The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon July 29th, 2009

Note: Yes, another re-run.  Today’s project is to re-do the Table of Contents and Book Proposal for my next book, which is now a one-author (me) project.  So yes, re-play, but this one, I think is even more important as time passes.

Barbara Ehrenreich has a wonderful essay on the way we’re turning on ourselves in response to the financial crisis – and how we should be turning our anger outwards.  She’s right – and it isn’t just suicide.  Depression, domestic violence, child abuse – all of these are on the rise, and in large part due to the fact that people are poorer, scared and frustrated.  Ehrenreich writes of the move to respond to the financial bad news by destroying yourself that we’re aiming in the wrong direction:

“Dry your eyes, already: Death is an effective remedy for debt, along with anything else that may be bothering you too. And try to think of it too from a lofty, corner-office, perspective: If you can’t pay your debts or afford to play your role as a consumer, and if, in addition — like an ever-rising number of Americans — you’re no longer needed at the workplace, then there’s no further point to your existence. I’m not saying that the creditors, the bankers and the mortgage companies actually want you dead, but in a culture where one’s credit rating is routinely held up as a three-digit measure of personal self-worth, the correct response to insoluble debt is in fact, “Just shoot me!”

The alternative is to value yourself more than any amount of money and turn the guns, metaphorically speaking, in the other direction. It wasn’t God, or some abstract economic climate change, that caused the credit crisis. Actual humans — often masked as financial institutions — did that, (and you can find a convenient list of names in Nomi Prins’s article in the current issue of Mother Jones.) Most of them, except for a tiny few facing trials, are still high rollers, fattening themselves on the blood and tears of ordinary debtors. I know it’s so 1930s, but may I suggest a march on Wall Street?”

And may I hear an amen?  I’m with Ehrenreich here – we’ve all been taught to be ashamed of poverty, that we’re in charge of our own destiny, and thus, if we are poor, we’ve failed.  This, of course is a lie – but a terribly potent one, one with the power to hurt us very badly – as long as we let it.

It is time and past time to stop buying that lie, to get angry and turn our anger towards the places we can make a difference.  For example, right now, our future is being stolen from us as the Fed and other government agencies pour billions of dollars – billions that might have been spent on food aid, hunger relief, reinsulation of millions of homes, renewable energy applications for schools and hospitals – into Wall Street, into an economy that is collapsing anyway.  Our money, and our future is being treated as so much garbage.  And we are permitting it.

In his book _The People’s History of the Twentieth Century_, Howard Zinn speculates that in fact, the New Deal wasn’t so much a response to the desperation of the American people during the Depression, but a response to the sheer success of collective action by ordinary people.  Labor Unions and organized resistance to foreclosures and evictions became so powerful, so dangerous to institutional powers, that government response was in part motivated by the recognition that their power was *GOING TO GO AWAY PERMANENTLY* because people realized – oh wait, we don’t have to let them take our homes away, or treat us like slaves.  That is, the Depression brought great suffering – but it also brought the recognition that the only solution to that suffering lay in the hands of ordinary people.  This is no less true now than then, although it is sometimes hard to see or remember.

Or think, for example, about the tremendous energies used by Southern slave owners to prevent slave rebellions.  The prohibitions against reading and writing, the hideous punishments of failed ones, all of this was used to convince slaves that they could not win – even though there’s an excellent chance they could have, had enough rebelled.  Deep at the heart of slavery and every kind of repression is the knowledge that if enough people care enough, are angry enough, are willing enough to sacrifice for something better, all the slave owners and entrenched powers are doomed.  All it takes is enough “no”s.

On the same day I read Ehrenreich’s article, I got an email from a man who said:

 ”I’m getting ready for climate change and peak oil. I’m working with my community.  I’m preparing personally. I know I’m doing the right thing by reading and learning and teaching others.  But I can’t shake this feeling of sadness.  When my daughter was born, 6 years ago, I was so excited, so filled with hopes and dreams for her.  Now, as I learn more about the world, I feel like all my dreams have died, and my hopes are being reduced to ‘I hope my daughter gets to live in a world that isn’t too brutal and inhumane’ or ‘I hope even though there might not be enough resources to go around that she gets some.’  I don’t like the dreamless person I’m becoming.  How do I find something to hope for, to dream of, that isn’t the bare minimum of survival?”

It was an email I didn’t quite know how to answer when I first got it, and the gentleman kindly gave me permission to think about it and print an answer here.  But now, I think I do have a kind of an answer. 

One of the criticisms levelled at my end of (the relocalizers, permaculturists, sustainability crew) is that we’re unrealistic, utopian, that we don’t fully grasp how hard it will be to simply keep alive, and now we’re shooting at making things better?!?  And there’s almost certainly some truth to that criticism – as there is to all potent critiques.  And lord knows, as a recent Onion Headline (”Small, Dedicated Group of Concerned Citizens Fails to Change World”) points up, it is easy to get a little too fuzzy and cute about empowerment and imagine that simply by reducing the scale of some things while fundraising and putting up the right bumperstickers that we’ll magically make all the entrenched powers go away.

But while they are pretty good at ignoring or subverting small groups of concerned citizens, the old adage about coyotes (that they are more scared of you than you are of them) rather applies to politicians, corporations and other entrenched powers when faced with big groups of pissed off people.  Want proof?  Look at history – at the number of times angry groups of people have changed societies quite rapidly and radically.  It happens all the time.  It isn’t happening yet, but that doesn’t mean it can’t. 

So as I cast about for answers to what my correspondent can dream for his children, and I for mine,  I found this – a dream of anger, used wisely.  A world in which today’s parents,  and all today’s grownups have the courage to get angry, and use the power they have.  In which they have the ability to see what is possible, and to take in a host of ways as much power as they can for ordinary people.  As institutions and politicians and corporations are more and more proved utterly unequal to the task of meeting our needs, we can open our eyes and see that we can meet them – or we can withdraw our support and tolerance from those institutions until serve us, rather than forcing us to serve them.  Anger is a dangerous tool – but it is a tool, and one we cannot put down entirely, because if those of who us know the truth put it down, it will be wielded by those who tell lies.

I can dream of two things for my boys, and for my reader’s daughter.  First, that they will grow up uncowed by those powers – aware that they only seem distant and immovable.  And also that they will know that their anger and passion are powerful enough to take an imperfect, warmer, depleted world, and find a kind of sufficiency within it – with enough left over for dreams for the next generation.

 Sharon
 

• America , citizenship
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Sharon July 29th, 2009

…it is much, much more sinister.  At least according to Bloomberg’s very funny Michael Lewis.

“Rumor No. 5: Goldman Sachs is “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Those words are of course taken from a recent issue of Rolling Stone magazine and they are transparently false.

For starters, the vampire squid doesn’t feed on human flesh. Ergo, no vampire squid would ever wrap itself around the face of humanity, except by accident. And nothing that happens at Goldman Sachs — nothing that Goldman Sachs thinks, nothing that Goldman Sachs feels, nothing that Goldman Sachs does –ever happens by accident.”

The best I could muster way back in October was a vision of Paulson and Bernanke, in preparation for erotic release, drinking and singing “And no one’s getting fat except Goldman Sachs.”  I swear, I was trying to be funny, not making serious predictions.  Uh-oh.

 Sharon

• America , economy
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Sharon July 21st, 2009

You’ve got to read the whole thing, but Joe Bageant’s essay on our society’s shifting class status, and the pain and suffering that accompany it is stunning, and utterly, appallingly accurate. 

 If in my travels and experience in American life I see that tens of millions of Americans being screwed silly by a handful of chiselers at the top, or if I see one percent of Americans earning as much annually as the bottom 45 percent of Americans, then that 45 percent is an underclass. When I see a 70 year old man on his second pacemaker limping through Wal-mart as a “greeter” so he can pay at least something on last winter’s heating bill this month, then he is part of an underclass. When I see the humiliated single mom waitress tugging downward on the ridiculously short red plastic skirt she must wear at the Hooter’s type joint so her crotch won’t show, she’s part of an underclass of humiliated and socially oppressed people. Screw the hairsplitting about who qualifies as underclass and what color they are. Just fix it. Or reap the consequences.

We’re finally starting to hear a little discussion about the white underclass in this country. Mainly because so many middle class folks are terrified of falling into it. Frankly, I hope they do. We’ve got room for them. All the lousy, humiliating jobs have not yet been outsourced. The Devil still has plenty for them to do down here.

Call all of this anecdotal evidence. You won’t be the first. I was on a National Public Radio show last year with a couple of political consultants, demographers as I remember. One, a lady, was obviously part of the Democratic political syndicate, the other was part of the Republican political mob. The Democratic expert said dismissively of my remarks, “Well! Some people here seem to believe anecdotal evidence is relevant.” Meaning me. I held my tongue. But what I wanted to say was this:

Sister, most of us live anecdotal lives in an anecdotal world. We survive by our wits and observations, some casual, others vital to our sustenance. That plus daily experience, be it good bad or ugly as the ass end of a razorback hog. And what we see happening to us and others around us is what we know as life, the on-the-ground stuff we must deal with or be dealt out of the game. There’s no time for rigorous scientific analysis. Nor need. We can see the guy next door who’s drinking himself to death because, “I never did have a good job, just heavy labor, but now I’m all busted up, got no insurance and no job and it looks like I’ll never have another one and I’ve got four more years to go before Social Security.” He doesn’t need scientific proof. He doesn’t need another job either. He needs a cold beer, a soft armchair, some Tylenol PM and a modest guarantee of security for the rest of his life. Freedom from fear and toil and illness.

And furthermore, Sister, we cannot see much evidence that other, more elite people’s scientific analysis of our lives has ever benefited us much. When you’re fucked, you know it. You don’t need scientific verification.

I wanted to say that on the radio. But I didn’t. The little white guy mojo voice in my head told me not to. So I just laughed good naturedly. Like any other good American.

May God forgive me.

This is precisely what is at stake for many of us – getting to know the kind of degrading poverty that leaves you isolated, miserable and afraid (and I can say this because I know exactly what it feels like to have someone deal you an eviction notice, or to take a job that involves humiliation and shame as part of the work description) – or finding something better, not just for us, but for the people who are already living this way.

It isn’t a small or easy thing to deal with.  But there are ways of making it better than this.  We have failed to do so out of the goodness of our hearts.  It is my hope we may do so out of fear of joining the underclass.

Sharon

• America , poverty
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Sharon July 19th, 2009

As I head back home from Chicago (more on this later this week), I knew you’d all find this heartening:

 ”The Bush administration and Congress discussed the possibility of a breakdown in law and order and the logistics of feeding US citizens if commerce and banking collapsed as a result of last autumn’s financial panic, it was disclosed yesterday.

Making his first appearance on Capitol Hill since leaving office, the former Treasury secretary Hank Paulson said it was important at the time not to reveal the extent of officials’ concerns, for fear it would “terrify the American people and lead to an even bigger problem”.

Mr Paulson testified to the House Oversight Committee on the Bush administration’s unpopular $700bn (£426bn) bailout of Wall Street, which was triggered by the failure of Lehman Brothers last September. In the days that followed, a run on some of the safest investment vehicles in the financial markets threatened to make it impossible for people to access their savings.

Paul Kanjorski, a Pennsylvania Democrat, asked Mr Paulson to reveal details of officials’ concerns, which were relayed to Congress in hasty conference calls last year. The calls included discussion of law and order and whether it would be possible to feed the American people, and for how long, according to Mr Kanjorski.

“In a world where information can flow, money can move with the speed of light electronically, I looked at the ripple effect, and looked at when a financial system fails, a whole country’s economic system can fail,” Mr Paulson said. “I believe we could have gone back to the sorts of situations we saw in the Depression. I try not to use hyperbole. It’s impossible to prove now since it didn’t happen.”

Translation, folks – we know that we could be in a very dire situation, that people may go hungry, that things could collapse.  But we won’t tell you, because, after all, you might be scared.

 That’s helpful.

 Sharon

• America , economy
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Sharon July 8th, 2009

I was struck this morning by the implicit assumptions in a Washington Post article about Michelle Obama’s visit to Russia.  The headline reads “In Mother Russia, She’s 1st Lady of Gardening.”  And even in that terse bit of writing are a whole bunch of implicit assumptions – after all, why invoke “Mother” Russia, except to emphasize the backwardness of Russian women, who, we learn, are interested not in Obama’s education, her speeches or her Narciso Rodriguez dress (whatever that is).  Instead, they are interested in how she grows food and runs her domestic life.

The article is rather patronizing to Russian women.  Yes, they admit that Russian women also have degrees and education, but:

“Women here have long stood equal to men on a variety of fronts — one of the lasting aspects of the Soviet era — but they are also expected to tend the hearth, raise the children and maintain the family. Obama, a lawyer and former hospital executive, has described her White House role as mom in chief. That title, as well as her very public sowing and planting, speaks volumes in a culture where men and women relate in very traditional ways and women struggle to balance independence with homemaking.”

Oh gosh, I wonder what that would be like – a society where women struggle to balance independence with homemaking, and where women have to do the vast majority of the work in tending the hearth, raising the children and maintaining the family?  I can’t imagine such a shocking situation happening anywhere.  Next you’ll tell me that a major national newspaper in Russia has so little respect for women that an article about Obama’s reputation contains half a paragraph about what she’s wearing, and less than a single sentence about what she has said.  Oh, wait, that’s the Washington Post.

Yes, there are real cultural differences between the US and Russia, but is hard to see them clearly because our own prejudices are showing so clearly.  Consider this quotation by a Russian teacher,

“The dacha is something important in our life and something present in our life all the time,” says Alla Lapidus, 52, a teacher at a music school. Obama is appealing not only because she has a career but also because “she can work with her hands,” Lapidus says.”

Try to imagine an American – almost any American, saying that about their first lady – that she’s appealing because she is not afraid of manual labor.  There are parts of American culture where that is a term of praise still, but it stretches the imagination to conceive of someone applying it to Michelle Obama – simply because we are told that the primary grounds on which to admire a woman who takes on the fraught and uncertain job of first lady is her education and policy talent.

But, of course,  she hasn’t been elected to anything, and for the duration of her husband’s presidency is expected to devote herself to parenting, redecorating the White House, doing Oprah and posing for publicity shots far more than policy work.   We don’t actually like it much when highly educated and competent women who happen to be married to presidents actually intervene in public affairs – witness Hillary Clinton during her husband’s tenure.  The role is still very narrow, but we are expected not to admire her for her domestic skills or willingness to work, but for her willingness to look attractive (the Washington Post article contrasts the lack of interest in Russia in her clothing with Europe’s fascination, and manages to slip in that she “wore flats” at the tomb of the unknown soldier, perhaps the least useful information on earth that could be appended to any fact).  We are supposed to see in her fashion sense and her Oprah interviews the keen legal intellect, and admire her for it. 

This represents a fundamental intellectual problem – one’s intellect does not reside in one’s choice of shoes.  Of course we know Michelle Obama is brilliant and talented.  We also know that for the next 3-7 years, she’s going to be set up as first domestic in the land, whether she’s enthusiastic about the job or not.  Redbook is going to show her Christmas tree, people are going to judge her on her parenting and her clothing, she’s going to have to make sure to tell everyone her favorite recipes, and odds are, if she actually steps in in any major policy role, she’ll be criticized for it.  And to the woman’s enormous credit (because I find it very hard to imagine that any bright woman enters this deal with the devil with anything other than deep ambivalence), she’s done a pretty good job with it – she’s still smart and funny, but she’s also expanding the role of first domestic to include gardening.  She’s blunt that her children still have to do chores, and that she doesn’t think that a little thing like your husband being president gets you out of weeding the garden.  She’s in a difficult spot, and she’s doing it very well.

And of course, it is just a smaller version of the reality of women in general.  We all know that it isn’t just Russian women who live in a country where it is hard to balance independence with domestic life, where women have to work with their hands – or want to.  It isn’t just in Russia where women are torn between tending the hearth and family and going out to work and make money in the formal economy.  The game of being first lady is damned if you do, damned if you don’t – and the practice you get for that job is to be a woman – or occasionally (and increasingly frequently) a man – who does domestic work.

The reality is that all of us are in the situation the the paper implies is exclusively the territory of Russian women, who have not sufficiently evolved – and if there’s less attention on us, well, we most of us don’t have a working staff to handle the cleaning and cooking, either.  There are several ways one can navigate the problem of domestic life – I’m sure I’m overstating the difficulties in some cases, but I think there’s some truth in these broad categories established with in our nuclear family structure:

1. Both the adults in the household work full time by choice or necessity.  They make enough money to outsource any domestic work that needs doing, except what actually can’t be skipped or sold.  The/one of the woman/women if any probably does much of that, although there are exceptions.  There is sometimes money, and never any time.  Most of the work doesn’t get done to anyone’s satisfaction, and many people feel bad about it.  Children, if any, spend a lot of time with paid caregivers and unless they are very good (and usually, the parents very affluent) or family, everyone feels guilty, but usually mostly the female parent.  Domestic skills needed in a changing future are frantically gathered as best can be, and again, guilt reigns.

 2. One member of the adult household works, the other one stays home and does the domestic work,  and that person is female.  The domestic work gets done, but there is often an economic cost, and often a time cost – in many families the breadwinner works long hours to compensate for the loss of a full time earner, with predictable cost to his time with his children.  The domestic worker often finds herself isolated and struggling with a large burden, particularly if she is trying to gain skills and self-sufficiency and has children.  People ask her “What is it you do?” and then wander off when she struggles to explain, or say loftily and condescendingly, ”Oh, I couldn’t do what you do…I work.” 

 3. The gender roles are reversed and the father or male partner is the primary domestic figure.  He gets all the disadvantages of being at home, plus the reality that if there is a female partner, she probably micromanages a lot more than a comparable male spouse would , and the fact that almost no one thinks he should be doing this work.  This is particularly unpleasant for people who did not choose this situation, but had it thrust upon them due to unemployment.  If there are children, he gets the dubious delight of being the only guy at the playground, and thus gets more than his share of discussions of mastitis, the side effects of pregnancy and other joys.  Otherwise, the situation is the same, except that every single woman in the world is impressed if he can just dress his children in the morning and keep them out of the road, except, of course, his spouse or partner ).  The woman is assumed to be an unnatural parent and probably secretly to have a penis or a complex, because she makes more money than her partner and doesn’t love her children enough to stay home with them . 

4. The parents/partners divide the domestic and employed work, and probably argue about it a fair bit.  Either one works days and the other nights, and they are never together and always exhausted, or both work from home and constantly struggle with privacy, space and whose turn it is to take the kid to the potty, or something.  Both of them do without sleep and free time, while also attempting to build a sustainable future until they go completely mad.  

5. There is only one adult in the household and he or she gets all the fun.  He or she is held morally responsible for not being there for the kids, not doing enough domestic work, not making enough money and not providing another parent.  He or she knows that they are also not doing enough to prepare for incoming zombies, but figures that he/she is already a zombie from lack of sleep and stress, so perhaps they’ll be able to pass.

I’m going to guess that these variations on this are available to women in Russia as well, with one important difference – many of the Russians I know live in extended families with their parents or in-laws.  I have no doubt that this comes with many disadvantages – a neighbor of mine, for example, who married not a Russian, but Ukrainian woman, found it very difficult now that they were living in the US to clearly explain why the parents could not hang pictures of Joseph Stalin in their living room. On the other hand, the grandparents helped cook, gardened, cleaned and helped tend their grandchildren.   The reality of a household with three, four or more adults is very different than one with one or two people and enough labor for 10.

I realize it isn’t just women who get screwed here – men at least have a place where they can win, but of course, are terribly vulnerable to losing that place.  But I think it is fascinating to see how turbulent and troubled our relationship to domestic life and its work are, and how deeply gendered that turbulence is. The article unintentionally turns a microscope not on Russian attitudes, but on American ones.  Consider the opening paragraph:

 ”On her second international trip as first lady, the welcoming cover stories and street chatter here have focused on her White House kitchen garden rather than her clothes, her Ivy League pedigree or her interest in promoting public service. The current cover of Ogonyok, for example, a weekly magazine focusing on politics and culture, carries a candid photograph of the first lady dressed in a burgundy windbreaker with her hair pulled back, working in the garden with students from Bancroft Elementary School in the District. The cover line reads: “The Queen of the Fields: Michelle Obama and her husband can overturn our understanding of America.” It’s accompanied by an extensive story about gardening culture in the United States. Tomatoes, apparently, now serve as tools for diplomacy.”

The article assumes that “public service” doesn’t include helping develop schoolyard gardens, and that there’s something weird and trivial about tomatoes having anything to do with the understanding of the US that Russia has.  Her public service couldn’t include something as domestic as the garden, because when she touches dirt, we don’t see her education – we’ve been trained to see dirt touching as the territory of near-illiterates, so of course we can’t see her law degree and “spunky independence” when she’s got a hoe in her hand. 

And of course, engagement with her food could never be vital, exciting, and truly a diplomatic tool – that’s just proof that Russians again, are backwards, they worry about stupid little things like food.  Of course it couldn’t be important to the world for them to see us as like them, as caring about food security and doing the hard work involved in creating it – better we remain in everyone’s view rich, fashion conscious and talking about self-esteem, rather than dinner.

And of course, even though in its function, the role of first lady still carries heavy domestic assumptions, it is implied there’s something wrong about Michelle Obama embracing and expanding those to any extent.  And definitely, there’s something weird about people responding to her because she does those things, and does them well.  We are told in the article that people are more interested in how she raises her children than in her speeches – well, first of all, that’s almost certainly true of Americans as well, otherwise “Inside the White House” wouldn’t be in so many magazines.  Americans want to know what the front-face of American motherhood and domestic life actually does – that’s why all the photo spreads. 

Some interest is obviously gossipy trivialities or celebrity worship, but some of it isn’t.  Some of it is genuinely reasonable – after all, fair or no, being first lady means taking on a public domestic role – people cared that Eleanor Roosevelt stopped serving coffee in the White House during rationing and that they ate what everyone else ate, people cared that the Clintons seemed to be mostly good parents, if not always good people.  And they don’t care just for bad reasons – they care because they know that domestic life didn’t disappear just because we stopped talking about it, or implying that it took intelligence, skill and strength to manage. 

The truth is that someone does have to parent Sasha and Malia Obama, and it won’t be their Dad, for the most part – he’s got a big job.  The truth is that someone has to be the face of domestic life in America – because that life is real, and it is increasingly flooding into our reality.  As fewer people can afford even fast food and bad daycare, as more people are unemployed, as more and more people need to tend their own needs and expand their self-sufficiency, domestic life is reminding us that despite our lack of respect or even interest, it is a primary human activity, one we cannot negate simply by declining to value it or the people who do the work.

Those Russian women being interviewed have educations too.  They have jobs or even careers too.  They also have gardens and kitchens and children – and the very fact that they aren’t interested in Obama’s legal career or her speeches on self-esteem suggests something – in a society where domestic life literally saved lives – where the gardens kept people fed during the SU’s collapse, domestic life is more interesting than jobs. Jobs go away sometimes. Education is great, but you can think about poetry while you cook or dig. 

It is us who haven’t come to terms with reality – tomatoes can change the world.  It does matter how you parent children, and doing so is not trivial work.  Pretending that domestic labor doesn’t exist doesn’t make you happy or your life easier.  And that maybe, just maybe, there are better choices for both women and men than damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

 Sharon

• America , women
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