Showing posts with label Walt Whitman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Walt Whitman. Show all posts

Friday, September 05, 2008

Looking for Walt Whitman's America in Saint Paul

Amidst days of writing and swimming off the coast of Belize, at the conclusion of a long trip through Central America, I tuned into the Republic convention, broadcast from Saint Paul, Minnesota, in my native United States.

How to describe what awaited me? In their nomination of Arizona Senator John McCain for the Republican presidential ballot, the party of Abraham Lincoln put on a stomach-churning display of vainglorious militarism, moral hypocrisy and hysterical speechifying that seemed designed to do nothing so much as deepen the divisions that already exist in a very polarized country.

Watching former Massachusetts governor and failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the billionaire son of a former Michigan governor who has never had to break a sweat doing a day’s work in his life, rant against “liberals” and “timid, liberal empty gestures,” was an experience rich in irony. Former Tennessee Senator and television mediocrity Fred Thompson told the audience that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama was "the most liberal, most inexperienced nominee to ever run for President." Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee at least came across as a human being, but the Republicans’ much-heralded Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, by trying to paint herself as the darling of small-town America, appeared to equate being from a small town with being small-minded, a continuation of the proud ignorance that appears to be the Republican party’s standard fare these days. As someone who grew up in working-class Pennsylvania, Palin reminded me not of the values of hard work that I saw there, but rather of the worst nasty, gossipy tendencies and insularity that sometimes came along with them. Palin, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the actress who played “Elaine” on the television show Seinfeld and possesses a grating, nasal whine of a voice, mocked Barack Obama’s work as a community organizer in Chicago and went on to commit herself to overturning the Bill of Rights by saying that Obama, in dealing with suspected terrorists, is “worried that someone won’t read them their rights,” as if a lawless nation is something that Americans should be proud of.

John McCain, for his part, was content to allow his convention to denounce anything bipartisan, and seemingly anything modern, in an attempt to define patriotism solely in military terms and with a geometry that focuses on those to be excluded from the American family, not those included. The focus on McCain’s heroic service in Vietnam was particularly ironic as it was lauded by the very same people who lied and slandered Senator John Kerry, a three-time Purple Heart winner, when Kerry was running for the presidency in 2004. Coupled with the non-stop attacks on the press (“liberal,” “elite,” etc) at a convention nominating a candidate who has courted that very same press more enthusiastically than perhaps any other member of Congress, the effect was surreal and matched perhaps only by the seeming hoped-for amnesia of a party promising “change” that had been in charge of the presidency for the last eight years and both houses of Congress for much of that time, as well.

What a contrast, I thought, with Barack Obama’s declaration at the Democratic Convention in Denver that "patriotism has no party" and that "the men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America - they have served the United States of America."

McCain’s claims in his speech last night that the fact that he and Obama are both Americans is the distinction that means most to him was a statement that flew in the face of the fact that his supporters spent three nights trashing Obama, Democrats and urban America as a whole. Indeed, the struggles of America’s working-class went almost unmentioned during the convention, after which it was announced the that unemployment rate in the United States - after eight years of Republican rule - had jumped to 6.1% , with 84,000 jobs lost in august and 605,000 jobs lost thus far this year.

The raging, angry, insular, overwhelmingly white Republican Party of John McCain does not reflect the America I know, the towns and cities that raised me, and the values that I found there. It says nothing to me of the country’s scientific or artistic prowess, its history as a beacon for immigrants or its famous encouraging of individual initiative.

The effect was particularly jarring as I watched the convention at the same time as reading Jerome Loving’s biography of Walt Whitman, a real American patriot and visionary who, had he been alive today, would no doubt have been equally derided and denounced by the frothing crowd in Saint Paul for his intellectual and secular humanistic bents (to say nothing of his homosexuality), despite his history of physical labour and his endless hours spent nursing wounded soldiers in the military of hospitals of Washington, DC during the Civil War.

As I watched the delegates in Minnestotra salute the stage in a quasi-facist raising of cowboy hats, I thought of Whitman’s expansive definition of our nation in his most famous poem, Song of Myself, and how it stood in contrast to the intolerance vision on display before me:

I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
Stuffed with the stuff that is coarse and stuffed with the stuff
that is fine,
One of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the
largest the same,
A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and
hospitable down by the Oconee I live,
A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest
joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth...

After such a display as I have witnessed over the last couple of days, John McCain’s much-vaunted reputation and honor seem too be worth little more than a cardboard tombstone, perhaps made of one of the vitriol-spewing, sloganeering signs waved by the delegates at the convention in St. Paul.

If my country falls for the bitter, cynical display that I have watched over the last several nights from the Republican Party, the reputation of the United States will be well on its way to joining it.

Let us hope that some wisdom will prevail.

Sunday, May 27, 2007

New York City Serenade


When I first arrived in New York City in the spring of 1997, being a relatively impoverished recent college graduate, I roomed with my friend Sebastian Quezada at his modest apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The neighborhood at that time, as I have noted on this blog before, had a distinctly Latin flavor, largely of the Puerto Rican and Dominican variety, with a smattering of Mexican influence, as well as a large and still-remaining population of Yiddish-speaking Satmar Hassidim Jews in rather far-out traditional costumes living along the southside. Beyond the main strip of Bedford Avenue, warehouses, many rusting and disused, still stretched on for blocks at a time before halting at the churning expanse of the East River, the Lower East Side of Manhattan visible in the distance. The Domino Sugar refinery, which had been part of Brooklyn's waterfront since the 19th century, was still the neighborhood’s most regular employer. At that time, Williamsburg was a place where, at a local joint called simply “Pizza Restaurant,” one could get a $5 plate of carne guisada con arroz y habichuelas, and young folks who were actually struggling financially could afford to live.

It has been quite a pivotal decade both for myself and New York City since then. On the personal side, I’ve gotten to know all of the neighborhoods I’ve lived in - Williamsburg, Fort Greene, Park Slope and now Astoria - quite well, never having the funds to live on the other side of the East River in Manhattan and being perfectly fine with that, as Brooklyn and Queens offer a dizzying diversity that much of Manhattan (not named “Millionaire’s Island” for nothing) decidedly lacks. I’ve traveled to quite a few countries, writing probably hundreds of articles at this point, having written and published a book, watched my friends and I edge into out thirties (losing some on the way and gaining new ones) and had about as many amity and romance-based interactions as one could ever ask for in that amount of time. I’ve acquired so many books that any apartment I have is now essentially a library where I sleep, witnessed some great concerts lots of concerts (Cheb Mami in Prospect Park and the Tindersticks and Seu Jorge in Central Park come to mind) and seen how truly glorious and alive New York becomes as the city edges into its lustrous summer, as it’s doing now.

For New York’s part, we witnessed the 1997 campaign and re-election of mayor Rudolph Giuliani (now running for president) as mayor, the 1999 slaying of unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo by four New York Police Department plain-clothed officers (who were subsequently acquitted in a criminal trial), the terrible attacks of September, 11, 2001 (which I witnessed first-hand and during which I walked home to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge with tens of thousands of other New Yorkers) and the subsequent election (and re-election) of billionaire tycoon Michael Bloomberg as the city’s mayor. The city that was robust and vibrant when I arrived in 1997 picked itself up and dusted itself off after the events of 2001 and now is every bit as vital as it ever has been.

It really has been quite a time.

But now I start a new chapter, and, tomorrow, I say goodbye to the city I have called home for the last ten years. I do so without regret, but perhaps a twinge of melancholy that we all feel when parting from a familiar companion, one so we’ve become so used to that we often take for granted how deeply it has immersed itself into our daily lives, out habits, our personalities. No matter where I go in the world, a large part of me will always be a New Yorker, and that is a sobriquet that I am very proud to carry.

Many things have changed with the city’s economic and political fortunes over the years. The Old Dutch Mustard factory on Metropolitan Avenue is now gone, torn down last year. The Domino Sugar refinery largely ceased business in 2003. The great Norfolk Street music venue Tonic shut down this spring. But, mercifully, as I found out this week, Pizza Restaurant still exists, with the same ebullient boriqua women behind the counter, dishing out Caribbean food, a place to sit and chat and a measure of my past, $5 at a time.

As Walt Whitman wrote in his 1860 poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,”

We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us;
We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also;
You furnish your parts toward eternity;
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.


Adios, New York, and cuídate, may you always shine so lovely, reflecting the firmament to those of us here on earth.