Lisa Solod's Open Salon Blog

What the Rally for Sanity and Obama Have in Common

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 14:10:59 -0400

On the bus ride home to the Shenandoah Valley with some of the nearly two hundred people who made the hours-long journey to the Rally for Sanity, October 30, we were fired up. We were talking politics, the Democratic Party, The Tea Party, Republicans, and, well, passion. Mostly where the passion of two years ago went. Many of those on the bus had campaigned heartily and heavily for the president. Some were disappointed. But none were willing to switch party affiliation or fail to vote. Most were on the same page. Except for one thing. There seemed to be disagreement as to the question of “marketing,” for want of a better word ,the message that the president had actually done a lot of what he had promised and why so many people were unable to grasp some of the historic legislation he had ushered in.

I agree with Obama’s statement on the Daily Show recently that the health care bill, while far from perfect, shared many similarities with social security. It also shares the same similarities with early civil rights legislation: it’s a great first step that can be built upon. And I also disagree with the many pundits (including Maureen Dowd in the New York Times) that putting so much energy into health care instead of jobs was a mistake. In fact, most people on my bus thought that Obama should have pushed through health care (and an even more comprehensive bill at that) in the early months of his administration, rather than trying to make nice with the Republicans. The argument came in the form of whether people knew exactly what was in the health care bill, or, for that matter, the financial legislation bill. And that is when the conversation turned to marketing and public relations, or, as more than one writer recently has put it, politics. Where is Obama’s political savvy? People want to know. Why isn’t he making sure the American public understands what he’s done for us?

Because he doesn’t believe in spoonfeeding grown ups. And neither do I.

The quarter of a million people who turned out to for the Rally for Sanity (along with the thousands who never made it because of Metro malfunctions and highway traffic) and President Obama have something very important in common. And it’s not politics. Not at all. It’s the deep-seated belief that we have the duty and responsibility to educate ourselves. To read. To think. To pay attention. It’s the deeply-held notion that Americans are, or should be, able to parse information and get the gist of it. Just like we used to read texts and respond to them in school; just as we used to learn math formulas and then use them to solve problems.

But, it’s clear, the American public finds that just too too tiresome. Rather, both the media and
“ordinary people” (whoever they are) delight in calling Obama an elitist and sport snark the lefties who, carrying often erudite and ironic signs, attended the rally.

As one middle-aged black woman, as ordinary an American as I, or anyone else, argued: “Look, the health care bill was big and somewhat complex, but I took the time to look at it and see what was in it that affected me. I thought, if I can find one thing that would make a difference in my life, then I can support it.” She found that one thing, extended coverage for her children, both in their twenties. And then she went on to find more.

Yet, according to pundits the bill was too large and cumbersome for ordinary people to understand. Those same ordinary people who spend, on average, seven hours a day with the television on, don’t have the time to do a little thoughtful reading. Those same ordinary Americans who pass around you-tube videos of kittens just can’t find a half hour a day to look at more than one news source, read deeply into the issues, and come up with something more than talking points. From any one side.

That’s elitist, right? To say that people should spend some time paying attention, read a little, think a little, tamp down the anger and the rhetoric and the slurs and the stupidity? That’s elitist. And it’s more than a little elitist, right?, to say that anyone who is an “ordinary American” (that is, anyone who makes the average $50,000 a year for a family of four) would be a fool to vote for the Republicans or the Tea Partiers, because to do so is so clearly going against their own self interest. Oh. Oh.

Yet the facts are there. The people who angrily joined the Tea Party because government is out of control need that same government even more than the leaders of those parties because the leaders of those parties don’t need social services, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. Because the leaders of those parties talk about jobs jobs jobs but are the chief outsourcers of American jobs. Because the leaders of those parties are financing their own campaigns with millions of their own dollars along with millions more from corporations who don’t give a damn about ordinary Americans. And yet, millions of ordinary Americans will vote back in Republicans. The same Republicans who got us into this mess in the first place and the same Republicans who have held up over 200 bills in the Senate and recently voted against tax breaks for companies who keep jobs in this country. The same Republicans who will cut taxes on the rich again and still promise to balance the budget, which anyone with a modicum of common sense realizes is an impossibility.

Those same people who will vote back in the Republicans must be among the 92 percent who don’t’ know that Obama gave them a tax cut. Those same people who have no idea the contempt with which the Republicans hold ordinary Americans.

It’s no secret that the Republicans who paint Obama as an elitist because he is an intellectual are elite in a profoundly more sinister way: controlling influence, money, power, big media, and pouring billions of dollars into buying elections.

But logic is elitist.

It requires critical thinking. And critical thinking is beyond ordinary Americans, right? We would rather have our information spoon fed. We would rather have our president act more like a politician, or, even a huckster, and sell himself to us one more time. Rather than work to get things done, we depend on our politicians to both sell themselves to the people who finance their campaigns and again to us so that we keep them in office.

Wonder why so many on the left are cynical? Why so many turned out for a rally that was both ironic and political? The answer is simple. As ordinary Americans ourselves we are tired of being told we are elitist for thinking. The other ordinary Americans should be tired of being told they are too dumb to see who really is working for them and who against.

When Is A Literary Feud NOT A Literary Feud?

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 10:08:30 -0400

For all those tired of debating who is a "real" American and to whom Constitutional rights apply, and don't, the feud between literary star Jonathan Franzen and bestselling novelists Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult is a welcome distraction.

Actually there is no feud. It's just two popular women writers angry at the kind of laudatory press Franzen is receiving.

The two women say Franzen is getting too much play for his new novel Freedom (which, incidentally hasn't even hit bookstores yet) and that his subject matter is one that women like them write about all the time but for which they never receive the kind of press Franzen is getting (the cover of Time being the breaking point, perhaps). Picoult is quoted as saying that the New York Times favors " white male authors" and Weiner, in the Huffington Post, says that she thinks "it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention."

While Weiner admits she is not a literary fiction novelist and while Picoult argues that the themes of her work and Franzen's, for example, are the same, even if she is a "commercial" writer and he's not, both writers feel unduly dissed that critics don't seem to take them as seriously as they do Franzen.

Yet neither of them see the disconnect. They just want the press. Or as Weiner argues (not at all convincingly) "I think a most respectful and informed attitude toward a wider range of books would help everyone - commercial writers, literary writers, men, women, and, most importantly, readers."

Good luck with that. If a brilliant writer like Stephen King had to publish dozens of books before the "literary establishment" took him seriously as a writer and not just a horror/thriller author, Weiner has a long row to hoe.

But does it matter?

One benefit of reviews in mainstream, influential publications like Time and the New York Times is to introduce readers to writers who may not be on the average reader's radar. Stephen King didn't need the press. Weiner and Picoult, among others, don't need it either: they sell and sell and sell. And one reason, I argue, is that their books are far "easier" to read than Franzen or a host of other more literary writers like Paul Auster, Philip Roth, Marilynne Robinson or Margaret Atwood. No one needs to convince a reader to pick up the new Picoult in the airport or order the latest Weiner from amazon.com. But readers of those books might benefit from reading something slightly more challenging, something that pays as much attention to the writing as the plot and subject matter. And that's where the critics come in. PIcoult doesn't like the Times devoting so much space to Franzen, but there are now, thanks to the internet, dozens of reader review sites where people can weigh in. Those populist reviews can balance out the critics if one wishes them to. But I think it's still important for real critics to write real reviews.

Picoult may be right that "a lot of the same themes and wisdoms I find in commercial fiction are the same themes and wisdoms as what I see lauded in literary fiction" but there is still a difference in how well one writes about those themes and wisdoms. The truth is that authors like Picoult and Weiner can't hold a candle to Franzen. But they also can't hold a candle to Margaret Drabble, Anita Brookner, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, Anne Tyler, or a number of other "women" writers who write on many of the same themes as Franzen, Weiner and Picoult: family, life, children, work, relationships. Why the two women are picking a fight with the coverage of Franzen's new novel is confusing. It seems more about professional jealousy than equal coverage or women's rights.

What is literary and what is not literary has been up for debate since writers began writing. Some popular writers (in fact Weiner does it in the HuffPo article) like to cite Charles Dickens as an example of a "commercial" writer because he wrote for the masses and his work was serialized in newspapers. But what is never pointed out is that Dickens was a superior stylist. Not only was his craft exemplary but over a hundred years later readers can still delight in both his themes and his writing. Whether today's popular, commercial writers will stand that test of time is, I suppose, arguable. Jonathan Franzen's work will.

Do I Want to Know I Have Alzheimer's?

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 14:08:57 -0400

Five years ago, right before her seventy-eighth birthday, my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The symptoms had been apparent for several years but alcohol masked some of them and denial, perhaps, masked others. Once my mother finally entered a rehabilitation facility and was no longer drinking, it became obvious that something was seriously wrong. Within weeks my sisters and I had cleaned out and sold her house and moved her into a secure assisted living facility with an attached unit for when her memory finally and completely gives out. She was given Aricept to try and slow the progress of the disease and it seems to be working. After a couple of years of railing at her fate and moments of clear and painful lucidity she has stabilized. Although her short-term memory is completely gone, she still knows family and friends, can still dress herself, and enjoy certain limited events, although she has no recall of any of those events as little as hours later, and conversations with her are repetitive in the extreme.

More than a dozen years ago, my grandmother, her mother, died after a long battle with what we now believe was Alzheimer’s, although at the time was diagnosed as senile dementia. Her symptoms were the same as my mother’s, although she became progressively and more quickly worse: unable to manage even the simplest of tasks.

I know that my chances of suffering from Alzheimer’s have increased exponentially, perhaps as high as fifty percent, by having both a mother and a grandmother who suffered from the disease. And now, science has made breakthroughs which may well lead to an early diagnosis, as early even, as the age of fifty. I am fifty five.

So, do I wish to know? Do I wish to take the new spinal-fluid test which, according to the New York Times is “100 percent accurate in identifying patients with significant memory loss who are on their way to developing Alzheimer’s disease”? Do I wish to live with the knowledge that ten years down the road I will be unable to think, remember, perhaps even dress or recognize family and friends?

I don’t think so.

Although I admit that part of me wishes to know, if only to put to rest my fear of the disease, the larger part of me just can’t cope. If there were a cure, yes, of course. But the fact is that the medications that are currently available may only slow the progress of the disease, and only in some persons. And the new medications being tested have side effects I am simply not ready to cope with. Although I sympathize that early detection may well help scientists to “save the brain” as they put it, of patients who otherwise would degenerate swiftly, I am not ready to offer myself as a guinea pig. Call it the ostrich syndrome but at this point I prefer the knowledge of no knowledge.

In addition, what if, like the early tests for AIDS, I got a false positive on the spinal-fluid test? The stress of waiting for another painful test would be nigh unbearable. And ultimately, and perhaps most crucially, if I should test positive, that particular information would severely limit my sense of my future and my ability to enjoy the life I lead now. Even should medications be able to slow the progress of the disease, the mere information that I had it would, for me, lead to impossible despair.

I assume I have “biological markers.” I can live with that. I also assume that in ten years time the research will be perfected to a point that it may well make sense to take the spinal-fluid test and, should I show the markers, begin treatment. But for the present, doctors have run the usual tests for early memory loss on me and I seem to suffer no symptoms. A check of the ten early warning signs of the disease lets me know that none of the more serious incidents: repeatedly losing things, acting inappropriately, forgetting simple tasks, personality change, have reared their ugly head. But do I worry? Of course I do. My mother was a brilliant, accomplished woman. To see her reduced to a shattered shell of her former self is heart-breaking.

I have watched the progression of the disease in both my grandmother and my mother. My mother, five years after her diagnosis, remains physically healthy; she could easily live five more years at the least. But what is her quality of life? She can no longer read, no longer remain interested in a film or a television program. Her beloved stereo sits gathering dust. She gets anxious and disoriented if taken out of the safe haven of her assisted living for more than a couple of hours. She forgets her children’s and sister’s visits, can’t remember what she did a day earlier. Her joy is fleeting, her grief palpable, and her life an endless stretch of things she can no longer love. The possibility of that sort of future for me is painful enough in the abstract. I do not wish to know for certain.

Stop Me Before I Click Again

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:07:43 -0400

On a recent short getaway I was sitting over breakfast one morning with my friend B, clearly jonesing from both the absence of my netbook and the dearth of decent newspapers available at the hotel at which we were staying. While I pushed my eggs around my plate, B pulled out his Kindle, bought the day’s New York Times for me, downloaded it and handed me his little machine to read on while I ate. I was nearly moved to tears: it was an extraordinary gesture-- akin to handing a drunk her first drink of the day.

I felt I could make it through the next couple of hours.

Once upon a time, it was enough to wake, bring in the newspaper from the front step, read it while I drank my tea , check in with NPR throughout the day and, perhaps, catch the evening news. I felt informed. Now, I make my tea, immediately sit down at the computer, read the New York Times online (no home delivery is available where I live), check in with the Daily Beast and the Huffington Post, Salon and Slate, read Mike Allen’s Politico playbook and peruse another half dozen news and information sites. All before I even look at my personal emails.

During the day I have my car radio tuned to an assortment of radio talk shows, and in the evening I check in with as much cable news as possible. I actually click on the links that appear in my twitter feed, read several magazines online and look at a half dozen blogsites. On Sunday I run out early and buy in paper form the New York Times—which I then read throughout the week. If I don’t catch the cable news shows I think I should, I access them online. I peruse the sites my friends on Facebook and other social networking sites recommend. At the gym, warming up on the treadmill, I click between MSNBC’s Morning Joe and Fox. And I still receive, in paper form, a half dozen magazines from The New Yorker to Harper’s to Elle.

None of my excessive intake makes me feel a whole lot more informed than I felt when I read one paper a day and listened to one or two news programs but although I am overloaded with information, I still can’t make myself stop reading or accessing. (A recent article in Monday Note which talks about the need for speed in the media went right to my heart, too.)

Articles by Rebecca Traister in Salon and Laurie Winer (in a review of Hamlet’s Blackberry in the New York Times Book Review) as well as Gary Shteyngart’s wonderfully self-deprecating and brilliant essay also in the Book Review have decried our necessity to be plugged in, phone-wise, all day long. (I am deliberately not linking to those articles here because that is one of my problems: each piece I read has links which I then have to follow, which then take me other places and...) But that’s far from my real problem. Although I, too, am attached to my Blackberry and find it helpful when waiting in line or for my daughter somewhere to be able to “read” the news stories that come through my email, it is not my phone that is the real problem for me. It is not unplugging that particular device. It is, instead, unplugging from my obsessive attachment to information in general. It is unplugging my brain from its overwhelming need to know everything about everything.

This is not really a new disease with me. It’s just a variation on an old one. For most of my life I have needed to have at least a dozen books on my shelves that I have not yet read. The thought of wanting something to read and not having a choice, a wide range of choices actually, makes me nervous. Very nervous. I continue to buy and collect books even as there is no way I can ever read them fast enough to even try and keep up. I have considered the notion of getting rid of one book for every new one I bought but that idea quickly went by the wayside. A major move three years ago forced me to cull through my books and only keep the ones I absolutely had to have (plus a supply of the classics so my teenaged daughter would also always have something to read) but in the three years since my move I have, alas, amassed an even larger number of unread books. None of this, of course, has stopped me from buying more book. Ever. Even as I have often said that I could stop eating, sleeping, living in general, and just sit down and read all the books I wish to read right this moment and never be done before I die.

But that particular obsession (seeing my house as a dessert island on which I might be stranded without something to read) has, in the past couple of years, been replaced by the yet more dangerous obsession to electronically access every bit of information that seems remotely interesting to me or that I might need to make an informed decision about the events of the day. Or that, God forbid, might come up in conversation somewhere, at some point. Ever.

I can partially parse my problem by the visceral reaction I have to comments on articles I read. Too often as I am reading them I think: That person hasn’t read such and such. That person clearly has no idea what he is talking about. That person is getting his information from one single source instead of ferreting out the real truth. It’s kind of the way some people watch reality television shows with the express interest of making themselves feel superior. But the real gist of my problem is probably a latent paranoia. If I don’t stay on top of what’s being reported, wool of some sort will be pulled over my eyes. Don’t we need to know the real truth behind what’s happening in the Gulf? Isn’t the recent expose on our intelligence agencies and their information gathering in the Washington Post a must-read? Who else will stay on top of Congress’s shenanigans? But those are just the tip of the iceberg for me. If I miss Bob Edwards or On Point or Fresh Air or Talk of the Nation I feel bereft. If I don’t catch Jon Stewart’s latest diatribe or Rachel Maddow’s fresh reporting I feel remiss in my duties as a citizen. And I think it necessary to also catch news from sources other than those I trust: The guilt! The responsibility! They all fuel my obsession. And the truth is that, like any addiction, my particular torment gives me as much pleasure as it does those rumblings of guilt.

I hear from others, smart people, too, people that I respect (sort of), that it really isn’t necessary to read everything that comes my way. I know, intellectually, that that is true. But telling me to stop, asking me to take a break even, is like requesting any other addict to just quit his or her addiction cold turkey. I need a program, a patch, a support group or some number of steps (probably well more than twelve) to help wean me off my compulsion to absorb. I could check myself into some place sans a friend with a Kindle, a place with no satellite service, like Shteyngart’s oasis: I could do that for a week, a month, even longer, maybe. I could. The problem is that once I returned to “civilization” I would be so far behind it would take me months to catch up.

WHY Are We in Afghanistan? And Other Pressing Questions

Wed, 12 May 2010 09:05:45 -0400

Bill Press had a discussion on the “war” in Afghanistan on his radio show this morning. I put the word “war” in quotation marks because it remains difficult for me to decide whether this is an actual war or another incursion/occupation based on our idea of promoting democracy around the world—even in places that aren’t receptive to it. His point was: Where is the media coverage? Where is the information about the war that we can actually use? Why is the media moving from one event/disaster/news story to another, once again without giving the American public anything to hang our hat on?

Point taken.

I, for one, am finally and perhaps irrevocably suffering from information, or perhaps lack of information, overload. An earthquake here, another there; the huge oil spill in the Gulf, health care, a Supreme Court fight, upcoming elections, Iraq, Afghanistan, jobs, the continue recession and housing crisis….it all seems to seamlessly (if problematically) meld into one unending story of doom and destruction.

No wonder the American public is suffering from a collective Attention Deficit Disorder. The media, in its inimitable fashion, perpetuates it, and it takes a stronger woman than I to both deflect and absorb all I should deflect and absorb.

Some of us are just hunkering down and working on our gardens. There is something Zen-like about pulling weeds and planting flowers and vegetables, even as we struggle with debt and foreclosure and joblessness and a sort of existential despair that seems never-ending. And why not? No matter how often we spin the dials of our radios, flip the channels of our televisions, turn the pages of our newspapers and magazines, and jump from internet site to internet site, the chances that we will really A) find anything we can actually use to either inform us or make us feel more in control and B)feel anything like we have a handle on the issues of the day becomes slimmer and slimmer.

Even those of us who truly wish to keep up find that the work of keeping up is more work than we can possibly handle.

Some of us resign ourselves to just shutting down completely, turning off all sources of “information” save for celebrity rehab and plastic surgery stories, meta posts on writing sites, or bad reality television. Some of us even eschew those assaults on our consciousness. A scattered few spend their time trying to meditate their way out of the abyss that is modern society with its overload of, well, nothing much we can either use or understand.

We know that Afghanistan is a mess we may never fully grasp and that the implications of our sending troops with so little back-up for so very long may well be with us long after our own children, and even our grandchildren, are grown and gone. We know, despite our best efforts, bombs continue to kill people in Iraq, while the European Union struggles with debt that may dwarf our own and important elections in England will have consequences we can’t even really imagine; we remain aware that the tourism and fishing industry along the Gulf is on its way to total destruction. We know that the health care bill is imperfect, at best, and that our Congress seems immobilized. That hundreds of important bills are languishing in the Senate and House and will never see the light of day. We know that the continued infighting between the right and left is heating and heating up, and that hatred and ugliness is so permeating the airwaves and internet that it sometimes seems that civility is a completely lost cause.

And yet, those of us who write and think and wonder and want to make a difference find it hard to just sit back and give up. We search and search for information in which to make informed decisions, even as that “information” makes our blood boil and our heads nearly explode. We wish to remain sanguine but we cannot. Because to stop asking the hard questions, to stop trying to stop evil and misinformation means to lose our place at society’s table—something we are loathe, even as we recognize its ultimate futility—to do.

I doubt any of us would really wish to go back to the age when our news was spoon-fed to us by a limited number of “experts” who kept us abreast of what was really “good” for us. The simpler time was never simple at all. But the explosion that is “information” without context, that is opinion without fact, that has us careening from story to story to story—each with its own limited shelf life—doesn’t seem to offer anything more concrete than ignorance sometimes. In fact, so much ignorance and misinformation is inherent in the information overload that the irony is in escapable. Parsing what is on offer could, if we let it, become a full-time job, something no one I know can really afford. There are still the children to raise, the relationships to nurture, and the laundry to do. Groceries must be purchased, bills must be paid, elderly parents must be attended to, even as we may yearn to retire to a beach (unspoiled, if we can find such a place) with a drink and a novel.

I know I am not alone in wanting both more and less: an impossible quest. How then do we get the information we need to make informed decisions and choices, cut out the distractions posed by Snooki and the Sex and the City ladies, and shoot-em-up movies, and internet snark, and the huge numbers of people who assure us that if we just accept the Christian roots of our nation and turn our lives over to Jesus Christ all will be answered? How do we even reconcile all those conflicting notions and come out even reasonably sane, never mind reasonably informed?

I have no answer, even as I fight my own inclination to just shut down and turn off. There must be a way to process what is necessary and jettison the rest but I,for one, despite my desire to do so, have yet to find it.