Chicken fried information...

Back when I was a young lady, growing up in the South, I knew there were people who used words like nigger and kike, and who thought that beating a nice gay man between pinball machines constituted civic activity. And I was also aware of churches where people handled rattle-snakes, drank poison, believed in demons, and flopped around shouting in tongues. Even vacuum-sealed and plastic-wrapped in my middle-class Episcopal world, I bumped up against tabloids full of exciting stories about commie infiltration and the dangers of fluoride-treated water. And I was not exceptional in my awarenesses. Check out any Southern writer of the mid-20th century.

Fortunately, I was brought up by people who were big on manners, a good education, and FDR-style liberalism. Early on, I was taught that when someone in your vicinity either cut a fart, or expressed their views on the social advantages of lynching, you politely ignored them. You did not despise them or consider them moral warthogs. They were unfortunate souls who, as my mother gently explained, didn't grow up in as lovely a home as you. My more robust father, informed me that such folks were the products of pig-ignorance due to lack of vitamins, incest, bad schools, and deluded religions. However, both parents agreed on this: whenever you encountered these sad-sacks, you didn't entertain their addled notions or attempt a reasoned debate.

Ah, but then the sixties happened, didn't they? During this period, thanks to heavy use of the chronic and some very good music, a gentle spirit of tolerance settled over the land like parachute silk. During this heady era, a variety of exotic ideas were written about and discussed, some worthwhile, like civil rights and nuclear disarmament, and some not so much, like psychics, Peter Max, levitation, and unicorns. But under our peace and love banner, plus it being the Age of Aquarius, we smiled our spacey tolerant smiles no matter what we encountered. This is how Charles Manson made his bold unlikely inroads into the mainstream consciousness. In an earlier age, he would have been shunned as the criminal imbecile he was, but back in the day we tolerated all comers.

This over-eager acceptance of the clearly deranged seems to have stuck with us. Why else would we listen to the creationists, the Rapture believers, the Hitler fans, the Joe McCarthy devotees, not to mention unconscionable fools who are given mainstream air-time?

As I puzzled over the ignorant armies loose in our land, I decided the Middle Ages had again descended like a thick sullen blanket, blotting out all sense and logic. We certainly had all the symptoms of a hefty Dark Age: a belief in irrationality, the faulty assignment of causality, a terror of learning, the denigration of the individual and the rise of a faceless mob, the worship of brutality, and a general unschooled intolerance.

Given this, I continue in my ink-stained scrivener ways, while I wait out the folly. No sense in arguing with a jack-ass, as my daddy used to say. Even less sense arguing with a huge sprawling herd of them, so say I. Sooner or later, the witches will flee, as Thos. Jefferson remarked during a similar time. But in the meantime, it's hard out there for an 18th c. Enlightenment girl.

Probably time to scope out some monasteries. Maybe illuminate a few manuscripts, or chisel some gargoyles.

And that sound of iron-clad hooves, ringing on pavement?

It's the sound of hard times coming, coming fast.

Glug, glug...

Iowa is flooded. More particularly DesMoines, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, and Coralville are flooded. Once upon a time, I went to graduate school and lived in those last two towns for six years. I still have friends in Cedar Rapids and I exhibited at the DesMoines Art Center a couple of times, maybe more than a couple. One of my oldest friends still lives in Coralville; at least I count him as an old friend since he's so alive in my memory. Because we're so rarely in touch, he probably only thinks of me around Christmas, if he thinks of me at all, and that's fine. Keeping up with news of this disastrous rain, the creeks and rivers overflowing and the levees breaking, I've been trying to call him and can't get an answer. I imagine he's evacuated. At least, that's what I tell myself. The same is true of my friend in Cedar Rapids, except that I've been emailing her rather than phoning since that's my latest contact information. But to no avail.

Cedar Rapids has been reduced to a giant metal-hued puddle. Everything appears to be underwater. My friend in Cedar Rapids has become a known artist in the intervening years. Remembering that her studio was always in her house, I'm hoping against hope that her work is safely stored someplace. Actually, I probably don't need to worry about either of them. They're both remarkably self-sufficient people. They were even back when I lived in Iowa, so long ago. It's what I liked and admired about them, while envying their self-containment greatly.

Back then I was a mess: a dependent messy mascara-streaked drama queen, with only the flimsiest awareness of what I was. With my past and my genes, this emotional slobbiness was unavoidable, but, understandable or not, I didn't like myself. I wanted to change but didn't know how. And so, as I always had, I combed through books, hoping the answers to my problems would magically appear, embedded in some essay, story, or novel.

Sometimes they did.

While reading a collection of famous letters, I happened across Lord Chesterfield's. He advised his son to always be friends with his superiors. I don't know if Lord Chesterfield Jr. ever took his dad's suggestion, but it seemed like an eminently sensible notion to me. So I assiduously cultivated people who were what I wanted to be, observed them, copied them in some respects, and learned from them. My two old Iowa friends were people I watched closely, hoping that, at some distant time, I would be as responsible, unpretentious, and staunchly individual. I think now I've become a bit more like them. Every so often, I send up a tiny prayer of thanks that we once crossed paths.

I had friends living in New Orleans during Katrina, and every day TV news kept that nightmare luridly alive. These floods are similar in the scope of their disaster, and yet I've had to crawl all over the web to find out basic information. I wonder why. Is Iowa considered too dull a place for our concern? Do only the coasts count in our national attention?

The Iowans themselves don't seem to care if the news trucks show up or not. Black, white, young, old, student, and farmer, standing side by side, the photographs show them stolidly filling sandbags and slamming them against the levees. Today, in an NPR interview, one old man remarked, "Well, I've lost everything, but y'know other people have gone through things like this. We'll make it too. And everything will be fine."

Be well, David and Jane. Be safe. Be fine.

I'll be talking to you soon.

Old men and storage units...

For these past mildewed eight years, thanks to the White House's Current Occupant, I've had to take my consolation where I can: mostly from old men like Ted Kennedy, Senator Byrd, Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer and Max Cleland. These are men who can remember an America gone by: imperfect and maddening, but also a place where decency could live in tandem with politics. They're old guys, but they still roar like ancient lions at the deception and corruption gnawing out the heart of our nation. Sometimes too, I took comfort from an old dead guy like Thomas Jefferson, who wrote: When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.

So last night I watched a young black man speak after he had cinched the necessary party delegates for the nomination. And I remembered seeing the Ku Klux Klan parade down main street in Burke, Virginia, I remembered walking up the steps of my school surrounded by men with guns and dogs after integration, and I remembered being hurried out of school a few weeks later because of a bomb threat. I remembered drinking fountains in Tulsa, Oklahoma labled Colored and watching black people sit in the back of the buses. I remembered a few friends who went to Mississippi to work on voting rights for blacks, and who never came back. These images are a part of the factual world that made up my childhood and youth. And now, in my adulthood, I have another fact as bright as Christmas morning. A young black man stood up before all the world and accepted the nomination of his party to run for president of the United States. That's something. That's a stone miracle.

And today too, I read an article on Alternet about storage units. I gathered, with little surprise, that Americans have too much crap and they won't let loose of it. They'd rather shell out $100 a month to store their crap and, often, wind up leaving it in another state, untended and forgotten. Growing up in the South, now living in the Southwest, I can guarantee there are whole states that hold onto crap, crap like dragging a black man behind a car until he's dismembered. Crap like ignoring bad housing and worse schools because only black people live there and learn there. Crap like memorializing the War Between the States like it was something more than a shameful, bloody war. Crap like that.

Be nice to have a National Storage Unit for national crap: a place where we can store our old, old garbage and ultimately forget it. It sure is time for that. It surely is.