Columbus Day

“Daddy, where do we come from?”

“You’re eight. You don’t need to know yet.” My son is interrupting the eleven and a half minutes a day I allow myself to read the morning paper. My quality time with the timeless saga of human lunacy.

“It’s ‘Roots Week’ at school,” my wife points out, “He needs to know where your ancestors came from.”

“Hunger,” I say.

“Da-aa-ad!” he complains. In Chinese the meanings of spoken words are changed by tone and pitch. My son has just repeated the Miracle by which the English word “dad” comes to mean “oh cruel ignorant ancient one.”

“No, really. Like all immigrants, they came from hunger.” I’m riveted by a local news story about a guy who drove his RV-based meth lab to the county courthouse to fight a parking ticket.

“Dad’s ancestors came from a trailer,” says my wife, glaring at me.

My son is perplexed. “I thought ‘ancestors’ lived in caves.”

I give up. I put down the paper.

“They came from Kentucky and Indiana to Missouri.”

My son rolls his eyes. “Dad, those are states, not countries!”

“Why do we have to come from countries?” Dope-sniffing dogs have surrounded the RV.

“Roots Week is about the children’s ethnic identities,” my wife explains to me patiently.

“Okay,” I concede, as the SWAT team hides in ambush outside the RV. “My father’s family came from England and my mother’s family came from the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea.”

“Oh.” My son looks disappointed. “But . . . is that ‘ethnic’?”

I want to tell him we’re not ethnic, we’re just in debt. Instead I ask him, “Well what do you think? If everybody has an ‘ethnicity,’ isn’t that mine?”

He thinks for a minute. (When an eight-year-old stops fidgeting, he’s thinking.) “Did they come from somewhere before THAT?”

“From the Rift Valley in Ethiopia in east Africa.”

“Honey, it’s just a school project. Tell him what he needs to hear.”

“It was in the paper last week. Before several thousand generations of global wandering, we all shared a common ancestor in east Africa. The rate of mutation in our mitochondrial DNA dates and places our common ancestor then and there.”

“Dad, that’s not what my teacher wants to hear!”

“Ah but it’s the truth.” The parking scofflaw, returning to his meth lab RV, is surrounded by a pack of snarling snapping German shepards.

“Okay, you’re a quarter Celtic, a quarter English, and half Russian Jew from your mom’s side—”

“—But it’s not that simple,” counters my wife. “My great uncle Modest’s family thought of themselves as Russian, not Jewish, even though they WERE Jewish, and then there was the Mongol great-grandfather, and—”

My son interrupts, “—but mom! Did they wear ‘costumes’?” Aha. It’s a COSTUME he needs, not a history.

“Come on, I’ll help you,” she says, and they head for the picture dictionary of historical costumes, leaving me with my costume-challenged British ancestors and the ACLU appealing the meth lab parking lot arrest. The amateur chemist is claiming entrapment.

But I’ve lost the train of thought. I’m thinking about the annual ritual of identifying school children by the countries their people left behind.

Every Columbus Day — in Berkeley that’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day — school kids make dolls dressed in their ancestors’ costumes, make a speech about why they’re proud of their ancestors, and bring one of the ancestors’ favorite snacks to share with classmates. The Melting Pot un-melting.

I used to find this harmless — maybe even a good thing in a polyglot immigrant nation.

Until the day a friend, after describing the ethnic and religious identity he planned to imprint on his daughter, asked about our “plans” for our son.

I did my impersonation of a deer frozen in the headlights.

“So you’re planning to raise him as a big Nothing?” my friend asked. By “big” he meant “little.”

“No. Not a ‘nothing.’ We’ll raise him as a human being.” Which I always thought of as . . . something. A big thing even.

Since that day I haven’t thought of celebrating our differences as a very good way to narrow them. Imagine the Russians and Chechens celebrating Roots Day together. Should Serbs and Croats or Hutus and Tutsis be encouraged to celebrate their differences?

“Dad, now I need a food for school. What did your ancestors eat?”

“Beer.”

“No, EAT! What did they eat?”

“Meat and potatoes.”

“What’s that?”

“Before you were born, your mom and I visited my grandma at her farmhouse in the Ozarks. My aunts and uncles and their families came for this occasion. As in many cultures, relatives visiting from afar is cause for celebration and over-eating.

Since the men in this tribe no longer hunt, my aunts drove to the supermarket. They came back with big slabs of cheap ground beef in bulk and a gunny sack of potatoes. These three large women chopped up and poured the ground beef and potatoes and a mountain of white flour into a huge kettle of boiling well water on my grandma’s wood-fired stove. They boiled it for about an hour, until it was a thick, gelatinous gray glue. Then they ladled it onto plates and we ate.”

“Your mom had never tasted such a dish, so she politely asked, ‘Mmm. What is this?’ and all three aunts answered in unison, ‘Meat and Potatoes.’ ”

My son looks thoughtful, then worried, then embarrassed and ashamed.

“Mom, did YOUR family cook?”


originally published on MSNBC.COM, 10 September 2000

Be Nice to Fascists Day

My cousin sent me a link to an essay on Barack Obama in The Atlantic. (Follow this link: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama). My cousin is a good guy, likely way more intelligent than I am, and an Obama supporter. Here's what I wrote him:

Given that Kucinich (the guy closest to my votes on the issues) seems to have zero chance, my guy becomes Edwards, the only "major" candidate who says the right things about corporate power, the rights of the poor, health care, constitutional rights and climate change.

(We should also note that the status of "major" and "minor" candidate is one conferred by the mainstream media which so disingenuously denies any role in weeding out candidates deemed too "radical." A little like the way that Iran's "Assembly of Experts" vets candidates and disqualifies those deemed insufficiently pious.)

I like Obama okay, but he really is in the back pocket of the corrupt & phony corn-to-ethanol industry, and I find that disheartening. (Especially because I think that climate change is the issue that trumps everything & it depresses me to see "major" candidates refuse to deal with it seriously & instead advocate phony solutions based on subsidy, sleight of hand, fear, fake economics, and corporate donations.)

And that brings me to the thing I don't like in this article. The writer savages the whole concept of ideological commitment. As if "getting along" [with whomever] were the highest calling. It's not. When life on this planet is in jeopardy, the fight is worth fighting, no? (Actually there are many fights worth fighting, and this guy pooh-poohs them all.)

I also really don't like Sullivan's offhand acceptance of a permanent occupation of Iraq. ("…which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade…") Evidently he thinks we should overcome our sense of shame and horror so that we can all . . . get along better.

Is it really "wrong" to "bitterly" oppose the Cheney administration's usurpation of constitutional rights? (But maybe Sullivan thinks that a genteel opposition is okay? I don't get this guy.)

Should the majority opposed to the war simply be polite about the treasonous campaign of deception to con us into an unnecessary murderous war which has bankrupted the country and led to the deaths of thousands of soldiers and tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis?

Germany's Social Democrats chose the "getting along" path in 1930. Lots of luck with that.

I think Kucinich is 100% right to impeach Cheney. Either we have a rule of law or we don't. No, I don't think it will go anywhere (after all, Dick didn't get blown by a girl with big hair — so far as we know). But it IS the job of congress to check and balance the emperor uh make that the "executive branch" if we're going to continue pretending we've got a representative form of government.

For Schumer to vote for Mukasey because "that's the best we're going to get" really isn't good enough. Every once in awhile (!) one should stand up for what's right. Torture isn't right and I just don't see any reason to endorse someone who can't say so.

But back to Obama: for most of the reasons Sullivan cites, I much prefer him to Hillary. Much. And I wouldn't have the trouble supporting him as our nominee that I would (and probably WILL) with Hillary Clinton.

Hillary is, however, a much sharper politician than Obama. Much faster on her feet. (No, this isn't a character issue either. Personally I have stage fright and hate public speaking, so I don't hold it against him.)

Hillary won't take the right-wing mud lying down as Kerry did. (I suspect Obama won't react fast when the Rovians swift boat him — and this "civility" is just another side-effect of the spirit of conciliation Andrew Sullivan proposes.)

I don't agree with Sullivan though that Hillary is a closet left-winger. The fact that a serious article in a serious publication would make such a claim shows how far to the right our mainstream media is listing.

I think Hillary Clinton is a "moderate" whose commitment to labor and the poor and the environment is totally suspect. (Remember that the "socialist" universal health care plan she championed in 1993 didn't even shoo the insurance industry away from the trough.)

Senator Clinton is also, like her husband, an imperialist.

She will, however, be a very tough candidate & trash the clumsy liar Giuliani, who is, IMHO, a fascist.

There, I've said it. I think it's critical to call fascism by its name, and to not compromise with it. Sullivan's premise that the divisiveness of inconclusive "culture wars" debilitates a society makes plenty of sense.

But playing nice with fascism makes NO sense. Are we suppose to compromise on torture by putting nice curtains on the windows? Apologize to the populace as we rescind habeas corpus?

The damage toll from the "healing" approach of our current Democrats is alarming. Electing an appeaser with a "mandate" to placate the right wing would be a catastrophe. It's time to stand up for what's right and realize the foolishness of apologizing for doing so.