Exceptionalism is the idea that U.S. society, politics, and economics are unique and better than other societies and peoples. U.S. political culture has a long history of exceptionalism dating back to colonial America. Puritan leaders, such as John Winthrop, viewed the Massachusetts Bay Colony as “a city on a hill with the eyes of the world upon them.” The Puritan goal was to create a model of Christian morality. Theocracy gave way to broadening conceptions of freedom, which eventually led to an irreparable relationship with Great Britain. The Founders articulated their conceptions of freedom using universal language, which was focused on all of humanity, rather than just citizens of the U.S.A. This was remarkable considering how this little group of colonies broke away from the most powerful empire in the world; success was far from likely. Thomas Jefferson began the Declaration by placing the American Revolution “in the course of human events” and explaining that when rebellions occur, reasons had to be provided. The Founders justified the rebellion through dedication to certain natural rights premised on the notion that all “men” were created equal. Essentially, the one thing all human beings have in common is that we are not God, so all people, including government, must respect basic human rights. The Founders believed they were making a grand statement for all people whose government infringed on their natural rights, not just colonial Americans in 1776. The U.S. remains unique in having natural rights written into the country’s founding document, including the right to rebel if government infringes on these rights. To this day U.S. leaders regularly invoke the imagery of “a city on a hill” in speaking about the exceptional character of the U.S. experience.

A second way exceptionalism is manifested through U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. first embraced democracy promotion during World War I under Woodrow Wilson, who famously stated “the world must be made safe for democracy.” This quote is revealing because it highlights the belief that the world must be adapted to suit U.S. political beliefs and values, rather than the other way around. The U.S. emerged as a major superpower after World War II and emerged as the world superpower after the Cold War. From a Western perspective democracy’s major ideological rivals, fascism and communism, were severely discredited after the three major conflicts of the twentieth century. Exceptionalist elements of U.S. political culture now believe that the U.S.’s unique path to the top demonstrates that U.S.-style democracy and capitalism constitute the best of all types of social order. This is personified in President George W. Bush’s 2003 State of the Union, where he stated that “Americans are a free people who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation.” The exceptionalism of the U.S. tradition is now connected with the geo-political realities of U.S. military and economic power. The U.S. views itself as the model of democracy in an era of globalization where major powers have profound impact on the world at large.

Exceptionalism provides a useful perspective through which to better understand the contemporary healthcare debate given its historical prominence in U.S. development and culture. Senate Republicans, such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch, Jim DeMint, and Richard Shelby, have argued that the U.S. has the best healthcare system in the world, as did George W. Bush, and President Barack Obama’s rival in the 2008 election, John McCain. These arguments have created controversy and confusion. One of the few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on is that healthcare reform is needed. Major differences emerge over how to do this. How can the U.S. healthcare system simultaneously be the best in the world and be in need of reform? Conservatives inherently want to conserve the pace of change. One way to articulate and justify this political behavior is to laude the status quo, which in this case, is the current healthcare system. One tactical way to do this is to hyperbolize the effectiveness of the current system, which particularly resonates with many U.S. citizens because of the role of exceptionalism in U.S. political culture. The inverse approach has been adopted as well. In addition to lauding the status quo, the enemy, Barack Obama in this case, has been demonized. Prominent examples include Representative Joe Wilson’s unprecedented shout of “you lie” during a presidential address before Congress and popular conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh comparing Obama to Hitler. “Going negative” and criticizing political rivals is not new. Importantly, however, these criticisms have more traction and can be more outlandish, when framed in a belief that U.S. healthcare is exceptional, so that whoever seeks to change the status quo, threatens national well-being, and is deserving of harsh criticism.

Public opinion is a second way to consider the impact of exceptionalism in the opposition to healthcare reform. Access to healthcare, a major concern of Democrats, does not resonate with broader U.S. culture to the same degree that it does in the Democratic party, even though Democrats received widespread support in the 2006 and 2008 elections. People in the U.S. predominately view poverty as the result of individual failures; this view contrasts to much of Europe, whose people predominately view poverty as the result of structural problems, such as the lack of education or the lack of opportunity. The U.S. view constrains reform efforts because people who are financially successful are considered exceptional and thus more deserving of healthcare coverage than financially challenged Americans, who are blamed for being poor and their inability to gain or purchase healthcare coverage. These attitudes reflect a form of Social Darwinism,. In the nineteenth century, Social Darwinists, such as Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner, justified economic inequality as a natural product of competition and used this belief to advocate limited government involvement in social activity, and such attitudes linger in U.S. public exceptionalist sentiments. Not surprisingly, the U.S. has the most limited welfare state in the West. In turn, people in the U.S. are divided over whether the federal government should make sure all U.S. citizens and legal residents have healthcare coverage, again in sharp contrast to European countries, all of which have an increased federal role in healthcare to ensure access.

The divisions that now plague healthcare reform in the U.S. run much deeper than this moment. U.S. political culture is inherently resistant to political change that questions the exceptional nature of how people in the U.S. live and seek to build a more collective understanding of the public good. The U.S. has not decided whether it wants to remain committed to the welfare state, pursue a long term process of deregulation and privatization, or continue shifting back and forth in a highly polarized fashion. Greater understanding and appreciation for the cultural dynamics influencing this situation helps explain why opposition to healthcare reform has been so contentious. Conventional and scholarly examinations of opposition to healthcare reform would be well-served by greater discussion of the role of U.S. political culture. The final bill, regardless of the specific form, will likely raise a new and important set of questions, the answers to which will determine whether a movement toward a more European style welfare state is truly progressive or moving the U.S. away from the exceptionalism that made the country what it is today. This will inevitably shape and be shaped by U.S. political culture, no matter how exceptional and enlightened we think we are.

This isn’t exactly how it happened.

I fell in love, first with the mountains, then with a woman. And it ended. But it didn’t end quickly, in one fell swoop, or a nice quick chop. The love faded like the furniture, piece by piece. This is the love of the woman I’m talking about. My love of the mountains never vanished even if the jagged outline of a ridgeline or a range no longer appears on my horizon. It took a whole week for my furniture to disappear. It took 18 months for that love to evaporate.

The teaky futon was the first to go, and my kitchen table was the hardest to let go. It was the first piece of furniture I had bought in Salt Lake and I carted it everywhere: from the South Temple apartment to our house on the West Side to the 9^th & 9^th cottage. A modest pine table with two hinged leaves, it had been painted multiple times and partially sanded. The leaves had stretches of green and white paint on them while red and yellow paint twisted down the legs. My dad and I had found it at an art gallery consignment shop, and, with a little elbow grease, we unearthed matching chairs in the bowels of the shop. I sold the table and chairs for a crumble of cash to a half-drunk guy in his 20s.

With the furniture gone, the cottage reminded me of what it felt like when I moved in. This place had radiated potential. Here was a humble place where someone could make a life or recover from a past one. The shower had good water pressure, and the kitchen had a gas stove. Windows dotted the east, south, and west walls. The neighborhood boasted a park, a coffee shop, a yoga studio, and killer burritos. The basement provided ample storage space. There was a porch and screen door off the living room. The backyard was fenced. I had even started a compost pile. But sometimes it’s not enough to have everything in place.

The one thing that remained in the cottage was the Delta Sky Kennel, Prufrock’s home for the next several hours. I had purchased the kennel a month ago, and Pruf and I had been practicing. First, we worked on simply being in the kennel. I’d coax him in with a treat and close the door. We worked up to Pruf spending 30 minutes or more in the kennel while I was in the other room or out on a quick errand. But, now, our last morning in Salt Lake, our beloved Salt Lake, I went full-bore with him. I scooped him into the kennel, slammed the door, and prepared him for takeoff. The rumpled brown carpet offered just the right amount of resistance. We didn’t sail across the floor; instead, we bumped along, much like, I told my dog, flying over the merciless Wasatch. Wrestling the kennel across the floor, I pushed, pulled, and shimmied. I dragged it in circles, I rocked it side-to-side, I pounded on the top, I rattled the sides. I even howled. I just didn’t want him to be scared. I didn’t want him to be as scared as I was.

Natalie chuckled when she walked in on me whirling around my dog. I had said goodbye to everyone else, leaving my best friend Natalie to the final hours. We had met through a yoga workshop and had built our friendship from the ground up: funny emails at first, followed by more personal ones, and eventually, we found the courage to hang out in person. Over “B & N,” beer and nachos, we listened to each other cry, offering up yoga pointers—“Try 10 minutes of bound lotus every day for a month to break bad habits”—and relationship counsel—“She’s really missing out on life by not going with you.” While nine a.m. was too early for B & N, we could at least have coffee and eggs at the Avenues Bakery, a prime brunch spot in my old neighborhood.

It’s hard to say what the Avenues Bakery was more famous for: its tasty food or its unforgivable service. Waiting 10 minutes for a cup of coffee was routine. The wait staff was young, pierced, and inked, and as they clotted behind the counter in their black T-shirts and aprons, glaring off into the distance, it was clear that they had better things to do. The well-intentioned middle-aged couple who ran the bistro bakery had studied in France and were trying to import a foodie culture to a homogenous city whose idea of fine cuisine extended little beyond green Jell-O. They sponsored wine tastings, scrambled local farm-fresh eggs, served up a mouth-watering assortment of tortes, tarts, and other tangy confections, and yet they consistently hired a slow, surly staff. This questionable combination of the earnest and the disenfranchised made any meal there a dangerous proposition.

Shortly after nine, the Saturday crowds had yet to appear at the Avenues Bakery. Natalie and I easily found a table by the window, and our coffee arrived within a few minutes of our order. The Bakery covered half a block on South Temple, a wide boulevard with cast iron streetlamps, ancient trees, and Gothic “gentile” churches. The windows spread almost from floor to ceiling, making this place a prime people-and-car-watching venue. My first couple of years in Salt Lake, when I was in grad school, I had lived just three blocks away, between the Presbyterian church and the Catholic cathedral. Once a week, usually after my seven o’clock seminar, I would treat myself to take-out. Picking up the turkey-and-brie panini on my way home from the university, I’d pass the evening stretched out on the floor, with plenty of beer and a weepy Lifetime movie, my books, notebooks, packets, papers, and handouts circling me. No dog yet, no lover yet, just all those words.

Over huevos rancheros and rosemary toast, Natalie regaled me with the latest Buchi family drama. This time, her younger siblings were torpedoing her efforts to resurrect Grandma Marge’s famous Christmas Eve Pajama-Waffle party. I fixed on Natalie’s story, laughing on cue, because I had gotten tired of saying goodbye. I commiserated on cue, inhaling and nodding, because there were too many questions I couldn’t answer, not even to myself. There was only the thin thread of something I knew. The thread was enough to hold on to, but if I tugged too hard or tried to pull myself up, it would snap. And so I explained sparingly but ached excessively. If it hurts so bad, then something here must matter. But if that were true, if something—or someone—here mattered, then why would I leave?

But, I could commiserate for only so long. Together, we had to face the unavoidable: I was leaving. Bumping over our words, we tried to explain what it meant to know each other. I thanked her for taking care of me during the six months of the so-called “separation” from my lover. I wished I had said more, but the thread tightened in my throat. Natalie thanked me for dragging her outside to play in the dead of winter. We laughed about our final excursion, just last week. Natalie and her husband Sam joined Prufrock and me on the Shoreline trail after a snowfall. The fresh snow tempted me. “I want to roll down this hill,” I announced, uncertain, for a moment, of my own sanity because the hill in question was really the side of a mountain. Natalie and Sam looked at each other and shrugged. “Let’s do it,” Sam said in his honey-velvet voice. Praying we didn’t lose our keys, we dove off the ridge, belly-flopping on the snow. And then we slid. And the momentum of the slide sent our legs up and over our heads. And then we tumbled. And we went faster and faster until the tumbled turned into a roll. Rolling over and over until we plowed to a stop at a gully full of scrub oak. Drunk on vertigo and Utah’s famous champagne powder, we tried to stand up. And we fell over. And we tried again. And we fell over again. Piece by piece we pulled ourselves back up the hill, wobbling, cackling, and chucking snowballs at each other. And then we did it again. And again. And again. All three of us were thirty, and we flew and fell, over and over, with the grace and promise of a child, someone not yet disappointed, not yet afraid of the rocks, lying in wait under the thin veil of snow.

Pruf danced around us, darting up the hill and down. Reaching his haunches up in the air, he stretched his paws forward and barked, his black ears waving. He licked Sam’s face, sat on my belly, and nipped at Natalie’s heels. He taunted us for being slow and dizzy and showed us how to run and kick up powder at the same time. My dog taught me how to love the mountains. I hoped he’d forgive me for taking him away. Another space lost.

The server cleared our plates and twisted his lips in something like a smile. Natalie and I drained our coffee cups empty and settled the bill. We still had time.

On the way to the airport, I asked Natalie to drive me around town, my last chance to lock my eyeballs on this city. From the Bakery, we headed north through the Avenues neighborhood, and I marveled at the cozy arts and crafts bungalows with their recessed porches and the fanciful Queen Anne’s. We worked our way up to 11^th Avenue and then headed west, winding around City Creek Canyon. The road hugged close to the steep, towering land. We swayed from side to side at every bend. Pruf began to stir. He stood up, his claws clicking against the plastic floor of the kennel. His tail thumped and he whinnied. Turning circles in the kennel, Pruf’s whinnies grew into full-fledged barks. He wanted to get out and run. I wanted to get out and run. I thought about the moose, deer, elk, coyotes, bobcats, magpies, jackrabbits, and rattlesnakes I had seen in this canyon. We had seen in this canyon. This was our place, and when the car made the last bend in the road, the canyon vanished. Defeated, Pruf pancaked on the plastic floor. The car continued on its course. As we made our way out North Temple, passing the Red Iguana, I asked Natalie to take me by the house. We still had time.

I hadn’t seen it in a year, since my lover had sold it. We idled at the curb. “Wow,” Natalie exhaled, “it’s so cute.” Except for that storm door, I thought. But I was also glad that the new Mission-style front door was protected. It took us two contractors and three months to get that door from the factory in Tennessee. The living room window, with the BB-gun bullet holes in it, had been replaced with a monolithic plate of glass. We had wanted to repair that window—which had snowflake stickers over the holes when we bought the house—but we didn’t want to do what these people had done. We didn’t want to swap one giant plate of glass, albeit with small holes, for another, equally unattractive plate of glass, however solid. Somehow, we wanted that window to be able to open, to offer us some fresh air, but we couldn’t figure out how. We left it the way it was, snowflake stickers and all, for the full four years of our shared life.

The front yard was still intact. We spent every weekend of August 2004 digging up with the front, just the two of us, armed only with a shovel whose handle was splintering and a pick ax. Hours and hours passed as we wedged the blunt shovel into the sun-baked sod and wielded the ax overhead. Thirsty and tired at the end of the hot afternoon, my lover and I stumbled to the Red Iguana and sought refuge in cold Coronas and homemade mole. That August was the only time in my life I ever looked forward to Monday mornings. At work, I could rest, recharge, recover, my muscles twitching, my eyelids heavy.

I made more than she did and that fall, I spent my money on plants. Silver fountain grass, yucca, Japanese blood grass, saltbush, Russian sage, feather reed grass, and blue fescue. The front yard was spare but textured. The violet blossoms of the Russian sage sparkled next to the corduroy bricks of the house. The pointed yucca and billowing saltbush took over the southwest corner of the yard. The silver fountain and feather reed grasses reached high as their plumes bobbed in the wind. Struggling to find their footing in the rocky soil, the fescue and blood grass kept their bold colors close to the ground. But, it was the zebra grass that enthralled me the most. The tall, broad blades alternated from base to tip between a rich but pale green hue and a neutral fawn color. Like a tiger-striped kitty or my own speckled blue heeler, this grass was nature’s version of a rugby shirt, the Fair Isle sweater, argyle socks. Patterns released by genes, no elaborate stitching required.

Next to the zebra grass, there was a spot in my heart for the Alpine Blue Spruce, a young evergreen we had planted in front of the living room window. We had told ourselves we planted the tree there to block the late-day western sun. But really we had planted it to prevent passer-bys from seeing the snowflake stickers and their sister BB holes. We named the tree Bruce, Bruce the Blue Spruce. He was a squat Christmas tree, tinged with smoky blue, and we loved him. When you look at something you love every day, you don’t really notice that it’s changing. Bruce looked the same every day, but we told each other that he was getting bigger. “Look at him, now,” she’d say to me. “He’s getting so tall! In a few years, we may have to prune him. In 10 years, we’re going to have so much shade in the front yard.” Today, on this bitter, drab December morning, Bruce did look taller. My throat swelled and my jaw tightened. In 10 years, that will be an enormous tree. In one year, the space in my heart for her will contract so smoothly that I won’t even notice until it’s almost closed. This isn’t exactly how it happens.

At the airport, Natalie gave me a gift, a candle. “For meditation,” she said. We watched Pruf and his kennel get wheeled away. We hugged goodbye.

The plane to Atlanta was empty. I scooted over to a window seat. Pruf’s kennel sat on the tarmac, next to a ramp. I could see his black nose pressed up against the holes. The ground crew sweet-talked him as they loaded the kennel on the ramp. His tail flickered. He disappeared into the cargo hold. I closed my eyes.

It exemplified the extent to which our culture has become irrationally obsessed with celebrity.  At the time, I couldn’t resist joking about how Michael Jackson’s death had brought world peace, simply because it created a media blackout of everything else.  Many people were disturbed by the level of attention Jackson received, especially when the Iranian government was violently repressing election protestors, over 70 people had just been killed in another bombing in Baghdad, the US government had just sent arms to aid the Somali government’s fight against Islamists, and, of course, the governor of South Carolina had just admitted to having an affair.  But in a way, it made sense to focus on the sudden permanent loss of a person whose fame will most likely never be equaled, a person whose death actually does signal the end of an era.

Unless you happen to be a member of one of those South American tribes who have managed to exist completely isolated from the modern world, you knew who Michael Jackson was.  That’s only slight hyperbole.  I remember, as a kid, seeing video footage of his concerts in Europe and Asia, even in Russia during the Cold War.  He had fans in Iran during the Revolution.  My own father, who deliberately ignores almost everything that could be considered pop culture, has fond memories of listening to the Jackson 5 in his younger days.  For the entire decade of the 1980s, Michael Jackson was probably the most famous non-politician on the planet.  He’d worked for it, and he’d earned it.  There is something to be said for that.

Only a handful of artists have truly made an enduring mark on popular culture in the past century; Charlie Chaplin, Elvis Presley, Audrey Hepburn, the Beatles, Madonna, Michael Jackson, to name a few.  These are people whose images and work are recognized almost everywhere.  They displayed talent, hard work and dedication, and what they created inspired people all over the world.  They also gained their fame and popularity long before the age of “new media.”  Perhaps it’s not coincidence then, that of all the faces featured in current celebrity-focused magazines and websites, none stands out as potential Beatles or Madonnas.  I’m convinced none ever will because with the rise of 24-hour news, internet tabloids and social networking sites, our concept of fame and our ability to recognize and bestow it has been utterly altered.

We live in the Age of Information.  The internet is the great democratizer.  Anyone with a mobile phone can broadcast their thoughts and observations to any number of people at any time via Facebook or Twitter.  Anyone with a video camera can subject the general public to their pets’ quirks, their friends’ idiocy or anything else via Youtube.  This is all well and good, but it has had a few consequences.  One is that everyone wants to be famous and believes not only that they should be, but also that they deserve to be.  Another is that fame itself has been completely diluted.

Thanks to the prevalence of reality TV and voracious internet tabloids, there are so many famous people in this country, that I gave up trying to keep track years ago.  Names I have never seen or heard of before pop up in the latest celebrity gossip headlines everyday.  They’re always treated as though everyone naturally knows who they are.  Most of the time, not only do I not know who they are, I can’t even discern what they might have done to warrant their apparent fame.  As it turns out, most of them haven’t done anything beyond mug for the cameras on some random cable network reality show or date someone with a well-connected PR person.  This generation of celebrities has earned their fame by being the bitchiest, sluttiest, craziest, crudest, most racist or sexist person in the cast of whichever reality show they appeared on.  They don’t seem concerned with displaying any real talent or holding any responsibility, only with their own notoriety.  Media outlets like Us Weekly and TMZ highlight every scandal, every bar brawl, every traffic ticket and botched Botox job that these personalities can conjure.  And the public consumes it like a drug.  No one seems particularly concerned with the fact that fame of this kind is especially fleeting in this age of instant gratification.  With so many outlets, so many sources, so many contenders, the public consciousness can only process each one for so long.  Like bubbles on a playground, these celebrities rise and burst in an instant.  Occasionally, they snap, like the contestant from a VH1 show who apparently murdered his ex-wife and became a fugitive only to commit suicide himself.  Or the DJ who was known among Hollywood celebrities, but who I heard of only because he’d died of a drug overdose.  Or the unfortunate Jon and Kate whose marriage disintegrated in the glare of the spotlight, which boosted their show’s ratings but at what cost to their eight kids?

Of course there have always been one-hit wonders, flash-in-the-pan starlets, and child stars who disappeared after they hit puberty.  But most of them made some kind of positive contribution to the entertainment world while they had their moments, whether it was a fun, catchy song or a movie that made people happy.  Many were part of a larger pop culture trend (80s hair metal bands, for example) that had its day and faded. I can only hope that the current obsession with superficiality in celebrity is one of those.  As it stands, it is beyond me how people who become famous for shooting each other with staple guns on cable TV (does anyone even remember those guys?) can possibly be making a positive contribution let alone a lasting impact that inspires anything good in anyone. And I find it a bit sad that, given the viewing public’s devotion to a show like American Idol, even the competitors who show real talent and stage presence usually last barely long enough to release an album before that same public has lost interest.  Some don’t even last that long.

Ancient heroes sought glory, fame and fortune in quests and on the battlefield.  In the early days of Hollywood and in the old Broadway musicals, a small town kid was always trying to break into show business to become a famous actress, singer or dancer.  For all his inexplicable eccentricities, Michael Jackson was an extremely talented musician and performer.  People gained fame because they had unusual talent, determination, charm, intelligence, or at least savvy.  Even people who sought fame for its own sake, had to do something to earn it.  Madonna, for example, could never really sing, but she’s an intensely ambitious self-promoter, and she worked her ass off, quite literally, to become a world-class entertainer. With the rise of new media, our admiration of talent and dedication is fading along with our capacity to appreciate a well-crafted coupling of gifted performance and marketable personality. Now we just pay attention to whomever makes the most noise until they are drowned out by someone else.  Mass media truly does represent the masses now that just about everyone has a digital camera and internet access, but there are very few filters and even fewer incentives to create anything of quality.  As Andy Warhol predicted, people who have done nothing more than lipsync in front of a webcam seem to feel entitled to their fifteen minutes.  Fame has always been something to aspire to and admire, but very rarely to achieve. The whole point was that not everyone could do it.  It meant more than having your picture taken on a red carpet and posted on Perez Hilton’s website with graffiti over it.  It took more than sitting around gossiping with your friends in front of a video camera. And yet, it seems that this is what fame means now.  But, in this world, where anyone can become famous for the slightest or most random act, how can fame mean anything at all?

Much to my parents’ and black community’s surprise, I found friends among my peers in my private, predominately white elementary school. That’s fine for children, said some of the elders at my black Pentecostal church. For even before the civil war, white children played with the black slave children, they would say. However, these elders would say in hushed tones, once the children became of age, those friendships were impossible. And so it will be with you, the elders said, as I came of age in the early 1980s. Some boundaries, the elders said, are impossible to cross.

In college, some of my roommates who shared my theologically conservative upbringing were skeptical about my secular peers, especially my friends who were neo-atheists, and, in come cases, Wiccan wannabees. My conservative friends were fine with having relationships with “non-believers,” as long as I was trying to convert them to Christianity. Other than that, my religious friends said, these relationships were impossible and would eventually fade once the superficial boundaries of dormitories and classes ended with graduation. Some boundaries, my friends said in quiet, prayerful tones, are impossible to cross.

Much to my delight, while having dinner with two college friends in the early 1990s, we realized that our friendship had lasted more than ten years. We marveled at how our college-era acquaintanceship had evolved into lasting friendships. We were from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, and all of us had grown up in communities that cautioned us against alliances with the communities that we each represented. During that dinner, we talked about how we were able to cross the impenetrable boundaries that we had been raised with, the fences that were supposed to keep us within communities often defined more by who we were not than who we happened to be.

At first, we thought we had been friends because we were able to forgive each other. We had other close friends in college, some of whom we assumed we’d be friends with for the rest of our lives. However, disagreements, busyness, distance and shifts in ideology ended many of those relationships. Despite our ability to forgive each other for various clashes, this did not seem to define why we had managed to remain friends into adulthood.

Perhaps we were friends because the world had changed so much that the boundaries of our childhood were no longer applicable. Those ethnic and class boundaries that once confined us to a station in life were now looser. A shared college degree from the same institution also leveled our playing field. We found that we had arrived on the doorstep to adulthood with more baggage from college than from childhood. Perhaps we were surprised at how four years at the same institution created new bonds that now redefined our communities of origin. The old fences of ethnicity and religion still mattered; however, four years in the same place created new alliances and boundaries.

And in the new communities formed by this common experience of college, we discovered that we as a group of friends shared something that barely registered in today’s multicultural discussion. This “something” is probably what gave us that additional comfort level with each other. The best way I can describe this “something” is that my friends and I all come from ethnic and religious communities that had once been on someone’s list for being wiped from the face of the earth. Now, this aspect of our identity is not the kind of thing you introduce yourself with; hello, my great grandparents were once forcibly detained in some manner (concentration camp, reservation, ghetto, sexual, ethnic or religious discrimination laws, immigration status designations) for some difference deemed dangerous by the majority culture. Although these nineteenth and twentieth-century atrocities are rarely discussed in polite company, even among Jews, African Americans, and Native Americans, this legacy of oppression still defines these communities. These narratives of communal and shared oppression are often talked about among close family members and friends. The stories of pain are spoken in whispers over dinner and drinks, often while reflecting on the latest news of some genocide, somewhere in the world. Our whispers tell stories where our family members were not the main characters, but the secondary, unnamed cast members, the corp, the nameless masses, the expendable people who were not important to some oppressor’s major plot point. And this aspect of our identity as the secondary character in someone else’s story of glory and power is a powerful moniker.  For the lack of a better metaphor, this aspect of our identity as someone else’s minor character is like being the doomed “Red Shirt” character in a popular television series.

The Red Shirt character is a colloquial reference among fans of a 1960s era television science fiction program. In Star Trek’s opening scenes, two or three of the lead characters (often wearing yellow or blue uniforms) would land on a planet, accompanied by one or two characters wearing red uniforms. Within the first ten minutes of the show, generally someone wearing a red uniform died, and her or his demise introduced the central conflict of the episode’s plot. So, at the beginning of the episode, if someone appeared in a red shirt, you knew that this person, no matter how likeable, competent, or regardless of how much this character connected for the moment with the yellow and blue uniformed lead characters (often the stars of the show), this Red Shirt was toast.

When I first walked into my private, white religious school as a sixth grader, an African American from the inner city, my classmates probably looked at me with a mixture of shock and pity. They had designated me a Red Shirt in their meta-narrative of their educational experience which was suppose to result in a high school diploma, the gateway to college, business or some kind of suburban success. This suburban success would elude me, the new black kid, because, I was slated to eventually suffer some kind of fate early in the narrative of our shared school experience. This new black kid, they might have thought, is probably a nice person, but the poor girl is doomed. She’s probably a future welfare mom, I imagined people would think, or, perhaps they thought I would become a member of the service industry that would help cater to someone’s suburban success. I remember being treated politely, but eventually, people stopped reacting to me at all. I became invisible; maybe my expected short and irrelevant existence was too much to bear. As a Red Shirt, I could not be an equal in a community where the white children were groomed for the leadership and privilege that no minor character could acquire. My presence was merely to be a prop, or a token of their kindness. Eventually, for the convenience of the plot, I would be dismissed, either in actuality or existentially through being ignored and rendered invisible. I suppose this is much better than being wiped off the face of the earth. Then again, there is not much difference. Either way, I was being removed from the plot.

Perhaps the warnings about crossing boundaries to make friends came from the reality that if you are the designated Red Shirt in someone’s narrative, the initial camaraderie could quickly devolve into the experience of genocide on a personal or communal level. The warnings were quite accurate, and there was wisdom in not becoming too comfortable with your friends until you understand where you fit into someone else’s narrative. Being a Red Shirt created insanity, psychosis, neurosis, paranoia, addictive behaviors, all related to the strangeness of knowing that you are the extra, easily disposable character, in someone else’s epic narrative. It’s probably why so many marginalized people end up being designated the “crazy” Red Shirt person. As part of the elimination process, the crazy Red Shirt person is blamed for their own negation, thus relieving the main characters of guilt and insuring their roles as heroes in their own meta-narratives.

So, in an effort to find true friends and avoid insanity, I heeded the warnings, I made friends cautiously, and tried to live out my own meta-narrative where I was the lead character and conquering hero. I had not planned on the narrative’s transformation. The change started after college in the 1990s, when my Red Shirt status expired and was replaced with a new narrative shaped by the shared experience at an institution that treated me not like a minor character, but as an equal with my peers. My new uniform after graduation was not red. I was no longer the character whose demise was required by the plot of the larger narrative. I had become a productive member of society with a college degree and thus no longer a threat to the meta-narrative of US culture…sort of.

While I enjoyed this new narrative status, I found that most of my friends felt similar about their former Red Shirt status. The Red Shirt status crosses ethnic, religious, and gender boundaries, as was also the case with the science fiction show. I remember taking comfort that it was not always the black character who died in the first ten minutes, but it was the Red Shirt character, who might be a man or woman, or a black or white or Asian character. The Red Shirt status of non-existence was an equal opportunity position.

For my friends (whom I have known for almost 25 years), this former Red Shirt identity was often a coat that hid our original ethnic and religious attributes. For some, the assimilation process was adopted in an effort to stay off the Red Shirt list. For others, assimilation was adopted as part of living out our own personal meta-narrative while ignoring the majority culture’s efforts to assign us to the role of the doomed Red Shirt (like, for example, attending college and gaining access to networks of privilege). I found that beneath the surface of my friend’s skin lurked Catholic guilt, habits honed in former British colonies, a hidden ability to dance rhythmically shaped by a Celtic heritage, or perhaps a secret and unexpressed taste for kugel, bratwurst, and kimchi.

I vacillated between the paranoia of being someone else’s minor character in their major culture epic narrative and my new found identity outside of my previous Red Shirt status. As I grow older as an African American, I must not forget my Red Shirt reality, that in someone else’s meta narrative, I am not suppose to exist. I must hang onto the sane part of my paranoia as a reminder that someone’s meta-narrative once required my demise. This paranoia is not needed to keep me safe from false friends or tokenism anymore. What I hope is that by remembering my former Red Shirt status, I won’t absentmindedly write my own meta-narrative that assigns the role of the Red Shirt to some kind, jovial, and unsuspecting person out of convenience or in a delusionary attempt at some kind of suburban nirvana.

A few different aspects of this situation frustrate me to no end.  First, and most selfishly, there is nowhere within easy walking distance for me to rent a movie anymore.  For most people in the country, this is not a big deal because they can just drive the extra mile over to the next Blockbuster or Hollywood Video or whatever.  I live in Manhattan and do not own a car.  For something as trivial as a video rental, if I can’t walk there within ten minutes, it’s not worth going.  When I complained of the situation to friends, their answer was simple, just join Netflix.  The movies come to you.  For a flat fee, Netflix sends one or two movies at time based on a list you compile on their website.  It’s a very simple, user-friendly process.  But that’s not how I rent movies.

When I was a small child relishing the miracle of my family’s brand new VCR, we would all pile into the car and go to the video rental place.  I learned the pleasures of browsing the shelves, looking at titles and poster art, debating whether we should get a comedy or action movie based on what we felt like watching at the time.  It was a social activity.  As an adult, I still enjoyed roaming from one genre section to another thinking about what kind of mood I was in and whether it was more conducive to an indie thriller that I’d heard was really good or the romantic comedy that I already knew I liked.  Or maybe something else entirely would catch my eye and be the perfect choice even though I hadn’t known it existed before.  Or feeling indecisive, I could just ask the film geek at the desk for a recommendation.  The options were endless.

For all its convenience, Netflix can’t provide the satisfaction of an impulse.  The movies come to you in a steady stream of titles you picked out at some point when you had a few minutes to mull it over and then forget about it.  How can you know what kind of mood you’ll be in when the movie finally shows up two days later?  Of course it’s lovely that there are no late fees, but that means DVDs arrive and sit around collecting dust when you don’t have the time or inclination to watch them and send them back.  Meanwhile, you continue to pay the monthly fee.  And if you change your mind at the last minute and decide you’d rather watch something else on your queue, or some other film entirely, you have to wait for the one you don’t want anymore to show up before you can send it back in exchange for the one you do want which won’t show up for another two days, by which time you may not want it anymore either.  It was so much easier to just walk into a store and pick up whatever caught your eye at that moment, and take it home to watch right then.  The digital world’s answer to this is the instant view function, which allows you to watch select titles on your computer or via a box that connects your television to one provider or another.  Aside from the questionable video quality, limited list of options, and necessity for even more tech gadgets; scrolling through titles on a screen just isn’t as satisfying or as informative as picking up a little plastic box with poster art on it and turning it over to look at pictures, review quotes, plot summary, and all the other miscellaneous details.

Secondly, I’m irritated and disappointed with Blockbuster and its kin in the world of traditional media corporations.  This is partially because I work for one of those corporations and, I’m pretty sure that in about ten years, my job will be obsolete.  But it really comes down to the widely recognized and basic fact that they didn’t see it coming.  All of the huge multibillion dollar, international, media conglomerates never anticipated that at some point, they would have to evolve.  Now, they’re all either playing catch up or shutting down, which just leads to more inconvenience for me.  As a result of the online digital revolution and deficient and/or greedy business strategies, there are fewer and fewer places to go shopping for media of any kind, but especially music and movies.  I freely admit that iTunes is a wonderful thing.  It is amazing that you can open up a computer program and buy music, movies, TV shows, and what have you from all over world and from a wide variety of sources and then put in all onto a little device that fits in your pocket.  It truly is a miracle of modern technology that we pretty much take for granted now.  Just like I took video and music stores for granted my whole life.

When I first came to New York as a college student, I was impressed by the size of music stores here.  An HMV at 72nd Street and Broadway had two floors.  That was nothing compared to the Tower Records near Lincoln Center whose classical music section alone was the size of any entire music store in the malls back home.  When the Virgin Megastore opened up in Times Square, some of my fellow students and I made a pilgrimage to check out the reason for all hype.  One of my companions looked at the multiple escalators, flat screen monitors and aisles upon aisles of CDs, and breathed, “Yeah, it’s pretty mega.”  He was right. Walking into that store wasn’t just shopping, it was an experience.  Listening stations lined the walls, a DJ played a more diverse song list than most radio stations, you could find just about anything that had ever been put on a CD or DVD, and it had a multiplex movie theater right inside!  But each chain, had its own brand and its own personality.  HMV was dark with moody pink and purple highlights, a Brit pop rebel that never quite got over the 80s. Tower, on the other hand, felt like the super cool, sunny California native that it was, with huge windows and airy spaces. None of these retail chains exists in the United States anymore, but they can all be found on the internet, where the shopping experience is exactly the same as at any other online store, the only difference is the logo on the home page.

Which brings me back to my point that for a culture so obsessed with shopping, we are gradually losing our venues for it.  Yes, I know, anything you can find in a store, you can also find on a website.  Point, click, type in a few crucial numbers, click again and eventually the item will show up at your door, or possibly your office mailroom.  But that means you have to wait for it to get to you, wait until it is already yours, before you can touch it, look at it, or decide whether or not it fits or the color is right.  And if you don’t like it, you’re either stuck with it or you have to go through the process of sending it back.  What’s wrong with the old fashioned method of going to a store, walking around, looking at the options, standing at a listening station, asking a salesperson’s or fellow shopper’s opinion?  I love the immediacy of seeing something in a store and knowing that I like it and want it and can walk out with it in my hand.  I enjoy looking around and seeing what other people are looking at or listening to or talking about.  And what’s more convenient than being able to run to a store and pick something up?

Several weeks ago, I was assigned a project at work that required me to watch a handful of specific movies within a pretty short time frame.  I sent my production assistant out to get the DVDs.  They were all mainstream titles that should have been easy to find, except that our old standby, the Virgin Megastore in Times Square, was closing and therefore no longer restocking.  The Union Square location had similarly slowed down on restocking.  Both stores had sold out their copies of one of the films on the list and wouldn’t be getting new ones.  We suddenly realized that, with the closing of the Union Square Virgin Megastore, New York City would no longer have a large dedicated music and video store.  I don’t want to diminish the value of the handful of local independent places that are still holding on.  If anything, they are more valuable than ever.  But their resources are limited, almost by definition.  And their numbers have been dwindling for years.  In a city that has long been associated with the creation of music and film, it’s getting harder and harder to find places that actually sell the stuff.  Currently, Best Buy is making a notable effort to fill that void, but DVD shopping there is not unlike shopping at Sears.  Your favorite movies are just twenty feet from the vacuum cleaners and dishwashers.

And that leads to the third aspect of my original story that drives me nuts.  When my neighborhood independent video place shut down, it was not for lack of business but because their landlord wouldn’t compromise on a rent hike.  And, as it turns out, the US Virgin Megastores are not, in fact, victims of the recession or even the struggling music industry.  As a chain, they had been able to prop themselves up by expanding their retail offerings and they were consistently profitable.  In 2007, Virgin Entertainment Group North America was acquired by a partnership of two real estate companies.  Those companies decided, quite early on, that the spaces the stores occupied were worth more than the stores themselves.  So, just as with my little local video rental place, it all came down to real estate.  That place was driven out over two years ago, right around the peak of the real estate boom.  The storefront has been empty ever since.  The situation at the Times Square Virgin is a bit different, since the owners secured a new tenant before even announcing that the store would shut down.  A year from now, that site will be home to the largest, and no doubt most obnoxious, Forever 21 clothing shop that anyone would ever want to see.  Apparently, cheap trendy clothes bring in a lot more money than music or movies these days.  I can’t argue with that.  But it does make me sad.

Change is hard sometimes.  As much as I appreciate downloading songs off iTunes (and of course there was no other way to get Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog), I also enjoy shopping as a social activity.  It was a great thing to walk out of a movie with a friend and wander into the Virgin to see if anything interesting had come out or discuss the merits of a DVD’s special features.  And, of course, artist in-store appearances are a thing of the past.  Even if I rarely went to them, it was nice that they happened.  What it comes down to is that I don’t like losing my options.  What bothers me even more is the idea that this is just the beginning.  How long before Kindle and Amazon partner with real estate developers to kill off Barnes & Noble?  At least two Barnes & Noble locations in Manhattan have already been shut down thanks to the real estate industry’s irrational exuberance.  One of those was among the chain’s most profitable stores, and its space has been vacant ever since.

There is an inherent value in doing things in person, value in the tactile turning of a page, reading of liner notes that are not electronic files, and being handed a pen to sign your name on a receipt.  Right now, we still have the option in most cases, of taking part in these tiny human moments.  But as a culture, we are in transition in ways many of us don’t even realize.  In our thirst for cheaper, faster, more convenient consumption, we are gradually giving up things that are more basic and just as valuable.  The physical act of making eye contact, or sometimes just as significantly avoiding it, is one of the most basic and most crucial elements of human society.  As we turn to wider uses of all our wonderful technology, we must also maintain opportunities to engage with each other and the world around us because all our gains do have their costs, and we are wise to be mindful of them.

U.S. involvement in the Philippines began with the Spanish-American War of 1898 and continued with the Japanese occupation during World War II.  Philippine liberation in 1945 directly led to large-scale Filipino immigration to the United States in various waves following the war.  The aggressive Americanization that  twentieth-century U.S. military occupation in the Philippines gave Filipinos an “anything American is better” mentality that later gave Filipino immigrants to the United States a unique head-start to assimilation.  Filipino cultural traditions seem to be practiced by immigrant grandparents and parents but appear to be entirely abandoned by their U.S.-born grandchildren.  I suspect this is an unfortunate consequence shared amongst countless other immigrant groups.

Filipino-Americans have always suffered a mild inferiority complex in the United States in regards to their status in both the Asian-American community and U.S. society at large.  Filipinos in the United States have settled for a strange complacency about being overlooked when it comes to recognition and representation in the greater Asian-American community.  It may seem like a presumptuous statement to make about all Filipino-Americans, but their obscurity persists in a nation that is finally warming to its inherent and inevitable ethnic diversity.

In my lifelong struggle to reconcile my Filipina identity with my U.S. heritage, I’ve simply become accustomed to being under-noticed, underappreciated, and simply overlooked as a Filipino-American in U.S. culture and history.  Filipinos come from a region considerably ravaged and irrevocably transformed by U.S. colonization, military intervention, and desperate poverty.  Millions have immigrated to the U.S. for better lives with the promise of opportunities nearly impossible to achieve in the Philippines.

It is no surprise that most people in the U.S. are simply unaware that the Philippines was a U.S. Commonwealth from 1898-1946.  The United States took the Philippines as a prize after the Spanish-American War in 1898 much to the dismay of the Filipino freedom fighters like rebel leader Emilio Aguinaldo who sought freedom from centuries of oppressive Spanish rule.  Although Aguinaldo and his rebels proved crucial to the U.S. victory, their efforts were thrown in their faces when the U.S. decided to colonize the country instead of liberate it.  It was an especially cruel bait-and-switch that compelled Aguinaldo to oppose the U.S. push for sovereignty.  Again, he led rebel forces, but this time against the very soldiers who were once his allies.  The Philippine-American War lasted for three years resulting in American victory and subsequent colonization that lasted until the end of World War II.  The Philippines did not truly gain independence until July 4, 1946, in the wake of calamitous destruction from battling Japanese and U.S. forces.  Manila, once the shining metropolitan jewel of the Pacific, was flattened on a Dresden-level scale by Japanese bombers and, to this day,  has never quite recovered 

It is no question that Filipinos exulted in their long-awaited independence after two major world powers shaped disparate island communities into the unified, developing, and politically struggling nation of today.  U.S. intervention was a critical factor in achieving this freedom and opportunity for a unified self-rule.  Yet the imbalance of a third world nation having close links with the world’s main superpower naturally sent millions of Filipino immigrants to this country.  When restrictions on Philippine immigration were lifted following the Immigration Act of 1965, an expected surge in the number of Filipino immigrants to the U.S. quickly followed.

Children of Filipino immigrants share the somewhat embarrassing peculiarity of being unable to speak their parents’ native languages, whether it is Tagalog or any number of the regional dialects spoken throughout the Philippines. I find it embarrassing because most of my second generation Asian-American peers, who had Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, and Laotian backgrounds, are fluent in their parents’ languages without having any trouble speaking English as fluently as I do.  The fact that most of my classmates were first generation Mexican-Americans who switched between English and Spanish with enviable ease only compounded my sense of failure at not being bilingual.  For most second-generation Filipino-Americans, our aptitude in any native Filipino tongue is limited to understanding major vocabulary words (especially swear words), the general gist of conversations, but never truly understanding or parsing the language.  Lack of fluency in my parents’ language has served to distance me from my parents’ culture in a way they probably never intended.

The reasons why most second-generation Filipino-Americans grew up only speaking English are certainly related to the U.S. colonial influence on English-language education in the Philippines.  When the United States annexed the Philippines as a commonwealth, they established a comprehensive educational system that made English a requirement of scholastic success.  By contrast, when the Spanish ruled, only the white peninsulars (people born in Spain) spoke Spanish among themselves and the language remained in the upper classes with a fair number of words seeping into local dialects.  Today, high rates of English literacy in the Philippines has made it a popular alternative to India for outsourced call center support.

Mastery of the English language has given Filipino immigrants the ability to assimilate to U.S. ways and lifestyles much easier than many other Asian immigrant groups.  Those same inquisitive Thai and Vietnamese nail salon clerks have told me on several separate occasions that they are jealous of how well Filipinos speak English.  I have noticed that Filipinos do largely belong to the middle class, and a high percentage of us have college degrees.  My parents, born in the mid-1940s during the catastrophic devastation of World War II and its aftermath, grew up speaking English from grammar school to university because it was and continues to be the primary language of instruction.  Even when the U.S. left, the Filipinos caught onto the “lingua franca” upswing of the English language.  Nearly everyone in the country is fluent, making many Filipinos tri-lingual by being able to speak English, Tagalog, and sometimes a local regional dialect.

In the midst of writing this piece, I came across a serendipitous validation of my cultural dilemma on a recent Philippines-themed episode of chef Anthony Bourdain’s show, No Reservations.  For this show, he travels to locales far and wide around the planet to meet foodie locals and indulge in authentic local cuisine.  In Season Four, the Philippines was the very last country in Asia featured on the program.  Mr. Bourdain admitted that he had to capitulate to pressure from outraged, neglected, and very vocal Filipino viewers of his program.  In this episode, he interviewed a young second-generation Filipino-American man named Augusto.  He shared my concern about being caught in a strange limbo of not feeling truly Filipino, because of the distance and inability to speak the language, while not feeling truly American either.  Mr. Bourdain himself asks the various locals in the program, “Who are the Filipino People?”  He speaks for a great deal of people in the U.S. who are genuinely curious but know very little about Filipino culture and cuisine.  Augusto gets to the heart of the matter in a statement, “Filipino families will put another culture before theirs just so their kids can get along.”  I asked my parents why they never forced us to speak Tagalog or thought it was important that we speak their language.  They believed that it was the best way we could speak with non-accented English and have easier lives at school and at building a new life in the U.S. 

Perhaps all those years of Spanish occupation set in the mentality of making the best out of limited circumstances.  But now we are in an era that celebrates difference and change.  I am recklessly optimistic that the tide is changing for Filipino-Americans. President Barack Obama’s recently passed stimulus package is righting a wrong that occurred 63 years ago: President Truman signed the Rescission Act taking away full veteran benefits to Filipino World War II soldiers who volunteered to fight when the Philippines was a U.S. commonwealth.  CNN.com reports, “A provision tucked inside the stimulus bill that President Obama signed calls for releasing $198 million that was appropriated last year for those veterans.  Those who have become U.S. citizens get $15,000 each; non-citizens get $9,000.”  Out of 250,000 Filipino men who volunteered to fight for the United States, only 15,000 survive and most of them are in their 90s.  The NPR program “Morning Edition” interviewed an elderly Filipino World War II veteran who, in response to the long-delayed reception of benefits, merely proclaimed, “America has come to its senses.”

The Obama presidency also has another Filipino-American connection close to home: the White House head chef happens to be a Filipina.  In the March 2009 Vogue cover story, First Lady Michelle Obama shares her enthusiasm about her new life in the White House by sharing, “I am excited about the potential of the White House kitchen being a learning environment for the community.  The current chef, Cristeta Comerford, is the only female chef in the history of the White House.  She’s a young Filipina woman, a mother with a young child, and I am excited to get to know her and for her to know us as a family.”  Ms. Comerford was appointed by Laura Bush but the Obamas elected her to stay on to be the main cook of all family meals and state dinners.  I am curious whether she’ll whip up some of my favorite, delicious Filipino food concoctions for the Obamas.  President Obama, after all, did grow up in the multicultural melting pot of Hawaii where the Filipino population is substantial.  Given his Southeast Asian roots in Indonesia, I think he is open to more recognition of the general region.  Indonesia is a sister country to the Philippines (given our shared Malay and Muslim roots) that could also use more exposure and representation.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder made some controversial remarks effectively accusing the U.S. of being a “nation of cowards” for not being able to recognize the racial rifts that still plague a great deal of this nation despite all the encouraging progress of recent years.  Mr. Holder says that the U.S. is  “…[a] nation has still not come to grips with its racial past nor has it been willing to contemplate, in a truly meaningful way, the diverse future it is fated to have.  To our detriment, this is typical of the way in which this nation deals with issues of race.”

My singular quest may be Filipino-specific, but I feel a particular spark in my soul to heed Mr. Holder’s call to “engage one another more routinely” about the issue of race because “there will be no majority race in America in about fifty years.”  I hope that Filipinos, and many other invisible minorities who have practically zero representation or recognition, are able to be vital and valued members of this astonishing and inevitable multicultural future.  The historical tendency to “Americanize” through the forced use of English deprives many Filipino-Americans of today the ability to speak a Filipino tongue.  However, it does not mean that Filipinos, as an ethnic group, have to be excluded from the cultural dialogue.  Someday soon, as people learn more about the vital historical connections between the United States and the Philippines, more people will start to ask me and my sister, “Are you Filipino?”

SOURCES

“Chronology for the Philippine Islands and Guam in the Spanish-American War.” http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/chronphil.html

“Filipino American.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipino_American

“Full Text: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Remarks on Black History Month, ‘Nation of Cowards.’” http://www.clipsandcomment.com/2009/02/18/full-text-us-attorney-general-eric-holder-remarks-on-black-history-month-nation-of-cowards/

Macabenta, Greg. “An undiscovered market [3-4 million Filipino-Americans].” Free Republic, July 12, 2008.

“Philippines.” No Reservations broadcast on the Travel Channel. February 17, 2009.

Skillin, Don. Magdalo: The Story of Emilio Aguinaldo; Revolutionary Hero of the Philippines. PublishAmerica, 2006.

 ”Stimulus To Repay Debt To WWII Filipino Veterans,” http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101024302

Talley, André Leon. “Leading Lady.” Vogue. March 2009.

“TV Sweep:  Asian Faces Now Showing.” http://www.eastwestmagazine.com/content/view/119/40/

“U.S. to pay ‘forgotten’ Filipino World War II veterans.”  http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/02/23/forgotten.veterans/

photo credit: berlinpiraten.de

If they wish to survive, the Republicans must confront five major issues: (1) they must re-think religion as it relates to politics and the social sphere; (2) they must re-think race and ethnicity in the context of traditional conservatism; (3) they must broaden the term “life,” as in pro-life, so that “life” is not reduced to an ideological debate concerning only conception and fetuses; (4) they must come to grips with the fact that gay people are not a threat to their lives; and (5) they must see that guns, in fact, are a threat to their lives (this is, ironically, the easiest claim for a liberal to make, and the hardest for a conservative to accept). If they could do these things, while staying true to the ideals of individualism and fiscal conservatism, they may be able to avoid being subsumed into the Libertarian party, or, possibly, becoming extinct altogether.

The first problem with Republicans is that they are confused about Christianity, or at least what to say about Christianity. They are first and foremost a Protestant Christian Party with a strong Evangelical voice. The problem with this “Christian” proclamation is that it is exclusive of, and, therefore, necessarily off-putting to, religious minorities in the United States. The first thing Republicans would have to do is admit, whole-heartedly and without shame or guilt, that they are, primarily, a Christian party. This would be an honest claim and it would be the first step to winning back the center. Then (and this is the hard part) they would have to say they are absolutely, positively committed to religious inclusion. Christianity can be one significant point of power within the Republican Party, but multiple spaces, which are inclusive of varieties of religious experience, must also be respected. For example, a concerted effort must be made to build alliances with Muslim religious communities. Subsequently, any person who believes in the “American Dream” of individualistic achievement through hard work could, in the context of her or his own personal faith, take his or her place alongside the good Christians of this glorious nation. This would be the first step in bringing a dead party back to life.

The next problem is race and ethnicity. The November 2008 election showed, beyond reasonable doubt, that minorities are moving further and further away from the GOP. In terms of social inclusion, this problem with American conservatism runs parallel to its problem with Christianity, though it may be a bit harder for a right-winger to admit that their party is, racially, a white (of [Western] European descent) party. After all, it is not as bad to be called a “religionist” (if there is such a word) than it is to be called a “racist.” Nevertheless, Republicans must come clean and admit that they are presently a white-centric party. This of course, is a naming of white privilege, and so more rethinking must be undertaken past this admission. As would be the case with Christianity, multiple points of racial power would have to be posited. Everyone can “come to the table,” no matter their race or ethnicity, as long as they believe in individualism and fiscal conservatism. There is a bit of a paradox here: members of all races are welcome, but they might want to check their race at the door before they sit at the table as autonomous individuals. In this case, a “default” setting of whiteness (and, for that matter, Christianity) may kick into gear, and force all people to assimilate into a monolithic edifice of conservatism – the same problem that got the Republicans into their current mess. Such a shift to a multiracial party will require considerable work from Republican strategists. There must be a concerted effort, then, to engage in an honest dialogue about the complexities of race, while maintaining an ideological and practical commitment to individualism. As such, the aforementioned paradox might be negotiated without reverting to the either/or extremes of either a racial identity or a completely privatized individualism.

Next, the Republicans must confront the “wedge” issue of abortion and life. The wording of this previous sentence is precisely the problem for Republicans: a false dichotomy is set up between “abortion” and “life.” What does it mean to be “pro-life?” Some Americans think that Republicans care very much about conception, embryos, fetuses, and trimesters, but they do not care very much about the actual persons that are brought into this world. They may be pro-life, but do they genuinely care about the well-being of a life? One can preach “compassionate conservatism” until one is blue, but at some point the rhetoric will have to be put into practice. And if Republicans are truly going to be pro-life, then they have to completely change the party line on the death penalty. How is it that a life must be brought into this world under any and all circumstances, but this same life can be taken away if it sins or commits a crime? Conservatives believe that they must never go “soft on crime” and they must never become “pro-choice.” Of course criminals should be punished for their individual transgressions, but they must be allowed to rehabilitate themselves, and they must be permitted to atone for any sins that they might commit.  But if Republicans are going to care for life, then this may be an area in which some “message consistency”– life must be cared for under all circumstances — may serve to bolster the claims of “compassionate conservatives.”

As for gay people, Republicans must move toward secularism on this issue, even if they cling to the notion that Christianity is a powerful force within the party (and this assumes that true Christianity is anti-gay, which may not be the only “Christian” perspective). Gay people should be treated as individuals. Individualism is the very pillar of U.S. conservatism. If a particular church or temple will not allow for same-sex couples to marry, this is fine. But church and state must remain separate. Under the law, governed by reason and rationality, any two people must be allowed to enter into the institution of marriage, and they should be afforded the same rights as any other married couple. There is no slippery slope here, no imminent danger of a person marrying a sibling, or an animal, or a lamp. This should just be a simple issue of two people wanting to enter into a life partnership, and the state should have a limited control over the policing of individual civil rights. The Republican Party can cling to its Christian roots, but just as there are to be multiple centers of religious power, there must also be multiple interpretations of “love” and “partnership” between two people.

Guns. Getting through this issue is like trying to break through a steel wall that is ten feet thick. The NRA has a quasi-transcendent power in the United States. And certain people in the U.S. love their guns. They may appeal to the Second Amendment, but the deeper psycho-social issue at play is the deeply ingrained feeling of paranoia and alienation among some U.S. citizens. The problem of alienation is a by-product of the modern institutionalization of everyday life brought on by the dynamics of advanced capitalism, but these issues are beyond the scope of this essay. For now, suffice to say that those who are pro-life and pro-gun, believe that the best way to protect a life is to shoot anyone who threatens, or is perceived to threaten, a life. But police officers will tell you that they are being out-gunned by assault weapons in the streets of our cities. Does the NRA care about this? Do you really need an automatic weapon to defend yourself or shoot for sport? Of course not. Like all the other issues I have mentioned in this essay, this is a contentious point, and if the GOP can confront it, they will have to negotiate difficult solutions. I am simply throwing out some ideas. It is the job of the experts to put together a platform. I wish them luck.

photo credit: auburnxc

Imagine my surprise when the movie turned out to be brilliant. Brilliant, note—not enjoyable. The cinematography was fantastic and every one of us was retrospectively amazed that the whole thing was accomplished using a mere five actors. So yes, an incredible piece of work. The technical coups, however, were only icing on the cake. Its true distinction lay in its patent ability to discomfort the viewer in ways that I no longer thought possible, in a show-all, tell-all world.

Disclaimer: I can’t proceed without plunking down a massive spoiler. You’ve been duly warned; if you haven’t already seen the film, and you want to be surprised, stop reading, go out and watch it, and join us again later.

Now, then: as I mentioned above, the basic summary that I had received only covered a minute fraction of the overall narrative. Mainly, the film consists of a fourteen-year-old girl drugging and torturing a man who—and we don’t know this for sure until well near the end of the movie—enjoys picking up woefully underage females and, to use an outmoded euphemism, corrupting them, sometimes worse. The height of tension comes as we (and the depraved villain) realize that a safe, hygienic, and considerately anesthetic castration will soon take place, courtesy of the enterprising heroine’s prescient purchase of a medical reference and a book bag packed with all of the requisite tools to perform the operation in the comfort of one’s own home. The only thing we see while this procedure is ostensibly underway are shots of the respective players’ faces; the lack of visual confirmation of bloodletting and corporal restructuring still set off tangible winces, cringes, and waves of general disgust and terror through the audience. The males in my group were especially uneasy with each new development, screwing themselves up into contortions that would seem to indicate the receipt of a good, hard kick to the groin. Even after we learned that our bright young gal has only faked the procedure—she’s merely made him believe that she’s removed the visible representations of his manhood and sent them through the disposal—the sense of moral indignation, of shock and outrage, was still palpable among our little assembly. Why did we need to see that? What possible reason could anyone have for creating such a thing? That’s revolting.

The collective sense of having been abused was, I think, undeniably justified. But then—simultaneously, disturbingly—it also wasn’t. A curious sort of appreciation began to make its ugly appearance inside of me, accompanied by the hopefulness that my feelings about the film were “right,” that the writer and director and whoever else was in charge also had hoped to convey the message that was gradually taking shape inside my head. Stay with me.

Throughout most of my adult involvement in cinema and literature, I’ve regularly had to endure portrayals of rape, whether in print or on celluloid, while trying to remind myself that it’s not real, that it’s all a condemnation of human brutality. In discussions about these scenes, in class or informally, I’ve had to sit there and pretend to be objective, try to get through the ordeal and successfully hide the fact that those artistic encounters with rape have left indelible bruises on my psyche, punched empty spaces into my stomach that will never really fill themselves in again. I try to dismiss the foolishness of feeling personally small and hurt and beaten down by the action. And resignedly, I realize that there’s not much protest to make after others (usually men) have ended the conversation by walking away congratulating themselves that they’ve been able to float past all of this pain to an appreciation of the greater significance of the piece—having  defended the sacrality of Art and brought me to a higher plane of awareness in the bargain. 

I’m tired of having a man condescend to explain to me that art can’t ignore the violence in society, that these scenes portray reality and thereby refuse to talk down to us by hiding the evil of the world from us. I’ve had enough of hearing such episodes justified by an assertion that, in showing the cruel truth of life, the purgative powers of horror will bring us to some sort of realization and change us into better people because of it. That, according to the guys down the hall, for example, the mental scars that remain fifteen years after viewing A Clockwork Orange constitute a small and worthwhile sacrifice compared to the new, profound considerations of ethics to which the film supposedly exposed me.

Every time I hear such schlock, I’m reminded, in spite of all of our contemporary rhetoric of equality and worth, of the still-present, senseless ways that (mostly) men can demonstrate what they perceive to be superiority over (mostly) women. It’s not merely the act of rape itself, then—or the vicarious humiliation of a viewer faced with its reenactment—but the noble-sounding defense of its inclusion in art that seems so insulting. The justification believed, so smugly, to be representative of advanced rationality. The authority so convinced of his instruction on the proper way to feel about (portrayals of) something so unforgivable.

Admittedly, these proponents of Truth in Art might not change their tune, where Hard Candy is concerned; if so, I’ll at least congratulate them on their consistency. Based, though, on the reactions I saw in the guys around me, I would expect a different sort of argument to ensue, at least a pause or a momentary lapse of certainty. Because I’ve witnessed these same men sit through more “traditional” rape scenes, visions of slaughter, war crimes, and so forth, and even while acknowledging, on some level, the dread of it all, not displaying any sort of physical discomfort, or expressing a post-viewing condemnation of the project’s creators as sick.

I’m guessing, in other words, that with this film, art has brought us as close as possible to allowing males to appreciate the emotional reaction that I (and many other women) have when watching a rape scene. Not nearer, note, to understanding the actual crime, or to acknowledging that humans are capable of heinous cruelty, or that life is intricately unjust. Rather, the movie might just give guys a taste of the chilling sensation that what you’re witnessing is somehow directed at you, almost a warning that you, too, could have your soul and dignity hatefully, mercilessly, and often casually shattered in front of your face. A reminder to watch out: don’t become too secure in your foolish conviction that you are a unique and valuable individual.

Why does this movie get those messages across so successfully? Among a multitude of other reasons, it openly addresses, without shying away from any of the “truths” that proponents of truthful art so admire, the fact that so much of being able to prove that one is a respectable man seems tied up in the presence or absence of a functioning organ. That someone might care so little for you that that person wants to go beyond hurting you physically, taking, too, that thing that, at bottom, you believe is yours alone. I saw those men in my little group begin to understand what it feels like to see someone so successfully go after another’s soul with a self-congratulatory smile. And then to get the impression that those around you would dismiss you as weak and hysterical were you to admit your painful feelings of empathy and fear, were you to do anything other than walk away from the screen and grab a beer and move on to the next activity. Well, I thought, they might finally know what it feels like.

But hold on, now; I’m not trying to “get back” at anyone; I’m not gloating over a victory in the ridiculous battle of the sexes. The scene I’ve described, and most of the movie, in fact, was almost too excruciating to watch. There was nothing enjoyable about seeing someone tortured, despicable person though he was; I experienced no triumphant feeling of “justice” (if we must call it that) having been served. There was no glee in wondering what this act of vengeance was doing to the person perpetrating it, or what sorts of hurt and sense of futility had led her to undertake such an extreme course of action. It was more than unnerving to think that a whole team of creative professionals came together with the intention of turning a disturbing idea into a visible reality. This film is not, in other words, what I would call “entertainment” in any sense of the term.

I feel that I should note, too, that this picture was not the product of angry, vindictive females; writer Brian Nelson and director David Slade are, as their names suggest, men. And watching the DVD commentary, it’s quite obvious that their purposes in making this movie weren’t aligned with the ones the ones that I’m taking out of my experience with it. 

All of its motivations aside, though, Hard Candy is an obviously powerful film. And, sadly enough, in spite of all of my disparagement of “truth in art for truth’s sake,” I think it had to be as gruesome as it was in order to wake “us,” male or female, out of the desensitized ways in which it seems that we accept violence in this culture—at least violence against women, or any sorts of brutality committed between members of the same sex. (Think of the especially prurient pleasure taken in “chick fights.”) I don’t know of any more fruitful course of action in terms, for example, of getting men to see just what the idea of rape does to at least this woman. Other than this incident, the closest I’ve come to that outcome has been a sort of paternalistic sheepishness on the part of nice, guilty-feeling men who can’t imagine (and why should they be able to?) how it affects me.

What am I really trying to say, then? My plea is not for a balancing of the scales, so that brutality is acceptable as long we achieve parity in the number of victims of each gender, each side keeping up in a continual raising of graphic stakes. Neither am I demanding a wide-ranging ban on the depiction of violence, in film or elsewhere. But might we consider—just for a second—whether letting us in on the intricacies of a sexual assault is really worth it? Whether the continuing portrayals of such an act—and the justifications made about them—might be (maybe unconscious) attempts to hold onto a place on some remaining hierarchy? Or whether they only present us with “inevitabilities”—for whose elimination, in our newfound artistic maturity, we might as well not struggle?   Why resist truth, after all? 

How about we get a little more creative than merely reporting on “reality?” Why not, in other words, ditch the rape scenes and scrap the shoot-em-ups? Idealistic? Sure. Willfully naïve? Maybe so. Likely? Not in this universe, I’ll admit. I’m not asking for a revoltingly aseptic cinematic universe worthy of Patty Duke and the Beave. But I will ask that writers or directors consider, next time they feel like using rape to make a point, that they think not only about what kind of world they’re reporting on—but what sort of reality—emotional, spiritual, even physical—they’re helping to create.

The illustration is based on the photo by Made Underground. Credit: Made Underground

Whichever side they come from – and whichever variation of the arguments they choose – it all boils down to this: they are decrying the fact that relationships have moved from the private to the public sphere.  The underlying logic is that love is between two persons only and should remain between them; love should remain an unmediated experience between the two persons in that relationship.

Which of course completely misses the point. 

If we consider the fact that relationships are the result of a negotiation between two persons, then there must be a space between them for this very negotiation to occur. Otherwise, all that is happening is that one person is subsuming the other within their own sphere of understanding.  This would be understanding at its most banal – and perverse – form; that of bringing the other person under one’s stance.  If that were the case, there would no longer be any relationship; all negotiation is gone and the other person is effectively effaced.  Hence whenever one hears the phrase “I understand my partner,” one should be wary; clearly that person’s version of a relationship is a masturbatory one.

In this sense, any relationship between two (or more) persons always already carries with it the unknown, and always unknowable.  The other person is an enigma, remains enigmatic, to you.  This is the only way in which the proclamation “I love you” remains singular, remains a love that is about the person as a singular person – and not merely about the qualities of the person, what the person is.  For if the other person comes under your own schema, then the love for the other person is also a completely transparent love, one that you can know thoroughly, calculate; the other person becomes nothing more than a check-list.  To compound matters, if it is the qualities that you love, by extension, if those qualities go away, so does the love.  Only when the love for the other person is an enigmatic one, one that cannot be understood, can that love potentially be an event.

If it is an event, then strictly speaking it cannot be known before it happens; in fact, at best it can be glimpsed as it is happening, or perhaps even only realized retrospectively.  Hence at the point in which it happens, it is a love that comes from elsewhere; this strange phenomenon is best captured in the colloquial phrase, ‘I was struck by love’ or even more so by ‘I was blinded by love.’  This is a blinding in the very precise sense of, ‘I have no idea why or when it happened; before I knew it, I was in love.’ Cupid is blind for this reason: not just because love is random (and can happen to anyone at any time) but more importantly because even after it happens, both the reason you are in love, and the person you are in love with, remain blind to you. 

Since there is an unknowable relationship with the other person, the only way you can approach it is via a ritual.  This is the lesson that religions have taught us: since one is never able to phenomenally experience the god(s), one has no choice but to approach them through rituals.  These rituals are strictly speaking meaningless – the actual content is interchangeable – but it is the form that is important. Rituals allow us momentary glimpses at secrets, and secrets are never about content. Rather, secrets entail the recognition that they are secrets; the secret lies in their form as secret.  This can be seen when we consider how group secrets work; since the entire group knows the secret, clearly the content of the secret is not as important as the fact that only members within the group are privy to this secret.  Occasionally the actual secret content can be so trivial that even other people outside the group might know the information; they just do not realize its significance.  For instance, if I used my date of birth as my bank-account password, merely knowing when I was born would not instantly give you the key to my life savings.  In order for that to happen, you would have had to recognize the significance of the knowledge of my birthday.  This of course means that you have to know that you know something.  Since the god(s) are, strictly speaking, unknowable, this suggests that rituals put one in a position to potentially experience the god(s).

The meaningless gestures on Valentine’s Day play precisely this ritual role.  It is not so much what you give the other person, but the fact that you give it to them.  The gift in this sense is very much akin to an offering; the gift opens the possibility of an exchange.  Gift-giving does not guarantee that you will like what is returned; there is always a reciprocation of the gift, but what is returned to you is never known in advance, until the moment it is received.  This of course means that the worst thing that one can do is not to give the gift: that would be akin to a cutting off of all possibilities, a complete closing of all communication with the other person.  This at the same time also means that you cannot wait for the other person to give you something before you get them their gift: if that were the scenario, the return gift would be nothing more than a calculated return, where the relationship is nothing more than an accounting figure, where the other would be once again reduced to a statistic, a mere return of investment.

The only manner in which both persons can give true gifts is to offer them independently of the other person, whilst keeping them in mind.  In this way, the two gifts are always already both uncalculated (in the sense of not knowing what the return is) and the reciprocation for the other (without knowing whether the other person actually has a gift in the first place). 

Of course this would seem like an irrational, even stupid, way of buying gifts. The stupidity involved actually saves the relationship from being merely banal.  And more importantly, prevents it from entering the mere profane.

It is the stupidity of Valentine’s Day – complete with it kitsch-ness – that protects the sacredness of relationships, precisely by being completely and utterly meaningless …

This dog reminds me of Jesus. We’re swimming on a summer night. All the heat trapped in the air enhances the dark blue of the night sky in such a way that lighter objects seem to glow in contrast. This dog is such an object. His sandy and grey flecked body shines against the swelling blue Oklahoma night. He seems heavenly.

And he whimpers. Whimpering does not preclude heavenliness. Jesus wasn’t all shimmer and gilt. He cried out on the cross. He wanted out. This dog wants out. He hobbles around the pool, translucent and crying. His owner, the motel’s proprietress, leans against a stucco wall and releases cigarette smoke into the blue night. She wants out.

We left Atlanta at 7 o’clock that morning. Fourteen hours later we’re a few miles west of Oklahoma city, at this motel, in this swimming pool. Our destination, San Francisco, is twenty-five hours away. Tomorrow night at about 9:30, after having just crossed into California at Bakersfield, we will make the decision to drive through the night. But tonight, we stop. It’s hot, we’re dirty, we swim, the dog whimpers, the big-haired, faux-blonde smokes. I get out of the pool.

*

I’m laying in the street, bleeding. I’m at the intersection of 2^nd and Market at a red light. People with power–power ties, power suits, and power pumps–step over me as they traverse the crosswalk, moving north-to-south and south-to-north on their way to and from power lunches. A group of homeless men on the corner in a drumming circle begin chanting, “ouch, that hurt, ouch that hurt” over and over as they beat on their plastic buckets. I pick up my bike and my body, pretending that I am not in pain. Two minutes earlier I had no idea that my bike would capsize if I rode on top of the streetcar tracks. The light turns green, I mount my bike and ride down Market Street with the fervor of someone who knows exactly what she is doing.

I hit the next light green and cut over to Sansome, beginning my climb into Pac Heights. I think this is the best way into Pac Heights. Today is only my second day as a bike messenger; next week I will learn how to loop around the Embarcadero and enter Pac Heights from the north. At this moment, the most power I have in my life resides in my legs. My right leg is slightly numb and bleeding. I hate having a job. This is the sixth job I’ve had in eighteen months. I will have one more before I move to Utah. My parents think there’s something wrong with me. “Honey,” they say, “you have been beautifully educated, why can’t you get a real job?”  Because I enjoy sitting on a bench along the Embarcadero at 8:30 in the morning, watching the pigeons twitter and pick, watching the homeless unfurl from their blankets and cardboard boxes, watching the standing traffic on the Bay Bridge, waiting for my dispatcher to call me with a pick-up. I prefer my life this way.

I arrive at the graphic design office where the drawings are to be delivered. The receptionist is old and fat. Her glasses are thick and large, covering her cheeks. A knotted chain dangles from the sides of her glasses. She has smeared makeup all over her face, perhaps to conceal her deeply etched wrinkles, and she smells like the Clinique counter at a suburban mall. I hand her the tube of drawings from my bag and ask to use the restroom. “I’m sorry,” she whines, “our restroom is for employees only.”  I turn and leave, still bleeding.

*

The Canon to the Ordinary just fired me. He called me into his office, an office blanketed in plush green carpet, an office with two wingback chairs in one corner and an expansive mahogany desk in the other, an office much larger than the Bishop’s office. He sits behind the desk, instructing me to take a seat in one of the wingbacks, a good ten feet away from him. “This just isn’t working,” he tells me. “It’s just not working out,” he clarifies. I don’t tell him that ordering the Bishop’s coffee and tea supplies is not a good use of my “beautiful education.”  I don’t tell him that the only thing I like about my job is riding the cable car to and from work. I don’t tell him that I think he treats his secretary like crap. And I don’t tell him that two weeks ago, exactly two weeks ago, I gave my two weeks notice, meaning today, the day he is firing me, is, technically, my last day. I sit and listen to him yell. I turn in my keys and leave.

I walk across the Close to the Cathedral. Grace Cathedral sits atop Nob Hill, right along the California cable car line. Grace draws crowds; tourist and locals come to see the stones, the stained glass, the doors, the Bishop himself, but mostly they come to walk The Labyrinth, a maze to spiritual enlightenment, first designed by the Catholics in Chartres. Grace has two Labyrinths:  one carved onto the stone of the Close, and the other, a velvety carpet model, sits in the Cathedral’s nave. I have never walked The Labyrinth, and I do not do so today. Today, I cry.

I sit in a pew and cry.

The B.V. M. stares at me. I am sitting beneath her. The Window of the Annunciation shines down on me: Gabriel bestows God’s message on an overjoyed virgin. I have nothing. This is what I think. I quit my job and was fired from my job. Unemployment does not scare me; losing my health insurance scares me. Zoloft, my antidepressant of choice, costs $93 a month for a subclinical dose. I am on a subclinical dose. The Rev. Gwyneth Murphy breezes past my perch beneath The Annunciation. I recognize her from a staff cocktail party. She wears a 2″ clerical collar. Most female priests in the Episcopal Church wear the 1″ collar. Three years from now, she will work at St. Mark’s, the Episcopal Cathedral in Salt Lake City, and I will live 2 blocks away. I get up and leave.

*

After our swim, Jonathan and I decide to get some food. Not being familiar with the local cuisine in El Rio, we end up at Denny’s. We think it’s better to know in advance that our food will be bad rather than hope for something fantastic and regional, only to be disappointed and disgusted. I have no idea that San Francisco will disgust and disappoint me and that, after two years, I will leave it for Utah.

I want an omelet. It arrives and the waitress, attuned to our travel fatigue and noticing, perhaps from my short hair and Jonathan’s tongue ring, that we are not local, asks where we’re headed. San Francisco. “On I-40?” she asks. Yes, on I-40, straight through Texas. “Be careful in Groom-there’s a speed trap there. Also, right outside Groom is the largest cross in the Western Hemisphere. It’s beautiful.”  She smacks her gum, slaps the bill on the table, and turns on her heels.

*

It is the summer of clergy deaths. In addition to ordering the Bishop’s coffee and tea supplies, one of my duties in the Diocesan Office is to make and send out clergy death announcements. Clergy death announcements are postcards, a somewhat questionable generic decision given the postcard’s message. But I do not dispute the use of postcards; I simply make them. At first, I try to have fun with the assignment, crafting in large, obnoxious text: “Dear Clergy, Hey!  What’s up?  Weather’s great, wish you were here…all of you except the Rev. Bill Riley ‘cuz that motherfucker bit the dust!  Have a good summer. Love, The Diocese of California.”

Marilyn Belove is an exacting person. She has been the Bishop’s secretary for five years; before that she worked as the Canon’s secretary, but she fell in love with him. The Canon to the Ordinary dealt with the situation by firing her. The Bishop hired her. Her new desk sits right outside the Bishop’s office door and right outside the Canon’s office door. Her new desk is one foot to the right of her old desk. As the Bishop’s secretary, she has the same paper weights, paper clip dispenser, sticky notes, mousepad and file tabs as she had as the Canon’s secretary. And she swoons every time the Canon walks by in his dark cleric suit, tortoise shell glasses, and wavy blond hair.

Marilyn studies the language on my postcard. “Beautiful,” she says. I have used my father’s favorite words in the Book of Common Prayer for my third batch of clergy death announcement postcards: “a sheep of thine own fold, a lamb of thine own flock, a sinner of thine own redeeming.”  Marilyn asks me if these words need to be italicized. It’s a nice touch, I tell her. I’ve made 400 of them, I tell her. “Yes, but they’re all different sizes,” she replies, holding up a clump of oddly-sized postcards. I’m not good with the paper cutter, I tell her. “They need to be fixed,” she says, “they all need to be exactly the same size.”  They’re fine, I say. Marilyn spends the next two hours trimming the edges of 400 clergy death announcement postcards. I hop on a cable car and go home. Tomorrow I will give my two weeks notice.

*

Lynnie is skeptical. Lynnie, a forty-something lesbian with hairy legs, blue spiky hair, and an unlit cigarette somehow suctioned to her lower lip, is reading my resume. My over-education concerns her. “You could do anything you wanted. Why exactly do you want to be a bike messenger?” she asks me. I’m not sure what to tell her. I like to ride my bike and wish for the chance to be caught by the Bay, to take a peek on my way up a hill and see the vast grey waters spread out before me. Seeing water on my way up a hill surprises me. I tell Lynnie that I just want to try something different.

She hires me with the warning that I had better not “fucking flake out” after six months. I quit after two because the surprise of the water is no longer enough. A swinging taxi cab door throws me over my handlebars in Portrero Hill. A Marin Country widow drives right over me on Van Ness. Another messenger slams into me on Battery. I take down a pedestrian on Montgomery. January and February, the months that I worked, are San Francisco’s wettest. Eight hours a day I skim along the surface of downtown streets, blinded by fog and unrelenting rain. Gortex begins to retain water after two hours of uninterrupted exposure. My forearms get the wettest in the rain. And it’s hard to see the Bay through the burdened clouds.

*

On one side of the Texas stretch of I-40 are signs which read, “Caution: Hitchhikers May Be Escaped Convicts,” and on the other is, as our waitress at Denny’s promised, the largest free-standing cross in the Western Hemisphere. But what our waitress at Denny’s in El Rio, Oklahoma didn’t tell us is the largest free-standing cross in the Western Hemisphere is surrounded by about twelve respectably sized statues of Jesus, each one depicting the Son of God in various poses of distress. There’s “Standing-Up-Tall-Jesus” who, despite his erect posture, sports a look of mournful foreboding. This statue is followed by “The Back-Bent Paschal Lamb” in which our Lord and Savior appears somewhat stooped. Next is “The-Word-Made-Flesh-at-90…Degrees,” a concrete masterpiece, immortalizing Jesus’s flexibility. This forward-falling motif progresses through the rest of the statues and culminates in the final statue, “The Collapsed Christ,” in which the Messiah lays prostrate at the foot of the largest free-standing cross in the Western Hemisphere. I think about the whimpering, heavenly dog at the motel.

*

We live in a bad neighborhood. Women have broken beer bottles over one another’s heads in the street. DEA snipers have staked-out on our roof. There’s a woman with wiry hair shooting from her head who wanders around half-dressed, screaming. She screams things like “bitch, get your black ass back to Oakland” or “I ain’t yo’ niggah, niggah.”  Sometimes, she carries a one-armed doll and swings it to accent her screaming.

I am under the kitchen table, screaming at Jonathan. Get down, I tell him. Turn off the lights and get down. He tries to tell me it was a firecracker. I know it’s gunfire because I saw the man running down the street firing the gun. Was his shirt yellow or grey?  Forty-five minutes later, when the police officer asks, I can’t remember. He asks me at approximately what time did I see this man?  I tell him 8:40.

Jonathan and I crawl on our bellies into the living room. The lights are out. We climb on the couch, peek over the back of the couch and out the window. DeMarco Jenkins lays face-first on Buchanan Street. A woman in pink flips him over. Jenkins is twenty-one years old and does not live in my neighborhood. He has a beautiful Afro-it is voluminous and thick and flecked with fresh blood.

*

The espresso machine is temperamental. I explain this to Jean-Jean, a fashion design student on exchange from Belgium, because he is laughing at my apron. It looks like a Jackson Pollack original, done in java. I just made a double cap dry for the testy gay man who lives down the street and, as usual, the machine exploded, pelting me with ground espresso. Jean-Jean thinks this is funny. He orders a Magritte.

The Magritte is my favorite, to eat and to make. I have a weakness for Nutella. The batter sizzles on the crepe wheel as I quickly chop a banana. I flip the crepe over and wrestle with the Nutella; it is thick and solid and resists being spread over the warm crepe. But soon it melts, giving in to the demands of my wrist and forearm. I add the banana, fold everything up, dress it with powered sugar and whipped cream, and hand it to Jean-Jean. I am drunk and I am stoned and I have made another beautiful crepe.

When my shift ends, I drive to Oakland to see my girlfriend. We spent a great deal of our time having sex-in the bed, in the bath, on the kitchen floor, in organic supermarket parking lots. My girlfriend takes fourteen pills a day because she is a bi-polar, borderline, OCD, dyslexic, anorexic self mutilator. In three months, she will light herself on fire and I walk out of her life forever.

*

It’s three a.m. and we are, for the second time in as many days, at Denny’s. Jonathan hands me the car keys. It’s my turn. In the past ten minutes, I’ve had three cups of coffee and five cajun chicken fingers. We are sitting at the counter. Denny’s is doing good business in the middle of the night; many of the booths are full, even if only with one person. Our waitress, with a ponytail and bangs, smiles at me every time she tops off my coffee. We leave her a good tip.

The Mojave Desert is dark at 3 a.m. There are no streetlights along the highway, nor are there any reflectors along the lane lines. I’m guessing. Jonathan is curled asleep against the window, clutching a pillow. The pillowcase, a yellow and orange array of floral patterns, is the brightest thing I can see. I sing Madonna to stay awake. I yell Madonna to stay awake: “Borderline. You just keep on pushing my love over the borderline.”  Three and a half hours later, I tell Jonathan it’s his turn. The sun starts to come up over the hills of San Mateo County, and my pupils are so dilated from caffeine that I can’t squint enough to keep out the light.