ramblings

Once upon a time The New Rambler was entirely composed of things I wanted to write about but lacked an outlet for. I still lack an outlet, other than this, but I seem to be rather busier now than I was then. So instead I offer partial list of topics, to be updated as I see fit. . .

Busy Being Free: Freedom and Responsibility in Rock and Roll, 1965 to the Present (or possibly the mid-1970s)
starting with “Like a Rolling Stone,” with its salvo “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose,” and continuing through such classics as “Me and Bobby McGee” (”Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose“), with particular attention to the works of Joni Mitchell in songs such as “Cactus Tree” and “All I Want”

Men in Rock
simply because I’m so sick of reading articles about Women in Rock. “Men in Rock” would be both a celebration and an exploration of the role of masculinity in rock and roll, beginning, I suppose, with Elvis and ending perhaps with Prince, particularly during his “the artist formerly known as Prince” phase

The Romance Writings of Edward Abbey
an examination of the works of Edward Abbey and how they do (and do not) fit into the conventions of romance and erotica, with possible digressions to consider the concept of the romance of the wilderness in the American mind and the works of other writers, such as Terry Tempest Williams, who explore the erotics of place

In my new town, I am frequently called upon to do things I have never done before, or have never done with any regularity. Some of them, like hauling my own trash, are tedious but not really a big deal. Some of them are more troublesome. Near the top of that list comes the opening of the monthly school board meeting, at which we are all called upon to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

My background is probably somewhat unusual: I have never in my life been required or even asked to say the Pledge of Allegiance on a daily basis. When I was in third grade, some parents at my grade school became deeply upset that we weren’t saying the Pledge every morning. Our teachers put aside the regularly scheduled social studies programming for a few days, and we studied the Pledge of Allegiance. We looked up all the words we didn’t know and talked about them. We watched a little film on the history of the Pledge. We discussed the addition of “under God” (”your parents will probably remember when that phrase wasn’t there”) and talked about what God that meant and whether one might feel alienated if one believed in a different God, or gods, or didn’t believe in God at all. After due consideration of all these points, we voted. Yes, that’s right–we voted. Seven and eight and nine and ten and eleven and twelve year olds voted on whether and when we ought to say the Pledge of Allegiance at school. We voted for the option of maybe saying it for a special occasion, but it would of course be optional, and no one would be forced to participate. It never came up again.

I went to a small elementary school in the People’s Republic of Johnson County, Iowa. The students were mostly the children of doctors and lawyers and professors. I had fellow students who were Indian and Korean and Israeli, but none who were black. (African-Americans constitute, as I recall, 2% of the overall population in Iowa but 26% of the prison population; in Wyoming, I suspect, the numbers are even smaller, though probably similarly skewed.) It was not, then, the most realistic setting in the world, but it is the one I grew up in, and there are experiences, like books, that you may get past but never get over. That vote on the Pledge is one for me–both the fact of the voting and its outcome.

I try to go to the school board meetings here every month (I say try because I don’t always last until the end–after two hours, my resolve does begin to fade), but I don’t say the Pledge. In my younger years, I would have remained seated while everyone else stood. Because I am trying to forestall the day when the locals start running up the hill to the library, flaming torches in hand, yelling “Burn the witch!”, I now stand for the Pledge and the national anthem, but I don’t put my hand over my heart, and I don’t join in. It’s the best compromise I can make.

I was explaining this to an old friend (who, in fact, went to the same grade school I did, though her memories of it may differ somewhat), who wanted to know what objection I had to the Pledge. Was it the God part? No, I said, or not exactly–since I believe in God (the Christian God, no less!), I don’t object to talking about Him, but I don’t think others should be forced to do so. What I really object to is the whole idea of nationhood.

There has been a meandering discussion on Hermits Rock of late on the subjects of nationhood, nationality, citizenship, immigration, race, and other such small topics. Like Jeremy, I feel very little attachment to the United States as a nation, but I don’t have his reasons. I grew up in the US, in a household that was, despite its churchgoing, largely secular. When I lived in the Chicago area, I often got asked what nationality I was. The first time it happened I was at an almost total loss for words. My first thought was that the questioner was trying to determine if I was legal–a nonsensical thought, since I am in appearance as white as white can be. That in itself does not, of course, prevent me from being a foreigner, but it would limit me to being a foreigner of northern European extraction, and people do not seem particularly concerned about their presence in this country. I stammered and finally said, “Uh. . . American?”, with that ever so annoying rising inflection, as if I were questioning the fact.

What the questioner wanted to know, as it turned out, was just what kind of northern European I was. “I mean, I’m Polish, and my friend here is Irish,” she said. I explained that I was little bit of both, plus English, German, Swiss, probably French, a pinch of Native American, and God knows what else. She still didn’t seem satisfied: she wanted me to identify as one of these things, and I don’t. My ancestors have been on these shores far too long for me to feel any allegiance to their home countries. The first of them, German draft dodgers and fourth or fifth sons from England, arrived before the Revolutionary War and some of them fought in it (not, I presume, the draft dodgers). I could, if I wanted, belong to the Daughters of the American Revolution, though no one in my family has for generations, in honor of Marian Anderson.

But in truth I stammered my reply to the woman because I truly didn’t know what to say. I don’t think of myself as having a nationality. I know that I am American in cultural ways that are indelible, even if I forsake large parts of American culture. But the notions of nationality and citizenship have never made sense to me. Because I happen to have been born within a particular set of imaginary lines, I should therefore feel (and even pledge!) an allegiance to the entity encompassed by those invisible lines, to this thing called a nation?  Why?

My friend (remember her?–I apologize for the meandering nature of this narrative) brought up the social contract.  Didn’t I have some obligation to the country because of the things the country provided for me?  Well, yes: I have the obligation to pay taxes, which I do and to obey laws, which I mostly do (I won’t say completely–I’ve been known to drive over the speed limit).  I reap certain benefits from being a citizen, and in turn I accept certain of the chains that come with it.  But I can’t believe that accepting those chains carries with it an obligation of eternal allegiance to the republic.  The republic in question hasn’t even been around all that long, at least not when considered in the broader sweep of human history.

I believe in loyalty, I told my friend.  I am even somewhat hung up on it, especially when it comes to family and to friends.  And I believe in an overall allegiance to humanity–not that I don’t criticize them, God knows, but I believe that if your neighbor has fallen in the ditch, you should help him out.  I just don’t ask to see what kind of papers my neighbor is carrying before I help him out.

I was not at any immigration rallies on Monday (some photos and reporting from Chicago), and thus I did not face the question of what, if any, flag to march under.  It has filled my heart with gladness to watch the marches around the country in the past month.  Three years ago I attended the launch of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride in Chicago, which was more or less a nonevent in the local and national news (if for no other reason than “Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride” is quite a mouthful).  It was, however, a part of the mobilization that resulted in what we’ve seen these past few weeks.  That movement is something I could pledge to–but the key word there may be movement: a group of people, an idea, a groundswell with no borders.

For reasons I cannot fathom, this blog gets far, far more comment spam than my other, far more active blog, lis.dom. As a result I’ve had to turn the settings on Spam Karma up to “total beeatch.” It’s saved me from spending time every day deleting spam comments, but it might mean that real comments get caught as spam. I try to check periodically, but if you leave a comment that doesn’t show up, let me know, and I’ll go hunting for it.

My mother has always said that had my father chosen to join another church, he would have leaned toward the fundamentalist and that were she to chose another church, she would probably go to the Catholics. I may have pointed out that though different in style, there is, from a secular viewpoint, a great deal of similarity in substance between the two, but I’m not sure I ever did. Instead I said that were I to stop being an Episcopalian, I would probably become a Quaker.

As it happens, only my father ever left the Episcopal Church, but he never joined another one. He opposed the ordination of women, and so we stopped going to church in 1979. By 1981, he was dead. (That sounds, of course, as though it was leaving the church that killed him, which isn’t true, though it makes an intriguing theory.) Some years after that my mother asked if I would like to go to church again. “Your friend Heather goes there,” she said, which seemed like a good enough reason to me. We started attending Trinity Episcopal Church, which, at the time, had a female associate rector.

It took years to escape from my father. A few years after he died my mother asked at dinner one night if anyone would object if sometimes we had regular green beans instead of French cut. The live-in sitter and I both said we would not mind. My father would only eat French cut green beans, which were one of about three vegetables he tolerated (and all had to be just so–carrots had to be cut into sticks and then placed in a small bowl of ice water in the refridgerator for half an hour or so; green beans had to be French cut. I can no longer remember what the third vegetable was.)

I often wonder what our lives–my life in particular–would have been like had my father lived. The other day over at Hermits Rock, one writer related a story he had been told about the conversion of a former women’s studies professor:

a girl in her women’s study class convinced her that there is such a thing as evil, thus such a thing as absolutes, thus that the bible was right and that her women’s study class was teaching error because women’s studies doesn’t jive with the bible.

As I commented, the logic of the story was chilling in a variety of ways, but alarming most particularly to me because it could so easily have been a story someone told me about my father. A former student and later friend of his told me once of one of his early encounters with my father. “He asked me if there was anything that was absolutely true, and, being a good little relativist, I said no. He said, ‘Do you exist?’ I knew he had me, but I was young, and stubborn, and so I said I wasn’t sure. Your father then turned in his chair and went back to the papers he was reading on his desk. ‘Aren’t you even going to talk to me?’ I said, shocked. ‘I don’t talk to non-beings,’ your father said. ‘When you have decided you are sure of your existence, come back and we can talk.’”

I always thought the story charming and funny until a friend pointed out to me that it could just as easily be quite obnoxious. And intellectually speaking, it is obnoxious: by refusing to engage with anyone until they agreed in the existence of absolute truth, my father set the stage for the eventual triumph of his point of view, which followed inexorably from that first premise, just as the student’s argument did. Absolutes exist, therefore women’s studies is wrong. The Bible is right, therefore ordaining women is wrong.

I sometimes wonder why I am a Christian. I wonder not because I suffer from any crisis of faith but because there are so many ways in which it seems like a poor fit for me. I am no theologian, and I couldn’t really explain the historic episcopate to you if I tried. I know there are important theological distinctions between different branches of Christianity, but I could not explain them to you, and I doubt that most could. I go to the Episcopal church, I am sure, because it is comforting to me: I like the cadences of the service and the music. I am familiar with them, and familiarity breeds comfort and makes a foreign place seem a little like home.

It helps, I am sure, that the Episcopal Church has been, during my life time at least, progressive in many of its views and practices. We ordain women and now gays. Episcopal Relief and Development earns generally good scores as a charity. We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, but we also work in this world. Back in Iowa City, Trinity has been active in providing overflow housing for Shelter House in the winter since the program began a few years ago, and we have helped out with the Free Lunch Program for decades. The Episcopal Chaplaincy at the University of Iowa runs the Agape Cafe, which serves breakfast to those who are homeless and in need once a week. While its true that there is still plenty of class privilege at work in the church (and in some places a degree of sexism: when we attended a church in Indianapolis when I was in junior high, they did not allow women to be ushers. When I asked why not, I was told that because they had three ushers at each service, it simply wouldn’t look right to have one couple and a single man. I still can’t fathom the logic that led to such a position–could they not use three women, if a mixed group was so offensive to them?–but that seemed not to be an option).

Had I grown up in that particular church, or in any Christian community in which women were undervalued and gays not tolerated–had I grown up, say, in the church as my father would have wished it–I can imagine quite easily that I would be agnostic today. Had my father lived, I know I would have argued with him, but I don’t know whether I would have found myself able to stay with a religion that, however far its practices had drifted from his beliefs, was something he still believed in.

I would like to think that I still would have found my way, but I do no know.

It’s been a techy weekend around here: my friend Mitchell finished working out the kinks in the installation of a second WordPress blog, which will host my other blog, lis.dom, and I imported the lis.dom entries from Blogger and started categorizing them. I also downloaded and installed a couple of new themes, although I need to tweak them a bit before using them. . . .

I upgraded to WordPress 2.0 for this blog, and, since it’s now so easy to do, I imported the entries from my very short-lived Gone Suburban blog that I kept for a couple of months back in the fall of 2003 when I first moved to La Grange. So if you’re interested, you can read my bitter rantings about being an unemployed suburbanite in her late 20s by going back a few pages or just going to the suburbia category. (And incidentally, if anyone can tell me what all that weird warning crap at the top of the page is and/or how to get rid of it, I’d be grateful. Leave a comment, e-mail lauracrossett at hailmail dot net or AIM theblackmolly.)

Oh, and I installed Spam Karma on both blogs, which should make for much less time deleting comments about drugs ending in -ine and online casinos, which can only be a good thing.

I’ve been listening to the new Dar Williams album pretty much non-stop, especially since I got my computer back from Apple. (They even slapped a new keyboard on–my cat had clawed off several of the keys, and they don’t pop back on the way you think they might). I have a stereo, but it, along with most of my other possessions, is in storage–hence this whole computer listening thing. Luckily, unlike my father, I am not that fussy about sound quality.

I am feeling a little guilty because my copy of the album is a copy (though not really guilty, because, as much as I love Dar Williams, I am less than pleased with the music industry) and somewhat more guilty because I’ve realized I like her covers on this album better than her original material. I’m particularly taken with the version of “Comfortably Numb” she does with Ani Difranco.

I was once trying to explain the nature of Pink Floyd and the attraction they hold for certain males of junior high age (and up, come to think of it). I finally said that they had a song called “Comfortably Numb.” That seemed to do it. I always found it overwrought, but I love this version. Perhaps I’m just relating to Dar’s stated intention

The song is a commentary on who we are in the aftermath of the last election, no matter who you voted for. On one level it is about a dream which seems to have died in our society and the ultra convenient numbing I am witnessing these days.

Or perhaps I’m just down. The sun shone today, and on Friday, but other than that it’s been unrelentingly gray here for weeks. I had no idea before I moved to the Chicago area that it really ought to be called–in the winter, at least–the Gray City, not the Windy City. I have one of those fancy lightboxes, and I use it from time to time, but it’s just not the same. The other day I asked a woman here in the suburbs when she’d last seen the stars. “Last night!” she said. “I have glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling over my bed!” It’s kind of like that. Or, as my college friend Theo once said of File Maker Pro, then the reporting system for Campus Patrol: “it’s like a vibrator–it gets the job done, but it’s not the same as the real thing.” Well, perhaps it’s not quite like that. . . but you get the idea.