Seeing Jane Fonda

Actress, philanthropist, and activist Jane Fonda was arrested on the steps of the Capitol yesterday, demanding that our political leaders take action on the climate crisis through what she is calling "Fire Drill Fridays", which she has organized with Code Pink.

Ms. Fonda has been an activist—anti-war (Vietnam, Iraq), civil rights (women, African-Americans, Native Americans), pro-environment, and more—for about fifty years now.

Jane Fonda at an anti-war conference in the Netherlands, 1975
Photo by Mieremet, Rob / Anefo - [1] Dutch National Archives, The Hague, Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANeFo), 1945-1989, Nummer toegang 2.24.01.05 Bestanddeelnummer 927-6990, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32335035.

Ms. Fonda's actions have often been controversial, and I imagine there's a fair amount of cynicism swirling about as she embarks upon this new project. I was a bit cynical myself. But then I had the opportunity to see her in person at U.S. Representative Don Beyer's Fifth Annual Women's Conference: Nevertheless, She Persisted.

Jane Fonda has been a force since the 1960s, through her talent, her hard work, and her dedication to her art and to social justice. Still, her gravitas took me by surprise. I was also surprised to feel myself identifying with her so strongly.

It occurred to me that she has lived a life similar to my own—that of an American, white, middle to upper-middle class woman; daughter, wife, mother—only she has had to live it under intense public scrutiny since childhood.

Being a part of our particular demographic is, of course, not the hardest lot in life—not by a long shot—but it does entail its fair share of indignities, impossibly conflicting expectations, and lots of other things that I won't rant about here. But Ms. Fonda hasn't let herself be silenced, she hasn't shrunk away in shame for her failings, she's never given up on herself. And more than most of us, she has consistently tried to use her privilege and her platform for the greater good. She'll be 82 in December, and she's still at it.

She told us—and I didn't get the exact quote, but it was something like this: It would be sad to get to the end of my life and not have figured out why I was here. 

Imagine, someone who has done as much as she has, but who is still searching. That's something to think about at any age.


P.S. Just FYI, by way of introducing Ms. Fonda, conference organizers showed the trailer for the HBO documentary, Jane Fonda in Five Acts (2018). It made me curious to watch the entire film. Also, Ms. Fonda recommended that everyone read Naomi Klein's On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal. Ms. Fonda's autobiography is called My Life So Far.

P.P.S. Even aside from Ms. Fonda, there were many amazing and accomplished women at this conference, on stage and in the audience. Plan to come next year!

Striking for the Climate in Seven Easy Steps: We Are Not Alone

Climate activist Greta Thunberg began striking for the climate last year, standing alone outside the Swedish Parliament, day after day, month after month. This past Friday, she spoke before a crowd of 250,000 climate strikers in New York City.

Let us join them!

Here's the story of a strike that took place in our little community while masses gathered in New York and all over the world.

Building a climate strike--building a community--doesn't take as much as you might think.

1. A listing
A man registered a climate strike on fridaysforfuture.org.

Friday, September 20, 2019, 8 AM.

The environment is important to him, as it is to all of us humans. "I didn't know whether anyone would show up," he said. "But I just went ahead and did it."

2. A prop
As we were getting ready to go to the climate strike, the globe caught my eye. The stand had broken long ago, so only the sphere of the Earth remained, wedged between books on the bookshelf. Its political boundaries were out of date, but I hadn't wanted to just throw it away. It brought to mind the iconic Earthrise photo, taken from the moon in 1968--the one that was so important to the nascent environmental movement.

That's what we're striking for, right?
Our planet.

I grabbed it as we walked out the door.

3. An icebreaker
There were fewer than ten people standing there when we arrived at the busy intersection where the strike was to happen, but everyone wanted their picture taken with the globe. I don't like to be in pictures, but I ended up posing for a few, and I smiled. It was for a good cause.

4. An activity
As we approached the intersection, we could see a small group of people standing on the corner about a block ahead. We thought they were probably fellow strikers, but there was nothing to distinguish them from any other random group of pedestrians.

"I'm going into the CVS to buy some poster-board and markers," my husband said.

I said okay, although I have just enough social anxiety that I don't like to be left alone in a new group of people.

(See #3, An icebreaker, above.)

Of course, everyone wanted to make a sign, because who can resist poster-board, big fat markers, and the opportunity to say what's on their mind? Many of the strikers were older people, crouching on the sidewalk, thinking about what to write. "My grandchildren deserve a future." "EPA Do your F-ing Job." "Listen to the Science."

There was much discussion and shared laughter around this sign-creation. A community was born!

5. A bullhorn!
Someone brought one. It was necessary. A major intersection at rush hour is very noisy. But with the bullhorn, we could hear each other.

No more coal, no more oil, keep the carbon in the soil! We began walking around the intersection. We didn't impede traffic, we just crossed with the lights and kept moving, holding our signs up and chanting.

6. An ask
One striker made a sign instructing drivers to Honk for Climate Action. This was genius.

The honking of the cars--and even of delivery trucks and construction vehicles--electrified our little group of strikers, now maybe around 40 people.

It created a communication loop. We weren't just shouting into the noisy, smelly void of engines and combustion engine exhaust; drivers were receiving the message, responding, and then we, in response to their honking, were cheering and waving our signs. We were not alone.

We ARE not alone.

7. Youth, energy, creativity
Two bright, enthusiastic, positive young women from nearby George Mason University ventured off campus, into the unknown, to join our strike. They made signs with us and took lots of pictures.

One of them borrowed the bullhorn and began chanting: Hash-tag, Go green, Save Our Climate, Join Our Team. It was a great chant, combining some modest syncopation with a contemporary, inclusive, imperative. I asked the young woman where she'd gotten the chant, had she made it up? And she said, "we both did." Everyone loved the chant. It really brought our little group together. Chanting can do that.

We spent a little more than an hour walking around and around the intersection. I don't know how many drivers saw us and our signs, but I'd guess they numbered in the hundreds. Maybe a few of them are thinking more about the climate now. Equally important, we created a little spark of community and learned some valuable lessons.

As we walked away I remarked to my husband that it reminded me of the story of Stone Soup. Building a climate strike--building a community--doesn't take as much as you might think.

All photos by Michael Edson. Thanks, Mike!

An excerpt from Seeking the Center, in honor of the Stanley Cup Playoffs

The final round of the 2019 Stanley Cup Playoffs is set to begin on Monday, May 27, between the Boston Bruins and the St. Louis Blues. Eliminated in the previous three rounds were: the Washington Capitals, Pittsburgh Penguins, Tampa Bay Lightning, Toronto Maple Leafs, Calgary Flames, Las Vegas Golden Knights, Winnipeg Jets, Nashville Predators, New York Islanders, Columbus Blue Jackets, Dallas Stars, Colorado Avalanche, Carolina Hurricanes, and San Jose Sharks.

That’s a lot of sad hockey teams!

I'm posting an excerpt from my novel Seeking the Center in honor of all the teams that have been eliminated from the Stanley Cup Playoffs—or from tournaments anywhere, of any kind. You can read the excerpt here. It's one of my favorite chapters in the novel, so I hope you enjoy it!

P.S. I plan to post an audio version of the excerpt within the next week or so.

P.P.S. You can purchase Seeking the Center directly from the publisher, Cuidono Press, here, from your local bookstore, or from the usual suspects including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Indigo/Chapters.

Book review: Dancer by Colum McCann

In Dancer, Colum McCann gives us a passionate, gorgeous (fictionalized) account of the life of dancer and choreographer Rudolf Nureyev.

Often, when we hear statements like, "his life is inseparable from the tumultuous events of the twentieth century," we cringe--what a cliché! But in the case of Nureyev it is undoubtedly true. Furthermore, McCann blows the cliché out of the water by actually showing us what this means. For example, he plots Nureyev's childhood against the backdrop of what Soviets called "The Great Patriotic War"--the part of World War II in which they fought off the German invasion. McCann's depiction of frostbitten, maimed Soviet soldiers eating their starved horses in the trenches, the women who cleaned them up afterwards, and little Rudik Nureyev and his schoolmates performing folk dances to entertain the wounded men in the hospital is no less virtuosic than Nureyev and the great Margot Fonteyn as Romeo and Juliet.

Nureyev was born in 1938 in Soviet Russia; in 1961 he defected to the West. McCann masterfully creates the colors and contradictions of both worlds. The Soviet Union is a repressive regime whose luckiest citizens are those old enough to cherish memories from before the Iron Curtain dropped. The West has its own brand of coldness. McCann reveals the sorrow of the émigré who--a product of both, yet belonging to neither--may never go home again.

Through this bleak milieu leaps Rudik Nureyev, a gay (bisexual?) ballet dancer of Muslim Tatar heritage, passionately devoted to his true self and his art in defiance of his army veteran father and eventually in defiance of his government. We come to know him through others: his mother, his first ballet teacher, his sister, his assistants and lovers and friends--even the cobbler who manufactures his custom ballet shoes. We also know Rudik through pages of hastily scribbled notes to himself--on how to perfect his grand jetés, to remember social appointments, on books he'd like to read or had read, on his travels--his energy and love of life transported as if by electrical impulse from his mind to the page.

To me, McCann's refusal to tie up or reconcile the many facets of Nureyev's life and personality speaks not only to how various, how expansive, and how deep this artist was, but also to how many strands of his being there were to manage, how many relationships to nurture, how many choices to make. What was the limit of the sacrifice he offered to Dance?

Or maybe McCann means to say that there can be no definitive version of Nureyev's life, other than the one that he himself lived.

That life ended in 1993, when Nureyev succumbed to HIV/AIDS. But, as portrayed by Colum McCann, the Dancer never succumbed to the vast impersonal forces of twentieth-century wars, totalitarianism, capitalism, or even homophobia. He soared above.

Book review: Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, by Jefferson Cowie

I didn't study the 70s in school, because it was happening as I was growing up. So, though I remembered the outlines, I needed someone to fill them in. Cowie's palette is a somber one, though. At stake was, he writes: [the] dream... that collective working-class agency could guarantee basic economic security for all as the foundation of a greater freedom.

Cowie begins in 1972 in Lordstown, Ohio, where young auto workers, fearing that they will be "hacking on the line for 30 years" with no say in how their work is managed, go on strike. Pitted against them are the old, entrenched capitalists (of General Motors) and status-quo loving union bosses. These guys fear the young strikers - men with long hair and afros, love beads and mod clothing; Vietnam vets who know dysfunction when they see it. This bunch had seen liberation (at least on television) and wanted some for themselves. 

Stayin' Alive looks at the 70s as two distinct periods (1968-1974 and 1974-1982). Cowie discusses the political and economic happenings within each, followed by an analysis of that period's popular culture - music, movies, and television. At the beginning of the 70s, there is a glimmer of hope: maybe the young, integrated, liberation-demanding kids can win. But alas, Nixon's paranoid scheming, an energy crisis or two, stagflation, an ineffectual Carter administration, a union-busting Ronnie Reagan, and the sickening, no-holds-barred, runaway greed of the wealthy classes, all combine to drastically shrink the pie for which American workers must compete. By the end of the decade, being chained to an assembly line job in a factory with no say in your present, let alone your future, is actually looking pretty good - and damn near unattainable - to most working class Americans.

Cowie explains how the rise of identity politics, sadly, played directly into the cynical divide-and-conquer strategies of the union bosses and politicians. He shows how Wallace, Nixon, and Reagan deliberately inflamed racist white nationalist and misogynist sentiments in order to consolidate their own power. Sound familiar? Even the part where (Republican) politicians turn their backs on the material concerns of poor white people and replace those concerns with cultural ones - things like abortion and school prayer that would have no effect on their standard of living no matter how they were decided: that strategy began all the way back then, in the 70s, too. 

Cowie clearly knows his stuff - the detail about labor legislation and all the various political maneuverings are fascinating. That the momentous decisions made by the president and congress come down in the end to trivial matters of timing, or even just naked human frailties, incompetencies, and vanity is not well understood by most of us and is difficult to fully comprehend. I suppose that's why we accept simplified and simple-minded explanations for so many things? At any rate, Cowie's conclusion is that, by the end of the 70s, no economically-based "working class" identity remained in the United States - that workers had been successfully divided and, thus, had no real voice. 

He ends the book with something of a challenge: 
Whatever working-class identity might emerge from the postmodern, global age will have to be less rigid and less limiting than that of the [post-World War II] order, and far less wedded to the bargaining table as the sole expression of workplace power. It will have to be less about consumption and more about democracy, and as much about being blue collar as being green collar. It will have to be more inclusive in conception, more experimental in form, more nimble in organization, and more kaleidoscopic in nature than previous incarnations. The chapter of the modern working class has closed; the page of imagination is open; and the future is unwritten.

Book review: Dispatches, by Michael Herr

As a correspondent in the Vietnam War, Michael Herr experienced first hand the Tet Offensive, the siege of Khe Sanh, and the battle of Hue. In Dispatches, which I believe was first published in 1977, Herr describes multiple facets of the war as seen through his eyes, as filtered through his consciousness, and as wrung through his conscience.

Much of what Dispatches describes is not news to me; the Vietnam War has been something of a hot topic since I was a little girl listening to the casualty counts on the evening news. However, Herr's account is so rewarding, so riveting, that I hated to put it down. Combining rich descriptions of the milieu - landscape, city, or awesome, ghastly destruction - with unforgettable portraits of grunts and officials, fellow correspondents and super sappers, he fills in the outlines of what I already knew with vivid color.

The themes of the book are military malpractice, political bullshit, and, of course and above all, death. Also, Herr's (and everyone else's) love-hate relationship with war. And his attempt to reconcile the unreconcilable. And the sheer inevitability of it all. He writes, "There'd been nothing there that hadn't already existed here, coiled up and waiting, back in the World."

Epic and intimate, humorous and horrible, Herr's account is never simplistic and almost always fascinating. The only part that falls short for me is the section about his colleagues in the press corps; though many of the portraits are well drawn, for me they rarely measure up to those in the remaining chapters of the narrative. 

Still, I enthusiastically recommend this book for those interested in the Vietnam War, and for those interested in war generally. Men and war. Yep, men and war.

Book Review: The Other Side of Grief: The Home Front and the Aftermath in American Narratives of the Vietnam War, by Maureen Ryan

The Other Side of Grief is a survey of what must be hundreds of narratives, mainly novels and memoirs, relating to the Vietnam War - every type of narrative that I can imagine, except for stories of combat. Author Maureen Ryan takes the soldier's often repeated, familiar refrain of "you had to be there [or you can't understand]" and replies, "we were all there." 

Ryan's thesis is that we tend to privilege the stories of men, and therefore those of combat vets (who, we assume, are particularly manly men), but that, if we wish to understand the American "lingering fascination" with the Vietnam War, we need to consider everyone's stories - those of the siblings, wives, and children left at home, those of the war protesters who dodged "home front artillery" in Chicago and on college campuses, those of Vietnamese refugees, as well as the "aftermath narratives" of returning vets, and POW memoirs.

In The Other Side of Grief each of these categories gets its own chapter, in which Ryan discusses the themes touched on by the narratives in that category. Those themes illuminate interesting historical, social, political, or psychological points. For example, in the chapter "Years of Darkness: Narratives by and about American Prisoners of the Vietnam War," Ryan dissects the texts in question to lay bare the political appropriation of the POW issue - in careful counterpoint to women's liberation in the context of the POW wives. In "The Other Side of Grief: American Women Writers and the Vietnam War," Ryan examines the unique psychology of the sisters of soldiers.

Although I thought I knew a lot about the Vietnam War, the '60s, '70s, and '80s, I learned quite a bit from this book. I believe that the sheer number of texts that Ryan examines allows her to make certain assertions with authority. One of the most important from my point of view is her statement that "the women understand, as the men do not, that the Vietnam War happened to an entire generation and lingered long after the last bullet was fired." Clearly, many of us have had that thought before. But in this case Ryan shows how it is grounded in numerous texts, written by many different men and women, all seeming to indicate that same pattern. 

Privileging one type of story unquestionably leads to misunderstandings of reality. This should be a rallying cry. We need the full spectrum of perspectives not only to unravel our fascination with the Vietnam War, but also to prevent future wars.