AJCalhoun's Open Salon Blog

Saving Education and the Arts: our "Cloverfield"

Fri, 18 May 2012 22:05:27 -0400

Is it a stretch to suggest that American public schools are being attacked by a hideous and somewhat amorphous monster? If not (and clearly I believe it is not), then is it a stretch to compare the decapitation of the Statue of Liberty in the 2008 film "Cloverfield" with the decapitation of public education in the United States? Again, I think not.

"Some thing has found us."

Consider: The vast majority of American children (yes, including those born here to parents who are here illegally, but who will stay on and either become part of productive society or part of destructive society, largely as goes their education) attend public schools and it is not the system itself that is in crisis as we are perpetually being told, but the Federal, state and local governments which fund them that are in crisis, and that panic over keeping the lid on hell almost always finds some sort of balm in declaring austerity budgets that start with, of all things, public education.

Education would appear to be the least-valued item on the list of priorities. Should this surprise anyone? Really? Isn't public education full of what are essentially useless entitlement programs, starting with that most dispoable of pursuits, the arts? Then of course we can always pare back Godless Science, at least in the cultural backwaters.

But wait! The shot that should have been heard 'round the world is not being fired in East Stumpjump, Mississippi (or perhaps the target there was already dead; it is beside the point). In Los Angeles, California, the entire arts program in public schools is facing obliteration, along with literally thousands of teaching positions in all areas, because of a quite serious budget shortfall being faced not only in LA but across the state, a place roughly the size of Iraq.

How does any state of any size manage to get so short of funds that the shortfall is now, at $16 billion, more than double the predicted $7 billion? How do you even get $7 billion in the hole? In the case of California it would be in large part attributable to the slipshod, ham-handed, random exercise of estimating budgetary needs by the legislatures in Sacramento. But there is also Jerry Brown, the self-professed "buoyant optimist" who now says "...but this is the best I can do." And with that, turns loose the various unified school districts to start the beheading of the Statue of Liberty via cutting school budgets to shreds.

And why should this matter to anyone with enough sense to not live in the Golden State? I mean, isn't that where all the Fruits and Nuts are located? That's what we've been told by conservatives for four decades, yet this debacle has only recently occurred, and was observable on the horizon in 2008 when then-Governor Schwarzeneggar signed off on that year's budget, and it could have been seen falling into the water off-shore as far back as 1978 when Proposition 13 passed into law (cast in stone, apparently). The decline has been slow but steady ever since.

So California's got problems. So what? The rest of us don't live there (though I did for a time; it can happen to anyone). Well, in 2008, around the time Ahnuld was signing that budget, a very bizarre and disturbing movie was released, titled "Cloverfield." The title was supposed to be the U.S. government's code name for an unspeakable and horrendous incident that began when something struck New York City. A monster not unlike the one in the 1951 classic "Beast From 20,000 Fathoms," in fact, but shown from the point of view of a video camera dropped on the ground by a horrified onlooker shortly after the initial assault, when the head of the Statue of Liberty Landed in a street near Central Park.

Are we getting it yet? New York City's schools are next. And it doesn't matter that the Mayor is one of the wealthiest men in the world. The good old Free Market will kill the beast, and besides, it's really, this time, almost 3000 miles away in LA, where the axe is being swung wildly at almost everything, but most notably...as usual...public education. As many as 11,000 teachers may get RIF notices, that is to say, be fired, with first right of return, should the ship of state ever get right-side-up again. And of all the programs being hacked at, the arts - all the arts, every last part and particle of the arts in public schools, is targeted for anihilation.

LAUSD superintendent John Deasy (pronounced "daisy" and prefixed by him with "Dr." even though he holds no doctorate), a product of the Gates Foundation, has, it appears, never even observed any part of the arts program he now intends to obliterate.

Is that a terrible thing? I mean, really, isn't education about reading and writing and math and science? Isn't all that other crap just window dressing?

I can tell you from personal experience that the answer to that question is a resounding Hell no! Were it not for art I would likely have dropped out of high school during a particularly difficult time in my life, even though, in the end, it was English literature (oh my lord, books? Can't we get rid of them too?) that got me over the final hill. I'd never have been there had it not been for art. A lot of kids show up for school because of arts classes, whether it is "art" as many think of it, drawing, painting, sculpting...but there was also drama, the performing arts, and...oh! Aha! That airy fairy crap again! The disposable stuff which, at my school, anyway, gave us people like Goldie Hawn, the girl I fed the answers to in algebra class. We were only there because of art. It sure as hell wasn't algebra.

And why does this matter to us rubes to the right of California? Because, goddammit, this is what will fall to the axe first when the Cloverfield monster works its way to your city or town on its way to DC and then New York City, by which time it will already have beheaded the Statue of Liberty by taking down the system of public schools and its first victim in most cases will have been the arts.

It is interesting to note that the title was taken by the movie's producer, J.J. Adams, out of practically thin air, as it was the Cloverfield exit from Route 10 in Santa Monica, right next to the current disaster area that is Los Angeles. I crossed Cloverfield Parkway a few weeks ago on my way to Santa Monica and it caught my eye, then I realized why it made me flinch for a moment. I said nothing to my companion. I didn't want to poison a beautiful conversation just then.

For a day the monster was quiet.

How ironic, then, that the one city that is almost entirely dependent upon the arts - performing, cinematic and all other forms as well - should be the one now choosing to kill its firstborn child in the name of balancing a budget that should never in a million years have become as out of control as it is, and which might not have, had its state legislators perhaps been better educated in economics.

How horrifying, too, the prospects for the rest of us, once the monster has consumed LA and begins to wade into the midsection, on its way to its ultimate goal: to de-educate as many children as it possibly can, to kill the hope and promise of at least a generation, if it is not stopped now, if it is not smothered in its cradle.

A wonderful group of teacher-activists, parents, concerned citizens and, yes, artists: actors, musicians, celebrities for god's sake! are fighting to prevent this. Yet media attention is less than slight so far.

The fight is to the west right now, and unlike the right wing rhetoric about Al Qaeda, this beast will come to us if we don't help kill it now. In fact its tentacles are already everywhere. Still, the heart of it is presently beating most strongly in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Los Angeles is our Cloverfield then, our Lexington, and quite possibly the Mark of the Beast.

Our duty is clear.

(This link leads to some more useful information on the topic: http://btownerrant.com/2012/05/18/in-the-city-of-corporate-love-and-beyond-the-boston-consulting-group-gates-and-the-filthy-rich/ )

An Overdue Letter to My Mother

Fri, 11 May 2012 18:05:00 -0400

In the beginning was an epic struggle. Apparently I've done everything the hard way from Day One, so was a breach birth. In 1945, in the hands of a doctor who was famous as the godfather of what would one day become laparascopic surgery (by adapting a victorian buttonhook to accomplish simpler, less-invasive appendectomies, and so known as JoJo "Buttonhook" Mundell) but didn't know nothin' about birthin' babies, well, I could understand why my mother chose not to go down that path again.

It also may explain why she was so devoted to me. Or maybe that's just because she was who she was.

She was a character, but a heroic character.

She left me occasional letters, as she was prone to write, as am I, so as to keep her thoughts on point. Those letters, like her poems, her love letters to my father, her letters to politicians and activists and editors, were works of love, of passion, and often of great humor.

I owe my mom a letter. I've owed her one since probably 1962, when she left a lengthy one on the desk in my room during a bout of physical illness, situational depression, a broken heart and a drug habit. That letter let me know my life still mattered, and why.

My mom's life still matters too, and here's why:

Hi Mom,

You was an awesome human being, smart, talented, incredibly funny, a fantastic singer, a devoted wife and mother, and one of the most patient people I have ever known. You endured me for over 50 years, even after I tried to kill you in childbirth, then took up the space between you and Daddy in that twin bed (another likely reason there were no siblings), in the apartment Apocalyptic Grandma allowed us to share with her for the better part of a decade.

You were a woman of parts. Part performer, part wit, part activist (though you'd never have accepted that descriptor for doing what was right), part Southern belle, part raconteur, part saint.

You gave up singing in clubs along the 14th Street corridor and U Street in DC once I was born. You gave up your day job as well. But you never stopped singing around the house, having mastered the Great American Songbook, and you burned those standards into my brain forever. I'm eternally grateful for that, for jazz, blues, and for coming along for the great ride when rock and roll and R&B exploded into our home, for falling in love with Jackie Wilson and Tony Williams and even Little Richard. You don't need to know every little detail.

_{Part Patwomeck Indian, too. Did I mention that? (That's her, 3rd from left, above).}

Music was your greatest mode of expression, and I have no doubt you're the reason music is like air to me. While Grandma, a rather terrible singer (you laughed at those records too), was recorded by Johnny Burley, you declined because you had a kid to raise. You just did it around the house once I was carried up those stairs. But before...well...

^{In her heyday - before I came along}

You were a movie buff, too, and since we lived less than a block from the grand old Tivoli theater, you dragged me there every chance you had. We'd always sit in the balcony, remember? Back when it was marked with a sign, with an arrow pointing up those stairs, "Colored Only." It was more fun up there. We could laugh out loud without drawing funny looks. It was also one way for you to defy the insanity that was Jim Crow segregation in the Nation's Capital til well past Brown v. Board of Ed., when the city scrambled to desegregate the schools in order to save some face, and triggered the great White Flight phenomenon. The less said about that now, though, the better. Daddy repented before he died. I'll never forget that. He finally admitted we'd been right and he was wrrr....wrrr....yeah, just like Fonzie.

You also taught me to respect those 78 RPM records we played on the rather fancy victrola changer, through which I learned to appreciate jazz (the B-side of The Christmas Song by the Nat Cole Trio was, to me, one of the funniest intances of recorded noodling ever. I loved the main side, around Christmas, which was somehow made magical in the place we lived, the living room with no windows, just a skylight, but then I'd always want to hear that untitled other side several times, just because it made me feel good, free, funny, loose, nutty).

You know John Fahey offered me $10.00 for the Vernon Dalhart "Wreck of the Old 97." You must know I didn't do the deal. It's still around here somewhere. John died in 2001. Maybe you knew that too.

And spontaneously singing "Blues in the Night" or "To Each His Own" (while walking back from the Tivoli after seeing the movie of the same name) or "I'll Be Seeing You" or Appalachian songs of Death Doom Destruction such as the heart-rending, horrific "The Baggage Coach Ahead" (Google it, dear reader, if you dare) or "The Ballad of Floyd Collins," (a mining disaster song). Then back to "Beyond the Sunset" or "Strange Fruit" or...well, you name it, joyous or ghastly, you'd sing it as though you were somewhere else, a blend of Ella Fitzgerald, Shirley Horn and Eva Cassidy,who died one month, to the day, before you. I didn't tell you then. I draw certain irrational but glorious conclusions from the timing, though. Either you've met now or not. I like to imagine you have.

And yes, Mom, you were insanely funny, and I understand why you couldn't turn that part of you loose in front of too many family members or officialdom later. But "Shit my mom said" will live forever in my sick little brain. Things like:

"May I borrow your frame for the next struggle?" (instruction on how to ask a girl to dance with me);

On refusing another bon bon,"I don't want some. I just had any."

"She's ugly as a mud fence, but a lovely person."

Or, in answer to questions about your behavior: "Only if I'm alone or with somebody."

You were not ugly as a mud fence. You were always quite striking, from your 30s when I met you, right on into your later years, until diabetes, blindness and other, more horrible complications began to wear your body down and slowly leave you seemingly helpless. But that would come later.

^{In 1977, steeling herself for my second marriage or my father's hand to slip.}

Diabetes caused a whole host of horrors. The woman who loved to write began to lose her vision. You also began to lose your balance to diabetic neuropathy. You'd stagger across the living room from the kitchen to the sofa with your coffee, leaving little spatters all over the rug. You couldn't see them, so they weren't there. Daddy had the carpet replaced with a two-tone beige and brown swirl that didn't show the coffee drops. You thought the new carpet was hideous. That was true, but it was also utilitarian. You have no idea.

As your health began to deteriorate in your 80s (sorry Mom, but you should be proud of the number), your daily writing and mailing of birthday and anniversary cards began to tell on you. I realized as time went by most recipients wouldn't be able to read them, and this was painful, because you had for most of your life the most incredibly beautiful handwriting, and were rightfully proud of it. I didn't say anything, but did try to explain to the pyramid of relatives and friends that you was doing your best and weren't likely to stop, so just assume there were kind thoughts in those eventually indecipherable scribbles.

I can say that now, because you're as dead as you're ever gonna get. I say that with a cautious wink.

Once, when I was very young and you could write, sing, and walk for more miles than I could hope to keep up with you, you commiitted a kindness I almost wish you hadn't. Your only brother had married a very fertile woman, and though that uncle earned a decent living - a good deal more than Daddy was eking out at the time as a traveling salesman - my uncle and aunt had produced 12 children, ten of which were still alive when this gesture was made. You gave them your entire life savings, the $1000 you'd been given as a retirement bonus by your boss at Palais Royale, gave it all to them because you couldn't stand to see them and your neices and nephews living in a three-room shack with a wood stove and an outhouse.

You know they always considered us their "rich" relatives. They still talk about that and it still burns me. And of course the money was never paid back. Family. Never loan money to family. Of course it became, over time, a gift, and they've all, save one, done remarkably well, and he's dead now, too. But that has hung over things like the occasional dark cloud, and they still talk about how I was "spoiled" and I want to just punch somebody out, but I think of you, and of course I don't do it.

Yeah, I know this is pretty random stuff. Stream of consciousness. You read to me and kept books in the house and made sure I could read early and allowed me access to books I probably shouldn't have been reading at six or seven, but we'll just pretend that didn't happen, same as with those old Playboys later on - which I read from cover to cover. You may as well know, if you don't already, the centerfolds weren't all that big a deal. Yeah, I looked. Then I kept reading. Thank you for that. Maybe as much as the music; the words, the writing, the reading - and the ideals.

Thanks for taking on the psychopath that broke into grandma's apartment later, and for having the sense to have brought a knife with you when you went looking for him. Thanks for only getting cut on the wrist, then going with the cops to identify him within the hour when he'd been caught.

Thanks for the walks through Rock Creek Park, the countless funny comments, for being a woman among women and teaching me the value of women. Thanks for calling Daddy Erich Von Stroheim that one time, too. I was getting pretty scared with all the yelling, but that shut him up and I had to run out of the hallway so he wouldn't see me laugh.It really was funny. He needed that. He was kinda crazy when he was younger. Well, even when he was older. But he did evolve. Your dying was the thing that completed his turnaround. He called me in the middle of the night and when I got there he asked me if I'd go into the bedroom to make certain you'd gone. I did. You had. But not before that night when we were all over there, sitting around in the bedroom with you and him, and we all thought you were sleeping, as you did more and more often toward the end, and we were listening to him tell that idiot's tale of the ring he bought for some girl he thought was in love with him who ran off with another guy and the ring...and then we all heard you say, your weak voice dripping with sarcasm, "Sucker!" Stunned silence, then all of us - except Daddy - laughing ourselves sick. Poor guy. He finally did shake his head, laugh, and sigh "Yep..."

One last thing, Mom, then I'll close. It's one of my favorite memories, and there are just far too many to mention here, now. It was when you could still see the TV screen. That Sunday Oscar Brown Jr. was on that show on Channel 4, the one that finally got canceled because it was too damn good. Oscar Brown Jr., talking/singing/howling "But I was Cool," and you laughing hysterically, only having heard the song but never having seen him perform it, and then we were all laughing as you howled along with him in the last verse and, without missing a beat, said along with him "But I was cool!"

Oh hell yes you were. Beyond cool.

I'll be seeing you.

Return to Forever

Sat, 5 May 2012 23:05:58 -0400

There is an interesting pattern I have noticed in the way sea changes occur in my life, and they didn't begin to happen until Al Gore or the NSA or Teilhard de Chardin or God or somebody invented the internet. Prior to that, things just kind of happened, with no real, observable cause and effect.

John Fahey taught me about cause and effect, and in his one complete book he mentioned how at age five he didn't have any grasp of that concept, that, in his words, "I was an idiot." At age five.

I was an idiot till age 50. John, I got you beat.

In 1994 I went on line while recuperating from a near-catastrophic (for me, anyway, since I am the center of my own universe), coronary event. That was the cause. The internet was the effect. I was sitting around the house and my daughter handed me a Prodigy floppy disk, and it started.

They had a medical support bulletin board on Prodigy back then (when one had to choose a service and learn to live with it while all the cool kids were having fun over on AOL, or so they thought). When I realized there were actual other people out there doing the same thing more or less, I began to have conversations with them. This eventually led to me ressurecting my borderline writing career, and it also led to me meeting people back when everyone always warned everyone else to watch out for ax murderers when meeting people in person they'd first met on line.

Eventually all this led to me getting involved in a long-distance relationship which in turn eventually led to me moving across country to be with the girlfriend. It didn't last, but by then the ball was really rolling, and Teilhard's "Globe, clothed with a brain" was helping me think and do.

It was handy when I was on the way to the door, when I'd been asked to leave the seven year long relationship I'd found on the opposite coast. I'd also discovered, again, Salon, which has been mentioned to me by a long-lost high school friend who'd turned up on that other coast as well. I became a chronic commenter on Salon, and when the powers that be decided to create this thing called Open Salon, none other than Joan Walsh persuaded me to join in at the outset. I couldn't understand why, since I had no faith in my writing abilities and believed I had been one of the worst-behaved commenters probably in the history of the site.

I was persuaded somehow, and the causes and effects continued.

My first ever attempt at OS writing, talking about the weather for chrissake, got me my first EP. To this day I am confounded by that, but I continued to experiment, to find my voice, not knowing then that Joan had effectively changed my life, set it off on a new arc, shortly after I'd arrived back here in the mysterious east.

All this is by way of prologue to the story I am trying to find a way to tell about last week. As I write this, a week exactly has passed since I made the most recent real-time connection with someone I had originally met on line, and in that short time (and, in reality, in the year leading up to it), I've had my life changed again, for the god-only-knows how manyeth time now. Each change has been positive, often wonderful.

Since I slipped into OS, trying to not be noticed (yes, I get how stupid that sounds), I have gained a family and more. I have become the writer I feared I could not possibly be, or at least came to accept that I can write, and it is because of people who encouraged me and even embraced me (occasionally quite literally) that I have found myself on the threshold of being completely in love with life, more than I ever would have believed possible, even though my life has, on balance, been awfully damn good. Even that time when they took out my heart and played catch with it, back when this all began.

This past week I returned, after more than five years, to the place I'd lived for a while in Southern California, to see what it would be like withhout her being involved.

It was incredible.

I met more friends I'd never met, found friends I hadn't seen in ages, discovered La Jolla and a Chinese abstract artist whose work threw me into a prolonged trance; I walked into a bagel place I used to frequent but hadn't visited for more than five years, only to have the counter guy call me by name the moment I walked through the door; I was reminded just how insane Laguna Beach is on a sunny weekend day; I listened to a rare April rainstorm quietly in the dark, alone; and on the last day (or was it the first?) I hiked the Hollywood hills, wandered Santa Monica (where I was congratulated on having such a lovely wife, which elicited some awkward laughter and a "We just MET!"), and generally felt that sense of riding the vast wave that is the Eternal Now.

I want to thank those dear OS friends who shared their precious time with me, and those Facebook friends who also shared their time, those I know because I was on Facebook because of OS, because of the internet, because my right coronary artery once upon a time came apart. I cannot thank you enough for having helped make my survival of that and the figurative broken heart two of the most positive things that have ever happened to me.

About the time I signed onto Open Salon beta, I'd decided to open a Facebook account. I figured maybe I could network with other aspiring writers as well as political activists, and maybe even keep track of my family. All those things happened, and a huge chunk of my large group of friends there are people I've come to know through OS. By whoring out...I mean linking...my posts here, especially the political ones, on Facebook, I attracted some politically like-minded people. Not just ones from OS, but just random ones

One of them, I realized at some point, shared much more with me than just political leanings. We think alike, we love the same music, we have many of the same passions, and, well, we just kinda like each other a lot.

On the last day of my trip to SoCal, during which I felt the last of the past finally fall away and the light come all the way back on, during the trip during which I met a couple more of the most wonderful friends-I'd-never-met in person, connected with another old high school friend I hadn't seen since I left for California a decade ago, and wandered alone along streets and paths I used to wander hand in hand with a woman I thought I loved more than was humanly possible but who didn't love me quite as much, I finally, at the end of that particular trip, came face to face with that person I'd crashed into on Facebook, where I'd never been were it not for OS, which I'd never ventured into were it not for Joan, and found myself looking into the eyes of the future.

The future is beautiful, and I will meet it out on the blue horizon and will never again shrink from its approach because of the past - or for any other reason.

I need to go back to LA soon. I left some books out there.

The Ghost of Gladys Spellman

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 23:04:58 -0400

Recently a Facebook friend asked me how I manage to avoid burnout in nursing, and how is it that I am able to say "I love all my patients, even the ones I can't stand."

An interesting thing happened the day I was planning to write this: I got sick. I live alone. I am often reminded I am a senior citizen, to which of course I reply with a crotch-grab, "I got your senior citizen right here." It is not denial. It is a Dorian Gray thing, I suspect. At any rate, getting sick while living alone delayed my writing, but it also put a finer point on the issue of the questions. I'm glad I live alone when something like that happens. My house is a shambles after 36 hours of chills, fever, nausea, splitting headaches, etc. Yeah, a "man cold." I'm glad there was no one here to pick up after me. That would be more than wrong.

In the morning I will rent a bulldozer.

But I digress: The burnout factor is something I live with and have lived with ever since this second career found its roots in my 30 years of fire/EMS service, when I saw the same thing happen to, first, "aid men," then ambulance corpsmen, and finally EMTs and paramedics. A lot of them, like a lot of nurses, seem to go cold after a while, to just be going through the motions, or worse, to resent the very people for whom they are caring.

I am reminded of the night a car came screeching up onto the apron of my fire station. A young woman in the passenger seat was gasping desprately for air, doing what we call "posturing", screaming and sobbing that she couldn't breathe. A classic first panic attack. Our ambulance, as it often was then, was out of service again, so we called for a medic unit since it was technically a "trouble breathing." I began talking to the young woman, talking her down (I've done this countless times, and they first look at me like I'm insane, but eventually they catch on and start to calm down). Medic unit arrives, paramedic goes to patient side of car, recognizes what's going on, and begins to berate and shame the patient for being "hysterical." I tapped him on the arm, nodded for him to follow me to the other side of the medic unit (where I'm sure he thought I would tell him this was a frequent flyer), grabbed him, slammed him against the ambulance, and said "Motherfucker, you're at my house now, and if you ever speak to one of may patients that way again you will be getting flown to the trauma center."

Which one of us was burned out?

But again, it is digression, because what really guides me now, even with all those years of preparation, all that time regarding those patients as "mine" as in "my sister," or "my mother," etc., I wind up working at a hospital that contains the Gladys Spellman Specialty Care Unit. This is a very large wing with 90% of the patients on ventilators, either hopelessly mired in end-of-life issues or having sustained permanent brain damage. Sometimes it's someone from a nursing home who caught pneumonia and is now living in an unattractive sort of mechanical homeostasis.

I am a critical care technician. My home base is intermediate medical care (IMC), the best place probably to work in my hospital (yes, I am aware I speak of all these things in possessive terms. That is not an accident), though I really prefer the ER. But I have a sweet deal here as a PRN ("as needed" or per diem) worker; I make my own schedule. The quid pro quo is I don't know what unit I'll be working on a given day. And at least once a month all us PRNers have to do a turn in the Spellman unit. It is the name of that unit that makes my approach to caregiving the opposite of burnout. I've said, and I believe, I couldn't do that every day. But when it's time, I go and do it anyway, and I love those patients too, who cannot speak to me, at least verbally, or who may even lack awareness. Hope does spring eternal. Sometimes it pays off, too. Statistically not very often, but they are still people, people lying in their own waste, people sometimes physically falling apart, bedsores, sloughing skin, unseeing eyes - or as often those eyes that see in such a panetrating way that I am locked into them, and we converse in a way that defies words, just as the suffering of being trapped inside one's body must be the most horrific sort of nightmare, and yet I can come and join them in the experience for a while, and I do. I don't look away, I look in. This prevents burnout. The conventional wisdom is "don't get emotionally involved." My acquired wisdom is that the only way to avoid burnout is to join your patient, no matter what's going on, whether he or she in in a hospial bed, ER cubicle, lying on a sidewalk, trapped in a wrecked car, at the t0p of an antenna tower...

Or a politician working the crowd at the mall here in Laurel in 1980. Gladys Noon Spellman was one of the most loved, respected and accomplished Democratic Senators ever. She was talking with constituents, hugging people, shaking hands, making the rounds, one of those typical political moments, when the Sword of Damocles fell and her heart stopped beating. No reason. She just hit the floor.

The local rescue squad arrived, performed CPR, delivered her to what is now "my" hospital, but while her heart resumed beating, her brain did not wake up. She was transferred to the flagship hospital of the county system, back in the town where she'd lived, raised a family, taught in the local elementary school, become an advocate for educators and education, ran successfully for the County Council, was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to the Advisory Committee on Intergovernmental Relations in 1967 and was awarded the highest honor that could be bestowed by county officials nationwide when she became the first woman elected president of the National Association of Counties in 1972.

^{_{Former Happy Acres Elementary school, where Ms. Spellman taught.}}

When it became clear Ms. Spellman was unlikely to come out of her coma, other patients with similar problems were placed in the same area. Gladys Spellman died eight years after that ordinary night in 1980. By then a unit had formally been created at the big hospital to care for people who, for the most part, weren't going to come back, who were stuck in limbo. Steny Hoyer won Ms. Spellman's seat when it was finally declared vacant in 1981. Two years ago the unit was moved to my hospital, because there was an underused wing.

Gladys Spellman was just an ordinary person who did extraordinary things. She walked among us, she fell among us, she was rescued - or perhaps not - by fire-EMS personnel on the floor of the now-moribund Laurel Mall, she was treated in the intensive care unit of the big hospital, and now the unit is at my hospital and that wing of the 4th floor bears her name.

It also bears her legacy. Every one of those people, in fact every person who comes through the doors, usually beginning with the ER, is an ordinary person with a story. Most of them get better and go home. Some do not. Some linger for months or years. Even those who go back where they came from are sometimes bitter. Wouldn't you be if you were 80, as a recent patient of mine, and knew when you were well enough you'd be returned to the nursing home you'd been living in prior to the hospital's god-awful atmosphere? (And I say that having spent some time in hospital beds as a patient - it is not the greatest place for a sick person to be). This gentleman was difficult. None of the med-surg staff (where I wind up more than half the time normally because of a shortage of help) liked him. He was very insistent about one thing in particular: that his door be open far enough to allow air to circulate (the 4th floor is hot year 'round. I do not know why) but closed enough that he could sit on the edge of his bed and use the urinal without being exposed to passers-by. He had, in his mind, the perfect alignment of that door, and he had been cursing people for several days for not placing it just so.

I also once failed to get it right, and he yelled at me and cursed me. I apologized, moved it slowly, saying "Tell me when it's right, okay?" which he did. A while later I came back and he was sitting on the edge of his bed. He said "I'm sorry I cussed you" in a very contrite tone. I told him it was okay, I understood. He raised his voice then, saying "No it isn't! It's not okay! I was wrong. Don't tell me it's okay. I know better than to act that way!' I stood, silent, for a moment, thinking what, if anything, might be the right thing to say.

"I'm sorry," he said again, in a soft voice.

"Thank you, sir. Apology accepted."

Then one of those things happened that I cannot explain and almost never mention to anyone: I felt something; a physical touch on my shoulder, and a sense of voice where there was no audible voice, saying "We get a little testy sometimes."

I knew that touch from more than 30 years ago. I knew that voice that only existed inside my head.

Ordinary men and women, every one. From the crazy drunk to the drug seeker to the needy and demanding sickle cell crisis patient, to the frightened one with chest pains who is feeling that sense of imminent doom, to the panicky patient who will be talked down eventually, to incredibly demanding to those who seem to have given up and those beyond having given up. On giving report to my relief at midnight in the Spellman unit: "Everybody alive and breathing? Good."

They are all mine when I am there, and Gladys Spellman walks those halls with me, and in the words of Dan Fogelberg, "Death is there to keep us honest and to constantly remind us we are free."

Racists and Bigots and Brutes

Mon, 2 Apr 2012 14:04:16 -0400

It is clearly time to sort through our lexicon of sociopolitical terms and pejorative usages.

As we approach the End of Times according to those who believe the Mayans didn't simply run out of enthusiam or energy, and to those who live for the mad dream of immanentizing the Chritian eschaton , not to mention those who use politics and religion and safe havens for promulgating their sociopathy and gathering support for it, the dicourse has become course, and speech and actions once considered too shameful to display publicly, even by those who held them dear, have become increasingly common.

From the simple, clear and stunning public murder of Trayvon Martin to the passage of laws in various states reducing women to the status of cattle, the Far Right and Christian lunatic fringe have joined forces to seemingly issue the sort of cry for help that a mass-murderer often is seen to have broadcast prior to a slaughter of the innocents. Are these people pushing the envelope of sociopathy in order to be put forcefully in their place or do they truly believe they have the clout and/or firepower to bring us all to our knees?

The religious right seems bent upon returning us to "the good old days," when Negroes and women both knew their respective "places" and a Negro woman had virtually no place, but was regarded, rather, as a sort of necesary, utilitarian evil, because who else was going to pick up after these swine, submit to their sexual aggressions, and serve, from time to time, in place of the black Whipping Boy. The Good Old Days.

Damn you, Norman Rockwell.

These people on the far right (and there appears no longer to be any near right, no moderate right, no sane Republicanism as it once existed during the last of those Good Old Days when people like Dwight Eisenhower and yes, even the evolved Barry Goldwater provided some sort of intellectual and moral balance to the binary system in which we live and move and have our being), accept as their spokesmen people who are brutes, bigots, beasts, misogynists - and we are content to call them mere racists and pigs (an insult to pigs, at least).

Racists? Hell people, nearly everyone of us is racist, at least those of us who were born nominally white. I will accept that burden if the reader will not, if the gentle reader recoils in liberal righteous outrage at the suggestion that being born white almost confers a certain degree of racism along with all the rights and priviliges it continues to deny people of color. Yes, even I, the blackest white man most of you will ever meet, was born white, and so had a leg up on every black or brown person around me. Born and raised in Jim Crow DC in the mid-1940s, I was made aware, by my parents (particularly my mother) that we were given an advantage not conferred upon our black and brown bretheren. We could pass for white, even if we were of mixed ancestry, Irish, American Indian, and, yes, somewhere back there, a black guy, lost in the mists of time. We looked white. Of course the Irish did their turn at being black, Jews, members of a religion and perhaps sharing a sort of ethnicity, but basically white people, though racially sometimes different, sometimes darker, semitic, and so vulernable to charicature, had their own problems, and to a remarkable extent still do. In fact for many a Jew it's even worse, because they get to be white and an Jew at the same time, so the whiteness often does them less good than it does someone like me. Like the Irish, many a Jew learned to alter his last name so as to sound more Anglo-Saxon. This is pathetic.

Racism, then, is not the same as bigotry, and most of us, as I've already blurted out, are racist, at least those of us with the right skin tone and the right last names. We accept our advantage as a matter of course. We could reject it and put ourselves in the line of actual merit (wasn't that called "affirmative action," something that was forced on us so that "they" could take over and push us aside? I think I remember that). We live in and accept the terms of a basically racist society, simply by forgetting that our black or brown neighbors are, in fact, looked upon with suspicion and often have to work far harder to achieve the same level of material success and social acceptance that is give to us and which we can't even destroy by acting like literal monsters. So long as we don't go on mass murdering spress and confine ourselves to just the lone, occasional young black man, and so long as our sexual affinity for children goes undiscovered, we are pretty much free to pluck all the low-hanging fruit - and even then we get a pass more often than not if we but only act contrite once caught at our crimes.

We who pass for white get a better deal from the day we are born. And we take it for granted, even as we bemoan the lot of those less fortunate. In the words of William S. Burroughs, "Wouldn't you?" The system is rigged in our favor, and when we come to realize that, we realize we participate in a racist system, and that makes us racists. The least we can do is try to upend that system.

The same thing goes for sexism. It is an evil ideology as well, and any man who doesn't call it into question is less than a man.

The bigots are far, far worse, because those will preach from the pulpit or the podium or the public square or the electronic media their abject hatred for The Other. This deplorable condition is also generally found to co-exist with misgogyny, and while that has never fully gone away in our society, it had, for some decades, slowly made strides toward getting more nearly right - until now. Now the bigots, the mouth-foaming haters of non-whites and non-Europeans when you get down to it, are feeling more emboldened than ever to join the army of those who have decided to declare an all out war against women and the human rights of women. While these same people unfavorably compare Muslim society to ours by citing examples of (isolated) cases of Muslim patriarchy, they seek to create a Taliban-like standard for American womanhood and, in the most recent development on this front, as it unfolds state-by-state, have now, in Georgia, passed legislation that effectively reduces women to the status of cattle (by use of the argument that a cow must carry a dead calf full term, as though that is even somehow a good and human idea), so women should have to do the same - with certain merciful exceptions, but in no case be able to obtain an abortion beyond 20 weeks.

Given any latitude, bigots evolve into brutes who physically abuse, torture and kill - in the name of some sort of "God." This is the end result of the evolution of unreason.

And we liberals, who are our very own selves reactionaries for the most part, respond by reacting - with vitriol and self-righteous superiority, as though if we repeat the andidotal words often enough, we have not only done our duty to the right (as opposed to the Right) but somehow believe this will have some effect on events.

Meanwhile the landslide continues toward us at the base of the mountain where our village sits and we all tell each other "It hasn't gotten here yet."

The fact that there be monsters, that there are utterly despicable people among us who are given a platform from which to spew their poison, does not make us, by default, the Good Guys. We actually have to do something. We have to show up. Women, rise up, as the statistical majority you are, and take back your hard earned ground - now. Liberals, show up and be heard. We are now in the midst of an all-out assault on our good and decent American ideals and the fact that we are almost all, to some degree, racists, needs to be understood and acknowleged so that we can join ranks with our non-white brethren. No, it shouldn't matter, but the fact is it still does. We've come a ways, but we are far from the destination, which is elusive at best. The biggest enemy we have is our own notion that "all that" was resolved years ago, and the assault on human decency is some sort of surprise attack. It is not! This war has been building a head of steam for at least 30 years. It comes from a virus never fully eradicated, but which, like herpes, lives in dormancy until the time is right and the host is compromised. We compromised ourselves and let this thing get loose by assuming we had "won." We have our work cut out for us now, and we have an opportunity to at least push it back into its damp, dark hole so as to address the problem without having to dodge literal bullets.

We don't have the luxury of sitting around and talking about "them" as though this will somehow shame them back into line. At last, perhaps we can see, they do, in fact, have no decency.

As the great cartoonist philosopher Walt Kelly once wrote:

"Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blasts on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us."