full fathom five

A timely reminder from heroes

    I've been away book-touring, so I haven't posted here for a long time.  I'll be leaving again tomorrow as well, but it's been wonderful to be home this week of the election, and to reconnect with my ESL students.  They are mostly Chinese, with one Thai woman and a Columbian for an interesting variety of perspective.

   The Chinese students work about sixty hours a week among local Chinese restaurants, so they're always tired, always dragging a bit to class, yawning, and resigned to nothing more than their present routine throughout their lives.  They're working for their children,  and have no expectations for themselves.

    But yesterday, the morning after the election, the students walked quickly into class, their heads up, making eye-contact.  It made me smile, and I asked M., one of the three with citizenship so that he could vote, if he was happy.  "Yes," he said.  "Yesterday I make my dream come true."  

    Another, L., had stayed up late to see Obama's acceptance speech.  Despite the fact that she'd had only a few hours' sleep and was facing into another 12-hour work day, she looked fresher, more alert than I'd ever seen her.  She said her son, in his last year at N.Y.U. and eyeing a particularly tough job-market, had called in tears after the speech.  "Now we have hope," she said.  

    I know that M. and L. were thinking of their children when they said these things, but I find great comfort in Obama's shining the light for a few moments of these last few days on people like my students themselves.  He eulogized his grandmother, who died election eve, as an unsung hero.  

    As someone new to the definition of hero, having had to research and write my way to an understanding of my father's sacrifice in WWII in my late-fifties, I finally can appreciate people who uncomplainingly sacrifice sleep, comfort, status, dignity, vacations, health, any hope of retirement, and even their lives - for future generations.  In Dreams of My Father, Obama's grandmother has to forfeit her dreams for retirement after her husband's sales career stalls, and re-enter the work-force in middle-age, slowly working her way up at a local bank.  Obama makes her sacrifice come alive in showing her pretzling herself every morning into a suit and heels, coming home at night with aching feet to cook dinner.  

    Before I got home from my recent book-trip, I was bemoaning the fact that the economic debacle will make it impossible for my husband to retire next year as we'd planned.  It only took a day back with my students to realize how lucky I am that we can think of retirement at all, any time.    

                    

Balancing Act

Everyone I know is trying to economize, and the hard thing is to compromise, just slow down our consuming rather than bring it to a grinding halt, thereby contributing to the freezing up of business.  Slowing things down means going a longer time between haircuts, dental cleanings, and oil-changes; and substituting high-priced goods like organic coffee-beans, arugula, and fresh salmon for cheaper ground coffee in a can, Boston lettuce, and chicken.  It's hard, even so, to avoid hurting small local businesses in these attempts. 

    But it's the only way I can think of to get some sense of control in the chaos of this past week.  This and trying to focus on the riches we still have: freedom to think and speak our minds, domestic peace under the rule of law, peak foliage season here in the Northeast, our health, and good friends.   

The Debates

Today on NPR, commentator Daniel Schorr called the Vice Presidential debate a draw because neither candidate fulfilled negative expectations. Palin didn't look naive and Biden wasn't too wordy.  I earnestly hope this is true, because it looked to me that Palin won, based on my assumption that the portion of the viewing audience who decides things based on appearance far outnumbers those who have to step back, read, research, and reflect before they can decide. 

Palin shows an impressive grasp of how to sell herself to this first kind of voter.  She smiles often, talks readily and forcefully, and is almost always positive.  This latter technique means that she almost never addresses problems, or if she does, she quickly summarizes them with a catchy phrase like "bridge to nowhere," and moves on to the sunny future McCain will give us.  And so, while Biden answered the moderator's questions by identifying the problem so that we could follow the reasoning of his proposed solutions, Palin skirted the questions, going straight to bright futures.  For instance, when asked how they would fix the economic crisis or end the Iraq War, Biden outlined policies of the Bush administration that got us into both messes to underscore how his solutions represent change.  Palin then responded to Biden by saying something like "There you go again, looking backward.  McCain is forward-looking, pointing the way to a better future." 

And Biden replied to this with "The past is prologue,"  - and I wanted to turn off the TV.  The number of viewers who don't understand what he means by that, or won't bother to figure it out, and who would rather hear palliatives like "a better future," far outnumber the viewers who want to hear problems clearly addressed. 

I'm not saying this out of elitism or because I live in the liberal northeast or because I'm cynical or prone to seeing the glass half-empty.  I'm saying this because of the last election, when Bush - who talks platitudes rather than problems - beat Kerry.

Another way Palin resembles Bush is that neither of them correct themselves when they mispeak.  They just blunder on - with confidence.  This is brilliant on Palin's part, because when she said things like "The toxic mess of mainstreet has spread to Wall Street," or misnamed the general in Iraq who replaced General Petraeus, she didn't blink.  She went right on talking forcefully and with a smile.  My ESL students, who aren't even fluent in English, noticed at least one of these times, and ventured that maybe Palin isn't smart enough to realize that she's made a mistake.  I told them I don't think so, and I differ here from many of my friends, too, who say that neither Palin or Bush are very bright.  I'm afraid this is wishful thinking.  They are smart, to my mind, in knowing that they project strength, reliability, and know-how if they talk past their mistakes rather than saying "oops, I mean the toxic mess of Wall Street."  It takes a lot of practice to perfect this sprightly flow of words, to rid oneself of any show of hesitation, even of any ums and ahs. 

I think both these people are superb politicians.  They have a sophisticated grasp of what pleases the majority, and that plus their ability to deliver it should never be underestimated.          

Three Elephants in the Livingroom

I find three things missing in all the talk about the financial bail-out.  Although there is endless acknowledgement that we, the taxpayers, will be responsible for having to bail Wall Street out of a mess that they clearly made, there has not been one apology to us.  Not in Bush's speech last night, nor in Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke's, nor from any of the failing Wall Street firms', Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae's, CEO's.  And none of the pundits even mentions this lack.  Am I the only one who "hears" this gap as a silence that deafens?  Am I the only one who thinks it's the epitome of boorishness and incivility to blame, blame, blame, yet never offer a whisper of apology to us, the people who will have to clean up the mess?

    And in these words "have to," above.  Isn't that the way it is?  And yet suddenly we're hearing all kinds of talk as if it's up to us.  Talk like: The American people should get some quid pro quo for their money.  They should demand more oversight of financial markets, an investigation of who got us into this mess, and no more golden parachutes for executives of failing firms.  So it seems there's another glaring omission, another elephant in the livingroom: that we have no choice.  We will be taxed to clean up the mess, just like we were in the late '80's with the savings and loan debacle.  And yet we're being advised on what we should demand of lawmakers.  Hmmmm.

    And another omission in all the talk of the financial meltdown is The Iraq War.  Doesn't the fact that the U.S. treasury, after nationalizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and rescuing AIG, must now turn to the taxpayers to bail out the rest of Wall Street, have something to do with the billions of dollars that have been streaming out of this country since we invaded Iraq?  Doesn't it stand to reason that we would have had some kind of a cushion against this bail-out if not for the war? 

    If I'm wrong, I'd love to know.  Just let's talk about this possibility, get it out in the open. 

    And, as usual, it's not enough to rant and rave here on a blog.  I've now got to write to my congresspeople, which is what I recommend to any of you who feel these and undoubtedly more glaring gaps in recent public discourse.    

Church State?

I went into Portland yesterday and noticed the flags all flying at half-mast.  Someone told me it was for the pope.

  I thought there was a separation of church and state, or is the pope some kind of national hero?