A Globalization Moment

Several years ago, I was in New York City for a board meeting of the International Council for Distance Education.  After the session, several of us decided to have dinner together.  We were four—from Germany, India, Norway, and myself from the U.S.

            We set out to find a good restaurant, deciding that we could easily find good food within walking distance of our Manhattan hotel.  We came to the door of a well-known Italian restaurant and were about to enter when our Indian colleague stopped.  “I’ve never understood Italian food,” he told us.  “I don’t think I am ready for this.”

            We stood on the sidewalk and discussed where to eat.  Eventually, we all agreed on Chinese food.  We had passed a Chinese restaurant on the way and so backtracked to it.  It was late, and the restaurant had on a few tables with customers.  Our waiter, apparently, was born in China and, if his grasp of English was any indication, had arrived fairly recently.   We struggled to identify what was in the different menu items.  Finally, my Norwegian colleague found something he liked.

            “Bueno!” 

            He had a habit of exclaiming in Spanish like that. 

            Our waiter’s eyes lit up.  “Quiere esto?”  he asked.  It turned out that, in the New York neighborhood where he lived, Spanish was more common than English.  It was his American language.

            After that, we had no problem.  We ordered the rest of our Chinese dinner in English, confirming the details in Spanish.  It was a great evening.  Smiles all around, including the waiter, who was much relieved.

            It was a globalization moment—a little example of how our new world works.  We are all in this together.  All of us equals in a world, all of us trying to find a language that will help us become part of the new community in which we find ourselves.  There is no room for xenophobia in this world:  we are all strangers here.

Reading Memoirs

I have become a big fan of memoirs.  Not biographies, but books where interesting individuals explore major events in their own lives.

            It began with One Hundred Names for Love, Diane Ackerman’s memoir of life with her husband, novelist Paul West, after he suffered a stroke that affected his ability to communicate.   This was a very personal memoir for me.  I took several courses from Paul when he taught at Penn State.  More than that, I thought of him as a mentor and role model at a time when I hoped to become a writer myself.  I don’t know Diane, but we very likely were both students at Penn State during the late sixties and early seventies.   She is a wonderful writer in her own right, the author of The Natural History of the Senses,among other books.  She had been researching a book about the brain when Paul suffered his stroke.  As a result, her memoir starts with the science of what he suffered and expands to explore how their relationship evolved as he recovered and, ultimately, how he himself experienced the stroke and its aftermath.   The powerful aspect of this memoir, though, is her description of their daily life together, both before and after the stroke. 

            I then read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which starts with the sudden death of her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, and her life over the next twelve months.   I knew little about Didion at the time.  I discovered that she was an inspiration for a generation of women and that she and her husband had been an important screenwriting team.  From her narrative, I learned that she was also a “tough customer.”  As she describes it, when her husband died, she went to the hospital, not knowing whether he was alive or dead.  When the attending physician came in, she overheard the EMT tell him, “It’s okay.  She’s a tough customer.”   For a while, she takes that as an ironic nickname.   Reading Magical Thinking was a bit like moving into a new neighborhood and getting to know a wonderful, but complex neighbor. 

            I had just finished Magical Thinkingwhen Karen and I took a vacation to Maine.  We stopped by the public library in Kennebunkport, where I was delighted to find a copy of John Gregory Dunne’s last novel.   Interesting how reading can become a family affair.  Didion completed a second memoir—about the death of her daughter—before she died earlier this year.  I have yet to read that one, but I will.

            I knew almost nothing about Patti Smith, the punk rock poet, until I picked up Just Kids, her memoir about her early days in New York and her relationship with the photographer Robert Maplethorpe.   She is just about my age.   She ran away to New York from New Jersey in the 1960s and recounts her life there during the flowering of the American counter culture.  I was amazed to read about a peer’s experiences, so different from my own, but with many of the same cultural contexts as background.  I immediately went out and bought Horses, her breakthrough album.

            This week, I started another memoir—Along the Way, a father-son memoir by Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez.  Again, I was confronted by two people who experienced some of the same events that I did—the death of Robert Kennedy, for instance—but from two very different perspectives:  one, a man a few years older than me; the other, his son, much younger than me.   I could identify with both as they talked about their experiences in the 1960s—Martin getting starting his career and his family in a time of cultural revolution, Emilio experiencing a nomadic childhood in a strong family.  I am still reading this one, but it promises to be very revealing of the dynamics between two creative people in a demanding profession.

            What I like about all of these books is the way these first-person accounts are like sitting down and catching up with an old friend.  In the end, I feel a personal connection with the authors.  It is a fantastic literary experience.

Planting Roses

This morning, I planted three rose bushes--three double knockout reds--behind our new house in State College.  I've been looking forward to this for some time, but was excited to actually get planting, even if it was the hottest day of the summer (so far).  I always like to have roses in my yard.  When I was a boy, growing up in my grandparents home, I was surrounded by roses.  My grandmother's mother's name was Rose.  My mother's name was Rose, and Grandma and Grandpa had huge rose bushes lining the long drive up to the house--red, pink and white roses with huge blooms.  Two other bushes, at right angles to the others, defined our front lawn.  At the corners were lilacs (my aunt's name was Lillian).

Roses remind me of what was good about my childhood.  They help me stay in contact with Grandma (whose love of these particular flowers extended even to her talcum powder, which was named "Lilacs and Roses") and Grandpa (who did the hard work of planting and very occasional trimming) and, of course, my mother and aunt (whose names always conjure up the image of "the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley"). 

They help make our house home.

Deadly black lung surges back in coal country - Open Channel

The article contained in the link below is a truly sad reminder of why we need regulation--and enforcement--to protect workers.  Coal companies are not going to protect their workers unless they are regulated.  In this case, regulations were made to control the cause of black lung disease in mines, but the regulations have not been adequately enforced.  Coal companies care only about money.  Government needs to care about people.  That means not only putting regulations on the books, but enforcing them.  We've seen enough examples recently in the financial area to demonstrate that enforcement cannot be limited to fines--corporations have come to see federal fines as simply a  cost of doing business, no different than the bribes they pay overseas.  Enforcement must require that the individuals who break the law pay personally, in some cases by doing time.  Creating environments that harm workers--and even kill them eventually--should be seen as a serious crime.  Shame on these companies, and shame on the individual investors who profit from their awful treatment of workers.

Deadly black lung surges back in coal country - Open Channel

Ben Franklin's Lesson

I am reading Walter Isaacson’s biography, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.  In it, there is this paragraph that I find to be very important for Americans today:

Tocqueville came to the conclusion that there was an inherent struggle in America between two opposing impulses: the spirit of rugged individualism versus the conflicting spirit of community and association building.  Franklin would have disagreed.  A fundamental aspect of Franklin’s life, and of the American society he helped to create, was that individualism and communitarianism, so seemingly contradictory, were interwoven.  The frontier attracted barn-raising pioneers who were ruggedly individualistic as well as fiercely supportive of their community.  Franklin was the epitome of this admixture of self-reliance and civic involvement, and what he exemplified became part of the American character (p. 103).

            It strikes me that what Tocqueville called “inherent struggle” is the yin and yang of American society.   The opposites are, in fact, just as Franklin saw them:  two aspects that, taken singly, are in opposition but that, taken together, define the American character.  Throughout our history, it has been this kind of civic individualism that has allowed Americans to solve problems and to innovate to create a better society.  It is what allowed us to be not just a nation of immigrants, but a nation of immigrants who created a unique culture.

            Today, in our politics and in our culture more generally, we are ignoring the unity that these apparent opposites allow us.  We are focused on the yin and the yang—the sun and the shadow—rather than on the mountain they define.  We need a Franklin to remind us that, as he wrote, “The good men may do separately is small compared with what they may do collectively.”

Reference:  Isaacson, Walter.  Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003.

Reminders

My Aunt Lillian, when she died a fewyears back, left behind her high school year books, from 1939 when she was in the sixth grade, through 1945, when she graduated. Today, I thumbed through them, looking for Aunt Lillian and other relatives. I found several Elliott cousins--Alice, Bill, and Jim—who grew up across the street from us but are allgone now, and also saw a lot of familiar names from my youth, some of whom areprobably the parents of my school mates. But perhaps the greatest surprise was to see the number of faculty members fromthose days—well before I was born—who were also my teachers in the 1960s.  Looking back, it was not that long atime between 1945 and 1966—well within a teaching career. Nevertheless, I was surprised to see those familiar, although much younger faces:

Rethinking "Community"

I was both shocked and dismayed last Thursday morning over coffee to read a letter to the editor of our local paper that began, “In the event that Barack Hussein Obama is re-elected to the presidency of the United States of America, all members of the military, all members of all the police services, and members of emergency services providers, will have to evaluate and decide if they are going to obey the dictates of the president and his cadre of ‘czars,’ or they will honor the Constitution of the United States.”

            The shock was that someone would go so far as to urge members of our military to consider what is, at the bottom line, something that looks very much like treason—that U.S. soldiers should disobey their commander in chief—and, even more, that a newspaper would publish it.   Free speech is the price of democracy, and in this case I felt some “sticker shock.”

            More deeply felt, though was dismay over what the letter suggests about the loss of community in the U.S.   We’ve seen this in so many ways over the past few years, but this letter illustrates just how profoundly separated from the mainstream some of our citizens feel. 

            It is easy to chalk some of this up to racism.  Clearly, there is a segment of the U.S. population who cannot identify with an African-American being President and who, as a result, see themselves as no longer needing to be loyal to a government led by a President who is not “us.”  This is downplayed in the media, but it is obvious when you listen to what people say.   There is also an element of xenophobia—fear of the stranger—at work.  For the past decade, many in the U.S. have marginalized all Moslems for what some Moslems did on 9/11/01.  Note that the letter emphasized President Obama’s middle name, which is also the name of the dictator that we deposed in our misguided war against Iraq.  The ongoing nonsense about the President’s birth certificate is an example of how this has been used to create suspicion that he is not one of “us,” but instead an exotic “other.”  The right wing in our country has used this as a tool to further radicalize those who already felt disenfranchised by the economy, loss of social standing as workers, etc.

            But I believe that these two factors are symptoms of a broader and, ultimately, more widespread concern.   William Irwin Thompson wrote about the idea that, as society expands, so does our cultural identity.  Early cultures celebrated the clan or tribe as the point of identity.  As farming took root and towns developed, the family identity became “private,” and citizenship in a town became the “public identity.”  Eventually, one’s identity with one’s hometown became private as nationality became the public identity.  We see this in the evolution of how immigrant families identify themselves over the first few generations.  The first generation brings to their new home the language and customs of the old country.  The second generation begins to make much of that private, as they take on the identity of the new country in which they were born.  By the third generation, the old culture is a heritage celebrated at family events and holidays.

            Today, we are at a point where our public identities are being challenged by globalization.  Traditional definitions of communities as groups of mutually dependent people in a defined geographic area are fading.  The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, even the ephemera of our lives—our toys, our greeting cards, etc.—are not made locally by our neighbors.  Instead, they are produced all over the world by people most of us never see and to whom most of us have no sense of social obligation.   But, we have not yet begun to see ourselves as “citizens of the world” or members of a “global community.”  As a result, many of us—having been raised to expect to be part of a traditional community that takes pride in the “Made in the USA” label—feel vaguely disenfranchised.  Being an American seems not to mean what it used to mean, but we don’t know what else to be.

            Then along come the politicians and the robber barons who finance them, who sense they can gain an advantage by playing off the unease that people are feeling.  The result can be seen in headlines throughout the political season as politicians pander to the unease, turning fear into anger and, they hope, action that will benefit their political or corporate interests.  In this environment, we cease to be a community at a much deeper level.

            I have been reading Citizen, Louise Knight’s biography of Jane Addams, the great social reformer of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.   Looking back on the Pullman strike of the 1890s, she noted that one’s ethics are contextual and that, when major changes happen in society, a new ethic may arise.   In the context of the Industrial Revolution—and the massive immigration and urbanization that accompanied it—that meant moving beyond the old class-based ethic of philanthropy as looking down on others to a new ethic of mutual engagement among social equals.   

            Today, the Information Revolution is causing a disruption that is similar equal in scope, if not greater, to the Industrial Revolution.  Instead of immigration and urbanization, this new revolution is causing globalization and, as Fareed Zakaria noted in his book, The Post-American World, not the decline of America, but the “rise of the rest.”   We can no longer see the rest of the world as strangers:  we are too interdependent on numerous fronts.

            What we need to do, in order to mend our increasingly shattered sense of community, is to embrace what is best about our culture and celebrate it and, at the same time, get to know our neighbors.  The long-term solution lies in our educational system.  When I was in high school in the 1960s, seniors took a course called “Problems of Democracy.”  It was designed to help us understand the complexities of the American vision in practice before we went out and joined the adult world.  We need a fresh take on that to prepare people to live as citizens and be productive workers in our new, global community. 

            Meanwhile, I hope that, by the end of this political season, we will be able to find ways to mend relationships and find common purpose as members of a shared community.  That, it seems to me, is the job of our elected representatives—and those who want to be elected—and our media, which has been awfully silent on the issues that underpin the headlines these days.