Tag: New York Times

It’s not about “cold fish” or “wet fish” – it’s about people’s lives, stupid

On By Michael KirkeIn National and International AffairsLeave a comment

What a breath of fresh air this sober analysis is after the rantings of Paul Krugman  and utterly blinkered wishful thinking of Lara Marlow in the Irish Times and her other platforms.

Liberalism’s Glass Jaw by ROSS DOUTHAT in today’s New York Times calmly and coolly exposes the bubbly substance of everything that Obama stands for and shows us that the real problem with all this is not Obama himself but the fragile ideology he stands on. We can only hope that while he has been able to fool a majority of the people to get  one term in office he will not be able to fool enough of them to get a second.

As Doubthat reads it, all of Obama’s signature accomplishments have tended to have the same weakness in common: They have been weighed down by interest-group payoffs and compromised by concessions to powerful insiders, from big pharma (which stands to profit handsomely from the health care bill) to the biggest banks (which were mostly protected by the Dodd-Frank financial reform).

It may have been an empty rhetorical gesture, but the fact that Romney could actually out-populist the president on “too big to fail” during the last debate speaks to the Obama-era tendency for liberalism to blur into a kind of corporatism, in which big government intertwines with big business rather than restraining it.

Doubthat does not mention his social policy “evolutions” and the concessions he has risked making to the gay lobby on marriage, the ease with which he has slipped into assuming that Christian consciences on sexual morality issues can be tossed around the ring like so many rag dolls. But he might have done. These were the cotton wool compassionate gestures which Obama has allowed to distract him from really grappling with the more difficult challenges of getting the country back on its feet.

One hopes that the American electorate will get well beyond the preoccupation which some in the media have tried to focus on – whether it is Romney as a “cold fish”, or Obama as a “wet fish” – and look at the real issues of substance which Doubthat summarizes here.

All at Sea on Same Sex Marriage – and Everything Else

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

I can’t but help thinking that while the whole boring topic of same-sex marriage rages on and our fellow human beings throw insults at each other across the divide, we are letting the human race slide down the tubes of oblivion in a welter of sentimentality and gross self-indulgence – all for want of not seeing the wood from the trees. The debate is irrelevant for a number of reasons. The debate we should be having is anthropological and because we have abandoned that debate we are all at sea with the same-sex marriage issue and any number of other questions as well.

In the last decade of the 20th century the people of the Irish Republic voted in a referendum which changed their constitution to allow its legislature to pass laws which would govern the dissolution of marriages. Up to that time marriage in that jurisdiction was “until death do us part”. After that constitutional change – passed by the people with the narrowest of margins – marriage ceased to be a “for life” thing. One pro-marriage campaigner at the time argued that if you had divorce enshrined in legislation then your laws had immediately changed the definition of marriage – it ceased to be, in law, what it was before. In Ireland the net result was that the value of marriage plummeted, as it has done throughout the rest of the western world.  Marriage became a flashy and expensive ceremony which simply put some kind of stamp of a relationship between – until recently – a man and a woman. The old vows were uttered – until death do us part – but everyone now knows that they do not really mean that in law.

For a multitude of different reasons many people began to by-pass the whole thing altogether. As happened throughout the rest of the world more and more couples began to co-habit rather than get married. With that, since co-habiting couples tend to break up (see Brad Wilcox’s research on the matter,  here ) single parenthood became endemic.  Across the world some people still get married and they firmly intend that this will be until death does them part. However, the state no longer supports them in their pursuit of this intention – because if one of them were to wilt in that intention, the state would row in behind that partner and dissolve the marriage. No fault divorce is the name of that brand and it is the clear leader where this product is concerned.

Caesar Augustus, grappling with the citizens of Rome’s slide into debauchery tried to tighten up divorce laws in the lex Julia – if divorced by her husband, a wife found guilty of adultery in a special court might sacrifice the return of half her dowry and was forbidden to remarry. His tinkering failed miserably, of course. Our own tinkering, as experience shows, will fare no better.

Parallel with all this in our own time came what has been euphemistically called the sexual revolution – based on a reading of human sexuality which was as anthropologically flawed as was the reading which ended up giving us no-fault divorce. The real problem came when people began to replace  serious thinking about our condition as human beings – and the circumstances in which we live together in this world – with sheer sentimentality.

This week, Frank Bruni in the New York Times gives one of the clearest examples I have seen of adult human beings, elected legislators, abdicating their duty to make rational judgements in matters of great concern and surrendering to their emotions in a way which betrays their public trust and their responsibility to those they love in their personal lives. Bruni, of course, is totally approving of such behaviour.

He was cheerleading the onward march of the gay marriage campaign and how the opposition to it crumbled in one Washington State senator’s soul in the face of a totally emotional argument. In the final hours of the debate on the issue in that State, “Senator Brian Hatfield, a Democrat who considers himself a devout Christian and who said in a statement that he ‘went as far as to ask God for a sign.’ It came, he said, in an e-mail he got from former State Representative Betty Sue Morris, a fellow Democrat, who recounted how much she regretted a vote she cast against same-sex marriage in 1996 — and why.

“She shared her story with me on the phone on Monday. ‘In December of 1998,’ began Morris, 70, who then started crying. ‘Excuse me. I just remember it so vividly. My beautiful daughter, Annie, was home for Christmas, and she told us that she was gay.’

“In the days that followed, Morris said, she remembered her vote and ‘felt like I had denied her something.  A wholeness.  A freedom.’

“‘Here’s this precious child that you love and you care for,’ she added. ‘You don’t want to be a part of making them grieve for anything.’

“As it happens, she said, Annie didn’t even remember the vote. Now 47, she lives in California and married her long-time partner in 2008, just before Proposition 8 overturned the state’s short-lived same-sex marriage law.

“Morris told me: ‘Whenever someone opposes this, I always counsel: you never know. You never know when it will be your child or your grandchild. And you will eat your words.’

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California ruled yesterday that the proposition was unconstitutional. The battle will now probably go to the State Supreme Court.

That is a sad story – but it is sad for far more reasons than Frank Bruni is likely to accept. It is sad ultimately because it show legislators acting like marshmallow idiots and it show a parent treating her child with less responsibility than they would their pet poodle. Wholeness?  Freedom? What are we thinking?

The root problem is our total loss of any sense of human beings as human beings, our loss of our sense of their real nature and the needs of that nature. We are substituting that sense with a response built entirely on our emotional feelings. Unless we go back to a serious anthropological understanding of our nature – of which sexuality and relationships are a part – we can forget about all the frills we put on our silly ceremonies and all the names we put on them. Most of them mean nothing already. Soon none of them will mean anything at all.

Folly of Obama’s Technocratic General

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

David Brooks makes a cri de couer in yesterday’s New York Times – prompted by the folly of Obama’s technocratic general, Kathleen Sibelius. It reminds one of Tolstoy’s take on Ernst Heinrich Adolf von Pfuel, the Prussian mastermind who lined up against Napoleon as the French Emperor drove east. Tolstoy was summing up the various modes of foolish self-assurance which he observed among different nationalities.

“The German’s self-assurance”, he said, “is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth – science – which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.

“Pfuel was one of those hopelessly and immutably self-confident men, self-confident to the point of martyrdom as only Germans are, because only Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion – science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth.

“Pfuel was one of those theoreticians who so love their theory that they lose sight of the theory’s object – its practical application. His love of theory made him hate everything practical, and he would not listen to it. He was even pleased by failures, for failures resulting from deviations in practice from the theory only proved to him the accuracy of his theory.”

Obama’s generals are demoralising Brooks. He tells us why: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/opinion/brooks-flood-the-zone.html?

Every once in a while, the Obama administration will promulgate a policy that is truly demoralizing. A willingness to end the District of Columbia school voucher program was one such case. The decision to force Catholic social service providers to support contraception and other practices that violate their creed is another.

These decisions are demoralizing because they make it harder to conduct a serious antipoverty policy.

The essential truth about poverty is that we will never fully understand what causes it. There are a million factors that contribute to poverty, and they interact in a zillion ways.

Some of the factors are economic: the shortage of low-skill, entry-level jobs. Some of the factors are historical: the legacy of racism. Some of the factors are familial: the breakdown in early attachments between infants and caregivers and the cognitive problems that often result from that. Some of them are social: the shortage of healthy role models and mentors.

The list of factors that contribute to poverty could go on and on, and the interactions between them are infinite. Therefore, there is no single magic lever to pull to significantly reduce poverty. The only thing to do is change the whole ecosystem.

If poverty is a complex system of negative feedback loops, then you have to create an equally complex and diverse set of positive feedback loops. You have to flood the zone with as many good programs as you can find and fund and hope that somehow they will interact and reinforce each other community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood.

The key to this flood-the-zone approach is that you have to allow for maximum possible diversity. Let’s say there is a 14-year-old girl who, for perfectly understandable reasons, wants to experience the love and sense of purpose that go with motherhood, rather than stay in school in the hopes of someday earning a middle-class wage.

You have no idea what factors have caused her to make this decision, and you have no way of knowing what will dissuade her. But you want her, from morning until night, to be enveloped by a thick ecosystem of positive influences. You want lefty social justice groups, righty evangelical groups, Muslim groups, sports clubs, government social workers, Boys and Girls Clubs and a hundred other diverse institutions. If you surround her with a different culture and a web of relationships, maybe she will absorb new habits of thought, find a sense of belonging and change her path.

To build this thick ecosystem, you have to include religious institutions and you have to give them broad leeway. Religious faith is quirky, and doesn’t always conform to contemporary norms. But faith motivates people to serve. Faith turns lives around. You want to do everything possible to give these faithful servants room and support so they can improve the spiritual, economic and social ecology in poor neighborhoods.

The administration’s policies on school vouchers and religious service providers are demoralizing because they weaken this ecology by reducing its diversity. By ending vouchers, the administration reduced the social intercourse between neighborhoods. By coercing the religious charities, it is teaching the faithful to distrust government, to segregate themselves from bureaucratic overreach, to pull inward.

Members of the Obama administration aren’t forcing religious organizations to violate their creeds because they are secular fundamentalists who place no value on religious liberty. They are doing it because they operate in a technocracy.

Technocrats are in the business of promulgating rules. They seek abstract principles that they can apply in all cases. From their perspective, a rule is fair when it can be imposed uniformly across the nation.

Technocratic organizations take diverse institutions and make them more alike by imposing the same rules. Technocracies do not defer to local knowledge. They dislike individual discretion. They like consistency, codification and uniformity.

Technocratic institutions have an unstated theory of how change happens. It’s the theory President Obama sketched out at the beginning and end of his State of the Union address: Society works best when it is like a military unit — when everybody works together in pursuit of a mission, pulling together as one.

But a realistic antipoverty program works in the opposite way. It’s not like a military unit. It’s like a rain forest, with a complex array of organisms pursuing diverse missions in diverse ways while intertwining and adapting to each other.

I wish President Obama would escape from the technocratic rationalism that sometimes infects his administration. I wish he’d go back to his community-organizer roots. When he was driving around Chicago mobilizing priests and pastors on those cold nights, would he really have compelled them to do things that violated their sacred vows?

I don’t think so. I think if that Barack Obama possessed the power he has today, he’d want to flood the zone with as much rich diversity as possible.

Waterloo looming?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment
So it looks like it is all over and Republicans are going to unite behind Romney as their best hope of beating Obama. It may be a very close run thing.
Mitt Romney scored a sweeping victory in Nevada today with a broad coalition of voters that included groups that he has struggled to win in previous contests, including very conservative voters, strong Tea Party supporters and evangelicals.The victory extends the momentum Mr. Romney received from his commanding victory in Florida last Tuesday, and pushes forward his march toward the Republican nomination.

Mr. Romney’s rivals largely conceded the state before the results were known, with some leaving Nevada to campaign in Colorado and Minnesota. Mr. Romney, who won Nevada in 2008, had never given up the lead in polls here.

http://www.nytimes.com/?emc=na

A Distasteful Display of Acrimony: Frank Rich on Mel Gibson

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters5 Comments

Frank Rich used to be the terror of Broadway. This was in the days when he was the main theatre critic of the New York Times. Any playwright opening there with a new play had to keep his fingers crossed that Rich would either not cover the opening or would take a liking to it – for whatever deep and mysterious reasons the said critic might chose to like it and give it a good review. Rich was an all-knowing an inscrutable God when it came to theatre and his bad reviews had such divine authority that plays he disapproved of could close after a week.

But eventually Rich moved on – whether because he got tired of his own negativity or the Times felt that his negativity was becoming too much of a cliché, we cannot say. For whatever reason dramatists could breathe again and were happy to be able to take their chances again with critics who seemed less dogmatic and less prone to the use of vitriol to beef up their reservations about their work. But he did not move far.  He now writes a regular column for the paper and nothing much has changed in terms of his style or use of vitriol-laced ink for his fountain pen.

This brings us to poor old Mel Gibson, the renewed object of Mr. Rich’s ire. Mel has once again made himself cannon-fodder for his enemies – and there is no doubt but that he seems to have as much capacity for making enemies as he has – at least until now –  for making money. Last week Mr. Rich was to be found gloating on the dire consequences for Mel’s career in the aftermath of his most recent alcohol-fuelled outburst. But apart from the distasteful spectacle of one man gloating on the fate of a clearly unwell fellow human being, what is remarkable about Rich’s cashing in on the self-destructive propensity of Mel, is his use of this as a pretext to launch a major attack on what he labels the “Christian right” of America. The Christian right, of course, includes all those who hold any candle for traditional Christian morality. No effort is made to distinguish the extremes form the mainstream.

Rich’s jubilation in his piece on July 16, “The Good News About Mel Gibson”, was not just at Mel’s fall from grace, or the fall from the place the last fall left him languishing in, but the further damage which this will inflict on all those causes Gibson espoused to some good effect when his celebrity status was still intact.

“Gibson is in such disgrace today, Rich writes, that it’s hard to fathom all the fuss he and his biblical epic engendered back then”. He is referring to the controversy aroused when Gibson was making and releasing The Passion of the Christ back in 2004. Gibson defended the movie against an onslaught of allegations that it was going to be an anti-Semitic rant. Rich’s line is that all this was a very clever spin – “publicity screenings for the right-wing media and political establishment, including a select Washington soiree attended by notables like Peggy Noonan, Kate O’Beirne and Linda Chavez. (The only nominal Jew admitted was Matt Drudge.) The attendees then used their various pulpits to assure the world that the movie was divine — and certainly nothing that should trouble Jews. ‘I can report it is free of anti-Semitism,’ vouchsafed Robert Novak after his ‘private viewing.’”

 “Uninvited Jewish writers (like me) who kept raising questions about the unreleased film and its exclusionary rollout were vilified for crucifying poor Mel. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News asked a reporter from Variety ‘respectfully’ if Gibson was being victimized because ‘the major media in Hollywood and a lot of the secular press is controlled by Jewish people.’ Such was the ugly atmosphere of the time that these attempts at intimidation were remarkably successful. Many mainstream media organizations did puff pieces on the star or his film, lest they be labeled ‘anti-Christian’ when an ascendant religious right was increasingly flexing its muscles in the corridors of power in Washington.”

 So Rich clearly reads the considerable critical and popular acclaim which The Passion garnered as the result of a clever spin job. He puts it all down to the then dominance – as he sees it – of a resurgent rightwing Christian lobby. Read Rich between the lines, however, and it very hard not to see someone who will consider any telling of the story Gibson retold so startlingly as anti-Semitic.

“Once ‘The Passion’ could be seen by ticket buyers,” he maintains, “— who would reward it with a $370 million domestic take (behind only ‘Shrek 2’ and ‘Spider-Man 2’ that year) — the truth could no longer be spun by Gibson’s claque. The movie was nakedly anti-Semitic, to the extreme that the Temple priests were all hook-nosed Shylocks and Fagins with rotten teeth.” This kind of paranoia puts the tendency sometimes found in the British press to read any re-telling of Irish history as anti-British propaganda deep into the shade. Why is it so difficult for human beings to face the simple truths of history?

He continues, “It seems preposterous in retrospect that a film as bigoted and noxious as ‘The Passion’ had so many reverent defenders in high places in 2004. Once Gibson, or at least the subconscious Gibson, baldly advertised his anti-Semitism with his obscene tirade during a 2006 D.U.I. incident in Malibu, his old defenders had no choice but to peel off.”

 That kind of crass judgement is enough to strain the tolerant spirit of any soul, and much more so the ultra-volatile Mel in one of his inebriated states of being. He is easy prey for Mr. Rich. But it is not really Mel whom Frank Rich is after. The “religious right” is his main target. Its supposed discomfiture at the antics of  its fallen angel is what he is really rejoicing in.

“The cultural wave that crested with ‘The Passion’ was far bigger than Gibson. He was simply a symptom and beneficiary of a moment when the old religious right and its political and media shills were riding high. In 2010, the American ayatollahs’ ranks have been depleted by death (Falwell), retirement (James Dobson) and rent boys (too many to name). What remains of that old guard is stigmatized by its identification with poisonous crusades, from the potentially lethal anti-homosexuality laws in Uganda to the rehabilitation campaign for the “born-again” serial killer David Berkowitz (“Son of Sam”) in America.” Clearly, forgiveness of any kind is going to play no part in the world of Frank Rich.

One glimmer of charity and light, however, came in Rich’s noxious – to borrow his own word – package in the New York Times, and that was in an online comment from a professor of psychology in a New York college, David Chowes:

“Pathological behavior can occur to any person of any political stripe. While I have not spent any time with Mr. Gibson, as a professor of psychology at Baruch College/CUNY, for years I have observed Mel Gibson. My conclusion: he has at least (a) destructive personality disorder(s) and, especially the strong possibility of bipolar disorder (aka, manic depression).

 “His alcoholism is often correlated with my hypothesis; his untempered temper; his (believe it or not) creativity as an actor and director; his self-destructive behaviours; his alleged violence and tantrums… One doesn’t have to be right-wing to display aberrant displays of behaviour. Abby Hoffman  (ultra radical activist in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies) was an admitted bipolar which was coupled with a number of personality disorders. He ended his life via suicide. (I knew Abby Hoffman.)

 We hope and pray for better for Mel Gibson – but the vulnerability of the man should, one might think, give pause for thought to those who feel it is their duty to bring down further someone who is in as low a place as he finds himself at present. This may not be Frank Rich’s real agenda of course – which makes it even more reprehensible.

An Unexpected Dividend

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Call it the unexpected dividend of the financial melt-down – the getting of real wisdom. Amid all the outpourings of gloom, predictions of disaster and downward spiraling of this that and the other, there has been a clear upward spiraling of deeper reflections which see the silver lining in all this – in one way or another.

 

Even in the gloomier pieces churned out by the commentariat you can see the beginnings of a wisdom akin to – but on a much higher level than – that famous catchphrase which has come down to us from another US presidential election campaign. “It’s the economy, stupid”. This was a sign hung in Bill Clinton’s campaign headquarters to keep everybody “on message” in 1992. But in the end we seem to be coming to realise that it’s not just the economy, stupid. It’s a question of good old-fashioned virtue, stupid.

 

Novelist Margaret Atwood, writing an op-ed piece in the The New York Times on October 22 wisely warns us that we would be deluding ourselves if we were to think that recovery from the mess will be heralded by a simple return to form by the Dow Jones. Our wounds are deeper, she thinks. “To heal them, we must repair the broken moral balance that let this chaos loose.”

 

India Knight, columnist with the London Times declares herself “happy to observe that the decades of vulgar excess are finally over. There is a strong collective sense of us all coming back down to earth. It’s like a huge national reality check and, unwelcome as it may be, there is a possibility that it will result in us straightening out our priorities”

 

Sarah Lyall, reporting from London for The New York Times a day before Atwood’s article appeared, quoted the sage observations of 65-year-old Audrey Hurren whom she met on a platform in the Underground. It had all been too much in her view. “I think it wouldn’t do any harm at all for some of the younger generation to be less greedy.” Her grandchildren seemed to have everything they wanted and were still dissatisfied. “They get a mobile phone and if they don’t like it they throw it away and get a new one”.

 

But in that “having” there has been a problem. The trouble is that it wasn’t, in many, many cases, a “real” having. That was a “having” covered by – not necessarily in the cases of the Hurren grandchildren – a £1.52 trillion mountain of debt. And this was the broken moral balance which Atwood examines: the meaning of debt had gone out the window.

 

The simple economics of everyday life lost touch with the real world – even something which children know instinctively when they see something unfair happening and they shout out “That’s not fair”, was lost , she holds. Once you start looking at life without that sense of fairness, debtor-creditor relationships go much worse than pear-shaped.

 

“The version of the Lord’s Prayer I memorized as a child” recalls Atwood, “included the line, ‘Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.’ In Aramaic, the language that Jesus himself spoke, the word for ‘debt’ and the word for ‘sin’ are the same. And although many people assume that ‘debts’ in these contexts refer to spiritual debts or trespasses, debts are also considered sins. If you don’t pay back what’s owed, you cause harm to others.

“The fairness essential to debt and redemption is reflected in the afterlives of many religions, in which crimes unpunished in this world get their comeuppance in the next. For instance, hell, in Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy,’ is the place where absolutely everything is remembered by those in torment, whereas in heaven you forget your personal self and who still owes you five bucks and instead turn to the contemplation of selfless Being.”

Atwood is loath to make predictions that we are heading towards paradise on earth. However, she at least hopes that “if fair regulations are established and credibility is restored, people will stop walking around in a daze, roll up their sleeves and start picking up the pieces. Things unconnected with money will be valued more — friends, family, a walk in the woods. ‘I’ will be spoken less, ‘we’ will return, as people recognize that there is such a thing as the common good.”

Elaine Byrne in The Irish Times on October 15 also connected the financial debacle with the moral, quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt who told his public in 1937 “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics…We are beginning to abandon our tolerance of the abuse of power by those who betray for profit the elementary decencies of life”. He spoke scathingly of the “blindly selfish men” who had plunged the people into misery in the preceding decade. She ended her piece quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great parable of the era, “The Great Gatsby”, portraying that same selfishness and disregard for real human values which have been at the heart of our current woes.  “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…”

Reading all these reflections on a catastrophe gives hope that perhaps this time our political, intellectual and spiritual leaders will come up with a more penetrating solution that they did before and begin to look at the roots of our malaise. Rachel Sylvester’s observation in a London Times article on October 21 should give politicians some pause for thought:

“Mammon has been exposed as a false god whose worshippers seem to have been sacrificed on the altar of the credit crunch. There is a yearning for answers that go beyond interest rates, targets and the public sector borrowing requirement. The bishops have started bashing the bankers. Yet politicians, of all parties, have never been more fearful of faith.”

She does not seem particularly optimistic. She sees the retreat of Ruth Kelly from government and politics as a symptom of the problem which she describes as “a God-shaped hole in Westminster.” She implicitly recognises that the belief so readily discarded or despised by so many among Britain’s political class is a foundation without which a true recovery will be shallow and superficial.

“It would be wrong to suggest that Britain is any longer a Christian country in terms of the population – only 7 per cent of people regularly attend an Anglican church. Yet neither is Britain a secular State like France. Its history, culture and constitutional settlement are based on the link between Church and State. Earlier this year, Nicholas Sarkozy criticised the French republic’s obsession with secularism and called for a ‘blossoming’ of religions. ‘A man who believes is a man who hopes,’ he said. It is ironic that politicians in this country have abandoned belief – at the very moment that the people need hope.”

But the mass of politicians follow and do not lead. Only the few lead. Perhaps with a coming of a new-found wisdom – which undoubtedly is to be seen in all these tentative explorations for the deeper truths which our present pain may point to – then we can hope for the emergence of that critical few who will realise that financial regulation, state guarantees and better banking are not the ultimate solution to these problems. Let’s see a few signs hanging in the offices of our leaders reminding them that virtues – and where they come from – will go a long way to make the world a better place for us all.

 

Michael Kirke, formerly of The Irish Press, is now a freelance writer. His views can be responded to at mjgkirke@eircom.net . Other writing can be found at www.mercatornet.com and on at www.positionpapers.ie

Don’t Rubbish the American Dream

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Don’t  rubbish the American Dream – it is alive and well and continuing to redefine itself into reality for yet another generation of immigrants.

 

David Gonzalez is a journalist – he calls himself a “street reporter” – with The New York Times. David is the son of Puerto Rico immigrants and grew up in the Bronx in the nineteen sixties and seventies. His parents, poor but hard-working, had one ambition for their children – a good education and a life, in material terms at least, on a level different from their own.

 

They fulfilled that ambition. David was put through good Catholic schools and went on to win a scholarship to Yale. When his teacher at Cardinal Hayes High School encouraged him to apply for a place in an Ivy League college David didn’t even know what an Ivy League college was – and he thought Yale was a place where they made locks. He graduated from Yale with a psychology degree and went on to take a masters degree in journalism at Columbia University. He then went to work for Newsweek and eventually ended up in The New York Times.

 

Last weekend David Gonzalez addressed a media conference at Cleraun University Centre in Dublin on the topic of “Cities in Transformation, or The Varieties of Ethnic Experience”. While his own experience was relevant it was not what he dwelt on. His focus was more contemporary but it still shows that the immigrant experience in a place like New York – while it can be terrifying and traumatic – still is what it always was, a place where dreams can come true.

 

He began the story a century and a half ago, looking a an ethnic group trying to make their homes there then. He described how they were portrayed in the newspapers of the day – the Dublin conference’s focus was on the ethical challenges facing media in reporting the world around us. “They were scorned as dangerous louts, suspected of being loyal to a foreign power which cloaked itself in odd raiment and practiced bizarre rituals. They were caricatured as monkeys and drunkards. They were…the Irish.

 

“To a New Yorker of the 21st century, such an assertion would be laughable. Since then the Irish have a long and proud history in our city. They are captains of industry, politicians, philanthropists and scholars. They are indisputably American, too.” He jumped forward to the 1990s and found that the same fears which greeted the waves of Irish who flooded into the United States in the mid 1800s still characterise the “welcome” accorded to today’s immigrants – but he also finds that the response of the Irish at that time is still working today and has paved the way for the numerous ethnic groups who succeeded them in the century and a half which followed right up to the present. “Excluded from the city’s institutions, they created their own, working through then Catholic Church to establish schools, hospitals and parishes that protected newcomers. They educated, fed and clothed those who could not do so for themselves.” It was a question of the time-honoured “corporal works of mercy” serving as a civic contribution – “and in doing so they set up a network of institutions that have continued to ease the plight of the stranger in a strange land.”

 

Sprawling cities attract immigrants and immigrants compound the sprawl. Whole communities fly below the radar and get lost until some tragedy turns the spotlight on them. Gonzalez cited the horrific social club fire in New York in the 1990s when 87 Hondurans from a region on the Caribbean coast perished. Later in the decade it was the discovery of a large African community from Mali when 9 members of an extended family died in a house fire.

 

But all this is the hard end of the story. The story eventually begins to turn good when the resilient humanity of the subject and the civilised institutions of the host city begin to interact with each other. No more than one hundred and fifty years ago, the stories of today’s immigrant communities adapting to and being embraced by this great iconic city make inspiring reading, and the patterns of progress are still remarkably similar.

 

For example, Gonzalez recounts how churches and church leaders still play a vital role in the process – sometimes as advocates for better housing conditions, sometimes stepping in as pacemakers when inter-ethnic strife breaks out. In the course of his “street reporting” he found a Pentecostal Christian group in a tiny commercial storefront working away with some of the city’s most vulnerable residents – former drug addicts, delinquents, single mothers and impoverished factory workers – helping them reclaim their lives.

 

And then there is the community group, expressing “citizen democracy at its most basic” and proving very effective at holding officials and politicians accountable. He tells the story of Astin Jacobo who lived in his own neighbourhood.

 

“I used to live in a community near the Bronx Zoo that had fallen on some very hard times. Arson fires – set by landlords to collect on their insurance policies – had devastated the community. Many families moved away. Many stayed, however, since they had no money and hence no choice. But within that group lay the seeds of the community’s very rebirth.

 

“Astin Jacabo – who became known simply as Jacob – had come to New York from the Dominican Republic, where he had been a professional baseball scout. He now was a school custodian, which meant he was the man who opened up the school gymnasium after school for basketball practice. He soon learned it the early 1970s that the young people, especially during the winter, did not want to go home.

 

“He asked them why, and learned that their homes were cold, with no heat. In some cases, their buildings were half-vacant. So he told them to bring their parents to the gym for a meeting next time. Jacob, it turned out, had also been involved with a nascent community group that was trying to rally residents into stemming the tide of destruction washing over their community.

 

“From those humble beginnings, he was able to start bringing neighbours together to discuss their common concerns. In one memorable meeting, he actually confronted the Mayor of New York, Edward I. Koch, calling him a liar for tolerating illegal garbage dumping on empty lots owned by the city. The mayor, perhaps stunned that someone would challenge him so publicly, wound up visiting the area and in time directed other agencies to help the local group clean up both the abandoned lot and housing stock.

 

“The lot became a ball field. The buildings were rebuilt. Still, in the early 1990s people did not want to go out on the streets at night because of drug dealing. It was then that Jacob had a brainwave from the old country: as a young man in the Dominican Republic, he remembered how neighbours used to come out to the ball field when their children played. The adults would hang out and socialize. They kept an eye on things.

 

“And that is how Jacob got the idea to put lights on the field. By persuading officials to install lights, he could hold games at night. In turn, he could get parents to go out and watch their kids play. With scores of people now on the streets, gathered at a well-lighted park – the bad guys would soon find some other place to go conduct their business.

“An old tradition gave birth to a new solution.”

 

If the liberal chattering classes look to these groups and movements for ground troops in the culture wars of the future they might be very disappointed – and for this disappointment they have probably to blame the background Christian music which accompanies this transformation. What is happening, Gonzalez says, also challenges the ideas the larger society has about people like them.

 

“While Latinos and other members of minority groups have usually been seen as politically liberal, these congregations shunned any formal political affiliation. If anything, they confounded political stereotypes – conservative on family value issues like gay marriage or abortion and liberal on social issues like housing, education and immigration.

 

“They also present a major source of change for the future. Outsiders, especially those who would consider themselves to be secular humanists, would view these Pentecostals as people looking for some imaginary reward in Heaven after a lifetime of earthly suffering. But the members of these congregations embraced the value of hard work and its rewards right here on earth. They did not diminish their ultimate reward as Christians. But they did not brook any talk about being doomed to suffer. Instead, they urged their children to go to school and become professionals, rather than toiling in factories or grocery stores.

 

“The idea that thousands of teenagers are being raised in this faith tradition has implications for the city even if they fall away from their church (which is admittedly common). We are talking about a generation of minority youths who will go on to college and become part of the city’s core work force, taking on the kinds of jobs in business and government that keep the city running. Raised in a tradition that made them feel empowered and not helpless, they represent a segment of the city that will see its influence felt.

 

“More than a century ago, immigrants crossed the Atlantic Ocean and came to New York with not just a sense of new beginnings but a sense of finality. The old country was left behind, perhaps forever. But in this age of global economies, easy transportation and instant communication, the immigrant experience is being redefined daily”

 

In other words, the details of the dream may change but the big dream remains intact, and can and does become a reality. To paraphrase Norman Maine’s words to Esther in A Star is Born, “Don’t settle for the little dream. Go for the big one.” Dream on America.

 

Michael Kirke, formerly of The Irish Press, is now a freelance writer and the director of Ely University Centre, 10 Hume Street, Dublin 2. His views can be responded to at mjgkirke@eircom.net. Other writing can be found at www.mercatornet.com  and www.positionpapers.ie .