What will happen to all that beauty then?

The picture is taken from a screen capture of a video clip of James Baldwin at YouTube.

There are lots of pejorative terms used by Americans to divide us. A good number of them refer to the people of the Appalachian Mountains. I'm a child of this region. There's quite a bit of nuance and history to some of these terms like: hick, cracker, and redneck. And much of that history involves the Scots-Irish settlement of the southern parts of Appalachia. The various strains of Protestant Christianity born abroad and raised in America are so numerous that the distinctions get blurred in mind. The short version is my heritage is not Scots-Irish, but tangled in a web of common history; enough so that I am called the names.

My sense is that Americans in general are considered stupid by people all over the world. So that Americans have so many ways of calling one another stupid, and that so many stick to me, must mean I'm really, really unsophisticated!

It's a very good thing for people to connect across cultures using the Internet. I have several online friendships with people in Uganda. Mostly we chat using instant messaging. The other day my friend M pointed to an op-ed by Ali Muzuri in Kampala's Daily Monitor, Black Atlantic and a post racial society. M and I talk a lot about politics, and I use M for his name because many of his views aren't particularly popular, or even safe to hold, in Uganda. M is an atheist and humanist. M is also a Baganda and tribalism is something we've talked about over the years. So in our conversation about Mazuri's essay M stated that he felt it important that Africans drive tribalism out of their hearts. My response was that I think that unlikely and am not sure it would be desirable even if possible.

That's the gist of it. How strange a country bumpkin, hick, redneck American like me to be opining on such a topic. But then again, I don't find it strange when M comments about American politics and letters. It's precisely such dangerous and difficult topics that make our dialog important.

After M and I talked I went on to read an essay by Colm Toibin in The New York Review of Books, James Baldwin & Barack Obama. I'm in my fifties so James Baldwin is a famous person to me. I'm not so sure that's true for many younger Americans. I asked M if he knew of Baldwin. He did know the name, and knew that Baldwin was gay, but hadn't read anything by Baldwin. As a Ugandan, it's rather difficult to imagine how M might grasp Baldwin's importance. That said both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. have legacies of great interest to some of my African friends including M. I'll send some links of some of Baldwin's writing to read. I wonder if it's too much water under the bridge by now that Baldwin's words might resonate in M?

Colm Toibin, an Irish intellectual and writer recongnized something essentially American in the similarities between Obama and Baldwin. Toibin ends his essay:

Both men set about establishing their authority by exploring themselves and how they came to make it up as they went along, as much as by exploring the world around them. In Obama's own mixed background and complex heritage he saw America; out of his own success, he saw hope and a new set of values. Out of his own childhood Baldwin produced a number of enduring literary masterpieces and out of his efforts to make sense of his own complex, playful personality and his own unique place in history he produced some of the best essays written in the twentieth century. Reading these essays and Obama's speeches, especially the ones that are high on inspiration and short on policy, one is struck by the connection between them, two men remaking the world against all the odds in their own likeness, not afraid to ask, when faced with the future of America as represented by its children, using Baldwin's wonderful phrase, questions that are alien to most politicians: "What will happen to all that beauty?"

Baldwin's question hung in my mind, especially thinking back to my conversation with M. Sometimes when M and I have talked about clans and the Buganda Kingdom I sense pleasure in his words about them. A happiness that an American would want to hear and learn, also, I think, pleasure in the apprehension of some beauty there. And so I was thinking about M's comment that tribalism needed to be "driven out of our hearts."

Searching online I found a page at HannahArendt.net, The Meaning of Love in Politics: A Letter by Hannah Arendt to James Baldwin. Arendt's letter to Baldwin was prompted by The New Yorker publishing a piece by Baldwin called Letter from a Region of My Mind in November of 1962. In 1963 that essay as well as an essay My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One-Hundredth Anniversary of The Emancipation were published together with an introductory chapter in the book The Fire Next Time.

Arendt took issue with Baldwin's faith that love between people could help America prevent a conflagration rooted in racial injustice and vengeance. Arendt wrote:

What frightened me in your essay was the gospel of love which you begin to preach at the end. In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in the private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free.

Arendt's letter to Baldwin was posted at HannahArendt.net in regards a sentence in a speech given by former President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Johannes Rau which Rau attributed to Arendt: "Politics is is the application of love for the world" which had been mentioned in a previous document posted at the site. The letter to Baldwin was to show that the sentence really didn't seem to fit with Arendt's views. M is in his late twenties. Just as I can't expect him to understand the sorts of names other Americans call me, I don't really understand his outsider status in Kampala as a poor kid from the country. But the sting of presumption and name calling I can at least relate to. There's a gap between M and me that for many reasons we both find building a bridge across worthwhile. In the USA there's a gap between generations, I suppose that's true everywhere. For the life of me I don't understand why so many of my generation think the young people today are apathetic. Perhaps one reason my generation thinks so is too many hardly read anything online at all (note the weasel words). As I was writing I got a telephone call from the Obama for President office. I've been there and talked in person to the young woman on the other end of the phone. There's a generation gap, but I could hardly ascribe to her or the other young people in the campaign office apathy. If anything, it's I who's apathetic.

The quotation President Rau attributed to Arendt seemed memorable, so I searched for it. And the search came up blank. The best match came from a blog post by Matt Birkhold, Politics, Love, and a Radical Revolution in Values at the YP4 Blog (that's Young People for). My friend M holds close an idea of cosmopolitanism. In his views I see something akin to Arendt's desire to exclude love and hate from the political sphere. In part this exclusion seems necessary to allow individual freedom in the private sphere. I'm not sure, I'll have to talk with M some more before expounding on what he thinks. But the whole conversation and serendipitous reading does make me look more carefully to see what I think. It's clear to me now that I do earnestly believe that love must be brought to bear upon political problems. Arendt's objection: "In politics, love is a stranger" cautions me to look deeper at my presuppositions.

Colm Toibin sees many similarities between Baldwin and Obama. But he also draws a distinction:

Whereas Baldwin sought to make distinctions, Obama always wants to make connections; his urge is to close circles even when they don't need to be closed or the closure is too neat to be fully trusted. Whereas Baldwin longed to disturb the peace, create untidy truths, Obama was slowly becoming a politician.

It seems that Obama's making connection is "a feature not a bug." Many, of course, do see his tendency as a flaw; if not outright hypocrisy, at least opening himself to the accusation of it. Online there's a effort to enlist Bold Progressives to hold an Obama presidency and a Democratic-led Congress to a progressive platform. I'm rather wimpy, and hesitant about signing pledges of any kind. But I see the point. Obama's capacity to make connections is essential, but such connections need the tempering of the those who like Toibin says of Baldwin who are ready to "disturb the peace" and "create untidy truths." Love, if it is to play any part in politics must be true.

Update: changed a confusing sentence.

Mama's Boy

I better finish up these five things so I can get back to an African focus here at Bazungu Bucks.

So far I've given a chronological narrative about my life and foibles. Naturally throughout my life my mother is a presence; so that's hardly a surprise.

Mama's Boy:

Synonyms: baby, big baby, crybaby, gutless wonder, lightweight, Milquetoast, mollycoddle, mother's darling, namby-pamby, pansy, sissy, softy, teacher's pet

"boy." Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.3.1). Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. 07 Jan. 2007. Thesaurus.com

Wow! what am I admitting to? Gender ideas get pretty complicated. I've heard it said that where in one society an occupation is exclusive to one gender it often the exclusive province of the opposite gender in another. Nowadays in America it seems as though there's a rash of hyper-masculinity that's based on masculine as being not-feminine. That's rational enough, I suppose, but so much of the posturing sounds downright anti--women and misogynistic to me. That I don't get because a world without the feminine is unbearable to contemplate.

I love my mother. Even though now she's no longer living and breathing her presence is still palpable in my life.

I mentioned before that I'm a Southerner and mentioned how my claims to that identity have been contested. We moved to Greenville, South Carolina just about a month before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law. About a year after that my younger brother was old enough to begin school and my mother became a teacher.

Her degree was in Bacteriology so she had to go back to school to earn credits for her teaching credentials. I suppose that her being a student when I was in school contributed towards my interest in pedagogy. But it was also quite important when and where she became a teacher because of the great social change happening. Actually, my father is the only one of his siblings, who wasn't a teacher of some sort--he even taught for a while. And both my mother's brothers and their wives were teachers. So a positive view of the profession, if not individual teachers, is something I inherited rather naturally.

Before I flunked out of college I had wanted to major in Child Development. As I mentioned I was so eager in college to figure things out and the way that people learn was a burning topic for me. Alas I was too much distracted and did poorly. When I returned to college, partly in recognition of my interest in the ways that human beings grow and learn, and partly out of a lack of confidence about my capacity to succeed I choose to major in Elementary Education.

I very much enjoyed studying to be a teacher. Despite its reputation college preparation in education is demanding. It would seem that being a guy in classes of mostly women would have been great for me. Maybe because I was old, but I think it was more, I was not popular at all among students in my classes. And really given that my academic career in the main was rather unhappy, I should have known teaching wasn't a good fit for me. In fact, just before student teaching that understanding seemed so clear to me. But having successfully graduated an holding credentials, inertia kept me on track to get a job as a teacher.

Damn, and I got fired right after the second grading period. Contrary to popular belief, it's not uncommon for new teachers to be let go rather quickly when they're not working out, and I wasn't. This was a huge blow to me. I'd picked up stakes and moved from Pittsburgh to Florida. I was making a living waiting and busing tables and probably would have made a go following that trajectory, except my mother got sick with colon cancer.

When I came to visit her she'd been operated on and the tumor removed, but as a complication to the surgery she got intestinal adhesions forcing a second operation. When I saw her she was gray and very weak, I did not think she would live long.

My mother was a bit eccentric and one of her eccentricities was that she collected a lot of stuff. I didn't have a clue what it would be like for my father if my mother died and decided to move home. The good news is my mother lived for more than ten years after that bout with disease. Oh and the dynamic of living at home has had it's complications. For whatever self criticism I might make about myself over the years, I do think it's quite objectively true that I enabled my parents to do what they wanted.

My mother died in 2002 just shy of her 84th birthday. In the years since I've seen how the place has been neglected. But one of the things very important to me while she was alive is that I created many gardens here. I've dug and move tons of stone and debris, and planted thousands of seeds. The funny thing about a garden is they are very much connected to the gardener. A garden really isn't something for posterity, although some of the plants I've introduced are weedy enough, they'll probably out live me.

Today I was at Wal-Mart. I noticed a very dark-skinned man with two kids in his buggy who had lighter features and straighter hair. I wondered whether the guy was African. On my way out to my car I saw him loading up the kids in his mini van, a white woman sitting in the driver's seat. What I noticed was Dad encouraging his young son to step into the van. The essence of being human and adult is protecting what we love. It's easy to read too much into these sorts of vignettes, but what I imagined was a mom happy to have a few moments of solitude. I imagined a dad happy to spend some moments his kids and to offer his wife a few minutes without them.

It's no news that men and women are different, but our similarities are so much more than our differences. When people help each other be human, well, that seems a pretty good way of being. What's more masculine than being a father who spends time with his children? What's more masculine than loving a woman?

My mother was remarkable in so many ways; my sister's too. When I see and hear so much masculine hype premised on misogyny I'm so dumbfounded. Don't guys want to spend time in the company of women? It doesn't take a genius to know such talk won't get a guy anywhere fast. I suppose I've just been lucky in life to have a good mother and wonderful strong women as role models and mentors. But it gives me a blind side too because I don't always recognize the bias and prejudice against women that are all to common. Call me a mama's boy, I suppose I am one.

Welcome New Year

Something I've discovered is blogging is not addictive. I wonder why it is that I post at all? The simple reason is that I like to. The activity presents so many opportunities for learning in ways that I never anticipated before. It's a little like the advice that "failures are opportunities for learning," however, blogging isn't an unmitigated joy.

I'm impressed with the bloggers who manage New Year's posts full of reflection about the year past and optimism for this new year. In that reflective mode, I've been a little bit frozen; too many things I didn't do well in 2006. And I'm afraid my plans for 2007 amount to just keep plugging away at it.

I do want to wrap-up my five strange things postings. I've posted the first three and anyone who knows me knew about those stories. Number 4, "I love Trudy" has sort of weighed on me. What people know of me is that I'm "confirmed bachelor." Really that's not been according to plans, but rather simply my general incompetence.

My telling of Numbers 1-3 was a chronological narrative about my growing up. After flunking out of college one of my occupations was trying to fix-up a house in a derelict part of town. That experience seems a phantasmagoria in my imagination. Surely telling something of it would make a good story, but alas I don't know where to begin. Suffice it to say that experience was a long series of failures; but what I learned?

Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, had about a quarter million people working in the steel industry in 1980, by 1985 there were around five thousand. Without a college degree and with the scramble in the region for people to find work, what I found was there were job opportunities in lugging and toting stuff. The job I managed to keep for a while was making deliveries for a wholesale grocer.

So here's the backdrop to meeting Trudy: My youthful idealism had been just about crushed with the colossal failure of my real estate venture and settling into life doing a hard job I didn't much like. My love affair with Trudy was really quite brief, but so very significant. I discovered what it felt like really being in love. Perhaps most of you reading this know what an intimate relationship is all about. What seems the most amazing thing about such a relationship is discovering something new everyday about another, and looking forward so much to those discoveries.

Trudy and I discovered after a while, only a few months, we weren't to be a couple. This was a very disappointing discovery sprung on me. But probably because there wasn't a long history between us, we managed to cross the threshold from lovers to friends. Ah well, and because Trudy is a generous and lovely person.

I feel protective about the loving partnerships of my dear friends. My brief affair with Trudy gave me a window into the realm of romantic love more intensely than I'd ever experienced it. I'm too loose in telling people: "I love you." I really do love so many people. Despite not ever finding a partner, I've got romantic sensibilities. By becoming fast friends afterwards taught me there are many kinds of love, all valuable and worth cherishing. Trudy's love for me also gave me a very precious gift. At the time I met her I was feeling quite the failure and not very optimistic. She showed me that among the bramble of life, sometimes roses bloom.

A couple of years ago I got called for jury duty. In Voir Dire, the series of questions asked of potential jurors before selection, the question was asked: "Have any of you been victims of a crime?" I was quite surprised to be the only one in the pool who stepped forward saying yes. Geez, it was hard for me to keep track of all the times, so I figured most everyone had been. I'm not sure what to make of it, whether none of the others actually had never been victimized by crime. In a very general way however the fact is that poor people suffer crime the most as my failed real estate venture had shown me.

There are many dangers and much misfortune in life. My love affair with Trudy proved was that also along the path of life there is also opportunity and good fortune. It helps to know that around the next corner, maybe the next day or even the next moment, life will bring a gift so wonderful. She also got my butt back into college, and for that alone I'd be forever grateful.

It's around supper time. Rather than go onto item Number 5, "I'm a Mama's Boy" I'll stop.

My wish for you is that in this new year you steer clear of danger, but fearlessly explore the uncharted territories of your lives with an attitude open to the beauty of life's offerings.