Carolyn Schuk's Open Salon Blog

September 11, A Prose Poem

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 04:09:17 -0400

We can all recite this litany: Fire engulfing that panoptic view. Closely spaced columns losing resistance. A final shudder, then cascade, into dust.

Yet we can never know just where the failure began.

Like the woman standing ankle-deep in white dust and reading yesterday's newspaper, tries to reconcile "Newborn Abandoned in Central Park," "Slump Is Here, But Rebound In The Cards," and "Serena Marches Into Semifinals," so we instruct ourselves, assemble coherent narratives from scraps of paper and shards of buckled metal.

We look for the correct geography to precisely position our national pieta — the narrative demands serviceable villains. We painstakingly map the latitude and longitude of an evil axis and blowback, of failures of imagination and strategic imbecilities, of impact zones and malfunctioning radio repeater systems.

Together we compute the calculus of personal grief and collective loss, share the sacramental ground where so many of the lost have yet to be found.

This abrupt audition makes survivors of us all, sifting through the rubble for relics of someone we loved, some hero we thought we were. And reminds us history is not a argument of cause and effect, but an accident of time and place.

We are made equal in this sacrificial moment by fear and survival, where we are forever walking each other home in the dark across the Brooklyn Bridge.

33 Days Left Until the End of the World

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 17:04:58 -0400

You may have recently seen a billboard announcing "Judgment Day, May 21, 2011." You may have dismissed it as just-another-end-of-the-world-nutcase.

The billboard is only one of two thousand such billboards in the U.S. and its originator, 89 year-old Oakland-based radio preacher Harold Camping, is anything but a run-of-the-mill nutcase.

Camping is the founder of Family Radio Network and owner of nearly 70 U.S. radio stations with $120 million in assets. With an unforgettable speaking style – his creed apparently rejects as un-Biblical the notion of strong and weak syllables – Camping believes that Judgment Day will arrive on May 21 at 6:00 p.m., with the end of the world following in October.

Based on his own mathematical system of Biblical interpretation, Camping's calculations reveal that the world will end 722,500 days from April 1, of the year 33 CE. Why 722,500? Because it's the result of squaring the product of multiplying holy numbers 5, 10 and 17. Got that? (If you have spare time on your hands, you can download Camping's 80-page treatise at www.familyradio.com/PDFS/waat.pdf for a full explanation.)

If Camping is right, my biggest concern personally isn't my eternal destination – Camping's calculations also reveal that only two percent of us will be pressing the UP button on the Judgment Day elevator – but whether my tax refund will arrive in time for me to spend it at DSW Shoes before I'm consigned to eternal perdition.

Of course, there's a chance that Camping is mistaken – like all others to date – in predicting the end of the world. So far his batting average isn't encouraging. On September 6, 1994, Camping's followers gathered in Alameda to usher in the Second Coming. No word yet on whether they've decided against renting the auditorium in advance this time around.

Tea-Partying Like It's Nine Hundred Ninety-Nine

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 09:10:24 -0400

At the turn of the first millennium of what is commonly called the "Common Era" – despite its being "common" to only Europeans – Pope Sylvester II (Gerbert d'Aurillac, 946 –1003) was commonly believed to be a sorcerer in league with the devil.

Why? Sylvester was proficient in Arabic arithmetic, mathematics, and astronomy. He further earned his contemporaries' suspicion by trying to eradicate corruption – specifically, simony and concubinage – in the Roman Catholic Church.

Sylvester also advanced the art of pipe organ construction, introduced the abacus to Europe – that continent's intellectual backwardness being such that, apparently, 20 fingers and toes sufficed for any and all calculations – described the paths of the planets, and reintroduced the astrolabe as well as the notion of a spherical earth.

To what did contemporaries attribute Sylvester's knowledge? Not to scholarship, careful observation of the world around him, nor long study at the great medieval Islamic universities in Cordoba, Spain.

No. So exceptional for the time was Sylvester's erudition, the only believable explanation was supernatural intervention.

One story held that he stole a philosopher's book of spells. Another that he constructed a demonic oracle. Another popular story – my personal favorite – was that Sylvester won papal office in a dice game with the Devil. Others reported that Sylvester made a pact with a demon to become pope – not unlike Sarah Palin's "Lord, make a way" consultation with the witch-hunting Pastor Muthee.

Sylvester was clearly a dangerous man likely to poison impressionable minds with the infernal science of evolutionary biology, had it existed in 999.

A thousand years and countless witch hunts later, the spirit of the dark ages – and I mean 'dark' in its descriptive, not historical, use – refuses to die.

Like the Night of the Living Dead's zombies, the dark age has reanimated itself in the Republican Party's decomposing corpse, the Tea Party. It's easy to find evidence of Tea Partiers' pre-Sylvesterian information levels. You need look no further than its 2010 Three Weird Sisters casting call: Sharron Angle, Michele Bachman and Christine O'Donnell.

By now you've heard Christine O'Donnell's bewitching analysis of biotech – one of the U.S.' fastest-growing industries – to Fox's Bill O'Reilly: "American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains." Talk about Round about the cauldron go/In the poison'd entrails throw.

But perhaps you didn't hear Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachman take on modern chemistry: "Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn't one study that can be produced that shows carbon monoxide is a harmful gas."

Bachmann's passion for scientific inquiry led to her 2008 Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act to repeal the phase-out of conventional incandescent light bulbs (in favor of fluorescents). Global warming, Bachmann told fellow travelers at the Sherburne County Republican Club that year, was "voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax." Her words, not mine.

Moving west, Nevada's chickens-for-prescriptions senate candidate takes an unusual view of the U.S. Constitution: "Government isn’t what our Founding Fathers put into the Constitution,” says Angle, despite those words about the “Power To lay and collect Taxes” to “provide for the common Defense and general Welfare.”

Further, Angle's economic philosophy can only be called feudalistic: "What’s happening in this country is a violation of the First Commandment… We’re supposed to depend upon God for our protection and our provision and for our daily bread, not for our government." Angle also has described the First Amendment – separation of church and state – as "unconstitutional." Who was it that said, "Don't confuse me with logic?"

Even geography seems to be an arcane science for this coven. Reflecting a world-view acquired from cartoon maps rather than an atlas, Angle recently told supporters that "Sharia law" had taken over Frankford, Texas and "militant terrorist situation" prevailed.

Angle didn't share the source of this intelligence. However, according to the online Handbook of Texas, the municipality of Frankford reached its zenith in 1890, boasting a population of 83 and three churches. By 1940 it was virtually a ghost town, and, in 1975, was annexed by that notorious hotbed of 21st century international radicalism, Dallas.

Voltaire once said, "I never made but one prayer to God, and that was to make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it." Or in the words of a widely circulated Tea Party placard: "GET A BRAIN! MORANS."

The Family Pacifier

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 14:07:11 -0400

A few weeks ago I babysat for a friend of mine. She has two little boys – ages five and two. It was a powerful return trip for me to the challenges of having small children.

While I was trying to simultaneously sweep cheerios off the floor and tune the TV into The Wiggles, I noticed a developing crisis. The two-year-old had become disengaged from his pacifier.

I quickly dropped all other tasks to forage through sofa cushions and toys to retrieve it. When peace was restored, I reflected on how automatically I had reverted to the 'pacifier alert.'

You see, my son -- now 19 -- was a pacifier baby. From an early age — two days — he demonstrated a strong preference for habit over novelty, accepting only the rubber pacifier distributed at Good Samaritan Hospital in San Jose, California. Nothing else was acceptable in this critical matter of taste. I know, because when the hospital-issue equipment wore out, I tried every model on the market without success. In the end I purchased a case of pacifiers directly from the manufacturer.

As a baby boomer parent, actively in pursuit of all things excellent, I consulted the experts for pacifier guidance. And for us boomers, no discussion of child behavior is complete without a reference to Dr. Spock, the man held responsible for all our excesses from dope smoking to SUVs.

In the 1985 edition of Baby and Child Care, Spock devotes four pages to pacifiers. I conned the sacred text for clues about my son's pacifier attachment. Should I try to remove it? If so, when? "Most …[children] give it up by one or two years of age" according to Spock.

At a year, Will remained firmly plugged in. At two he showed no inclination to part with the pacifier. When he celebrated his third birthday along with the pacifier habit, I had to close the book on the celebrated baby doctor and wing it on my own.

At the other end of the spectrum the breast-feeding Gestapo takes a dim view of the pacifier, as they do of anything standing between perpetual constant connection between child and breast.

In “Reasons to Skip the Pacifier,” Kathleen G. Auerbach, Ph.D., an "international board certified lactation consultant, co-author of several books on breastfeeding and editor-in-chief of Current Issues in Clinical Lactation says that "mothers need to think twice about using pacifiers, because they can interfere with breastfeeding."

Linda J. Smith of the Breastfeeding LRC goes further with a list of "Top Ten Reasons for NOT Using a Pacifier" including, “encourages posterior-to-anterior tongue peristalsis.” Now that’s something to keep you awake at night.

My personal favorite of Smith’s list was exactly the condition I wished to induce in my son: “Causes altered brain wave patterns, trance-like state.”

I can assure Smith that the pacifier, nor anything else for that matter, put Will into the trance-like state generally called 'sleep' — the respite from his colicky crying that I would have devoutly welcomed.

Fortunately for Will, his parents chose Spock over Smith. Pacifier availability became a key organizing factor in our lives. During this time, we acquired an item I never knew existed but which became an essential part of our retinue: the pacifier-keeper.

To quote the MAM company, purveyor of better pacifiers everywhere:

"The keeper saves searching and keeps the pacifier clean. The specially designed clip secures the keeper to the child's garment while the pacifier ring snaps onto MAM pacifiers perfectly. It's an all-round mom-saver!"

While I wouldn't go as far as MAM's marketing hacks, the pacifier-keeper precludes tortured decisions about whether you put a pacifier retrieved from the floor of a San Francisco MUNI bus back into your child's mouth or listen to him scream until you get back to San Jose. (Answer: Plug it in while remembering that AIDS is only transmitted through direct contact with bodily fluids.)

The pacifier stayed with us through pre-school. It stayed through kindergarten. I comforted myself that, unlike a thumb, the pacifier didn't have go to school with him. More than one child in his class, in moments of intense concentration or anxiety, referred to that comforting digit. By the first grade, I was beginning to wonder if Will would be the only boy in his class to graduate from high school with a pacifier making a circular imprint on his wallet.

When Will was in the second grade, the preferred pacifier model went — out of production!

No warnings about electricity blackouts or the drying up of a fresh water supply could have alarmed us more. We hoarded the remaining inventory against the evil day. One night the doom came upon us. No pacifier could be found. I held my breath against the anticipated explosion. Nothing. Silence. We kissed goodnight, Will rolled over and was soon asleep.

We were finally, so to speak, pacified.

It's a Grand Old Song: 50s paranoia and political hymnody

Thu, 1 Jul 2010 14:07:08 -0400

The Tea Party recently found something else besides the Constitution that needs reinvention: the patriotic song. Apparently, our old standbys – the Star-Spangled Banner, America the Beautiful, and My Country 'Tis of Thee – don't cut it for these irrepressible mad hatters. Not even pop favorites like "You're a Grand Old Flag" make their hit parade.

So the "Don't tread on my Medicare" party launched what they are calling a "new, fresh idea" to "Unite America in Patriotic Song: We must once again, lift our voices singing revered music such as: 'Only in America', 'Where the Stars and Stripes and the Eagle Fly’, 'American Soldier', or 'God Bless the USA'."

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that's hardly a "new, fresh idea." More than half a century ago in Brooklyn NY's P.S. 107, I was force-fed a steady diet of patriotic songs.

Every morning began with the Pledge of Allegiance and "My country 'tis of thee/Sweet land of liberty/Of thee I sing." At Friday assemblies we further gilded that lily (following a reading from the Bible) with choruses of Hail Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and You're a Grand Old Flag.

I remember particularly a WWI-era rouser favored by my blue-rinsed teachers: A musical setting of Edgar Guest's "A Patriotic Wish:

I'd like to be the sort of man the flag's supposed to mean,
The man that all in fancy see wherever it is seen,
The man that all in fancy see wherever it is seen,
I'd like to be the type of man that really is American,
I'd like to be the type of man that really is American,
That is A—mer—i—can!
With head held high and shoulders square,
Clean-minded fellow, just and fair,
That all men picture when they see
The glorious banner of the free
The glooooooorious baaaaaanner of the free!

I remember this so clearly because the second line's obtuse grammar baffled me. I thought "all in fancy" was some kind of military decoration.

Because morality plays require villains, countering this square-shouldered all-American hero was the cold war era's devil incarnate, the Red Menace of Communism. Indeed, these elderly spinster pedagogues so convinced me of Communists' Fu Manchu-like reach, that, instead of monsters, I worried about "Reds" hiding under the bed.

These fears weren't unfounded, according to 1964's ur-text of anti-communist paranoia, "None Dare Call it Treason." Nothing, it seems, was too insignificant to be employed by these agents of menace:

"The brainwashing starts in the first grade. Recall the story…about the hard working little squirrel who gathered and stored nuts for the winter…that story has been rewritten. The new version is entitled, Ask for It. In it…Bobby Squirrel didn't like to work, [so] he ignored the advice [to store nuts]. Winter came and…Bobby…got awfully hungry but remembered that a boy who lived in a white house had taken some of the nuts…Bobby went to the white house…A door opened and a 'fine brown' nut' rolled out. Bobby learned….'All I have to do is ask for it.'"

I don't remember this story. In the first grade we read about Alice and Jerry and their dog, Jip. "Look, Alice, look. Jip can run. See Jip run. Jip likes to run." Then again, Alice and Jerry seemed to have a lot of unsupervised time on their hands. Could it be, they were being raised by Bobbie – aka Karl Marx – the Squirrel?

No doubt some readers wish for a return of these "good old days." However, as they say, be careful what you wish for.

The generation that grew up reciting the pledge of allegiance daily and singing "I'd like to be the sort of man the flag's supposed to mean" in the 1950s also invented the 1960s: Beatlemania, the sexual revolution, Stonewall, bra-burning, the anti-war movement, SDS, Woodstock, and "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

Now pass that doobie over here.