft on Twitter showed me this great website that helps voters find out how congressional representatives voted on the health care reform bill.

By typing in your zip code and street address, this website will show you who your representative is and then generates a letter “thanking” or “spanking” this person for doing or not doing the right thing by the people. It then gives you the option of sending the letter. I chose to “spank” Jerry Lewis for voting with the insurance companies. This is the letter that was sent:

Representative Jerry Lewis,

I’m extremely disappointed to learn you voted with the insurance companies and against health care reform for me and my family.

The bill that passed in the House will make health care affordable, do away with insurance company abuses, help small business and our economy, and give us a choice of a public health insurance option.

It is a good bill, and it would provide quality, affordable health care to all.

Instead of standing up for the people you represent, you sided with the insurance companies and voted for the status quo – denial of care, skyrocketing prices, and medical bankruptcy.

When you have the chance to vote on health care reform again on the Conference Report, I hope you will reconsider and vote for me and not them.

Not a badly written letter, if I do say so myself… ;^)   Thanks Health Care for America NOW and thanks @EileenLeft.

Summary:  Senator Joseph Lieberman has taken a dump on regular Americans one time too many. Protest his threat to filibuster the public option by tagging your Twitter posts with #dumpJoe at the end of every message. Help us make #dumpJoe a trending topic on Twitter that the insurance companies and their Washington whores can’t ignore.

Sometimes a small gesture repeated enough times, by enough people, can make a big statement.

Senator Joe Lieberman (CT), who ran with Al Gore back in 2000, has vowed to filibuster any health-care reform bill that includes a public option. For me this is the last straw. It’s time to move this guy out of office. But only the voters of Connecticut can make that decision and I live in California.

Back in the 1980’s, people started wearing red ribbons at public events to raise AIDS awareness. Criticized at the time as a silly or meaningless gesture by some, the Red Ribbon became ubiquitous wherever TV cameras were present, such as the Oscars, Grammys, Golden Globe and Tony Awards. Sure it seemed like many celebrities donned the ribbon to me-too it for the media, but in the long run it didn’t matter. The word got out and AIDS as a public health issue became unavoidable and all of those little red ribbons certainly helped. So much so that other causes have since picked up on colored ribbons of their own to market awareness.

So this is what I’m going to do and I invite you to join me:  All of my posts on Twitter are going to wear the hashtag, #dumpJoe, until the full Senate has an opportunity to vote on a health-care reform bill that includes a viable public option or Joe Lieberman leaves the United States Senate, whichever comes first.

The point? To start a cacophony of voices on Twitter protesting this man’s flagrant shilling for insurance companies and to make an example of him that other politicians can’t easily avoid. A small gesture? Yes. Trvial? Possibly. But collectively, with thousands of us sticking #dumpJoe at the end of our messages, we can make this topic trend, and then millions will see it and want to know why we are saying, dump Senator Joe Lieberman.

I understand the temptation to only use #dumpJoe in posts about health-care reform. But this is a protest. It’s public. It’s supposed to be somewhat inappropriate and in your face. For this to work, we really need to use #dumpJoe in as many messages as possible, regardless of the subject of the tweet. It must be everywhere. It must slightly annoy, even if it makes skeptics say, “How stupid…” If the word gets out and the topic trends, we win, Joe and his insurance cronies lose.

In case you didn’t know: On Twitter the “hashtag” is any word or phrase preceded by the symbol “#” and it is a way of  categorizing your 140-character post under a given topic, big or small. Twitter tracks these and then updates them into a top-ten list that shows up on your twitter homepage, known as “Trending Topics.”

If you’re on Twitter, you probably know all this already. If you don’t know a tweet from a tweep, sign up and give it a try. I am @TemporalFlush. Follow me and I will be happy to introduce you to some of my friends. I think you’ll like it.

#dumpJoe

Note: Big thanks go out to @shoq, @Karoli, @catawu and, especially, @cynthiaboaz (inspiring us with #retireJoeLieberman yesterday) for helping me with this little project to shout #dumpJoe to the world.

Artists have something to accomplish in this society. Regardless of forms or media, our times require the presence of art and the commitment of artists to contest the values of this world. We need musicians and writers, painters and dancers, photographers and actors, web designers and dramatists… We need artists who speak truth to power, who connect us to human realities that technologies shroud and the prevailing forces of political and corporate power would have suppressed. But where are these artists?

Oh, there are an abundance of individuals trained and skilled in the arts. They rush stages and “networking opportunities” everywhere to showoff their chops, to promote themselves to the next level, to grab a headline, to meme their way into fame — or greater fame — and a millionaire lifestyle. They push, they tug, they bully, they whore themselves without limit, delivering work that is as tiresome and irrelevant and vapid as their ethics.

So the aesthetic void known as Kanye West snagged a few days worth of attention at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards by publicly bullying another aesthetic void, Taylor Swift, and in so doing he just happens to promote his latest recording, which he made with two other aesthetic voids. The next day, the trio of voids appeared on the premiere of Jay Leno’s new show (a noise machine if there ever was one), where West made an inarticulate apology, appearing to wipe away a tear at the mention of his late mother (who raised no fool but who did fail to teach her son how to behave in public or how to use his talents for something other than making money and getting laid).

Following his mea culpa on Leno, West and his collaborators, Rhianna and Jay-Z, performed Run This Town, a track from their latest, in which West raps, “It’s crazy how you can go from being Joe Blow/To everybody on your dick,” and Rhianna sings, “Life’s a game but it’s not fair/I break the rules so I don’t care/So I keep doing my own thing,” and Jay-Z says, “You can call me Caesar.” I’m not making this up… All said: The whole thing turned out to be a promotional success story that will most certainly be studied by students of marketing and PR for years to come.

In this song alone we have a fascinating study of the melding of nihilism, individualism, fascism and, of course, consumerism in contemporary American culture, of which there are many examples, but that is not what this essay is about. Nor should my criticism be construed as an indictment of hip-hop or an endorsement of any particular genre of pop music.

But what is clear is that West, Rhianna and Jay-Z would like us to see them as individualists and rebels. But they are neither. They are outlandish, I’ll give them that. However, individualists and rebels don’t contort and distort and exploit themselves in order to pander to markets and audiences, nor do rebels become millionaires. In fact I will posit an idea that should be obvious but may shock and, even, cause outrage: One cannot become wealthy or maintain wealth and be in rebellion against the forces and values of this society. To be rich, to even be merely “well off” in America today, requires a compromise of ones principles and identity to the point of irrelevancy. We may take this logic one step further: To be rich and powerful in today’s America is to be a slave.

American culture is a wasteland of prosperous “artists” producing little of any enduring consequence. The corrupting influence is money. Whether we look at young successful “artists” or at the repackaging of old successful artists, it’s all the same. Money is the single constant and degrading factor. Consider one of our most recent divas to break into the pop music bordello, Lady Gaga (a.k.a. Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, 23), a child prodigy who gained early admission into NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where “she studied music and improved her songwriting skills by composing essays and analytical papers focusing on topics such as art, religion, and socio-political order.” Her biggest hit to date is “Poker Face,” a song based on a pun, construed around oral sex and gambling (to say it’s about anything would be an overstatement). The promotion machine behind Lady Gaga is massive, and it’s all about making money by dressing her in little and by greasing her up in as much sexual innuendo and soft-core, self-exploitative outlandishness as possible. She creates and performs what is expected to sell, bothering with little to nothing else. It’s a long-in-the-tooth formula that Madonna gave us in the eighties. She didn’t invent it, she just took the outlandishness and self exploitation and subsequent profits to new extremes. Since then the formula has been predictably regurgitated through the likes of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Lindsay Lohan and, now, Lady Gaga.

Another way to look at the corrupting influence of money in art can be seen in the latest repackaging of the Beatles oeuvre, fifty years after the band’s formation and forty since they broke up. For audiophiles the music has been digitally re-mastered. For gamers, you can play along with the Fab Four vis-à-vis Rock Band. Take your choice or have both. But be prepared to pay and pay big to participate in the fantasy.

Popular music has always had it’s whorish side, with managers and record companies and promoters pushing artists to do a little more, show a little more skin, be a little more outlandish to sell a little or a lot more records or concert tickets. But now it has become so degenerate, that members of the media and audiences expect artists to be outlandish as a matter of course, to exploit themselves as a rule, not as the exception. Audiences demand pornography and combat and games.  It’s not art because it’s not original, it doesn’t speak to the times, it doesn’t speak truth to power. It is the perversion of art by marketers — of one sort by Lady Gaga, of another by Kanye West, of a much more destructive variety in the Beatle’s case.

The emptiness of Lady Gaga and Kanye West are so obvious, there’s really no point in exploring them further. But what’s being done around the Beatles library is something else entirely. No new music has been produced or can be produced by the collaborative efforts of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr. Copyright holders, record companies and estates (apparently those of Starr and McCartney included) now see the Beatles collection not as a cultural treasure to be preserved but as a capital resource to be mined to exhaustion. What the band accomplished between 1963 and 1969 was remarkable, if not unprecedented. Through their music, they somehow managed to artistically presage while simultaneously express the feelings of a generation through their music and personal explorations. How rare: To be both at the cutting edge and at the center of a culture.

Of course they didn’t stay there. Who could? But that it was done at all, and done well for six or seven years, is a landmark accomplishment. They spoke in, of and to their time. And they can’t be separated from it. All of this repackaging is more insidious than nostalgia, it’s fantasy of the pornographic order. Only worse. It’s a kind of vandalism by exploitation, in the same way the beauty of a young woman might be vandalized by her pimp and johns; in the same way Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta is being exploited as Lady Gaga; in the same way a smart and talented and creative young man like Kanye West exploits himself to grab attention and push record sales; in the same way a clever comedian like Jay Leno exploits West’s stunt to drive up viewership… It keeps going until we can’t tell the difference between the cultural significance of a “Strawberry Fields” and a “Poker Face” or a “Run This Town.” The situation is no better in publishing, film, painting, dance or any of the arts.

So what should the serious artist do? What position should that artist take when counterculture is mainstream and money is the single motivating force in that stream?

The only aesthetic appropriate to our times is rebellion. Not the rebellious poses feigned by the likes of a Kanye West or a Lady Gaga, but true rebellion. Total rebellion. Which is harder to do than you might think, because rebellion in this culture means rebellion against the accumulation of capital and, in a sense, against self interest. Money is the one constant. Money in this culture is both motivator and measure. It drives behavior and its accumulation is the measure of success. And in large enough amounts, we even seem to confuse it with quality.

The artists of rebellion must learn to aspire to a living wage from their labor and be satisfied with no more. They must assault the exploitative forces that vandalize and loot art and human beings. Our work must subvert the dominant values and desires of powerful people; which means we must stop thinking of networking opportunities and, instead, of chances to embarrass and shame the rich and powerful, of ways to call out the middle class and inspire the poor through our work and in our social interactions. The aesthetic of rebellion includes a lifestyle of true nonconformity with this hyper-commercialized society. One cannot put out a book or movie decrying the crimes of capitalism while maintaining a stock portfolio and an accountant to manage millions or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. The successful artists of today are fully co-opted creatures. They own a lot, and they are owned. Insofar as they are owned, they are castrated as artists.

None of this is easy. All of us fall short. Everyone and everything of quality  ultimately faces the temptation of being absorbed by this culture, of being co-opted into supporting its values and economy. Why? Because life is hard and money has a way of making it seem so much easier. Even when it’s not a lot of money. We’ve been trained to measure others and ourselves by how much money is made.

Who among us would be proud to tell friends at a party that we make minimum wage? Who really looks his nose down at the investment banker or the overpaid business consultant? It just doesn’t happen. Guys like Bill Gates and George Soros are still people we want to meet and talk to, even if they have less of real substance to say than the kid who flips burgers or the woman who cleans toilets. We want to talk to men and women who can make things happen. Who can make things happen for us. This thinking is ingrained in our being. It’s fundamental to our natures as Americans. Yet it is a lie. It is a lie that the rich and powerful and successful have more insight than the flunkies and losers. But if you agree with me, you are admitting that we are programmed to judge people and things by a metric that is factually incorrect and flawed at its core.

So what will you do? Will you stop living by that faulty metric and choose rebellion? Or will you concede to the lie because reality is just too hard to confront?

To the artist again: Art can prick consciences and motivate revolutions. It has done so in the past. It can do it again. I’m reminded of the apocryphal question Steve Job’s is said to have asked John Sculley back in the 1980’s, “Would you rather sell sugar water to kids for the rest of your life or would you like a chance to change the world?” Every time artists set out to work, that’s the option before them. Sugar water or revolution. Selling sugar water can make you a living. There’s no doubt about it. Taking the chance to change the world can make you poor and despised. But it can actually hit its mark and the world can be changed. No guarantees. But the world needs changing. Do you doubt that?

Jesus is alleged to have said, “whoever wants to save his life will lose it…” (Matthew 16:25, NIV). As usual, most theologians and dogmatists trade the profound for the menial. What is profound is the obvious paradox: saving means losing, losing means saving. The menial ideas you can find on the shelf of your local Christian bookstore.

Who died on September 11th, 2001?

The literal answer to that question can be heard at the ritual reading of names that we’ve all become so accustomed to seeing in news reports this time of year, with solemn faced politicians surrounded by flags and soldiers. But like everything in life, the literal fact obscures the absolute truth. 2,998 people were killed by nineteen terrorists that day. Two Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety-Eight.

On September 12, 2001, our nation of three hundred million committed suicide. More than any country on this planet, the United States exists as an idea. Kill the idea and you kill the country.

Hitler ruled Germany for twelve years. To remove Hitler the allies bombed German cities into dust, conquered every square inch of its territory, carved it into four sections, looked on and did nothing while the Russians literally raped and pillaged the third of Germany under their control and, still, Germany survived as a nation. They ultimately freed themselves, reunified, rebuilt their cities and their economy, and formed a government as unlike the Third Reich as one could imagine.

The Germans are not special. The Japanese, the Indians, the Chinese, the Poles, the French, the Israelis and others have similar remarkable and tragic stories. They are peoples with national identities that are as much tribal as ideological, reaching back hundreds if not thousands of years. These are nations that exist apart from the form their governments take. In contrast, the United States was not a nation before it formed its first government. The form and policies of our government define us.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This is our national creed. This is who we are. Without it we cease to exist as Americans and become something foreign. In reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, we discarded this creed. We went on a mad rampage. We dropped thousand-pound bombs that decimated neighborhoods to go after one man. We tortured human beings, murdered human beings, incarcerated human beings without due process of law, denied other human beings their “unalienable rights” by the thousands, imposed our will on millions, all in response to what happened on September 11, 2001. We set the Constitution aside to ensure our safety. We committed suicide.

Being the United States of America is not easy. Just like being Christian is not easy for an individual. One chooses from moment to moment whether be like Jesus or not, to be humble, to relieve suffering, to reject wealth, to rebel against the tyrants of this world, to stand up for the poor… It’s hard for just one person to do this. How much greater is the challenge for three hundred million people to choose to be American?

We can’t be like Germany and expect to survive a Hitler. We live and die by our values. We are literally nothing without our principles, what we believe and how we act on those beliefs. No one person can save America. No one person can kill her either. She cannot be conquered or saved from without. As Lincoln said:

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step over the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth…with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge… At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.

To be safe for all time, to live as free Americans forever, the people of the United States must seek for all people that which we wish to preserve for ourselves: equality and the preservation of every person’s rights. Yes, there is risk. Some people will wish to do us harm. But they cannot beat us.

Osama bin Laden and his men killed three thousand Americans. That and a short recession was the extent of the damage they accomplished. We chose to stop being Americans thereafter. Al Qaeda didn’t end the American century, the American people and their government did. And now it seems the whole world is slowly going dark.

Hope? You want hope? Freedom, justice, prosperity, security… To whatever extent we have these in our own lives, we cannot take them from others and feel safe or free. There’s your hope. It’s in your Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.  – Ernest Hemingway

Over the last few months three projects have been occupying my mind: a novel, which is developing more slowly than I would like but going well; a personal manifesto, which I thought would be a breeze but isn’t; and a series of open letters to my children, something that is hard to do without getting weighed down in muddy cliché and sentimentality.

More than any other writer, Ernest Hemingway has always called me back to the task.

Hemingway was an American prophet. I call him that because prophets attempt to speak the truth. Hemingway sought truth in his fiction and he labored to say it with unembellished precision. The Hemingway aesthetic is not just a guide for great writing; it’s a code for living.

Truth is always original and “beyond attainment.” Nevertheless it must be attempted and, “with great luck,” reached. Truth must be spoken because we live in a world immersed in lies and run by liars. We live in a perpetual tsunami of spin and distortion, commercial exploitation and fraud. Truth on the other hand comes in an eyedropper, delivered to us a few molecules at a time.

Most artists give up on truth and salve their injured souls by mocking those who haven’t given up. They make a career of lying professionally and some do it well. My task today and tomorrow and beyond is not to believe them and to follow Hemmingway’s advice, to keep working at “something that has never been done.”

That puts us in the realm of faith. I’ve never been much good at faith, doubt being more my specialty.

Yet the task at hand requires it. Maybe that’s where the luck Hemingway spoke of comes into play. The Apostle boiled his creed down to “faith, hope and love.” Let me suggest you write on a slip of paper alongside those three words: truth, faith and luck. Now tuck it away in your wallet or stick it some place where you’ll see it more than occasionally or ask your beloved to have it tattooed on a favorite spot, for when the Apostle’s code starts to fail you, Hemingway’s may help pick up the slack.

What is it to be human? What of morality and ethics in the early 21st century? Technology gives us the ability to do damage from considerable distances, but it also allows us to perceive the conditions of others beyond family, friends, our culture and language.

Regarding the former, we find it comes easy. Young gamers are recruited to pilot Predator drones over Pakistan from consoles in Nevada. The American people are easily persuaded to use deadly force anywhere in the world, to send their neighbors’ children to risk lives and limbs for dubious causes. The rights of others, particularly non-Americans, are abstract to us and flippantly discarded for the vague assurance of our personal and national safety.

Our rights are sacred and inviolable. The rights of others who are almost always poorer, certainly less powerful, are not equal to our own. They don’t have our wealth or our Predator drones. They aren’t Americans.

So should it be such a surprise that a large majority of US citizens polled are against closing the American “detention center” in Guantanamo Bay if that means bringing the prisoners back to prisons in the United States? No. We can’t be bothered with the rights of others. They aren’t us. They are presumed guilty. Fair trials are luxuries we cannot afford because they might be released by our judicial system. There may not be facts to confirm our suspicions of guilt. We may have driven them mad through years of torture and solitary confinement, they may hate us as a result, they may act on that hatred, they may plot to blow us up, we can’t risk that. We may have to pay for our crimes. Better continue committing the crimes than risk a reckoning… So goes the twisted logic of the privileged guilty, the logic common to wife beaters around the world.

Perhaps that is what America has become, a nation of wife beaters.

We feel so bad, so horribly bad the morning after. We see the evidence of our abuse and we promise it won’t happen again. But later on, morning becomes afternoon, we come home from a hard day at work, we knockdown a few beers, our fears overwhelm our guilt. She says something or does something that shows she knows us for the fraud we are. We think, we worry: She might call the cops. She may try to leave and take the kids. She says something again. She provokes us. We slap her, first with an open palm, then with a fist. We hold her down, pin her face to the floor, bend her arm behind her back, maybe it breaks, maybe it doesn’t. That’s a risk we have to take because we can’t let her regain confidence, dare not let her think she’s our equal or capable of living without us. So while we have her pressed to the floor, while she begs us to stop, choking on her own fear and saliva, we worry that she may not have yet learned her lesson, maybe her cries aren’t pathetic enough (who knows what motivates our paranoia?). So we sodomize her. Take our pleasure on her while we crack another rib or blind another eye, and hopefully squeeze every drop of individuality from her until all resistance has dissipated. Yes. America is a nation of wife beaters. Make no mistake.

Technology, it’s a wonderful thing. Kill from a distance, easy. Blow up a house, a city block, a village… All so easy. It also allows us to learn about the lives of others living anywhere in the world. But as for feeling empathy for the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza or for orphans in Brazil or for prisoners in Gitmo, might as well try to break the sound barrier driving an oxcart.

We can’t even work up much empathy for former-middle-class auto workers whose pensions and wages are being slashed to save mismanaged car companies. They have to compete, don’t you know? There are a couple billion Indians and Chinese willing to do their work for one-fifth, one-tenth the price. We have to compete. Can’t keep bailing them out. What do they do? Move a lug nut from here to there? Spoiled, unskilled, ungrateful unionized whiners. Times are tough. Better to break them. Better to sodomize them while the recession has them pinned to the floor.

So again: What is it to be human? What of ethics, morality? The answer is that it’s no different today than it was two thousand years ago. Technology only extends our reach to either empathize or destroy. It certainly doesn’t make us better. Only our choices can do that. And that technology has been with us since the beginning.

The league playoffs were scheduled for the coming Saturday. At Thursday’s practice he had to tell his coach that he wouldn’t be at the game. Coach went to the effort of looking straight into Billy’s eyes, making him feel nervous and twitchy and want to look away. Coach was a big man with fat calloused hands that he waved around a lot whenever he spoke, and he spoke loudly, except this time. This afternoon he was quiet and reassuring: “That’s OK, we’ll miss you. We sure will miss you.”

His mother insisted that he let Fred pick him up from practice that afternoon without fussing. She wanted the boy to call him “Uncle Fred,” but he couldn’t do that. Just thinking about it made his stomach go all twitchy again. A lot of things these days did that to him.

On the way to the mortuary he studied the stitches of a baseball in his hand. He adjusted its position between his fingers, as if preparing to knock somebody out with a fastball. He looked down at the gray carpet beneath his feet. It was Fred’s carpet inside Fred’s car. The last place in the world the boy wanted to be.

So he imagined himself back on the baseball field where he hit his first home run, a field of weedy green interrupted in places by hard clay. It wasn’t Dodger Stadium but it was the sweetest place in the world to this boy. He was on the pitcher’s mound, a batter before him, his father calling out from nearby but out of sight, “That a boy, Billy, that a boy. Just one more strike. You can do it.” He was in control here, even when facing a batter twice his size, in this ballpark he always landed the pitch and sent the kid back to the dugout in shame. On the mound there was no confusion, there were no arguments, no contradictions, no lonely surprises, just he and a friend, his comrade in arms behind the catcher’s mask sending him signals. A fellow knight of the round table. The boy nodded and began the windup–

The car hit a pothole hard, jarring him out of his daydream. He was beside Fred again, inside Fred’s car and looking around at the gray interior as if he’d lost something. Fred’s car, so gray inside, was bland and worn in places. Its seats were made of soft gray leather and thickly padded. It didn’t take turns well but rocked and swayed with the road and on turns it leaned uncomfortably. Unlike his father’s truck, a ferociously loud machine that seemed to mow through asphalt more than ride on top of it, Fred’s car was quiet and fragile.

Fred spoke: “I hear you’re quite the baseball player, son.”

The hideous man speaks, he thought to himself. “My name is William.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“I’ve told you that already.”

“Right, right,” Fred said, and then with patronizing emphasis: “William. Right-o…”

The hideous man’s car rocked and swayed with the streets, taking the boy… somewhere. He hated it, Fred’s car. He hated this car as much as he hated its owner. Hideous “Uncle Fred,” pink-faced and fleshy, with blood-shot eyes, both hands on the wheel, stiff as wood, as a mannequin, hideous and unreal. “Hideous” was the right word for “Uncle Fred.” Hideous Hideous Hideous

Fred spoke: “Why William and not Billy? I thought everyone called you Billy.”

“They used to,” the boy said. “They used to before…” He was unable to finish the sentence.

“Say again?” Fred leaned his head toward the boy, forcing him to shift right and press himself hard against the passenger-side door with a look of annoyed revulsion. Hideous Hideous

“I said, ‘They used to.’”

Fred spoke: “They used to what?”

So “Uncle Fred” was not only hideous, he was an ignoramus too. “Ignoramus” was a Mrs. Brown word. Most of his favorite words were Mrs. Brown words. And “ignoramus” was one she saved up for kids like Cesar and Joey whenever they cheated on a test or didn’t turn in their homework, which was pretty much every day. “What kind of job do you think you’re going to get with this kind of attitude?” her tirade would begin. “Do you think there’s an employer out there willing to pay any old ignoramous off the street who can’t spell or can’t do third-grade math and who refuses to do the work assigned him? Well? You’ve got to do better than this, boys.” Yes, the boy thought to himself, “Uncle Fred” is an ignoramus.

Feeling the uncertain need to explain himself, the boy said, “I read this book about William the Conqueror, see?”

Fred nodded his head like he was listening and actually understood. But the boy didn’t want to be understood, not by “Uncle Fred” at least, and with that he found an empty chair inside his soul and drew the silence around himself like an old family quilt in winter.

Fred spoke: “So you like history, do you?”

“No,” the boy said. “I hate history.”

“You said you liked William the Conqueror.”

The boy took in a loud, deep breath… “I didn’t say that.”

“I guess I don’t understand.”

“I said, ‘I read a book about William the Conqueror.’ That doesn’t mean that I like him or that I like history.” It struck him that “Uncle Fred” had a gift for exhausting him (another Mrs. Brown word, “exhausting”). He wondered if he did that to all kids, and then he wondered if he had kids. Kids of his own? It seemed impossible but nobody ever said. “Uncle Fred” had been living with the boy’s mother for almost two months, and the boy had managed, until this very minute, to avoid being trapped alone with the man, and now he wondered if the man had kids of his own.

Fred spoke: “But the name?”

“I read this book, see? It had some cool pictures of old helmets and stuff like battle axes and chain mail.”

“Yes?”

He took in another long, deep breath and exhaled. “My grandma, on my father’s side, used to talk about the family tree all the time. That’s where I found the book, see?”

Fred: “Where?”

“My grandma’s. I found the book at my grandma’s house.”

Fred nodded, yes. As the boy was about to continue, he stopped himself and dropped into silence again.

Fred spoke: “What does any of that have to do with your grandmother’s family tree?”

The boy thought about this question, he thought about whether he should answer and he thought about the tree. It went way back in history, to William’s conquest of England in 1066. The boy could see his grandma (his great-grandmother actually). She would sit at the head of her old dark brown dinner table. Billy seated across the corner next to her. It was their habit to visit her for lunch one Sunday a month, which she always called “Sunday dinner.” And when everybody had eaten, and the other adults were in the kitchen putting leftovers in the fridge or smoking outside on the back patio, she would start from the beginning, from the very top of the family tree, with the youngest son of a German nobleman, who had nothing of his own and expected nothing — that is, if he stayed at home with his family. In those days, she said, the oldest son inherited the entire family fortune, and this young man had five brothers ahead of him. She called him “a landless prince,” with nothing of his own and forever subject to the wishes and demands of others. So this boy from a noble family signed on with the French speaking Norman, a descendant of Vikings. The father staked his youngest son with enough gold to hire five hundred lancers to serve under his command, then said goodbye forever. She said that he proved himself to be a fierce and trusted warrior to William. So good that he was made a baron in the Conqueror’s new kingdom and sent to settle along England’s northern frontier, to subdue its defeated inhabitants and keep out the Scots — a people even the Roman Empire could not conquer.

He wouldn’t admit it to Fred, but the boy did love history. The history of his family, of the sacred dead who were always good and caring and brave and noble and faithful and trustworthy, a family he only knew through his grandma. But they were real to him and he loved them. That family the boy believed in. His faith in them sustained him even now, even as Fred turned his fat car into the mortuary parking lot, past his mother standing at the front door, to a parking space not far away.

As his mother approached he could see that her eyes were red, like she had been crying, but she had that angry look too. She rushed to hug him once he was out of the car. He felt like a limp rag in her arms. She bent down to look him in the eye, “I am so sorry, Billy. You know that, don’t you?” He nodded. “I’m so sorry,” she said again. Adults were always apologizing to him. “Little boys shouldn’t have to deal with…” searching, “this sort of thing.” The boy couldn’t look at her, so he found a rock on the ground beside her shoe and stared at that. With firmness she added, “We need you to be very quiet when we go inside.” He nodded the quiet assent of a slave.

With that she turned to Fred, “Thanks, hun. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She wrapped her arms around him and gave him a kiss on the lips.

A man in a dark suit and slicked-back hair greeted them in the lobby and led them to his office. He took his place behind the desk. Fred and his mother sank into two chairs directly opposite and Billy was given a small, hard stool a few feet behind them.  He wasn’t happy but he was content to remain silent and invisible.

“Please fill this out, with the name of the deceased, date of birth, et cetera,” the man said.

His mother spoke up, her voice raised so as to be heard with absolute clarity, “My husband and I were in the process of divorcing. Does that effect anything, you know, between the mortuary and myself?”

Billy couldn’t see much, just the top half of the man’s head as he read something. “As long as you were both still legally married, and you remain the beneficiary of his life insurance, through which we will receive payment, everything should go as expected.”

“Good,” she said, “that’s good.”

For more than an hour that afternoon, the boy sat, studying the backs of their heads, his mother’s and Fred’s, studying the acne on greasy man’s forehead and other details in the room. During that time he thought about the word “good.” It was a small word, an abused word, one that is often stolen by those who lie (regularly for your own good) and who attach it to all kinds of horrific things:  A tornado flattens a town, “It’s good that more people weren’t injured.” A woman is murdered, “It sure is good they caught that son of a bitch.” A man hangs himself before his divorce is finalized and the wife says, “That’s good news about the insurance, isn’t it?”

As the adults rose from their chairs, the boy noticed his mother dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. The greasy man came out from behind his desk and said in a calm voice, leaning in very close, “I know it’s hard right now, these situations are never easy, especially under the circumstances. But you’ll see, kids bounce back better than you can imagine. It’s just good that he has folks like you two to take care of him. Honest.”

THE END