Vampires and All

I was talking with my friend, Tyler, the other day about vampires and he suggested there are degrees of vampirism—the less vampirish lamenting the horrible way they are forced to stay alive, the more, of course, having no regrets whatsoever.

Our discussion was particularly relevant to me given the imminent sentencing of Bernie Madoff, whom I see as a vampire of a particularly 21st Century type. Vanity Fair recently published a lengthy article on Madoff and his sons, mainly focusing on how much his family (all of whom worked for his firm) knew about the swindle. It’s a good question because the answer will determine how many others join Madoff in jail. All, of course, plead innocence.

How much one is willing to believe (or disbelieve) strikes me as an interesting question in its own right that many people seem to cast in terms of a failure of values or ethics.

The values group blame the investors who, they say, were blinded by greed and didn’t ask how Madoff was making money. It’s tautological: if they’d been honest, they would have asked how Madoff was succeeding where others weren’t. That they didn’t ask provides one more example of how society is going to hell in a hand basket. Certainly, Madoff was a cheat and a criminal but, they would argue, there are always cheats and criminals in any society. Anyone morally righteous and honest would not have been cheated because they would have asked about fair and right profit and realized something was terribly wrong. No sympathy here: send Madoff to jail and stress individual responsibility and let the learning curve begin among the investors.

The ethics group, on the other hand, prefers to point to some moral flaw or sociopathy in Bernie Madoff’s genetic inheritance. How, otherwise, could he have cheated his friends and those who trusted him? They would argue his fraud must result from some character flaw (or worse) with the bilked investors merely innocent victims. The only protection from the sociopath, they would argue, is regulation so let government intervention begin and let the losses be mitigated.

On a cynical note, let me say that I am attracted by neither position. I find both somewhat hypocritical and more or less fluid depending on how much the government is willing to mitigate: the most dyed-in-the-wool values evangelist tends to stretch out a hand as far as the ethicist. To me the larger question is one of character.

There may be some who feel that my distinction between ethics and values is too precise and that talking about a general failure of character is merely a diversion. While I can respect that position, I have to believe there is a larger question here, one that underlies and perhaps emphasizes a good deal of what passes for public debate these days. Let me explain.

The other day, George Sweanor, whose blog is linked to this one, forwarded a wonderful letter from a comrade not in arms but in conflict. This man had been part of an enemy air force charged with bombing England at the same time that George had been charged with bombing Germany. They met after George returned from being a POW at the Great Escape Stalag. Between the two men, both separated and joined by a common war, there grew a lifelong friendship based on compassion, empathy, and a wisdom that grew beyond judgment and pettiness. That’s what I call character and I think we’re missing it today. How easy it would have been for them to carry forward all the jingoism and propaganda of the wars. Yet they did not. They recognized a common humanity that illuminated them and, in a way, set aside the horrors of the conflict in the hope of communication and understanding.

As I say, this finding of common ground is character, and it is missing in those who indulge in name calling and vitriol, particularly from the group I have come to call the valueists. These are people who use their so-called values as ways to distinguish between themselves and others and deride those who do not agree with them. I have found values, whether they be religious, cultural, or political, not generally compassionate despite original founding principles that might suggest otherwise. If I have to be honest, I am frightened by those who use their values as clubs to beat others who do not share them.

I guess, when it comes to vampires, I am uninterested in whether they have approved values or whether they justify their behavior by appeals to their own survival. I prefer vampires, if I must have them, to be willing to drive the stake through their own hearts.

Taking Back Death

A few days ago, I had to say goodbye to my little cat. She had been with me for 171/2years and her life spanned all the meaningful events of my recent life. She came up from Hawaii with us when we moved to Colorado. She was there when my grandson was born and there when I lost my husband of 37 years. She moved into a new house with me and was the one constant as I tried to rebuild my life.

I knew it was time to let her go when she started having seizures and I realized they could only continue and get worse. Despite knowing this, though, I grieved her loss intensely and found myself wondering what it was so hard for me to let her slip away.

After much reflection, I realize it wasn’t really to do with her. She’d had a wonderful, long life, much loved and cared for, and I knew that keeping her alive would have been merely selfish. My grieving was a tsunami of emotion, built in volume by every other loss in my life. Her death made me remember every one that had preceded it, some of which I understand now that I have never discussed, let alone dealt with.

For example, I found myself dealing not only with actual death but also figurative regret. With little Squeak, I mourned again the loss of my mother, husband, three dogs, and four cats but also more intangible things such as the father I never knew (killed in WWII), the mentally ill grandmother who was unreachable during my childhood, the brother who died the year before I was born, the end of my professional career, the onset of new physical challenges, and the realization that I can no longer promise myself that I still have time to achieve the things I wanted to as a young woman.

You might say that a lot of issues were triggered by the loss a little black-and-white girl of barely ten pounds. These were things I had congratulated myself as having laid to rest or else never had dealt with.

The opportunity to reflect and grow is probably the gift that death gives us It’s a time when those remaining alive can touch the membrane between life and death and perhaps see just a little further. It’s also a time, I believe, to look at one’s own beliefs about death itself.

I’ve never found much comfort in religious leaders who preach about resurrection and expect me to be joyful. In my experience, there is no substitute for dealing with grief. If it’s not now, then it will be later. I also don’t accept the idea that our animals are kept out of whatever heaven is being promised. Life is life. If I want to believe in the Rainbow Bridge where the animals wait for us, and if I agree with the Indian belief that it is the animals who will decide who crosses, then I will do so. I don’t know when it was that we handed death over to religion: it’s the only power they really have over us. They threaten and promise but in the end, everyone dies alone. I think it’s time to make death personal again and take it back from the constraints of religious dogma.

Meanwhile, I am going to believe that I heard my blue heeler, Kepa, settle for the last time in my office after we had to put her down. I heard the familiar chink of her tags on the wood floor and I smiled—she was home. I’m going to believe that my late husband was on the other side to greet our pets. I’m going to believe that I will see my husband and mother waiting for me as well, along with all the other animals I have loved and that my little Squeak will be sunning herself as she waits for me.

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Looking for Someone to Hate

This is not a generous time in America’s history. There are always difficult times, but this time it appears that a large number of people are looking for someone or something to hate.

It’s not easy finding something credible to hate because there seem to be fashions. Thirty years ago, people hated the Women’s Lib movement because it upset too many apple carts. Talking about uppity women these days, for example, sounds really old-fashioned. The hate on that topic died when the Equal Rights Amendment didn’t pass—life as we knew it was preserved and equal rights went on to be supported in other ways.

Hatred, I’m told, is born out of insecurity. There’s nothing more likely to trigger that insecurity than not having a support group of like-minded individuals. Apparently, the group that hates together stays together. But I do think there’s also an element of desperately clinging to things as they (never) were and demanding that life conform. In this, there’s an element of arrogance and also King Canute-ism: he’s the king who commanded the tide not to turn with predictable results.

According to the latest reports, there are over 900 hate groups in the US. Traditional hatred is well represented among them. There are anti-semitic, anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-abortion, anti-government, and anti-ethnic groups just for starters. You can even start your own rant: one man was so angry over a zoning decision up in Granby, Colorado, that he built a home-made tank and tried to take out the town. Of course, he was the exception to being part of a group since he didn’t much like people period. But he shows the common denominator of these groups: hating requires release through violence and builds on a shared sense of injustice and threat.

Case in point: what motivated the 88 year-old bigot to start shooting in the Holocaust Museum? As one might predict it started with the mundane and banal: he thought he was shortchanged in his Social Security check as retaliation for the venom he had been spewing on his increasingly deranged website. I can imagine him working himself into a frenzy of hatred by imagining that others, people definitely not-him like minorities or in this case, Jews, were getting the things “due” to him. Let a few visitors to his website agree with him and the only outlet for the pent-up emotion becomes taking a rifle and opening fire. I’m not discounting the possibility of senile hyperactivity but it seems his whole life had been one long grievance.

And grievance is really what all this hate is about. We have a whole lot of people with grievances against a changing world that is not behaving as it should and they fear they are losing their place along with all the certainties they had believed in. The more threatening the changes the more hatred .

Well, I have news for the hatred groups of this country: You never were in charge of your world. You only thought you were because it was familiar. You were just as powerless as the rest of us in the face of technological change, political expedience, and cultural diversity. It’s just taken you a lot longer than the rest of us to become aware of it. To a certain extent, we have all been cheated. We believed our values were the only right ones and, in some instances, we gave our lives and our futures for them. But our values were only loaned to us and only because they were useful to the world at the time we were encouraged to believe them.

Let’s move on, guys, and get out of the way of the people who have to deal with today’s world. It’s theirs now and they’ll have their own illusions and disappointments.

Mrs. Hyde

I just reread my blog on Sonia Sotomajor and realized that I sound very prickly. Some of it, of course, may be the slow recovery from my knee surgery which is making me very impatient. But, to be honest—and I really do try to be that in this blog—I can almost draw a straight line in my life from initial naivete to a certain cynicism that now invades my thinking, particularly when it comes to those on the Right, or should I say those who now claim to be “conservative” rather than Republican. Was there ever before such a divorce of convenience?

The line starts with my childhood experience with an independent and unpredictable mother, which started me off well with my own independence. I think the word used most to describe me was “hard-headed.” I still get called that once in a while by those who dare, except now I take it as a compliment where before I knew it wasn’t really a good or lady-like thing to be. I know that because it seemed as it the world was a solid phalanx of people determined to mold me into something I wasn’t. Oh well—I was a tomboy and didn’t fit in well with curls and dimples.

Then came my early marriage to an older man that was opposed by virtually everyone including his family. Because I was only a teenager, it was thought appropriate to discuss my perceived shortcomings openly and in front of me. Since the marriage lasted 37 happy years, I had plenty of time to cause what we can delicately call a certain amount of reconsideration of me. The experience started my career of defiance and to tell me that I couldn’t do something became my marching orders not only to do it, but do it better than anyone else.

My college experience added competitiveness to the defiance and independence. I can remember being told not to take a course from a certain professor as he didn’t like women. I took his course and survived. Then I was discouraged from graduate school because I had a husband and child—the scholarships went to the men in the department who showed more promise. I couldn’t let that one go by. Without much help except from my mother and husband, I made it through the doctorate.

Now—I am not always defiant, independent, and competitive. I am told by others who should know that I am also generous, compassionate, responsible, and kind. Because of my background, I hate injustice and will go out of my way to help if I can. My Mrs. Hyde, if I can call it that, comes out only under certain circumstances. And generally, these are when I have the misfortune of having to deal with certain types of “conservatives.”

My Pavlovian response to the Right, comes, I believe, from the echoes of voices that I have had to still or overcome in my life. Politics on the Right always seems to be angry and—worse in my mind—judgmental, unkind, and rigid. Conservatives only seem to be happy when they are judging someone for transgressing the code of behavior they have selected for us all or watching as someone else gets punished. It’s like the older sibling, having pointed a finger, standing by with a smirk as a younger brother gets disciplined.

But now, I have a new perspective on all this.

I used to wonder how the more obnoxious Right-people could make such unpleasant, personal attacks on those who disagree with them and how they could come to conclusions so obviously at a tangent to facts. But then I realized that facts and rationality weren’t the point of the fun. It’s all about emotions. The politics of NO, the Rush Limbaughs of the world, and the flag waving is all about releasing pent-up and frustrated emotion.

I watch these Right-ers shifting ground, working themselves up into a frenzy of indignation, and sputtering out the name-calling, and see they are having a wonderful time being indignant, put-upon, and righteous. My gosh-it seems like fun to be completely right in their own minds.

By temperament and training, I have been conditioned to step back and analyze. I’m beginning to think, however, that I may have been missing something. I write to express my concerns and worries about what the world is becoming. Perhaps I would do better to throw a bloody good tantrum.

Go, Girl

Golly. Gee. Sonia Sotomajor said that a Hispanic woman might have better insight into issues regarding women and family than “objective” white men. To hear the outrage (in the US largely coming from old, privileged, white males on the right who hate parting with the least shred of control) is to assume that all the decisions made by “objective” men regarding women and children must always be the height of wisdom and fabled objectivity.

Let’s take a look at that.

My grandfather wouldn’t educate my mother because it would be a gift to another man. Golly. Gee. My mother was property that he didn’t want to improve and give free to someone other man. Never mind her talents or even her eventual children (me), it was all about goods and property. Same time period: children belonged to the man and he could remove them from the mother with no explanation or recourse on her part. Wife beating was merely someone exerting his husbandly rights. Golly. Gee. If you look on women and children as belongings I guess such decisions seem very “objective.”

Then there’s the lovely practice of genital mutilation—very “objective” indeed if you don’t want another man trespassing on your private preserve. Take away her pleasure and she may not stray. Or covering a women head to toe so she doesn’t attract attention—makes lots of sense if your woman belongs to you and you don’t want to risk someone stealing your exclusive reproductive rights. Whipping and stoning is a very nice touch—let’s keep those women in line and their legs tightly closed. After all, it's in the Bible, isn’t it?

And what about the genial practice of binding feet among the aristocratic classes in China. If a woman couldn’t walk she proved the man’s wealth since he didn’t need her economic contribution. Golly. Gee. Cripple the woman as a demonstration of wealth. How “objective.”

The thing I most dislike about the paternal tradition is not only its paternalistic assumption of knowing what is best for a women but also its dual emphasis on competition and display. Historically, men compete with other men by hiding their women, amassing large numbers of them and thereby denying them to others, raping to show power and superiority, refusing them education and then sneering at their lack of it.

This admittedly one-sided analysis is only exaggerated to a certain extent. And I certainly do not excuse those women who profit from becoming decorative and expensive trophies. I guess there will always be experts at making lemonade from other people's lemons. But claiming that men have the innate ability to be “objective” without input from those who actually bear children does not strike me as a sensible, let alone wise, attitude for either of the sexes yo accept, let alone promulgate.

In this country, the times have long changed from when women were chattel (won in poker games, anyone?)although even their getting the vote was a study in prejudice against female intelligence and stability. In other parts of the world children of eight can still be married to much older men and then not divorced unless a male relative makes the complain in court. It must be wonderfully ego-building to feel superior to a whole class of people without having to do anything to earn it except being born.

I say hail to a woman not afraid to take on the smug, paternalistic demagoguery of the males on the right. This is one qualified lady who knows her legal stuff and knows reality. It may be clichéd, but I repeat what I was told as I systematically outperformed all the men in my graduate programs—“You go, Girl.”