Stephanie Tames's Open Salon Blog

The Voodoo Doll Method of Political Action

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 14:07:48 -0400

During Watergate and up until President Richard Nixon’s resignation from office in 1974, my mother was crazy. Really. She was obsessed with every detail of the scandal and talked of nothing else. Her hatred of Nixon was palpable. And this is the crazy part: It was also visible. She made a voodoo doll of Nixon and everyday stuck pins in different body parts as she lit candles and murmured incantations she made up on the spot.

I admit that I thought it was over the top, even for my mother who was known for skirting the edge of sanity. She could be like a dog with a bone once she got an idea in her head. I first noticed this obsessive quality about her when we were kids and she spent lots of time in the principal’s office of our schools complaining about teachers and methods and rules or the lack of them all.

But then she began tilting toward a more dangerous kind of fixation, the kind that got Nixon in trouble, the kind that’s probably defined somewhere in the DSM. When she felt she was being abused in a business deal with friends of the family, all hell broke loose. There were rambling letters and “secret” meetings with a lawyer. She thought the phones were tapped. She suspected someone was intercepting the mail.

With Nixon, though, it wasn’t just the voodoo doll that made her crazy; it was her consuming hate. It was scary. There was a ferocity with which she thrust needles into the doll that seemed to me even then (I was a high school student) a tad out of proportion.

I follow national politics, read the news. I stopped watching television news when we cut our cable service as a cost saving measure when I left my job three years ago and wasn’t able to find another. I consider myself a responsible citizen, vote when I’m given the opportunity, and pay my taxes. And, yes, over the years I’ve gotten myself heated up over some political rhetoric, issue, or candidate. I’ve disagreed with a President or two. And I’ve done my share of protesting. I put signs in my front yard and stickers on my car declaring to anyone who cares to know what my position is on a candidate or issue.

But that’s about as far as it’s gone. Until the debt ceiling debacle. In the past few weeks I’ve found myself screaming at the radio and hurtling invectives at politicians (in the privacy of my home or car – windows rolled up). I’m enraged by the arrogance of the Speaker of the House, the tunnel vision of the Tea Partiers, and the general herd mentality of Republicans in and out of public office. I teach a couple of classes in a middle and high school and on a bad day those kids have a lot more discipline and maturity than anyone in Congress, and a better grasp of what should be done about the country’s debt.

But my frustration with the Republican handling of the debt ceiling issue and the cut-versus-tax dichotomy has spurred me to action. I’ve been making calls, leaving messages with the Speaker of House and my state representatives telling them what I think. I mention things like conceit and self-righteousness. I say I don’t like being held hostage by a Republican Congress that is more interested in face time on Fox News (how can I know – I don’t even watch the program?) than in getting anything substantive done to actually help the country. I put the numbers on speed dial.

I didn’t see this as obsessive.

And then after President Obama’s speech the other night and Speaker Boehner’s response, I grabbed my computer and started sending emails. Even when internet servers were overloaded and I couldn’t get through, I just kept hitting the refresh button until sometime before dawn when I was finally able to tell the Speaker what I thought. Then I started sending other emails to my representatives. When that didn’t seem satisfying, I just went down the list of every Republican Senator and Representative. I tried to keep my letters relatively civil. No bad language. I didn’t want whatever Congressional drone reads these things to dismiss what I had to say. I make good points. I did notice, however, that I like to put certain words all in capitals (COMPROMISE, YOU FOOL) and I didn’t spare the exclamation point. It seems the only way to show the depth of my emotion!!

The “send a message” email form usually asks if you’d like a response. I dare you, I say through gritted teeth, as I punch the “yes” box. Then, bang! I hit the send button. Hit is the operative word here.

No one has written back.

At some point during this tirade I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in my computer screen and it was a little scary. I was wild-eyed, my jaw rigid and face set in a menacing scowl. I had seen that look before. It was my mother during her Watergate years! All I needed was a cigarette hanging from my lips.

So maybe my mother wasn’t so loony after all. Or maybe I’m just as crazy. After all, as my husband likes to remind me, the nut doesn’t fall far from the tree.

But I think I do understand my mother’s frustration in a way that I hadn’t before. I understand the lack of control over what’s happening in our world, our lives, even while we know that control is illusory.

I walked into the kitchen for another cup of coffee, and there – and this is true -- hanging on the wall by the sink is a voodoo doll my husband and I bought many years ago as a souvenir from a trip to New Orleans. It’s been there so long I’ve stopped seeing it. For just a second I considered taking it down and trying my mother’s method of political action. It seemed to work for her. Nixon did resign.

But then I thought better of it. There is a difference between sticking pins in a voodoo doll (even if we all agree that it's only symbolic) and writing a letter of complaint. And besides, my rage need would need more than one doll.

Georgia Isn't a Peachy State

Mon, 16 May 2011 14:05:26 -0400

This isn’t something I want to admit right now, but I live in Georgia. I’m not native-born. After 20-plus years of making the Peach State my home, I guess I can say I’m a Georgian. An elderly neighbor, a woman whose family settled my south Georgia town, still routinely asks me where I’m from and gives me a little “harrumph” when I answer. It used to bother me but now I don’t care. In fact, I’m ready to give up any claim I might have on the state. Native or not, Georgia feels like an alien land, inhospitable, unwelcoming. And, yes, filled with crazy people

Georgia has felt this way before to me, and certainly the states’ history can provide a myriad of examples of craziness and inhospitable behavior. But what makes me now want to pack my bags has all happened this month. First, Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, announced he’s running for president. I’d put him in the crazy people of Georgia category. Then our new governor signed into law an Arizona-style immigration bill. I’ll put this in the inhospitable category.

And while I could get into the specifics of why both Newt and the immigration law are not giving me the warm fuzzies about Georgia, it’s the state’s Supreme Court ruling on Monday that has me reeling. In a 4-3 decision, the court decided that local boards of education have the sole power to fund and open public charter schools, striking down as unconstitutional a 2008 Act that authorized creation of a new kind of state charter school called “commission charter schools.”

On the surface, it doesn’t sound like a big deal. Local school boards should have control over the public schools in their districts. But Georgia’s local governments – all 159 of them – have the reputation of being good old boy networks, wary of outside views (and people), and slow to change. Compared to school boards, however, local governments look like bastions of progressiveness. It is no wonder that Georgia consistently ranks in the lowest third in the nation on standardized educational tests.

Georgia’s county school boards are notorious for rejecting charter and magnet school applications which they see as competing against county schools. For many of these school boards, approving a charter school is tantamount to admitting their school system doesn’t meet all the needs of the county’s children. It's also opening the door to something it may not be able to control. Control is power. That’s why the state legislature created a commission to grant charters to schools rejected by the politics of their local system.

My county was one of the counties involved in the suit. The decision Monday directly affected our charter school. My daughter graduated four years ago from the charter school here, and last fall I began teaching there part-time. It’s a small school run out of a retrofitted farm store. It’s nothing fancy. There are no smart boards. No cafeteria. No gym. It doesn’t appeal to every student but for some, it’s been a life saver.

And here’s the ironic part: the state charter commission – now held unconstitutional by the State Supreme Court -- helped the state win $400 million in federal Race to the Top grant funds promoting innovation in education.

So, Georgia, my neighbor can claim you for herself. She can have Newt and the immigration law and our failing schools. You're just not looking that peachy any more.

Lessons from My Five-Fingered Father

Thu, 3 Mar 2011 11:03:37 -0500

My husband and I were on a 30^thwedding anniversary trip to New Mexico last fall and I wanted a special keepsake from a Native American Indian Pueblo we were visiting. The place was magical and mysterious. I had never experienced anything like it before. I took photographs that are now framed and hang in our bedroom. We bought a piece of art made by one of the residents of the pueblo whose one-room home converted to a small store during the day when tourists visited. But I felt I needed something more, a physical expression of what the special trip meant to me. So when no one was looking I picked up a small black rock, a pebble really, and put it in my purse.

My father was a master at clandestine collecting. His job was to record history through the lens of a camera as a photojournalist in Washington, DC. But his avocation was to collect history. And he did so with the aid of a camera bag, tucking his finds between camera bodies and lenses, flashes and bulbs, and rolls and rolls of 35 mm film. The world was his personal archeological site and he dove into it daily as a photographer for The New York Times covering the White House and Congress.

Among his collection were wooden name plates for Senators from Humphrey to Kennedy, a silver sugar and creamer from the U.S. Senate dining room (stamped on the bottom), pens used by a president to sign a bill, a football from a friendly game of touch he played with the Kennedy’s at Bobby Kennedy’s Hickory Hill home, a plastic peanut from a cake for Jimmy Carter, a gavel from the Speaker of the House, a shell from Key Biscayne, a rock from Camp David, a brick from the Capitol, a piece of black ribbon from President Kennedy’s funeral.

Like the antiques that filled our house – also one of his passions -- my father’s treasurers became a part of him and he told the story of each artifact when visitors or admirers inquired, cradling the object in his hands as if conjuring the object’s spirit or secret tale. He often mimicked the voices, peculiar posture and gestures, or cadence of speech that went with a particular find. His impersonations were acute, coming as they did from the kind of intimate observation only available to someone looking at his subjects through the invisibility of his viewfinder. His stories became as much a part of the object as the object itself and he could hold visitors in the grip of his storytelling for hours.

I can’t say I was as taken as others by my father’s collection. It looked like a bunch of insignificant junk to me. Plus, hadn’t he stolen most of it? Picked it up and pocketed it? The five finger discount?

I saw my father in action once when he brought me along to an event at Hickory Hill. We had seen a couple of Bobby Kennedy’s older boys and their friends riding horses. When one of the boys rode past, he dropped his riding crop. My father saw it immediately. For you, he said, as he grabbed the crop and maneuvered it into his camera bag, the brown tip poking out between the zipper’s teeth. I’m not sure if he could sense I had a crush on one of the boys and knew this would be the closest I’d ever come to him or if my father thought I was like him, a collector of all things Kennedy. Either way, a riding crop last held by one of Bobby Kennedy’s sons hung from the post of my French provincial canopy bed for years.

Whether driven by example or DNA, everyone in my family is a collector. I’m a compulsive penny picker-upper. I’ve even risked my life stopping to pick up a penny on a busy road. What’s worse, I can’t bring myself to spend any of the money I find. It all goes into a box in my closet. I tell myself that every found coin is a piece of good luck. My younger brother buys and sells Civil War era relics and combs the beaches of North Carolina for treasurers with a metal detector always hopeful for that one big find. My father’s younger brother, Steve, collected vacuum cleaners and bicycle parts that he kept in our garage. Thinking about him now, I suspect he was more hoarder than collector. The distinction is often blurry.

In his later years, my father became obsessed with bricks. Anywhere he saw an old building being torn down, he’d stop (when no one was around) and fill the trunk of the car with bricks that he then stacked in the back yard against a cement wall. He could never remember my birthday but he knew where each of those bricks came from.

To be fair, some of the things my father displayed on the shelves of the den were given to him by those he admired most. They knew his penchant for collecting. Some even knew the secret of his camera bag. And he didn’t see anything wrong with what he did. To him, I thought, it was preserving history, that of the object as well as his own.

Still, however, while others admired his collection I always felt a gnawing uneasiness about his methods. I’m a stay-on-the-path kind of gal. I go the speed limit. Stop at yellow lights. I obey the rules. I didn’t even want the riding crop my father pocketed but I was more afraid of disappointing him than of accepting what to him was a gift.

So it is with some trepidation I admit my five finger discount. Insignificant in the larger scheme of things, I know that one small rock nevertheless leads to another and another until if everyone who ever visited say, the Grand Canyon, took a rock, it would soon be renamed the Petite Canyon. Yet that small rock from New Mexico is precious to me and every time I put it in my palm and caress its smooth surface, I’m immediately taken back to a particular place and time. What’s more, as soon as I slipped into my bag I understood how my father felt.

My father’s collection – we called it memorabilia – was divided up among the five children when he died. I keep mine in a box in the attic. It doesn’t hold the same meaning for me as it did for my father yet there is meaning in these things. They were my father’s and even if I don’t agree with how he came by them, each piece becomes a relic of him, something tangible I can hold, for each year that passes it becomes harder to remember what it was like to be near him.

I don’t know if my rock will have any significance for my children who will have the task of dealing with the physical part of my life when I am gone. And so as a means of amends I’ve told them to use my lucky coins to return my special rock to its home.

Or maybe they’ll keep my rock along with the box of found coins to remember their mother, the picker-upper of forgotten change and daughter of the master of the five-finger collector.

(This essay is excerpted from a memoir about my father)

My Not-So-Empty Nest

Wed, 9 Feb 2011 12:02:59 -0500

Technically speaking, my nest has been empty for four years. Both children, a son and daughter are, as I write this, completing their last semesters as undergraduates. My son, the older of the two, has taken a bit longer to complete his college journey. Nevertheless, he’s done it, almost, and that was all his father and I wanted. Yet I realized recently that while the children have gone, they left their pets behind and each year as the kids move closer to adulthood and financial independence their pets are tying my husband and me to home more than they ever did. Our nest isn’t empty. It’s filled with expensive, aging animals.

Barf, poop, pee. That was the subject line of an email I wrote to my husband last week while he was in Washington, DC, for a conference. We both wanted to go but one of us needed to stay home with the animals. Two dogs, two cats, three backyard chickens, and some fish in a small outdoor pond. The chickens are mine and don’t require much care, plus they’re an asset since they lay eggs. The fish are pretty much self supporting.

The dogs each belong to the children: Belle is a 15 year-old pug who can barely walk. Even as a youngster she pretended to be hard of hearing and I’ve never trusted her eyesight. Anyone who owns a pug knows what I mean. Now, however, I have to tap her on the shoulder to get her attention. Sometimes when I wake her she doesn’t seem to know who I am or where she is. She has to be carried outside. My husband says it’s like lifting a cinderblock but harder. There’s no place to really get a good hold and when you put her down you never know whether she’ll stay standing.

When my daughter was in second grade Santa brought Belle to her for Christmas. She calls Belle “her heart,” and I dread the day I have to make the call saying Belle is gone. How I’ll feel about Belle’s passing, however, I’ll keep to myself.

Molli belongs to my son. She’s a 12-year old golden retriever who suffers from severe arthritis and bad skin. She’s always been a bit nervous and fearful of new situations. Now, however, she only goes outside with much cajoling and coaxing. She spends her days in my husband’s study pressed between the bookcase and his heavy chair. If she hears someone unfamiliar in the house she growls but doesn’t move. Take that, robbers!

My son got Molli when he was just entering adolescence and their vulnerability and mischievousness seemed perfectly matched. They were both cute, but at times oh, so bad. My son often spent time with Molli in her crate. I’m not sure who was sent there first.

The cats, brothers whom we rescued from the shelter, belong to my daughter. One year for her birthday she asked only for a really big fat cat. As if fate had brought them together, a really big fat cat had just days before been surrendered to the local shelter along with his not-so-fat brother. My husband said we couldn’t take one without the other and so my daughter got a double birthday present that year. She and my husband renamed them Minnesota Fats and Fast Eddy.

Their age has never been determined. The only thing that’s clear is that they’re getting on in years, cat and human. Fats, the older of the two, has taken to gorging, then moving through the house like a drunkard until he heaves and heaves and heaves, leaving a trail of half digested kibbles and permanent brown spots on the carpet behind. He moves slower each year, his hindquarters swaying and dipping, as much from his girth as from his unfortunate encounter with the back wheels of our car. After the accident, his hips were reconstructed but never functioned quite the same. His brother finds his constant neediness tiresome and often puts up a paw and whacks him as he walks by.

I know that Belle and Molli and Fats and Eddie are family pets, too, and I love them. But from the beginning, it was the children who asked for them and who, to a certain degree, cared for them. Nevertheless, we might be called indulgent parents when it comes to pets. My son, for example, had Stan Lee, the turtle, in a beautiful aquarium in his room. Stan was really playful and very attentive to my son. When my son decided Stan needed a change of scenery, he put him in a small pond, more a water feature, in my garden in the side yard. We never saw Stan again. My son posted signs around the neighborhood: Come Home Stan Lee, I Love You.

Both children went through a hamster phase. I called them the damsters. We invested hundreds of dollars in specially designed “environments.” Although we were assured we had only purchased females, at some point someone had babies, including a hairless one that was nicknamed “Ratty,” that even the pet store wouldn’t buy back. At one point, they all got loose (neither child admitted to letting them out of their “environments”) and several found their way into the walls of our historic home where in the middle of the night you could hear the crunch, crunch, crunch as they ate at our home’s wooden foundation.

We also had rabbits and guinea pigs, and my daughter asked, again for birthday or Christmas, for a miniature horse that could live in the backyard but also come into her room to play. Amazingly, my husband said no. But she did have a pet mouse who had a Perrier water cap as a feeding bowl that he’d tap against the side of his plastic living container when he was hungry.

Neither child was interested in snakes or spiders, which I’m thankful for. But I did give each a baby chick for Easter one year. My son named his Donnie Darko. The chicks were both hens and turned out to be very prolific egg layers.

I’m certain there were other pets but I’ve blocked them from my mind. The four that are with us now have been a part of the family for many years and according to the vet, will be with us for many more. They each take more pills than my husband and I combined.

So we don’t feel comfortable leaving these pets, in various stages of decline, even for a weekend. The son of a friend does a good job looking after them when we do manage a day away but the cleanup afterwards makes it almost not worth it. No matter how good your caretaker, they often miss, or overlook, some of the nastier messes. And the whole time we’re gone my mind reels with worse-case scenarios.

I’ve resolved not to worry any more about the carpet or the wooden floors. There’s not much I can do about it anyway. The carpet will be replaced some day and the wooden floors can be refinished. But I was sad about missing the trip to Washington and we’ve decided to decline the offer of a house swap with a friend who lives in the mountains. Our friend, like us, has the occasional creaky knee and bad back and we just couldn’t see her physically being able to take care of the menagerie.

There are those who would say our children should take responsibility for their pets, and maybe they should. But there’s a part of me, too, that might be holding on to my not-so-empty nest, unwilling to completely let go of that time when children and pets filled the house with a cacophony of noise and activity. Caring for our children’s aging pets may be a way of letting go a little at a time, accepting change, and then moving on.

Maybe.

Or we’re just suckers, home-bound with aging animals. Our friends with adult children are off rekindling relationships or discovering new hobbies or traveling, or maybe even saving for retirement while we sit in our little nest surrounded by our pets’ pill bottles and our cleaning rags, sending each other our own kind of love notes, subject heading: barf, poop, and pee.

My Father’s Cannon, Gun Control, and Death Threats

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 15:01:08 -0500

My father didn’t keep a gun in his bedside table but he did have a cannon in his closet. It wasn’t battlefield-sized. It was a Civil War era antique, a model used by manufacturing companies. At least that’s the story I remember. The model my father had was smaller than a toaster oven and probably weighed 50 pounds. I guess cannon makers displayed their wares to competing armies for business. I don’t think I’m making that up. I do know that my father liked cannons, and guns, and anything else that, combined with black powder, made a loud noise and had the potential to reduce an object into microscopic parts. He kept the cannon and black powder in his closet, except for special occasions like July 4^th,New Year’s, or birthdays, when he’d set up a firing range in our city backyard.

I’m not sure if he kept the cannon in his closet because owning it, even a model, was illegal. Maybe it was the black powder. Still, if you can own an assault weapon like a Glock 19 pistol with high-capacity 33-round magazines, a cannon and a canister of black powder seems like child’s play. Whether it was legal or not, because it was in the closet it had a dangerous aura. Closets are for things you want to hide.

The cannon and its accouterments were the closest I’ve come to living with a firearm, if a cannon is a firearm. It’s designed to do bodily harm but as a means of protection, it lacks portability and the element of surprise. Still, however, if someone was breaking into our house a blast from the cannon would stop them in their tracks.

I don’t have much experience with guns. I did shoot a gun once. It was at my Uncle Frank’s house. He wasn’t a biological uncle. He was my father’s best friend from childhood. The two of them ran with a gang of poor Greek and Italian immigrant teenagers in southwest Washington during the 1930s. Uncle Frank and my father seemed to know their way around guns.

I do have another kind of experience with guns, however. It’s the kind of experience where you’re at the other end of the gun. At least that’s what the message said. Actually, it was more than one message.

On New Year’s Day 1993 I published an opinion piece in my local newspaper. I had a regular spot in the paper where twice a month I wrote about national or local events. The thesis of my New Year’s essay was that guns were hazardous to our health and I recommend that as a nation we needed a resolution to pass stricter gun laws. “We’ve taken the right to bear arms to mean the right to use weapons to solve our problems, prove our worth, and administer our own personal justice,” I said.

I wrote the piece because just weeks before a college student named Wayne Lo killed two people on a college campus with a modified version of an AK-47 rifle. It got me thinking about guns and a friend of mine who a couple of years earlier had been killed while hiking on the Appalachian Trail. She was there with her lover, another woman. The man who murdered her said by way of defense that he was enraged because the two women were lesbians.

As my husband, two small children, and I came into the house from a day out, the phone was ringing and the answering machine full. My editorial had so enraged some people they looked up my phone number and told me what they thought. The general consensus was that I should be shot. Dead. Two messages suggested I arm myself because they were coming after me and my family. My family!

The police department was unsympathetic. Until we were actually shot at, they couldn’t do anything. And besides, what did I expect saying that gun laws should be stricter? We lived in rural south Georgia where guns are as much a part of daily life as gnats.

Indeed.

I should have known better, and like a whipped dog with its tail between its legs, I took my naïveté and hid. We lived on a cul-de-sac. Any unfamiliar car became a potential hit man. We kept the children close and everyone stayed away from the windows.

I’ve been vilified before for my opinions. As a writer, it comes with the territory. But the messages and phone calls that New Year’s Day went beyond anything I had experienced. The gun threats and vituperative remarks were one thing; that we lived in a town of less than 20,000 (county population around 50,000 at the time) meant that I could very well have been chatting the day before – and the day after -- in the grocery store, post office, or doctor’s waiting room with the person(s) spewing hate and wishing me bodily harm.

I didn’t think I could live in a community where I didn’t feel safe voicing my opinions. But economics being what they are, we stayed. I even continued writing for the newspaper for about another year until my children began public school. I thought, and I believe rightly so, that my opinions would affect my children’s lives in the wider community. And that wasn’t something I was willing to do.

I’d like to say that I soon realized that I had never been in any danger, that there are people everywhere who over-react and shout and threaten but are really harmless. It’s human nature. Few people actually step over the line of civil behavior.

That’s not what happened. I’ve never forgotten what it feels like to be so hated for my opinion that someone wanted to hurt me. No. Not just hurt. That implies something else. The people who called me wanted to silence me. They wanted to put me in the cross-hairs of a gun sight.

I’m not saying that I’ve been scarred by this experience. It’s just a memory, an experience. But I am reminded of it sometimes, like when my political yard signs are vandalized or a bumper sticker torn from my car.

Or when something like the shooting in Tucson occurs.

Of course, we don’t know why the killer in Tucson acted, if he was answering a call only he could hear or if he was so enraged by the opinion of others he felt compelled to silence the messenger. Or both.

My father gave my son, who was just six years old at the time, one of his model cannons. It didn’t strike me as a kid-friendly toy and my son didn’t seem terribly interested. I put it in the attic where it remained. But for some reason I took it out the other day. I think I wanted to see if its weight, its potential power, moved me in any way. Without an explosive it’s just a decorative antique and that’s how I tried to see it.

But still it made me uneasy. It was meant – at least in its full-sized version – to kill, as all weapons, ultimately, are designed to do, and it wasn’t something I wanted to be reminded of.

I know, of course, what I’m supposed to think: guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Yes, I think I understand: People kill. With guns and cannons and bombs. And with the best intensions.