My latest commentary was just published by KotoriMagazine.com, “Leonard Peltier and this Great, Funny Nation.” It is really a personal essay, but full of good links and resources.
“To give Leonard Peltier the last decade or two of his life outside of prison, on parole in his home community, would require that this nation acknowledge a sickness that is its original sin.”
Something More (for Marion, October 13, 2009)
An older man with dark features
And an older woman – long brown hair,
Luminous eyes, blue like
A cloudless autumn sky –
Sit in an old wood bed together.
As the audience, we are tired.
They have been speaking to each other
For many days now.
We did not know
For the price of admission
The time spent would be weeks
Here in this theater
Where management has served us meals
And brought hot towels
Down the aisles
And given us breaks for showers
And toilet runs.
The older man looks at the woman,
Says, “This is amazing.”
Slowly she smiles.
The stage fades to black.
We hear sheets rustle.
The slow, sensual wet sound of lips
On skin, whisper kisses,
A quiet chuckle
From the older woman’s throat.
Then silence.
We know this is the silence
Of two lovers,
The embrace
Of what some call true love.
But we also know now
There is something more.
There are just no words to describe it.
-dcb
© Copyright David Biddle, 2009
Today’s New York Times contains an excellent essay by the playwright David Mamet called “We Can’t Stop Talking About Race in America.” The essay is part of The Times’ super-sized Arts & Leisure section cataloging all the new cultural events coming this fall and winter. Mamet has a new play coming out this fall called Race.
If you know Mamet, you know that he provides some fearless insights on this subject. Let me offer a few choice quotes to get you to go read the piece:
“Race, like sex, is a subject on which it is near impossible to tell the truth.”
“Most contemporary debate on race is nothing but sanctimony…”
“The question of the poor drama is ‘What is the truth?’ but of the better drama, and particularly of tragedy, ‘What are the lies?'”
In light of all the moments we’ve had this year: with Barrack Obama’s inauguration; the Valley Swim Club in Huntingdon Valley, PA; the Gates-Crowley face off; madding crowds wielding pictures of our president sporting a little Hitler moustache; and the troubling denial of parole for Leonard Peltier — a man many feel embodies America’s need to pretend its indigenous people do not exist –Mamet’s essay says a lot. What is the truth? What are the lies?
Hopefully the answers to these questions will become clear soon. If not in Mamet’s new play, then maybe in the drama and tragedy of the life we live moving into our future. We’ve got a little more than seven years to go…if you know what I mean.
Photo: David Shankbone, from http://www.broadway.tv
On and off today, I took part in an interesting though distressing set of comments at a FaceBook site that were spurred by this weekend’s bizarre confrontation and arrest of Louis Henry Gates by Cambridge police. Mark Cohen, an erudite Pennsylvania State Representative got the ball rolling by posting a link to his commentary on this issue at the Daily Kos. See Mark’s piece here. It’s an excellent drawing together of a number of the more bizarre race-related incidents that we’ve seen ’round here over the past several weeks.
The kurfuffle coming out of this Gates incident is the question of whether it is a blatant example of racial profiling. I usually try not to get involved in commenting on people’s posts to their FaceBook sites, but I really liked what Mark wrote and so I paid attention to other people’s comments on and off as their additions rolled into my email box. By the end of the day there are 40 comments and the entire discussion seemed to have turned into some folks claiming that racism is an evil that must be confronted wherever it is found in America, while others were arguing that perhaps acknowledging racism is a way of making it real.
Anyone who knows me or who has read this little blog of mine will know that I do not buy into racism on any level and that I choose to believe that life is about people living in the world as individuals. I strongly believe that folks cannot speak intelligently about race and prejudice because these issues are based on false premises, lies, and the funk of group hypnotism.
There is no question that there is a power system at play in America, and there is a case to be made that it is run by “whites,” but trust me, there are no “whites” in power. This is the 21st century. Who the hell is white? Generally, those in power are the ones with educations, particularly law degrees, money, connections, and hustle. You’re only as powerless as you feel. If you’re going to argue with cops, they’re going to more often than not take you in for a sit down visit and call to your parents or your lawyer.
Most important though, all of this points me towards music, comedy and intelligent poetics. Take Gil Scott-Heron’s little ditty that I ran into this morning at Peter Rothberg’s blog at The Nation Whitey On the Moon. I don’t agree with the “Whitey” sentiment Mr. Scott-Heron so expertly wields, but it’s important to pay attention to his message anyway: exactly what are we spending money on in this country?
My final word to Professor Gates, a man whose thoughts and persona we should all deeply love?
Dude, be pissed that the cops messed with you in your home! Don’t let other people’s stupidity work to manufacture and sustain the ugliness of racism.
This twisted appreciation of David Foster Wallace began as an email to my good friend Paula. I’ve edited it a bit since sending it to her, but for the most part it remains the same as I wrote it struggling to survive the weirdest illness I’ve ever had. (Click the photo to the left and it will take you to a short story published by the New Yorker in 2007 called “Good People.”).
By now you’ve heard that David Foster Wallace hung himself to death on Friday, September 12th. Around that time, I was just beginning a four-day, all out defense against a flu virus the likes of which have never been seen — literally, it would appear, since my name is now on the first page of the CDC’s list of 2008 flu-season illnesses treated in a hospital.
I would like to believe the wild and crazy spirit of DFW may have had a role in things attacking my body (although I know he would have no reason to do so). I knew nothing of his demise until Monday the 15th after a Sunday afternoon in the ER and the embarrassment of realizing that I wasn’t actually going to die (the embarrassment coming when my wife reported that she’d paid the $200 ER co-pay and that it was all right, but still if I could just learn to be sick a bit better without suffering quite so much we would have saved enough money to pay for the Orkin man to do a full sweep and extermination series on our dilapidated house).
I think DFW would have been fascinated by what happened to me on Friday night just as this virus was really kicking into high gear. I was lying on our couch, having dozed on and off through David Letterman and Craig Ferguson’s “Late Late” show. This was weird enough. In my super-psychotic state both shows annoyed me immensely. I began to worry that I’d finally gone beyond Schtick. That’s a terrifying feeling even if you question it from the get-go because you know you’re actually just moronically feeble due to a bunch of microscopic parasites looking to turn your brain into a frothing megalopolis. “I’ve gone beyond Schtick! Oy, fuck me!” Only David Foster Wallace would truly understand the path of fear I had stepped onto. Going beyond Schtick leaves irony behind as well; going beyond Schtick is a step into the unknown.
All of this was through the slow and gradual incremental anti-zen fermentation of viral LOVE that ultimately resulted in this little case of sleep apnea that I took on. By the end of Ferguson’s floggity “Late, Late,” I was floating in and out of sleep in a stupor and fog, sick as a door mouse crushed by barefooted clowns at a combined septuagenarian orgy and an octogenarian S&M-for-late-comers coming out party.
When you’re as sick as I was, sleep is the only heaven. But when every few minutes you begin to doze, feeling nearly pain free, and then you awaken first to the sense that you’re drowning in cotton and warm water, (can’t breathe mother fucker!), and then you realize you can, but oh My God how absolutely horrible it is to feel my body, and what the fuck is on TV?…What the?… perfect people sitting around a room, driving in perfect cars? I heard them just as I was falling asleep: insanely brilliant banter, socially astounding quips and metaphorical lunges, sexy voices, a plot that can turn a lag bolt under a summer deck in Maine. Brilliance!
I think: David Foster Wallace, are you writing TV shows? I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s beyond Mamet because its not trying to be anything important or thick with blood and turmoil.
I think these small but important thoughts about this Foster Wallace TV creation, understanding that I’m really just captured by a crude, multiplying substance roaming through my body, turning it into a home, and then I’m drowning again. It comes as a shock every time. Ub lub lub lub, I hate…and then I look up and everyone on the show has stopped speaking. They’re sitting there or standing in utter silence. I barely have time to register something is wrong, then I’m slipping into a daze again; I hear the intelligent dialog, feel the effect of profundity, and then I’m in a state of paranoid fear, I’m dying! They come up again, only this time the TV flashes a montage of close and wide-angle versions of these people’s lives, they’re not saying a thing, I’m wondering and breathing for my life and then I’m under again thinking maybe it’s them trying to suffocate me and the reason they’re not talking is that they’re waiting to see if I’m just going to die right there.
This went on for about an hour. I didn’t realize until the next day that I wasn’t really sleeping but just letting the virus play with my health. Germs are very intelligent, I think, lying there in agony with my beautiful, healthy wife taking my temperature. I’m hoping they’re not as intelligent as my wife.
The most frightening moment of that night came near the end of the show. I vaulted confused out of my swamp, snuffing and gasping, angry really, and they were all there in a room on the set, just staring at me with a hint of sadness on their faces. That’s when I knew I needed to turn the TV to ESPN reruns of Sports Center. Nothing is more soothing than hearing the same Schtick over and over when it is the importance of sports that is at stake. There is no way to go beyond ESPN Schtick.
Three days later, randomly it seemed at first, I read on my Salon.com an email posting of DFW’S self-hanging. “This is not real,” I thought. “How can you joke about something like this?” He is invincible! How can you be a God of Reality, a maker of Truth like no one else living in this language, and do such a thing. Surely, a joke…I was finally on the mend. Turns out I needed a double dose of Tylenol along with a double dose of Motrin. I’d only been taking Motrin in 200 mg tabs. Should have been 400 all along and taken with the Tylenol, not staggered, which was just a schedule that seemed more healthy. My wife never said, that’s an expensive lesson, $200 to learn that you need 1000 mg of Tylenol and 400 mg of Motrin, but she didn’t have to either. I love my wife. David Foster Wallace could not have killed himself. I feel so much better. But he had…
We’ve lost one of only four great writers living in America today. This will piss a lot of you off, but I don’t care. Barry Hannah, Don DeLillo, and Annie Dillard are the other three. DFW was the tops though. He was our Michael Jordon, our Muhammad Ali. And no one, except us hacks who had aspirations of these four’s absolute human genius, American genius, no one understood how important David’s work was and how he was preparing this next generation to fly finally beyond post-modern twittery. I read Infinite Jest on the toilet only. I figure with over 1200 pages it will take me at least 600 sessions on that toilet. I have Oblivion and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men next to my bed. I get false erections whenever I find a new essay, interview, or story by him in general media. How could anyone be so damned amazing as a writer? How could anyone tell the truth so well about being an American with a brain? How could anyone actually think you’re supposed try to tell the truth…not the literary truth but the raw up the butt truth, the sense of being a turd on the way down, sad, so sad…
I had intended for years to write to DFW after reading an interview in which he talked about “the click” and honesty and good writing being about dying in order to move the reader; that good writing is about really giving something to the reader — de-egoized; that there may be some writer out there who has gone beyond irony, a writer who uses sincerity as his tool, who brings back in the flush of life as lived through love. I wanted to write to him to tell him that I think that’s what I’ve been doing because I can’t even define what irony is and it makes sense, because for every great piece of fiction I’ve ever written I’ve received nothing but rejection. I was going to ask him if he might read my very long, sad novel about confused male sexuality. It would have been pathetic, I know. He is four years younger than me and I’m kind of seeing him as a god (a King really), but there you have it. By now, I would hope you’d expect something as childish as that from me. It’s not my childishness though. It’s his greatness. I’m willing to grovel at the feet of someone whose understanding of American literature was the new beginning we all wanted, even back there in 1977 when it became clear that Ken Kesey did not want to write anymore. We wanted something. I kept looking. I kept trying. Roth, Oates, Bellow, Salinger, Ford, Cheever, Munro — shit the list goes on and on. You can’t imagine how many girls I’ve picked up with the line, “When are we going to find the next Fitzgerald, Kerouac, or Hemingway? When? No, no, no, all of these you list are derivative, realist, bullshit.”
What would I say to DFW now, other than what I’ve already said here? Only one thing, a
nd I mean it from the bottom of my heart: I love you David Foster Wallace. I love you and we’re in deep shit now without your navigating system and your mapping of the social mind lost amongst the objects. I love you David Foster Wallace, and thank you.
And, no, I never picked up a girl with a line about the poor state of writing in America. Only you, David Foster Wallace, could have pulled something like that off.
“Confronted with a choice between saying no and saying yes, Americans are going to say yes — and in the process, show themselves and the world that America is still a place capable of reinventing itself.”
Gary Kamiya. March 13, 2008
“Poetry vs. Fear”
Photos above are taken from a Daily Kos entry in early March charging that the Clinton campaign doctored a photo of Obama to make him appear darker.
“In fact, I would venture to predict that the number of Americans who will vote for Obama because he’s black — out of admiration for his achievements and character, to prove to themselves they’re not prejudiced, to prove to the world that America is not prejudiced, to effect a historic change — will be greater than the number of Americans who will vote against him for the same reason.”
Gary Kamiya, Salon, May 13, 2008, “Poetry vs. Fear”
If you think he’s going down, you’re UnAmerican.
Go to Hitting with Wood to see my new baseball blog and to read my editorial published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on the metal bat controversy.
Stay tuned for more commentary on racial confusion in America.
Race is boiling up again in the collective conscience of public media and viewership. Michael ‘Kramer’ Richards’ comedy rampage got things going in grand style. Joe Biden kind of goofed his way into heating up our national confusion with his improvisational riff on Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American [candidate] who is articulate and bright and clean“. But Biden is by no means alone in coming across as a twit (I sat and chatted with Biden and his mother once at a bus stop in Wilmington, Delaware, and I know the man is not a twit and that he certainly deserves to be considered a strong contender for President of this country). As you will see in the links contained in the short essay below, the foot-in-mouth syndrome is growing with a fervor. Sadly, it’s not just liberalish people of European descent who are letting loose.
******************************
Beyond Prejudice and Stupidity
I am not yet convinced that I will be voting for Barack Obama in the primaries next year. It is too early to tell anything about this man’s hardcore ability to make tough decisions or to perform the demanding work of a statesman. I’m tired of liberal pandering and compromise. I’m tired of politically correct candidates mouthing the platitudes of the past 45-50 years. Substance, fearlessness, and truth about our future and how we’re going to get there is all that matters now. Does Obama have the goods? We’ll see…
All that said, it is very likely that we are about to begin a new chapter in the country’s long history of presidential elections that will be as fascinating and breathless and full of wonder as any in our 231 year story. Barack Obama glistens and vibrates right now with positive force and charisma, the likes of which we have not seen since John Kennedy. Historically, the parallels between these two men should be carefully examined. Eloquent, thoughtful, truly inspiring leaders are few and far between for this nation — for this world. Will Obama rise to the level of our one and only Irish Catholic President with that intoxicating Camelot glint in his eye? Only time (and the media and dirty politics) will tell. The best hint of success right now is how clearly so many people want to see him succeed.
With regard to the manner in which race will shape this man’s candidacy and this country’s view of itself, as a people we have a dilemma. Race is such a false and twisted social poetics. Words are ionically charged to maintain a state of confusion all the way around. The majority of us have, indeed, moved above and beyond prejudice and stupidity, but it is still virtually impossible to speak about racialism without being offensive to someone or sounding dim, insensitive, or silly. This endless national discourse should be beneath us by now and yet black and white, brown, yellow, red, blue, green, chartreuse, virtually anyone who seeks to speak about this issue manages to perpetuate a spiralling vortex of half-truth, finger pointing, and Othering. It is suffocating and stifling to continue to go to this place…and very dangerous. And yet it continues, and so, many are trying to pull Obama into the fray.
How this very young Presidential candidate responds to the nation’s intense desire to pull him into the discussion about race may well tell us what kind of man he is. Barack Obama, like most of mixed descent, knows how pointless this talk of skin color and origin is. He has spent his adult life trying to lead people (just people) and shape the world into a better place. If he is to become the next President of the United States, he will be carrying all of us on his back. He will be leading us despite ourselves. It will be one of the more Herculean socio-political feats this country has witnessed in many, many years.
And then the hard part will begin for all of us, because for one man to move us so far above and beyond the twisted social poetics of today, means that he will then have to move us into our future where we actually begin to solve real problems and seek to grapple again with the promise of this country’s ideals and principles set forth so many years ago: “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.”
Photo credit: www.barackobama.com
