Fourteen Years After

I wanted to write something about 9/11 today, even though most anything worth saying has been said and said again many times over the years. I think in the end my hero Charlie Pierce got it right when he wrote that “the sad, lasting legacy of that day 14 years ago today, and of all the different things that have been made of it since then, is that it is the day that America finally went mad.”

It’s hard to refute that, from where I sit. Like a nose-punched bully, we ran rampant, and the damage we did to ourselves and the world will take a very long time to repair. We are now an America that’s tortured, that’s executed our own citizens by drone strike without due process of law. We spent a trillion dollars to go to war with a nation that didn’t have anything to do with the attack (and continued our strong alliance with the nation most of the hijackers were actually from), and made room for the Islamic State to come into being when we left at the behest of the government we installed. Domestically, we went from a proto-fascist state where folks with the wrong t-shirts were escorted away from political rallies to a failing state whose political process has been hijacked by a faction who doesn’t believe government should be allowed to govern. And those are just the highlights.

Despite the patriotic memes in my facebook feed, I don’t want to remember 9/11. I don’t want to remember the fear and the pain and the determination to exact vengeance.

No, I want to remember the days and weeks after, when the divisions between us fell away. When we weren’t Democrats and Republicans and liberals and conservatives but Americans united by grief, shocked out of our petty disputes and tribalism by this unthinkable enormity. I want to remember how we all came together, how the world was ready to rally behind us. I want to remember the moment when it seemed possible we could make something good out of this horrible tragedy, when our common humanity united us and we were kinder and more real with each other.

A lot has happened in the fourteen years since then, and those days when what united us was stronger than what divided us seem very far away now. But it’s important we remember them. It’s vital to our well-being, both as a nation and as individual human beings. Because we’re all in this together, whether we remember it or not.

Making Gratuities Gratuitous

Depending on who you ask, tipping as practiced in the contemporary United States is either a crassly exploitative transfer of economic risk from a business to its employees which leaves them vulnerable to wage theft, sexual harassment, and economic uncertainty or a great way to earn a good living working part time for cash in hand — much of which is untaxed — leaving time to pursue any number of artistic or academic endeavors while sleeping in every day and getting paid for being likable.

As someone who spent the bulk of his adult life working front of house in restaurants and bars, I think I can say pretty definitively that both of those things are true. Continue reading “Making Gratuities Gratuitous” →

Put an Asterisk Next to His Accomplishments: Why It’s So Difficult to Get a White Man to See, Much Less Admit, His Own Privilege

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his [privilege] depends on his not understanding it.”

-Upton Sinclair, paraphrased

Very few people see the world as it truly is. It’s not our fault; that’s just how human brains work. For the most part, we only see what we’re looking for, what our worldview and training prepare and allow us to see. And it’s useful, even necessary: imagine what your life might be like if you were conscious of everything, every quantum of sense-data, every implication and nuance of every thought and decision. Without reasonable filters, you’d be overwhelmed, unable to sift through the reams and mountains of input in order to make enough sense to act or even just understand.

The flipside of the coin is that those filters can and often do filter out useful, even necessary information, salient facts and inconvenient truths that clash with our worldview and training. Cognitive dissonance ensues, and we find ourselves in the position of the robot caught in a logic trap, saying ‘Does not compute, does not compute’ over and over until our mainframe overheats and seizes up in a cloud of smoke, shutting us down.

Of course when that happens to people, we don’t generally seize up and shut down. Not literally, anyway. Mostly we just get angry and deny whatever information slipped through the filter to dissonate our cognizance. And who can blame us? It’s a lot easier than recalibrating (or replacing) our much-beloved and ever-so-useful filters.

In The Question Concerning Technology, the philosopher Martin Heidegger characterized our modern way of knowing with the word enframing, that is, by capturing what we sense and experience and placing it within a set of bounds by which we can render it meaningful. That sense of meaning is important, because it defines the grammar by which we interpret the narrative of our lives.

Its important to note that that grammar is both positive and negative, in that it allows certain formulations while disallowing others. This is why it’s so hard to get people to see their own privilege, especially cisgendered white men, who are most privileged of all.

Not that most of them will admit it.

Why won’t they? After all, to those outside the frame of cisgendered white male privilege, it’s plain as the nose on your face. The whole system, our whole society is set up with us at the top of the pecking order. In earlier times such was taken as both just and true, a sign of some inherent superiority or God’s will.

As Roland Barthes said in his book Mythologies, myth is what turns history into nature.

These mythologies are more contentious nowadays, and rightly so. But they are insidious, both in the macro-level social environment and in its micro-level reprise in our minds. They are at odds with new, and to my mind better, notions of egalitarianism and a level playing field, a world where, to paraphrase Dr. King, a person is situated by the content of their character and not by qualities outside their ability to determine.

Which is why even straight white guys (like me) who are allies and progressives can have real difficulties recognizing and admitting their own privilege.

In the end, I think it has mostly to do with our self-assessment. Our place in the narratives we tell ourselves about our lives. To recognize our privilege requires us not only to endure but embrace the cognitive dissonance that comes from admitting truths that undermine our view of the world and our place in it, which by itself is painful enough. But difficult as that is, that’s not the bit that really undermines our sense of self. What undermines our sense of self is the asterisk it requires us to put next to all our accomplishments. That’s the bit that sticks in the craw, because part of those insidious received mythologies that make up our personal narrative grammars is that a man stands on his own two feet and wins his advantage from the world through his own blood, sweat, tears, and toil. Admitting to a privileged spot in the hierarchy and the advantages that go with it undermines that sense of accomplishment, that sense that a man has earned what he has, and therefore deserves it. Take that away, even put an asterisk next to it, and that man feels like less of a person.

It takes a lot of heart to admit something like that.

Look, the thing is, most privileged people don’t feel privileged. And compared to the rockstars and oligarchs at the top of our social pecking order, they aren’t. Even with the advantages of cisgendered white masculinity, being accomplished enough to self-assess positively on your own merits takes more effort and sacrifice than most people can muster. To admit that folks without those advantages have a harder time of things can require a fundamental re-evaluation of the mythologies by which we live our lives and structure our society. That the work is necessary makes it no less difficult.

I Read Only Books by Women For a Year: Here’s What Happened

I read a lot of great books, is the short answer.

So, a few days ago writer K Tempest Bradford published this article, in which she challenged readers to stop reading white, straight, cisgendered male authors for one year. Sadly (and predictably), certain corners of the internet exploded in rage at the notion (she has assembled a lovely collection of rage-tweets here, if you enjoy that sort of thing). I won’t reprise their objections, which savvy interneteers will likely be able to intuit themselves, nor pass judgement on any validity those objections may or may not have. But it so happens that I recently spent the better part of a year doing something very similar to Ms Bradford’s challenge. From roughly November 2013 until late last year, I read only books by women(*), many of them women of color, others not cisgendered (two of the new favorite writers whose work I discovered are married).

I did so for my own reasons, both personal and (for lack of a better term) professional. On a personal level it was simply the realization that the vast majority of the books on my overstuffed shelves were by men. I fought it for a long time, that realization. I mean, these were great books, each easily defensible on the merits. I have, if I may say, damned fine taste in literature, and reading material in general. Ask any of my friends. I’ve been an obsessive reader since kindergarten, the kind of person who never goes anywhere without a book and hasn’t since he could carry one. But looked at en masse, the unconscious bias in my collection was (and is) painfully clear (in my defense, I actually am a cisgendered white male).

When I was younger, the notion of placing any kind of limitation on my reading material for a whole year would have seemed preposterous. Now comfortably ensconced in middle age, it didn’t seem like that big a deal. It wasn’t like I was going to run out of good books to read, and while it might mean holding off on some things in my to-be-read stack, it’s hardly without precedent for a book to be in that stack for years before I get around to reading it. Really all I had to do was rearrange the order, though of course I used it as an excuse to go book-shopping, which is one of my favorite things to do.

The timing that November seemed propitious. I’d started writing Continue reading “I Read Only Books by Women For a Year: Here’s What Happened” →

One Man International Rescue Mission: After Action Report, Part 3

(Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

The Rio Quijos Eco Lodge sits not far from the bank of its namesake river, a well-known and -regarded star in the constellation of meaningful places in the river kayaking world, with many miles of class four and five rapids though the stretch the lodge sits on is lazy and calm. Across the river is a wall of green, forty feet high and infinitely detailed, overwhelming in its undulous profusion. The perimeter of the well-maintained property is the same, trees stacked on bushes competing with palms and bamboo for space in the alluvial soil. Banana plants grow between the stone-lined gravel pathways that lead between newly built cabins and a large timber and stone lodge. Off to one side, a ragged net hangs on a volleyball court whose edges are growing in. The lodge is simple and rustic, made from local materials (funny how the locavore lifestyle we pay such a premium for in Seattle is just how life is in much of the world), and pleasingly authentic, the furniture made from fitted stripped logs, the interior subtly modern, the rooms walled with rough-cut planks stained a pleasing and comfortable dark walnut color.

Michael was downstairs when I woke up, stretched out on the more-aesthetic-than-functional couch watching Netflix. His color was improved, and he looked to be in good spirits, though he was still pretty weak. I met Kathy, the lady in charge, and she made me breakfast while another man — whose name I never learned but who also worked at the lodge — kept yelling ‘El Toro!’ at Michael and telling me Michael’s problem was too much masturbating. I agreed, but I agreed much more with Kathy’s opinion that it was likely some kind of food-borne parasite that had done Michael in. I was inclined to agree, both because she probably sees this kind of thing all the time and because Michael is always hungry (that he hadn’t eaten in days told me a lot about how sick he’d been) and not always picky about what or where he eats. Kathy was obviously quite taken with Michael, who has the sort of unthinking charisma that both causes and comes from things just kind of working themselves out in his favor most of the time. It gives him the sunniest outlook, and because he’s genuinely happy most of the time people respond very positively to his presence, which perpetuates the cycle (a quick f’rinstance: on his way down to Ecuador, Michael managed to get his river kayak, packed with gear, checked onto the airplane for free, just by being Michael and saying ‘aw, shucks, I didn’t know’). As super-powers go, it’s a pretty good one.

But every super-power has a downside. Intestinal parasites are immune to charisma, and because things mostly work out for Michael he hadn’t done his traveler’s due diligence before coming to Ecuador. He hadn’t gone to a travel clinic and made sure his immunizations were updated and that he got whatever vaccines might be necessary for where he was going. He didn’t have a bottle of wide-spectrum antibiotics just in case, or a stash of over-the-counter vitamins and meds to keep his body strong. He’d declined the fifty or sixty extra bucks for the catastrophic travel insurance (you know, to deal with situations exactly like this one) when he bought his plane ticket. He hadn’t even learned any Spanish.

And it had worked until the parasite. After all, here we were, in gringo paradise, because Michael, being Michael, had scored a gig as a river guide for the tour company occupying the eco lodge, who were putting him up for free in this lovely gringo bubble in paradise.

At least he picked a good spot to get sick in. Continue reading “One Man International Rescue Mission: After Action Report, Part 3” →